Lost in the City

A NEW MAN

One day in late October, Woodrow L. Cunningham came home early with his bad heart and found his daughter with the two boys. He was then fifty-two years old, a conscientious deacon at Rising Star AME Zion, a paid-up lifetime member of the NAACP and the Urban League, a twenty-five year member of the Elks. For ten years he had been the chief engineer at the Sheraton Park Hotel, where practically every employee knew his name. For longer than he could recall, his friends and lodge members had been telling him that he was capable of being more than just the number-one maintenance man. But he always told them that he was contented in the job, that it was all he needed, and this was true for the most part. He would be in that same position some thirteen years later, when death happened upon him as he bent down over a hotel bathroom sink, about to do a job a younger engineer claimed he could not handle.

The afternoon he came home early and discovered his daughter with the boys, he found a letter in the mailbox from his father in Georgia. He read the letter while standing in the hall of the apartment building. He expected nothing of importance, as usual, and that was what he found. “Alice took me to Buddy Wilson funeral just last week,” Woodrow read. “I loaned him the shirt they buried him in. And that tie he had on was one that I give him too. I thought I would miss him but I do not miss him very much. Checkers was never Buddy Wilsons game.” As he read, he massaged the area around his heart, an old habit, something he did even when his heart was not giving him trouble. “I hope you and the family can come down before the winter months set in. Company is never the same after winter get here.”

He put the letter back in the envelope, and as he absently looked at the upside-down stamp taped in the vicinity of the corner, the pain in his heart eased. He could picture his father sitting at the kitchen table, writing the letter, occasionally touching the pencil point to his tongue. A new mongrel’s head would be resting across his lap, across thin legs that could still carry the old man five miles down the road and back. Woodrow, feeling better, considered returning to work, but he knew his heart was deceitful. He folded the envelope and stuck it in his back pocket, and out of the pocket it would fall late that night as he prepared for bed after returning from the police station.

Several feet before he reached his apartment door he could hear the boys’ laughter and bits and pieces of their man-child conquer-the-world talk. He could not hear his daughter at first. He stopped at his door and listened for nearly five minutes, and in that time he became so fascinated by what the boys were saying that he would not have cared if someone walking in the hall found him listening. It was only when he heard his daughter’s laughter, familiar, known, that he put his key in the door. She stood just inside the door when he entered, her eyes accusing but her mouth set in a small O of surprise. Beyond her he could see the boys with their legs draped over the arms of the couch and gray smoke above their heads wafting toward the open window.

He asked his daughter, “Why ain’t you in school?”

“They let us out early today,” she said. “The teachers had some kinda meetin.”

He did not listen to her, because he had found that she lived to lie. Woodrow watched the boys as they took their time straightening themselves up, and he knew that their deliberateness was the result of something his daughter had said about him. Without taking his eyes from the boys, he asked his daughter again why she wasn’t in school. When he finally looked at her, he saw that she was holding the stump of a thin cigarette. The smoke he smelled was unfamiliar, and at first he thought that they were smoking very stale cigarettes, or cigarettes that had gotten wet and been dried. He slapped her. “I told you not to smoke in my house,” he said.

She was fifteen, and up until six months or so before, she would have collapsed into the chair, collapsed into a fit of crying. But now she picked up the fallen cigarette from the floor and stamped it out in the ashtray on the tiny table beside the easy chair. Her hand shook, the only reminder of the old days. “We just talkin. We ain’t doin nothin wrong,” she said quietly.

He shouted to the boys, “Get outta my house!” They stood up quickly, and Woodrow could tell that whatever she had told them about him, such anger was not part of it. They looked once at the girl.

“They my guests, Daddy,” she said, sitting in the easy chair and crossing her legs. “I invited em over here.”

Woodrow took two steps to the boy nearest him — the tall light-skinned one he would spot from a bus window a year or so later — and grabbed him with one hand by the jacket collar, shook him until the boy raised his hands as if to protect his face from a blow. The boy’s eyes widened and Woodrow shook him some more. He had been living a black man’s civilized life in Washington and had not felt so coiled and bristled since the days when he worked with wild men in the turpentine camps in Florida. “I ain’t done nothin,” the boy said. The words sounded familiar, similar to those of a wild man ready to slink away into his cabin with his tail between his legs. Woodrow relaxed. “I swear. I don’t want no trouble, Mr. Cunningham.” The boy had no other smell but that peculiar cigarette smoke, and it was a shock to Woodrow that a body with that smell should know something that seemed as personal as his name. The other, smaller boy had tiptoed around Woodrow and was having trouble opening the door. After the small boy had gone out, Woodrow flung the light-skinned boy out behind him. Woodrow locked the door, and the boys stood for several minutes, pounding on the door, mouthing off.

