Linden Hills

Book 809: Virago Modern Classics

by Gloria Naylor

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY IRENOSEN OKOJIE

By the bestselling author of The Women of Brewster Place

With its showcase homes and manicured lawns, an address in the wealthy Black American neighbourhood of Linden Hills is a symbol that you've made it. The ultimate achievement: a home on prestigious Tupelo Drive. Making your way downhill to Tupelo is irrefutable proof of your worth. But the farther down the hill you go, the emptier you become and the price of success may well be a journey down to the lowest circle of hell.

As two young friends - poets from the wrong side of town - look to earn extra money doing odd jobs in Linden Hills, their warmth, humour and disbelief exposes the hypocrisy of life on the 'right' side of the tracks. Exploring a microcosm of race and social class, Gloria Naylor reveals the true cost of success for the lost souls of Linden Hills.

'Gloria Naylor is gifted with timeless wisdom, bottomless empathy, and limitless language. Her novels will shine a light for readers and writers for generations to come' Tayari Jones, author of AN AMERICAN MARRIAGE

'Naylor's skill in weaving together culture, heartbreak, joy, magic, terror, laughter, pain, and love - which is to say, life - is extraordinary' Robert Jones, Jr., author of THE PROPHETS

'Naylor has produced an ambitious novel that aspires to be nothing less than a contemporary reading of Dante's 'Inferno' . . . One is quickly beguiled . . . so gracefully does Naylor fuse together the epic and the naturalistic, the magical and the real' Michiko Kakutani, New York Times

Publisher: Little, Brown Book Group

Print pages: 336

Sample

The business district of Wayne Avenue was contained within five blocks on the northern side of the street. It had one library, one dry cleaner, one supermarket, and two delicatessens (one of which sold a better grade of marijuana than of olive loaf and took numbers when the taxi stand was closed). There were three liquor stores and three storefront churches – the Tabernacle of the Saints and Harry’s Cut Rate Winery standing side by side. A host of small real estate offices were sprinkled amid all this, and their dusty windows held crayoned placards advertising garden apartments in Linden Hills. But the apartments they actually leased sat directly across Wayne Avenue – minus the gardens and the careful maintenance that existed when white families had lived there. These apartment buildings were the enclave of the hopeful who had fled from the crowded sections of Putney Wayne and the alleys of Brewster Place. They now felt terribly suburban because they had two scarred trees at each end of the block and could actually look down into Linden Hills from their back windows. Wayne Junior High School with its large asphalt yard, handball courts, and basketball rings took up one whole block on this side of the avenue.

Willie and Lester approached each other on the side of the school yard. Willie had just crossed the avenue from one of the liquor stores, his small brown package tucked into the pocket of his light pea jacket.

‘Hey, Shit.’

‘Hey, White.’

Willie held out his left hand, palm up, and grinned at Lester. ‘Take it to the left.’

Lester grinned back, smacked a gloved hand down on Willie’s, and held out his right palm. ‘Take it to the right.’

The ritual was finished with Willie’s right hand. Then arms up – ‘Take it all if it’s good and tight’ – four hands making two fists. And the boys laughed.

They had greeted each other like that since the time they had attended the school they now stood in front of. Both had graduated – Lester to Spring Vale High and Willie to the streets. But they had been inseparable in junior high school, and it was there they had picked up their nicknames and their desires to be poets. Willie K. Mason was so black that the kids said if he turned just a shade darker, there was nothing he could do but start going the other way. Didn’t ice get so cold it turned hot? And when you burned coal, it turned to ash; so if Willie got any darker, he’d just have to turn white. Willie believed this for a while and went around in the summer wearing long-sleeved shirts and a huge panama hat. He dreaded the thought of waking up white one day because then his mother would kick him out of the house and none of the really fine sisters would let him kiss them. So the darkest boy in Wayne Junior High was tagged White Willie. He became friends with Lester Tilson in the seventh grade after helping him fight a ninth grader who had called Lester ‘Baby Shit’ because of the milky-yellow tone in his skin. The boy was twice their size and welcomed Willie’s intrusion because he was able to save his knuckles and use Willie’s head against Lester’s jaw. When Lester and Willie got up from the ground with their bloody noses soaking their shirtfronts, Willie told the boy, ‘There’s more where that came from if you call him Baby Shit again. He ain’t no baby.’

