Linden Hills

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  Linden Hills

  A Novel

  Gloria Naylor

  For my parents—

  Roosevelt and Alberta Naylor

  Grandma Tilson, I’m afraid of hell.

  Ain’t nothing to fear, there’s hell on earth.

  I mean the real hell where you can go when you die.

  You ain’t gotta die to go to the real hell.

  No?

  Uh uh, you just gotta sell that silver mirror God

  propped up in your soul.

  Sell it to who—the devil?

  Naw, just to the highest bidder, child. The

  highest bidder.

  There had been a dispute for years over the exact location of Linden Hills. Everyone associated with Wayne County had taken part in it: the U.S. Post Office, census takers, city surveyors, real estate brokers, and the menagerie of blacks and whites who had lived along its fringes for a hundred and sixty years. The original 1820 surveys that Luther Nedeed kept locked in his safe-deposit box stated that it was a V-shaped section of land with the boundaries running south for one and a half miles from the stream that bordered Putney Wayne’s high grazing fields down a steep, rocky incline of brier bush and linden trees before curving through the town’s burial ground and ending in a sharp point at the road in front of Patterson’s apple orchard. It wasn’t a set of hills, or even a whole hill—just the worthless northern face of a rich plateau. But it patiently bore the designation of Linden Hills as its boundaries contracted and expanded over the years to include no one, and then practically everyone in Wayne County.

  The fact never disputed by anyone was that the Nedeeds have always lived there. Luther’s double great-grandfather bought the entire northern face of the plateau, descending from what is now First Crescent Drive to Tupelo Drive—which is really the last three of a series of eight curved roads that ring themselves around the hill. But Luther’s double great-grandfather, coming from Tupelo, Mississippi, where it was rumored that he’d actually sold his octoroon wife and six children for the money that he used to come North and obtain the hilly land, named that section Tupelo Drive. And at the time none of the white farmers gave a flying squat what he called it, ’cause if some crazy nigger wanted to lay out solid gold eagles for hard sod only good enough to support linden trees that barely got you ten cents on the dollar for a cord of oak or birch—let him. And the entire bottom of the land is hemmed in by the town cemetery. Had to be half-witted—who’d want to own land near a graveyard, especially a darky who is known to be scared pantless of haints and such? They pocketed Nedeed’s money and had a good laugh: first full moon on All Hallows would send them spirits walking and him running to beg them to buy the property back. That is, if he didn’t starve to death first. Couldn’t eat linden trees, and Lord knows he wasn’t gonna raise spit on that land. Would raise a lot of sand, though. Knees were slapped and throats choked on tobacco juice. Yup, he’d raise plenty of sand while trying to get a team and wagon down through that bush to fetch supplies.

  But Nedeed didn’t try to farm Linden Hills. He built a two-room cabin at the bottom of the slope—dead center—with its door and windows facing the steep incline. After the cabin was finished, they could see him sitting in front of it for an hour at dawn, high noon, and dusk—his dark, immobile face rotating slowly amid the lime tombstones, the tangled brier, and the high stretch of murky forest. He sat there every day for exactly seven days—his thick, puffed lids raising, lowering, and narrowing over eyes that seemed to be measuring precisely the depth and length of light that the sun allowed his wedge of their world.

  “Guess he’s trying to think a living out of that land.” But their victory had been replaced by a question as they watched Nedeed watching the path of the sun. No one admitted that they lacked the courage just to walk over and demand to know what he was doing. There was something in Luther Nedeed’s short, squat body that stopped those men from treating him like a nigger—and something in his eyes that soon stopped them from even thinking the word. It was said that his protruding eyes could change color at will, and over the course of his life, they would be assigned every color except red. They were actually dark brown—a flat brown—but since no man ever had the moral stamina to do more than glance at his face, because those huge, bottomless globes could spell out a starer’s midnight thoughts, black men looked at his feet or hands and white men looked over his shoulder at the horizon.

