Standing on the side-walk on a south-side street looking at what at first glance is an abandoned house, the shabby bungalow house stands alone. A Walnut tree is planted roadside. High above the roofline of the house the tree is in full blossom and the scent of it fills the air with a cloying spicy-sweetness. On a lower branch of the tree a rope swing shuffles from side to side as heat from the scorching sun rises from the black scar of bare earth made by the dragged feet of children. An old worn, threadbare, tyre is the swing seat, it is so old it is spilling out its reinforcing wires. The rope has cut deeply into the bark of this old girl, she will have seen many winters and summers looking over this house. In its heyday this area was known as ‘the shimmering south side’. There is notice gaffer taped on the door: It is a notice of demolition from the City Authority.
The only inhabitant in this housing wilderness is Roland Alphonse Junior lives here or exists here.
I have come to rehouse Roland, he can’t live here. I am part of the Eden Project a charity based housing group. We’ve housed most of the people from around here. They had been only offered $5000 to move out. That was more than they could ever get selling the houses. No one would buy them anyway.
Now shabby and peeling, shards of paint hang off the wood. Heaps of the white lead paint decorate the weed ridden grass beneath the verandah of the house. The verandah is now a patchwork of wood claimed from the other abandoned houses.
The bungalow is mainly roofed with corrugated iron sheets; it shows that they were hastily thrown on and hurriedly nailed to the timbers beneath. The original wooden shingles are still showing in places, most of them are rotten and are riddled with holes.
The three lopsided creaking steps make me stagger towards the badly restored and multi-coloured patchwork front door. It looks like it has been battered in at some time.
The door is slightly ajar. Roland Alphonse pulls at the door to open it, it juddered and creaked open like those ones in horror movies do.
“Hi Roland Alphonse Junior?”
“Hi man. You here to help me?”
“If we can, yeah. I’m Adam from The Eden Projects. We’ll do our best. I need to see what the house is like inside.” I knew what it would be like, I had to go through the motions.
Roland gestures to me to come into his house. He walked a short distance down the hallway with the floorboards creaking and cracking underfoot. His footsteps echo beneath the boards. There is no carpet, just boards. He points into the first room off the hall by just lifting his arm and vaguely gesticulating, he doesn’t say a word as we walk.
The smell of dampness filled my nostrils. The room was fetid and dank and smells of stale bodies, dust and mould, damp paper, sweat and heat.
Looking down the flooring in this room is the same as the verandah, a blurred randomly patched mess of woods and planks. The skirting boards are now mouldy black lines edging the room. The cream coloured door has an arc of grime around the brass door knob from the myriad of fingers that have opened and closed it.
A big signed poster of Muhammad Ali stares back at me as I enter the room. Ali’s signature is a bold flourish in thick black marker pen and covers the whole of the bottom of the poster. Hung underneath Ali is the faded Polaroid colour picture of a young boy. ‘M aged six’ is written under the photo on a Post-It note stuck to the border of the photo.
Glancing around the room the wide wooden slatted Venetian blinds hang forlornly at the windows and are dropped to their full length. Some of the slats of the blinds droop at awkward angles as the chords holding them hang tenuously by a thread.
The bright sunlight burns through the slatted wood of the blinds and gives the room a strange appearance as they cast eerie striped shadows across the whole room.
Underneath the poster and photo there is a makeshift bed made up of a few blue painted coloured pallets. A shabby, stained and yellowing mattress is thrown on top of them. Cheap green foam stuffing spills out the sides of the mattress; grey gaffer tape stymies some of the splits. The blue pallets barely lift the mattress from the floor. Roland has covered the mattress with a grimy Disney ‘Beauty and The Beast’ duvet cover.
The wallpaper lining the walls was once of maroon vertical stripe with roses insinuating themselves through the pattern, now they are faded and brown. The paper is being blown off the wall by damp. In some places it’s only held on the wall by thumb tacks. The places where the paper touches the ceiling are tatty and browned with iron stained water from the leaking roof. No doubt the corrugated iron patches on the roof were intended to save this room some of its dignity. The ceiling has taken the brunt of the rain’s intrusions; it is now covered in rusty iron coloured stains with grinning nail holes bursting out of its surface. There are thousands of black mouldy dots on the ceiling looking like small black stars looking down on Roland’s world. A single light bulb is hanging from a brown plaited mains cable.
On a dark brown dressing table a portable CD player/radio sits. The faint sound of rap music is coming from the speakers. A brown cable trickles from the back of the CD player down to the floor and then out under the floorboards to some unknown destination.
All the plug sockets are all smashed and are now showing bare wires.
