Linden Hills
A Novel
For my parents—
Roosevelt and Alberta Naylor
Grandma Tilson, I’m afraid of hell.
Ain’t nothing to fear, there’s hell on earth.
I mean the real hell where you can go when you die.
You ain’t gotta die to go to the real hell.
No?
Uh uh, you just gotta sell that silver mirror God
propped up in your soul.
Sell it to who—the devil?
Naw, just to the highest bidder, child. The
highest bidder.
There had been a dispute for years over the exact location of Linden Hills. Everyone associated with Wayne County had taken part in it: the U.S. Post Office, census takers, city surveyors, real estate brokers, and the menagerie of blacks and whites who had lived along its fringes for a hundred and sixty years. The original 1820 surveys that Luther Nedeed kept locked in his safe-deposit box stated that it was a V-shaped section of land with the boundaries running south for one and a half miles from the stream that bordered Putney Wayne’s high grazing fields down a steep, rocky incline of brier bush and linden trees before curving through the town’s burial ground and ending in a sharp point at the road in front of Patterson’s apple orchard. It wasn’t a set of hills, or even a whole hill—just the worthless northern face of a rich plateau. But it patiently bore the designation of Linden Hills as its boundaries contracted and expanded over the years to include no one, and then practically everyone in Wayne County.
The fact never disputed by anyone was that the Nedeeds have always lived there. Luther’s double great-grandfather bought the entire northern face of the plateau, descending from what is now First Crescent Drive to Tupelo Drive—which is really the last three of a series of eight curved roads that ring themselves around the hill. But Luther’s double great-grandfather, coming from Tupelo, Mississippi, where it was rumored that he’d actually sold his octoroon wife and six children for the money that he used to come North and obtain the hilly land, named that section Tupelo Drive. And at the time none of the white farmers gave a flying squat what he called it, ’cause if some crazy nigger wanted to lay out solid gold eagles for hard sod only good enough to support linden trees that barely got you ten cents on the dollar for a cord of oak or birch—let him. And the entire bottom of the land is hemmed in by the town cemetery. Had to be half-witted—who’d want to own land near a graveyard, especially a darky who is known to be scared pantless of haints and such? They pocketed Nedeed’s money and had a good laugh: first full moon on All Hallows would send them spirits walking and him running to beg them to buy the property back. That is, if he didn’t starve to death first. Couldn’t eat linden trees, and Lord knows he wasn’t gonna raise spit on that land. Would raise a lot of sand, though. Knees were slapped and throats choked on tobacco juice. Yup, he’d raise plenty of sand while trying to get a team and wagon down through that bush to fetch supplies.
But Nedeed didn’t try to farm Linden Hills. He built a two-room cabin at the bottom of the slope—dead center—with its door and windows facing the steep incline. After the cabin was finished, they could see him sitting in front of it for an hour at dawn, high noon, and dusk—his dark, immobile face rotating slowly amid the lime tombstones, the tangled brier, and the high stretch of murky forest. He sat there every day for exactly seven days—his thick, puffed lids raising, lowering, and narrowing over eyes that seemed to be measuring precisely the depth and length of light that the sun allowed his wedge of their world.
“Guess he’s trying to think a living out of that land.” But their victory had been replaced by a question as they watched Nedeed watching the path of the sun. No one admitted that they lacked the courage just to walk over and demand to know what he was doing. There was something in Luther Nedeed’s short, squat body that stopped those men from treating him like a nigger—and something in his eyes that soon stopped them from even thinking the word. It was said that his protruding eyes could change color at will, and over the course of his life, they would be assigned every color except red. They were actually dark brown—a flat brown—but since no man ever had the moral stamina to do more than glance at his face, because those huge, bottomless globes could spell out a starer’s midnight thoughts, black men looked at his feet or hands and white men looked over his shoulder at the horizon.
