Castles Made Of Concrete

Lucile & Michael

“I appreciate you taking the time to come here and take a tour and to tell us again that you’re interested in Munroe Manor but, let me explain to you why this does nothing for us. Mr. Lewis, you may live around the corner from here. You may have attended a few balls, plays, the block parties. Maybe you even wrote a check, but you’re not living the life that these kids are living. You can’t make something that tells their story that isn’t poverty porn or exploitation. I don’t wanna be rude, you’re a Black man, but let me tell you what I told that buckruh. Let me ask you the same question I asked her. What are you gonna give to these kids? What are you gonna give back to them? You can’t just take from them. You can’t come here, make them feel seen, and then leave. Some of them want to be like you. They want jobs like yours. They want to have careers, go to school, live their lives. How does some Times feature, open up a path for them to follow their dreams?”
“I understand where you’re coming from, and I don’t just want to take without giving, giving back.”
“Do you? Are you family?”
“...yes… I have a boyfriend. I have a partner.”
“Do they know that?”
“Ye… some of them do.”
“He’s white right?”
“Uh, yeah. What does that…”
“You’ve asked for my time. I’ve given it. I’ll ask the questions for now, but you know what I’m getting at.
“I’m here, I’m interested in doing, in the feature, because I wish that I had a place like this where I was when I was a kid. I had the church, but I couldn’t be myself there. Interviewing you, your team and the youth was my idea. That’s why I’m here.”
“Why didn’t you call me in the first place. Why was it Shapiro?”
“Because…”
“Oh of course! They don’t let you do your own work. You come up with the ideas, if they’e any good they take them, and then they give them to someone else. You’re here because you can code switch. You’re an emissary to them. That’s why they sent you. That’s why they let you come out here, because I told them I wasn’t having it. They want to focus on the voguing classes because that’s hot right now. They don’t care about the tutoring programs. They don’t care about the self defence courses run here, that we teach these kids how to cook, how to garden, how to manage finances. We offer sex education classes which consider who they sleep with, whether its a client or someone that they meet on some app they’re probably not supposed to be on. We are a church for these kids. That’s what the manor is. We teach the youth that they are the divine. That they better worship unto the altar of themselves and be a blessing to each other. Every day we turn something into nothing. We tell people who been told that they are nothing that they are everything. We tell them until they believe it. It doesn’t always work. Not for all of them, but we tell ourselves, we give like it’s gonna work for all of them. There are no acceptable casualties here. Not a one of them is someone that we can afford to lose. That this world can afford to lose.”
“I just wanna say that it’s true… I didn’t know about everything going on here but this is the story that… these are the stories that I want to tell.”
“Who are you telling these stories too? Who are you telling them for?”
“To anybody… to anyone who wants to see them. The work that you’re doing, the kids who come here, the goals that you have for them, the struggles…”
“You don’t know anything about the struggles that we have. That’s your problem. Do you get where I’m coming from? You don’t even know who, you haven’t even thought about it, but the people who watch your program, they don’t have anything in common with us. We don’t watch Times Tv. I do. But I watch everything. I have to watch everything so I can teach these kids what’s going on in the world. So I can tell them about things that they may not be paying attention to. So I can teach them how to be… in that world. The world outside the street corners and subway stops that they know. I have survived a lot Mr. Lewis. But the game is different. There are new struggles. New troubles. A kind of evil out there that I coulda never seen coming, and I’m one of the lucky ones. Well I don’t believe in luck, and that makes it harder sometimes because I have to ask, ‘Why me’? You see what I mean? No you don’t. You can’t. All you can do is sell our story to people who don’t really want to have anything to do with us. They don’t want us here. We’ll be news for fifteen minutes and that’s it. I have lived in this neighborhood for… for longer than I care to count. Actually that’s not true. Every year I’ve been here is a year that somebody else wasn’t here, but I’ve been here for over thirty years. When they came, first they looked at us with fear. They were ‘afraid of us’. They were afraid of what they imagined we would do to them or take from them. But they came because they could. That’s why a lot of them do what they do. Because they can. They smelled what they call cheap rents in the jungle. Then they