Linden Hills Read online

  There would be no problem in financing his vision. It took exactly three phone calls and one letter to acquire the state charter the new Tupelo Realty Corporation needed to finance, construct, and sell private developments. Nedeed never doubted that he’d be able to build the houses; the real problem was deciding who in Linden Hills should own them. This was something that he couldn’t leave to his lawyers, so with his son beside him Luther Nedeed visited every shack on the hill and talked to his tenants. He walked through Linden Hills as it would be—along smooth curved roads, up long sloping lawns and manicured meridians. He stood under the door fronts of imitation Swiss chalets, British Tudors, and Georgian town houses flanked by arbors choked with morning glories, wisteria, and honeysuckle. Driveways were lined with mimosas, and gazebos sat in the shadow of elms and tulip oaks while lavender and marigolds outlined the bases of marble fountains and aviaries. He trod quietly amid his vision, knowing that he must take extreme care to weed out anyone who threatened to produce seeds that would block the light from his community. And empty goblets let through the most light, Nedeed thought as he began knocking on doors down along Tupelo Drive.

  He started with the ones who would be the most eager to work with him on the future of Linden Hills. The children of the parasites and outcasts from the South, who could find a welcome only from the dead that bordered their homes, wanted nothing better than a way to forget and make the world forget their past. Many had already taken the ample income from their families and built frame houses on their land, with wire fences surrounding the neat front yards and backyard gardens. Beyond the money they had received from their parents, they had no use for the clouded inheritance of incense, blood, and distilled alcohol that had built the walls which they were constantly painting and whitewashing as if to remove a stench. Yes, they would gladly match dollar for dollar the investment from the Tupelo Realty Corporation to build up a community for their children to be proud of. So when their grandchildren thought back, it would be to Linden Hills. When they needed to journey back, it would be to the brick and marble they would erect with this man’s help. Strong, solid walls and heavy, marble steps—the finest in the new community—strong enough, solid enough to bury permanently any outside reflections about other beginnings. The Tupelo Realty Corporation offered them all this, and a memory was a small price to pay.

  Nedeed’s work was done quickly in Tupelo Drive, but now he had to tread more carefully as he made his way up the rest of the slope. Most of these people were proud of the lousy quarters and dimes, damp with their parents’ sweat, that had been invested in their thousand-year-and-a-day leases. The painted walls, additional bedrooms, and raked dirt yards were the labor of people who had hopes of building on, not over, their past. These were the fools who could do the most damage if he let them stay. There were some up there who had rooted themselves in the beliefs that Africa could be more than a word; slavery hadn’t run its course; there was salvation in Jesus and salve in the blues. Sure, Nedeed could tell them that you spelled real progress in white capital letters, but their parents hadn’t been able to read and here they sat as living proof that you could survive anyway. No, people like that looked back a millennium, and if they could sit on Linden Hills for a millennium they’d produce children who would dream of a true black power that spread beyond the Nedeeds; children who would take this wedge of earth and try to turn it into a real weapon against the white god. He’d cultivate no madmen like Nat Turner or Marcus Garvey in Linden Hills—that would only get them all crushed back into the dust.

  He knew how to stop that before it began. Even a goblet filled with the darkest liquid will let through light—if it’s diluted enough, Nedeed thought as he carefully dressed himself and his son before they visited the rest of Linden Hills. As he placed his polished wing-tip shoes on their sagging front porches, he watched them watching the crisp lines in his linen suit, counting the links in his gold watch chain, and measuring the grade of his son’s gabardine knickers. He made a note of the eyes that returned to his dark face carrying respect and not suspicion, and silently chose the ones who then found some pretense to make their playing children come up from the road or out of the house to stand quietly and listen while he talked about everything from the weather to the price of soap. He could now safely tell these about the Tupelo Realty Corporation with its low-interest mortgage and scholarship funds to Fisk and Howard, because he knew they were calling their children to watch a wizard: Come, look, listen and perhaps you will learn how to turn the memory of our iron chains into gold chains. The cotton fields that broke your grandparents’ backs can cover yours in gabardine. See, the road to salvation can be walked in leather shoes and sung about in linen choir robes. Nedeed almost smiled at their simplicity. Yes, they would invest their past and apprentice their children to the future of Linden Hills, forgetting that a magician’s supreme art is not in transformation but in making things disappear.