  As the sun disappeared on the seventh day of his vigil, Luther Nedeed closed his eyes slowly and smiled. Patterson said he was hauling his apples away from the field and the sight of Nedeed sitting there grinning like one of them heathen E-jip mummies scared him out of a year’s growth, and when he got home, all the bushels facing Nedeed’s side of the road had fruit worms in them. He claimed that as the justification for the eight-foot fence he erected on the northern border of his orchard. It might have been closer to the truth to admit that he just couldn’t stomach the sight of Nedeed dragging all those dead bodies into his yard. Because the day after Patterson’s alleged plague of worms, Nedeed went and bought a team of horses, a box-shaped wagon, and began an undertaker’s business in the back room of his cabin. His proximity to the town cemetery put little strain on the horses and funeral hearse, and Nedeed knew that, unlike the South, the North didn’t care if blacks and whites were buried together so long as they didn’t live together. Appalled by the reports of the evils that lay below the Mason-Dixon and the cry that “the only good nigger is a dead nigger,” Wayne County let it be known that any of their sable brothers who were good and dead were welcome to a Christian burial right next to a white person—Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, the days assigned for colored funerals.

  Nedeed then built wooden shacks up on the hill, from what is now First Crescent Drive down to Fifth Crescent Drive, and rented them out to local blacks who were too poor to farm and earned their living from the sawmills or tar pit. He also wanted to rent out shacks along Tupelo Drive, but no one wanted any part of the cemetery land. It was bad enough they were down on their luck and had to resort to living in the hills, but they didn’t have to live near that strange Nedeed by a graveyard. News that someone had moved into the hills was always rebuffed: They lived up from Linden Hills; only Nedeed lived down on Linden Hills. And the white farmer who owned the grazing land over the stream at the crest of the hill would fight over being told that he had land in Linden Hills: That was coon town and he didn’t have a blade of grass there; he was across from Linden Hills.

  The fact that no one wanted to be associated with his land didn’t bother Luther Nedeed. The nature of things being what they are, his business thrived. And over the years he was able to build a large, white clapboard house with a full veranda and a concrete morgue in the basement. He went away for a while in the spring of 1837 and brought back an octoroon wife. Rumor had it that he had returned to Mississippi and bought back the wife he had sold to a Cajun saloonkeeper. But the girl who set up housekeeping in the undertaker’s home couldn’t have been more than twenty years old, and Nedeed had owned Linden Hills for almost seventeen years by then. She gave him a son the following winter—short, squat, dark, and with an immobile face, even from birth. He grew up to carry his father’s first name, broad chest, and bowlegs. Big frog and little frog, the town whispered behind their backs.

  Luther left his land and business to this only son, who everyone was betting would sell it before the old man was cold, since little Luther had been sent to one of them fancy boarding schools and surely had more sense than ol
d crazy Luther to hold on to worthless hill land. But the son came back to the land and the undertaking business and carried the butt of the jokes about his father’s property on his quiet back. It seemed that when old Luther died in 1879, he hadn’t died at all, especially when they spoke to his son and especially when they glanced at those puffed eyelids and around those bottomless eyes. He, too, brought an octoroon woman into his home who gave him only one son—another Luther Nedeed.

  Nothing was changing in the white clapboard house at the bottom of Linden Hills. There was another generation of big frog and little frog going through the hills together every first of the month to collect rent. What was changing slowly—very slowly—was the face of Wayne County. Farms were dwindling and small townships were growing in the place of cornfields and fruit groves. Putney Wayne’s son had sold a quarter of his pasture to a shoe factory and the smoky cinders blew over the entire field, settling in the sheep’s wool and turning the grass an ashy blue. This caused Wayne’s grandson to think that the price a Welsh developer offered him for the land was a miracle, and he grabbed the money and headed for New York City at the miraculous speed of thirty-five mph on the new railroad lines and never came back. The second wealthiest man in Wayne County bought a curved-dash Oldsmobile, proudly announcing that he now had the power of three horses that he could feed for a tenth the cost of grain.

