Nickel City Crossfire, Gary Ross [ebook reader for pc and android txt] 📗

to meet her twenty minutes ago at the Walgreens down the street and give her a hundred bucks for food and a ticket to her sister’s in Syracuse. She didn’t show.”

31

Dr. Glendora Chancellor-Pratt lived in a modern home on Carlton Street, a few blocks away from the school where she had taught for eighteen years and served as assistant principal and later principal for nine. Her study was a paneled room to the left of the front entrance. The shelves were full of books and trophies. The walls held framed citations that included her doctorate. In casual brown slacks and a matching headwrap, with a loose-fitting white top between, she sat behind an antique wooden desk. Closed laptop pushed aside, she held a mug of herbal tea in both hands. I sat opposite her, my notebook open, my mug on a coaster. I asked her to explain gentrification to me as if I were ten.

“I hardly think such simplification is necessary, Mr. Rimes,” she said. “Gideon—if you’ll call me Glennie. After decades of teaching, I have a theory—unproven scientifically, of course—that the eyes are as much a window to the intellect as they are to the soul. What I see in your eyes tells me you already grasp the concept.”

Her manner was calm but authoritative, her voice strong but pleasant. She was clearly someone who had talked for a living and was accustomed to adjusting tone and word choice to the responses she got. She reminded me of Bobby. I liked her.

“Shakespeare would agree, Glennie, but he might make an exception in my case.”

She laughed. “All right. Let’s start with this house. We had it built, Will Henry and I, twenty-five years ago, after our first home, which sat on this very lot for almost a century, burned down from faulty wiring—which was the fire investigator’s way of saying our fuse box was so damn old it melted.”

“You decided to rebuild instead of relocating.”

“We could have left, gone to the suburbs,” she said. “But we both believed it was important to maintain a stable middle class presence in this community.” She sipped her tea. “Fortunately, it was during one of those periodic waves of urban renewal. Our insurance was supplemented by federal funds so we could do more than just replace what we had lost. The end product was something that looked very suburban, right in the heart of the Fruit Belt. The year it was finished we began the tradition of having my last-day-of-school class picnic in the back yard. When I was principal, I made it an end-of-the-year staff cookout. Students and teachers alike who have moved on or moved away drop by when they’re in the neighborhood or in town, just to see how I’m doing. They remember this place fondly.”

“It’s a lovely house,” I said.

“And a loved house,” she said. “Will Henry was an engineer and helped design it. He was very proud of his work, especially this study and the solarium out back.”

Because the lot next door was vacant, I had noticed the oval-shaped solarium when I walked from my car to the house. In the snow-covered yard, it resembled a transparent igloo. “I’m sure you’ll get a good price if you sell, but somehow I don’t think you will.”

Glennie shook her head, sadly. “He had rheumatic fever as a child. His heart gave out nine years ago, in the bedroom right above us. But I still feel it beating in every room. I know it’s very Poe, but I hope you don’t find it too creepy.”

“Not at all,” I said. “I was raised by an English teacher.”

She laughed again, harder this time. Then she said nothing for a few seconds. “I’ve had offers, even without a FOR SALE sign out front. That was one reason I ran for the Council seat. Will Henry and I were big proponents of economic integration. Like many black folks back in the red-lining days, we grew up in neighborhoods shared by white-collar and blue-collar workers and a handful of welfare recipients. Kids with fathers and mothers who worked factory jobs to provide a middle class life played and went to school and church with the children of black office workers, doctors, lawyers, people who owned corner stores, beauty parlors, and barbershops. Even the poorest kids saw examples of the fruits of hard work. Then came the civil rights movement and later race riots and so-called unrest. Lots of folks who could afford to move did. Housing equality was important but the poverty left in its wake grew more and more concentrated.”

“Which made upward mobility harder.” I sipped my tea, a berry blend.

“Exactly. Then factories began to close. Unions began to die. The entire middle class, not just black folk, started backsliding, even before jobs and businesses fled to the suburbs. For blacks, what could no longer be done by law was now done by wage suppression and limited public transportation. If you don’t have a car, how do you get to a job where the busses don’t run? How can you move up to the middle class if you can’t even get to the interview?”

“You can’t,” I said.

“The saving grace for the minimum wage worker, and the retiree with a piece of a pension, was always a poor neighborhood where they could pay the rent, even if they had to buy overpriced food from corner stores run by new immigrants who hand-painted their signs. That’s what this area became. But when you have economic development without economic integration, things change again. Once you build a high-tech medical corridor with jobs most neighborhood people just don’t qualify for and then convert empty factories and warehouses to expensive lofts and condos and upscale markets, poor folk and even the immigrant store owners get pushed out and have nowhere to go.” She set her mug down and leaned forward, looking straight at me. “The politicians, bankers, and developers tell us this is urban renewal, but it’s urban displacement fueled by