The dark brown wood dressing table’s mirror is missing; just the struts that once held it remain now. They point straight upwards to the ceiling looking like the arms of a headless drowning black man. Directly between the struts of the dressing table a colour poster of Bob Marley smoking a joint has been pinned on the wall. It makes it look like everyone who looks in that ‘mirror’ sees Bob. A single white sock pokes out of the middle jewellery drawer of the table trapped as the drawer shut on it.
A shabby wooden framed armchair has been placed against the opposite wall to the windows. The fading red cloth of the chair now has circular wear marks and the weave is becoming unravelled in places.
I doubt even the spiders in their silken webs clinging in the corners of the ceiling could call this place home.
Looking down under the dressing table there carefully laid in the knee hole a set of cheap plastic dumb-bells. On the table a few paper back books have been stood up between two bricks; there’s an Angelou, a Baldwin, and a Washington. On the floor by the chair a Linton Kwesi Johnson has a torn paper book mark in it. Roland is a man who reads.
There are three pairs of clapped out, shabby Nike trainers lined up along the wall in pairs. Above them on what looks like a curtain pole screwed to the wall on some shelf brackets, is a makeshift hanging rail that has a few short sleeve shirts and some track suit bottoms all hanging from wire coat hangers.
On another wall is a tall stately dresser that wouldn’t look out of place in a contemporary retro kitchen. It is oddly towering above all the other possessions in the room. It’s curious that the deep shiny brown open grained American walnut has been polished, cared for and clearly loved. It has nothing on it, not one piece of china or an ornament, it looks sad with no real purpose. It is so strangely out of place amongst so much damp and rotting wood, peeling paper, cobwebs and shabby walls.
Alphonse gestured to me and he goes back into the dark hallway and into the kitchen.
The nomenclature ‘Kitchen’ is an overstatement. The greasy smell of fried chicken hangs in the air. The pile of battered half open half closed Kentucky Chicken boxes in the corner of the room attest to that smell. Chewed chicken bones and hand wipes poke out of some boxes. Roland quickly threw a few into a black bin bag.
“Been meaning to get them to the trash dumpster. No collections here now. City stopped them….” he trailed off.
“It’s ok, times are hard.” I said as a consolation to his predicament.
“Ma would’ve whooped my ass. This was her kitchen.” he giggled at that image.
The large four pane window is boarded up from the outside, nails poke through the casings and into the room. Spiders trapped between the wood and glass are dessicated and have left their ghostly shells in the webs they built so many months ago.
“They put the boards at the windows when I was out one day. Came back to the whole place boarded, the damn idiots didn’t realise ‘bout the cellar hatch. They put them in these houses ‘round here. Some houses had basement cellars and the hatch was in the floor plan of all of them.” Roland smiled at the thought that he’d outwitted his tormentors.
A single fluorescent fitting stuttered into life overhead, then died then lit up in a strobe of sickly yellow tinged white light.
Standing in one corner a very old huge Frigidaire refrigerator is stacked on anther blue pallet in a vain attempt to stop it falling through the half rotten floor. It was making, sad choking and gurgling sounds much like a death rattle as it vainly struggled to cool anything inside and also to compete against the stifling, oven roasting, heat in the room.
The fridge suddenly stopped gurgling, Roland banged it with his fist. It lurched back into life.
“Keep meaning to get a new one.” He half smiled at the absurdity of that statement. We both know he has no money for such luxuries.
After that thump a trickle of water dripped out of the door seal and on to the floor.
An old heavy ceramic Butler sink is perched on four sturdy but rusted cast iron iron struts. Hung on a net curtain wire under the sink is strung a brown stained yellow floral cotton curtain. A tap drips into the dirty sink washing away the rusty water dripping from overhead.
A greasy battered and filthy, four ring cooker is wired into an electrical socket which itself is hanging precariously by two screws from the wall. The grimy oven door is hanging slightly ajar, it has strips of gaffer tape on it. Gaffer tape seems to be the standby in this house. The cooker stands oddly like a white enamel sentinel along a wall that is now entirely stripped of cupboards high and low. The pale shadows of their outlines show on the bare plaster; even if that is now stained with blackened cooking grease. On top of the carcass of a chest of drawers an old microwave oven that swerved the Millennium bug crisis is dumped. The drawers of the chest have long gone, it looks like an old man that has had all his teeth pulled out.
Out of the five rooms in the bungalow, Roland is preserving his pride and is only allowing me access to the best rooms.
“You know that you can’t live here for much longer Roland. The developers are pushing for you to get out.” I didn’t want to use the word ‘Insanitary’. It would insult him.
Roland moves up the hall and into the living room.
