Seven Days in West Sideville |
Issue 5
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For the former residents of The Triangle in Charleston, West Virginia and for Ledger Smith aka The Roller Man
Day 1 The West Side had a few blocks of affordable housing right on Washington between Barton and Adams. Fifteen ugly orange brick buildings arranged in rows around a large baptist church. Numbered 1-15, the buildings boasted outdated amenities and studio apartments for just $450 a month. They were the kind of buildings kids would explore and ghost hunt in. With small windows and perpetually broken door buzzers and dilapidated garden beds overgrown with dandelions Despite it all, hundreds made their home there. They covered the cinder block walls with tapestries hung with blu-tack, layered rugs on the concrete floors, burned incense and set bowls of potpourri on old carved coffee tables. Kids played ding dong ditch and during the winter, they waited for the school bus in the stairwell, pretending to smoke cigarettes. At five in the morning the construction vehicles dragged up Washington St. Five men in hard hats ran through each building, slapping a pink slip of paper on each door, all traces of them disappearing immediately after. The first tenant to emerge was Jordan. He worked on a crew filling in potholes in the Historic Downtown District, a job he’d had to pull every string to get, and made $1,250 every month, before taxes. He wore a reflective vest and an old Nas tour shirt he’d gotten in high school. He was just as lanky and smooth as he had been back then. At 26, he was beginning to wonder when he’d gain that grown man weight he’d heard legends of. And if he’d ever grow hair on his chest though he’d managed a thick mustache that he was quite proud of. Jordan quickly scanned the notice and ran back inside to wake everyone up. Up in Chicago, Ledger Smith had already risen. He clawed his way out of his coffin, a pair of pristine four top roller skates secured in his hands by the laces. The earth sunk beneath him, bearing the weight of a man more durable than any hero. He looked just like he did in 1963 before his 700 mile trip. But this time, he set out to take it alone. This Chicago was a city much different than the one Ledger remembered. The streets were tighter, the high rises rose even higher and the cemetery had the only grass around for miles. But Ledger didn’t have time to meet his city all over again. He had just seven days to skate 500 miles to West Virginia. |
A. BROWN is an Indianapolis-based writer from coastal Virginia. She was a TED Residency Finalist in 2018 and a recipient of the MVICW Author Fellowship. She is finishing up her MFA at Butler University and will begin working on her PhD in August. Her work has been published in RueScribe, Entropy Magazine and Honey Literary.
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Day 2
“How you ain’t see it? There’s one at every building. On every door. They look official, so ain’t nobody tearing them down. I tried to get you up yesterday, but you were gone all damn day.” Jordan settled himself on Rory’s pull-out couch, his phone on speaker, playing the awful hold music used by the Charleston Legal Aid Society, the city’s only nonprofit law firm.
Rory chewed on the nail of her thumb as she scanned the notice for the third time. Her latest depressive episode had hit her like a MAC truck with no brakes and she was still recovering, reassuring herself that panicking over an unexpected eviction notice was perfectly rational. She hadn’t been outside in a week, but if she told Jordan that he’d worry. He’d ask questions. He cared. She reassured herself of that too.
“And we got how long?”
“Seven days, starting yesterday. So six.”
“Fuck.” Rory eyed the clothes that spilled over her dresser drawers, the mason jar of weed on her coffee table, the pairs of shoes she lined next to the front door. All of the little things that made the studio her home. She sat on the edge of her bed, took a deep breath. Her hands left sweaty prints on the knees of her jeans. “Where they transferring us?”
“They not. We got seven days to find housing and leave,” Jordan was on his third cigarette and had a fourth tucked behind his ear. He leaned forward on shaking knees.
Rory felt her stomach lurch.
“I’m not letting them kick us out. I left a message with the ACLU yesterday and we got a couple of reporters coming later. If we can get it out there, we may be able to postpone the demo.”
“Even if it’s postponed, we still gotta move?”
He rubbed at his chin like he was trying to remove a stain, “Maybe. I don’t know. Let me make some calls.”