“Why you treat my guests like that?” Elaine Cunningham had not moved from the chair.

“Clean up this mess,” he told her, “and I don’t wanna see one ash when you done.”

She said nothing more, but busied herself tidying the couch cushions. Then Woodrow, after flicking the cushions a few times with his handkerchief, sat in the middle of the couch, and the couch sagged with the familiarity of this weight.

When Elaine had returned the room to what it was, her father said, “I want to know what you was doin in here with them boys.”

“Nothin. We wasn’t doin nothin. Just talkin, thas all, Daddy.” She sat in the easy chair, leaned toward him with her elbows on her knees.

“You can do your talkin down on the stoop,” he said.

“Why don’t you just say you tryin to cuse me a somethin? Why don’t you just come out and say it?”

“If you didn’t do things, you wouldn’t get accused,” he said. He talked without thought, because those words and words like them had been spoken so much to her that he was able to parrot himself. “If you start actin like a young lady should, start studyin and what not, and tryin to make somethin of yourself…” Woodrow L. Cunningham bein Woodrow L. Cunningham, he thought.

She stood up quickly, and he was sickened to see her breasts bounce. “I could study them stupid books half the damn day and sit in church the other half, and I’d still get the same stuff thrown in my face bout how I ain’t doin right.”

“Okay, thas anough a that.” He felt a familiar rumbling in his heart. “I done heard anough.”

“I wanna go out,” she stood with her arms folded. “I wanna go out.”

“Go on back to your room. Thas the only goin out you gonna be doin. I don’t wanna hear another word outta your mouth till your mother get home.” He closed his eyes to wait her out, for he knew she was now capable of standing there till doomsday to sulk. When he heard her going down the hall, he waited for the door to slam. But there was no sound and he gradually opened his eyes. He put a cushion at one end of the couch and took off his shoes and lay down, his hands resting on the large mound that was his stomach. All his friends told him that if he lost thirty or forty pounds he would be a new man, but he did not think that was true. He considered asking Elaine to bring his pills from his bedroom, for he had left the vial he traveled with at work. But he suffered the pain rather than suffer her stirring about. He watched his wife’s curtains flap gently with the breeze and the movement soothed him.

“I would not say anything bad about mariage,” his father had written to Woodrow after Woodrow called to say he was considering marrying Rita Hadley. “It is easier to pick up and walk away from a wife and a family if you don’t like it then you can walk away from your own bad cooking.” Woodrow had never been inclined to marry anyone, was able, as he would tell his lodge brothers, to get all the trim he wanted without buying some woman a ring and walking down the aisle with her. “Doin it to a woman for a few months was all right,” he would say, sounding like his father, “cause that only put the idea of marryin in their heads. Doin it to them any more than that and the idea take root.”

It had never crossed his mind to sleep with any of the women at Rising Star AME, for he had discovered in Georgia that the wrath of church women was greater than that of all others, even old whores. He only went out with Rita because the preacher took him aside one Sunday and told him it was unnatural to go about unmarried and that he should give some thought to promenading with Sister Rita sometime. And, too, he was thirty-six and it was beginning to occur to him that women might not go on forever laying down and opening their legs for him. The second time they went out, he put his arm around Rita and pulled her to him there in the Booker-T Theater. She smacked his hand and that made his johnson hard. “I ain’t like that, Mr. Cunningham.” He had heard those words before. But when he pulled her to him again, she twisted his finger until it hurt. And that was something he had not experienced before.

His father suffered a mild stroke a week before the wedding. “Do not take this sickness to mean that I do not send my blessing to your mariage to Miss Rita Hadley,” his father said in a letter he had dictated to Alice, his oldest daughter. “God took pity on you when he send her your way.” Even in the unfamiliarity of Alice’s handwriting, the familiarity of his father was there in all the lines, right down to the misspelled words. Until some of his father’s children learned in their teens, his father had been the only one in the family who could read and write. “This,” he said of his reading and writing, “makes me as good as a white man.” And before some of his children learned, discovered there was no magic to it, he enjoyed reading aloud at the supper table to his family, his voice stringing out a long monotone of words that often meant nothing to him and even less to his family because the man read so quickly.

