Plenty Good Room Read online

  The guard made a sharp turn to the left, and she followed closely behind.

  “You can have a seat, miss,” he said, gesturing for her to sit at an old, round wooden table in the corner of the small room.

  Tamara sat stiffly upright in the well-worn wooden-backed chair, still clutching her bag tightly. Then she set her briefcase on the floor, and, taking a deep breath, stared at the door and waited expectantly.

  She flinched when the door opened and the guard moved sideways to allow a short, heavyset, caramel-brown-complexioned woman to enter the room. The tall man towered over the shorter woman for a moment or two before turning to lock the door again.

  “This is Samyra Bailey,” he said to her.

  With a glance at both women, he added, “Now, ladies, I’ll just be here in the back. Y’all go ’head and talk now.” He laughed and gave them a flirty wink. “Don’t you ladies worry about me—I won’t listen to a word.”

  Tamara watched as his long legs took him up the short flight of stairs two at a time to a glass-partitioned area overlooking the room. He took a seat in a chair and, after glancing down at them once, picked up a newspaper and began to read it.

  When she turned her attention back to Samyra Bailey, the short woman was staring at her curiously. Noticing Tamara’s attention focused on her, she pulled with pudgy fingers at the red and white bandanna wrapped and tied around her head, Aunt Jemima-style.

  She rolled her eyes then and said conspiratorially to Tamara, “Guess we s’posed to be stupid or some kinda fools, uh? That is, if we believe he ain’t listenin’ to us. Dag, it’s his friggin’ job to listen to us,” she finished with a hard laugh.

  Roughly she wiped one hand over her light-brown face, then carefully folded back the sleeves on her blue denim work shirt as she walked over to the table. Tamara couldn’t help but notice that the woman’s mannerisms and walk were overtly masculine. With one small hand she pulled out the other rickety wooden chair, turned it backward, and straddled it. Her face was close to Tamara’s now, and her red-rimmed eyes stared unblinkingly at her. She asked in a rough, raspy voice, “Now, just why is you here, anyway? What do you want from me?”

  Tamara’s own eyes widened then. Face-to-face with this streetwise and life-hardened woman, she was speechless for a few moments.

  The woman sucked at her teeth and said, “C’mon girl, what you want? I know you didn’t come here ’cause you think I look good, did you?”

  Jolting into life, Tamara sputtered, “N-n-no!” Quickly regaining her composure, she launched into the discourse about her intentions just as she’d told it to Sissie Bailey. Once again she explained about Yvette’s problem and, though nervous, tried to convey to Samyra her empathy for the girl, which had sparked her deep interest in finding the young woman again, as well as her birth family.

  When Tamara finished explaining, the woman looked at her closely for a moment before asking, “You mean you come all the way out here to help somebody else? Shoot, that girl could be dead or somethin’—you don’t know, ’cause you ain’t talked to her in years, you say.

  “Oh, no,” said Tamara. “Yvette is not dead; I am quite certain of that.”

  Again the woman gave Tamara a long, lingering stare while she slowly stroked at her chin as though running her fingers through a well-groomed beard. For a moment Tamara thought the woman would question her more. Instead she said, “I’ma do it just because I hate the daggone system so much and what it can do to a person—because of that, I guess I can try to help you best I can.”

  Tamara had been holding her breath hopefully as the woman pondered her request, and exhaled now imperceptibly with a grateful “Thank you.”

  Shooting a quick glance toward where the guard sat, still apparently immersed in his paper, Samyra smiled widely, her mouth full of dark gaps where teeth used to be.

  She emitted a harsh croak of a laugh and added, “And anyway, talkin’ to you will at least get me out of that cell for a minute, and maybe you’ll even put a coupla dollars on my books, huh?” She looked up at Tamara as she picked at some dirt from under her long and uneven fingernails. “Thataway at least I can get a pack of smokes out of this little visit, you know?”

  Tamara gave her a weak smile as she nodded her head in agreement.

  “I will be happy to leave you some money for cigarettes—even though they are bad for you.”