  But the wealthiest man in Wayne County sat at the bottom of Linden Hills and still carried wooden coffins to the cemetery with a horse and wagon. Old Luther’s son had sent away to England for the circulars from a new locomotive company called Rolls-Royce that was willing to custom design and ship him a funeral hearse with a mahogany dashboard and pure silver handles. He locked the circulars up in his desk, went to the second wealthiest man, and bought his team of Cleveland Bays at an incredibly low price. Nedeed knew he would have to wait until almost the poorest white family in Wayne County owned an automobile before even dead blacks rode in mahogany and silver.

  Old Luther’s son was finally able to rent shacks along Tupelo Drive. These tenants didn’t seem to mind that they were surrounded by a cemetery. Talk had it that they had been murderers, root doctors, carpetbaggers, and bootleg preachers who were thrown out of the South and needed the short memory of the dead and the long shadows of the lindens for their left-of-center carryings-on. Nedeed didn’t care how they were able to pay their rent so long as they did it promptly on the first of the month. When the area within five acres of his funeral home became populated, he constructed an artificial lake (really a moat), a full twenty yards across, totally around his house and grounds. He filled it with marsh weeds, catfish, and ducks. Now the only entrance to his veranda was at the back, through a wood-and-brick drawbridge that he always kept down, but his neighbors saw the pulleys on the bridge and took immediate offense. Seemed as if he wanted to make out he was better than other folks—yeah, separate himself from the scum. Well, everybody knew that he’d been able to make them fancy changes on his house—building extra rooms and a third level—’cause years ago he’d financed gunrunners to the Confederacy. A rebel-loving nigger and now he was putting on airs with his blood money. They secretly nicknamed the lake Wart’s Pond—a fitting place for him and his frog-eyed son to squat on.

  But they kept paying him rent and letting him bury their dead. And as the faces on the hill changed and the old town became a young city as the last farmlands gave way to housing developments, Nedeed sat on his porch swing and watched the sun move as it always had over his world. He remembered his father and was thankful that he had lived long enough to watch his words engraved in the scarred landscape of the county: Let ’em think as they want; let ’em say as they want—black or white. Just sit right here and they’ll make you a rich man through the two things they’ll all have to do: live and die. Nedeed watched the sun, the twentieth century, and the value of his hard, sod hill creep upward as slowly and concretely as the last laugh from a dead man’s grave.

  The young municipal government soon took an interest in Linden Hills and tried to buy it from old Luther’s son, who was now very old himself. His refusal to sell provided months of employment for title searchers, city surveyors, and public works assessors. The location of Linden Hills made confiscation for the purpose of a bridge, tunnel, or some other “public good” ludicrous. Nedeed told the assessors that if they could come up with a blueprint for any type of municipal project, he’d give them the land—root to leaf. But set one brick on his property for some high-blown private development and—he pointed a gnarled finger at the squat carbon copy beside him—he would personally drag Wayne County all the way to the Supreme Court. The title searchers and surveyors were then sent to unearth crumbling state statutes and fading deeds, looking for some clause that either invalidated or whittled down Nedeed’s claim to the hill. Finally, an ambitious young lawyer found a seventeenth-century mandate forbidding Negroes to own, lease, or transfer property in Wayne County—regrettably, the same law that prohibited Hebrews, Catholics, and Devil worshipers from holding public office. Mayor Kilpatrick called an emergency meeting of the city council and they voted six to nothing to revoke the mandate. The mayor thanked them for convening on such short notice; then, after strongly advising the young lawyer to seek employment outside of Wayne County, he decided to let the matter of Linden Hills rest.

  Nedeed, seeing that the government and real estate developers wanted his land so badly, decided to insure that they’d never be able to get their hands on it. So he went throughout the hill with his son beside him and, starting with First Crescent Drive all the way down through Fifth Crescent Drive, sold the land practically for air to the blacks who were shacking there. He gave them a thousand-year-and-a-day lease—provided only that they passed their property on to their children. And if they wanted to sell it, they had to sell it to another black family or the rights would revert back to the Nedeeds. And it seemed as if there were always going to be Nedeeds, because his son’s pale-skinned bride was bloated with child. It surprised no one when the baby was male and had the father’s complexion, protruding eyes, and first name—by now it had come to be expected.