As the sun disappeared on the seventh day of his vigil, Luther Nedeed closed his eyes slowly and smiled. Patterson said he was hauling his apples away from the field and the sight of Nedeed sitting there grinning like one of them heathen E-jip mummies scared him out of a year’s growth, and when he got home, all the bushels facing Nedeed’s side of the road had fruit worms in them. He claimed that as the justification for the eight-foot fence he erected on the northern border of his orchard. It might have been closer to the truth to admit that he just couldn’t stomach the sight of Nedeed dragging all those dead bodies into his yard. Because the day after Patterson’s alleged plague of worms, Nedeed went and bought a team of horses, a box-shaped wagon, and began an undertaker’s business in the back room of his cabin. His proximity to the town cemetery put little strain on the horses and funeral hearse, and Nedeed knew that, unlike the South, the North didn’t care if blacks and whites were buried together so long as they didn’t live together. Appalled by the reports of the evils that lay below the Mason-Dixon and the cry that “the only good nigger is a dead nigger,” Wayne County let it be known that any of their sable brothers who were good and dead were welcome to a Christian burial right next to a white person—Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the days assigned for colored funerals.
Nedeed then built wooden shacks up on the hill, from what is now First Crescent Drive down to Fifth Crescent Drive, and rented them out to local blacks who were too poor to farm and earned their living from the sawmills or tar pit. He also wanted to rent out shacks along Tupelo Drive, but no one wanted any part of the cemetery land. It was bad enough they were down on their luck and had to resort to living in the hills, but they didn’t have to live near that strange Nedeed by a graveyard. News that someone had moved into the hills was always rebuffed: They lived up from Linden Hills; only Nedeed lived down on Linden Hills. And the white farmer who owned the grazing land over the stream at the crest of the hill would fight over being told that he had land in Linden Hills: That was coon town and he didn’t have a blade of grass there; he was across from Linden Hills.
The fact that no one wanted to be associated with his land didn’t bother Luther Nedeed. The nature of things being what they are, his business thrived. And over the years he was able to build a large, white clapboard house with a full veranda and a concrete morgue in the basement. He went away for a while in the spring of 1837 and brought back an octoroon wife. Rumor had it that he had returned to Mississippi and bought back the wife he had sold to a Cajun saloonkeeper. But the girl who set up housekeeping in the undertaker’s home couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, and Nedeed had owned Linden Hills for almost seventeen years by then. She gave him a son the following winter—short, squat, dark, and with an immobile face, even from birth. He grew up to carry his father’s first name, broad chest, and bowlegs. Big frog and little frog, the town whispered behind their backs.
Luther left his land and business to this only son, who everyone was betting would sell it before the old man was cold, since little Luther had been sent to one of them fancy boarding schools and surely had more sense than old crazy Luther to hold on to worthless hill land. But the son came back to the land and the undertaking business and carried the butt of the jokes about his father’s property on his quiet back. It seemed that when old Luther died in 1879, he hadn’t died at all, especially when they spoke to his son and especially when they glanced at those puffed eyelids and around those bottomless eyes. He, too, brought an octoroon woman into his home who gave him only one son—another Luther Nedeed.
Nothing was changing in the white clapboard house at the bottom of Linden Hills. There was another generation of big frog and little frog going through the hills together every first of the month to collect rent. What was changing slowly—very slowly—was the face of Wayne County. Farms were dwindling and small townships were growing in the place of cornfields and fruit groves. Putney Wayne’s son had sold a quarter of his pasture to a shoe factory and the smoky cinders blew over the entire field, settling in the sheep’s wool and turning the grass an ashy blue. This caused Wayne’s grandson to think that the price a Welsh developer offered him for the land was a miracle, and he grabbed the money and headed for New York City at the miraculous speed of thirty-five mph on the new railroad lines and never came back. The second wealthiest man in Wayne County bought a curved-dash Oldsmobile, proudly announcing that he now had the power of three horses that he could feed for a tenth the cost of grain.
But the wealthiest man in Wayne County sat at the bottom of Linden Hills and still carried wooden coffins to the cemetery with a horse and wagon. Old Luther’s son had sent away to England for the circulars from a new locomotive company called Rolls-Royce that was willing to custom design and ship him a funeral hearse with a mahogany dashboard and pure silver handles. He locked the circulars up in his desk, went to the second wealthiest man, and bought his team of Cleveland Bays at an incredibly low price. Nedeed knew he would have to wait until almost the poorest white family in Wayne County owned an automobile before even dead blacks rode in mahogany and silver.
