Downtown (25 page)

“Look, Smoky, nobody thinks you can’t do this piece,” he said. “But you don’t know anything yet. You don’t know anything about the people we’ll be seeing, or the place we’ll be going, or the way they do things there. You’re a white girl in a pretty dress; that’s all these folks will see. Not your talent, not your liberal sensibilities. They don’t like white people and they don’t trust them and they don’t talk freely to them. They talk to me only because I’ve already gone there with John, and they love him. After they see that he’s going to be working with you, get used to you, then they’ll talk a little. And you know Matt said that the format will be to show existing conditions first, and then, in the next report, show what Focus has been able to do about them. You only need your eyes today.”

“Not my mouth, in other words.”

“You said it, not me.”

I drummed my fingers on the door of the Morgan, but I knew he was right. Finally I said, smiling a little, “‘I Am a Camera.’”

“Thank you, Sally Bowles.”

“You can read?”

“Actually, no,” he said, stretching his long, lanky body so that the bones of his spine snapped in sequence. “Somebody read it to me. In bed.”

And he leered showily at me.

“Luke, you are such an ass,” I said, blushing, for some reason, to the roots of my hair. I heard him laugh softly, but I did not look over at him.

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He turned the little car east on Mitchell Street, past the courthouse, the beautiful Art Deco spire of City Hall, and the dirty marble and granite spire of the capitol building. He turned again, past the capitol, onto Capitol Avenue, and we slid down abruptly into the great, featureless wasteland where most of Atlanta’s Negro population lived. It was a part of the city that I had not known existed, although now, in its midst, it struck me as naive and stupid that I had not sensed, if not known, this other Atlanta.

One by one, silently, we ghosted through the black communities to the south of the city’s heart: Summerhill, Peoplestown, Joyland. I could not speak. The desolation and poverty of some of these tiny neighborhoods seemed to me as unredeemed as they were uniform. I could not tell where one left off and another began. But Lucas Geary seemed to know. He pointed them out by name as we passed through, and told me a little about each. When, I thought, had he had time to learn the geography and ethnology of these dismal black habitats in the bowels of Camelot? I felt stupid and shy and young. In point of fact, I was all those things.

Many of the streets in the little communities were unpaved.

In the small, snaking warrens, wooden and cinder-block houses crowded so closely together that often not even a driveway separated them. It probably did not matter; I saw very few cars. Most houses sat squarely on the streets or sidewalks, with only a few feet of weedy concrete or hard-packed dirt for front yards, these littered with broken toys and bottles and trash. Most were unpainted and some had blind eyes of cardboard or newspaper for windows. I knew that there was city water; I saw fire hydrants. But outhouses leaned crazily in many of the backyards. Kudzu seemed everywhere, kudzu and small, stunted, virulently green trees, 197 / DOWNTOWN

and weeds. It seemed the hectic green of a jungle reclaiming a lost city. They were lost, these miniature cities. Lost, and long had been. I saw almost no people.

Occasionally we would pass a larger cross-street with a shabby grocery store, liquor store, a pawnshop or two, and a cafe. A few people, men and teenaged boys mainly, lounged here, eyes following the Morgan as it slid through. Once or twice Lucas raised a languid hand, and I would see a black hand raised in return. But mostly he kept his eyes straight ahead. I did, too.

“Where is everybody?” I said finally, in a low voice.

“Where are all the women? Where are the people going to work?”

“Most of the women are already out in Buckhead, working in the kitchens,” Lucas said. “The guys mostly don’t have jobs. I still don’t know where they go in the daytime. They’re not usually around.”

Driving through Summerhill, he gestured to the right. I caught a glimpse of the blue bowl of the new stadium, and heard the muted rush of traffic on the freeway.

“That used to be a neighborhood,” he said.

“Where did the people go?”

“Good question. Holy Christ. The city could raise eighteen million dollars to put up a major league stadium, and the housing authority long ago pledged fifty million bucks to wipe out the slums in a decade, but they couldn’t seem to relocate a single black family whose home they knocked down, or spend a penny on communities like Vine City or Buttermilk Bottom. Ben Cameron has started, but it’s going to take way too long. Shit. No wonder Stokely Carmichael goes around with his fist in the air.”

