Stateway's Garden Read online

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 by Jasmon Drain

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

  RANDOM HOUSE and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Drain, Jasmon, author.

  Title: Stateway’s garden: stories / Jasmon Drain.

  Description: First edition. | New York: Random House, [2020]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2019016488| ISBN 9781984818164 (hardback: alk. paper) | ISBN 9781984818171 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PS3604.R3428 A6 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/​2019016488

  Hardback ISBN 9781984818164

  Ebook ISBN 9781984818171

  randomhousebooks.com

  Cover design: Rachel Ake

  Cover photograph: © John H. White/Chicago History Museum

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  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Epigraph

  B.B. Sauce: Found on Ogden and Central Park

  Questions by the Stove

  Wet Paper Grass

  Solane

  Reaganomics, Left Lying in the Road

  Middle School

  Interpreting Dolton, at Thirteen

  Shifts

  The Stateway Condo Gentrification

  Stephanie Worthington

  The Tornado Moat

  Love-Able Lip Gloss

  Epilogue: The Battle of Segregation, 1958–2007

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  You can’t go through life carrying a ten-gallon bucket. Get you a little cup. That’s all you need….That ten-gallon bucket ain’t never gonna be full.

  —August Wilson, Two Trains Running

  B.B. SAUCE

  FOUND ON OGDEN AND CENTRAL PARK

  They told me that I was the smart kid, very smart from what I understood, able to walk sturdily around our apartment when I was just over nine months old. The family, in jest, said I used those legs to observe and learn anything I could. Stories were that I held a fork the moment my hand muscles were strong enough to balance it; I used the bathroom while standing, barely capable of seeing over the toilet, and whenever I was quiet, which was often, I was attempting to learn something new. I believed only a little of this. However, my mother used those smarts of mine to her advantage every instance she could. Because although I was younger, I did the older-boy chores—the ones my brother, Jacob, should’ve done. As a reward for his complaining about everything, she left him home alone for hours some of the times she went to work. Said she could only take so much of his mouth.

  She worked at the corner store on Ogden Avenue and Central Park, the West Side of Chicago, at least an hour bus ride from our South Side Stateway Gardens projects. At first, Jacob was the one who always went to work with her ’cause he was supposed to be the grown one and I’d have to be with Mother’s friend’s niece Solane. Every day he came home and talked constantly about how uncomfortable being at work with our mother made him feel. Said he saw stupid people doing stupid-people things while trying to teach him stupider lessons. Even at nine or ten, and me six, he sounded younger when he talked. His stories were hardly elaborate, nothing close to the exaggeration that eventually floated in his language once we were older. But Jacob’s lack of detail about the store made me eager to travel to work with my mother on that Western Avenue bus. He just had to be hiding something good.

  “Put your jacket on,” she said to him. “We’re heading out in a minute.”

  “I don’t wanna go, don’t make me, I don’t like it there,” he replied. My brother always spoke in sentences that made it seem like his brain and tongue were fighting each other for leadership.

  “We go through this every time. You’re going with me.”

  “Why do I have to?”

  “ ’Cause you’re my young and pretty son,” she replied with a small smile. “You make me look better.”

  Jacob folded his arms as he sat on the double-mattressed bed in our room. “It’s dumb, I don’t never ever have fun there.”

  “Life isn’t about fun. It’s about money.” Mother’s voice was so potent whenever she said the word money that it could have bruised your arm. With the force she used to snatch him from the bed, the bruise would be there anyways. “I didn’t ask for your input,” she continued. “Put the damned jacket on.”

  “I want to go,” I interjected.

  “I didn’t ask you if you wanted to go.” Her body moved with such swiftness in my direction that I thought she was going to grab me as well. “Go over there and sit down, Tracy.”

  “Please, Mother?” I asked. “Can I go?”

  “Stop talking to me.” She pointed her finger to a seat.

  “I promise I will be good.”

  She lifted her arms into the air, rolling the sleeves of her shirt to the elbow. I noticed the light skin on Jacob’s arm turning red from where Mother had held him. She always made certain to never strike anywhere near his face, didn’t want to leave a mark. Mother wheezed after removing her hand from his arm, and huffed like a big-bellied crocodile finishing a water buffalo.

  True, I was my mother’s smart child, but Jacob was the handsome one with the precious button nose and eyelashes that flapped like dove wings. He had one of those faces that made you feel guilty for making him frown in even the slightest way.

  “Get up, boy,” she said, trying to remain in control. “Get. Up.”

  “I’m not going anywhere, you didn’t have to hit me.” Jacob folded his arms again.

  “Stand up. Now.”

  Even though he was so young, the deepness of his voice made you believe puberty occurred during his infancy. The only things he inherited from our mother were her temper and height. He stood against the bed while she stared him down, right fist balled as if he planned to swing without compromise, and said again, “I’m not going.”

  “Maybe you could take me, Mother?” I said again.

  She turned to me slowly, like her body was on an out-of-practice swivel. Judging my mother’s figure you would never have assumed she had kids. Neither her shoulders nor hips were wide at that time, and she was nothing close to physically imposing. Yet with those teeth clenched, both Jacob and I knew fear.