His father read anything he could get his hands on — the words on feed bags, on medicine bottles, on years-old magazine pages they used for wallpaper, just about everything except the Bible. He had a fondness for weeks-old newspapers he would find in the streets when he went to town. No one — not even the squirming small kids — was allowed to move from the supper table until he had finished reading, hooking one word to another until it all became babble. Indeed, it was such a babble that some of his sons would joke behind his back that he was lying about knowing how to read. “Few white men can do what I’m doin right now,” he would say. “You go bring ten white men in here and I bet nine couldn’t read this. Couldn’t read it if God commanded em to.” Sometimes, to torment his wife, he would hold a scrap of newspaper close to her face and tell her to read the headlines. “I cain’t,” she would say. “You know I cain’t.” No matter how many times he did this, his father would laugh with the pleasure of the very first time. Then he would pass the newspaper among his children and tell them to read him the headlines, and each one would hold it uncomfortably and repeat what their mother had said.

When Woodrow woke, it was nearly five o’clock and his wife was sitting on the side of the couch, asking where Elaine was. “She ain’t in her room,” his wife said and kissed his forehead. A school cafeteria worker, Rita was a very thin woman who, before she met Woodrow, had lived only for her job and her church activities. She was five years older than he was and had resigned herself to the fact that she was not the type of woman men wanted to marry. “I’ve put it all in God’s hands,” she once said to a friend before Woodrow came along, “and left it there.”

Rita waited until seven o’clock before she began calling her daughter’s friends. “Stop worryin,” Woodrow told her after the tenth call, “you know how that girl is.” At eight-thirty, they put on light coats and went in search, visiting the same houses and apartments that Rita had called. They returned home about ten and waited until eleven, when they put on their coats again and went to the police station at 16th and V Northwest. They did not call the station because somewhere Woodrow had heard that the law wouldn’t begin to hear a complaint unless you stood before it in person.

At the station, the man at the front desk did not look up until they had been standing there for some two minutes. Woodrow wanted to tell him that the police chief and the mayor were now black men and that they couldn’t be ignored, but when the man behind the desk looked up, Woodrow could see in his eyes that none of that would have mattered to him.

“Our daughter is missing,” Rita said.

“How long?” said the man, a sergeant with an unpronounceable name on his name tag. He pulled a form from a pile to his left and then he took up a pen, loudly clicking out the point to write.

“We haven’t seen her since this afternoon,” Woodrow says.

The sergeant clicked the pen again and set it on the desk, then put the form back on top with the others. “Not long enough,” he said. “Has to be gone forty-eight hours. Till then she’s missing, but she’s not a missing person.”

“She only a baby.”

“How old?”

“Fifteen,” Woodrow said.

“She’s just a runaway,” the sergeant said.

“She never run away before,” Woodrow said. “This ain’t like her, sergeant.” Woodrow felt that like all white men, the man enjoyed having attention paid to his rank.

“Don’t matter. She’s probably waiting for you at home right now, wondering where you two buggied off to. Go home. If she isn’t home, then come back when she’s a missing person.”

Woodrow took Rita’s arm as they went back, because he sensed that she was near collapsing. “What happened?” she asked as they turned the corner of U and 10th streets. “Did you say somethin bad to her?”

He told her everything that he could remember, even what Elaine was wearing when he last saw her. Answering was not difficult because no blame had yet been assigned. Despite the time nearing midnight, they became confident with each step that Elaine was just at a friend’s they did not know about, that the friend’s mother, like any good mother, would soon send their daughter home. Rita, in the last blocks before their apartment, leaned into her husband and his warmth helped to put her at ease.

They waited up until about four in the morning, and then they undressed without words in the dark. Rita began to cry the moment her head hit the pillow, for she was afraid to see the sun come up and find that a new day had arrived without Elaine being home. She asked him again what happened, and he told her again, even things that he had forgotten — the logo of the football team on the light-skinned boy’s jacket, the fact that the other boy was bald except for a half-dollar-sized spot of hair carved on the back of his head. He was still talking when she dozed off with him holding her.

Before they had coffee later that morning, about seven thirty, they called their jobs to say they would not be in. Work had always occupied a place at the center of their lives, and there was initially something eerie about being home when it was not a holiday or the weekend. They spent the rest of the morning searching the streets together, and in the afternoon, they separated to cover more ground. They did the same thing after dinner, each spreading out farther and farther from their apartment on R Street. That evening, they called neighbors and friends, church and lodge members, to tell them that their child was missing and that they needed their help and their prayers. Their friends and neighbors began searching that evening, and a few went with Woodrow and Rita the next day to the police station to file a missing person’s report. A different sergeant was at the desk, and though he was a white man, Woodrow felt that he understood their trouble.