“Isn’t there some public housing?” I said.

“Oh, yeah. Sure. There were exactly four, since about the mid-thirties, until Ben took office, and there’ll be lag ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 198

time till the new ones get underway. Atlanta’s going to be lucky if somebody doesn’t literally light a fire under it this summer.”

I was silent while he piloted the Morgan through the hot, nearly empty streets over to DeKalb Avenue past the odd little white enclave of Cabbagetown, around the sprawling Fulton Bag and Cotton Mill, and into another small warren of dirt streets just past it. The street we were on was narrow and deeply rutted, and overgrown with weeds on its verges.

It climbed steeply to a high point on which nothing but a small grove of tough little urban trees and more kudzu stood, and was lined on either side of its lower portion with sagging asbestos-sided houses the twins of those I had seen in the other neighborhoods. Lucas slowed the Morgan and stopped in front of one, the yard of which was planted with rioting old-fashioned sweetheart rose bushes and the latticed porch deeply shaded with purple wisteria. The smell of the invisible urban mimosa reached out again. I smiled involuntarily. The little house was shabby, but its trim was freshly painted and its dirt yard swept, and I could hear, from somewhere around back, the laughter of children.

“Is this it?”

“Yep,” he said. “The official day care center of Pumphouse Hill, Mrs. Mamie Lou Roberts, proprietor. John picked her out. She’s an old friend of his. There are old women like her in all the neighborhoods, community women who just take in children who don’t have any other place to go while their mothers are at work, and they feed them what they can, and look after them until the women get home at night. God knows what Mrs. Roberts uses for money. I think the mothers pay what they can, but it couldn’t be enough to feed all these kids, and buy mattresses and blankets for naps, and heat for 199 / DOWNTOWN

the winter. And a lot of the mothers are children themselves; young teenagers. No husbands, and their families have kicked them out.”

“Where in the hell are the fathers?” I said fiercely.

“I’m sure the mamas would like to know,” he said. “Negro men don’t hang around these communities much. If there are any jobs, they sure aren’t down here.”

“Aren’t there programs? Doesn’t the government do something for children like these? The city, or the state, or Johnson’s new stuff?” I said, despair swamping me. I would not have believed the communities of Atlanta’s Southeast if I had not seen them.

“I guess so, yeah,” Luke said, dismissing them with a flick of his hand. “Ben’s got the promise of a lot of stuff from Johnson. But nobody down here knows what they are, or how to apply for them, or even what the conditions are that have to be met before you can get the dough. Jesus, a great many of the old women who do the most good for the kids can’t read or write, and the younger ones, who can, are so damned tired they can’t get to the right office to apply; what government office ever kept anything but government hours?

That’s one thing Ben Cameron hopes this series can do, get the right local agencies in touch with the right people, cut through the damned bureaucracy and red tape. Give the problem a human face, as ol’ Culver baby so righteously said. Make people see.”

“Are we going in?” I asked, not wanting to.

“We’ll wait for John. We’ll be off on the wrong foot if we don’t.”

We sat silently in the Morgan. The sun climbed higher into the whitening vault of the sky. A stunted chinaberry tree shaded us, and on the other side, in a pool of pink dust, a thin black dog slept. It was very quiet; the children’s voices seemed to have drifted away

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on the small hot wind, and I heard no traffic noise, and no birdsong.

Finally I said, “This is the worst place I have ever been.

This is not even like the United States. How can this be a part of Atlanta?”

Luke sighed, and turned to me. The sly laziness was gone from his eyes, and I thought that he looked, all of a sudden, as tired as I had ever seen him.

“You saw the worst of it this morning, Smoky,” he said.

“I brought you through the bad ones, the flat-out ghettos, on purpose. There are better Negro communities in Atlanta, some of them okay, some of them not far from luxurious, over in the Southwest. Atlanta’s got one of the richest Negro communities in the country, though nobody hears much about that. They don’t want publicity. And it’s got a pretty big black power structure—businessmen, clergy, the folks at the Atlanta University complex. They’ve worked with Dr.