  “You’re too young to go, Tracy,” she said. When she turned to me, her eyes were no longer bulging and the frown had softened. Her hands, which had been shaking, steadied and began to relax. “You’re not ready.”

  “I could help you count money or something.”

  “I just think it’s too early for you to be going to that store with me.”

  When Mother turned to look at Jacob, red bruise on his arm swelling by the second, she knew there was no choice: Take me or go alone. Mother hated to be alone, hated it more than anything, if even for a brief moment. She wouldn’t eat by herself, slept with three to five pillows stacked next to her, and sometimes made Jacob or me stand right beside her in the bathroom whether she was brushing her teeth or sitting on the toilet. Going to work
was no different.

  I think that was one of the few times she favored my dirty skin and much wider nose over Jacob’s.

  “Maybe you can do something useful while you’re there,” she said after pausing for a while. “You are my smart child.” And she began introducing me as just that.

  * * *

  WE TURNED THE corner on Ogden Avenue that morning, walking with a holiday pace. Mother never took being on time to work seriously. In her opinion, nothing was more important than the way she looked. That was her moneymaker. For example, if she was to be at work at ten in the morning, she began prepping at six-thirty. She spent hours using Lynda Carter’s Maybelline mascara, hoping it got her eyelashes close to Jacob’s; she applied an even coat of brown lipstick that ironically helped her cheekbones jump; she used a brush resembling something for painting a wall to apply powder. And as we walked past parked cars, sometimes twelve or so on a West Side block, she employed windows on the passenger sides of fancier vehicles to check the shine of her large forehead and make sure there were no smears of blush on her cheeks. Mother had one of those open faces, hair always pulled back revealing her features; it was the kind of face that helped plastic earrings compete with diamonds. I guess the reaction she garnered from West Side of Chicago men made it all worth it. She continued to stroll like the Thoroughbred horse she was: legs tight, white-and-blue skirt tighter, and pointing her nose in the air.

  On Ogden Avenue, there were hardly any cars flying down the street and the traffic lights didn’t even work. There were numerous brown and green dumpsters on the curbs, most of which were overflowing and crowded with flies. The street smelled like our building’s incinerator. None of this seemed to bother my mother. She had to have had invisible nose and earplugs. Because the men that we passed walking down the street, some of which were missing at least one tooth and held accessory-like bottles of liquor in their hands, looked her up and down in the way I would a mag-wheeled Huffy. They said things like “What’s up, bricks?” and “Hey, sexy momma” and “I’d love to get with that.”

  “Don’t grow up and be like them,” she said to me without turning her head. “No woman wants a man with no money and nothing in his hand but a drink.”

  “But what if I don’t have any money?” I replied.

  “You will.”

  “How do you know?”

  “You’re my smart child.”

  She hardly ever looked me in the face while talking. Her voice simply loomed in the air; it was like having a speaker blasting loudly away and attached to something floating in the sky. But when we reached the store where she worked, I saw a difference in her immediately, a change in nearly everything.

  Her sashay toward the door was smooth and purposeful. The men standing by the door all gave off fresh fragrances of cologne and they didn’t appear to be without money. It was the first time I’d seen black men in suits who weren’t headed to a funeral: There wasn’t a speckle of lint on their fabrics, gold bracelets dangled from strong wrists, and their teeth were capped with so much silver that we could have made at least five forks and spoons.

  “Hey, baby,” a man said to Mother as we approached the door. His radiant skin and attractive nose reminded me of Jacob’s. “How you feeling this morning?”

  Mother simply replied, “I’m fiiiii­iiiii­ine.” She had a smile holding fifty-nine teeth.

  “I’m going to really need you to watch things for me today,” the man started again. I noticed him talking to Mother and gripping an area just below her waist. She pushed his hand lower. His eyes lifted. “And who is this?” he asked, turning to me.

  I looked at him closely. His skin was such a clean version of yellow that I knew he was a puppy mixed with something. He wore the perfect suit: blue with a gray vest and white shirt underneath, slanted black hat to match. His hair was short on the sides, a bit longer in the back, but not curled or anything that could be seen as feminine.

  “This is Tracy,” Mother said, making certain to stand close to him. “My other son.”

  “He doesn’t look much like his brother,” the man replied, lowering himself to his knees. I remained a few feet away.

  “Nah, he doesn’t,” she replied. “He’s my smart child, though.”

  “I guess he can make that work for him some kind of way,” the man said. He then lifted from his knees and moved a few steps from me. He took short glances from my mother then back to me, surely wondering how we were related.

  “He’s my smart child,” she repeated. “Tracy.”

  “Well, Tracy, I’m Mr. Mason.” He lifted his eyebrow, analyzing me further. “Don’t forget that. Mr. Mason.”

  I nodded.

  * * *

  —

  HONESTLY, I NEVER felt smart when I was with my mother, especially on the first day she took me to work with her. The more and more she said it, the more I tried to believe it. For once, I wasn’t competing with Jacob, who was called handsome and fine and cute and good-looking so much that he would flip coins each morning just to see which would be chosen as a nickname for the day. Considering the first reactions while being at the corner store on Ogden and Central Park, everyone around must have felt something similar.