  Nedeed got rid of the unwanted tenants by either buying or tricking them out of their leases. He finally managed to clear out most of the upper slope, but when he reached First Crescent Drive, he ran into a problem with Grandma Tilson.

  “I used to fish with your daddy down in that there pond, Luther, and he gave me this land and I ain’t giving it up. So take your frog-eyed self and your frog-eyed son out of here. And I know your evil ways—all of you. So if you plan to try something like burning my house down while I just happen to be in it, I got this here deed and my will registered at the courthouse. Your daddy weren’t no fool and he didn’t fish with fools either.”

  Mamie Tilson’s grown children hadn’t made her a grandmother yet, but she had carried that nickname from a young girl because she was born with an old face, the color of oiled cheesecloth. Her clear skin allowed people to see the firmness of character that it covered. She had never minded staring down a Nedeed, because she liked what she read about herself in their bottomless eyes. So when Nedeed put his foot up on the top step of her porch and in a slow whisper asked if she wanted to think her position over, she paused for a moment and then sent a wad of tobacco spit near his wing-tips. That said she had thought it over and hoped he finally understood her answer.

  Nedeed took his son’s hand and left her yard. Let the hateful old hag just sit up there and rot. She’d die one day and then his son would deal with her children. The Tupelo Realty Corporation would build around her, and even over her if need be. He’d bury that one flaw deep in the middle of his jewel and no one would know the difference.

  Nedeed didn’t live long enough to have the pleasure of actually burying Grandma Tilson, who shuffled past his grave for ten winters. But he did see the outlines of his dream crystallize into a zoned district of eight circular drives that held some of the finest homes—and eventually the wealthiest black families—in the county. When the city first zoned its districts, the grazing land that once belonged to the sheep farmer, Putney Wayne, became Wayne Avenue. And after two white children drowned in the stream that separated Linden Hills from the avenue, a marble banister was erected along both its sides. The eight circular roads that curved around the three faces of the plateau were designated as First Crescent Drive, Second Crescent Drive, Third Crescent Drive, and the city commissioner wanted to continue it all the way down to Eighth Crescent Drive. But the families in the newly slated Sixth, Seventh, and Eighth Crescent drives of the Linden Hills section went to the commissioner and protested. Their area had always been known as Tupelo Drive and should stay that way, and besides, the old town cemetery cut them off from the other side of the plateau, so he didn’t have eight whole crescents anyway. The city commissioner reared back in his tweed swivel chair and told them in so many words that he was keeping it just like it was and if they didn’t like it, they could go to hell. They went to Nedeed, instead, who went to Washington, D.C., and had the town cemetery and Tupelo Drive designated as a historical landmark.

  News of this sent the Wayne County Citizens Alliance, headed by Patterson’s great-grand
daughter, to the commissioner’s office, to question why their side of the plateau wasn’t a historical landmark as well. Their families had owned land there long before the Nedeeds. Patterson even dragged in her family Bible with dates and names that went back to the Revolutionary War. The disgruntled commissioner told them that there was nothing he could do. It seemed that Washington thought the site where some ex-slave’s cabin had been more American than the sheep dung that had sat on her parents’ land. And as long as that socialist with his nigger-loving wife was in office, that was the way it had to be. And no, they could not start calling their foot of the plateau Tupelo Drive. Weren’t his street plans messed up enough already?

