too well. He knew what he wanted, and kids didn’t figure into that. Wildey’s not about to leave this neighborhood. Not before he has the chance to save it.
So this Thanksgiving evening he’s off to pick up the one member of his family still alive and at liberty: his great Auntie M. The M is for “Margaret.” She doesn’t remember her name most times, nor does she know who Wildey is. Sometimes there’s a glimmer of recognition, but there’s never much follow-through. Wildey can’t blame her. Auntie M. turned a hundred over the summer—they showed her grainy photo on the
Today
show and everything. She’s survived improbable odds. Wildey just wishes she was one of those centenarians who remembered every blessed detail of their lives, down to what they ate for breakfast on the first day of kindergarten.
“Hi, Auntie M.,” he says in the lobby of the retirement home in Germantown, about twenty minutes away from his house.
She looks at him and smiles but it’s pretty clear she has no fucking idea who he is. Her mind constantly reboots itself. To Auntie M., Wildey is just someone who’s going to wheel her somewhere for a warm meal. Maybe down the hall. Maybe somewhere outside. Can happen either way. It’s just nice to move somewhere different. She isn’t very hungry.
This is fortunate. Wildey is not much of a cook.
Somewhere hidden in the shadows and mists and cul-de-sacs of Auntie M.’s mind is a past Wildey would very much like to recover. Her older brother was John Quincy Wildey—his great-grandpops and a hero cop, working the tough, booze-soaked streets of the 1920s. There weren’t many black cops working then; the trade was dominated by the Irish. But John Quincy managed to stand out, and was even once commended by the public safety director—a marine general and war hero—for his efforts battling bootleggers, pimps, and racketeers. Wildey didn’t hear the first glimmer of these stories until a year after he joined the force, when some oldhead asked for his name again.
Wildey, huh? Any relation to John Q.?
That offhand question sent Wildey to the central branch of the Free Library on Vine Street, where he dug up old newspaper clips from 1924, the year his great-grandpa joined the force. He spent the better part of a weekend pumping quarters into the microfiche machines, the homeless guys slumming around the tables, pretending to read the
Daily News
for the tenth time just to stay warm. Wildey printed out everything he could but still wanted more. So he bought an old bound volume of the
Philadelphia Record
on eBay, just to get a feel for the times—the old ads, the weird little stories, even the weather reports. The enormous slab of yellowed newsprint was already crumbling into fragile little flakes when it arrived. Turning the pages was an exercise in frustration. The past quite literally crumbled under his touch. Wildey had to Shop-Vac the floor under his kitchen table three times a day.
It all turned out to be true: Great-grandpops John Quincy Wildey was a goddamned police hero. Back then all the bad stuff happened in a downtown neighborhood called the Tenderloin, and John Q. worked its notorious Eighth District, which was corrupt as hell until that marine general hit town to clean things up. Wildey read the clips with a dizzy fascination. How did he not know this? Why didn’t anyone ever tell him this shit? Granted, only one article mentioned his great-grandpops by name (and probably grudgingly, because, you know: black folk). But there were plenty of stories about the Eighth, and Wildey knew his own blood was mixing it up in those streets back then.
Until he started researching, all Wildey knew was that his grandfather, George Wildey, had been a cop until the mid-1960s, when he was gunned down in the line of duty. He left behind a boy, George Wildey Jr.—Wildey’s own father. Whose name had made the papers, too. For all the wrong reasons.
Knowing that John Q. existed changed everything
So this Thanksgiving evening he’s off to pick up the one member of his family still alive and at liberty: his great Auntie M. The M is for “Margaret.” She doesn’t remember her name most times, nor does she know who Wildey is. Sometimes there’s a glimmer of recognition, but there’s never much follow-through. Wildey can’t blame her. Auntie M. turned a hundred over the summer—they showed her grainy photo on the
Today
show and everything. She’s survived improbable odds. Wildey just wishes she was one of those centenarians who remembered every blessed detail of their lives, down to what they ate for breakfast on the first day of kindergarten.
“Hi, Auntie M.,” he says in the lobby of the retirement home in Germantown, about twenty minutes away from his house.
She looks at him and smiles but it’s pretty clear she has no fucking idea who he is. Her mind constantly reboots itself. To Auntie M., Wildey is just someone who’s going to wheel her somewhere for a warm meal. Maybe down the hall. Maybe somewhere outside. Can happen either way. It’s just nice to move somewhere different. She isn’t very hungry.
This is fortunate. Wildey is not much of a cook.
Somewhere hidden in the shadows and mists and cul-de-sacs of Auntie M.’s mind is a past Wildey would very much like to recover. Her older brother was John Quincy Wildey—his great-grandpops and a hero cop, working the tough, booze-soaked streets of the 1920s. There weren’t many black cops working then; the trade was dominated by the Irish. But John Quincy managed to stand out, and was even once commended by the public safety director—a marine general and war hero—for his efforts battling bootleggers, pimps, and racketeers. Wildey didn’t hear the first glimmer of these stories until a year after he joined the force, when some oldhead asked for his name again.
Wildey, huh? Any relation to John Q.?
That offhand question sent Wildey to the central branch of the Free Library on Vine Street, where he dug up old newspaper clips from 1924, the year his great-grandpa joined the force. He spent the better part of a weekend pumping quarters into the microfiche machines, the homeless guys slumming around the tables, pretending to read the
Daily News
for the tenth time just to stay warm. Wildey printed out everything he could but still wanted more. So he bought an old bound volume of the
Philadelphia Record
on eBay, just to get a feel for the times—the old ads, the weird little stories, even the weather reports. The enormous slab of yellowed newsprint was already crumbling into fragile little flakes when it arrived. Turning the pages was an exercise in frustration. The past quite literally crumbled under his touch. Wildey had to Shop-Vac the floor under his kitchen table three times a day.
It all turned out to be true: Great-grandpops John Quincy Wildey was a goddamned police hero. Back then all the bad stuff happened in a downtown neighborhood called the Tenderloin, and John Q. worked its notorious Eighth District, which was corrupt as hell until that marine general hit town to clean things up. Wildey read the clips with a dizzy fascination. How did he not know this? Why didn’t anyone ever tell him this shit? Granted, only one article mentioned his great-grandpops by name (and probably grudgingly, because, you know: black folk). But there were plenty of stories about the Eighth, and Wildey knew his own blood was mixing it up in those streets back then.
Until he started researching, all Wildey knew was that his grandfather, George Wildey, had been a cop until the mid-1960s, when he was gunned down in the line of duty. He left behind a boy, George Wildey Jr.—Wildey’s own father. Whose name had made the papers, too. For all the wrong reasons.
Knowing that John Q. existed changed everything
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