Black & White Read online

  BLACK & WHITE

  LEWIS SHINER

  www.headofzeus.com

  PRAISE FOR BLACK & WHITE

  “Set in Durham, NC, Shiner’s powerful and affecting sixth novel…explores civil rights, race relations and ‘progress’ in that city over the past half century….Shiner weaves Michael’s, Robert’s and Ruth’s stories into a stunning tapestry that captures the hopes, dreams, greed, bigotry, ambitions and betrayals that shaped their destinies and those of our country.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Lewis Shiner’s latest, Black & White, is killer. Strong characters, suspenseful situations, and tremendous insight. A novel that doesn’t flinch from social issues, and is so gracefully written it makes you want to weep. Should not be missed. Lewis Shiner is the real deal, and this is his finest work.”

  — Joe R. Lansdale, author of The Bottoms

  “Shiner, with exhaustive research, uses the story of Hayti and urban renewal as the setting for a compelling novel that is part detective story, part novel of psychological discovery, and, most important, a story about the complex relationships that African-Americans and white people share.”

  —Cliff Bellamy in The Durham Herald-Sun

  “A near-perfect novel—steeped in important political and societal issues, neatly wrapped in the trimmings of a mystery story. With Black & White, Lewis Shiner ascends to a literary realm previously reserved for the likes of Michael Chabon and Jonathan Lethem.”

  —Rick Klaw in The Austin Chronicle

  “Black & White, Lewis Shiner’s long-awaited return to the novel, is social realism so urgent and committed as to be an act of witnessing. Like books by Richard Price and George Pelecanos, Shiner’s is both a page-turner and an urban documentary with a big, fierce heart.”

  —Jonathan Lethem, author of Motherless Brooklyn

  “There are secrets upon secrets in Black & White, sins upon sins, but they all revolve around a single, penetrating absence: Hayti, the African-American community gutted by the construction of the Durham Freeway 40 years ago….Secrets that could never be given voice are at last revealed: violence, sex, corruption and murder, sure, but also the simple, all-too-human cowardice that ruins lives. Black & White reveals itself through these flashback passages as a generational story that is by turns both Shakespearean and quintessentially Faulknerian.”

  —Gerry Canavan in The Independent Weekly

  “Working quietly on a string of brilliant books, Lew Shiner has proven himself as one of America’s best novelists….[Black & White] contains layers of mystery, not the least of which is Michael’s secret origin, but it’s not quite a mystery novel. Vodou is an important part of the plot, but it’s not a supernatural novel. It’s a book about race in America, but it’s not a sociological novel. It’s all of those at once, and a love story, and a family saga—in other words, it’s simply a beautifully written novel, full of tension and action and genuine human emotion.”

  —Jeff Mariotte, Mysterious Galaxy Bookstore

  “Black & White is a page-turner about a thirtysomething comics artist who returns to North Carolina in 2004 and hears a deathbed confession from his father that plunges him into the past—of a vital, successful black community outside of Durham that’s razed for a freeway—and an unexpected present. It’s a masterful portrayal of a post-racial South fighting to be born, and a thoughtful meditation on how personal change effects social change and vice-versa.”

  —Ed Ward in Paste

  On Best of the Year lists from:

  The Los Angeles Times

  The Durham Herald Sun

  First published in the United States in 2008 by Subterranean Press

  This edition first published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Head of Zeus Ltd

  Copyright © Lewis Shiner, 2019

  The moral right of Lewis Shiner to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  9 7 5 3 1 2 4 6 8

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN (E) 9781789541236

  Cover Design: Ben Prior

  Author Photo: © Orla Swift

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  Contents

  Welcome Page

  Praise for Black & White

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Michael

  Monday, October 18

  Tuesday, October 19

  Wednesday, October 20

  Thursday, October 21

  Friday, October 22

  Saturday, October 23

  Sunday, October 24

  Monday, October 25

  Robert

  Michael

  Wednesday, October 27

  Friday, October 29

  Saturday, October 30

  Sunday, October 31

  Monday, November 1

  Tuesday, November 2

  Wednesday, November 3

  Thursday, November 4

  Ruth

  Michael

  Friday, November 5

  Saturday, November 6

  Tuesday, November 9

  Thursday, November 25

  Sunday, November 28

  Tuesday, December 21

  Friday, December 24

  Friday, December 31

  Author’s Note

  By Lewis Shiner

  About the Author

  An Invitation from the Publisher

  MICHAEL

  2004

  Monday, October 18

  He looked at the angry red 5:05 on his travel alarm and knew he would not get back to sleep.

  He swung his legs off the foldout bed and walked five steps to the tiny kitchenette. He was still dressed in last night’s jeans and gray T-shirt, his mouth stale from recycled hotel air. He brushed his teeth and washed his face in the sink, combing wet fingers through his hair.