For nearly three months, Woodrow and Rita searched after they came from work, and each evening after they and their friends had been out, the pastor of Rising Star spoke to a small group that gathered in the Cunninghams’ living room. “The world is cold and not hospitable,” he would conclude, holding his hat in both hands, “but we know our God to be a kind God and that he has provided our little sister with a place of comfort and warmth until she returns to her parents and to all of us who love and treasure her.”

In the kitchen beside the refrigerator, Rita tacked up a giant map of Washington, on which she noted where she and others had searched. “I didn’t know the city was this big,” she said the day she put it up, her fingertips touching the neighborhoods that she had never heard of or had heard of only in passing — foreign lands she thought she would never set eyes on. Petworth. Anacostia. Lincoln Park. And in the beginning, the very size of the city lifted her spirits, for in a place so big, there was certainly a spot that held something as small as her child, and if they just kept looking long enough, they would come upon that place.

“What happened?” Rita would ask as they prepared for bed. What he told her and her listening replaced everything they had ever done in that bed — discussing what future they wanted for Elaine, lovemaking, sharing what the world had done to them that workday. “What happened?” It was just about the only thing she ever asked Woodrow as the months grew colder. “What happened? Whatcha say to her?” By late February, when fewer and fewer people were going out to search, he had told the whole story, but then he began to tell her things that had not happened. There were three boys, he said at one point, for example. Or, he could see a gun sticking out of the jacket pocket of the light-skinned one, and he could see the outline of a knife in the back pants pocket of the third. Or he would say that the record player was playing so loudly he could hear it from the street. They were small embellishments at first, and if his wife noticed that the story of what happened was changing, she said nothing. In time, with winter disappearing, he was adding more and more so that it was no longer a falseness here and there that was embedded in the whole of the truth, but the truth itself, an ever-diminishing kernel, that was contained in the whole of falseness. And, like some kind of bedtime story, she listened and drifted with his words into a sleep where the things he was telling her were sometimes happening.

By March, Woodrow had written countless letters to his father telling the old man it was not necessary to come to Washington to help look for the girl. “I got a sign from God,” the old man kept writing, “that I could help find her.” Then, with spring, he began writing that he had received signs that he was not long for the world, that finding the girl was the last thing God wanted him to do. In the longest letters the old man had ever written to the one child of his who responded, he would go on and on about the signs he saw signaling his own death: The mongrel would no longer take food from his hand; the dead visited him at night, sitting down on the side of his bed and telling him things about himself; the rising sun now touched his house last in the morning, though there were houses to the left and right of his.

“You keep telling me that I’ll be hurt or lost,” the old man wrote Woodrow. “But I know the way that Washington, D.C. is set up. I came there once maybe twice. How could I get lost. Take a chance on me, and we’ll have that child home before you can blink one eye. I can bring Sparky he got some bloodhound in him.”

In late April, Rita took down the map in the kitchen. The tacks fell to the floor and she left them there. She put the map in the bottom drawer of her daughter’s dresser, among the blouses and blue jeans and a diary she would not find the strength to read for another three months. Her days of searching during the week dwindled down to two, then to one. She returned the car a church member had lent her to drive around the city in. Each evening when she got home, Woodrow would be out and she left his dinner in the oven to stay warm. Every now and again, when the hour was late, she went out to look for him, often for no other reason than that there was nothing worth watching on the television. As she put on more and more weight, it became difficult for her to stand and dish out food to the students at lunchtime. Her supervisor and fellow workers sympathized, and, after a week of perfunctory training, she was allowed to sit and work at the cash register.

As he continued going about the city, sometimes on foot, Woodrow told himself and everyone else that he was hunting for his daughter, but this was only a piece of the truth. “I’m lookin for my daughter, who’s run away,” he said to those opening the doors where he knocked. “She’s been gone a long time, and her mama and me are about to lose our minds.” He sometimes presented a picture of his daughter, smiling radiantly, that was taken only months before she disappeared. But just as often, he would pull out a photograph of the girl when she was five, standing one Easter between her parents in front of Rising Star. All who looked at the photograph, even the drunks half-blind with alcohol, were touched by the picture of the little girl in her Easter dress who had now gone away from her parents, parents who were now worried sick. Many people invited Woodrow into their homes.

The Easter picture became a passport, and the more places he visited the more places he wanted to see. On U Street, a woman of twenty-five or so with three children put down the child she was holding to get a better look at the picture of the five-year-old girl. Woodrow, in the doorway, noted just over her shoulder that on her wall there was a calendar with a snow-covered mountain, hung with the prominence others would have given a landscape painting. An old woman on Harvard Street, tsk-tsking as she looked at the picture, invited him in for coffee and cake. “My prayers go out to you.” Nearly everything in her apartment was covered in plastic, even the pictures on the walls. The old woman sat him on her plastic-covered couch and placed the food on a coffee table covered with a plastic cloth. “And such a sweet-lookin child, too, son.” When he asked to use the bathroom (more out of curiosity than for relief), she pointed to a plastic path leading away down the hall. “Stay on the mat, son.”