Old Luther’s son was finally able to rent shacks along Tupelo Drive. These tenants didn’t seem to mind that they were surrounded by a cemetery. Talk had it that they had been murderers, root doctors, carpetbaggers, and bootleg preachers who were thrown out of the South and needed the short memory of the dead and the long shadows of the lindens for their left-of-center carryings-on. Nedeed didn’t care how they were able to pay their rent so long as they did it promptly on the first of the month. When the area within five acres of his funeral home became populated, he constructed an artificial lake (really a moat), a full twenty yards across, totally around his house and grounds. He filled it with marsh weeds, catfish, and ducks. Now the only entrance to his veranda was at the back, through a wood-and-brick drawbridge that he always kept down, but his neighbors saw the pulleys on the bridge and took immediate offense. Seemed as if he wanted to make out he was better than other folks—yeah, separate himself from the scum. Well, everybody knew that he’d been able to make them fancy changes on his house—building extra rooms and a third level—’cause years ago he’d financed gunrunners to the Confederacy. A rebel-loving nigger and now he was putting on airs with his blood money. They secretly nicknamed the lake Wart’s Pond—a fitting place for him and his frog-eyed son to squat on.
But they kept paying him rent and letting him bury their dead. And as the faces on the hill changed and the old town became a young city as the last farmlands gave way to housing developments, Nedeed sat on his porch swing and watched the sun move as it always had over his world. He remembered his father and was thankful that he had lived long enough to watch his words engraved in the scarred landscape of the county: Let ’em think as they want; let ’em say as they want—black or white. Just sit right here and they’ll make you a rich man through the two things they’ll all have to do: live and die. Nedeed watched the sun, the twentieth century, and the value of his hard, sod hill creep upward as slowly and concretely as the last laugh from a dead man’s grave.
The young municipal government soon took an interest in Linden Hills and tried to buy it from old Luther’s son, who was now very old himself. His refusal to sell provided months of employment for title searchers, city surveyors, and public works assessors. The location of Linden Hills made confiscation for the purpose of a bridge, tunnel, or some other “public good” ludicrous. Nedeed told the assessors that if they could come up with a blueprint for any type of municipal project, he’d give them the land—root to leaf. But set one brick on his property for some high-blown private development and—he pointed a gnarled finger at the squat carbon copy beside him—he would personally drag Wayne County all the way to the Supreme Court. The title searchers and surveyors were then sent to unearth crumbling state statutes and fading deeds, looking for some clause that either invalidated or whittled down Nedeed’s claim to the hill. Finally, an ambitious young lawyer found a seventeenth-century mandate forbidding Negroes to own, lease, or transfer property in Wayne County—regrettably, the same law that prohibited Hebrews, Catholics, and Devil worshipers from holding public office. Mayor Kilpatrick called an emergency meeting of the city council and they voted six to nothing to revoke the mandate. The mayor thanked them for convening on such short notice; then, after strongly advising the young lawyer to seek employment outside of Wayne County, he decided to let the matter of Linden Hills rest.
Nedeed, seeing that the government and real estate developers wanted his land so badly, decided to insure that they’d never be able to get their hands on it. So he went throughout the hill with his son beside him and, starting with First Crescent Drive all the way down through Fifth Crescent Drive, sold the land practically for air to the blacks who were shacking there. He gave them a thousand-year-and-a-day lease—provided only that they passed their property on to their children. And if they wanted to sell it, they had to sell it to another black family or the rights would revert back to the Nedeeds. And it seemed as if there were always going to be Nedeeds, because his son’s pale-skinned bride was bloated with child. It surprised no one when the baby was male and had the father’s complexion, protruding eyes, and first name—by now it had come to be expected.
Nedeed gave the same thousand-year-and-a-day option to the tenants who rented along Tupelo Drive, but he didn’t have to worry about them. They couldn’t move because only he would tolerate them on his land. Linden Hills was puzzled over Nedeed’s behavior. Why was he up and being so nice to colored folks when his daddy had been a slave dealer and he himself had sold guns to the Confederacy? Probably trying to make good with his kind before the Lord called him home. “God bless you,” an old woman breathed over her parchment of paper. Let him bless you—you’ll need it, Nedeed thought as he stonily turned his back.
