CHAPTER TEN THE FHA
CHAPTER
TEN
The FHA
Every night, when Benny came back to his cot in the trailer, he saw the progress Cora had made with the development and felt a swell of pride. She’d sold all thirty plots, with half the houses nearing completion, putting his loan repayment way ahead of schedule.
He and Cora had agreed that the first house finished would be Momma’s.
He couldn’t wait for her to own her home again all these years after losing the Rosewood house.
Cora’s would be finished next, giving her a place where she and Lee could settle down.
Maybe start a family. He’d be out of the hospital in a few weeks and Benny had no doubt he and Cora would marry as soon as the divorce from Roscoe came through.
Aunt Teen and Patsy’s place would be done soon after, then Uncle Drew’s and Pastor Glen’s and Mrs Hammond’s. He wasn’t sure who came after that, but all thirty houses would be built and moved into by year’s end.
With everyone settling down at Liberty Heights, Benny felt more adrift than ever.
A beautiful life had been his for the taking and he’d thrown it away to sleep on a cot in a trailer.
He hadn’t asked Cora to save a house for him because he didn’t know yet where he belonged.
His heart told him to go to Gloria and beg her to take him back; his head told him not to be an idiot.
Some days he felt sure he’d made a mistake not telling her everything.
Other times he knew he’d done the right thing: telling her would have meant losing her anyways and brought her father with a shotgun or her brother with a rope.
He avoided thinking about it by throwing himself into his work, coming in earlier and leaving later, which his boss mistook for diligence.
On his way home most nights, he’d take a detour to Gloria’s neighborhood on the chance she’d be walking down the street or out watering her geraniums by the front porch.
He never saw her, but it felt good to be close, to know she might be sitting right behind the living-room curtains or that it might be her who turned on the upstairs light.
After his Gloria detour, he drove to Liberty Heights. Usually, the site was empty when he got back, with even Cora gone for the night, but as he pulled up, he saw lights on in the trailer. He went inside and found Cora still there, looking frazzled.
‘You okay?’ he asked her.
She handed him a letter. ‘Uncle Drew’s on his way.’
As he read, Benny felt the blood drain from his face. They’d found out. The FHA had opened an investigation into a breach of loan conditions. They accused Benny of defrauding the government and threatened criminal proceedings.
His heart spluttered in his chest and he heard the anxiety in his voice when he said, ‘What are we going to do?’
Cora stood by the window of the trailer looking out over the field of homes.
She tightened her arms around herself like coiled steel.
‘I’ll tell you what we’re not going to do.
’ Her words bounced with the taut twang of strained wire.
‘We’re not going to throw in the towel and give up Liberty Heights because some agency pencil-pusher wrote a letter. Not when we’re so close.’
When Uncle Drew got there, he seemed more mad than worried, which calmed Benny some. He told them to sit tight and that he’d take care of it. ‘You followed your contract to the letter,’ he said. ‘Everything here is technically legal.’
Benny’s stomach twisted. ‘Technically?’
‘It’s legal,’ he said.
Benny sat down and put his head into his hands.
Liberty Heights might technically be legal, but Benny wasn’t.
Passing was still a crime in the state of Florida, and it wouldn’t take much for them to shift the fraud charges from the loan to Benny.
He felt dizzy, and the deep lungfuls he drew in seemed to empty his lungs instead of filling them.
Uncle Drew slipped the letter into his briefcase. ‘I’ll start working on this right away,’ he said, patting Benny’s shoulder. ‘In the meantime, don’t mention it to anyone. You don’t want to spook your buyers.’
After two weeks of letters and phone calls to the FHA, Uncle Drew secured them an appointment with the local representatives.
‘Don’t say anything,’ he warned Benny when they got to the Jacksonville office. ‘Leave all the talking to me.’
A put out looking secretary led them to a stuffy office full of filing cabinets where a gray man sat behind a gray desk.
‘This is Benny North,’ Uncle Drew said, standing, as there were no chairs for them to sit. ‘I’m his lawyer, Drew Brooks. You sent my client this letter.’ He laid it on the desk in front of the agent.