‘Well, he look like baby shit. Tell him to put a diaper on his face.’

Lester was ready to fight again, but Willie felt it was time for a compromise. ‘Look, I don’t want my man to kill you now. Just call him Shit, and we’ll leave it at that.’

He convinced Lester that was a cool name. Imagine – Shit. A real cuss word and nobody could get into trouble from the principal or anything for saying it: if it’s his name, it’s his name, so what could the teachers do about it? Lester wasn’t too sure about Willie’s logic, but he knew he’d be in for it if he kept bringing a torn and dirty shirt home every day. And since his mama was known to have a right hook worse than any boy at Wayne – even the ninth graders – he let matters lie.

They went through the eighth and ninth grades together, swapping baseball cards, Smokey Robinson 45’s, and lies about their conquests over the tight-hipped girls at Wayne who were notorious at the time for not giving it up until they were married – or at least in college, because if they got pregnant, then it was by a man with a degree. Willie had shown Lester his first condom. He hoped that if only half of the stories Lester told him were just halfway true, Lester would be able to teach him how to manage the secret of that small disc of rubber so expertly that Willie could then convince the other guys that maybe some of his own stories weren’t lies.

‘Come on, Shit, put it on.’

Lester stared at the limp, elastic nipple as mystified as his friend. ‘Naw, man.’

‘Aw, please. Just show me once. See, I’ve got this girl really ready. But she’s scared of getting banged up. And all the other times I did it, I just went natural, ya know. But this particular one won’t do it unless I use this.’

Lester took the condom with his heart pounding and tried to keep his hands from shaking. He examined it slowly while Willie waited, his eyes intent on each of his movements. Lester finally shook his head with disgust and flipped it back at Willie.

‘Man, that’s too small. It’ll never fit me.’

‘Yeah?’ Willie looked at his friend with new respect. ‘But it stretches.’

‘I don’t care – you got the wrong size for me. No point in breaking a good rubber.’

‘God,’ Willie said as he slowly uncurled the elastic tube to its full nine inches, ‘you must be really something.’

And Lester had shown Willie his first poems. They were studying for a geometry exam at Lester’s home on First Crescent Drive. Lester looked up several times at Willie’s dark, knotty head bent over a smudged looseleaf of triangles and lines. He nervously fingered the loose papers crammed in the back of his textbook, hoping that today would be the time he could summon up enough courage to pull them out.

‘White?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Nothing.’ Lester sighed and put his head back down into his book. Writing poems was sissy stuff in the crowd he and Willie hung with – unless it was something about Miss Thatcher’s umbrella-shaped behind, or just maybe on Valentine’s Day you could get away with it if the sister who was receiving them was fine enough. But crap like this about sunsets and flowers, and how sometimes he still got a little afraid in the dark, or how he wanted to grow up and be like Malcolm X, his favorite person in all history. Or the way it felt looking at the strong, muscular body of Hank Aaron twist around when he swung a bat – damn. He didn’t want Willie to think he was a fruit or something.

‘White?’

‘Shit, don’t keep bothering me if it isn’t important. I think I got old Thatcher licked on this one. I can take that test tomorrow and prove that the shortest distance between two points ain’t no straight line.’

‘Here.’ Lester stuck the papers in his face. ‘Read this.’ His suspended breath burned him while Willie smoothed out the crumpled sheets and began to read. Then he saw the edges of his friend’s mouth turn up just a flicker.

‘If you laugh, so help me God, I’ll jump up from here and kick you right in the butt. And if you tell anybody at school, I’ll call you a liar, White Willie – and, and, I’ll kick you in the butt again. I can beat you and practically every other guy there except Spoon and that’s ’cause he fights dirty. Give me my stuff!’

Willie held the poems out of Lester’s reach. ‘Hey, lay light, man. You know, these are really good.’

Lester flushed with pleasure but it would be unthinkable to show it. Then he’d really be a fruit. He sucked his teeth. ‘Aw, they’re nothing.’

‘No joke, Shit. You must have put a lot of time into these.’

‘Two seconds – that’s all. Less time than you need to take a leak.’

‘Well, it sure takes me a lot longer than that to do mine, and they ain’t this good.’

