Hells Kitchen

building?”
    “Yes, I do, young man,” the elderly black woman had answered, eyes confident, amused. Not wary.
    He’d looked up and down the street. “This is the last tenement on this block.”
    “Used to be nothing but tenements. Place I lived in for forty years was right there, see that vacant lot? There? I lived here for, lessee, five years or so. How about that? Almost half a century on the same block. God damn, that’s a scary thought.”
    “Your family lived in the neighborhood all your life?”
    The woman had set down the thin plastic grocery bag, containing two cans, two oranges and a half gallon jug of wine.
    “You bet I have. My Grandpa Ledbetter came up from Raleigh in 1862. His train, it came in at ten at night and he walked out of the station and saw these boys, dozens of ’em, in a alley and said, ‘Lord, why ain’t you home?’ and they said, ‘What’re you talking? This is our home. Go on with you, old man.’ He felt so bad for those boys. Sleeping outside was called ‘carrying the banner,’ and thousands of children had to do it. They had no home otherwise.”
    She’d spoken without a trace of accent, a deep, melodious voice—a singer’s voice as he would later learn.
    “Was it a nice building?” Pellam had asked, gazing at the vacant lot, overgrown with weeds, where apparently the woman’s old tenement had once stood.
    “Where I lived? That old thing?” She’d laughed. “Falling down ug -ly! You know something interesting though. I thought it was interesting, anyway. When they tore it down there was a big crowd of people came to complain. You know, protestor sorts. ‘Don’t take our homes,’ they were yelling. ‘Don’t take our homes.’ Course I didn’t recognize most of ’em from the neighborhood. I think they were students come down from Morningside Heights or the Village ’cause they smelled a good protest. Get the picture? Those sorts.
    “Anyway, who’d I meet but a woman I knew a long, long time ago. Many years. She was close to ninety then, been married to a man much older run a livery stable and sold horses to the army. Hell’s Kitchen used to be the stable of New York. Still have the hansom cab stables here. Anyway, this woman, she’d been born in that very building they were tearing down. Ineeda Jones. Not Anita, like you’re thinking. Ineeda. Like I need a. That was a southern name, a Carolina name. She was up in Harlem for years then she came back to the Kitchen and was poor as me. Cradle to grave, cradle to grave. Say, mister, I don’t take any offense but what exactly’re you smiling at?”
    “Can I ask your name?”
    “I’m Ettie Washington.”
    “Well, Ms. Washington, my name’s John Pellam. How’d you like to be in a movie?”
    “A movie? Hell. Say, why don’t you come on upstairs? Have some wine.”
    The interviews had begun the next week. Pellam would climb the six flights to her apartment and turn on the recorder and let Ettie Washington talk.
    And talk she did. About her family, her childhood, her life.
    Age six, sitting on a scrap of purloined Sears Roebuck carpet beside a window, listening to her mother and grandmother swap stories about turn-of-the-century Hell’s Kitchen, Owney Madden, the Gophers—the most notorious gang in the city.
    “. . . My Grandpa Ledbetter, he used a lot of slang he heard on the street when he was a young man. He’d say ‘booly dog’ for a policeman. A ‘flat’ was a man you could fool, like at a card game. ‘Blue ruin’ was gin. And ‘chips’was money. My brother Ben’d laugh and say, ‘Grandpa, don’t nobody use those words no more.’ But he was wrong. Grandpa always said ‘crib’ for where you live, your home, you know? And people’re saying that again nowadays.”
    Ettie at age ten, working her first job, sweeping sawdust and wrapping meat in a butcher store.
    Age twelve, in school, numbers easy and words hard, but getting mostly As. Stealing scraps from restaurant bins for lunch. Classmates vanishing as the need for money edged out the need for learning.
    Age fourteen, her beloved and feared Grandma Ledbetter dying as she sat on the couch at Ettie’s side one hot Sunday afternoon a week before her 99th birthday.
    Age fifteen, Ettie herself finally leaving school, working for twenty cents an hour, sharpening knives and chisels in a paperboard factory, stropping blades on long, speeding bands of leather. Some of the men gave her extra pennies because she worked hard. Some