Chapter 17 Lina #2
It took weeks of encouragement, but eventually Nellie convinced Lina to take a seat at Mother Natural Salon.
Lina had been afraid of what Nellie’s touch might awaken in her, but eventually she gave herself over to the pleasure of those fingers.
Over the course of several hours, Nellie washed Lina’s hair and braided it.
Then she looked admiringly at Lina in the dumpster-salvaged mirror and gave Lina a peck on the cheek.
“You look beautiful,” Nellie said. “Handsome.”
“Hmm. I like handsome.” Trying not to think about the softness of Nellie’s lips, Lina stared at their reflections.
“Yeah. I know that about you,” said Nellie, standing and removing the backward man’s coat from Lina’s shoulders.
“Oh yeah? What do you know about me?”
“I know you don’t want no man.”
“How you know that?”
“ ’Cause if you wanted a man, you’d take better care of your hair,” Nellie chided, pinching Lina’s shoulder, and yet there was something in the glimmer of Nellie’s eyes that left Lina breathless.
The same week that the temperature dropped to the teens, the radiators at 78 and 80 Livonia both went cold.
Shuffling around in multiple layers, Lina turned on the oven.
Her fingers were so numb she was afraid that, chopping the vegetables, she’d hack off her thumb and add it to the soup.
She canceled classes and spent all night monitoring the heat from the oven and checking in on the neighbors’ children, and she left voice messages for Mr. Wong, demanding that he send someone to fix the boiler.
At the end of the week, she decided, enough was enough.
She invited all the neighbors at 78 and 80 Livonia to a Freedom School town hall. About fifteen showed up, but many were nervous about withholding rent. Yes, they were sick of the conditions, but what if Mr. Wong threw them to the street?
Annetta Brown was one of these dissenters. “I have kids. You activists think this is fun and games, but I can’t risk being put out.”
“Sí, yo también tengo miedo,” whispered someone else.
“He can’t evict anyone,” Lina countered. “We’re protected by the law. He can’t throw us out if we take him to court.”
“I’m not taking chances,” Annetta said. “We won’t make it through the winter on the street.”
It was Nellie, ultimately, who ended the standoff.
“You love your babies, Annetta,” she said, stepping toward her.
“I know what kind a mother you are—I see it in your eyes. You never put nothing before your babies.” Nellie took Annetta’s hands in her own and pressed them to her heart.
“But you know as much as I do—this world don’t love a Black woman’s babies.
It’s not gonna give them what they deserve.
That’s why we got to fight for our babies, Annetta. ”
Annetta remained silent for a full minute. The room deliberated, neighbors whispering to neighbors.
“If I agree to this,” Annetta said slowly, “and he kicks us out, you all just gonna let me fend for myself at that point?”
“It’s not gonna happen,” Lina said. “I promise we won’t get kicked out.”
They were unable to reach a consensus, but more than half the room was willing to strike, and by majority vote, it was decided: when Mr. Wong showed up on February 1, he wouldn’t get no rent. He’d get a piece of their minds.
After everyone left, Wesley returned to Tilden Houses to eat supper with his cousins, and Lina and Nellie huddled in the kitchen, shivering as they drafted a list of demands: repairs to all cracked and caving ceilings, extermination of vermin, remediation of bathroom mold, and the replacement of malfunctioning boilers and radiators.
Nellie invited Lina to warm up in the car.
Lina wasn’t good in cars, but Nellie insisted.
They crossed two avenues and located Nellie’s Ford Galaxie, parallel-parked on Blake Avenue.
It was the car in which she and her son had fled Detroit, leaving Wesley’s father in the middle of the night and driving for ten hours.
The trunk handle was broken, and someone had shattered the back left window a few months earlier, but the car still meant everything to Nellie.
After Lina settled into the passenger seat, Nellie flicked on the blinkers and put the car in gear. They drove, and Lina watched Nellie’s fingers move with their usual ease, dexterity, and confidence. Desire knocked the wind out of her.
They drove and drove—Lina had no notion of which roads, which highways; she couldn’t keep track; in the blow of the heater, she sweated copiously.
“Go slow for me,” Lina whispered.
“You’ll get sick if we go too slow.”
They ended up on a beach somewhere, not Coney Island, but maybe the Rockaways or somewhere farther, on Long Island.
They took a walk on the sand, and Lina had never been to a beach so clean.
It was surrounded, it looked like, by rich white people’s homes, and at first, she found it difficult to relax.
