Anna in the Afterlife by Merrill Joan Gerber

Author:Merrill Joan Gerber [Gerber, Merrill Joan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, Literary, Anna in the Afterlife
ISBN: 9781480425989
Google: Fp5_C3mETGIC
Amazon: 0815606990
Barnesnoble: 0815606990
Goodreads: 16390105
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: 2001-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

A Good Neighborhood

ANNA HAD BEEN WORRIED for some time that she was a bigot, maybe even a racist. No one ever spoke those words in Brooklyn in 1945 where it was expected that when a colored woman came to clean someone’s house, she would be given her lunch in a special glass plate that was kept separate from the family’s dishes.

Anna’s cleaning girl, Bessie, got a special place in the bathroom where she hung her good dress on a hook and left her street shoes in a carton below. She worked in a loose faded housedress and shoes without backs. (The pink skin of her heels looked to Anna like the pink underside of Gert’s dog.)

Bessie was a woman who never said much. She smiled and nodded a great deal and ate silently with her special utensils, never making a sound, not even clinking her fork against her plate. She made the same brief comment to Anna every week: that she was afraid to leave the house after work because her husband had a habit of hiding in the bushes with a knife, waiting for her to come out so he could cut her up.

Anna actually feared there would be a killing in her alley. She was afraid that when Abram insisted on walking Bessie after work to the trolley stop, Bessie’s husband would kill Abram and leave Anna a penniless widow with two children. Then, like Bessie, she’d have to go to work cleaning other people’s houses.

Which is why—years later—Anna wanted her grown daughters to live in a good neighborhood far from where colored men waited in the bushes with knives. Even when Rosa Parks refused to sit in the back of the bus, even when everyone began calling colored people “black” and then stretched it out to “African-American,” Anna could not forget the scars Bessie-from-Brooklyn had on her face, on her back, and on her arms. If violence was Bessie’s fate, Anna wanted to see to it that it was never the fate of her daughters. (How could she have known that Carol would marry a crazy white man who was far more dangerous than Bessie’s husband?)

When Janet told Anna she and Danny were going to buy a house, Anna counted the life insurance money Abram had left her. Because her granddaughter, Bonnie, was about to enter first grade, Anna offered Janet the down payment for a house on the condition it would be in a part of the city where no men like Bessie’s husband would be lurking, in a school district that was guaranteed to be safe.

“Mom,” Janet said, “We want our children to be comfortable with people of all races. We’d like to live in a multi-ethnic neighborhood.”

Such fancy words everyone spouted these days: “multi-ethnic,” “rainbow coalition,” “family of man”—so many ads showing children with brown and red and yellow and white skin, all clasping their rainbow hands together. Anna didn’t really understand why yellow people, for example, didn’t just stay in yellow countries. It

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