“All I got in this raas claat world is here. This was my Ma’s house. This was Ma’s dresser. How will I get that in a car? You tell me. I own it all now and $5000 dollars is a few cents to those people. Back pocket money. Fuck all. This is my history, this is our south side history. She was the first black woman to own along here, you know. She worked every day cooking and cleaning and saving every dollar she could.”
He hesitated then said “You know they came here and smashed the place up in the hope I’d give in and go?”
“I know they tried to get you out. We would say that you need to accept the offer Roland.”
“Accept? Man what planet you on? Five grand don’t buy jack shit in this town. You know that. I can get me a dodgy car and sleep in that. You know everything is dragged down at 9.8 metres a second? That’s a Newton. These boys think they can heap my shoulders so heavy that makes my burden on this earth heavier? They won’t win.”
“I do know the price of things. That’s why we will try and get you into an Eden projects placement.”
“What with all those damn skank niggas? Dealing and selling their asses? No man. I’d rather die here. I stood up against those people when they took my wife Kelly away. I put my foot, I put my pride where no Po-Lice-Man would. I’d put my head in a noose for my son. But they took him away.”
“If they increase the offer will you go?”
“You know man, anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how expensive it is to be poor. Where I go to? I got jack shit man. My wife and the cops, took my son years ago. All I got is that picture of the boy. He was my life, then she fell in with another crowd. Took drugs and shit. Damn court decides that I’m not a proper parent..” he jabbed his finger into his chest. “and she takes him. You know till this gone down I used to hold down a job. I trained real athletes, I took some to the Olympics. I used to pay my way. You see those weights? Got them from a dumpster behind Wal-Mart.”
“You can’t live here Roland. They will get you out soon.”
“I’m gonna fight those boys. They might try and win but I’ll take them down first. I’ll float like a butterfly man and sting them like a Bee. Ali taught me that move.” Roland jabbed at the air with his clenched fists and smiled. He put his fist against Ali’s chin and grinned.
“You know my house, my home, is slap bang in the middle of the new shopping mall? I’ve seen the plans. I studied the plans. I can read plans. They’ll raise the money. They’ll give me what I want. Can you see them letting me wander out in my pants and vest with my Johnson on show in the middle of the new shiny shimmering south side Mall?” he chuckled at that thought “I ain’t gonna be like that boy in China, they built a motorway around his house. They’ll settle man. They’ll settle. Then we can talk ‘bout housing.”
“Those padlocks won’t keep them out Roland.”
“You think I’m a fool? I know that. Seen it house by house by house round here. It’s like that ethnic cleansing you see in Serbia. Here they turn up crack of dawn with their warrants and door rams and attitude. Some are damned pleased to be clearing the coons outta here.” he paused and thought for a moment.
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.”
I knew he was quoting Maya Angelou and just nodded to him.
I went back to the office and wrote a letter to the City Authority and Cleveland Rump Holdings explaining the position that Roland had taken and could they increase the offer to him. They replied by return. They had a decision made all along.
The notice of offer was sent from the City Authority and Cleveland Rump Holdings by motorcycle courier.
Roland ‘phoned me and told me the courier from the developers was nervous as he walked up the path to the house,
“He was shaking like a new born lamb. He had banged on the door with his fist like it was the walls of Jericho. 1956? He kept asking me Adam, 1956 like it was my date of birth. I had some fun with the boy.”
Soon after the City and Cleveland Rump Holdings sent two officers from their legal team to the house. I accompanied them so Roland would open the door or at least negotiate. It was 7:30 in the morning when they banged on Roland’s door. The three padlocks were all locked and in place. A plank of wood was nailed across the door too.
Roland opened the window overlooking the verandah and stuck his head out.
“Roland Alphonse Junior?”
Roland nodded.
“Hi Adam. You okay man?” Roland acknowledged my presence.
“We have your offer of $10,000 Sir. Do you accept this offer Sir?”
Roland rubbed his chin like he was considering the offer, mocking them.
“Sir, do you accept the offer put before you?”
Roland nodded.
“Where would you like it to be paid Sir?”
Roland passed out a piece of paper to the officer through the window.
“I am glad we could reach this point Sir.”
Roland ignored the officer.
The officer started to copy down the details of the account where the money was to be paid in.
“Like the late great Ali?” he held the piece of paper so Roland could see it.
Roland nodded.
“Yeah man, like Muhammad Ali.”
“Can you check the details Sir, if they are correct sign here and here. That’ll be paid in to that account in three working days, Sir.”
Roland nodded and signed the form of authority.
The officer closed his folder and offered his hand to Roland.
“You take care Sir.”
“See ya Adam.”
“Will you make an application to us Roland?” I pleadingly asked Roland.
