South Central Noir

Sankofa was not only a fortress from erasure, it had been a citadel during the fires. In 1992, when a jury in Los Angeles proclaimed that a Black man’s plight was worth less than a dog’s (since his neighbor had gotten jail time for beating his dog, unlike those cops who beat Rodney King for the world to see), the strip mall across the street had gone up in flames while Mrs. Richardson opened her doors to anyone who needed to sob or rant, or both, behind the safety of her bookshelves. Fruit of Islam guarded the doors, but even if they hadn’t, Darryl’s father and his Uncle Boo — both high school football coaches — would have joined any dozen other men or women to protect Sankofa and its treasures. Smoke rose east, west, north, and south of Sankofa, but not a single page in the bookstore burned.

When Mrs. Richardson offered Darryl a job after school when he was fifteen, it seemed harmless enough. Why not earn his movie and comic book money organizing the boxes, stacking books on shelves, and — after a couple of months of building trust — running the register when Mrs. Richardson had more than one customer, so she could hover and make suggestions? He’d imagined himself becoming a writer, so a bookstore felt like a natural incubator. If he were honest with himself — and honesty was harder to come by now that he was nearly forty — his days working at Sankofa had been some of the happiest of his life.

The problem was, he’d fixed the store, the street, the neighborhood, in time, as if they would always be the way he remembered. But in the Afrofuturism section, Octavia E. Butler had written, “The only lasting truth is Change” in Parable of the Sower for all the world to see, so that fallacious thinking was nobody’s fault but his. Everything changed. The South Central LA he’d grown up in had been different in his grandmother’s time, when it was mostly white. His grandfather used to say that the coyotes and mountain lions and bears that sometimes ventured from the hills were only a reminder that this land had never belonged to humans, period.

The Only Lasting Truth indeed.

Darryl first thought the word ghost the day the boxes tumbled down in the storeroom. The store was empty when he heard the noise, and the cramped storeroom, which housed the bathroom, didn’t have a door to outside. (How many times had the more celebrated authors complained that there was no rear door to sneak into past the crowd?) This was about a week after the wrong book covers had been turned out, which he’d pretty much forgotten, even when the other strange things started happening. Always when he was alone.

On Tuesday, the blinds over the picture window unfurled even though no one touched the pull string. The right half fell until it nearly touched the floor, but the left half got caught midway up, a leering eye. That was a first. Then the Barack Obama book cover he’d hung on the wall was on the floor when he opened the store Wednesday morning, the plastic frame cracked, Obama’s face grinning sideways at him. By then, it was three strange occurrences in as many days, and he’d begun to wonder if someone was sabotaging him on purpose. Low-key.

Then the storeroom. Darryl had part-time helpers who came in after school like he had — although, frankly, they lacked both drive and pride in their work — so Darryl checked the stability of every box himself even if he didn’t stack them. Hardcovers could get bent up in the box, and returning was a hassle, so he ran a tight storeroom. When he heard the crash, he thought a vagrant had snuck in to find a quiet place to sleep... and instead, he found all six boxes from the top of the wire shelf on the east wall tumbled down to the concrete, one of them bashed open and spilling Stephen King paperbacks.

“Hey! Who’s back here?” he called out with extra bass in his voice, picking up his broom, because, again, he wasn’t a “ghosty” kind of brother and the only hauntings he’d heard about were in old houses. Grudgingly, he remembered the security guards’ visit and talk of a local mugger, so he thought maybe his store was a target: he couldn’t guess the angle of knocking down boxes in the storeroom, but it could be a ploy to get him away from the register. He tried to keep one eye on his desk through the doorway, but the storeroom had a lot of narrow aisles to cover, so eventually his desk was no longer in sight as he peeked around corners.

No one. The storeroom was empty. He was about to try to figure out what else could have made the boxes fall when the bathroom door slammed itself shut. The slam was a loud CRACK like a gunshot that made him jump inside his clothes. The doorknob rattled like it might fall off, then abruptly fell still.

“Hey!” Darryl called with far less bass this time, more like a petulant child. “Get your ass out here and get the hell out of my store!”

The door didn’t move. The doorknob didn’t so much as tremble.