Rory walked over to the kitchenette and leaned against her counter and breathed deeply, struggling to remember the techniques her therapist taught her. She only heard white noise, like a TV with no antenna playing between her ears. She felt like she was exploding from the inside out. From her kitchen window she could see the yellow CAT vehicles lined up on the other side of the street. Roadblocks laid in wait on street corners. Men in hardhats walked around taking notes on clipboards. Rory paced. Stopped. And pivoted back to the living area.
“I’m going to the housing authority, see if I can get a transfer,” Rory grabbed her keys and bus pass and stuck them in her pocket.
“I’m getting a group together to help people pack and move. Should be ready by tonight.”
Rory ran a hand across Jordan’s shoulders, his skin smooth under her calloused hands, “I’ll pack my own shit up, thank you.”
Jordan sucked his teeth, shrugged her hand away. “Good, you got too much shit anyway.”
Usually, Rory was neurotic and on edge enough for the both of them. It worked because it kept them grounded. Kept Jordan from imagining a world too fantastical, one where he was an NBA player and spoke at community events in his spare time. Where she worked some sort of fulfilling job instead of just cleaning four nights a week. Where she wasn’t constantly caught between debilitating dark days and mania. Where their relationship brought them both more than comfort. But Rory could feel the stress between them building up to a fight that they may not be able to return from.
“What about you?” She pushed aside a stack of books she had yet to read and sat before him on a sturdy coffee table she’d found on the side of the road. “Where you gonna go if this doesn’t work?”
Jordan shrugged, “Probably go sleep under the West Side bridge, at least until the cops come and kick me out.
“That’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking…You know my pops died under that bridge?”
“I do.” Jordan only brought his pops up to remind her how he died and to talk about how he envied the stocky frame of the once was man. “Pops was a man,” he’d say. “Got respect in the streets, at work, at home.” She wanted to tell him that none of that made him a man, it was all in Jordan’s head. Tiger, a man in building five, with long matted locs and endless tank tops, would call it a mindset. Jordan was a man because he took care of his mother from his 18th birthday until the day she died. Because he had a little girl an hour away in Louisville that he took a Greyhound to see every two weeks. Because he always came over to building seven after work to check on her, even if she didn’t answer the door, and to sometimes lay silently in the bed next to her. The heat from his body alone making her feel alive.
Jordan stood, his knees loudly cracking, “I’ll come by later.”
“You promise?”
“Of course.”
Day 3
There were fifteen men and six trucks parked on Washington to help people move. There were over 150 people scrambling to find housing and at least 200 more pissed that they had to move in the first place. Police barricades were positioned at Barton and Adams, because Jordan and his megaphone had been holding a one-man protest since the night of Day 2. But early on the morning of Day 3, he found at least 20 tenants ready to stand beside him.
Rory lit a cigarette on the front step of building seven and listened to them scream, 1, 2, 3, 4, the government picks on the poor! 5, 6, 7, 8, we won't be bullied by the state! She’d tried to stand with Jordan, but her voice shook and the sign trembled in her hands.
Just before seven that night, Jordan rushed into her apartment and clicked over to Channel 10. “We were in the paper yesterday. Should be on the news tonight.”
Rory stood at the fridge, pouring the rest of her milk over her last cup of Crunchberries. When she made her way to the living room, Jordan’s face was being reflected back to him with the words “Community Organizer” printed beneath.
Just because other people don’t care about us and our projects don’t mean we don’t care. We ain’t got much, some of us ain’t got nothing, but that don’t mean they can come in and take it.
“Well, look at that,” Rory settled herself on his lap, all fifteen of the soon to be gone buildings showing their broken windows like chipped teeth. “My man’s a revolutionary!”
“I told you. I told you,” he said. “We just gotta get people talking.”
But it was like God was hell bent on proving Jordan wrong. The same reporter appeared on screen, holding a stack of notices printed on bright yellow paper. It looks like the tenants housed here didn’t care for these notices delivered to their doors, put on their doors three weeks ago by city officials.
Rory cut off the television, her Crunchberries good for nothing but smashing with the back of her spoon.
“I never seen those notices. Never.”
She grabbed his face in her hands, his shoulders slumped forward.“Me neither.”
“They just don’t give a damn, do they?”
