Über die Autorinnen und Autoren

Tayari Jones is the author of Leaving Atlanta, The Untelling, Silver Sparrow, and An American Marriage. She holds degrees from Spelman College, Arizona State University, and the University of Iowa, and she serves on the MFA faculty at Rutgers.

Michele Blackmon has spent more than twenty-five years performing, directing, and teaching theater. As an actor, singer, and dancer she has performed in numerous stage productions in Seattle, Portland, Aspen, and at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. She has appeared in television commercials and corporate video projects, radio and voice-over projects, and she has performed in the Soviet Union as part of a cultural arts exchange.

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The Untelling

By Tayari Jones

Sound Library

Copyright © 2005 Tayari Jones
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780792736387

Chapter One

I still live in Atlanta. All of us do-Mama, Hermione, and me. Mama still lives on Willow Street, in the house we moved to after losing the split-level on Bunnybrooke Drive. She stays there out of spite, I think. This way no one can forget the cruelty that life has done her. Hermione and her family live in a suburb called Lawrenceville, halfway to Athens, which is as far away as you can get without actually leaving town. I can picture my sister leaving us for good, moving to France, doing a Josephine Baker, wearing a dress made of fruit. She can likely envision such scenarios for herself as well. But she stays here in Georgia because of her husband, Mr. Phinazee, who is far too old to learn any new tricks.

I make my home in the West End. Little plaques affixed to the street signs insist that it is "The Historic West End," a designation secured by real estate interests. For the last twenty years people have predicted that this area was on the rise. They point to Grant Park, which has become a Victorian oasis, smack in the center of town. It's only a matter of time, they say, urging yuppies and buppies alike, until gentrification elevates the West End, the historic West End, too. I hope they are right. I only rent my house, so I have no real financial stake in the prospect, but I like the idea of imminent transformation and appreciation.

The West End is a hard place to wrap your mind around. My house is off People Street, not too far from the Wren's Nest-where, depending on your take on things, Joel Chandler Harris either wrote or plagiarized the Uncle Remus stories. Just over a mile away is Spelman College, my alma mater, built where there were once Civil War barracks. And across the street from Spelman are some of the meanest housing projects in the South. I guess the only really consistent variable in the West End is that nearly everyone within a five-mile radius is black. From the bourgie girls I went to college with, all of whom seemed to be doctors' daughters or professors' kids, to my neighbors, cracked out and depressed, everybody is black. My landlord, crooked and mean, is every bit as black as the people who run the homeless shelter on the corner of Landrum and Cascade.

Lately white folks are moving into our neighborhood, one by one. I'm not bent out of shape about it. A gay couple, Jewish, according to my roommate, Rochelle, bought the pale yellow bungalow across the road, which has recently been restored to its turn-of-the-century splendor-wraparound porch and stained-glass panels in the mahogany door. Rochelle and I considered taking them a gift to welcome them to the neighborhood. She suggested baking cookies, but then we worried that they might not trust us enough to eat what we had prepared. The very idea of this offended us as though we had actually offered them the cookies and they'd refused. So we never introduced ourselves to them and they never introduced themselves to us.

Quiet as it's kept, the house where Rochelle and I live is identical to the showplace across the street. Ours is a fixer-upper that hasn't been fixed up yet. The paint flakes like green dandruff; underneath, the wood is dotted with termite tunnels. Inside, however, is much nicer. The wood floors might be paint-flecked and scarred, but you can still tell that it is good pine. In my bedroom there is a great old fireplace, but the mantels were stolen decades ago, when all the houses in the West End stood empty and abandoned. Still, the mantels can be replaced along with the crystal doorknobs and brass window cranks.

Last March, crackheads stole two potted ficus trees and a wrought-iron mailbox from the house across the street. The three of us-me, Rochelle, and my boyfriend, Dwayne-watched from my front porch. The porch is one of the best places in our house, despite the fact that it is not screened in. Our landlord let us keep the wicker patio furniture left by the previous tenants. There were two pieces, a love seat that could seat two people comfortably and three in a pinch and a high-backed throne that Rochelle called the Huey Newton Seat. At night we left the love seat on the porch, figuring that it was too bulky for crackheads to steal; but the Huey Newton Seat was stored in the living room when it wasn't in use. "It's a cultural antique," Rochelle insisted. I told her that most people didn't even remember who Huey Newton was, but she said that they would steal the chair anyway. It was like stealing a rare coin not because it's rare, but because it's a coin. It was a pain to haul the chair in at night-it was over five feet tall and the wicker was brittle with age. But Rochelle does what she wants.

Winter had just ended when my neighbor Cynthia and her cousin stole the Jewish guys' mailbox and ficus trees. Dwayne and I had sat close and cozy on the love seat and Rochelle used the Huey Newton Seat. The day was cool, but the sun warmed our foreheads. It was the sort of afternoon that is hot and cold at the same time, letting us know that spring was ahead of us, but not quite allowing us to forget the winter behind. Rochelle and Dwayne had laughed as Cynthia, who lived three doors down, and her cousin dragged the dainty trees and their glazed pots down the repaved driveway. Dwayne said, "Remember the Alamo," and this made us laugh. The mailbox was harder to steal. Together they tugged at the white post until it gave way, like a stubborn hunk of crabgrass. We laughed some more, now rooting against the taming and gentrification of our neighborhood. We delighted in the hardheaded nature of poverty, of a block that didn't welcome change. We drank to Cynthia and her cousin, clicking the rims of plastic tumblers of lemonade, vodka, and ice.

So I'm not sure why I was stunned when I came home one May afternoon to find deep ruts in the soft wood around the dead bolt on my front door, the door itself hanging open just a bit, the way you do when you know company is coming and you don't want them to bother to knock. Why did I stagger backward, a step or two from the opening, frightened and disbelieving at the same time, my eyes scanning the quiet road for a face that could explain things to me, straighten this whole thing out? Of course I knew that this wasn't the safest of neighborhoods. My mother, who lives less than ten miles away but never visits, sends me news clippings snipped from the back pages of the Journal-Constitution, little news articles about rapes, murders, and drug busts in the West End. She keeps me informed so I will always be aware of how safe I am not. It wasn't that I doubted the accuracy of the articles. Lying in bed, I often heard gunshots as distant as thunder and close as lightning. But I didn't imagine that someone would one day dig out the locks on my door, rifle through my belongings, taking what they wanted, leaving the rest. This wasn't supposed to happen to Rochelle and me.

We often joked that no one bothered us because everyone knew what we did for a living: nonprofit work at the Literacy Action and Resource Center. Even crackheads knew that there was no money in nonprofit. We'd borrowed this quip from Lawrence, our boss, who used the same rationale to explain why the Literacy Center-three miles away in Vine City-had never been vandalized, burglarized, or otherwise defaced. This, despite the fact that four homes on the block were boarded up, housing drug addicts and other vagrants. We really did believe that we were exempt from the crime in the area due to our vocation. Not because of our low wages, but...