  The woman snickered again. “I got worse things to worry ’bout in here than smokin’, gal.”

  Wanting to waste no more time, Tamara reached in her bag, grabbed her small tape recorder, set it on the table, and turned it on.

  “Why you got that tape player? How’d you get it in here anyway? You not gonna use this against me in some kinda way, are you?” asked the woman suspiciously.

  With a nod toward the guard, Tamara replied, “He checked my bags and let me have it—and anyway, how would I use it against you? This is just a way for me to make sure that I don’t miss any important information.”

  Samyra squinted at her suspiciously now. “How’d you know I was here anyway?”

  “Sissie Bailey told me—she is your mother, right?”

  The woman sucked her teeth and then turned up her pink lips to one side of her face and flicked some dirt from under her nail.

  “I guess you could say that, although that woman ain’t never did a friggin’ thang for me. She birthed me and my sisters, and that was about it . . . Seemed like we wasn’t nothin’ but a bother to her, and the truth is, she wanted to get laid more of the time than she wanted to be bothered with us.”

  Thinly veiled beneath her tough exterior was a sadness in Samyra’s eyes when she spoke of her mother. Tamara was almost overwhelmed with an unexpected wave of compassion for the woman, who obviously had experienced much instability as a child.

  Samyra stared into space then, and her hazel eyes glazed over as she continued to reminisce. “Shoot, we was in and out of the house, in some dang foster home or back with her, until she went to jail for killing me and my sister’s daddy,” she said with a grunting laugh. “Then the state took us out for good . . . I wasn’t but six then.”

  “What happened to your sisters?”

  “Didn’t my so-called mama tell you?” she asked sardonically.

  Falteringly Tamara replied, “S-s-she didn’t seem to know much about them. Really, I think she only knew where you were because she has your son living with her—you know that, though.”

  The woman sat up straight in the chair and said, “Yeah, I know it, and I hate it, too! I wish every day that Dontay could be anywhere than with her . . . well, almost anywhere, that is. I don’t want my son in the system. Gal, you can get lost in there and nobody could even find you.”

  “I guess I’ve never thought of it that way,” Tamara said quietly.

  The woman glared at her. “Why would you think of it? You work for the system—you don’t know nothin’ about how it is to be moved from home to home. Every now and then you get one who really cares, but most of them don’t care nothin’ ’bout you—and anyway it just don’t seem the same as blood family, you know?”

  For a long moment, Tamara said nothing; then she asked again, quietly, “Your sisters? Do you know where they are, or did they get lost in the system?”

  Samyra took a deep breath and replied, “We all got separated; only me and Lanisha grew up in the same town, but I think I know where they are.” She glued her eyes onto Tamara’s. “Last I heard, Lanisha locked up just like me in Lake County Correctional Center, and Kaytriona live in Dayton, Ohio. She married, got a coupla kids, and probably want to forget she was ever a member of the Bailey family.” She looked at Tamara, turned her lips down, and snickered, “Cain’t blame her for that, now, can we?”

  Tamara gave her a sympathetic smile before asking, “What about Jannice—where is she?”

  The woman eyed her as she said, “You know all about my family, huh? Know everybody’s name and everything. You is a real good friend to this girl that you
used to know. Gal, ain’t nobody in my whole life never helped me like you helpin’ her—shoot, I needs a friend like you!”

  “I really miss her,” said Tamara earnestly, missing the sarcasm dripping from the woman’s statement. “I hope that when I find her again, she will be happy to get this information . . . She was always so unhappy about not knowing her family.”

  Sensing Tamara’s straightforwardness, Samrya gave up her derisive stance and asked, “What does Jannice have to do with all of this, anyway?”

  “I think Jannice is my friend’s mother.”

  “Oh, yeah?”

  “Yes.”

  The woman stared into space and began to muse over long-ago recollections of her sister. “One thing I gotta say: that Jannice sho’ was pretty. Dark skin so black it was shiny almost. She got that from our daddy—he come from Mississippi and was just as black as he could be. She was slim with long, pretty hair that was thick and shiny, and she had sparkly, dark eyes that was a little turned up on the ends.”