She hugged him close to her, his breath grazing her neck like a fly away, the panic building in her like the tide rushing in.“We should both start looking for a place.”
“I guess so.”
Outside the protestors continued, 5, 6, 7, 8, we won’t be bullied by the state!
Day 4
The Baptist church held service outside along with the rest of the West Side neighborhood. No one loved the Lord like poor folk. Even on the brink of losing their homes and belongings they dug in their pocketbooks and purses and worn vinyl wallets to tithe. They ate the bread and drank the wine and clapped along to every hymn the choir sang.
Rory helped Mrs. Shepherd load the last of her belongings into the raggedy U-Haul she’d rented with the last few pennies of her disability check.
“I don’t know them,” she said, eyeing the group that waited with their trucks. “I rather do it all myself.” Mrs. Shepherd was spry and looked nearly thirty years younger than she was. In the summers, she sold ice pops and snow cones for fifty cents each. She also sold bags of chips, cans of soda and $1 candy bars. Everyone on the West Side knew her by her long white hair and knobby knuckles.
“Is somebody gonna help you move in?”
“I’m sure I can figure it out.”
“You sure you don’t wanna stay? I saw on the news this morning that Ledger Smith is coming.”
“The roller man?”
“That’s right,” Rory eyed the growing group of protestors receiving their next set of instructions from Jordan.
The man booking it down US-95 on roller skates was a sight in and of itself. He moved smoothly down the shoulder, his sneakers tied together at the laces and hanging over his shoulders. The cars speeding by were nothing more than white noise. Things only got more interesting when he explained that he’d just been six feet under and that he’d skated from Chicago to Washington DC in 1963 with the word “FREEDOM” across his chest.
Why now? Reporters clamored to ask him. They held up traffic slowing their vans to match his speed. Some kept up just behind him on bikes or skateboards.
Because someone’s praying for these people. Even if it ain’t you, he said. Someone’s praying and someone even bigger is listening.
“Ain’t it sad? We can’t even escape this mess in death.” Mrs. Shepherd hopped in the cab, the jaws of the truck quickly swallowing her frail frame. “I met Ledger Smith that first time, when he skated to DC. I was just a little girl. The first thing my mother did was ask how his babies were doing.” She leaned her arms on the steering wheel, the loose skin of her arms forming smooth wings across the polyurethane. “If you ever wanna lose ten pounds, skate for ten hours a day for ten days straight like that man did.” She turned the key and the U-Haul rumbled like an old man choking on dip. “I hope he can help y’all. Lord knows I wouldn’t die for this building. Ain’t no way in hell I would rise from the dead for it.”
Rory knew a thing or two about rising from the dead. About laying in bed and wondering if she’d be able to pull herself up before the skin of her back began to fuse into the sheets. About feeling the world sink beneath her.
“Aurora?”
Rory’s ears pricked and she turned back to the truck, “Ma’am?”
“I got something for you,” she handed over a sealed envelope. “This is where I’ll be. There’s enough space for all of us. If you ever make it to the city, you find me.”
Rory knew the envelope’s contents without ever opening it. Her mother had given her the same directions to Jubilant City several years before, she kept them hidden in her pillowcase along with her $245.68 savings, birth certificate and social security card.
Jubilant City. A place where anyone could thrive, assuming you knew how to get (and stay) there. But the city’s secrets only began with its location. Would the officials there also make it difficult for her to get her medication by closing every pharmacy in the hood? Would they also close the community pools in the summer “for maintenance” only to use them as storage? Would she be forced to live with her mother and aunt forever due to the ridiculous public housing application process? How would it be any different?
Day 5
The new name was West Side-ville. The police had shut down the stretch of Washington Street and even some of 7th Avenue. People moved out everyday, some getting housing transfers and others choosing to rough it out with family. In their place, the council Jordan put together offered up apartments to the people sleeping under the West Side bridge and in long-abandoned houses. In exchange for a security shift or a role on the move-out crew or some time yelling 5, 6, 7, 8 just behind the roadblock. A retired couple in building eight took the food that people donated and made three meals a day that kids handed out door to door. Teenagers offered a summer reading group at noon and again at 5PM. A set of twin sisters from building eleven found a stack of work orders in the office and went around fixing everything they could, by the end o f the day, they’d visited 36 units and solved issues in 31 of them. Tiger led early morning yoga and early evening HIIT.