  Go, he thought.

  His suitcase was packed, as it had been for most of the last month. The only hanging space—as well as the only bathroom and the only exit—was in the bedroom where his mother slept in a tranquilized haze. The rest of his belongings lined up next to the suitcase: a small drawing board, a FedEx box, and two plastic Harris-Teeter grocery sacks.

  He put on his glasses and shoes and added the clock and shaving kit to the suitcase. He was able to roll the suitcase with his right hand and carry everything else in his left.

  He stopped by the door to the hall. His mother’s snoring suspended momentarily as he took his jacket off a hanger and slipped into it. She was in the farther of the twin beds, near the window. The other would have held his father, except that his father was across the street in the Durham VA Medical Center, dying of lung cancer.

  *

  Michael was 35, too old, he thought, to spend this much time with his parents, no matter what the circumstances. From the lobby he called a cab and picked, more or less at random, another faceless suite hotel out of the phone book. The new one was just off I-40 at the eastern edge of Durham, where the city proper blended into Research Triangle Park. During the tech boom RTP had been the Silicon Val
ley of the East Coast, pumping millions into the North Carolina economy. When the bubble burst with the new century, it left behind inflated housing costs, thousands of overqualified, unemployed tech workers, and an abundance of empty hotel rooms.

  The dispatcher told him it would be half an hour. Michael left his belongings with the desk clerk, a heavyset woman with meticulous cornrows. “If my cab comes, tell him to wait for me,” Michael said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

  “All right now, hon.”

  He crossed the street to the hospital and took the elevator to the sixth floor. The charge nurse was at the station and managed a tired smile. “He had a good night,” she said. “Some coughing, but he slept.”

  “That’s something, I guess.”

  “He’ll be sleeping more and more,” she said. “It’s like they make the transition kind of gradual, a little less hold on this world every day.”

  Michael stood in the hallway and watched his father sleep. He had faint wisps of white hair that had grown back since the initial chemo fallout, and his skin had turned a nicotine-stain yellow from jaundice. His thin forearms protruded from red VA pajamas, the left hooked to a morphine infusion pump. An oxygen cannula ran under his nose. As Michael watched, his father coughed wetly, cleared his throat, and shifted his head, all without seeming to regain consciousness.

  After he turned 30, Michael had gone through a period of seeing his father’s face in his own when he looked in the mirror, especially first thing in the morning, when he was still puffy with sleep. That was a different face than his father had now. Now his father’s face was crumpled like a used towel. When his eyes were open they were bloodshot, restless, and haunted.

  It had all happened with terrifying speed. One day his father had seemed all right; the next he had coughed up a huge mouthful of blood. In retrospect he’d been tired and had lost some weight, but there’d been nothing to prepare him for what the doctors found. It was “everywhere,” his mother told Michael on the phone, nearly hysterical. This had been back in Dallas. Michael had flown up from Austin to do what he could. Tests had revealed small cell lung cancer, already in both lungs and metastasized to the lymph nodes, too far gone for surgery and not within what the doctors called “one radiation port.” He’d had a round of chemotherapy and then, inexplicably, insisted on coming to the VA hospital in Durham for what everyone understood would be his final weeks.

  Logic was clearly not the issue. There was a huge VA hospital in San Antonio, and one of the world’s finest cancer centers, M.D. Anderson, in Houston. But North Carolina was where he and Michael’s mother had met and married, where he’d begun his career in the construction business, where Michael had been born. And it was apparently where he had determined to die.

  “Take care of him,” Michael said to the charge nurse, and went back to the Brookwood Inn.

  *

  His cab driver had a heavy accent and was playing a cassette with jangly guitars and hand drums. “What part of Africa are you from?” Michael asked.

  “Benin,” the driver called over his shoulder. “You know it?”

  “I know the name,” Michael said.

  The driver seemed as grateful for someone to talk to as he was for the fare. In the two months he’d been in the US, the dream that had brought him eight thousand miles had already begun to fade. He worked 24-hour days, dozing in the cab between infrequent jobs. “Too many cabbies, not enough work,” he said.

  It was Saturday morning and the sun was not yet up. They were heading east on the Durham Freeway, the road Michael’s father had helped to build. As they crested a hill, the lights of downtown Durham spread to the horizon on Michael’s left. The city seemed frozen in time, low to the ground, built of old-fashioned brick and granite and concrete. Liggett & Myers and the American Tobacco Company, sometime rulers of the city’s economy, had long since moved to New York. The red brick shells of their office complexes and warehouses had been reborn as condos and mini-malls. American Tobacco’s signature water tower and smokestack, complete with newly repainted Lucky Strike logo, now overlooked the last stages of a major renovation project.

  Michael’s father had smoked Lucky Strike for over 50 years.