  Nedeed gave the same thousand-year-and-a-day option to the tenants who rented along Tupelo Drive, but he didn’t have to worry about them. They couldn’t move because only he would tolerate them on his land. Linden Hills was puzzled over Nedeed’s behavior. Why was he up and being so nice to colored folks when his daddy had been a slave dealer and he himself had sold guns to the Confederacy? Probably trying to make good with his kind before the Lord called him home. “God bless you,” an old woman breathed over her parchment of paper. Let him bless you—you’ll need it, Nedeed thought as he stonily turned his back.

  Like his father, he saw where the future of Wayne County—the future of America—was heading. It was going to be white: white money backing wars for white power because the very earth was white—look at it—white gold, white silver, white coal running white railroads and steamships, white oil fueling white automotives. Under the earth—across the earth—and one day, over the earth. Yes, the very sky would be white. He didn’t know exactly how, but it was the only place left to go. And when they got there, they weren’t taking anyone black with them—and why should they? These people, his people, were always out of step, a step behind or a step ahead, still griping and crying about slavery, hanging up portraits of Abraham Lincoln in those lousy shacks. They couldn’t do nothing because they were slaves or because they will be in heaven. Praying and singing about what lay beyond the sky—“God bless you”—open your damned Bible, woman, and you’ll see that even the pictures of your god are white. Well, keep trying to make your peace with that white god, keep moaning and giving the Nedeeds over half a year’s wages to send a hunk of rotting flesh off to heaven in style instead of putting that money into bonds or land or even the bank at one-and-a-half-percent interest. Yes, make your peace with that white god who lived beyond the sky—he was going to deal with the white god who would one day ow
n that sky. And you and yours would help him.

  Sure, they thought him a fool—look at the fools that he had to claim as his own. When they laughed at them, they laughed at him. Well, he would show them. This wedge of earth was his—he couldn’t rule but he sure as hell could ruin. He could be a fly in that ointment, a spot on that bleached sheet, and Linden Hills would prove it. He had given his people some of the most expensive property in the county. They had the land for a millennium. Now just let them sit on it and do what they do best: digging another man’s coal, cleaning another man’s home, rocking another man’s baby. And let them learn to count enough to keep paying monthly insurance, because they could read enough to believe that heaven was still waiting while they wrote just enough to sign those insurance premiums over to him. Nedeed’s last vision when he closed his puffy eyelids, with his image bending over him, was of Wayne County forced to drive past Linden Hills and being waved at by the maids, mammies, and mules who were bringing the price of that sweat back to his land and his hands. A wad of spit—a beautiful, black wad of spit right in the white eye of America.

  But Nedeed hadn’t foreseen the Great Depression that his grandson was to live through. Those years brought another pale-skinned bride to the clapboard house, the construction of a separate mortuary and chapel, a triple garage, and the first set of automated hearses. They also brought a wave of rumors that Nedeed managed to come through so well because he’d sold all his stocks and bonds just a day before Black Friday and kept his money in a coffin, where it grew like a dead man’s toenails because he sprinkled it with the dust he gathered from the graves of babies.

  Luther Nedeed didn’t care where Linden Hills thought he had gotten his money, but he spent several years deciding where it should go. Watching America’s nervous breakdown during the thirties, he realized that nothing was closer to the spleen and guts of the country than success. The Sunday papers now told him what the sun had told his dead fathers about the cycles of men: Life is in the material—anything high, wide, deep. Success is being able to stick an “er” on it. And death is watching someone else have it. His grandfather’s dream was still possible—the fact that they had this land was a blister to the community, but to make that sore fester and pus over, Linden Hills had to be a showcase. He had to turn it into a jewel—an ebony jewel that reflected the soul of Wayne County but reflected it black. Let them see the marble and brick, the fast and sleek, yes, and all those crumbs of power they uniformed their sons to die for, magnified tenfold and shining bright—so bright that it would spawn dreams of dark kings with dark counselors leading dark armies against the white god and toward a retribution all feared would not be just, but long overdue. Yes, a brilliance that would force a waking nightmare of what the Nedeeds were capable. And the fools would never realize—he looked down at his son playing with a toy dragon—that it was nothing but light from a hill of carbon paper dolls.