And Jordan oversaw every part of it. He okayed the apartments before they were reassigned, he approved the menu for the day, he kept track of the work orders and he was the only one to make a public statement on behalf of West Side-ville.
I don’t care what the news report. I care what I know. I know we ain’t get no advance notice. All we got was 7 days. Imagine having to pack up and move your whole life in 7 days. And some of us ain’t got no place to go.
For once, Rory spent the night at his place. All day people came and went. Asking Jordan to sign off on this or that. Seeing what he thought about the latest rumor that once the apartments were gone, a prison would go up instead. Seeing if he’d heard any other news from the ACLU.
Rory offered to help him pack, just in case things didn’t work out. She’d already gotten rid of most of her belongings and donated most of her canned food to the West Side-ville kitchen. But Jordan had yet to pack a thing.
“I ain’t goin nowhere. They want my place? They gotta take it.”
“What if we get a studio? Money will be tight, but we’ll make it.”
“Like move in together?”
“...Yeah.”
He thought about it. He never knew what it felt like not to struggle. Ever since his parents’ soul food spot got demoed with the rest of the Triangle District in 1974 to extend Interstates 64 and 77, he and his family had never known peace. Plus, Rory would be there and she made every day a little easier.
“I don’t think so.” It was just like Jordan to deny anything good for him.
Rory let his answer hang in the air before she whispered, “Why?”
“Because I can fix this. Ledger Smith is coming, Rory. A man rose from the damn dead and he on his way to help us. Ain’t that enough?” He quickly pulled on his reflective vest. He was fired from his job on day one, as soon as his supervisor realized that he hadn’t arrived on time. He took the vest back home with him, a symbolic move that he hoped wouldn’t end up in a theft charge. “I’ma check on everything outside.”
Day 6
At dinnertime, Jordan delivered that night’s meal: beef stew over rice, a can of Coke and a Cosmic Brownie for dessert. They ate cross-legged in the middle of her living room floor. Her clothes sat around them, folded into 32-gallon bags. She’d dumped nearly everything else at the free item exchange in front of building 12 in exchange for the old radio playing a Donny Hathaway song on full volume in the corner.
When they finished, they laid on the palette of blankets Rory would stuff into a trash bag the next morning. Jordan tucked his face into the crook of her neck, the scent of chocolate thick between them.
"I'm going to see my momma,” Rory said to the ceiling. It had been nearly six years since Rory had seen her mother. The time apart was purposeful on Rory’s end. Too much time around her mother and Rory realized just how much she was turning into her. But now she didn’t have a choice.
“Over in Jubilant City?”
“Mhm.”
“I’m gonna go to Louisville. Be closer to my daughter,” he said, twisting one of her long thin braids around his finger. “If this don’t work.”
“Will you come and visit me?”
“I wanna see you try and stop me.” He kissed her shoulder.
“You promise?”
“Of course.”
She patted his cheek. As if to say, we both know the truth.
Day 7
The moving crew had loaded up Rory’s things into the truck she used her last $50 to rent, but she refused to leave until she saw Jordan meet Ledger Smith. The man was due to arrive at any moment and the CATs on the other side of Washington were moving into place, police vehicles began lining up on either side of the barricades. News channels picked several areas to set up shop, capturing as many angles of West Side-ville as possible.
Jordan had two plans:
A plain-clothed officer found his way into West Side-ville and asked Jordan to work with him. “We don’t have to have anybody get hurt if you all would just move on out.” Instead of escorting him out everyone ignored him, pretending not to hear him when he spoke.
We do not negotiate with terrorists! We do not owe hospitality to intruders!
At 12PM, when the construction was due to start, Mr. Talbert was tired of waiting for Ledger Smith. He was headed out too and worried about getting stuck in traffic or worse, in the demo. “That man ain’t here, girl. We got to go.”
"Go on then," Rory said.
Mr. Talbert hopped into his pinto,looked up at them in his rearview mirror and shook his head, “Idiots.”
