"So who is this Blackwelder? He doesn't talk like an American."
From the start Amarelle was not impressed with the Bronx – she didn't like
the area, the neighborhood - and she was sceptical of their landlord's claim to
property ownership.
They lived in a two-family dwelling, occupying the first floor; but all around,
encircling their oasis of independent housing, was the towering brick of apartment
buildings, some occupied, others empty and boarded up. And the streets were so
dirty; the cracked sidewalks threatening to twist your ankle; and the noise, nerve-
shattering at all hours of the night!
The people she encountered walking about seemed happily jobless, dregs of the
earth, to be feared. Bedraggled men pushing shopping carst filled with swollen dark
plastic bags. "In the middle of the roadway, pushing shopping carts! You have to drive
'round them," she reported. And the children, foul-mouthed and impudent beyond
belief! Quick to violence, disdainful of authority, intimidating even to their own
mothers!
So who was this Blackwelder?
Radix had spent many summer mornings and afternoons on his stoop getting
acquainted with fellows on the block; they liked to hang out in the shade. They
had a lot to say about Blackwelder; they'd watched him come and go about his
business for years; they'd even traded insults with him and gave good imitations of
his accent.
Blackwelder himself showed up in a van. He was doing repair work on the
building to the left of the one he owned. Now and then he'd take a lunch break
and join Radix on the stoop; he'd drink a beer and chomp through an Italian loaf
with salami; and he offered with laughter morsels of information about himself,
for he was intrigued and flattered by his tenant's interest in him.
"And where he get money to actually own a building?" Amarelle asked.
"Well, for one thing he's glad to have us as tenants.He had problems with the
previous tenants.They left garbage backs on the sidewalk for the dogs to tear open;
got him cited by the city. And at one stage they didn't pay rent for months. He had
a hard time getting them out. By the way the top floor's vacant, but he lives there."
"How you mean, he lives there?"
"He doesn't really live there. It's furnished and everything, but sometimes he
overnights there."
"So where does he live?"
"He has New Jersey licence plates, so I guess New Jersey. And one more thing,
he says he found tenants for the basement, a Nigerian fellow and his wife. They
moving in at the end of the month."
"Lord help us."
Amarelle was unhappy every day she stepped out to her job, her dignified
manner like steel plating on her chest.
"He's from the islands," Radix told her one evening.
"Which island?"
"Didn't say…but he speaks French creole with the fellow who helps him
…which could mean he's from St Lucia or Dominica. Or Martinique. Or maybe
Haiti."
"Well, he don't look like a property owner."
�
160; "He was a fisherman back in the islands, then he came up here. Now he calls
himself a handyman specialist."
"Well, something about all that sound fishy, that's all I have to say."
FARJOURNEY CARIBBEAN 