The Turner House by Angela Flournoy Page A

damn near
everybody.
And the house is basically worthless. Why?”
    â€œCause people like Cha-Cha and them always get taken advantage of,” he said. “So scared of breaking the rules, like somebody is even thinking about them. Wasn’t nobody thinking about us when they
made
these rules. But they wanna sit around and follow them.”
    There was a difference between violent, destructive crimes and bending rules that were prejudiced or predatory to start. Over the last few months, as the housing bubble burst, he’d read article after article about banks pressuring black and Latino homebuyers, even those whose income and credit scores could have warranted a better deal, into subprime mortgages. It was illegal and deplorable to steal from your neighbor, yes. Manipulating a housing system that had manipulated people who looked like you for decades? He saw no harm in that. But for as long as he could remember, Cha-Cha and Tina had acted like the integrity police. They had been above getting illegal cable installed in the nineties when everyone had “black boxes.” They wouldn’t let anyone drive their cars if they weren’t on the insurance, not even around the corner. A couple years back they had overextended themselves financially to prevent their son Chucky from filing for the unemployment compensation he was entitled to. It was a particular sort of Turner weakness: self-sabotaging self-righteousness masked as self-reliance. It made Troy sick.
    â€œYou know, Cha-Cha’s not the only one who put some money and time into that house,” he said. “When I first got out the service, I lived on Yarrow with Mama, and Cha-Cha
never
came over to see how I was doing, let alone how Mama was doing. He came over to ‘handle business,’ like check on the water heater or whatever, but that’s it. And doesn’t spending time count more than his stupid money, especially cause his money comes with strings attached? Like, when I was in high school I had to take the bus out to Cha-Cha’s house early every morning, and Tina would take me and Chucky and Todd to school. It’s cause they had a better basketball program over there, and by that time Kettering was a shithole. I’d wake up around six just to get there, and wait for Tina to wake up around seven-thirty and take us. I had made it on this traveling team, and I needed new team shoes and a special jersey. Daddy and Mama didn’t have the money, so they told me to ask Cha-Cha, which is what they
always
said when they didn’t have the money, but that’s not my fault, right? Remember I’m only fourteen, fifteen years old. The shoes and jersey were like a hundred dollars.
    â€œDo you know that before he would give me the money he made me get to his house at
five in the morning
for a month? He didn’t want me to shovel snow, or do any chores or nothing. I just had to get there at five, and he’d come down the stairs in his pajamas when he felt like it, let me into the house, then go back to sleep. And his own sons were upstairs sleep the whole time! Fuck was the point of that, huh? Even in the navy, if they made us wake up at the crack of dawn, there was a point, we did some drills or whatever. Me standing outside, I couldn’t even do my homework, I stood there on the front step looking like a fucking burglar. I know he just did it cause he
could.
And every day that I had to go to practice without the gear I felt like shit cause you know the white boys on the team came back with their money the
very next day.
You know how cold it is at three-thirty in the morning in the winter? I’d be standin at the bus stop on the east side hopin I didn’t get jumped, freezin my ass off.”
    Troy breathed quickly. The veins in Jillian’s neck relaxed.
    â€œI’m sorry, babe. He probably thought he was building your character or something.”
    â€œIt’s true,” she added after a