Unburying Hope Read Free Page A

she’d been excited to walk in to her first job,
except that the cheap materials hadn’t aged in the same manner as the elegant
ceiling carvings in the cavernous 100 year old building.   She’d have graffitied here, but risking
her job had never been worth the momentary sense of justice that spraying the
word ‘HOPE’ would have brought her.   Better to do it surreptitiously on the walls of abandoned buildings in
her beloved home city.  
    She usually carried the spray paint and four
36 by 36 inch stencils, folded down into small squares in her purse.   She’d first painted the walls of one
home in her neighborhood, one she’d coveted from afar for years, afraid she’d
never be able to save enough to buy it.   It had dormers, was two stories high, had curlicue Victorian trim around
the double hung windows and she’d wandered through it four or five times each
time it had came on the market in the last six years.   Every time it was listed for sale, another family had lost
it, the bank had repossessed it and the price dropped.   It was almost in her price range, when
suddenly it was plastered with the yellow sheets of paper from the City,
eviction notices, demolition notices.   Before it could be pulled down, her heart broken with the realization
that she would not be able to wake up within the comfort of its walls, she
bought the spray cans and cut out the letters in cardboard culled from the delivery
boxes left behind the back of her corner market and one night in the dark, she
painted one letter on each side of the house.   H on the front, O on the right side, P on the back and E on
the left side.   She’d painted in
orange, with navy blue tears dripping from the letters, spraying a touch of silver
on to make the tears glisten at night.   It had been her prayer, her gift to the house and it had salved her
sorrow to see the neighbors wander around the house reading her short message
the next day before the huge yellow excavator arrived to pull her dream house
down to the ground.
    What angered her most was the onslaught of
thieves in the dark of the terrible night, who crawled onto the broken down
walls and ceilings left behind by the tractor, stealing the copper pipes out of
walls, pulling sheet metal out of the roof, all to be sold for scrap by poor
Detroiters who had no income with which to feed themselves, no jobs available
and no homes themselves.  
    With half of Detroit unemployed, the
cannibalism of demolished homes was the final insult to her.   It catalyzed her and she’d gone out
night after night for months after that, with Frank after he found out, and she
painted her letters around homes and old brick storefronts, anywhere that the
City turned off street lights to save money.   Her graffiti was photographed a lot, in the Detroit Free
Press, online.   No one knew who
could possibly have hope in that cesspool of poverty, but she did.   She did.

Chapter Four

 
    The ceiling bell rang.   Fifteen minutes to door opening.   In two of the five empty cubicles lined
parallel to hers, Frank and Jeanne scrambled into their chairs and flipped on
their own computers.   The other
three cubicles had been empty for seven months, since the last downsizing.   Celeste sat with her computer ready,
her keyboard clear, her brain turned off just enough to be able to hear between
the lines of the customers who would stand at her window one after another
until lunch break, giving her small checks or cash to pay up their delinquent
accounts and reinstate their phone service.
    Plexiglas separating the employees from the
customers went from the top of each desk to the ceiling, with squawk box holes
for the customer to speak through to each teller.   There was a small cutout at the bottom of the glass where
they could slip a check or ten and twenty dollar bills to catch up their
account.   She thought it was funny to
discover it on her first day, a protection against what?   She’d been in line at the