  That didn’t stop the white families on the other side of the plateau from telling stray tourists that, of course, they lived in Linden Hills—the real Linden Hills. And even after both Nedeed and Grandma Tilson had died, some of them were still putting LINDEN HILLS on their mail. This only added to the confusion of the post office that had to deal with the poor black families across Wayne Avenue in the Putney Wayne section who were also addressing their mail LINDEN HILLS. The Putney Wayne residents were telling census takers, school superintendents, and anyone else who cared to listen, that since Linden Road ran up the side of Linden Hills, crossed Wayne Avenue, and continued northward for three miles through their neighborhood, they lived in Linden Hills too. Weren’t both areas full of nothing but black folks? And trying to call their section Putney Wayne was just another example of the way all those lousy racists in Wayne County tried to keep black people down.

  Because the cemetery stopped Linden Road at Fifth Crescent Drive, Tupelo Drive could only be entered through the center of Fifth Crescent, and the Tupelo residents built a private road with a flower-trimmed meridian headed by two twelve-foot brick pillars. They then put up a bronze plaque on the pillars and had the words LINDEN HILLS engraved in deep Roman type. This caused the residents on First through Fifth Crescent drives immediately to erect a wooden sign—WELCOME TO LINDEN HILLS—behind the marble banister and the stream, separating them from the avenue. They didn’t know what those people down in Tupelo Drive were trying to pull; maybe their homes weren’t as large and fancy as those down there, but they definitely knew that they also lived in Linden Hills. They had the papers—actual deeds—that said this land was theirs as long as they sat on it, and sit they would.

  So now practically every black in Wayne County wanted to be a part of Linden Hills. While it did have homes that had brought a photographer out from Life magazine for pictures of the Japanese gardens and marble swimming pools on Tupelo Drive, that wasn’t the only reason they wanted to live there. There were other black communities with showcase homes, but somehow making it into Linden Hills meant “making it.” The Tupelo Realty Corporation was terribly selective about the types of families who received its mortgages. Entrance obviously didn’t depend upon your profession, because there was a high school janitor living right next to a municipal judge on Third Crescent Drive. And even your income wasn’t a problem, because didn’t the realty corporation subsidize that family of Jamaicans on Tupelo Drive who were practically starving to put two of their kids through Harvard? No, only “certain” people got to live in Linden Hills, and the blacks in Wayne County didn’t know what that certain something was that qualified them, but they kept sending in applications to the Tupelo Realty Corporation—and hoping. Hoping for the moment they could move in, because then it was possible to move down toward Tupelo Drive and Luther Nedeed.

  Yes, Linden Hills. The name had spread beyond Wayne County, and applicants were coming from all over the country and even the Caribbean. Linden Hills—a place where people had worked hard, fought hard, and saved hard for the privilege to rest in the soft shadows of those heart-shaped trees. In Linden Hills they could forget that the world said you spelled black with a capital nothing. Well, they were something and there was everything around them to show it. The world hadn’t given them anything but the chance to fail—and they hadn’t failed, because they were in Linden Hills. They had a thousand years and a day to sit right there and forget what it meant to be black, because it meant working yourself to death just to stand still. Well, they had the chance to move down in Linden Hills—as far as Luther Nedeed, sitting at the foot of the hill behind a lake and a whole line of men who had shown Wayne County what it was possible to do with a little patience and a lot of work. They wanted what Luther Nedeed had, and he had shown them how to get it: Just stay right here; you step outside Linden Hills and you’ve stepped into history—someone else’s history about what you couldn’t ever do. The Nedeeds had made a history there and it spoke loudly of what blacks could do. They were never leaving Linden Hills. There was so much to be gotten. Surely, in a millennium their children could move down or even marry down the hill toward Tupelo Drive and Luther Nedeed.