Like his father, he saw where the future of Wayne County—the future of America—was heading. It was going to be white: white money backing wars for white power because the very earth was white—look at it—white gold, white silver, white coal running white railroads and steamships, white oil fueling white automotives. Under the earth—across the earth—and one day, over the earth. Yes, the very sky would be white. He didn’t know exactly how, but it was the only place left to go. And when they got there, they weren’t taking anyone black with them—and why should they? These people, his people, were always out of step, a step behind or a step ahead, still griping and crying about slavery, hanging up portraits of Abraham Lincoln in those lousy shacks. They couldn’t do nothing because they were slaves or because they will be in heaven. Praying and singing about what lay beyond the sky—“God bless you”—open your damned Bible, woman, and you’ll see that even the pictures of your god are white. Well, keep trying to make your peace with that white god, keep moaning and giving the Nedeeds over half a year’s wages to send a hunk of rotting flesh off to heaven in style instead of putting that money into bonds or land or even the bank at one-and-a-half-percent interest. Yes, make your peace with that white god who lived beyond the sky—he was going to deal with the white god who would one day own that sky. And you and yours would help him.
Sure, they thought him a fool—look at the fools that he had to claim as his own. When they laughed at them, they laughed at him. Well, he would show them. This wedge of earth was his—he couldn’t rule but he sure as hell could ruin. He could be a fly in that ointment, a spot on that bleached sheet, and Linden Hills would prove it. He had given his people some of the most expensive property in the county. They had the land for a millennium. Now just let them sit on it and do what they do best: digging another man’s coal, cleaning another man’s home, rocking another man’s baby. And let them learn to count enough to keep paying monthly insurance, because they could read enough to believe that heaven was still waiting while they wrote just enough to sign those insurance premiums over to him. Nedeed’s last vision when he closed his puffy eyelids, with his image bending over him, was of Wayne County forced to drive past Linden Hills and being waved at by the maids, mammies, and mules who were bringing the price of that sweat back to his land and his hands. A wad of spit—a beautiful, black wad of spit right in the white eye of America.
But Nedeed hadn’t foreseen the Great Depression that his grandson was to live through. Those years brought another pale-skinned bride to the clapboard house, the construction of a separate mortuary and chapel, a triple garage, and the first set of automated hearses. They also brought a wave of rumors that Nedeed managed to come through so well because he’d sold all his stocks and bonds just a day before Black Friday and kept his money in a coffin, where it grew like a dead man’s toenails because he sprinkled it with the dust he gathered from the graves of babies.
Luther Nedeed didn’t care where Linden Hills thought he had gotten his money, but he spent several years deciding where it should go. Watching America’s nervous breakdown during the thirties, he realized that nothing was closer to the spleen and guts of the country than success. The Sunday papers now told him what the sun had told his dead fathers about the cycles of men: Life is in the material—anything high, wide, deep. Success is being able to stick an “er” on it. And death is watching someone else have it. His grandfather’s dream was still possible—the fact that they had this land was a blister to the community, but to make that sore fester and pus over, Linden Hills had to be a showcase. He had to turn it into a jewel—an ebony jewel that reflected the soul of Wayne County but reflected it black. Let them see the marble and brick, the fast and sleek, yes, and all those crumbs of power they uniformed their sons to die for, magnified tenfold and shining bright—so bright that it would spawn dreams of dark kings with dark counselors leading dark armies against the white god and toward a retribution all feared would not be just, but long overdue. Yes, a brilliance that would force a waking nightmare of what the Nedeeds were capable. And the fools would never realize—he looked down at his son playing with a toy dragon—that it was nothing but light from a hill of carbon paper dolls.
There would be no problem in financing his vision. It took exactly three phone calls and one letter to acquire the state charter the new Tupelo Realty Corporation needed to finance, construct, and sell private developments. Nedeed never doubted that he’d be able to build the houses; the real problem was deciding who in Linden Hills should own them. This was something that he couldn’t leave to his lawyers, so with his son beside him Luther Nedeed visited every shack on the hill and talked to his tenants. He walked through Linden Hills as it would be—along smooth curved roads, up long sloping lawns and manicured meridians. He stood under the door fronts of imitation Swiss chalets, British Tudors, and Georgian town houses flanked by arbors choked with morning glories, wisteria, and honeysuckle. Driveways were lined with mimosas, and gazebos sat in the shadow of elms and tulip oaks while lavender and marigolds outlined the bases of marble fountains and aviaries. He trod quietly amid his vision, knowing that he must take extreme care to weed out anyone who threatened to produce seeds that would block the light from his community. And empty goblets let through the most light, Nedeed thought as he began knocking on doors down along Tupelo Drive.