King and are starting to work with Ben Cameron; they respect him. He’ll get a lot done through them, if time holds out for him. He’s gone after as much federal money as there is up there: Head Start, Model Cities, EOA, Job Corps, urban renewal, the whole nine yards. It’ll start to kick in sooner or later, and in some of the older, more stable neighborhoods, where people have lived for two and three generations, they know that, and they can hang on.

“But there are places, mainly in the Southeast, the ones I brought you through today, that haven’t gotten the word.

They’re ghettos; as bad as anything in Detroit, or Newark.

They’re full of dirt-poor, hopeless rural Negroes from all over the South who came here in absolute desperation looking for something better, and didn’t find it, and don’t have a history with the neighborhoods, or know about the federal programs, or give a shit, or even know who Ben Cameron is. They care about where the next 201 / DOWNTOWN

meal is coming from, or the next drink, period. They don’t see anything out there on the horizon. They’re the last ones the federal money will reach, and the ones that need it worst and first, and when trouble starts, it’s going to be there.

Here.”

“Why didn’t you show me some of the others?” I said.

“Why did you want me to think it was all like this?”

“Because you don’t know shit about Atlanta, although you think you do,” he said. “Because you think it’s all swimming pools in Buckhead and maître d’s knowing your name. You have some talent and you have some guts, and I’d hate to see you waste them on what Comfort will give you.”

“You take what he offers you quick enough,” I said, stung.

“You spend more time with him than any four of the rest of us.”

“Yeah, but I’ve seen and done the other, too,” he said.

“I’ve put in my time in the underbelly, where things happen in the South. You need to, too. And he’s not about to let you do that. I will.”

I was quiet. His words made me angry, but I could feel a solid shape under them that I knew to be truth. I looked around me at Pumphouse Hill. To the west, I could see, dimly through the heat haze and smog of many dingy, lowlying industrial buildings, the skyline of Atlanta. It looked as ethereal, as unreachable, as the Emerald City must have seemed to Dorothy. As it must seem, every day, to the people of Pumphouse Hill.

“Tell me about Mrs. Roberts,” I said. “Why her, particularly? What’s her story?”

“Well, like I said, John knows her,” Luke said. “He used to stay with her some when he first came to Atlanta. I think he preached a little at her church. Kind of an internship, and she put him up. She’s got three or four children who cut out and went North and left her

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with grandchildren—that happens a lot here; grandmothers raising generations of children—and gradually all the young women down here who were trying to work outside started asking her to look after their kids, and pretty soon she was kind of the local granny-day care person. Her husband died years ago, and she hasn’t seen her son in years, and she needs the few pennies she gets for looking after them. John says more times than she’ll tell you, she looks after them free. She loves kids. But she needs literally everything; some of the children come at daybreak and stay till after dark, and she has to scrounge food to feed them three meals, and blankets for them to roll up in for naps, and some way to keep them warm in winter. She’s only got space heaters and an old gas stove. Her church helps when it can, and I know John gives her money regularly. But she’s got fifteen or sixteen children at any given time, and there’s never enough.

Forget schooling. She can’t read or write herself, except her name.”

“What will Focus do for her?” I said. My eyes stung.

“Focus will make her real to a lot of people with bucks,”

Luke said. “Show her face and the kids’ faces around Buckhead and Ansley Park, places like that, where somebody could write one check and feed those kids for a month. John says sometimes they have cereal and water three meals a day.

Let Atlanta know it’s not all the Braves and the freeway down in the Southeast. Give a name to all the tired old black ladies they see waiting for the Twenty-three Oglethorpe bus. Maybe stir up the folks at the capitol to shell out some more, or at least get the city agencies to get down here and see what they can do for her. And then for other old women like her, who look after the children. It’s easy to think of the people down here as ‘them,’ statistics, in a part of town you don’t ever go, or even think about. It’s harder to ignore them when 203 / DOWNTOWN

they’re little kids named Otis and Ivan and Patricia, looking right at you.”

“And that’s what you’ll do, shoot the faces,” I said.