“I’ll think about it Adam, I’ll consider my options.”
Roland shook the officer’s hand and quickly closed the window and locked it tight shut. Then I heard him nail some wood across what little glass remained. I didn’t have much confidence that he’d move out.
I peered through a crack in the window. Roland was sat on a metal chair I think he’d got out of a skip, I hadn’t seen it when I visited him; it was rusty and battered. He looked up at the picture of Muhammad Ali.
“See ya, my friend.” his voice sounded tear stained and hesitant.
I left Roland in his house, sitting on that metal chair. He looked like he was defeated and mulling things over.
As I hadn’t heard from Roland a week after the payment had been cleared I went down to Roland’s house.
There was blue Police scene of crime tape strung across the outside of the house. A digger had its bucket torn into into one part of the roof. It had been stopped mid stroke. There was a pile of broken rotten wood laying in the front garden.
Police officers were walking in and out of the house. I approached an officer and asked what was happening and showed him my ID card.
“Demolition guys found a body inside. We don’t know, we think it’s Roland Alphonse, Sir.”
Soon after a black body bag was taken to an ambulance by the ambulance crew. I went back to the office and hoped it wasn’t Roland. I had an application form on me just in case Roland turned up and it was a vagrant that had been found in the house.
It wasn’t.
It was Roland, it made the local IDBN news that night. He’d been found in the front room hanging with a noose around his neck. I phoned the Police and told them that he had accepted the $10,000 dollar relocation payment and he was soon to make an application for housing. So why would he hang himself? It raised suspicion in them. Then the Police considered there were suspicious circumstances to his death. They were right, my information had alerted them and they investigated his death. Months later the bailiff that had attended the eviction was charged with murder and assisting a suicide, contrary to State Law.
I tore up Roland’s application for housing.
It transpired that a bailiff had left his personal body camera on and an employee of the bailiff company had witnessed the events that led to Roland’s death and alerted her bosses.
The footage was played in Court at the trial of Donald Wassall, one of the bailiff’s who attended the eviction. His partner John Evans was acquitted of all charges. Wassall stood in the dock totally upright and impassive to where he was. He smiled and waved at some supporters who had attended.
Roland’s son Muhammad Ali Alphonse was sat at the back of the court, he was about 20 years old and looked like Roland. I took it to be his mother Kelly who was sat next to him crying, she looked thin and pale, addled by years of hard drugs.
The time and date on the video shows that they waited only a day before attempting to evict Roland. The body camera recorded every move and word spoken in the eviction of Roland Alphonse Junior.
The video was shown on a screen in the court. Wassall just stared at the screen. Sometimes a smile passed across his face.
It started to be screened. The audio started,
“Sir, open the door or we will gain entry by force.” Wassall said as he banged with fist on the door.
Roland must have ignored the warning and stood where he was as there was no attempt to open the door.
The Bailiffs then used a battering ram to smash in Roland’s front door. The padlocks pinged off like confetti and fell to the floor like Christmas decorations falling off a tree. They clunked down on to the wooden boards and the men dismissively kicked them aside. Wassall laughed as the door was smashed in. He smirked in court too.
“I love this bit, taking control of these nigger shit holes.”
Someone called out Roland’s name as they walked down the hallway, they walked down the hall into the kitchen first.
“Jeez the smell, what a shit hole, these people live like this….”
Wassall sitting in the dock smiled at that remark. Judge Baldwin gave him a withering look.
The video showed that they both turned and walked back up the hall towards the living room and front door.
“Get the pads John, I’ll check in here.” Wassall said. The video showed John kept on walking and went over to their truck to get padlocks to secure the door again. Wassall pushed open the door leading off the hall. His camera showed Roland was standing on a dining chair with a noose around his neck. He had his best trainers, a white tee shirt and track suit bottoms on. It showed Roland kiss his fingers and then he touched the photograph of Muhammad his son with the kiss.
“Fuck you man, I’ve won. I’ve won.” A smile passed across Roland’s face as he said it. The camera was focussed on Roland’s face as he said that.
“Nah, Fuck you nigger! Fuck you! You ain’t had time to cash the cheque yet. I’ve won, like I always do.” Wassall spat his words out as he kicked away the chair Roland was standing on.
As that part of the video played Muhammad Alphonse jumped up and shouted
“No! No! That’s my dad you fucking scum.”
The Judge banged his gavel and called for order. A court officer walked towards Muhammad and sat him down. Kelly wept out loud and hugged Muhammad.
Then Wassall was shown to have walked out of the room and closing the door behind him. He walked down the rickety verandah steps and towards the truck where John Evans was taking some padlocks from a tool chest.