  Next door was the swank new Durham Bulls Athletic Park, whose brickwork seamlessly matched its surroundings. Next to that was an auto dealership, and after that, absences. The parking garage that took the place of the train station that had given Durham its name. The vacant lots and abandoned buildings that used to be the most prosperous black neighborhood in the south.

  It was called Hayti for the Caribbean island, but pronounced with a long final “i”: HATE-eye. Over 500 black businesses had fallen to the bulldozer when the Durham Freeway went through the middle of it. All that was left was St. Joseph’s African Methodist Episcopal Church, coming up now on the right. The original building dated to 1891; the modern brick extension that grew out of the south side was the Hayti Heritage Center. Further south along Fayetteville Street were the sprawling Victorian homes that had once belonged to the first families of Hayti, and beyond that the campus of North Carolina Central University, formerly North Carolina College for Negroes.

  These few facts Michael had learned in the last week from a black janitor at the hospital, a man Michael’s age with wild hair and a long, pointed beard. He called Michael “young brother,” and asked where he was from. He’d started talking about Durham’s history before Michael could tell him about his father’s part in it; by the time he’d finished, Michael no longer wanted to mention it.

  The sun was lightening the sky in the southeast, and suddenly Michael saw something at the top of the St. Joseph’s steeple that he’d missed in the dozen or more times he’d driven past it in the last month.

  “Turn around, can you?” he said to the driver.

  “Sir?” Michael could see the driver staring at him in the rearview mirror. He realized how unhinged he must look—over six feet tall, not overweight, exactly, but soft and pale, thinning brown hair, bloodshot eyes, slept-in clothes, possessions in plastic bags.

  “Take the next exit, turn around, and come back to that church.”

  “You don’t want to go to the hotel?”

  “Yes, in a minute. I need to stop at the church first.”

  The driver shrugged, exited, and turned under the freeway. Run-down houses were visible from the access road, partly obscured by oaks and sycamores in a riot of autumnal orange and yellow. They crossed the freeway again and pulled into the asphalt parking lot.

  “Stop here for a second,” Michael said. Along the south retaining wall someone had painted names and primitive likenesses of famous Hayti residents: Moore, Merrick, and Shepard, who’d founded North Carolina Mutual Life, along with other names that Michael didn’t know. Steps led up to the brick and steel of the Heritage Center, and above it all towered the steeple.

  Michael reached for the car door.

  “You are getting out here?” the driver asked nervously.

  “Just for a second.”

  From where he stood, resting his hands on the open door, he could see the thing at the top of the steeple clearly. It was made of black wrought iron, an intricate design of intersecting curves, heart shaped, on an axis like a weather vane.

  Michael reached into the cab and dug a sketchbook out of one of the plastic bags. “Keep the meter running,” he told the driver. He got the thing down in a couple of minutes. Roger could tell him exactly what it was, but Michael didn’t need him to know it had no business on top of a church.

  He got in the cab. “You know what that is?” he asked the driver.

  “It’s a church, sir.”

  “The thing on top of the steeple. Where the cross should be.”

  “I never saw that before.”

  “It’s called a vévé,” Michael said. “It’s the symbol of a voodoo god.”

  *

  Michael was the artist on a comic book named Luna, and issues 17 through 20 had been set in New Orleans. The
writer, Roger Fornbee, had sent the title character there to battle the Haitian snake lwa, Damballah. Roger had made a point of saying vodou instead of voodoo, and he’d shipped Michael stacks of books for research. His scripts, detailed as always, called for vévés woven into the background texture of the panels. The heart shape belonged to Erzulie, a sort of vodou love goddess, though potentially a rather prickly and dangerous one.

  When he used his credit card to check in at the hotel it occurred to him that he was leaving an obvious trail. His parents could find him with little effort, if they wanted to. Whether they would bother was another question.

  He carried his things up to his room and used his cell phone to call Roger. In LA it was barely past 3 a.m., meaning Roger would be in full caffeine and nicotine stride, sending out long, rambling emails, flipping through reference books with page crumpling intensity, and, if up against the tail end of a deadline, possibly even writing.

  His wife of some years, whom Roger had known since they were kids, kept normal hours, sent their two daughters off to grade school, cooked, cleaned house, and answered most of Roger’s fan mail in his name. She never traveled and Michael had never met her, never even talked to her on the phone, as Roger always used his “mobile,” as he called it.

  “It’s me,” Michael said.

  “So it is,” Roger said, in what he’d once explained was not a “British accent” but a North London public school accent. “What’s the latest on the old man?”

  “Well, in our last episode, you may remember, they had to discontinue the chemo because the cancer had moved into his spinal column and they needed to irradiate that. Now they’ve had to knock off the radiation because his lungs are losing function.”

  “Christ. Poor bastard.”

  “Stubborn bastard. This is probably it. I don’t think he’s got more than a couple of weeks left at most, and he still won’t talk to me.”