‘Yeah?’ Lester felt the muscles in his face relax but he checked himself. ‘Come off it. I never saw you writing no poems, not even about Miss Thatcher.’

‘I never saw you neither, but you got ’em right here.’

Lester wasn’t going to be trapped that easily. ‘Okay, where are they? Come on, let’s go to your place right now and let me read them.’

‘You can’t read them, Shit.’

‘Yeah, I thought so.’

‘No, they’re not on paper. They’re all up here.’ Willie pointed to his head. ‘You know how my house is; I don’t have a room all to myself like you. If my brothers saw me writing poems, they’d call me a queer and then it’d be all over school and I’d have to fight my way home every day. You know, most guys think you’re a sissy if you like this stuff.’

‘Yeah.’ Lester nodded. ‘I know. But you can’t worry about those losers. What are yours about?’

So Willie began to recite to Lester. Crude, choppy verses about a place called Bedford-Stuyvesant in New York, which Lester guessed must be a lot like Putney Wayne. Garbage can hide-and-go-seek. Winos who spoke wisdom. And Willie went on – about how it felt to hear your father beating your mother and what the tears looked like on your face. Willie hadn’t grown up around too many sunsets and flowers, but he too was still afraid in the dark sometimes. And once he had gotten the same crazy feelings from staring at the thighs of a Knicks center that he got from touching pretty Janie Benson.

Lester then went under his mattress and dug out more crumpled papers that he said he had to hide from his older sister, who was lower than a snake and once had read his diary, which was mostly lies anyway but it got him a whipping from his mother. Geometry forgotten, they sat in Lester’s room for hours, reciting to each other the lines that helped to harness the chaos and confusions in their fourteen-year-old worlds. Bloody noses had made them friends, but giving sound to the bruised places in their hearts made them brothers.

Willie had left school after the ninth grade. He said there was really nothing more they could teach him. He knew how to read and write and reason. And from here on in, it was all propaganda. He was now free to read the books that were important to him, not to some rusty-minded teacher. And if you wanted to write about life, you had to go where life was, among the people.

Lester went on to high school and graduated because his mother swore she’d see him dead before she saw him a dropout since, in the end, it would amount to the same thing. But he came to the conclusion that Willie had been right, although Lester could put his poetry in the school literary magazine. So all of his mother’s tears, threats, and stony silences couldn’t convince him to enroll at the university. Didn’t he want to be more than a bum like his dead father? He’d be the only kid in Linden Hills not going to college. Lester told her that Kiswana Browne hadn’t finished college and her father was hardly a bum – they had the best house on First Crescent Drive, didn’t they? That Browne girl was mentally disturbed – everybody knew that – putting holes in her nose, taking some heathen name, and going to live in the slums of Brewster Place. But Lester had all of his faculties. Didn’t he want to go to the university and come out a great poet? Lester had his mother there. Exactly – he was going to be a poet, and to write great poetry you had to be out among the people, not locked away behind a twenty-foot stone wall. Mrs Tilson threw up her hands. He was his father’s son and she might as well accept it. His grandmother – that scheming Mamie Tilson – should have died a lot sooner before she’d corrupted his brain like she corrupted his father’s. And Mrs Tilson would never forgive herself for letting that scum, Willie Mason, come into her home and influence her son while she was probably the only one in Linden Hills who treated him like a person. Lester hardly remembered her treatment of Willie in the same light as she did, but it seemed that she had decided to stop nagging him about school and that was good enough for the present.

So Lester then joined Willie in giving poetry readings in coffeehouses, bookstores, and the city park. They supported themselves with odd jobs because they couldn’t make a living from their work. And Willie couldn’t even pick up the occasional five dollars that Lester got from getting a poem into a local newspaper because he never wrote them down. Willie continued the habit of creating stanzas in his mind and eventually had a repertoire in the hundreds. He said his aim was to be like the great slave poet, Jupiter Hammon, who memorized thousands of verses because he couldn’t read. Willie considered it a terrible drawback that he had even gone as far as junior high and so could read very well. The written word dulls the mind, and since most of what’s written is by white men, it’s positively poisonous.