“No one in John. They all piss off when they see the dollars. Us white boys have the real power.” He laughed as he said it.
John re-secured the door with a heavy duty padlock and then put notice of full legal possession on the door with gaffer tape and then they drove off.
The demolition of 1956 Solomon’s Court Drive, City Southside started a week later.
The only inhabitant in this housing wilderness is Roland Alphonse Junior lives here or exists here.
I have come to rehouse Roland, he can’t live here. I am part of the Eden Project a charity based housing group. We’ve housed most of the people from around here. They had been only offered $5000 to move out. That was more than they could ever get selling the houses. No one would buy them anyway.
Now shabby and peeling, shards of paint hang off the wood. Heaps of the white lead paint decorate the weed ridden grass beneath the verandah of the house. The verandah is now a patchwork of wood claimed from the other abandoned houses.
The bungalow is mainly roofed with corrugated iron sheets; it shows that they were hastily thrown on and hurriedly nailed to the timbers beneath. The original wooden shingles are still showing in places, most of them are rotten and are riddled with holes.
The three lopsided creaking steps make me stagger towards the badly restored and multi-coloured patchwork front door. It looks like it has been battered in at some time.
The door is slightly ajar. Roland Alphonse pulls at the door to open it, it juddered and creaked open like those ones in horror movies do.
“Hi Roland Alphonse Junior?”
“Hi man. You here to help me?”
“If we can, yeah. I’m Adam from The Eden Projects. We’ll do our best. I need to see what the house is like inside.” I knew what it would be like, I had to go through the motions.
Roland gestures to me to come into his house. He walked a short distance down the hallway with the floorboards creaking and cracking underfoot. His footsteps echo beneath the boards. There is no carpet, just boards. He points into the first room off the hall by just lifting his arm and vaguely gesticulating, he doesn’t say a word as we walk.
The smell of dampness filled my nostrils. The room was fetid and dank and smells of stale bodies, dust and mould, damp paper, sweat and heat.
Looking down the flooring in this room is the same as the verandah, a blurred randomly patched mess of woods and planks. The skirting boards are now mouldy black lines edging the room. The cream coloured door has an arc of grime around the brass door knob from the myriad of fingers that have opened and closed it.
A big signed poster of Muhammad Ali stares back at me as I enter the room. Ali’s signature is a bold flourish in thick black marker pen and covers the whole of the bottom of the poster. Hung underneath Ali is the faded Polaroid colour picture of a young boy. ‘M aged six’ is written under the photo on a Post-It note stuck to the border of the photo.
Glancing around the room the wide wooden slatted Venetian blinds hang forlornly at the windows and are dropped to their full length. Some of the slats of the blinds droop at awkward angles as the chords holding them hang tenuously by a thread.
The bright sunlight burns through the slatted wood of the blinds and gives the room a strange appearance as they cast eerie striped shadows across the whole room.
Underneath the poster and photo there is a makeshift bed made up of a few blue painted coloured pallets. A shabby, stained and yellowing mattress is thrown on top of them. Cheap green foam stuffing spills out the sides of the mattress; grey gaffer tape stymies some of the splits. The blue pallets barely lift the mattress from the floor. Roland has covered the mattress with a grimy Disney ‘Beauty and The Beast’ duvet cover.
The wallpaper lining the walls was once of maroon vertical stripe with roses insinuating themselves through the pattern, now they are faded and brown. The paper is being blown off the wall by damp. In some places it’s only held on the wall by thumb tacks. The places where the paper touches the ceiling are tatty and browned with iron stained water from the leaking roof. No doubt the corrugated iron patches on the roof were intended to save this room some of its dignity. The ceiling has taken the brunt of the rain’s intrusions; it is now covered in rusty iron coloured stains with grinning nail holes bursting out of its surface. There are thousands of black mouldy dots on the ceiling looking like small black stars looking down on Roland’s world. A single light bulb is hanging from a brown plaited mains cable.
On a dark brown dressing table a portable CD player/radio sits. The faint sound of rap music is coming from the speakers. A brown cable trickles from the back of the CD player down to the floor and then out under the floorboards to some unknown destination.
All the plug sockets are all smashed and are now showing bare wires.
The dark brown wood dressing table’s mirror is missing; just the struts that once held it remain now. They point straight upwards to the ceiling looking like the arms of a headless drowning black man. Directly between the struts of the dressing table a colour poster of Bob Marley smoking a joint has been pinned on the wall. It makes it look like everyone who looks in that ‘mirror’ sees Bob. A single white sock pokes out of the middle jewellery drawer of the table trapped as the drawer shut on it.
