Black Water Rising by Attica Locke Page B

he was gon’ do this, he was gon’ do it big. He arrived in the city at dawn. He didn’t know a thing about where he was, didn’t know a soul. He spent half a day talking to a janitor at the bus station, ask ing about a place to stay. He ended up in Fifth Ward because it was black and therefore safe. He found a room on the first floor of Miss Mitchell’s boardinghouse, where it was clean and there was always fresh coffee. His upstairs neighbor was a transves tite burlesque dancer whose stage name was Effie Dropbottom. They sat up most nights, when Effie wasn’t performing, smoking cigarettes and playing records. Wilson Pickett and Ray Charles and any Motown. Or they listened to the True Confessions show on 1430 AM.
    He found a job at a bakery, cleaning ovens and sweeping up after hours. He scratched out a living and called home when he was ready. It was his sister he wanted to see about. He felt awful for leaving her behind. It was a cowardly thing to do, he knew. But he couldn’t protect her from his mother’s third husband— the nasty, sidelong glances and midnight gropes—and that fact alone had been more painful to a young boy trying to be a man than any guilt about leaving. They talked a couple of times, he and his sister. He sent her a postcard once. It was a picture of the Astrodome, the words “8th Wonder of the World!” scrawled in silver glitter across the top. Sometime after that, he heard she went to stay with her father, his mother’s second husband, up around Dallas.
    Jay never finished high school. But when the University of Houston was making noise about integrating, trying to head off at the pass any radical violence or government injunction, he went down to the admissions office without an appointment. He scored near 100 percent on the entrance exam, and they let him in without a diploma. He moved into a segregated dorm a couple of miles off campus and said good-bye to Fifth Ward for a long, long time.
    Driving through the neighborhood now, Jay stares out of his car window, thinking how much Fifth Ward has changed. Down Lockwood Drive, fine-dining restaurants and clothing shops have been replaced by liquor stores and Laundromats with single women inside, folding clothes alone. There are boardedup buildings on nearly every corner and empty fields thick with weeds and flattened soda cans, shards of broken glass, trash and used furniture. Even the sidewalk in front of the Freedman’s National Bank, the first black-owned bank in the state, has dead grass coming up through cracks in the cement. Jay remembers the neighborhood differently, remembers when it was a point of pride for black folks to say they lived near Lockwood Drive or had a little place on Lyons Avenue or went to Phillis Wheatley High School. He knows plenty of doctors and lawyers who came out of Wheatley. Fifth Ward was a place where black people thrived. People made a little bit of money, made a nice life for themselves. The neighborhood wasn’t much, wasn’t fancy or rich, but it was theirs.
    And then, of course, came integration.
    Black people suddenly had a choice, in theory at least, and the ones with any money almost always chose to leave Fifth Ward behind. Just because they could. Because wasn’t that, after all, the very thing they had been fighting for?
    Jay lights another cigarette and makes a right turn onto Clinton.
    The newspaper said it was the 400 block.
    He wants to see it for himself.
    If only to put this whole thing out of his mind.
    He drives parallel to the bayou, along Clinton, a narrow twolane road, heading west. There are warehouses on the south side of the street, tall trees and brush behind them, and then the bayou, which Jay knows is there, but can’t see in the darkness. There are no streetlights or even city signs on this stretch of road. Jay flips on his brights, taking a curve in the road, his head lights swooping past the warehouses, dark and deserted at this hour, past grain silos and steel machinery