He started with the ones who would be the most eager to work with him on the future of Linden Hills. The children of the parasites and outcasts from the South, who could find a welcome only from the dead that bordered their homes, wanted nothing better than a way to forget and make the world forget their past. Many had already taken the ample income from their families and built frame houses on their land, with wire fences surrounding the neat front yards and backyard gardens. Beyond the money they had received from their parents, they had no use for the clouded inheritance of incense, blood, and distilled alcohol that had built the walls which they were constantly painting and whitewashing as if to remove a stench. Yes, they would gladly match dollar for dollar the investment from the Tupelo Realty Corporation to build up a community for their children to be proud of. So when their grandchildren thought back, it would be to Linden Hills. When they needed to journey back, it would be to the brick and marble they would erect with this man’s help. Strong, solid walls and heavy, marble steps—the finest in the new community—strong enough, solid enough to bury permanently any outside reflections about other beginnings. The Tupelo Realty Corporation offered them all this, and a memory was a small price to pay.
Nedeed’s work was done quickly in Tupelo Drive, but now he had to tread more carefully as he made his way up the rest of the slope. Most of these people were proud of the lousy quarters and dimes, damp with their parents’ sweat, that had been invested in their thousand-year-and-a-day leases. The painted walls, additional bedrooms, and raked dirt yards were the labor of people who had hopes of building on, not over, their past. These were the fools who could do the most damage if he let them stay. There were some up there who had rooted themselves in the beliefs that Africa could be more than a word; slavery hadn’t run its course; there was salvation in Jesus and salve in the blues. Sure, Nedeed could tell them that you spelled real progress in white capital letters, but their parents hadn’t been able to read and here they sat as living proof that you could survive anyway. No, people like that looked back a millennium, and if they could sit on Linden Hills for a millennium they’d produce children who would dream of a true black power that spread beyond the Nedeeds; children who would take this wedge of earth and try to turn it into a real weapon against the white god. He’d cultivate no madmen like Nat Turner or Marcus Garvey in Linden Hills—that would only get them all crushed back into the dust.
He knew how to stop that before it began. Even a goblet filled with the darkest liquid will let through light—if it’s diluted enough, Nedeed thought as he carefully dressed himself and his son before they visited the rest of Linden Hills. As he placed his polished wing-tip shoes on their sagging front porches, he watched them watching the crisp lines in his linen suit, counting the links in his gold watch chain, and measuring the grade of his son’s gabardine knickers. He made a note of the eyes that returned to his dark face carrying respect and not suspicion, and silently chose the ones who then found some pretense to make their playing children come up from the road or out of the house to stand quietly and listen while he talked about everything from the weather to the price of soap. He could now safely tell these about the Tupelo Realty Corporation with its low-interest mortgage and scholarship funds to Fisk and Howard, because he knew they were calling their children to watch a wizard: Come, look, listen and perhaps you will learn how to turn the memory of our iron chains into gold chains. The cotton fields that broke your grandparents’ backs can cover yours in gabardine. See, the road to salvation can be walked in leather shoes and sung about in linen choir robes. Nedeed almost smiled at their simplicity. Yes, they would invest their past and apprentice their children to the future of Linden Hills, forgetting that a magician’s supreme art is not in transformation but in making things disappear.
Nedeed got rid of the unwanted tenants by either buying or tricking them out of their leases. He finally managed to clear out most of the upper slope, but when he reached First Crescent Drive, he ran into a problem with Grandma Tilson.
“I used to fish with your daddy down in that there pond, Luther, and he gave me this land and I ain’t giving it up. So take your frog-eyed self and your frog-eyed son out of here. And I know your evil ways—all of you. So if you plan to try something like burning my house down while I just happen to be in it, I got this here deed and my will registered at the courthouse. Your daddy weren’t no fool and he didn’t fish with fools either.”
Mamie Tilson’s grown children hadn’t made her a grandmother yet, but she had carried that nickname from a young girl because she was born with an old face, the color of oiled cheesecloth. Her clear skin allowed people to see the firmness of character that it covered. She had never minded staring down a Nedeed, because she liked what she read about herself in their bottomless eyes. So when Nedeed put his foot up on the top step of her porch and in a slow whisper asked if she wanted to think her position over, she paused for a moment and then sent a wad of tobacco spit near his wing-tips. That said she had thought it over and hoped he finally understood her answer.