Everyone else in West Side-ville had marched outside of the compound, forming a line that encircled all 15 buildings. They all linked arms, forming one long human chain.
A police officer stepped to the front of the reflective vests, propped his foot on the bottom rung of a barricade. “Residents of West Side. This is your last chance. Go inside of your homes, pack your belongings and leave.”
Jordan looked back to see Rory still standing by the back of her truck. He nodded at her in what he assumed would be his last goodbye. As she finally climbed into the truck he lifted his megaphone and said, “You can have it when I’m dead.”
The truck grumbled to life and easily maneuvered out of the throughway they’d left open for anyone that changed their mind at the last minute. Rory set her sights on the new city she’d call home, refusing to think of her comfortable studio or the nights when she and Jordan stayed up to watch the police cars creep slowly through the neighborhood. The residents of West Side-ville tightened their links, Jordan calmly looked into the eyes of any construction worker or police officer bold enough to do the same and Ledger Smith, on his two skates, rolled into view.
“How you ain’t see it? There’s one at every building. On every door. They look official, so ain’t nobody tearing them down. I tried to get you up yesterday, but you were gone all damn day.” Jordan settled himself on Rory’s pull-out couch, his phone on speaker, playing the awful hold music used by the Charleston Legal Aid Society, the city’s only nonprofit law firm.
Rory chewed on the nail of her thumb as she scanned the notice for the third time. Her latest depressive episode had hit her like a MAC truck with no brakes and she was still recovering, reassuring herself that panicking over an unexpected eviction notice was perfectly rational. She hadn’t been outside in a week, but if she told Jordan that he’d worry. He’d ask questions. He cared. She reassured herself of that too.
“And we got how long?”
“Seven days, starting yesterday. So six.”
“Fuck.” Rory eyed the clothes that spilled over her dresser drawers, the mason jar of weed on her coffee table, the pairs of shoes she lined next to the front door. All of the little things that made the studio her home. She sat on the edge of her bed, took a deep breath. Her hands left sweaty prints on the knees of her jeans. “Where they transferring us?”
“They not. We got seven days to find housing and leave,” Jordan was on his third cigarette and had a fourth tucked behind his ear. He leaned forward on shaking knees.
Rory felt her stomach lurch.
“I’m not letting them kick us out. I left a message with the ACLU yesterday and we got a couple of reporters coming later. If we can get it out there, we may be able to postpone the demo.”
“Even if it’s postponed, we still gotta move?”
He rubbed at his chin like he was trying to remove a stain, “Maybe. I don’t know. Let me make some calls.”
Rory walked over to the kitchenette and leaned against her counter and breathed deeply, struggling to remember the techniques her therapist taught her. She only heard white noise, like a TV with no antenna playing between her ears. She felt like she was exploding from the inside out. From her kitchen window she could see the yellow CAT vehicles lined up on the other side of the street. Roadblocks laid in wait on street corners. Men in hardhats walked around taking notes on clipboards. Rory paced. Stopped. And pivoted back to the living area.
“I’m going to the housing authority, see if I can get a transfer,” Rory grabbed her keys and bus pass and stuck them in her pocket.
“I’m getting a group together to help people pack and move. Should be ready by tonight.”
Rory ran a hand across Jordan’s shoulders, his skin smooth under her calloused hands, “I’ll pack my own shit up, thank you.”
Jordan sucked his teeth, shrugged her hand away. “Good, you got too much shit anyway.”
Usually, Rory was neurotic and on edge enough for the both of them. It worked because it kept them grounded. Kept Jordan from imagining a world too fantastical, one where he was an NBA player and spoke at community events in his spare time. Where she worked some sort of fulfilling job instead of just cleaning four nights a week. Where she wasn’t constantly caught between debilitating dark days and mania. Where their relationship brought them both more than comfort. But Rory could feel the stress between them building up to a fight that they may not be able to return from.
“What about you?” She pushed aside a stack of books she had yet to read and sat before him on a sturdy coffee table she’d found on the side of the road. “Where you gonna go if this doesn’t work?”
