South Central Noir

The more Darryl tried to think of whose ghost might be haunting Sankofa, the more he realized it was a long-ass list. His parents were gone, killed by a drunk driver on Crenshaw when he was thirty. His mother might be the haunting type, but she would never intentionally knock over boxes of books; that was sacrilege. And why nearly twenty years later? His Aunt Lucy and Uncle Boo. His cousin Ray. Dead, all of them. They were ghosts haunting him even when they didn’t make themselves known. But would they follow him to Sankofa?

All he knew was that this haunting felt deeply personal. The haint knew him, and well. The Autobiography of Malcolm X was a good guess, but Fanon too? When he’d read them the same year, back to back? No way that was random. Only his father knew that — maybe. But his father would never have knocked down the Obama poster, not enough to hurt it. They’d had long arguments over what Obama was and wasn’t doing for Black people, and his father had been Obama to the bone. If anything, Dad would have sat the poster in Darryl’s office chair.

Darryl wrote down as many names as he remembered. Tried calling out a few. But no answer came, not even the sound of a flapping page. The more names he called out to the silence, the more a cold loneliness wrapped itself around Darryl’s chest, the feeling he sometimes tried to drink away with half a bottle of wine after work, when there was nothing else for his hands and mind to do except remember that, once upon a time, he’d planned a bigger life. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d even pretended to write.

Old folks called dead people who came back haints, but what was the word for those, like him, who had been left behind?

Darryl was close to telling himself he’d imagined everything when he saw the haint in the window. He? — She? — was standing just below the giant golden script of the backward S in Sankofa on the glass. At first he thought it was someone standing outside, obscured in a blaze of sunlight, but it was a reflection as if someone were standing inside the store. No one else was with him, not on a Tuesday afternoon when it wasn’t Black History Month. About six feet tall. Dark skin. Darryl couldn’t make out the facial features, but the figure’s bulk standing there looked as real as the life-sized Michelle Obama cutout posed beside his desk.

Darryl couldn’t read the expression on the blurry face, though the eyes were staring straight at him. The stare felt ominous, so dispassionate and yet... so urgent. All moisture left Darryl’s mouth. For the first time in his life, he rubbed his eyes like people do in movies to make sure they’re not hallucinating. He wasn’t. The haint was still in the window when he opened his eyes.

“Who...” Darryl cleared his throat, since the word was buried in nervous phlegm. “Who are you? What’s your name? What do you want?” The questions running through his mind for days spilled from his mouth.

The haint only stared from the window, reflecting... no one.

“Why are you here? Tell me what you want me to—”

Bells jangled, and for one glorious, endless breath, Darryl was sure the haint was communicating in a musical language from another plane — until the front door opened and a customer wandered in. (Only the door chimes! The disappointment was real.) She was a blond-haired white woman in a sundress and wide-brimmed hat like a Hollywood starlet. A tourist, obviously. Her nose was sunburned bright red.

“Excuse me... can you recommend a good beach read?” She pointed to the new names in his window display. “How about Stephen King?”

Darryl had glanced away for only an instant, yet of course the haint was gone the next time he looked. Rage coursed through him, but he swallowed it away. Would rage bring the haint back? Bridge the gulf between the living and the dead? The present and the past?

For horror fans, Darryl usually recommended Victor LaValle instead, or Octavia’s Fledgling, or that anthology Sycorax’s Daughters with horror by all of those fierce sisters, but instead he only said blandly, “Which one? I think I’ve got ’em all.”

“Right?” she laughed. Her laugh was a knife twist, though he didn’t have time to explain the long story about how Sankofa was supposed to be.

He pointed her toward his New York Times best sellers section. She bought two King books and didn’t blink at the price. At the register, she chatted about how she was staying in an Airbnb at the Gardens after flying in from Phoenix for a pitch meeting and how the neighborhood was so convenient to everything in LA. Darryl barely heard her. He was thinking about how Mrs. Richardson rarely visited in person after she broke her hip last December, and how she would barely recognize her own store now. And how maybe it was time for him to find another job. Another city, even. Another life.

Darryl stared at the window looking for his haint the rest of the day.