Willie sought out fewer and fewer jobs over the years. He became a regular on Wayne Avenue, where he’d rented a room, and could be seen sipping wine and smoking pot with other young black men who were either tired of looking for work or tired of finding it. When he got drunk enough he dropped his street language and totally bewildered them with long recitations in perfect iambic pentameter about the state of American society. So Willie gained the respect of Wayne Avenue because he was a ‘deep’ dude. But it was getting toward the end of the year and the icy winds had driven Willie’s audience into their separate homes. He was now forced to talk to himself, and his reflections disturbed him. He was twenty years old and the last job he had he worked side by side with a twelve-year-old who came in after school. Would that be his fate at thirty and forty? What difference did it make that he could arrange the ingredients on a cereal box into heroic couplets while he shoved it into a bag and carried it out to someone’s car? With jobs like that, he saw himself frozen in time, never becoming a man, just a very gray-haired boy. He’d think about Linden Hills and all that it offered, and wonder if perhaps there might have been another way.

Willie thought about this now, looking at Lester, who had at least finished high school and would inherit a home on First Crescent Drive.

‘Hey, man, what you know good?’ Willie said.

‘It’s good and cold, bro – I’ll tell you that. Saw you coming out the Tabernacle. You been praying?’

‘Ah.’ Willie stamped his feet to keep the ice from seeping into the soles of his shoes. ‘You know I was in Harry’s, getting a little liquid fire for my coffee. This time of year brandy’s all you can get to keep you warm. The babes don’t wanna hang with nobody around Christmas who can’t shell up for a gift.’

‘Know what ya mean.’

‘Do you, Shit?’ Willie looked at him closely.

‘Sure I do.’ Lester frowned. ‘Hey, I don’t have no job either. They lay off at the factory this time of year.’

‘Them’s some nice threads you sporting on your hands and feet.’ Willie nodded at Lester’s thick suede gloves and Western boots.

‘These?’ Lester threw out his hands and stamped his feet as if wanting to fling the things off. ‘It’s an early Christmas present from my mom and sister. Said they might as well give it to me now since it’s so bitter and I’m too damned trifling to buy myself something to keep away frostbite. A nice way to say Happy Holiday to a fella – huh?’

‘Least you got someone to care about whether you freeze or not. It must be nice to have a family in Linden Hills who can afford that kind of stuff.’

Lester started for a moment and then stared at Willie. ‘Hey, baby – come out of it. Is this my main man talking? That ain’t caring, White, that’s showing off. See what we gave you? Now what you gonna give us, you no-good bum, you. They gave me this stuff and prayed it would burn my ass every time I wore it. And believe me, if I was a better man and it wasn’t so damned cold, I would’ve left this crap right under their Jesus-tripping, tinseled tree.’

Willie was silent and crammed his cracked hands deeper into his pockets.

‘I know you’re saying, sure, I’m standing here trembling in a pea jacket and thin-soled shoes and this mother’s talking about turning up his nose at gloves and boots. But I’m telling ya, Willie, it’s torment every time I have to wear this, ’cause it’s less than a week till Christmas and I ain’t got the money to buy them something expensive. You know those type of broads. I’d better not bring in no Woolworth’s perfume and powder set. It’s Chanel or nothing. And I ain’t got no Chanel money, so it’s nothing. And then I’m nothing and they’ve made their point again for another year. Merry Christmas, baby.’

Willie sighed. ‘Yeah, I guess you’re right.’

‘Guess nothing, why—’

‘It’s not cold enough for you two? You just gotta be out here reciting poetry, even if it’s only to each other.’ The man who called to them came up with a young woman pressed against his arm, her body turned slightly in toward his for warmth because the thin beige coat afforded her very little.

‘Hey, Norm, tell it right, baby.’

‘Hiya, Ruth.’ Willie was always awed in front of Ruth. He had never seen a woman whose beauty seemed to go down to the bare bone. He saw it pushing out from under her skin to highlight the bronze tinge that the wind put on her smooth, round face, a face like smoky caramel. And her oval eyes, narrowed against the wind, didn’t look squinty like most people’s but positively sexy, as if she was doing that just to make his heart stop. He often dreamed about his friend’s wife, and it was always the same. She was lying on his bed with that golden-brown glow on her face coating her entire body. And he was standing over her, just looking. There was no desire or need within him to touch her, just a heady contentment in watching her nipples and pubic hair all golden and glowing like her face. Then there would be a knock on his door and his mouth would go dry because he knew it was Norman. And Norman would, somehow, manage to come in through the locked door and Willie would say, ‘I was just looking, Norm, just looking.’ And Norman would say, turning toward the golden goddess on the bed, ‘Yeah, she’s really something, huh, man?’ Willie would wake up and wonder why he never wanted to do anything to Ruth while she lay on his bed – just look, as he was contented to do now, a little tongue-tied in front of her.