  When we entered the door kept locked nightly by an abnormally large gate with a steel padlock, all the people standing nearby stared at me. “Who’s the little boy?” they asked. “I thought you only had one child, Joanne.” Or they would say, “He sure doesn’t look much like you.” Mother would then grin awkwardly at the men, especially those wearing green and orange suit jackets so bright I thought they were colored with crayons. “He’s my smart little boy,” she repeated.

  Men on the South Side of the city, especially in the high-rise project buildings we lived in at the time, had nothing on the thorough styles and manners of these black men. They began walking up as my mother tried to hide me, extending hands that were larger than my torso for a shake. They said things that made me feel good like “What grade you in?” and “You speak very well to be a young boy.” I couldn’t help smiling when I noticed how they cleared and deepened their voices when talking to me, talking like my first-grade teacher did. No sooner had they walked away and began conversing with others, wearing shoes shiny from polish, they began calling one another bitches and faggots and motherfuckers and pussies and some other words I couldn’t say at that age.

  “Can I stay out here with them?” I asked my mother. “They like me.”

  She glared at me sharply, makeup helping her look even more frightening. “They don’t like you, boy. They like me.” She pulled my hand and turned my body to face the door. “That’s the kind of stuff men say to kids when they want something from their mother.” She yanked me with such force through the front door that I wondered if my shoulder joint was intact.

  When I walked inside, my arm still hurt. I can’t lie, I forgot about it quickly, because the store smelled entirely of raw meat. The stench was thick, mixing with a hint of the West Side air’s pollution, and there was a piece of glue paper in a far corner that I couldn’t help but notice a few roaches were stuck to. I was used to them; everyone in Stateway had roaches, but West Side roaches were different—they had a browner coating, longer antennae, fatter bodies—and I hesitated to touch anything in the building. I was greeted politely by customers and other employees in the store as they passed the doorway.

  “Who is he?” a lady asked as she was coming around the corner.

  “His name is Tracy,” Mother replied. “Tracy, this is Ms. Rose. She owns the store.”

  “Hi, Ms. Rose,” I said, timidly.

  “I want you to address everyone here as Mr. and Ms. when you talk to them.” Mother gripped my arm just below the shoulder. “Got that?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “A boy as distinguished as this knows how to talk to a woman,” Ms. Rose said. She had the face of a bus driv
er. Her skin was as dark as mine, rather rough in certain spots on the cheeks, and she had black speckles and faded colors around her mouth that reminded me of a layer of sausage. I later learned those came from smoking cigarettes heavily. “I’m so glad she finally brought you by, Tracy.”

  “Don’t say things like that, Rose,” my mother said. “He’s too young and he doesn’t need to hear all that stuff.”

  “Hear stuff like what?” She lifted her head toward my mother. “I was just noticing that he does look a little like you.”

  Mother responded, “Nah.”

  “It’s your eyes,” Ms. Rose continued. “You guys have the same round eyes.”

  “Those belong to his father,” Mother stated while moving away. “They are not mine.”

  Ms. Rose then giggled. “Well, yeah. They sure do belong to him. They’re big and pretty.”

  I think that was the only time in my life that someone used the word pretty to describe anything of mine. Ms. Rose grabbed my hand tightly and pulled me close. She kneeled on the square-sectioned concrete floor, right in front of me, and smiled. I saw every one of her spaced teeth.

  “You’re different from your brother,” she said. “A shy boy. I’m going to make sure you feel all right around here today.”

  I nodded at Ms. Rose, clueless as to what she meant by that.

  “He’s my smart child,” Mother said in the distance.

  Ms. Rose didn’t acknowledge the words. She merely walked away, gave a few instructions with her strong voice to other employees standing close by, and disappeared.

  So there I was, alone, circling the room with my newly prettied eyes, realizing that the Ogden and Central Park corner store where Mother worked sold everything imaginable: from chips to chili, liquor to laundry soap. Upon entry, the area was shining in certain spots from a recent mopping, with small dark scuffs scattered along the floor from sneakers; there was a large windowed cooler, maybe ten feet long or more, with lamps so lengthy they could have been used to brighten a small bedroom. The glass with those lamps was murky, smeared with handprints, and if you touched it—which I did—you may have took on some frostbite. I did press my face against the glass, taking ten-second breaks every so often to allow blood to circulate. There was so much uncooked meat in that cooler, all of which was sealed tightly in paper or plastic, that I couldn’t place it all. The meat was arranged in random rolls, stretching from the front of the glass to its back end. I saw bologna, and salami in a roll with the black spots that made your mouth burn; there were bags of chicken wings frozen solid, sharing space with rows of various cheeses: white-colored, yellowed, and orange-tinted, and there was even an unattractive version called liver cheese that was brown and looked all but spoiled. Each piece of meat and cheese was measured and sold in pounds. Just behind me, where a weak door creaked every time wind blew, people began flooding in and yelling at a man standing behind the frozen glass.