A Quiet Teacher by Adam Oyebanji

Author:Adam Oyebanji [Oyebanji, Adam]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Severn House
Published: 2022-07-18T00:00:00+00:00

12:45 P.M. EST

Greg hadn’t bothered to look up Demetrius Freedman’s address on a map, but he was not surprised to find his GPS taking him out of Bloomfield and into the Hill District. It was, after all, a historically black neighborhood, and precisely the sort of place Demetrius Freedman would choose to live. He was driving along Bigelow, the spectacular road that ran halfway up the bluffs that rose steep and fierce from the brown depths of the Allegheny River. To his right, the landscape plunged down hundreds of feet through Polish Hill and the Strip District to the wide water below. To his left, a vertiginous wall of rock marked the lower shoulder of Upper Hill. He followed the instructions on his screen and made a hard left onto the road that appeared there, climbing so steeply he briefly imagined he was driving a fighter jet instead of a Mini Cooper.

What brought his imagination crashing back to earth was the bleakness of his surroundings. Climbing up the lower slopes of Upper Hill, the houses, swallowed up by woodland, and some of which must once have been something to behold, were rundown to the verge of collapse. Signs of poverty were everywhere: broken-down cars; a decrepit general store with every window barred; bus stops the Port Authority had never bothered to repair. Sidewalks appeared and disappeared seemingly at random, quite possibly consumed by the weeds that forced their way through uneven flagstones. And of people, there was no sign. For a city neighborhood, it was dispiritingly quiet. The world, after it had ended.

And yet, as he wound his way higher and higher, the air seemed to be getting fresher, the light brighter. The Appalachian ridges and hillsides that hemmed in the city’s other neighborhoods had no place here. Upper Hill rose above it all, surrounded by nothing but boundless winter sky. Greg, a child of the great wide open, who found the city’s deeply notched valleys vaguely claustrophobic, was suddenly breathing a little easier.

When his Mini Cooper finally leveled out, Greg found himself in a beautiful green square overlooked by a massively impressive water tower. The square – a little park, really – with large mature trees, was faced on four sides by grand, three-story houses; some dilapidated to the point of ruin, others rehabbed to a standard that would have fetched vast sums of money in Squirrel Hill or Shadyside. It was one of the latter, festooned with black-and-gold flags, and other Steelers regalia, that turned out to be the home address of one Dr Demetrius Freedman.

‘Come in, brother. Make yourself at home,’ Demetrius said, ushering him inside. Greg caught a brief glimpse of a bright living room, dominated by a huge, plate-glass window affording spectacular views across the Allegheny. He was gently shooed downstairs and into a luxuriously furnished den. No plate-glass windows here, just a TV screen so big it wouldn’t have looked out of place in a movie theater. Half-a-dozen men and two teenage boys, all African American, were already present.

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