Over the years there’d been rumors of ill health: diabetes? arthritis? (Seeing how Ednetta had put on weight, fifty pounds at least.) Taking the children to relatives’ homes to hide from Anis Schutt in one of his bad drunk moods but Ednetta had not ever called 911 and had not ever fled to St. Theresa’s Women’s Shelter on Twelfth Street as other women (including her younger sister Cheryl) had done at one time or another nor had she gone to Passaic County Family Court to ask for an injunction to keep Anis Schutt at a distance from her and the children.
Ednetta Frye, who loved her children. Who did most of the work raising Anis Schutt’s several children (from his only marriage, with the wife Tana who’d died) along with her own—five or six of them in the cramped household though Anis’s boys being older hadn’t remained long.
One of the sons at age nineteen shot dead on a Newark street in a drive-by fusillade of bullets.
Another son at age twenty-three incarcerated at Rahway on charges of drug-dealing and aggravated assault, twelve to twenty years.
They were an endangered species—black boys. Ages twelve to twenty-five, you had to fear for their lives in inner-city Pascayne, New Jersey.
Ednetta had a son, too—ten years old. And another, younger daughter, Sybilla’s half-sister.
Of the women to whom Ednetta Frye showed Sybilla’s picture this morning several knew Anis Schutt “well” and at least two of them—(Lucille Hersh, Marlena Swann)—had had what you’d call “relations” with the man, years before.
Lucille’s twenty-year-old son Rodrick was Anis’s son, no doubt about that. Marlena’s eight-year-old daughter Angelina was Anis’s daughter, he’d never contested it. Exactly how many other children Anis had fathered wasn’t clear. He’d started young, as Anis said, laughing—hadn’t had time for counting.
It was painful to Ednetta of course—running into these women. Seeing these women cut their eyes at
her
.
Worse, seeing these women with children the rumor was, Anis was the father.
That
was nasty.
You could see that poor woman scared out of her wits like she ain’t even aware who she talking to. I saw it myself, Ednetta come up to me an my friend Jewel in the grocery like she never knew who we were—Ednetta Frye be Jewel’s enemy on account of Anis who ain’t done shit to help Jewel out, all the time he promise he would. And Ednetta looks at us with like these blind eyes sayin ’Scuse me! Hopin you can help me! My daughter S’b’lla—you seen her?
That big girl gone only a day or two and Ednetta was actin like the girl be dead, we thought it was kind of exaggerated but when you’re a mother, you do worry. And when a girl is that age like S’b’lla, you can’t trust her.
You wouldn’t ask Ednetta if she’d called the police, knowin how Anis feel about police and how police feel about Anis.
So we said to her, we will look for S’b’lla for sure! We will ask about her,
everyone we know, and if we see her, or learn of her, we will inform Ednetta right away.
And she was cryin then, she like to hugged us hard and she say, Thank you! And God bless you, I am praying He will bless me and my baby and spare her from harm.
And we stand there watchin that poor woman walk away like she be drunk or somethin, like she be walkin in her sleep, and we’re sayin to each other what you say at such a time when nobody else can hear—Poor Ednetta Frye, sure am happy I ain’t her!
OCTOBER 7, 1987
EAST VENTOR AT DEPP
PASCAYNE, NEW JERSEY
Y
ou hear that? That like cryin sound?”
In the night she’d heard it, whatever it was—had to hope it wasn’t what it might be.
Might be a trapped bird, or animal—not a baby . . . She didn’t want to think it might be a baby.
A soft-wailing whimpering sound. It rose, and it fell—confused with her sleep which was a thin jittery sleep to be pierced by a sliver of light, or a sliver of sound. Those swift dreams that pass before your eyes like colored shadows on a wall. And mixed with night-noises—sirens, car motors, barking dogs, shouts. The worst was hearing gunshots, and screams. And waiting to hear what came next.
She’d lived in this neighborhood of Red Rock all of her life which was thirty-one years. Bounded by the elevated roadway of the New Jersey Turnpike some twelve blocks from the river, and four blocks wide: Camden Avenue, Crater, East Ventor, Barnegat. Following the
“riot” of August 1967—(
riot
was a white word, a police word, a word of reproach and judgment you saw in headlines)—Red Rock had become a kind of inner-city island, long stretches of burnt-out houses, boarded-up and abandoned buildings, potholed streets and decaying sidewalks and virtually every face you saw was dark-skinned where you might recall—(Ada recalled, as a child)—you’d once seen a mix of skin tones as you’d once seen stores and businesses on Camden Avenue.
