Chapter 15

Do you see it now? Where the spine of the story begins and ends? It runs along the length of the rise and decline of the family, the city, the country, because the system, the animal, runs its course and then keeps running, longer than it should. Call it capitalism. Call it American. Call it what you want. There isn’t an animal born yet that doesn’t get sick someday, and it gets sick in Cleveland in 1966, because too many people have been left out, and decide they’ve had enough.

It’s Monday, July 18, 1966. In the afternoon, a prostitute walks into the Seventy-Niners’ Café, a bar on the corner of 79th Street and Hough Avenue. She’s there looking for money; she needs to get some together for the children of another prostitute who just died. Owner Dave Feigenbaum tells her to leave. She balks. Soon they’re swearing at each other. She storms out, and Feigenbaum says something under his breath about serving Negroes. It’s about five o’clock in the afternoon. A little while later, a guy walks in and gets a pint of wine, asks for a pitcher of ice water and a glass to go with it. It’s ninety degrees out. Feigenbaum says no; someone says he overhears him talking to his waitress, too. Don’t serve no niggers no water. Maybe he’s thinking back to the winter, when someone tried to burn up his car. Maybe he thinks the people in the neighborhood don’t like him and has decided to be hateful and return the favor. Maybe he’s a virulent racist. Or maybe it’s just too hot and things are too tough in Cleveland, not enough is going well for anyone. Maybe it’s everything all at once, the race, the poverty, the sense that it’s all coming apart. But that’s how it starts. The guy who doesn’t get his water gets angry. He tells all his friends in the place what happened, and he’s nice and loud about it. Then he’s out of there. Minutes later there’s a brown paper bag stuck to the door of the place with writing scrawled on it: No water for Niggers. Now there are a bunch of people gathered around it, and they’re not happy. The Feigenbaum brothers call the police and then step outside themselves. They’ve got a pistol and a rifle. Then the police show up, and everything explodes.

Three grocery stores are on fire, a drugstore, a clothing store. Then the fires are everywhere. The police set up blockades, cut off twenty blocks from the rest of the city to try to contain it. The firemen go in and get bottles and rocks thrown at them. The fire hoses get slashed, along with police cruisers’ tires; the cars’ windows get broken in. The police set up a command station at East 73rd and Hough, and soon they’re taking fire from snipers nesting in the apartments around them. The police captain there says later that it’s like a western. A woman named Joyce Arnett dies in the crossfire that night, trying to get home to her baby daughters. Three other people are shot. Eight people go to the hospital with wounds from rocks and bottles. A policeman who served in World War II says it reminds him of London during the blitzkrieg. The next day the looters are selling what they stole as fast as they can. The mayor thinks about Watts and Chicago and calls in the National Guard in the afternoon. The shooting starts before they arrive. A stray bullet gets a man named Percy Giles right in the head, they say, while he’s trying to help a friend board up his store. He dies in the hospital. The National Guard arrives and things settle down, but there’s still plenty of looting the next day. The third night, Hough is quieter; there are three National Guardsmen at every intersection, soldiers accompanying the police. There’s a fire just south of the place and the police shoot up a family in their car who are trying to get to safety. On the fourth day, there’s an outbreak of over a hundred fires, half of them started by Molotov cocktails. It doesn’t settle down until the end of the week, and by then, the damage has been done.

A year later, Hough Avenue’s still destroyed buildings and streets full of garbage. The kids walking it don’t have enough clothes or enough to eat. There are more murders, more firebombs. They say later that the only thing keeping the entire neighborhood from going up in flames in the summer of 1967 is Carl Stokes’s run for mayor—Stokes, Cleveland’s only black candidate for mayor who stands a chance of winning. Cool it for Stokes, they say. They do, and Stokes wins. But Stokes can’t save Hough. Thirty years later, they’re calling it an urban prairie because most of the houses and apartment buildings are gone. There are just the streets and the sidewalks, the telephone poles, a house or two left on an entire block next to an apartment building that’s boarded up and falling over. The rest of the block is weeds turning into forest. From the air, you can see the dark outlines of the foundations where all the other buildings used to be, and it breaks people’s hearts. They argue, then, about what happened in 1966, about whether the riots bled Hough out or whether they happened because Hough was already bleeding. Fifteen years later the city makes a move, and houses get built in Hough again. The empty blocks get filled in. But then it looks like a suburb, and people are angry about it. The city’s giving up on being a city, some people say. No, say others. The city sees the writing on the wall. All those people left, all those jobs left, and they’re not coming back.

They’re having an argument about the future, and the public version of it is all sparks, thrown off from the friction between practicality and ideology. The nostalgia for the past, the push for progress, the American stubbornness in insisting that everything always gets better. But it’s getting harder and harder not to see how the big wheel’s turning. How they’ve been on a long arc going up, and now they’re on the other side going down. Some of the people, in America and elsewhere, want to turn around; there must be a way back, they think, a way to climb up the rim as it’s moving downward beneath them. Some of them are turning and facing it, trying to save what they can, to prepare their children for the harder world that’s coming. And a few of them are checking out the approaching chaos, speculating on just how things will fall apart. How the laws will weaken, and how the market—the market for everything—will rise to fill the space. How the people around them will become more vulnerable, more desperate. And then they think about where they need to be to profit from it.