A shabby wooden framed armchair has been placed against the opposite wall to the windows. The fading red cloth of the chair now has circular wear marks and the weave is becoming unravelled in places.
I doubt even the spiders in their silken webs clinging in the corners of the ceiling could call this place home.
Looking down under the dressing table there carefully laid in the knee hole a set of cheap plastic dumb-bells. On the table a few paper back books have been stood up between two bricks; there’s an Angelou, a Baldwin, and a Washington. On the floor by the chair a Linton Kwesi Johnson has a torn paper book mark in it. Roland is a man who reads.
There are three pairs of clapped out, shabby Nike trainers lined up along the wall in pairs. Above them on what looks like a curtain pole screwed to the wall on some shelf brackets, is a makeshift hanging rail that has a few short sleeve shirts and some track suit bottoms all hanging from wire coat hangers.
On another wall is a tall stately dresser that wouldn’t look out of place in a contemporary retro kitchen. It is oddly towering above all the other possessions in the room. It’s curious that the deep shiny brown open grained American walnut has been polished, cared for and clearly loved. It has nothing on it, not one piece of china or an ornament, it looks sad with no real purpose. It is so strangely out of place amongst so much damp and rotting wood, peeling paper, cobwebs and shabby walls.
Alphonse gestured to me and he goes back into the dark hallway and into the kitchen.
The nomenclature ‘Kitchen’ is an overstatement. The greasy smell of fried chicken hangs in the air. The pile of battered half open half closed Kentucky Chicken boxes in the corner of the room attest to that smell. Chewed chicken bones and hand wipes poke out of some boxes. Roland quickly threw a few into a black bin bag.
“Been meaning to get them to the trash dumpster. No collections here now. City stopped them….” he trailed off.
“It’s ok, times are hard.” I said as a consolation to his predicament.
“Ma would’ve whooped my ass. This was her kitchen.” he giggled at that image.
The large four pane window is boarded up from the outside, nails poke through the casings and into the room. Spiders trapped between the wood and glass are dessicated and have left their ghostly shells in the webs they built so many months ago.
“They put the boards at the windows when I was out one day. Came back to the whole place boarded, the damn idiots didn’t realise ‘bout the cellar hatch. They put them in these houses ‘round here. Some houses had basement cellars and the hatch was in the floor plan of all of them.” Roland smiled at the thought that he’d outwitted his tormentors.
A single fluorescent fitting stuttered into life overhead, then died then lit up in a strobe of sickly yellow tinged white light.
Standing in one corner a very old huge Frigidaire refrigerator is stacked on anther blue pallet in a vain attempt to stop it falling through the half rotten floor. It was making, sad choking and gurgling sounds much like a death rattle as it vainly struggled to cool anything inside and also to compete against the stifling, oven roasting, heat in the room.
The fridge suddenly stopped gurgling, Roland banged it with his fist. It lurched back into life.
“Keep meaning to get a new one.” He half smiled at the absurdity of that statement. We both know he has no money for such luxuries.
After that thump a trickle of water dripped out of the door seal and on to the floor.
An old heavy ceramic Butler sink is perched on four sturdy but rusted cast iron iron struts. Hung on a net curtain wire under the sink is strung a brown stained yellow floral cotton curtain. A tap drips into the dirty sink washing away the rusty water dripping from overhead.
A greasy battered and filthy, four ring cooker is wired into an electrical socket which itself is hanging precariously by two screws from the wall. The grimy oven door is hanging slightly ajar, it has strips of gaffer tape on it. Gaffer tape seems to be the standby in this house. The cooker stands oddly like a white enamel sentinel along a wall that is now entirely stripped of cupboards high and low. The pale shadows of their outlines show on the bare plaster; even if that is now stained with blackened cooking grease. On top of the carcass of a chest of drawers an old microwave oven that swerved the Millennium bug crisis is dumped. The drawers of the chest have long gone, it looks like an old man that has had all his teeth pulled out.
Out of the five rooms in the bungalow, Roland is preserving his pride and is only allowing me access to the best rooms.
“You know that you can’t live here for much longer Roland. The developers are pushing for you to get out.” I didn’t want to use the word ‘Insanitary’. It would insult him.
Roland moves up the hall and into the living room.
“All I got in this raas claat world is here. This was my Ma’s house. This was Ma’s dresser. How will I get that in a car? You tell me. I own it all now and $5000 dollars is a few cents to those people. Back pocket money. Fuck all. This is my history, this is our south side history. She was the first black woman to own along here, you know. She worked every day cooking and cleaning and saving every dollar she could.”
He hesitated then said “You know they came here and smashed the place up in the hope I’d give in and go?”
