When No One Is Watching Read online

  Epigraph

  The position of my white neighbor is much more difficult. . . . The game of keeping what one has is never so exciting as the game of getting.

  —ZORA NEALE HURSTON, FROM “HOW IT FEELS TO BE COLORED ME,” WORLD TOMORROW (1928)

  One is astonished in the study of history at the recurrence of the idea that evil must be forgotten, distorted, skimmed over. . . . The difficulty, of course, with this philosophy is that history loses its value as an incentive and example; it paints perfect men and noble nations, but it does not tell the truth.

  —W. E. B. DU BOIS, FROM BLACK RECONSTRUCTION (1935)

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  Prologue: Sydney

  Chapter 1: Sydney

  Chapter 2: Theo

  Chapter 3: Sydney

  Chapter 4: Theo

  Chapter 5: Sydney

  Chapter 6: Theo

  Chapter 7: Sydney

  Chapter 8: Sydney

  Chapter 9: Theo

  Chapter 10: Sydney

  Chapter 11: Theo

  Chapter 12: Sydney

  Chapter 13: Theo

  Chapter 14: Sydney

  Chapter 15: Theo

  Chapter 16: Sydney

  Chapter 17: Theo

  Chapter 18: Sydney

  Chapter 19: Sydney

  Chapter 20: Theo

  Chapter 21: Sydney

  Chapter 22: Theo

  Chapter 23: Sydney

  Chapter 24: Sydney

  Chapter 25: Sydney

  Epilogue

  Additional Reading Material

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Also by Alyssa Cole

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Prologue

  Sydney

  HISTORY IS FUCKING WILD.

  Last fall, on a night when my ass was getting well acquainted with the uncomfortable guest chair in Mommy’s hospital room, I’d numbly tapped and swiped my way to an article about a place called Black America. Not the label politicians use to place our concerns into a neat box full of worries they don’t have to attend to immediately or ever, but an actual, tangible place—a slavery theme park that’d opened in Brooklyn at the end of the nineteenth century.

  Slavery. Fucking. Theme park.

  Black America, the theme park, was billed as “an opportunity to become familiar with plantation life for those of the North who belong to a generation to which the word slavery has but an indefinite and hazy meaning.” This was, like, twenty years after slavery ended, mind you. I mean, I too get nostalgic when an eighties jam starts playing on the radio, but these motherfuckers really needed to reminisce about owning humans?

  It was the “those of the North” part that really annoyed me. The North does not remember; in fact, the North has a super-selective fucking memory. As if slavery was something that happened down there, even though there were enslaved Africans building, planting, and harvesting in colonial Brooklyn alongside the Dutch.

  People bury the parts of history they don’t like, pave it over like African cemeteries beneath Manhattan skyscrapers. Nothing stays buried in this city, though.

  Anyway: Black America.

  White people came to Brooklyn to tour the “faithfully recreated plantation.” They sang along to Negro spirituals and took refreshment as they watched Black people, free Black people, pretend to be slaves.

  History.

  Wild.

  After I stumbled onto that article, Brooklyn history became a refuge for me. It blotted out thoughts of my failed marriage and the persistent sense memory of restraints chafing my wrists. It was something to focus on besides my mother’s illness and the way everything was changing. Everything, no matter how much I wanted the world to stop spinning for just one goddamn minute.

  I decided to pay for one of those expensive-ass “Historic Brooklyn Brownstones” tours. I’d lived in one of the beautiful old buildings for most of my life, apart from those few years in Seattle, but I needed a distraction, and maybe an outlet for my frustrations. A Groupon-discounted tour with a meeting point two blocks from my front door had been cheaper than therapy and a thousand times easier to get an appointment for.

  I wanted to know what the tour guides said about us as they led crowds over the cracked blue slate sidewalks of Gifford Place. I wanted to know what the tourists were oohing and ahhing over when they clustered in front of our houses, looking through the present inhabitants in search of long-dead grandeur.

