Free The Turner House by Angela Flournoy

himself of them.
    During his sixteenth summer, Francis stopped receiving Cynthia Turner’s small packages of neatly folded money and sweets. She had maintained one-Sunday-a-month visits with him up until then. She would take a bus out or hitch a ride, and the two of them would sit on the reverend’s porch and talk. A stranger driving past might have mistaken the two for teenagers embarking on a courtship via sanctioned Sunday visits. If they were lucky, the reverend would join them and fill up their awkward silences with self-congratulatory chatter. On her final Sunday, Cynthia said her white folks were moving to Dallas, where the husband had some sort of work lined up, and they had asked her to join them. Francis was not surprised that his mother had said yes; the white folks had seven children, and he’d long suspected that the line between blood and water—questionable water at that—had gone blurry for his mother. His sixteen-year-old pride prevented him from showing his disappointment. He took a long look at her smooth, wide face, the high eyebrows he’d inherited, and said a variation of something he’d heard the reverend tell many a congregation member when they moved away: “I’ll be prayin for you, Mama. You call or write me if you ever need a thing.”
    Pride worked in mysterious ways on Francis, much like the God he worshipped. Pride prevented him from using Reverend Tufts’s letter of introduction to get a good job and maybe even free rent for a while. But he was not too proud to ask strangers for help. At the train station in Detroit he chatted up a porter who directed him to a janitor who told him to head to a house off Hastings and see about renting a room. He had a gift for conversation, for making people feel at ease. It wasn’t his words, exactly; Reverend Tufts always said that Francis was eloquent in his head but still too much a country nigger out his mouth. It was his looks, he supposed. He was tall and slender without lapsing into frail, and his skin was the color of baked-right cornbread. He’d learned early on that folks assigned all sorts of qualities to skin like his, and that a certain type of middle-aged woman would always consider a yellow boy somehow trustworthy. The sort of young man who would help carry a load of groceries and not run off with them. He asked colored person after colored person for advice until he climbed aboard a streetcar headed for Paradise Valley.
    The best way to avoid feeling too small for a place was to pretend you’d been there before. It was Francis’s first time on a streetcar, but after the lurching claustrophobia of the train ride (another first), the wide-open windows were welcome. On Hastings, among so many citified Negroes, Francis tried to feel like one of them. He dawdled in front of a chicken shack he didn’t dare spend his money in. He stood in front of a vegetable cart and lamented the pallor of Up North tomatoes. He broke down and bought a plum, found it sour but ate it anyway. Poor folks and the better-off were out, couples shopping and mothers with children in tow. It was Saturday. He’d only had liquor a couple of times in his twenty years—a neighbor’s moonshine made his throat swell when he was thirteen—but he thought that after seeing about a room he’d find himself a nice place to sit and have a drink. There would be workingmen at a bar, and maybe he’d find his way into a job.
    A room. The boardinghouse was crumbling. Ash-gray rotting wood showed through the black paint, and greasy sheets hung in the windows. The porch sagged as if it were sometimes tasked with supporting more than a dozen Negroes at once. The house sat on a street narrower than Hastings, and poorly paved. The smell of garbage and sewage made Francis’s mouth tingle with nausea. He knocked, and a sharply dressed young woman with a wide, pouty mouth opened the door. Too good-looking for such a