‘Mitch, you want to get in here?’ the FHA office worker called past them, through the open door.
An older man came in, stiffening when he saw Uncle Drew. ‘What’s going on here?’
‘Mr North and his lawyer,’ the first agent said, drawing the last word out with a mocking slur.
‘My client obtained an FHA-backed loan to build a housing development. He has clearly done that, and the first residents will be moving into their homes in the next few weeks. There was no fraud.’
‘You sold those houses to coloreds,’ the agent behind the desk said, looking past Drew and speaking to Benny.
Benny wondered how they knew. Had someone bragged about the Negro development they’d bought into until the FHA got wind of it?
Or had someone they’d turned away when they ran out of plots reported them out of spite?
He’d probably never find out, but knowing how it happened wouldn’t change anything now.
He stayed silent, and looked to Uncle Drew for a response.
‘It’s not illegal to sell a house to a colored man,’ Uncle Drew said.
‘You know damn well it’s supposed to be a white community,’ said the older agent, Mitch, also to Benny. ‘Those were the terms of your loan.’
‘Actually, they weren’t.’ Uncle Drew fished in his briefcase and pulled out a copy of the loan.
‘Say, what’s wrong with you, anyways, bringing this guy in here?’ the younger man said to Benny. ‘Don’t you think you’re in enough hot water as it is?’
‘You’re not one of those …’ Mitch trailed off and came around the desk, lowering his voice. ‘Did you check?’
The younger man looked confused. ‘Check what?’
‘That he’s white, Fletcher. With some of them you can’t tell.’
Benny’s pulse raced. His instinct told him to run for the door, but he forced himself not to move.
‘I checked all that,’ Fletcher said, rifling through a file. ‘It’s in his discharge papers. See?’
‘Hmm,’ Mitch grunted, begrudgingly appeased.
‘The terms of my client’s loan don’t say it must be a white development,’ Uncle Drew cut in.
‘Or that loans will not be given for colored developments. That would violate the Fourteenth Amendment, the Plessy versus Ferguson decision of separate but equal, and the stated principles of the GI Bill of Rights meant to benefit all veterans regardless of race, color or creed.’ He forced a strained chuckle.
‘It’s not every day you set yourself against the Constitution, the Supreme Court and the president, all with one little letter. ’
Mitch’s face reddened. ‘The FHA decides which loans can be backed,’ he said, ‘and we say you pulled a bait and switch.’ He pointed at Benny, eyes bugged wide. ‘We say you knew it was meant to be white, and that you were told to put in a whites only restrictive covenant.’
‘Well, that’s true,’ Uncle Drew said. ‘But on further consideration, he decided not to.’
‘And that’s fraud.’
‘Well, actually, gentlemen, Buchanan versus Warley determined that racial zoning ordinances interfered with the right of property owners to sell to whomever they pleased, so neighborhood zoning has been unconstitutional since 1917, which leaves the ever-popular private restrictive covenants that you recommended.’
‘Stipulated.’
‘You may not be aware, but the Supreme Court just finished ruling on May the third, in Shelley versus Kraemer, that the enforcement of restrictive covenants by the state is unconstitutional, so even if he had agreed to a whites only restriction, there’s no longer anything you can do if he changes his mind. ’
The younger looked to the elder, ‘Is that true?’
‘But the fact is, my client’s loan stipulated that in order to,’ he pointed to the words as he read, ‘achieve compatibility among the neighborhood occupants, he shouldn’t sell to inharmonious racial groups.’ Uncle Drew smiled, shark-like. ‘By selling only to Negros, he has fulfilled those terms.’
‘Wait … But …’
Their spluttering anger relaxed Benny and loosened his tongue.
‘We know you like to deny loans for anything that will benefit Negro Americans, but you did all your checks and backed the loan as a good investment, so now, after the fact, you don’t have a legal leg to stand on.
’ He glanced at Uncle Drew, conscious he’d disobeyed the no-talking rule, but Uncle Drew stifled a smile, so Benny straightened his spine, and in a tone that would have made even General Patton sit up and listen, he said, ‘Gentlemen, I think we’re done here,’ nodding to each of them and making for the door.