  It was a day that actually felt like autumn—the weather cool enough to wear a cute blazer and the oak trees lining Gifford Place ablaze in gold and red. I was struck by how beautiful my neighborhood was, bathed in these warm hues that contrasted so well with the brick and brownstone exteriors, how beautiful it had always been despite decades of being ignored. Neglect had shielded us, in a way, and watching strangers stroll through in their comfortable sneakers, with Nikons hanging around their necks, felt like our walls had been breached and the horde was marching in.

  The tour guide, Zephyr, was pale with a brown bob and a British accent that gave her a sense of cheery authority, though it seemed like she’d just memorized some Wikipedia facts. She didn’t know shit about my neighborhood, really, but she didn’t need to. The tourists weren’t there to hear about Mommy’s community garden, or the time someone left a snake and some tarot cards on Ms. Candace’s stoop when they thought she was talking shit about them. They didn’t want an anthropological deep dive into the relationship between bodega owner and lotto enthusiast, or an oral history of stoop usage.

  Zephyr was just fine for them.

  She pointed down the tree-lined street and asked us to imagine the Brooklyn of old. I stared at the spots where I’d skinned my knees Rollerblading and gotten tangled up in double-Dutch ropes, but Zephyr had meant old old. Cobblestone roads and horse-drawn carriages and homes owned by the elite of the elite old. It was probably easy to do for the people on the tour—the street was quiet and almost empty, as if my neighbors had sensed the approach of the interlopers and retreated into the safety of their homes.

  We started to walk, the leaves crunching beneath our shoes serving as the beat under Zephyr’s singsong voice.

  “And this is the former Gifford Medical Center, originally the Vriesendaal Sanitarium, completed in 1830 and shuttered in 2005,” she said as we stepped into the street to bypass the chain-link fence surrounding the building where I was born. The architecture was still striking, even with the boarded-up windows, but I’d known it as “Murd-ical Center,” the hospital where either incompetence or ghosts would fuck you up, so I wasn’t impressed.

  “This building has recently been the center of controversy, as it’s one of the proposed sites for the next VerenTech Pharmaceuticals campus,” Zephyr said. “There have been protests by community activists who don’t want the company here, despite the promise of hundreds of new jobs and a revitalization of the area. Those against the campus are also upset that an opioid research center is being placed in a community that they feel was overpoliced during their own drug epidemic.”

  It was a bit more complicated than that—my best friend, Drea, worked for the city and had been keeping me and Mommy informed of what would happen if VerenTech chose our neighborhood, and none of it was good. Not for us.

  “These people are never satisfied,” a white man with graying hair grumbled.

  I glared at him, and so did a few other people, but he didn’t seem to care. Zephyr ignored him and ushered us on.

  As we stopped in front of each brownstone, she’d carefully detail the lives of the rich white people who’d lived there a hundred years ago—what foo
d they’d eaten, what kind of clothing they’d worn, the parties they’d thrown. That was all well and good, but as the tour pressed on, my frustration—my anger at being erased from my own life in so many ways I’d lost count—pushed my hand up into the air like the teacher’s bane I’d been long, long ago, before I’d learned curiosity killed the cat. Zephyr narrowed her gaze at me for just a second, perhaps sensing my petty intentions, before saying, “Yes?”

  “So the stuff about the Vanderwhosits is cool, but the woman who lives here now was the first Black female head of an engineering firm,” I said peevishly.

  “Oh? Thanks for that tidbit.” She waved the tour onward and I followed, smirking because annoying people with history they didn’t want to acknowledge was kind of fun.

  We stopped in front of Mr. Joe’s house, and Zephyr talked about some architect named Frederick Langston.

  “The current owner is a jazz musician who traveled all over the world, playing with some of the greats,” I cut in. “He gives music lessons to children now.”

  “That’s cool. Who’d he tour with?” The question came from a tall, solidly built white guy with dirty-blond hair, a heavy brow, and ridiculous cheekbones; he asked quickly, as if purposely trying to get the question in before Zephyr could talk over me. His gaze was focused, and something about the way he waited intently for a response threw me off.

