Free The Given Day by Dennis Lehane Page A

only in pictures of Chicago and New York, and cars filling the streets, and people, too, and he thought how you would have figured a place like this would take a century to build, but this country just didn't have time to wait no more, no interest in patience and no reason for it either.
    He looked forward as they drove into Greenwood, and James waved to some men building a house and they waved back and he tooted his horn and Marta explained how coming up here was the section of Greenwood Avenue known as the Black Wall Street, lookie here. . . .
    And Luther saw a black bank and an ice cream parlor filled with black teenagers and a barbershop and a billiard parlor and a big old grocery store and a bigger department store and a law office and a doctor's office and a newspaper, and all of it occupied by colored folk. And then they rolled past the movie theater, big bulbs surrounding a huge white marquee, and Luther looked above that marquee to see the name of the place --The Dreamland--and he thought, That's where we've come. Because all this had to be just that indeed.
    By the time they drove up Detroit Avenue, where James and Marta Hollaway owned their own home, Luther's stomach was starting to slide. The homes along Detroit Avenue were red brick or creamy chocolate stone and they were as big as the homes of white folk. And not white folk who were just getting by, but white folk who lived good. The lawns were trimmed to bright green stubble and several of the homes had wraparound porches and bright awnings.
    They pulled into the driveway of a dark brown Tudor and James stopped the car, which was good, because Luther was so dizzy he worried he might get sick.
    Lila said, "Oh, Luther, couldn't you just die?"
    Yeah, Luther thought, that there is one possibility.
    The next morning Luther found himself getting married before he'd had breakfast. In the years that followed, when someone would ask how it was he came to be a married man, Luther always answered:
    "Hell if I know."
    He woke that morning in the cellar. Marta had made it plenty clear the evening before that a man and a woman who were not husband and wife didn't sleep on the same floor in her house, never mind the same room. So Lila got herself a nice pretty bed in a nice pretty room on the second floor and Luther got a sheet thrown over a broke- down couch in the cellar. The couch smelled of dog (they'd had one once; long since dead) and cigars. Uncle James was the culprit on that score. He took his after- dinner stogie in the basement every night because Aunt Marta wouldn't allow it in her house.
    Lot of things Aunt Marta wouldn't allow in her house--cussing, liquor, taking the Lord's name in vain, card playing, people of low character, cats--and Luther had a feeling he'd just scratched the surface of the list.
    So he went to sleep in the cellar and woke up with a crick in his neck and the smells of long- dead dog and too-recent cigar in his nostrils. Right off, he heard raised voices coming from upstairs. Feminine voices. Luther'd grown up with his mother and one older sister, both of whom had passed on from the fever in '14, and when he allowed himself to think of them it hurt enough to stop his breath because they'd been proud, strong women of loud laughter who'd loved him fiercely.
    But those two women had fought just as fierce. Nothing in the whole world, in Luther's estimation, was worth entering a room where two women had their claws out.
    He crept up the stairs, though, so he could hear the words better and what he heard made him want to trade places with the Hollaway dog.
    "I'm just feeling under the weather, Auntie."
    "Don't you lie to me, girl. Don't you lie! I know morning sickness when I see it. How long?"
    "I'm not pregnant."
    "Lila, you my baby sister's child, yes. My goddaughter, yes. But, girl, I will strap the black straight offa your body from head to toe if you lie to me again. You hear?"
    Luther heard Lila break out in a fresh run of sobbing, and it