Nedeed took his son’s hand and left her yard. Let the hateful old hag just sit up there and rot. She’d die one day and then his son would deal with her children. The Tupelo Realty Corporation would build around her, and even over her if need be. He’d bury that one flaw deep in the middle of his jewel and no one would know the difference.
Nedeed didn’t live long enough to have the pleasure of actually burying Grandma Tilson, who shuffled past his grave for ten winters. But he did see the outlines of his dream crystallize into a zoned district of eight circular drives that held some of the finest homes—and eventually the wealthiest black families—in the county. When the city first zoned its districts, the grazing land that once belonged to the sheep farmer, Putney Wayne, became Wayne Avenue. And after two white children drowned in the stream that separated Linden Hills from the avenue, a marble banister was erected along both its sides. The eight circular roads that curved around the three faces of the plateau were designated as First Crescent Drive, Second Crescent Drive, Third Crescent Drive, and the city commissioner wanted to continue it all the way down to Eighth Crescent Drive. But the families in the newly slated Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Crescent drives of the Linden Hills section went to the commissioner and protested. Their area had always been known as Tupelo Drive and should stay that way, and besides, the old town cemetery cut them off from the other side of the plateau, so he didn’t have eight whole crescents anyway. The city commissioner reared back in his tweed swivel chair and told them in so many words that he was keeping it just like it was and if they didn’t like it, they could go to hell. They went to Nedeed, instead, who went to Washington, D.C., and had the town cemetery and Tupelo Drive designated as a historical landmark.
News of this sent the Wayne County Citizens Alliance, headed by Patterson’s great-granddaughter, to the commissioner’s office, to question why their side of the plateau wasn’t a historical landmark as well. Their families had owned land there long before the Nedeeds. Patterson even dragged in her family Bible with dates and names that went back to the Revolutionary War. The disgruntled commissioner told them that there was nothing he could do. It seemed that Washington thought the site where some ex-slave’s cabin had been more American than the sheep dung that had sat on her parents’ land. And as long as that socialist with his nigger-loving wife was in office, that was the way it had to be. And no, they could not start calling their foot of the plateau Tupelo Drive. Weren’t his street plans messed up enough already?
That didn’t stop the white families on the other side of the plateau from telling stray tourists that, of course, they lived in Linden Hills—the real Linden Hills. And even after both Nedeed and Grandma Tilson had died, some of them were still putting LINDEN HILLS on their mail. This only added to the confusion of the post office that had to deal with the poor black families across Wayne Avenue in the Putney Wayne section who were also addressing their mail LINDEN HILLS. The Putney Wayne residents were telling census takers, school superintendents, and anyone else who cared to listen, that since Linden Road ran up the side of Linden Hills, crossed Wayne Avenue, and continued northward for three miles through their neighborhood, they lived in Linden Hills too. Weren’t both areas full of nothing but black folks? And trying to call their section Putney Wayne was just another example of the way all those lousy racists in Wayne County tried to keep black people down.
Because the cemetery stopped Linden Road at Fifth Crescent Drive, Tupelo Drive could only be entered through the center of Fifth Crescent, and the Tupelo residents built a private road with a flower-trimmed meridian headed by two twelve-foot brick pillars. They then put up a bronze plaque on the pillars and had the words LINDEN HILLS engraved in deep Roman type. This caused the residents on First through Fifth Crescent drives immediately to erect a wooden sign—WELCOME TO LINDEN HILLS—behind the marble banister and the stream, separating them from the avenue. They didn’t know what those people down in Tupelo Drive were trying to pull; maybe their homes weren’t as large and fancy as those down there, but they definitely knew that they also lived in Linden Hills. They had the papers—actual deeds—that said this land was theirs as long as they sat on it, and sit they would.
So now practically every black in Wayne County wanted to be a part of Linden Hills. While it did have homes that had brought a photographer out from Life magazine for pictures of the Japanese gardens and marble swimming pools on Tupelo Drive, that wasn’t the only reason they wanted to live there. There were other black communities with showcase homes, but somehow making it into Linden Hills meant “making it.” The Tupelo Realty Corporation was terribly selective about the types of families who received its mortgages. Entrance obviously didn’t depend upon your profession, because there was a high school janitor living right next to a municipal judge on Third Crescent Drive. And even your income wasn’t a problem, because didn’t the realty corporation subsidize that family of Jamaicans on Tupelo Drive who were practically starving to put two of their kids through Harvard? No, only “certain” people got to live in Linden Hills, and the blacks in Wayne County didn’t know what that certain something was that qualified them, but they kept sending in applications to the Tupelo Realty Corporation—and hoping. Hoping for the moment they could move in, because then it was possible to move down toward Tupelo Drive and Luther Nedeed.