Jordan shrugged, “Probably go sleep under the West Side bridge, at least until the cops come and kick me out.
“That’s not funny.”
“I’m not joking…You know my pops died under that bridge?”
“I do.” Jordan only brought his pops up to remind her how he died and to talk about how he envied the stocky frame of the once was man. “Pops was a man,” he’d say. “Got respect in the streets, at work, at home.” She wanted to tell him that none of that made him a man, it was all in Jordan’s head. Tiger, a man in building five, with long matted locs and endless tank tops, would call it a mindset. Jordan was a man because he took care of his mother from his 18th birthday until the day she died. Because he had a little girl an hour away in Louisville that he took a Greyhound to see every two weeks. Because he always came over to building seven after work to check on her, even if she didn’t answer the door, and to sometimes lay silently in the bed next to her. The heat from his body alone making her feel alive.
Jordan stood, his knees loudly cracking, “I’ll come by later.”
“You promise?”
“Of course.”
Day 3
There were fifteen men and six trucks parked on Washington to help people move. There were over 150 people scrambling to find housing and at least 200 more pissed that they had to move in the first place. Police barricades were positioned at Barton and Adams, because Jordan and his megaphone had been holding a one-man protest since the night of Day 2. But early on the morning of Day 3, he found at least 20 tenants ready to stand beside him.
Rory lit a cigarette on the front step of building seven and listened to them scream, 1, 2, 3, 4, the government picks on the poor! 5, 6, 7, 8, we won't be bullied by the state! She’d tried to stand with Jordan, but her voice shook and the sign trembled in her hands.
Just before seven that night, Jordan rushed into her apartment and clicked over to Channel 10. “We were in the paper yesterday. Should be on the news tonight.”
Rory stood at the fridge, pouring the rest of her milk over her last cup of Crunchberries. When she made her way to the living room, Jordan’s face was being reflected back to him with the words “Community Organizer” printed beneath.
Just because other people don’t care about us and our projects don’t mean we don’t care. We ain’t got much, some of us ain’t got nothing, but that don’t mean they can come in and take it.
“Well, look at that,” Rory settled herself on his lap, all fifteen of the soon to be gone buildings showing their broken windows like chipped teeth. “My man’s a revolutionary!”
“I told you. I told you,” he said. “We just gotta get people talking.”
But it was like God was hell bent on proving Jordan wrong. The same reporter appeared on screen, holding a stack of notices printed on bright yellow paper. It looks like the tenants housed here didn’t care for these notices delivered to their doors, put on their doors three weeks ago by city officials.
Rory cut off the television, her Crunchberries good for nothing but smashing with the back of her spoon.
“I never seen those notices. Never.”
She grabbed his face in her hands, his shoulders slumped forward.“Me neither.”
“They just don’t give a damn, do they?”
She hugged him close to her, his breath grazing her neck like a fly away, the panic building in her like the tide rushing in.“We should both start looking for a place.”
“I guess so.”
Outside the protestors continued, 5, 6, 7, 8, we won’t be bullied by the state!
Day 4
The Baptist church held service outside along with the rest of the West Side neighborhood. No one loved the Lord like poor folk. Even on the brink of losing their homes and belongings they dug in their pocketbooks and purses and worn vinyl wallets to tithe. They ate the bread and drank the wine and clapped along to every hymn the choir sang.
Rory helped Mrs. Shepherd load the last of her belongings into the raggedy U-Haul she’d rented with the last few pennies of her disability check.
“I don’t know them,” she said, eyeing the group that waited with their trucks. “I rather do it all myself.” Mrs. Shepherd was spry and looked nearly thirty years younger than she was. In the summers, she sold ice pops and snow cones for fifty cents each. She also sold bags of chips, cans of soda and $1 candy bars. Everyone on the West Side knew her by her long white hair and knobby knuckles.
“Is somebody gonna help you move in?”
“I’m sure I can figure it out.”
“You sure you don’t wanna stay? I saw on the news this morning that Ledger Smith is coming.”
“The roller man?”
“That’s right,” Rory eyed the growing group of protestors receiving their next set of instructions from Jordan.
