South Central Noir

The next morning, every book from the shelves lay across the floor in a sea. Darryl stood in the doorway staring at the spectacle for a full two minutes, nearly in tears. Then he went inside, locked the door, and kept the CLOSED sign turned out. He definitely wouldn’t be selling any of Stephen King’s books today. Or anyone else’s.

He almost called the security service — the card was still propped by his register as an inside joke to himself — but he didn’t want to invite those two assholes near him again, especially not that itchy one. Besides, the more he looked around, the more he realized it couldn’t be the work of vandals.

The evidence was all around him. The door had been locked. No windows broken. Nothing taken from the register. It was as if Sankofa had suffered its own private earthquake, the books shaken away while everything else was left upright. No part of it looked natural.

And the scene felt angry. An attack. A taunt. For the first time, Darryl felt afraid of the haint. (But he definitely didn’t want the haint to know that.)

“Oh yeah?” Darryl said. “Fuck you. This is my store, not yours. What else you got?”

His knees were tense, ready to spring him under his desk in case the haint did have something else. (As he thought about it, a haint might have a hell of a lot else.) Yet the store was still and silent, just like the storeroom before the door slammed.

“You want me to leave? Is that it?” Darryl said. “You’re the one who needs to leave. Get out of here! I better not see you again. Leave me alone!”

Darryl didn’t go to many horror movies because the characters could be so dumb, but he wondered why more people in movies didn’t just tell the ghost to fuck off. Because that would be a short-ass movie, he decided. But that was his plan. And if establishing dominance wasn’t enough, he’d bring in that new tarot reader from down the street to make the banishing more official. “Mess up my store like this?” he said as he went shelf by shelf, replacing the fallen books one at a time, setting the ones with bent covers aside, a growing pile. “You just fucked all the way up.”

He impressed himself with his tough talk, decided he wasn’t scared, but then a soul food cookbook in trade paperback teetering on a shelf behind him fell to the floor, and he screamed like a high school girl. And then laughed at himself. And then... yeah, maybe he cried a little too. Or a lot. All of those Black books scattered in disarray on the floor, the bare shelves looking eager for a new adventure, made Darryl want to curl up in a corner. The store felt closer to the truth today than it had in a long time. Mrs. Richardson said she could barely make rent in the past couple of years. How long before he would be packing up Sankofa anyway? Should he even bother reshelving the books?

But over time, as he filled the shelves aisle by aisle, the despairing feeling was replaced by resolve. Excitement, even. He’d always wanted to move the Science Fiction section closer to the Mystery & Thiller section, and add a dedicated Horror section, and suddenly he had the freedom to recreate the store the way he’d wanted to, no longer bound by Mrs. Richardson’s years of habit. By the end of the day, he’d filled all of the shelves except the New York Times best sellers section. No way he’d put those back. Now he finally had room for the Young Adult section he’d been dreaming of: rows of Black and brown boys and girls who were wizards. Vampires. Basketball champions. They were anything they damn well pleased.

What was that line from the baseball movie? If you build it, they will come.

The tourists could buy Rivers Solomon and Nnedi Okorafor and Attica Locke and Steven Barnes and Nikki Giovanni and Toni Morrison too. They just had to learn. Someone could stay behind and teach them. Then mail orders, which were picking up since he hired someone to update the store’s website, could take care of the rest.

Maybe that was what the haint was trying to tell him. Make the store his.

Darryl was so excited that he climbed inside the window display to start ripping down the posters and signs he had put up to try to catch the newcomers’ eyes. More than he remembered, actually — an entire side of the display, including the prime corner. Gillian Flynn was dope, but why was she in the window at Sankofa when she could be celebrated anywhere?

Darryl didn’t hear the commotion until it was practically in his ear, the shout of a woman who sounded like Big Hat with the sun-broiled nose. “Maybe he went that way?” More of a question than a comment, and Darryl heard stampeding feet from around the corner.