  His girlfriend, a short, high-ponytailed Lululemon type, nudged him with her elbow. “Theo. Stop disrupting the tour,” she chided, as if he’d just dropped his pants to his ankles instead of asking a question, then looked in my direction as if her words also applied to me.

  The I wish a motherfucker would simmered in my veins at the familiar condescension in her eyes. For a moment, Ponytail Lululemon’s face morphed into that of the nurse who’d looked me dead in the eye and said my mother didn’t need more pain meds, even as Mommy writhed and wailed in the bed beside us.

  “I appreciate the bonus information. It’s quite helpful,” Zephyr cut in, her tone showing she didn’t appreciate it at all, “but this tour is about historically important people.”

  “This is a historically Black neighborhood, but none of the important people you’ve mentioned thus far have been. What does that mean?”

  Her face flushed but she hit me with a customer-service smile.

  “Look . . . miss. I’m just doing my job. If you have a problem with this tour, you can send suggestions to the organizers. Or maybe you should, I don’t know, start your own?” she said cheerily, then smoothly returned to her script.

  I pursed my lips. Nodded. Turned and crossed the street, heading to the bodega to get an egg and cheese on a roll and a coffee, light and sweet. Comfort food. Abdul was on the phone behind the counter, arguing with his landlord about how he couldn’t afford another rent hike, which didn’t help my mood, though playing with Frito, the store’s resident cat, did.

  I walked by the group a few minutes later as they learned about filigree or some shit, then jogged up the steps to my mother’s house and turned the key in the lock with more force than was necessary. The advertising flyers shoved into the crack between the door and the jamb fluttered to the ground.

  Sell your house for big money! We pay cash! Quick and easy sales! screamed the cards scattered around my feet. The one closest to the toe of my boot, from a company called Good Neighbors LLC, had the tagline, We care about your future!

  Zephyr’s voice faded into the background as I snatched the flyers and crumpled them up. I wanted to turn and throw the wad at the tour group, to chase them away. I wanted to call the police and report strange people who might be casing the neighborhood for a break-in, like some new neighbors had done the previous week—police had shown up and harassed a man who’d lived here for twenty years.

  Logic prevailed—that shit wouldn’t fly for me. I already knew how easy it was for authorities to believe someone like me was a problem to be locked away; one wrong move on my end and the vultures circling Mommy’s house could get what they wanted all the sooner.

  I glanced over my shoulder as I stepped into the foyer, mostly so Zephyr could see that this was my house, no matter who had lived here in the nineteenth century, and caught the heavy-browed guy watching me intently.

  I closed the door firmly in his face.

  Welcome to the OurHood app, helping neighbors stay connected and stay safe. You have been approved as a member of the GIFFORD PLACE community. Please use the site responsibly and remember that each one of us can make our neighborhood a better place!

  Chapter 1

  Sydney

  I SPENT DEEPEST WINTER SHUFFLING BACK AND FORTH BETWEEN work and hospital visits and doctor’s appointments. I spent spring hermiting away, managing my depression with the help of a CBD pen and generous pours of the Henny I’d found in Mommy’s liquor cabinet.

  Now I’m sitting on the stoop like I’ve done every morning since summer break started, watching my neighbors come and go as I sip coffee, black, no sugar, gone lukewarm.

  When I moved back a year and a half ago, carrying the ashes of my marriage and my pride in an urn I couldn’t stop sifting through, I thought I’d be sitting out here with Mommy and Drea, the holy trinity of familiarity restored—mother, play sister, prodigal child. Mommy would tend to her mini-jungle of potted plants lining the steps, and to me, helping me sprout new metaphorical leaves—tougher ones, more resilient. Drea would sit between us, like she had since she was eleven and basically moved in with us, since her parents sucked, cracking jokes or talking about her latest side hustle. I’d draw strength from them and the neighborhood that’d always had my back. But it hadn’t worked out that way; instead of planting my feet onto solid Brooklyn concrete, I’d found myself neck-deep in wet cement.

