I’d been thinking about it, and I’d decided Freedmen’s Town was the place to take Ray for his driving lesson: a mostly black neighborhood northeast of Montrose, not far from the Magnolia Blossom Cemetery. The streets are narrow, but traffic is light.
Like the Shamrock, Freedmen’s Town offers me a vicarious sense of home, though my white skin draws curious — sometimes hostile — stares from the porch-sitters. I never worry, though — maybe because so many cheerful mothers live in the area. I see them watching their kids in the yards, laughing with each other, big, solid anchors of safety.
The Town — an area of a few blocks — was founded by ex-slaves shortly after the Civil War. It used to have filling stations, dry-goods stores, and nightclubs, but now it’s a cluster of dilapidated rent houses threatened by bulldozers and high-flying redevelopment. Here and there, its old brick streets bleed through the asphalt, and I feel connected to the past in a way I don’t anywhere else in the city. Sort of like Jean and her apple trees.
Except the comfort, for me, comes from hanging around ghosts and misfits.
“Take a left here,” I tell Ray. “Watch this corner. It’s a sharp one. Okay, when you hit the brake, don’t stomp, pump it a little, gently, that’s it.”
We pass a dusty brick building in a field of weeds, the old city-county hospital named for Jefferson Davis. It’s been closed for years. Jagged glass teeth are all that remain of its windows.
Past an Asian grocery, and rows of wooden houses. A hand-lettered sign droops on a dead yellow lawn: “Big Bad Dog.” Hip-hop shouts from open windows. Someone shatters a porch light with a rock; thick laughter cartwheels down the block.
In the near distance, downtown Houston glimmers, peach and amber. A sumpy sulfur smell rises from tall, moist grass and from froggy mudholes exposed to the sky.
“Stay off the shoulder. There’s broken glass up here. That’s it, you’re doing fine.”
“It runs real smooth,” Ray says. “Unc’s Bookmobile is a little hard to handle. No power steering.”
“Guess you’ll have to get a sleek sports car, then, if you’re going to impress the girls.”
He grins.
“You want to try parking?”
“Sure.”
“Pull in over there, where it says Mount Carmel Baptist Church.”
I catch a whiff of pork chops in the air, and fried okra. Ray whips the car into a wide slot between faded yellow lines, and jerks us to a stop.
“Sorry,” he says.
“Remember, pump the brakes.”
We sit with the windows down. In vacant lots west of the church, crickets creak like old wooden doors.
“Where are we?” Ray asks.
“The Fourth Ward. Freedmen’s Town.”
“Looks like it’s seen better days.”
“Yeah. It used to be the heart and soul of black Houston,” I say. “Then the city ran a freeway through here and chopped it all up.”
Ray wipes his eyes.
“Hey. What is it, Ray?”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Palmer, I’m just — ”
“You did great. Really. Don’t worry about the brakes — ”
“No,” he says. “It’s not that. It’s … looking around here, at all this …”
“Tell me.”
He sighs. “For six months, my mom and me, we’ve been anxious about my dad, you know? It’s the first time someone close to me has been real sick, the first time I’ve had to think about someone I love maybe dying. It scares the hell out of me.”
“I know.”
“But it’s more than just my dad. I mean, sometimes lately, I feel sorry for myself because I’m going to kick off someday, too. I knew that, of course, but …”
“It’s real for you now in ways it wasn’t before?”
“Yeah. And now I see … parts of whole cities can die too, can’t they?”
Horns blare down the street. Squealing tires. I smile at the boy. “You’ve got to cruise with the changes, Ray. That’s all you can do.”
He’s nodding. His foot taps the floor, by the brake.
“Hell, you know this.” What would a good father tell him? “I haven’t figured it out, myself.”
He looks at me, poised, handsome — too young to feel this bad.
Watching his leg, I feel for a moment my own foot, again, slamming down hard — the sickening slide, the smoke of rubber, the glance into the rearview, and Jean’s anxious eyes — “Well. What do you say? Another spin around the block?”
“No thanks, Mr. Palmer.” He rubs his cheeks. “That’s enough for tonight.”
“All right. You’re going to be a fine driver, Ray.”
“Thanks. Thanks for your help.”
We change places. I take the wheel and head us out.
I still meet the Thuots once a week. Their oldest son, Kim — sixteen, and with a good command of English — turned in one of the job applications I’d brought and got a cashiering spot at a Circle K convenience store. Last Wednesday, the Thuots spent his first check on roast duck and rice, and invited me to dinner.
I toasted them with a bottle of cheap Italian wine I’d bought. In Tuscan folklore, I told them, water’s linked to filth (pissing) while alcohol, fa buon sange, makes for good blood. They liked that.
I brought them some shrimp from Water Under the Bridge. “And,” I said, “you won the raffle at Cal’s Bookstore.”
“The what?” asked Mrs. Thuot.
“The raffle. Free gifts.”
“My goodness. How?”
“I filled out the entry form for you. Here.” I handed Mr. Thuot the books Cal had given me to deliver. Cal was furious. He’d hoped a regular customer would be hooked into spending hundreds of dollars in the store. Worried about his competition — the encroaching chain stores — he wasn’t in the mood to let the Thuots come in and choose their own prizes. “What do they care? Do they even read? Just give them these.”
Now Mr. Thuot stared, confused, at a deck-repair manual, a shipbuilder’s guide, The Bra Book, and Mamie Eisenhower.
The family unpacked its gongs. We rang them several times, to celebrate Kim’s good fortune. I gave him six free passes to the Shamrock.
“The children,” said Mr. Thuot. “May their skies be high, yes?”
We filled our cups to the brim.
Tonight, birthday candles in paper lantern shells float down the bayou at dusk: a Festival of Lights — “The Bayou Beckons,” the city calls it, a celebration, in part, of Fiestas Patrias, Mexico’s Independence Day, and a remembrance of families who died in Hiroshima (each flickering flame in the mist a token of loss).
Flowers and wooden crosses mark Chatito’s drowning, Roberto’s disappearance.
Mariachi music echoes in the trees. Fireworks break like eggs against the sky. Gritos — shouts of independence — carry on the hot breeze. Elsewhere, Asian priests ask children to send their thoughts to Heaven, to those who once wore cloaks of fire.
A young Japanese couple cuddles in the grass. The woman is pregnant. Watching them, I remember an old Ashanti folktale. In the beginning women bore no children. One day a python asked a man and woman who came to bathe in his river if they had any offspring. “No,” they replied unhappily. “Bring your friends to my woods,” the python instructed them. “I’ll make the women conceive.” The couple did as they were told. When the people had gathered, the snake said, “Each couple must stand toe to toe.” He slithered into the river and drew a mouthful of water. Then he sprayed the water on the bellies of all the men and women and told them to lie together that night in warm leaf-beds on the ground. In nine months the women conceived. The world knew birth and desire.