The man booking it down US-95 on roller skates was a sight in and of itself. He moved smoothly down the shoulder, his sneakers tied together at the laces and hanging over his shoulders. The cars speeding by were nothing more than white noise. Things only got more interesting when he explained that he’d just been six feet under and that he’d skated from Chicago to Washington DC in 1963 with the word “FREEDOM” across his chest.
Why now? Reporters clamored to ask him. They held up traffic slowing their vans to match his speed. Some kept up just behind him on bikes or skateboards.
Because someone’s praying for these people. Even if it ain’t you, he said. Someone’s praying and someone even bigger is listening.
“Ain’t it sad? We can’t even escape this mess in death.” Mrs. Shepherd hopped in the cab, the jaws of the truck quickly swallowing her frail frame. “I met Ledger Smith that first time, when he skated to DC. I was just a little girl. The first thing my mother did was ask how his babies were doing.” She leaned her arms on the steering wheel, the loose skin of her arms forming smooth wings across the polyurethane. “If you ever wanna lose ten pounds, skate for ten hours a day for ten days straight like that man did.” She turned the key and the U-Haul rumbled like an old man choking on dip. “I hope he can help y’all. Lord knows I wouldn’t die for this building. Ain’t no way in hell I would rise from the dead for it.”
Rory knew a thing or two about rising from the dead. About laying in bed and wondering if she’d be able to pull herself up before the skin of her back began to fuse into the sheets. About feeling the world sink beneath her.
“Aurora?”
Rory’s ears pricked and she turned back to the truck, “Ma’am?”
“I got something for you,” she handed over a sealed envelope. “This is where I’ll be. There’s enough space for all of us. If you ever make it to the city, you find me.”
Rory knew the envelope’s contents without ever opening it. Her mother had given her the same directions to Jubilant City several years before, she kept them hidden in her pillowcase along with her $245.68 savings, birth certificate and social security card.
Jubilant City. A place where anyone could thrive, assuming you knew how to get (and stay) there. But the city’s secrets only began with its location. Would the officials there also make it difficult for her to get her medication by closing every pharmacy in the hood? Would they also close the community pools in the summer “for maintenance” only to use them as storage? Would she be forced to live with her mother and aunt forever due to the ridiculous public housing application process? How would it be any different?
Day 5
The new name was West Side-ville. The police had shut down the stretch of Washington Street and even some of 7th Avenue. People moved out everyday, some getting housing transfers and others choosing to rough it out with family. In their place, the council Jordan put together offered up apartments to the people sleeping under the West Side bridge and in long-abandoned houses. In exchange for a security shift or a role on the move-out crew or some time yelling 5, 6, 7, 8 just behind the roadblock. A retired couple in building eight took the food that people donated and made three meals a day that kids handed out door to door. Teenagers offered a summer reading group at noon and again at 5PM. A set of twin sisters from building eleven found a stack of work orders in the office and went around fixing everything they could, by the end o f the day, they’d visited 36 units and solved issues in 31 of them. Tiger led early morning yoga and early evening HIIT.
And Jordan oversaw every part of it. He okayed the apartments before they were reassigned, he approved the menu for the day, he kept track of the work orders and he was the only one to make a public statement on behalf of West Side-ville.
I don’t care what the news report. I care what I know. I know we ain’t get no advance notice. All we got was 7 days. Imagine having to pack up and move your whole life in 7 days. And some of us ain’t got no place to go.
For once, Rory spent the night at his place. All day people came and went. Asking Jordan to sign off on this or that. Seeing what he thought about the latest rumor that once the apartments were gone, a prison would go up instead. Seeing if he’d heard any other news from the ACLU.
Rory offered to help him pack, just in case things didn’t work out. She’d already gotten rid of most of her belongings and donated most of her canned food to the West Side-ville kitchen. But Jordan had yet to pack a thing.
“I ain’t goin nowhere. They want my place? They gotta take it.”
“What if we get a studio? Money will be tight, but we’ll make it.”
“Like move in together?”
“...Yeah.”
He thought about it. He never knew what it felt like not to struggle. Ever since his parents’ soul food spot got demoed with the rest of the Triangle District in 1974 to extend Interstates 64 and 77, he and his family had never known peace. Plus, Rory would be there and she made every day a little easier.