  Last month, on the Fourth of July, I pried open the old skylight on the top floor of the brownstone and sat up there alone. When I was a teenager, Mommy and Drea and I would picnic on the roof every Fourth of July, Brooklyn sprawling around us as fireworks burst in the distance. When I’d clambered up there as an adult, alone, I’d been struck by how claustrophobic the view looked, with new buildings filling the neighborhoods around us, where there had once been open air. Cranes loomed ominously over the surrounding blocks like invaders from an alien movie, mantis-like shadows with red eyes blinking against the night, the American flags attached to them flapping darkly in the wind, signaling that they came in peace when really they were here to destroy.

  To remake.

  Maybe my imagination was running away with me, but even at ground level the difference is overwhelming. Scaffolds cling to buildings all over the neighborhood, barnacles of change, and construction workers gut the innards of houses where I played with friends as a kid. New condos that look like stacks of ugly shoeboxes pop up in empty lots.

  The landscape of my life is unrecognizable; Gifford Place doesn’t feel like home.

  I sigh, close my eyes, and try to remember the freedom I used to feel, first as a carefree child, then as a know-it-all teenager, as I held court from this top step, with the world rolling out before me. Three stories of century-old brick stood behind me like a solid wall of protection, imbued with the love of my mother and my neighbors and the tenacity of my block.

  Back then, I used to go barefoot, even though Miss Wanda, who’d wrench open the fire hydrant for kids on sweltering days like the ones we’ve had this summer, used to tell me I was gonna get ringworm. The feel of the stoop’s cool brown concrete beneath my feet had been calming.

  Now someone calls the fire department every time the hydrant is opened, even when we use the sprinkler cap that reduces water waste. I wear flip-flops on my own stoop, not worried about the infamous ringworm but suddenly self-conscious where I should be comfortable.

  Miss Wanda is gone; she sold her place while I was cocooned in depression at some point this spring. The woman who’d been my neighbor almost all my life is gone, and I didn’t even get to say goodbye.

  And Miss Wanda isn’t the only
one.

  Five families have moved from Gifford Place in less than a year. Five doesn’t seem like much, but each of their buildings had three to four apartments, and the change has been noticeable, to say the least. And that doesn’t even count the renters. It’s gotten to the point where I feel a little twinge of dread every time I see a new white person on the block. Who did they replace? There have, of course, always been a few of them, renters who mostly couldn’t afford to live anywhere else but were also cool and didn’t fuck with anybody. These new homeowners move different.

  There’s an older, retired couple who mostly have dinner parties and mind their business, but call 311 to make noise complaints. Jenn and Jen, the nicest of the newcomers, whose main issue is they seem to have been told all Black people are homophobic, so they go out of their way to normalize their own presence, while never stopping to wonder about the two old Black women who live next door to them and are definitely not sisters or just friends.

  Then there’re the young families like the people who moved into Miss Wanda’s house, or those ready to start a family, like Ponytail Lululemon and her Wandering Eye husband, who I first encountered on the historical tour. They bought the Payne house across the street—guess they had been casing the neighborhood.

  They don’t have blinds, so I see what they do when they’re home. She’s usually tearing shit apart when she’s there, renovating, which I guess is some kind of genetic inheritance thing. He seems to work from home and likes walking around shirtless on the top floor. I’ve never seen them actually interact; if I had a man walking around half-naked in my house, we’d be more than interacting, but that’s none of my business.

  The shrill, rapid-fire bark of a dog losing its shit pulls me from my thoughts.

  “Goddammit, somebody put him in his cage before the guests arrive! Terry!” a woman yells, followed by a man shouting, “Christ, calm down, Josie! Arwin! Did you let Toby out of his cage?”

  Terry and Josie and Arwin and Toby are Miss Wanda’s replacements. They’ve never properly introduced themselves, but with all the yelling they do, I figured out their names quickly.