“I know they tried to get you out. We would say that you need to accept the offer Roland.”
“Accept? Man what planet you on? Five grand don’t buy jack shit in this town. You know that. I can get me a dodgy car and sleep in that. You know everything is dragged down at 9.8 metres a second? That’s a Newton. These boys think they can heap my shoulders so heavy that makes my burden on this earth heavier? They won’t win.”
“I do know the price of things. That’s why we will try and get you into an Eden projects placement.”
“What with all those damn skank niggas? Dealing and selling their asses? No man. I’d rather die here. I stood up against those people when they took my wife Kelly away. I put my foot, I put my pride where no Po-Lice-Man would. I’d put my head in a noose for my son. But they took him away.”
“If they increase the offer will you go?”
“You know man, anyone who has struggled with poverty knows how expensive it is to be poor. Where I go to? I got jack shit man. My wife and the cops, took my son years ago. All I got is that picture of the boy. He was my life, then she fell in with another crowd. Took drugs and shit. Damn court decides that I’m not a proper parent..” he jabbed his finger into his chest. “and she takes him. You know till this gone down I used to hold down a job. I trained real athletes, I took some to the Olympics. I used to pay my way. You see those weights? Got them from a dumpster behind Wal-Mart.”
“You can’t live here Roland. They will get you out soon.”
“I’m gonna fight those boys. They might try and win but I’ll take them down first. I’ll float like a butterfly man and sting them like a Bee. Ali taught me that move.” Roland jabbed at the air with his clenched fists and smiled. He put his fist against Ali’s chin and grinned.
“You know my house, my home, is slap bang in the middle of the new shopping mall? I’ve seen the plans. I studied the plans. I can read plans. They’ll raise the money. They’ll give me what I want. Can you see them letting me wander out in my pants and vest with my Johnson on show in the middle of the new shiny shimmering south side Mall?” he chuckled at that thought “I ain’t gonna be like that boy in China, they built a motorway around his house. They’ll settle man. They’ll settle. Then we can talk ‘bout housing.”
“Those padlocks won’t keep them out Roland.”
“You think I’m a fool? I know that. Seen it house by house by house round here. It’s like that ethnic cleansing you see in Serbia. Here they turn up crack of dawn with their warrants and door rams and attitude. Some are damned pleased to be clearing the coons outta here.” he paused and thought for a moment.
“I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel. Ask for what you want and be prepared to get it.”
I knew he was quoting Maya Angelou and just nodded to him.
I went back to the office and wrote a letter to the City Authority and Cleveland Rump Holdings explaining the position that Roland had taken and could they increase the offer to him. They replied by return. They had a decision made all along.
The notice of offer was sent from the City Authority and Cleveland Rump Holdings by motorcycle courier.
Roland ‘phoned me and told me the courier from the developers was nervous as he walked up the path to the house,
“He was shaking like a new born lamb. He had banged on the door with his fist like it was the walls of Jericho. 1956? He kept asking me Adam, 1956 like it was my date of birth. I had some fun with the boy.”
Soon after the City and Cleveland Rump Holdings sent two officers from their legal team to the house. I accompanied them so Roland would open the door or at least negotiate. It was 7:30 in the morning when they banged on Roland’s door. The three padlocks were all locked and in place. A plank of wood was nailed across the door too.
Roland opened the window overlooking the verandah and stuck his head out.
“Roland Alphonse Junior?”
Roland nodded.
“Hi Adam. You okay man?” Roland acknowledged my presence.
“We have your offer of $10,000 Sir. Do you accept this offer Sir?”
Roland rubbed his chin like he was considering the offer, mocking them.
“Sir, do you accept the offer put before you?”
Roland nodded.
“Where would you like it to be paid Sir?”
Roland passed out a piece of paper to the officer through the window.
“I am glad we could reach this point Sir.”
Roland ignored the officer.
The officer started to copy down the details of the account where the money was to be paid in.
“Like the late great Ali?” he held the piece of paper so Roland could see it.
Roland nodded.
“Yeah man, like Muhammad Ali.”
“Can you check the details Sir, if they are correct sign here and here. That’ll be paid in to that account in three working days, Sir.”
Roland nodded and signed the form of authority.
The officer closed his folder and offered his hand to Roland.
“You take care Sir.”
“See ya Adam.”
“Will you make an application to us Roland?” I pleadingly asked Roland.
“I’ll think about it Adam, I’ll consider my options.”
Roland shook the officer’s hand and quickly closed the window and locked it tight shut. Then I heard him nail some wood across what little glass remained. I didn’t have much confidence that he’d move out.