Yes, Linden Hills. The name had spread beyond Wayne County, and applicants were coming from all over the country and even the Caribbean. Linden Hills—a place where people had worked hard, fought hard, and saved hard for the privilege to rest in the soft shadows of those heart-shaped trees. In Linden Hills they could forget that the world said you spelled black with a capital nothing. Well, they were something and there was everything around them to show it. The world hadn’t given them anything but the chance to fail—and they hadn’t failed, because they were in Linden Hills. They had a thousand years and a day to sit right there and forget what it meant to be black, because it meant working yourself to death just to stand still. Well, they had the chance to move down in Linden Hills—as far as Luther Nedeed, sitting at the foot of the hill behind a lake and a whole line of men who had shown Wayne County what it was possible to do with a little patience and a lot of work. They wanted what Luther Nedeed had, and he had shown them how to get it: Just stay right here; you step outside Linden Hills and you’ve stepped into history—someone else’s history about what you couldn’t ever do. The Nedeeds had made a history there and it spoke loudly of what blacks could do. They were never leaving Linden Hills. There was so much to be gotten. Surely, in a millennium their children could move down or even marry down the hill toward Tupelo Drive and Luther Nedeed.
Tupelo Drive and Luther Nedeed: it became one cry of dark victory for blacks outside or inside Linden Hills. And the ultimate dark victor sat in front of his home and behind his lake and looked up at the Nedeed dream. It had finally crystallized into that jewel, but he wore it like a weighted stone around his neck. Something had gone terribly wrong with Linden Hills. He knew what his dead fathers had wanted to do with this land and the people who lived on it. These people were to reflect the Nedeeds in a hundred facets and then the Nedeeds could take those splintered mirrors and form a mirage of power to torment a world that dared think them stupid—or worse, totally impotent. But there was no torment in Linden Hills for the white god his fathers had shaken their fists at, because there was no white god, and there never had been.
They looked at the earth, the sea, and the sky, Luther thought sadly, and mistook those who were owned by it as the owners. They looked only at the products and thought they saw God—they should have looked at the process. If they could have sat with him in front of a television that now spanned their tiny planet and universe to universes beyond the sun and moments that had guided their hand, they would have known the futility of their vengeance. Because when men begin to claw men for the rights to a vacuum that stretches into eternity, then it becomes so painfully clear that the omnipresent, omnipotent, Almighty Divine is simply the will to possess. It had chained the earth to the names of a few and it would chain the cosmos as well.
A white god? Luther shook his head. How could it be any color when it stripped the skin, sex, and soul of any who offered themselves at its altar before it decided to bless? His fathers had made a fatal mistake: they had given Linden Hills the will to possess and so had lost it to the very god they sought to defy. How could these people ever reflect the Nedeeds? Linden Hills wasn’t black; it was successful. The shining surface of their careers, brass railings, and cars hurt his eyes because it only reflected the bright nothing that was inside of them. Of course Wayne County had lived in peace with Linden Hills for the last two decades, since it now understood that they were both serving the same god. Wayne County had watched his wedge of earth become practically invisible—indistinguishable from their own pathetic souls.
The only ones who didn’t seem to know what was happening in Linden Hills were the thousands of blacks who sent him applications every year. And since there was nowhere left to go with his land and nothing left to build, he would just let the fools keep coming. Let them think that he held some ultimate prize down there. Let them think that they were proving something to the world, to themselves, or to him about their worth. Unlike his fathers, he welcomed those who thought they had personal convictions and deep ties to their past, because then he had the pleasure of watching their bewilderment as it all melted away the farther they came down. Applications from any future Baptist ministers, political activists, and Ivy League graduates were now given first priority, since their kind seemed to reach the bottom faster than the others, leaving more room at the top. And whenever anyone reached the Tupelo area, they eventually disappeared. Finally, devoured by their own drives, there just wasn’t enough humanity left to fill the rooms of a real home, and the property went up for sale. Luther often wondered why none of the applicants ever questioned the fact that there was always space in Linden Hills.