She’d gone to Edson Elementary just up the block. She’d taken a bus to the high school at Packett and Twelfth where she’d graduated with a business degree and where for a while she’d had a job in the school office—typist, file clerk. There were (white) teachers who’d encouraged her to get another degree and so she’d gone to Passaic County Community College to get a degree in English education which qualified her for teaching in New Jersey public schools where sometimes she did teach, though only as a sub. There was prejudice against community-college teacher-degrees, she’d learned. A prejudice in favor of hiring teachers with degrees from the superior Rutgers education school which meant, much of the time, though not all of the time, white or distinctly light-skinned teachers. Ada didn’t want to think it was a particular prejudice against
her.
She’d lain awake in the night hearing the faint cries thinking it was probably just a bird trapped in an air shaft. This old tenement building, five floors, no telling what was contained within the red-brick walls or in the cellar that flooded in heavy rainfall when the Passaic overflowed its banks and sewage rushed through the gutters. A pigeon with a broken wing, that had flung itself against a windowpane. A stray dog that had wandered into the building smelling food or the possibility of food and had gotten trapped somewhere when a door blew shut.
“Nah I don’t hear nothin’. Aint hearin anything.”
“Right now. Hear? It’s somebody hurt, maybe . . .”
“Some junkie or junkie-ho’. No fuckin way we gonna get involved, Ada. You get back here.”
Ada laughed sharply. Ada detached her mother’s fingers from her wrist. She was a take-charge kind of person. Her teachers had always praised her and now she was a teacher herself, she would take charge. She wasn’t the kind of person to ignore somebody crying for help practically beneath her window.
Down the steep creaking steps with the swaying banister she was having second thoughts. In this neighborhood even on Sunday morning you could poke your nose into something you’d regret. Ma was probably right: drug dealers, drug users, kids high on crack, hookers and homeless people, somebody with a mental illness . . .
She couldn’t hear the cries now. Only in her bedroom had she really heard, distinctly.
Years ago the factory next-door had been a canning factory—Jersey Foods. Truckloads of fish gutted and cooked and processed into a kind of mash, heavily salted, packed into cans. And the cans swept along the assembly line, and loaded into the backs of trucks. Tons of fish, a pervading stink of fish, almost unbearable in the heat of New Jersey summers.
Jersey Foods had been shut down in 1979 by the State Board of Health. The derelict old building was partially collapsed, following a fire of “suspicious origin”; its several acres of property, including an asphalt parking lot with cracks wide as crevices, as well as the rust-colored building, lay behind a six-foot chain-link fence that was itself badly rusted and partially collapsed. Signs warning
NO TRESPASSING
had not deterred neighborhood children from crawling through the fence and playing in the factory despite adults’ warnings of danger.
In the other direction, on the far side of the dead end of Depp Street, was another shuttered factory. Even more than Jersey Foods,
United Plastics was off-limits to trespassers for the poisons steeped in its soil.
You’d think no one would be living in this dead-end part of Pascayne—but rents were cheap here. And no part of inner-city Pascayne was what you’d call
safe
.
It was Ada’s hope to be offered a full-time teacher’s job in an outlying school district in the city, or in one of the suburbs. (All of the suburbs were predominantly white but “integrated” for those who could afford to live there.) Then, she’d move her family out of squalid East Ventor.
Six years she’d been hoping and she hadn’t given up yet.
“God! Don’t let it be no
baby
.”