looked at us, they started to look at us like we were stupid. We didn’t realise what we were sitting on. Sounds familiar doesn’t it. That’s how they get rid of people. They tell themselves that we don’t know what to do with what we have, we don’t know what we’re worth. Then they try to act like what they’re doing for themselves is something that they did on our behalf. It’s twisted you see, but that’s how it has to be done. Then they just kept coming and coming and the looks said ‘Oh you poor fool’, you don’t know what’s happening. They even bought out the… the… I don’t know what you’re supposed to call em anymore but I don’t want to say the wrong thing because I can’t trust you. Everything that I’m telling you is off the record by the way. But they drove up the rents and they found other ways to drive out the uh… the non-Blacks. Let’s call ‘em that.  And they never liked us anyway so I don’t feel too bad for them, but they left. They’re always gonna be good. They gonna always have somewhere else to go and the money to support themselves. That’s one thing I’ll give them. They support each other. Then the buckruhs, the looks turned hateful. They’re hateful people. Confused people. Oh they are so confused. Sometimes when you give it to em good, just lookin like lost puppies chasing their tales. They say after hundreds of years that the people who built this country are the lazy ones. They done told themselves this so many times they believe it. But you know… I got this place. I started this place because I knew one of them, well actually he was passing. He was a regular at a bar I was tending. I guess you could say I was passing too. I think he loved me. I think I was the realest person he ever met. Everybody else treated him like he was something because he had money. I never lied to him, and I never allowed him to lie to me. Maybe that was it. He had a wife and kids, the whole thing. Parents that he hated. white people always hate they parents. Always talk about they parents like they parents are stupid. Either that or they mad about they parents for things that don’t make sense to be mad at them about. Black people… we’re different. Our mamma’s and daddy’s take pleasure in being violent with us. The whole I’ll beat you before the world does. Go out there and get me a switch. Get me a good one too, cause I’ll whip you twice as hard if you draw the shortest stick. They’ll beat us with rods, hand bags with bricks in them, irons, skillets, and all we can do is talk about how much we love them. How good they were to us. Not like buckruhs. The contempt that they have for their parents is something else. I think it comes from something that everyone of them recognises, even the most dim witted ones… when they realise exactly what they’ve inherited. It’s a day of reckoning that turns into a lifetime of denial, feeling betrayed, trying to keep the truth just below the service. And it’s maddening. It makes ‘em nuts. To be white you have to be out of your mind. I’m not a psychiatrist but I know all about crazy. I had to learn about them and I have to keep studying them so they can’t hurt me and mine. But that’s who I got the money from to start this place. I knew he was rich, but he turned out to be filthy rich. He’s the reason why I understand that expression because that money, the amount of money he ended up inheriting, nobody should be sitting on all that cash. So rich was he that it can only be blood money, but most rich people are rich and it comes from ill deeds, not hard work, not opportunity, but from thievery. Really all rich people are like that. The game is rigged. He was a Friday to Sunday evening Johnny be- good. Didn’t care if people saw us either. He came around Friday evenings wasted. Wanted his beans and cornbread. Roast beef. Fried fish. Shrimp and grits. Red rice. Gumbo. Biscuits and syrup on Sundays. And he ate pork too. He wasn’t supposed to but he did. And he loved my smothered pork chops and collard greens.. And he left on Sunday night and went back to his wife. He told me he was gonna take care of me. He was a lot older than but he was still that kinda man that people noticed, and the Black in him kept him looking a good fifteen years younger. Drinkin and hard living be damned. I could tell he was somethin back in the day. He definitely had his day. He liked me just the way I was. If he could see me now. He wouldn’t like me spending what he left me on this place, but that’s what I wanted to do so I did it. I earned it. I was his friend, lover, confidant, and I wouldn’t put up with his shit. I didn’t think he would make good on his promise but he did. My name was Sharon back then. I had to grow into that before I became Lucille, and he asked me, ‘Sharon my dear, what’s a dream so big you think it might never come true’. He had that transatlantic old hollywood accent but he did something really boring like banking. At least that’s what he told me. I told him I wanted to make a safe haven. A Hyannis port for me and all the girls. It