The Sacrifice Read Free

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