I peered through a crack in the window. Roland was sat on a metal chair I think he’d got out of a skip, I hadn’t seen it when I visited him; it was rusty and battered. He looked up at the picture of Muhammad Ali.
“See ya, my friend.” his voice sounded tear stained and hesitant.
I left Roland in his house, sitting on that metal chair. He looked like he was defeated and mulling things over.
As I hadn’t heard from Roland a week after the payment had been cleared I went down to Roland’s house.
There was blue Police scene of crime tape strung across the outside of the house. A digger had its bucket torn into into one part of the roof. It had been stopped mid stroke. There was a pile of broken rotten wood laying in the front garden.
Police officers were walking in and out of the house. I approached an officer and asked what was happening and showed him my ID card.
“Demolition guys found a body inside. We don’t know, we think it’s Roland Alphonse, Sir.”
Soon after a black body bag was taken to an ambulance by the ambulance crew. I went back to the office and hoped it wasn’t Roland. I had an application form on me just in case Roland turned up and it was a vagrant that had been found in the house.
It wasn’t.
It was Roland, it made the local IDBN news that night. He’d been found in the front room hanging with a noose around his neck. I phoned the Police and told them that he had accepted the $10,000 dollar relocation payment and he was soon to make an application for housing. So why would he hang himself? It raised suspicion in them. Then the Police considered there were suspicious circumstances to his death. They were right, my information had alerted them and they investigated his death. Months later the bailiff that had attended the eviction was charged with murder and assisting a suicide, contrary to State Law.
I tore up Roland’s application for housing.
It transpired that a bailiff had left his personal body camera on and an employee of the bailiff company had witnessed the events that led to Roland’s death and alerted her bosses.
The footage was played in Court at the trial of Donald Wassall, one of the bailiff’s who attended the eviction. His partner John Evans was acquitted of all charges. Wassall stood in the dock totally upright and impassive to where he was. He smiled and waved at some supporters who had attended.
Roland’s son Muhammad Ali Alphonse was sat at the back of the court, he was about 20 years old and looked like Roland. I took it to be his mother Kelly who was sat next to him crying, she looked thin and pale, addled by years of hard drugs.
The time and date on the video shows that they waited only a day before attempting to evict Roland. The body camera recorded every move and word spoken in the eviction of Roland Alphonse Junior.
The video was shown on a screen in the court. Wassall just stared at the screen. Sometimes a smile passed across his face.
It started to be screened. The audio started,
“Sir, open the door or we will gain entry by force.” Wassall said as he banged with fist on the door.
Roland must have ignored the warning and stood where he was as there was no attempt to open the door.
The Bailiffs then used a battering ram to smash in Roland’s front door. The padlocks pinged off like confetti and fell to the floor like Christmas decorations falling off a tree. They clunked down on to the wooden boards and the men dismissively kicked them aside. Wassall laughed as the door was smashed in. He smirked in court too.
“I love this bit, taking control of these nigger shit holes.”
Someone called out Roland’s name as they walked down the hallway, they walked down the hall into the kitchen first.
“Jeez the smell, what a shit hole, these people live like this….”
Wassall sitting in the dock smiled at that remark. Judge Baldwin gave him a withering look.
The video showed that they both turned and walked back up the hall towards the living room and front door.
“Get the pads John, I’ll check in here.” Wassall said. The video showed John kept on walking and went over to their truck to get padlocks to secure the door again. Wassall pushed open the door leading off the hall. His camera showed Roland was standing on a dining chair with a noose around his neck. He had his best trainers, a white tee shirt and track suit bottoms on. It showed Roland kiss his fingers and then he touched the photograph of Muhammad his son with the kiss.
“Fuck you man, I’ve won. I’ve won.” A smile passed across Roland’s face as he said it. The camera was focussed on Roland’s face as he said that.
“Nah, Fuck you nigger! Fuck you! You ain’t had time to cash the cheque yet. I’ve won, like I always do.” Wassall spat his words out as he kicked away the chair Roland was standing on.
As that part of the video played Muhammad Alphonse jumped up and shouted
“No! No! That’s my dad you fucking scum.”
The Judge banged his gavel and called for order. A court officer walked towards Muhammad and sat him down. Kelly wept out loud and hugged Muhammad.
Then Wassall was shown to have walked out of the room and closing the door behind him. He walked down the rickety verandah steps and towards the truck where John Evans was taking some padlocks from a tool chest.
“No one in John. They all piss off when they see the dollars. Us white boys have the real power.” He laughed as he said it.
John re-secured the door with a heavy duty padlock and then put notice of full legal possession on the door with gaffer tape and then they drove off.
The demolition of 1956 Solomon’s Court Drive, City Southside started a week later.
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