was cloud talk, you know? Something that I did dream about, but something that I never thought could actually be. I wanted something for us girls. A castle… no a fortress where we could dress how we wanted too, grow and raise our own food, with a library, and a piano, and a… a big kitchen, and room. A room for us to sit and talk talk talk talk talk. I knew what community tasted like. I was an Island girl who might have been born somewhere that wasn’t the U.S. of A but it was at the same time. The community took care of everybody who fit in but it was clear that I didn’t. My brother Lazzie, he gave me the money to come here. All his savings. He wanted to leave the island too but he was scared. He said that he could afford to be scared but told me I couldn’t. He handed me a cigar box full of money he made working here and there. I left. I never went back. They wouldn’t have even recognised me. Mama wouldn’t have believed how long my hair could grow if I let… tsch. When I came here I was all legs, bright eyes, with a big smile. That’s when I met the others. I met him just a few years later. He didn’t want me to work. So being with him Friday to Sunday, that covered a lot. I didn’t give up my job of course. He wanted me to look good. He wanted a cook. He wanted me to be able to fix him drinks, and he wanted to have clothes for him, nice clothes, shoes, and even a dressing gown. I told him all that cost money. I was a smart girl. I saved.  We passed by this building and I told him I wanted to live here and start a school or a program for the girls. He knew the other girls too. Sometimes he went with them too. Two months later he told me he bought this place. I didn’t believe him. He died maybe a year or so after that and a white man in a suit and tie came knocking on my door. I hadn’t seen or heard from Eddie, that was his name, for two weeks. I didn’t think he was dead. Maybe sick. But not dead. He told me that Eddie had died. I still remember that day, not like it was yesterday but maybe a few months have just passed. I think I was in shock but also not sure why he was there. Why was he at the door? He had to ask if he could come in. Of course I said ‘No’. So he told me right there on the porch that Mr. Edouard Sofer had left me… some things… but also this building. I was twenty something and I had no idea at first how to do anything… and then it was the crisis. Our crisis. I lost a lot of people and that’s how I… that’s when I knew that I was gonna do something. Something for us but for the rest of the family too. For young runaways, young people who lived here who passed me by in the streets and looked at me, not out of disgust. Not with anger, but with understanding. With curiosity. ‘How are you doing it? How are you being… who you are, who you’re supposed to be’. The island girl, she knew how to do a lot of things. She had to learn all of the things that the boys did, but her mother insisted that she and her brother learn all of the things that the girls did, I think because she didn’t want her… her children to have a woman doing all of the woman’s work plus the man’s work, with nary a moment to herself. Mama liked to read. That’s why the library was named after her. The Sharon. We call it. I had to honor her somehow, but then I realised I couldn’t make my name a plaque for her. I had to become my own person, my own woman, not in her shadow. So you see, Munroe Manor got a lotta stories. You gotta tell a story that buckruhs can relate to. And both you and I know that’s the truth. One of the ways that they’re trying to get us outta here is… and it’s really smart actually… but we don’t receive the little public funding that we used to get it. That’s dried up, no matter how many times we apply, we don’t get it. They don’t want us here. Even your little story about us isn’t gonna change that. I’m resigned to fight for this place until I die. This is the house that I built. The home that I made. You’ve been a guest here. You’ve been a passerby. Now it’s time for you to give back. Your story… even if you tell it right, it won’t save us… but you can do something for my kids. If this house should fall, you can do something that might have its own legacy. I’ll grant you permission. You can film here under the condition that you tell the whole story about what we do here. That and you have to work with my kids on the production. Let them, those that want to, shadow you. You’re gonna become a mentor to these kids and the ones that follow them. No matter what you are gonna mentor young kids who are a part of this family, even if the house folds. You’re gonna do it, and you’re gonna inspire them because it’s one thing to tell a story and another thing to be a part of someone else’s story. A part that gets them where they want to go. So these are the terms Mr. Lewis. Take it or leave it. I have lunch in five minutes so you’re gonna have to make up your mind now. I get hangry as the kids call it. Real hangry.”

Written by Isaiah Lopaz, Anthology / Appendix 2021