  Hopefully Tamara asked, “Where is she?”

  Turning lifeless eyes toward her, in a flat voice the woman replied, “She dead.”

  “Dead?” That was an answer Tamara was totally unprepared for.

  “’Bout five years ago now. She was a pretty girl, real smart and funny, too, but my sister took a lot after ol’ Sissie even though she didn’t live with her long. State moved her up to the Chicago area, and the city can be rough, ’specially when you in the system. She growed up way too fast, had kids young; she was a bad mother, lots of men always around, and the worst habit she got up there in the city was wantin’ that horse.”

  Tamara’s expression was curious. “Horse?”

  “Her-on,” the woman said. “Smack . . . She left her kids alone, sold herself—shoot, she’d even leave a man for that her-on. She told me one day that when she hit it the first time and the warm calm spread over her body like a fuzzy, safe blanket, it was the feelin’ she longed for her whole life. I really think it only took a couple of times, and from then on when she was high was the only time she felt good.”

  Tamara pushed aside the sick feeling that came over her when she thought about the young woman addicted to the powerful drug. “What happened to her kids?”

  She said disgustedly, “Shoot!, the state got ’em all. That girl had seven kids, and I bet she didn’t spend more than a month with any one of them. I swear, she was just straight-up triflin’ in that way . . . a couple of them babies she just dropped and walked out on. It got so bad toward the end that whenever the state found out she was pregnant, they just waited for her to have the baby, so they could take it from her. I don’t think she spent a day with the last three.”

  Tamara exhaled heavily and then asked, “Where is the father of the kids?”

  “Daddies, you mean.” The woman rolled her large eyes toward the ceiling and stroked her round chin again, “Let’s see, Danny Stewart is the papa to the middle three, and he’s dead, too . . . least that’s what I heard through the grapevine, and Victor Davis was papa of the two at the end, and he’s incarc’ated, as they say, just like me.”

  “What about the oldest two? Do you know where their father is?”

  The woman twisted one side of her lips up into smile. “Ol’ Three, that’s what we called him, but Maurice Lewis the Third was his name. His name even sound like he was some kinda prince or somethin’! Whoo-wee . . . he was one fine man, too! Big and tall and dark-eyed with long, pretty eyelashes. His skin was smooth and dark, and he had thick, naturally wavy hair.” She patted her leg hard and looked at Tamara in the face and said, “Girl, if he hadn’t been my sister’s man, I’da went for him—back then, anyway. I mean he looked-ed dat good!”

  Still overwhelmed by the unexpected news about Jannice’s death, Tamara nodded numbly before asking, “Do you know where this ‘Three’ is?”

  The woman twisted her full lips downward and said, “Sho’ don’t, baby gal. I haven’t heard nothin’ ’bout that brotha in years. He mighta went back to the city—he was a local boy, but he’d ran away to Chicago when he was ’bout seventeen, you know. Used-ta run numbers on Fifty-fifth Street. Jannice met him up there when she was only sixteen; he was ten years older. It weren’t till later on she found out that he was born downstate, too.”

  Tamara sighed deeply and turned off the tape recorder—she couldn’t get Jannice’s death off her mind. “How did she die?”

  Samyra turned up her lips disgustedly and replied, “Do you really have to ask, Miss Lady? My sister died the way most drug addicts do—she OD’d.”

  “Where?”

  Samyra was quiet for a moment, and Tamara could see that the woman’s eyes were shiny with unshed tears when she turned to look at her. “She died all alone up there in an old warehouse on the streets of Chi-town. My sister died all alone, just like she’d left them kids all them times, you know?” Her raspy voice was hard when she added, “I guess what goes around really does come around, huh?”

  Tamara was silent, and her own heart felt heavy in her chest as she thought of the woman’s cold, lifeless body lying alone in some abandoned building in that large city.