“I don’t think so.” It was just like Jordan to deny anything good for him.
Rory let his answer hang in the air before she whispered, “Why?”
“Because I can fix this. Ledger Smith is coming, Rory. A man rose from the damn dead and he on his way to help us. Ain’t that enough?” He quickly pulled on his reflective vest. He was fired from his job on day one, as soon as his supervisor realized that he hadn’t arrived on time. He took the vest back home with him, a symbolic move that he hoped wouldn’t end up in a theft charge. “I’ma check on everything outside.”
Day 6
At dinnertime, Jordan delivered that night’s meal: beef stew over rice, a can of Coke and a Cosmic Brownie for dessert. They ate cross-legged in the middle of her living room floor. Her clothes sat around them, folded into 32-gallon bags. She’d dumped nearly everything else at the free item exchange in front of building 12 in exchange for the old radio playing a Donny Hathaway song on full volume in the corner.
When they finished, they laid on the palette of blankets Rory would stuff into a trash bag the next morning. Jordan tucked his face into the crook of her neck, the scent of chocolate thick between them.
"I'm going to see my momma,” Rory said to the ceiling. It had been nearly six years since Rory had seen her mother. The time apart was purposeful on Rory’s end. Too much time around her mother and Rory realized just how much she was turning into her. But now she didn’t have a choice.
“Over in Jubilant City?”
“Mhm.”
“I’m gonna go to Louisville. Be closer to my daughter,” he said, twisting one of her long thin braids around his finger. “If this don’t work.”
“Will you come and visit me?”
“I wanna see you try and stop me.” He kissed her shoulder.
“You promise?”
“Of course.”
She patted his cheek. As if to say, we both know the truth.
Day 7
The moving crew had loaded up Rory’s things into the truck she used her last $50 to rent, but she refused to leave until she saw Jordan meet Ledger Smith. The man was due to arrive at any moment and the CATs on the other side of Washington were moving into place, police vehicles began lining up on either side of the barricades. News channels picked several areas to set up shop, capturing as many angles of West Side-ville as possible.
Jordan had two plans:
- Ledger Smith arrived and the presence of a dead man along with several others from the NAACP would intimidate the crew and police into going away for fear of turning a peaceful demonstration into chaos.
- Ledger Smith didn’t arrive/people didn’t care about the miracle before them, leading to the beginning of removal and demolition. He would beg for one final hour and would instruct everyone to pack up and go to keep them all safe.
A plain-clothed officer found his way into West Side-ville and asked Jordan to work with him. “We don’t have to have anybody get hurt if you all would just move on out.” Instead of escorting him out everyone ignored him, pretending not to hear him when he spoke.
We do not negotiate with terrorists! We do not owe hospitality to intruders!
At 12PM, when the construction was due to start, Mr. Talbert was tired of waiting for Ledger Smith. He was headed out too and worried about getting stuck in traffic or worse, in the demo. “That man ain’t here, girl. We got to go.”
"Go on then," Rory said.
Mr. Talbert hopped into his pinto,looked up at them in his rearview mirror and shook his head, “Idiots.”
Everyone else in West Side-ville had marched outside of the compound, forming a line that encircled all 15 buildings. They all linked arms, forming one long human chain.
A police officer stepped to the front of the reflective vests, propped his foot on the bottom rung of a barricade. “Residents of West Side. This is your last chance. Go inside of your homes, pack your belongings and leave.”
Jordan looked back to see Rory still standing by the back of her truck. He nodded at her in what he assumed would be his last goodbye. As she finally climbed into the truck he lifted his megaphone and said, “You can have it when I’m dead.”
The truck grumbled to life and easily maneuvered out of the throughway they’d left open for anyone that changed their mind at the last minute. Rory set her sights on the new city she’d call home, refusing to think of her comfortable studio or the nights when she and Jordan stayed up to watch the police cars creep slowly through the neighborhood. The residents of West Side-ville tightened their links, Jordan calmly looked into the eyes of any construction worker or police officer bold enough to do the same and Ledger Smith, on his two skates, rolled into view.