Then someone came up with the idea for a grand park in the middle of Manhattan, an oasis inside the newly teeming metropolis. Various locations were proposed, rejected, reconsidered, until the white leaders decided on a vast, rectangular patch in the heart of the island. People already lived there; no matter. The colored citizens of Seneca were property owners, they voted, they had a voice. Not enough of one. The City of New York seized the land, razed the village, and that was that. The villagers dispersed to different neighborhoods, to different cities where they might start again, and the city got its Central Park.
You’ll find the bones. Dig under the playgrounds and meadows and silent groves, Carney supposed, you’ll find the bones.
Carney admired the story. Less so the haughty complacency of those who kept it alive. Alma came from similar stock: teachers and doctors for generations, an uncle who was the First Negro to attend this Ivy League college, a cousin who was the First Negro to graduate from that medical school. First this, First that other thing. Race-conscious and proud, up to a point—light enough to pass for white, but a little too eager to remind you that they could pass for white. Carney spooned Gerber baby food into May’s mouth, saw his hand against her cheek. She was dark, like him. He wondered if Alma still recoiled when she saw her granddaughter’s skin, felt dismayed that she hadn’t turned out light like Elizabeth. He saw her flinch in the hospital room after the delivery. All that hard work and then look at what her daughter marries. Did she stare at her daughter’s belly and wonder whose blood would win out this time?
“Ray,” Elizabeth said. She noticed his mind had drifted. She raised her eyebrows and smiled, tugging him back. Elizabeth had seen straight through him during school, even when he sat next to her or walked her home in the rain, but he was grateful she saw him now. That night at Stacey Miller’s rent party, she offered a coy apology for not remembering him when he told her that they’d gone to school together. He’d finished college and had been putting in the hours as a stock boy in Blumstein’s furniture department. It was the first party he’d attended in a long time. Freddie tried to coax him out, to a night spot, a get-together, but he’d been too embroiled in his studies—Carver High School hadn’t prepared him for the rigors of Queens College—and once he started the department store job, he was too tired. He fell asleep nights to the news station as the whoops and laughter of uptown snuck in the windows.
But the night of the party he’d saved up for a new suit—a brown pinstripe number that fit perfectly off the rack. Freddie took him to the party and introduced him around. It was different than before, being out. The talk and interaction took less out of him; finishing his studies, his industry, had made him more confident. Currents plopped him next to Elizabeth in the line outside Stacey Miller’s bathroom. Someone smoking reefer in there. Freddie had told him to piss off the roof. Ignoring his cousin’s advice had always been a good policy; that night it placed him next to his future wife. He had not been one of those boys in his grade who’d had a crush on her. Those Alexander Oakeses with their ploys. She was out of his league so he never wasted a thought on it. “Of course!” Elizabeth said that night outside the bathroom, as if she suddenly remembered him. Lying. They spent two hours on the lumpy couch by the fire escape—apartment full, rent met—and he asked her out to dinner.
She had been at Black Star Travel for two months. He liked the earnestness in her voice when she talked about work, the urgency of her mission. Black Star arranged tourist and business trips for black travelers, booking them into black-owned and desegregated hotels in America and abroad, mostly the Caribbean, Cuba, and Puerto Rico. The company provided entertainment options; tips on banks, tailors, and friendly restaurants; pamphlets on which theaters in New Orleans or some other destination provided colored seating and which ones wouldn’t let you in the door.
America was big and blighted in gamey spots by racial intolerance and violence. Visiting relatives in Georgia? Here are the safe routes around the sundown towns and cracker territories where you might not make it out alive, the towns and counties to be avoided if you valued your life. Best to stay at the Hanson Motor Lodge, fifty miles away, and hit the road by five p.m. to make it back in one piece. It wasn’t medicine or law, like her parents had envisioned, but it was service, practical and meaningful. “I want them to be safe,” Elizabeth said. Carney reached across the table and took her hand. They went to the movies the next night, and the night after that.