  The woman repeated softly, “What goes around comes around . . . well, at least it was thataway for Jannice.”

  Tamara cleared her throat and said, “I’m sorry.”

  The woman wiped her eyes hard with the back of her hand and said, “Well . . . I guess it be’s like that sometimes, huh?” With a half smile, she asked, “Any more questions, baby gal? I’m kinda tired now.”

  “No. Thank you, Samyra, for speaking with me.”

  The woman blinked her eyes a couple of times, wiped them with a finger, and then got up and said, “Guard, I’m ready to go.”

  Deep in thought, Tamara’s eyes watched Samyra as she walked toward the door, where the guard met her. Once there, the woman turned to her and said, “Hey, sweet sista, don’t forget to put some money on my books for the smokes, huh?”

  “I’ll do that,” said Tamara, but her lagging reply was too late—the door was already closed, and Samyra Bailey was gone.

  18.

  Stopped Cold

  After pulling her frayed cap down lower on her head, the girl moved as fast as her short legs would allow, turning the corner onto the darkened street. After a quick glance behind her, she hurried down the side of the old, dark underpass. The girl hurried past the small cardboard lean-tos scattered here and there in the grassy area serving as home for those with no other place to lay their head at night. Inadvertently she kicked an empty bottle with the side of her foot, and she stopped in her tracks, holding her breath as she watched it slowly travel down the grassless incline until it came to rest with a quiet thud by a pile of paper and an old pizza box at the bottom of the hill.

  Certain that the noise had brought no undesirables from their hiding places, she began her descent again. At the bottom of the hill, she slid through a large, leafless bush with prickly branches into the small space behind. Then, without hesitation she slid her agile body down into a huge concrete drainage pipe obscured by the leafy growth in front of it. After the new expressway was built, this dead-end street was traveled only by a rare lost automobile, whose driver hurriedly U-turned to get back on the main road once he found himself in this obvious camping ground for the homeless.

  The large duct must have been long forgotten by some construction worker and was now almost an ingrown part of the hill. This nature-made back wall insulated the tube from the wind and weather, and she’d wedged an old plaid blanket between the outer edge of the pipe and the grassy dirt, creating a colorful, wooly partition. Then she’d pushed her meager belongings back into that far corner hidden away from the probing eyes of any chance passerby.

  Once safe inside, the girl reached outside the opening to pull over some loose brush she kept there to conceal the entrance from passersby. Then, with her head hunched between her small shoulders, she walked down the length of the pipe and gave the old duffel
bag that held her few belongings a swift, hard kick. She was taking no chances today! Just yesterday she had her hand poised to open the bag, and without warning a huge rat reared its ugly head out of the top of the bag and bared its yellow fangs at her. Newly frightened by that sobering memory, she gave the old green duffel bag another kick, even harder than the first.

  Finally satisfied that there were no unwanted visitors inside the bag, the girl removed an old towel and then sat down in the tight space. Next she got the old sleeping bag that she’d lucked upon walking by a Dumpster one night, then pulled out another faded blue towel, folding it over carefully twice before she rolled it tightly into a coil.

  Reaching inside her pocket, she pulled out a chocolate candy bar. Her mouth watered as she removed the wrapper from the Hershey bar she’d hoarded all day. Carefully she broke it into tiny pieces. Placing it piece by piece into her mouth, she slowly chewed each small morsel, savoring the taste of the chocolate until there was nothing of its sweetness left on her tongue. Finished much too soon with her dinner for that night, the frustrated girl crumpled the paper, angrily stuffing it back into her pocket, unwilling to throw the wrapper outside and have it land next to her “home.”

  I’ll find someplace to throw it away tomorrow, she thought as she yawned sleepily.

  The girl hated nighttime. Though tired, she was constantly aware of her vulnerable position, alone and out in the wide open, mindful that a bad dog or a rodent, or even a crazed street person, could attack her while she slumbered. But much of the day she walked, constantly moving, too afraid of being caught to sit still very long anywhere. The continual movement exhausted her, and she was bone tired at the end of each day.