They drove southeast into Petworth and Park View. Darius Strange parked the Mercury on Princeton Place, a street that graded up off Georgia. Row houses holding single and multiple families, mostly colored now, lined the block.
“Go on and get your mother some milk,” said Darius as he set the brake.
“Okay,” said Derek.
Derek went down the block to the east side of the Avenue. On one corner was the neighborhood movie house, the York, and on the other was a small grocery, one of many neighborhood markets scattered around the city. He picked up a bottle of milk and took it to the counter, where the owner, a Jew the kids called Mr. Meyer and the adults called just Meyer, sat on a high-backed stool. Mr. Meyer knew Derek and the other members of his family by name. He marked the purchase down on a yellow pad and thanked Derek for his business. Darius Strange settled his debt with Meyer on payday, or the first of the month, or sometimes whenever he could.
Derek came out of the market. A girl he knew was standing on the corner, wearing a store-bought dress. She was his age and his height, and she had breasts. She had dimples when she smiled. She was smiling now.
“Hi, Derek,” she said musically.
“Hey,” said Derek, stopping in his tracks. He had the milk bottle in one hand, but the other was free. That hand felt awkward hanging there, so he put it in the pocket of his blue jeans.
“Don’t you know my name?” the girl said. Lord, thought Derek, she has got some pretty brown eyes.
“Sure, I know it.”
“Why you don’t call me by it, then?”
“It’s Carmen.”
“I know what it is. You don’t have to tell me it! You should be polite, though, and call me by my name when you see me.”
Derek felt his face grow hot. “Why you got a Puerto Rican name, girl?”
“It’s not Puerto Rican. My mama thought it sounded pretty, is all.”
“It’s all right,” said Derek.
Carmen Hill giggled and began to tap one foot on the sidewalk. She was wearing patent leather church shoes, must have had something on the tips of those soles for dancing, ’cause they made a sound.
“Why you laughin’?” said Derek. “I ain’t tell no joke.”
“That how you give a girl a compliment? My name is all right?”
“It’s pretty,” said Derek quickly, and before he lost his nerve added, “Just like you.”
He turned and went up the street. He passed a German man, one of the last whites on the block, who had once thrown hot water at him and his brother for playing too close to his house, and a boy he recognized who was cradling a Daisy lever-action BB rifle he had gotten for his birthday. Ordinarily Derek Strange would have stopped and checked out the gun. But he kept going, looking over his shoulder at Carmen Hill, still standing there tapping her foot, smiling that smile, her eyes alive, those deep dimples of hers…
That girl bothered him nearly every time he saw her. Least he had had the nerve to tell her she was pretty. He wondered what her smart self thought of that.
At 760 Princeton, he took the steps up to his home.
SIX
THE FAMILY LIVED in a row house that Darius Strange had divided into two apartments. A single mother who worked at the cafeteria down at Howard University, not much more than a mile away, lived in the bottom unit with her three wild sons. Darius had bought the house after answering an ad in the Washington Post that read, “Colored, NW, Brick Home.” After putting three hundred and fifty down, he had secured a GI Bill loan at 4 percent. His nut was eighty-six dollars a month, and so far he had not missed a payment. The tenant downstairs was often late with her rent, but she was trying her best, and often he let her slide.
The Strange unit consisted of two bedrooms, a living room/ dining area, and a galley-style kitchen. The furniture and appliances were old but clean. A screened-in porch, where Derek Strange often slept on summer nights, gave onto a view of a small dirt-and-weed backyard and then an alley. The alley, and the grounds of Park View Elementary up the block, were the primary playgrounds for the boys and girls of Princeton Place and those on Otis Place, the next street to the south.
Derek Strange entered the apartment. His father had settled in his regular big old chair, the one facing the television set, a new twenty-one-inch Zenith with Space Command remote control. He had the latest Afro-American spread out in his lap. On the TV screen, James Stewart and Stephen McNally were firing rifles at one each other, both of them having found protection in an outcrop of rocks.
“Young D,” said Dennis Strange, eighteen, tall and lean like his father, dark skinned like the entire family. Dennis was seated at the table where the Stranges took their meals. He, too, had a copy of the Afro-American before him. There were always extras around the house.
“Dennis,” said Derek.
“What you been doin’, man?”
“Playin’.”
Dennis rubbed his fingers along the top of his shaven head. “With your white-boy friend?”
“So?” Derek stared at the gunplay on the TV screen. The sound of ricochet was loud in the room. “Why they tryin’ to kill each other, Pop?”
“One man took the other man’s Winchester in the beginning of the movie,” said Darius Strange. “They just gettin’ around to settlin’ it now.”
Derek looked at the tabloid-sized newspaper in his father’s lap. Derek and his best friend, Lydell Blue, delivered the Washington edition of the newspaper to neighborhood subscribers on Tuesdays and Fridays, earning roughly two dollars a week each. This was real money to them. Derek always tried to read the paper, too. Unlike the stuff he read in the Post and the Star, the stories in the Afro described his world.
Often, though, the stories scared him some. The front page of the latest issue talked about this boy Mack Parker, only twenty-one years old, who got beat half to death and dragged out of his cell by a lynch mob down in Mississippi. His mother was sayin’, “Oh, Lord, why?” ’cause no one had seen Parker since the mob threw him in a car outside the jail. Reminded Derek of the story of that boy Emmett Till, which Dennis was always goin’ on about, who got murdered down there for nothing more than whistling at a white girl.
But in this apartment, with his mother, father, and big brother, Derek felt safe.
“Where Mom at?” said Derek.
“Kitchen,” said Dennis.
Derek walked by the Life magazines stacked on a table by the sofa. The cover story of the issue on top was one in a continuing seven-part series called “How the West Was Won.” Darius Strange had collected every one. Dennis called it “How the West Got Stole” just to annoy their father. The same way he made fun of those programs his father loved to watch at night during the week: Wagon Train, Bat Masterson, Trackdown, and the like. These days, seemed like Dennis and his father were at each other all the time.
Next to the eating table sat a Sylvania hi-fi console combination with records stacked on top. His father listened to some jazz, but mostly the rhythm and blues singers who had started out in gospel. Derek liked to look at the album covers, photos of people like Ray Charles and that Soul Stirrers singer, and a big boy on the Apollo label named Solomon Burke. He wondered what it was like to sing for all those people up onstage, have that kind of money, have the finest women and the Cadillac cars. He wondered if his father, who smelled like grease, sweat, and burned meat when he came home from work, was envious of these men’s lives. Derek didn’t like to think on it too much, because it made him feel bad to imagine that his father would ever leave their home.
As Derek tried to walk by him, Dennis grabbed hold of his shirt and pinned his arms at his side. Derek managed to place the bottle of milk he was holding atop the stack of records. Once he had done this, he tried to break free, but Dennis was too strong. Derek did the only thing he could, dropping to his knees, taking Dennis down with him. They hit the floor and rolled.