(Well—it wouldn’t be the first time a baby had been abandoned in this run-down neighborhood by the river. Dead-end streets, shut-up warehouses and factories, trash spilling out of Dumpsters. Some weeks there wasn’t any garbage pickup. A heavy rain, there came flooding from the river, filthy smelly water in cellars, rushing along the gutters and in the streets. Walking to the Camden Street bus Ada would see rats boldly rooting in trash just a few feet away from her ankles. [She had a particular fear of rats biting her ankles and she’d get rabies.] Nasty things fearless of Ada as they were indifferent to human beings generally except for boys who pelted them with rocks, chased and killed them if they could. And what the rats might be dragging around, squeaking and eating and their hairless prehensile tails uplifted in some perky way like a dog, you didn’t want to know. For sure, Ada didn’t want to know. Terrible story she’d heard as a girl, rats devouring some poor little baby left in some alley to die. And nobody would reveal whose baby it was though some folks must’ve known. Or who left the baby in such a place. And the white cops for sure didn’t give a damn or even Family Services and for years Ada had liked to make herself sick and scared in weak moods thinking
of rats devouring a baby and so, whenever she saw rats quickly she turned her eyes away.)
Ada was uneasy remembering Ednetta Frye from the previous morning. She’d seen the distraught woman first crossing Camden Avenue scarcely aware of traffic, then in the Korean grocery, then approaching people in Hicks Square who stared at her as you’d stare at a crazy person. Ednetta had seemed so distracted and disoriented and frightened, nothing like her usual self you could talk and laugh with—it was Ednetta who did most of the talking and the laughing at such times. There’d been occasions when Ednetta had a bruised face and a swollen lip but she’d laugh saying she’d walked into some damn door. You guessed it had to be Anis Schutt shoving the woman around but it wasn’t anything extreme, the way Ednetta laughed about it.
Ada was at least ten years younger than Ednetta Frye. She’d substitute-taught at the middle school when Ednetta’s daughter Sybilla had been a student there, a year or two ago; she knew the Fryes from the neighborhood, though not well.
They were neighbors, you could say. East Ventor crossed Crater and if you took the alley back of Crater to Third Street, somewhere right around there Ednetta was living in one of the row houses with that man and her children—how many children, Ada had no idea.
With her education degree and New Jersey teacher’s certificate Ada Furst liked to think that there was something like a pane of glass between herself and people like the Fryes—it might be transparent, but it was substantial.
But the day before, Ednetta hadn’t been in a laughing or careless mood. She’d been anxious and frightened. She’d showed Ada photos of Sybilla as if Ada didn’t know what Sybilla looked like—Ada had had to protest, “Ednetta, I know what Sybilla looks like! Why’re you showing me these?”
Ednetta hadn’t known how to answer this. Stared at Ada with blank slow-blinking eyes as if she hadn’t recognized Ada Furst the schoolteacher.
“She’s probably with some friends, Ednetta. You know how girls are at that age, they just don’t
think
.”
Ednetta said, “S’b’lla know better. She been brought up better. If Anis get disgusted with her, he goin to discipline her—serious. S’b’lla know that.”
Ada said another time that Sybilla was probably with some friends. Ednetta shouldn’t be worried, just yet.
“I don’t know how long you’d be wantin me to wait, to be ‘worried,’” Ednetta said sharply. “I told you, Anis don’t allow disrespectful behavior in our house. S’b’lla got to know that.”
Clutching her photographs Ednetta moved on. Ada watched the woman pityingly as she approached people on the street, imploring them, practically begging them, showing the pictures of Sybilla. Most people acted polite, and some were genuinely sympathetic. There was something not right about what Ednetta was doing, Ada thought. But she had no idea what it was.
Ada was ashamed now, she’d spoken so inanely to Ednetta Frye. But what did you
say
? Girls like Sybilla were always “running away”—Ada knew from being a schoolteacher—meaning they were staying with some man likely to be a dozen years older than they were, and giving them drugs. What she could remember of Sybilla Frye from the middle school, the girl was sassy and impudent, restless, couldn’t sit still to concentrate, had a dirty mouth to her, and hung out with the wrong kind of girls. Her grades were poor, she’d be caught with her friends smoking out the back door of the school—in seventh grade. None of that could Ada tell poor Ednetta!
Ada knocked at the second-floor door of a woman named Klariss—just a thought, she’d ask Klariss to come with her. But Klariss was as
vehement as Ada’s mother. “You keep outa that, Ada. You know it’s some drug dealer somebody put a bullet in, or some druggie OD’ing. You get mixed up in it, the cops is gonna mix you up with them and take you all in.”
Weakly Ada tried to cajole Klariss into at least coming outside with her, in back of the building—“You don’t have to come any farther, K’riss. Just, like—see if anything happens . . .”
But Klariss was shutting her door.