In the black south-side ghetto of Chicago, on the night Pam Tate died, Sidonia Harper lay on her cot in her second-story tenement room, staring into the darkness long after she should have been sleeping.
It was amazing, Siddie thought, what you could tell just from the sounds and smells that came to your room. Here, in the summer heat, there was no hiding from the rank garbage smell that came billowing up from the fire-escape alley outside her window. No fresh air ever penetrated here — you didn’t expect it to. In the darkness outside she could hear others, sitting out on the metal steps above and below — talking, smoking, now and then laughing, a beer can clattering down onto the alley pavement, a giggling discussion of the weatherbeaten tomcats patrolling the overflowing trash cans. Somewhere else in the building a party was going on, with shrieks and whoops and the thrumming of punk-rock music. And somewhere, inevitably, somebody was cooking cabbage, adding its reek to the fetid garbage stench. Siddie knew them all by their sounds and smells — but there was no way she could go out to join them.
It had been a long day for Siddie. The Man from social services had come today, like he’d said he would, to bring her his answer, like he’d said he would, and the answer was no. There wasn’t going to be any banister-lift to carry her and her wheelchair down from this second-story flat to the ground floor below. There wasn’t any money for that, the Man said. Everything had been cut back, so they had to do without the frills. A banister-lift wasn’t a matter of life or death, the Man had pointed out. And after all, she did have her chair. It wasn’t as if she had to stay in bed all the time.
So there she was, she thought, good old no-frills Siddie, taking it on the jaw again. Maybe once a week, if she was lucky, she or her mother could get a couple of the boys from upstairs to carry her down the long flight to the ground floor, along with her chair, so she could have an hour — a whole hour! — of freedom from this tiny second-floor prison. The rest of the time — well, this was home, baby, and this was where she stayed.
She stirred, got her arms under her, and laboriously shifted the upper half of her body over from one side of the cot to the other for a while. Some eighteen-year-old girls might have wept at the news the Man had brought today, but not Sidonia Harper. There was a dogged toughness about her that made even her mother wonder sometimes. As soon as she’d heard what the Man had to say, she’d started revising her thinking about more freedom, making peace with the denial. She’d learned how to make peace with a lot of things since that awful night two years before when she’d gone through the fire-escape rail and down to the concrete alley below …
So there wouldn’t be any lift to carry her chair down. Well, that was all right. Someday, she thought, things were going to be different and she wasn’t going to need any lift.