But they were too busy to question—they were so busy coming. And the one consuming purpose in Luther’s life was to keep them doing that. Get them in, give them their deeds, and watch them come down. The plans and visions of his fathers might have been misdirected, but the Nedeeds could still live as a force to be reckoned with—if only within Linden Hills. His dark face at the bottom of the hill served as a beacon to draw the blacks needed as fuel for that continually dying dream. And it could go on forever through his son. But whenever Luther was forced to look at his son, his heart tightened.
Luther had not followed the pattern of his fathers and married a pale-skinned woman. He knew those wives had been chosen for the color of their spirits, not their faces. They had been brought to Tupelo Drive to fade against the whitewashed boards of the Nedeed home after conceiving and giving over a son to the stamp and will of the father. He actually had to pause a moment in order to remember his mother’s first name, because everyone—including his father—had called her nothing but Mrs. Nedeed. And that’s all she had called herself. Luther’s wife was better than pale—a dull, brown shadow who had given him a son, but a white son. The same squat bowlegs, the same protruding eyes and puffed lips, but a ghostly presence that mocked everything his fathers had built. How could Luther die and leave this with the future of Linden Hills? He looked at this whiteness and saw the destruction of five generations. The child went unnamed and avoided by his father for the first five years of his life and Luther tried to discover what had brought such havoc into his home.
He took out the journals and charts that were locked in the ancient rolltop desk in his den. Weeks were spent tracing the dates and times of penetrations, conceptions, and births for every Nedeed in Linden Hills. He then matched all of this with the position of the stars and the earth’s axis at those moments and it all verified what had been passed down to him about the facts of life: “There must be five days of penetration at the appearance of Aries, and the son is born when the sun has died.”
Luther slammed the journals shut. He had done that—it was followed to the word. Like every Nedeed before him, his seed was only released at the vernal equinox so the child would come during the Sign of the Goat when the winter’s light was the weakest. It had been infallible for generations, so what was wrong now? He then bore the humiliation of seeing a doctor to be sure that there was nothing abnormal with his reproductive organs. When the medical reports returned positive and healthy, Luther held the written evidence for what he had felt all along in his heart: there was no way that this child could be his son.
And as the child faded to him against the clapboards of Tupelo Drive, Luther’s eyes rested on the shadow floating through the carpeted rooms. It began to take form in front of his face. He noticed when it bent over and walked and sat down. He heard the lilt in the voice when it spoke. He distinguished between the colors that hung from the short frame and smelled the perfumed talc as it passed him. He could see the amber flecks in the heavily lashed eyes, the tiny scar on the right side of the lips. The long neck, small breasts, thick waist. Woman. She became a constant irritant to Luther, who now turned her presence over in his mind several times a day. Somewhere inside of her must be a deep flaw or she wouldn’t have been capable of such treachery. Everything she owned he had given her—even her name—and she had thanked him with this? The irritation began to fester in his mind and he knew he had to remove it or go insane. He could throw her out tomorrow; there wasn’t a court in this country that would deny him that right, but no one in his family had ever gotten divorced. And she had to learn why she was brought to Tupelo Drive. Obviously, he had allowed a whore into his home but he would turn her into a wife.
It was then that Luther reopened the old morgue in his basement. He worked alone and in a methodical fury, connecting plumbing and lighting, stacking trunks and boxes against the damp walls. A grimy sweat stung his eyes as he erected metal shelving and wired an intercom. He brought down clumsy cartons of powdered milk and dry cereal, and finally, trembling from exhaustion, he dragged two small cots down the twelve concrete steps. He stood in the middle of the basement and surveyed his work.
Now, let her stay down here with her bastard and think about what she’d done. Think about who she was playing with. He climbed the steps and checked the iron bolt on the door. Did she really think she could pass her lie off as his son? His fathers slaved to build Linden Hills and the very home she had tried to destroy. It took over a hundred and fifty years to build what he now had and it would be a cold day in hell before he saw some woman tear it down.
It was cold. In fact, it was the coldest week of the year when White Willie and Shit slapped five on Wayne Avenue and began their journey down Linden Hills.
December 19th
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.”