Nellie had barely finished speaking when they all heard a loud clatter from down the hall. Lina ran to the bathroom and found that half the ceiling had collapsed, raining chunks of plaster on the toilet and on the sink counter. “Shit shit shit.” The others hurried over to survey the damage.
Mr. Eugene shook his head. “The hell with paying rent for these conditions.”
After the seminar finished, Nellie and her son lingered, helping Lina sweep up the plaster and tape bags to the ceiling.
“I hope all this craziness tonight don’t keep y’all from coming back.”
“Oh Lord, we love craziness. We fit right in,” Nellie replied.
Lina laughed. Watching that long-limbed woman crouch on the floor with the dustpan in one hand and the splintering floor brush in the other, Lina wanted nothing more than to pull Nellie’s bodyagainst her own and kiss her with a passion that no man on earth had ever felt or offered.
Instead, she saw them off to the door, handing Nellie her only umbrella and a container with the remaining fried rice.
Lina came up with the idea of designating a corner of the Freedom School as Nellie’s salon. The services would have to be free of charge, but it would be a way for Nellie to build her name in the neighborhood. Nellie called it Mother Natural Salon, and she did hair, but also skin and nails. As she was always discovering coats and skirts laid out on the fences in other Brooklyn neighborhoods, she also built up an attractive rack of clothes that she shared with any visitor in need of a new outfit. She groomed mailwomen, bus drivers, and men living on the streets, and soon she had a steady crop of visitors, all of them drawn as much by her sense of style as by the tenderness of her nimble fingers.
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.