A tottering man in a place on 21st Street just off Benning Road began to cry when Woodrow told him his story. “Dora, Dora,” the man called to a woman. “Come see this little angel.” The woman, who was also tottering, pulled Woodrow into their house with one hand, while the other hand pressed the picture to her bosom. The man and Woodrow sat on the couch. The woman stood in front of them, swaying trancelike, her eyes closed, the picture still pressed to her. The man put his arm around Woodrow and breathed a sour wine smell into his face. “Let’s me and you pray about this situation,” he said.

One April evening, a little more than a year and a half after their daughter disappeared, Rita was standing in front of their building, waiting for him. “We have fish tonight. It’s in the stove waitin,” she said, in the same way she would have said, “I know what you been doin. And who you been doin it with.” “We have fish to eat,” she said again. She turned around and went back inside. “We have fish, and we have to move from this place,” she said.

Woodrow’s father died nearly seven years after Elaine Cunningham disappeared. Of the eight children he had had with Woodrow’s mother and the five he had had with other women, only Woodrow, Alice, and a half-brother who lived down the road from the old man came to the funeral. It was a frozen day in January, and the gravediggers broke two picks before they had even gone down one foot. They labored seven hours to make a hole for the old man. “Even the ground don’t want him,” said one of the old man’s friends standing at the gravesite.

There was not much in the old man’s place to divide among his heirs. In a wooden trunk in one of the back rooms, Woodrow found several pictures of his mother. He had been kneeling down, going through the trunk, and when he saw the pictures, he cried out as if he had been struck. He had not seen his mother’s face in more than forty years, had thought his father had destroyed all the pictures of her. “You always looked like her,” Alice said, coming up behind him. “Even when you sat at the right hand of the father, you looked like her.”

Though he was younger than three other brothers, Woodrow had worked hardest of his father’s children. At first, his father had sat his children about the supper table according to their ages, but then he began to seat them according to who did the most work. His best workers sat closest to him, and by the time he was seven, Woodrow had worked his way to the right hand of his father. Woodrow’s mother sat at the far end of the table, between two of her daughters. Most of his brothers and sisters, unable to pick the amount of cotton Woodrow could, never forgave him for living only to be close to their father. But he learned to pay them no mind and even learned to enjoy their hostility. He never moved from that right-hand place until the day he went off down the road to work in the turpentine camps.

He also found in the trunk some letters he wrote his father from the camps and from railroad yards and from the places he worked as he made his way up to Washington. They were all of one page or less, and they were all about work, work from sunup to sundown. There were no friends mentioned, there were no descriptions of places where he lived, there were no names of women courted, loved. “I got a two-week job tanning hides,” he wrote from a nameless place in South Carolina. “I got work cureing tobacco. I may stay on after the season,” he wrote from somewhere near Raleigh. “I have been working in the stables outside Charlotesvile. The pay is good. I got used to the smell. and the work goes easy.”

Woodrow and Rita took the train back to Washington, bringing back a few of the pictures and none of the letters, which he burned in a barrel outside his father’s house. Everything along the way back to D.C. was as frozen as Georgia. It was as if the cold had separated the world into three unrelated and distinct parts — the earth, what was on the earth, and the sky above. Nothing moved. Flying birds seemed to freeze in midair, and then the cold would nail them there.

Rita and Woodrow were back in the apartment on Independence Avenue in Southeast by ten o’clock that night. Rita took her usual place at an easy chair near the window. On a table beside the chair was all she needed — the television guide, snacks, the telephone. The chair was very large and had had to be specially ordered, because she could not fit into the regular ones in the store.

Woodrow, even though the hour was late and the weather people were predicting even colder temperatures, quietly put on his heaviest coat and left the apartment. He said nothing to Rita, and she did not look up when the door locked behind him. At the corner of Independence and 15th, Woodrow looked into the grocery store window at the owner he had become friends with since moving to Southeast. No customers went into the store, and the owner was dozing behind the counter, his head back, his mouth open. Woodrow watched him for a very long time. By now he knew everything about the man and his store and the sons who helped the man, and there was no urgency to be inside with him. Having lost so much weight, Woodrow felt that even more of the world had opened up to him. And so he wondered if he should go on down 15th Street, try to find a house he had not visited before, and bring out the picture of the child in her Easter dress.