  Tupelo Drive and Luther Nedeed: it became one cry of dark victory for blacks outside or inside Linden Hills. And the ultimate dark victor sat in front of his home and behind his lake and looked up at the Nedeed dream. It had finally crystallized into that jewel, but he wore it like a weighted stone around his neck. Something had gone terribly wrong with Linden Hills. He knew what his dead fathers had wanted to do with this land and the people who lived on it. These people were to reflect the Nedeeds in a hundred facets and then the Nedeeds could take those splintered mirrors and form a mirage of power to torment a world that dared think them stupid—or worse, totally impotent. But there was no torment in Linden Hills for the white god his fathers had shaken their fists at, because there was no white god, and there never had been.

  They looked at the earth, the sea, and the sky, Luther thought sadly, and mistook those who were owned by it as the owners. They looked only at the products and thought they saw God—they should have looked at the process. If they could have sat with him in front of a television that now spanned their tiny planet and universe to universes beyond the sun and moments that had guided their hand, they would have known the futility of their vengeance. Because when men begin to claw men for the rights to a vacuum that stretches into eternity, then it becomes so painfully clear that the omnipresent, omnipotent, Almighty Divine is simply the will to possess. It had chained the earth to the names of a few and it would chain the cosmos as well.

  A white god? Luther shook his head. How could it be any color when it stripped the skin, sex, and soul of any who offered themselves at its altar before it decided to bless? His fathers had made a fatal mistake: they had given Linden Hills the will to possess and so had lost it to the very god they sought to defy. How could these people ever reflect the Nedeeds? Linden Hills wasn’t black; it was successful. The shining surface of their careers, brass railings, and cars hurt his eyes because it only reflected the bright nothing that was inside of them. Of course Wayne County had lived in peace with Linden Hills for the last two decades, since it now understood that they were both serving the same god. Wayne County had watched his wedge of earth become practically invisible—indistinguishable from their own pathetic souls.

  The only ones who didn’t seem to know what was happening in Linden Hills were the thousands of blacks who sent him applications every year. And since there was nowhere left to go with his land and nothing left to build, he would just let the fools keep coming. Let them think that he held some ultimate prize down there. Let them think that they were proving something to the world, to themselves, or to him about their worth. Unlike his fathers, he welcomed those who thought they had personal convictions and deep ties to their past, because then he had the pleasure of watching their bewilderment as it all melted away the farther they came down. Applications from any future Baptist ministers, political activists, and Ivy League graduates were now given first priority, since their kind seemed to reach the bottom faster than the others, leaving more room at the top. And whenever anyone reached the Tupelo area, they eventually disappeared. Finally, devoured by their own drives, there just wasn’t enough humanity left to fill the rooms
of a real home, and the property went up for sale. Luther often wondered why none of the applicants ever questioned the fact that there was always space in Linden Hills.

  But they were too busy to question—they were so busy coming. And the one consuming purpose in Luther’s life was to keep them doing that. Get them in, give them their deeds, and watch them come down. The plans and visions of his fathers might have been misdirected, but the Nedeeds could still live as a force to be reckoned with—if only within Linden Hills. His dark face at the bottom of the hill served as a beacon to draw the blacks needed as fuel for that continually dying dream. And it could go on forever through his son. But whenever Luther was forced to look at his son, his heart tightened.

  Luther had not followed the pattern of his fathers and married a pale-skinned woman. He knew those wives had been chosen for the color of their spirits, not their faces. They had been brought to Tupelo Drive to fade against the whitewashed boards of the Nedeed home after conceiving and giving over a son to the stamp and will of the father. He actually had to pause a moment in order to remember his mother’s first name, because everyone—including his father—had called her nothing but Mrs. Nedeed. And that’s all she had called herself. Luther’s wife was better than pale—a dull, brown shadow who had given him a son, but a white son. The same squat bowlegs, the same protruding eyes and puffed lips, but a ghostly presence that mocked everything his fathers had built. How could Luther die and leave this with the future of Linden Hills? He looked at this whiteness and saw the destruction of five generations. The child went unnamed and avoided by his father for the first five years of his life and Luther tried to discover what had brought such havoc into his home.