‘Norm,’ Lester said, ‘if I had a woman like that this morning, I wouldn’t be out here freezing her to death – I’d be at home squeezing her to death.’

Norman and Ruth laughed, and Willie was disgusted by the cheap rhyme that Lester dared apply to Ruth. She deserved at least a sonnet.

‘Les, it’s all in your mind,’ Norman said. ‘It’s not that cold.’

‘Not cold? Man, it’s cold as a witch’s tit.’

‘Why do you men always apply something bad to a woman? Why can’t it be cold as the devil’s balls?’

‘Aw, don’t come off with none of that women’s lib stuff,’ Norman teased her. ‘How do you know if the devil’s got cold balls, you ever slept with him?’

‘No, but Les has never slept with a witch either.’

‘He did if he scored with that disaster he was dating last month.’ Willie found his tongue and was thrilled to see that he had made Ruth laugh, her voice floating high and translucent above their heavier ones.

‘Look, why don’t you joy monkeys come on up to the house and have a little something hot?’ Norman offered.

Lester counted their heads dramatically. ‘But there’s four of us here. Since when you got more than two cups?’

The Anderson’s poverty was a standing joke on Wayne Avenue. People said that if Norman brought home air, Ruth would make gravy, pour it over it, and tell him not to bring so much the next time.

‘I’d like you to know that we have three cups.’ Ruth smiled. ‘One each for you and Willie, and Norman and I can share the other one. And we’ve even got the coffee to put in them, too.’

‘And I got the cream.’ Willie pulled his brandy out of his pocket.

‘Aw right!’ Norman slapped him on the back.

They crossed Linden Road and entered one of the dilapidated garden-apartment buildings. It was difficult to notice what wasn’t in the Anderson’s apartment because so much care seemed to have gone into what was there. Visitors found themselves thinking, What a nice feeling to be allowed into a home. And it was a home with its bare wood floors, dusted and polished, and with the three pieces of furniture that sat in three large rooms: one sofa in the living room, one kitchenette set with plastic-bottomed chairs on uncertain chrome legs, one bed. Two towels hung in the bathroom side by side with two washcloths folded neatly over them. In all the rooms there were matching colored shades that served for curtains or draperies. Norman took the boys’ coats and hung them over his and Ruth’s on the only two hangers in the guest closet.

‘Wooh, it’s good to be inside. You folks sure get great heat in here.’ Willie rubbed his cracked hands together and saw the steam misting on the windows.

‘It’s a wonderful apartment in the winter,’ Ruth said. ‘There’s always plenty of heat. And in the summer when the windows are open, the cross-ventilation is better than air-conditioning, isn’t it, Norm?’

‘You’re right about that.’ And Norman went to the stove to put on water for the coffee. The Andersons looked around their apartment as if the warm and cool air that filled up the empty rooms were all that mattered.

Ruth put three Styrofoam cups on the table, setting the ones in front of Lester and Willie as carefully as she would china. And she gave them each a plastic spoon with a paper napkin folded underneath. Norman poured the coffee and made such a ceremony of unwrapping Willie’s cheap blackberry brandy and adding it to their cups, you might have thought it a rare cognac. And when the two boys raised the steaming coffee to their lips, that’s exactly what it tasted like.

Their hosts sat there, talking and laughing with such ease that Willie had a hard time figuring out how Ruth and Norman were both drinking from the same cup. Norman would take a sip and talk, and then she’d take a sip. It soon appeared unthinkable that there should be more than one cup between them since they never reached for it at the same time.

Lester and Willie were careful not to bite into the rims of the soft Styrofoam. They knew the cups were to be washed and used repeatedly. They would be made to last until Norman got the pinks, when they would be destroyed. Ruth had bought hard plastic cups once, but Norman had managed to splinter those and stick the edges into his wrists. Now there could be no danger of that happening next year – if it was the year for the pinks.