It’s August 1966. The second stroke, the one that kills Peter Henry Hightower, gets him in his sleep. For Peter, it’s like a switch is flipped, a plug gets pulled, and the dreams and memories left in his head are gone. Lights out. Sylvie comes into his bedroom in the morning to check on him because she doesn’t hear him stir. She can tell from the doorway what’s happened. The covers are off him and his right leg is bent, his foot tucked underneath his body. His left arm is out straight, hanging over the edge of the bed. Sylvie doesn’t make a sound. Maybe for her siblings, the line between their father alive and their father dead is bright and clear, a crack in the sidewalk. But Sylvie’s been living with no one but Peter for years now. She’s seen how there’s a gray country between life and death; her father’s taken his sweet time walking across it, and Sylvie’s been standing on the edge of it, watching him go. She’s had a long time to prepare. She goes to him, arranges the body like he’s still sleeping to give him some dignity. Puts his pillow beneath his head and tucks the blankets around him. Then makes the calls, to the hospital, to the police. To Stefan, who sighs and thanks her for the news, agrees to break it to Jackie. She calls the rest of her siblings, first Henry, then Rufus. Muriel last, and only after the authorities have arrived to take the body away; she knows that Muriel would have rushed over, lost it a little bit, made the necessary parts of dealing with a corpse harder. There’s some ruthlessness in that decision, to deny Muriel the chance to see her father by herself before he’s packed away. But there’s compassion in it, too; she knows that their father’s body isn’t going to give Muriel whatever sense of completion she’s looking for. It’ll never end, Sylvie thinks. Never be done. And something moves in her, a sense of acceptance, of where she finds herself. Of what she has to do.

So she’s quiet, quieter than usual, when Henry comes a few days before the funeral to sort out the paperwork for their father’s estate. He gives Sylvie a good look when he finds out just how orderly it all is. I know you’re smart, Sylvie, he says, but I still underestimated you. Sylvie just smiles. Let me know if you need anything else, she says, and gets her first taste of the power her mother felt when she married Peter Henry Hightower. Sylvie knows something Henry doesn’t, a big thing. To her, it’s like Henry’s going through everything in a grand house, and as thorough as he prides himself on being, he never finds the switch under the shelf of a bookcase in the library that would make the walls part, show him the wing of the house he didn’t know was there. She doesn’t say anything even during the fight in the dining room. Raise your hand if you think equitable doesn’t mean equal, but fair, Rufus says. He thinks he’s saving her from poverty. What’s wrong with you, Henry? Don’t you ever see regular people anymore? She’s still mum even to Rufus hours later, when he explains to her in the garden what he’s going to do. I’d do anything to keep you in this house, he says. I don’t need the money. She feels a little guilty; it would be so easy to tell him what reins have been handed to her, the direction she’s going in. But nothing is certain yet, her transition to power in the underworld isn’t assured. So she just gives him a hug. I owe you one, she says. I owe you everything. Someday I’ll pay it back. And after the family departs and the house is quiet again, she meets with Michael Rizzi. Tells her how much Rufus gave her and what she’s planning to use it for. I don’t want to take my father’s place, she says. I want to be bigger than he ever was.

In time, she is. Big enough that she needs to tell Henry how she’s still living in that giant house in Bratenahl, because he’s sensitive enough to the money to know that the legitimate numbers don’t quite add up, even as she doesn’t need to tell any of her other siblings anything; she lets them think she’s just being careful with what she has. Big enough that she can’t launder the money she makes fast enough to spend it; she has piles of cash in the bedrooms, in the basement, under the stairs, but she can’t hire anyone to fix the roof without drawing the authorities’ attention to her. She has her hands in everything in town, in all that’s left of Cleveland’s criminal heyday—the Irish, the Italians, the Eastern Europeans, the Jews. She does the financial stuff, the loan-sharking, the money laundering. She’s the bank for some of the drug trade, for gambling circuits, for real estate swindles, for human trafficking. They always tell her she doesn’t need to know what she’s investing in, where the money’s coming from, but she always finds out, she always knows. They don’t know how she does it; her own husband goes to his grave in 1986 not knowing how she’s always four steps ahead, even of the FBI, which is aware only of the fact of her existence. When the criminals don’t call her the White Lady, they call her the Goddess: She’s the all-seeing eye, knows what everyone’s up to. And in the early 1990s, when the Soviet Union implodes, her eye turns east, to the criminals rising up there, and she buys in. What are you doing that for? Kosookyy says to her, over coffee in the living room. They’re bad news over there. And Sylvie gives him a little smile. For protection, she says, I want to know who they are. She sees how the criminals in Eastern Europe are just capitalists run amok. The governments and the borders between the countries are dissolving, there’s no one in charge; there’s only the logic of the market, putting prices on cars, factories, houses, towns. People. What are you made of? How much are you worth? It’s all for sale, and the price is so low, for everything, everyone. No wonder it’s so brutal. But then Sylvie looks out the window, thinks about what her city, her country, is becoming, and thinks she sees the future on the other side of the ocean. The new gangsters are coming here, she tells Kosookyy. And when they arrive, either they’ll eat us alive or we’ll become them. Though I’m not sure I see the difference. Even before her nephew Peter, Rufus’s son, shows up at her door, she’s figuring a way out, and she’s learned from her father’s mistakes. Right before she goes, she has to try to kill it all and set it on fire. Not just one man. All of it, all that she’s built since her father’s death and all her father built before she was born. She has to slaughter it and light it all up, make it burn quick and hot, until there’s nothing left but ashes. That part is easy, though there’ll be so much blood. The trick, the hard part, is in escaping the bullets, the knives, the flames. In making sure that the blood that flows doesn’t belong to her or the people she loves; and that no more flows again.