Coogler sheepishly looked over his shoulder as Vera approached. “Now hold on, Miss Vee. This here is a police matter.”
She ignored him and forged her way past Coogler and inside the house. Coogler glanced over his shoulder again at the rest of us across the neighborhood before he took a few tentative steps inside the house behind Vera.
A few minutes later, Willie Jay rushed out of the house. Mario Jackson stumbled out in handcuffs, Willie Jay holding him by the scruff of his neck. His T-shirt was torn in a couple places and his jeans were disheveled. The side of his face bore a bright red mark. We didn’t even have to guess to know what happened after the two men stepped inside that house.
“I didn’t do nothing,” Mario yelled. “I told y’all crackas, I didn’t do nothing!”
Coogler followed behind them. Vera and Miss Jackson came out last with Miss Jackson sobbing in Vera’s arms. Willie Jay threw the teenager in the back of the patrol car with such brutal force, Mario’s head hit the top of the door opening, causing him to wail in pain. His scream sent an electric spark of fear through me. A hard knot rose up in my chest at the sight of Mario being manhandled and tossed into the patrol car like a child’s discarded toy. Willie Jay stormed around the car, jumped inside, and sped off, leaving Coogler behind. The short, thick man stood in the middle of three Black women nervously trying to explain that Earthalene could pick up her son at the station after they finished questioning him.
A couple minutes later, I watched Birdie spring into action, backing her old Impala out of her driveway and into the front of her neighbor’s house. Earthalene, still wearing her housecoat and pin curlers, hopped inside the waiting car with Miss Vera. All three women sped off, hanging on the tail of Coogler’s patrol car.
Three hours later, the women returned home with Mario. He was missing two teeth and one of his eyes was crusted shut with blood. All because old lady Nessie from across the tracks told the police she thought she saw Mario throwing rocks at the windows of an abandoned building.
Two weeks later, Earthalene and Mario Jackson packed up everything they owned into her brother’s van and moved somewhere up north. That same day, Martha Littlejohn shocked everyone on Periwinkle Lane by announcing that she was getting married—to Willie Jay Groover.
Chapter 5
It had been a day straight out of hell. If I drank, this would have been the perfect excuse to drown myself in a wine bottle. My feet hurt, I was hungry, and I was miserable at the thought of spending the end of a day like today alone. It was almost eight o’clock at night by the time I dragged myself to the front door of my condo in Vinings, a conservative section of Atlanta with lots of old white wealth and a few folks, just a few, who decided to buck the tradition and add some melanin to the neighborhood. Every day, I drove past a historical marker indicating the spot where General William Tecumseh Sherman’s Union troops marched toward Atlanta to shut down the Confederate soldiers. To this day, some die-hard fans of the Civil War still reenact the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain less than thirty minutes from that marker.
The faint soothing sounds of a Ravel piano concerto drifted from Mr. Foster’s condo across the hall. I didn’t know any of my neighbors except for Mr. Foster, a widower with a penchant for making small talk at the door. By now, he was probably tucked in his favorite chair in the living room listening to his record albums. He abhorred CDs and the one time I tried to explain the convenience of streaming services like Spotify and Pandora to him, he brushed it off saying those things were money-grabbing follies. Maybe he was onto something. Vinyl was making a comeback. Sometimes, I wished I had grown up with a father like Mr. Foster. Some elegant man with good taste and an eye for social standing. Someone to pass along fatherly advice and wisdom while we chatted in a Zagat-rated restaurant over dry-aged porterhouse steaks. Silly.
I dropped my tote bag and keys in the foyer, slipped off my shoes and coat, and crossed through my condo, a huge open-concept kitchen-dining-living room. Viking appliances, dining room seating for eight, three large bedrooms, all exquisitely decorated. My sanctum. Every square foot of my home was like a barometer of how far I’d come from the squalor of that dilapidated shotgun house back in Chillicothe, Georgia.
I stepped into the kitchen, clicked on the burner under the teapot, and stood staring into the dancing blue flame. I glanced down at my cell phone. Three voice mails from Grace and another two from Lana. Grace, Lana, and I were roommates at Georgetown University. A few seconds later, the phone buzzed in my hand. An incoming call from Grace again. I didn’t have the energy to talk to her tonight, but I answered anyway.