Looking at him, it was difficult to imagine that this square-jawed man with the gentle, sloping lips was the same one who every other spring went up and down Wayne Avenue, screaming and tearing at his face and hair with his fingernails, trying to scrape off the pinks. He resorted to his teeth and bare nails only after everything else had failed – jagged sections of plates and glasses, wire hangers, curtain rods, splinters of wood once part of a dresser, coffee table, or her grandmother’s antique music box. Up and down Wayne Avenue – in a frantic search for untried edges and textures to dig into his skin – until he was taken away, arms forced and laced to his side, and sent into a twilight that dimmed the shades of his nightmare.

People wondered why Ruth stayed. They knew she was used to better since she’d once had a husband down on Fifth Crescent Drive. And Norman could never keep a job for more than a year and nine months. And she’d certainly keep no furniture for longer than that. He’d come out of the hospital after three months and usually get a new job within a week, or at the most two. But then a year and nine months later, it would happen again.

She didn’t stay because every dime he did earn, when he could earn it, was brought home to her; or because he would take her swollen feet out of her waitress loafers, put them in his lap, and rub them patiently for hours; or because the music in his laughter had a way of rounding off the missing notes in her soul. No, none of that would have kept her there. Because Ruth was a woman who wanted children and that anchor of security which comes with the weight of accumulated things: good brocade chairs, linens, a set of company silverplate. And she came to realize after their fourth summer that she could have none of that with Norman. He would manage to destroy everything that was painfully gathered for almost two years and then awaken from his twilight cry, promise to take his medication, see the psychiatrist, and he would – for each of the seven seasons before the return of the pinks.

Ruth had gotten tired, past bone-tired, of hurting from being crushed between her hatred and love of this man. Tired of being afraid to have children and of thinking that one spring he just might kill her. Tired of looking into his beaten eyes when he came back from the hospital and saw his life shredded on the floor of their home. She was leaving six winters ago. That year had started off badly anyway. Her ovaries became seriously inflamed, and since there was just no money to treat them, she lost her job at the restaurant, no longer able to lift those heavy trays of food. And the pinks were due again by spring. She phoned her mother who said Hallelujah and loaned her a set of luggage.

Ruth packed early one afternoon, but the burning in her side forced her to lie down and rest. As soon as the pain lessened, she’d get the rest of her things, call a cab, and go. But Norman came home at two o’clock, eyes red-rimmed and threatening to roll back into his head. He told her that he felt the pinks were coming, and he was lucky this time, he’d been able to leave the plant before the guys saw them clinging to his flesh. God, he was so relieved to have made it home to her.

Contempt mates well with pity. So Ruth raised herself up in the bed and lashed out against what was driving her from everything that she loved. She was through, did he hear her, through. Because he was a maniac – a fucking, crazy maniac. And she hoped to God that this time he would drive a piece of broken glass through his heart. Then a sharp pain bent her over at the waist.

Norman saw with concern the tight lines around her eyes and mouth as she dug her fingers into her side and shivered on the bed. Gently, he pulled the sheet over her knotted body, and just as he went to stroke her forehead, he was thrown into another dimension. A wad of pink slime hit him on the back of the hand and moved up his wrist in wet, sucking motions. He cried out and beat his arm savagely against the air. The slime fell to the floor and curled up into a soft ball, but then it began to inch its way back toward his leg. Norman turned to the bed and reached out for her like a bewildered child. ‘Ruth?’

She curled up in the bed and moaned.

Oh, Christ, she was sick. Ruth was sick and those bastards were on their way. He turned to run toward the bathroom and a clammy weight slammed into his neck and slowly clawed its way up to his ears. His skin crawled toward his scalp, trying to escape the consuming mass, as he threw himself against the bathroom sink. His brain screamed, Scrape them off. But Ruth was sick, and he could never stop, he knew he could never stop. The glass of water he’d run splashed over his knuckles and soaked the front of his shirt when he stumbled back to the bedroom. He could smell his flesh dissolving under the pinkish slime that now clung to his chin and throat. The glass tumbled to the bed and what was left of the water seeped into the pillow and sheets. The aspirin poured out of the plastic vial, rolling over his fingers and falling on Ruth’s hair and shoulders. The jellied mucus was now biting into his chest and gnawing at his thighs and groin. The screaming now came from his very being. Scrape. But he could neve. . .