But there was the moon, dangling like an egg yolk in the sky, and there was Nellie, who hooked her elbow through Lina’s, and whose head bent so close, Lina could smell the coconut oil in her hair.
It was safely in the car with the heat turned up that she first dared to kiss Nellie.
She leaned in slowly, tentatively, and Nellie waited for her.
When her chapped lips at last met Nellie’s soft ones, Nellie gently brushed back Lina’s curls with her nails, took Lina’s cheeks in her hands, and pulled her closer.
They drove home, shed their coats on the kitchen counter. “Let me warm you,” Lina whispered, weaving her arms around Nellie’s slim baby-blue jumpsuit, the fabric silky against her palm.
Under the thumping of the train, Lina’s fingers grappled for the zipper, drew it down her back, Nellie’s bare shoulders and breasts emerging like petals of a moonflower. Lina had wanted this so badly, she couldn’t trust it was happening.
She kissed each soft curve of skin she had yet to meet. Removed her own three layers of turtlenecks in haste, pressed her chest to Nellie’s breasts, held the small of Nellie’s waist, her neck in Nellie’s teeth.
And then, on the floor mattress, far as possible from Annetta’s wall, Lina drank from the ocean of Nellie’s wetness. She anchored Nellie’s thighs as the tide rolled in.
Like usual, Mr. Wong showed up on the first of the month at the crack of dawn, announcing his arrival on Livonia Avenue by honking the horn of his Chevy until he’d woken every baby on the block.
This time, they were waiting. The tenants marched down to the sidewalk: Lina followed by Harry Eugene and Daddy J, the Jenkins siblings, Patricia Taylor and her eldest grandson, and another dozen renters from 80 Livonia.
Young and old, Black and brown, coated, gloved, and scarved, they gathered around the car—motley figures and steady eyes, the teens channeling Panther stoicism, the elders just tired.
Mr. Wong’s eyes flitted nervously from one face to the next, his butt still planted in the driver’s seat. He rolled down his window, and Lina handed him the petition.
“What’s all this?” he muttered.
“Mr. Wong, you don’t get a cent until you fix these buildings up. We’re on rent strike, and these are our demands.”
He squinted, examining the list, his brow furrowed. In the nine years since they’d first met him, his stomach had thickened. His hair was graying in patches.
Eventually, he crumpled the paper and threw it over his shoulder into the back seat.
“No, you people brought your problems with you.” He nodded toward the second floor, where June and William watched intently from the window.
He waved a hand at the orange banner. “Who are these people? They’re not my tenants.
What’s the ‘Freedom School’? It’s a zoo.
The buildings have problems ’cause you make trouble with these parties. ”
“The Freedom School ain’t no zoo,” said fifteen-year-old Jamie Taylor, angling his head toward the car window. “And it ain’t no party. It’s the Freedom School. The best school in Brownsville.”
“I said no guests. This many people, something’s gonna break.”
“You’re the one who packed us in here,” said Mr. Eugene, stepping forward and rapping the car hood with his knuckles.
“That’s right. And when you filled the restaurant with customers to eat Chinese food,” added Evelyn Garcia, her arm around Lina, “did you complain then?”
“You ain’t so different from the rest of them,” said Patricia Taylor. “Leave Brownsville, then act like it still belongs to you.”
Mr. Wong looked at all the faces now squeezing into the window to say their piece. “The building, the building is old now,” he stuttered. “If you don’t pay the rent, how am I supposed to make the repairs?”
“Man, you’ve been living off that rent for years,” said Daddy J. “And you never gave a damn about these apartments!”
They spoke their minds, and Mr. Wong held up a palm as if it could stop the truth from reaching his ears. He turned on the engine.
“You people are crazy. I’m sending the marshal. If you don’t have rent by tomorrow, you’re evicted.”
“Oh yeah?” Lina leaned her elbows on the lip of the window.
He thought he could scare them, that they didn’t understand the law.
“You can’t get a marshal without a court order.
And you won’t get that court order because we’ll be in court.
You’re in violation of the housing code and the warranty of habitability statute.
And we’ll let the reporters know what kind of landlord you are.
Either that, or you give us the building. We’re already running it without you.”
He shook his head and began rolling up the window before she had a chance to remove her elbows—and then he muttered something sharp and bitter, just loud enough that she heard.
“Fucking spic.”
“Fucking bigot,” she hurled back.
The glass shut, the motor growled, the tenants dodged out of the way, and Richard Wong careened down the street, turning south on East Ninety-Eighth with a screech.