Hogan’s Alley
Fiction by Chelene Knight
1980
She didn’t die the way she was supposed to die. No one said it out loud, but Junie knew everyone was thinking it. A year shy of her eightieth birthday, Madeline Lancaster was found dead in her home on prior Street in Vancouver, fully clothed in her best dress — the one with the white lace scoop neckline — and a painting of Vancouver rolled up and tied with a frayed pale yellow ribbon, clutched in a tightly closed fist.
Later that evening Junie walked down union toward Vie’s Chicken and Steaks where some of Maddie’s friends and close family would be gathering to share old memories, and talk about good times. Junie was sixty. Sixty years old but she still felt like she was twenty-one and still standing in the way of her mother’s real plans, and the main cause of her drinking. Junie looked around. Listened to the cars buzzing and zooming around her. Looked up at the neon-lit signs on businesses. This whole area has changed so much Junie thought to herself. I’ve been here all my life, I’ve watched it change, felt it change, but now it feels like I’m a stranger here. She walked further down Main Street past the sounds of back and forth yelling over the price of some dried spice outside of a Chinese grocery shop where bins and bins of dried spices, fruit, and other unidentifiable things were piled high. All the buildings on the street were small but packed to the gills with merchandise. Shop windows plastered with signs reading “sale,” “half price,” and “last chance to buy” and she wondered where all these places would be in five years. Even the people who passed her on the street were different. No one stopped to say hello, or how are you? No smiles, no nods of recognition, no “nice day isn’t it?” Folks nowadays didn’t even offer up a sideways glance, in fact, they went out of their way to avoid eye contact.
“She passed peacefully and painlessly in her sleep,” the Coroner said the morning they found her. Junie was in Toronto on business. A neighbour called police after Maddie missed their routine coffee meet-up at Mr. Cooper’s diner where they met every day for the last fifteen years. The place was still running and going strong, but old Mr. Cooper had been shot and killed in the early 1960s during a late- night robbery. Maddie had been there that night, but walked away completely unharmed.
251 Prior Street (Back), 1968. This house was in an area commonly known as Hogan’s Alley. [CVA 203-25 - 251]
According to the police report, Maddie had been drinking on shift and had clumsily left the door unlatched while she was cleaning up after closing. Mr. Cooper was in the back counting and bagging the days earnings. Maddie didn’t hear the bell on the door when it creaked open and the masked man entered. She was on the floor wiping up a spill, so the intruder probably never even saw her. She was a few years from retirement, still drinking heavily and just sort of breezing through life. When Mr. Cooper walked out of the back room unexpectedly, he must have startled the robber because the gun went off almost immediately, one bullet hitting Mr. Cooper in his chest and the bills in his hands flying into the air. The man just ran off. They’d found him hours later, at a local dive bar huddled over a short glass of whisky, neat.
After that night Maddie didn’t sleep for five days straight. The thick, moist air in her apartment seemed to pin her eyelids to her brows, never letting her blink. She tried to eat but couldn’t. A man lost his life because of her, because of her drinking, and so the thought of saltines and slow-cooked cream of mushroom just did not appeal, and so she sat, hungry, empty, and hurting from the inside out. Night after night she sat on her used-to-be white couch, running her shaky fingers along the edges of the arms allowing the tingling sensation to run all the way up the back of her neck. Her apartment was small but tidy, and sat atop a small convenience store. Her one window bled the light in, soaked up her sadness, her anger, and her craving for the drink. Every single night she’d come home, look out her only window and realize there’s no more black folk here. Where they all moved to, she wasn’t sure, but she felt like she was one of only a few. She was alone.
Her mother was dead. Junie couldn’t find it in her to wail like everyone else around her. She looked around at the sullen faces, contorted into expressions that looked painful, wet cheeks wiped red and raw. Instead she stood there, still, black shades covering her dry eyes, the trees whipping in the wind doing the crying for her.
On the perfectly mowed lawn woven between the worn and the new gravestones, stood rows and rows of friends, family, and even strangers weeping for a woman who lived a wild and unpredictable life. A woman who wanted the attention of every man that crossed her path. A woman who craved the touch of a man — any man — as much as she craved the drink.
Junie left the burial wrapped in numbness. Even the sun hitting the skin of her cheeks, warming the backs of her ears, didn’t make her feel anything.
Junie walked and the thoughts in her head changed as she passed different businesses. As she strolled by the local coffee chain, she thought about her old friend Estelle. Estelle she said to herself. That girl was lost from day one. Doomed on the inside. They first met forty-seven years earlier and became instant friends. Junie could still see Estelle’s slick smile, her eyes, and the way she’d twist her soft curls around her thin brown finger, smiling, saying “Junie girl, you funny.” She missed those days. So much is different and seemed to change so quickly, like her city. Nothing will ever be the same. Estelle gone, my city gone, my mama gone. Lord what you doin’ to me? Most of the buildings had signs on the windows “Coming Soon” an all too familiar sign around here. All the places she’d call home like the barbershop, the cafe where had her first art exhibit … gone.
Junie stopped in front of Vie’s and just stood there for a moment before grabbing the knob of the door for what would most likely be the last time since it was scheduled to close its doors for good in a few months. The last real remnant of Hogan’s Alley’s existence — her neighbourhood — about to be wiped out for good, she thought to herself. Junie thought about her son James and how when he was thirteen he’d come down to Vie’s and draw in his yellow-lined notepad, biting on the end of his pencil like he was deep in thought while sipping on a coke, extra ice. She smiled slightly at the thought of their conversation nine years earlier. Their relationship changed that day, and Junie thanked the lord everyday.
Vancouver. No more were the black-owned barbershops where men exchanged stories of how they almost snagged that beauty at the bar, or the chicken houses cooking up everything you could imagine for their hungry and over- worked customers that would pile in after a long day doing whatever they did to earn a dollar, and the speakeasies that lined the alleys, streets, and popular corners. No more were the jazz clubs with music pulsing through the alleys after dark, enticing the bricklayers and shopkeepers to spend their last few dollars on a whisky or gin and the promise of a good time. These were replaced with prim and proper coffee shops where no one knew your name, and you were known simply as “next customer please.” Everything was slipping away. Junie stopped and stood in front of Vie’s Chicken and Steaks for a moment. She looked up at the roof, the window frames, the slow peeling paint. She gone.
1941
The music was bumpin’, people were dancin’, sliding and rubbing against one another in the air hot and thick and heavy. A wetness hovered. The room was darker than it should be. This was a basement club. The place got louder the later it got. If the walls could talk. The Coal Club was the“it” spot in Vancouver’s black community and everyone knew it. barely there lighting from coloured paper lanterns hung on strings from the ceiling, low smoke, textured walls:the place to be. And the heat. This was what the clubs were like around here. It looked mystical in a way. A place to let your hair down after a long day of floor scrubbin’, hair wash-in’, or brick liftin’ — people needed to let loose. If you looked at the worn down building from the outside you’d never think this was the paradise that existed inside. The music was another thing. It was like the walls were vibrating and the floorboards about to fly up nails and all. The smell of fried chicken lingered from the early evening chicken ladies that’d come to feed the band before the club opened. It was just perfect. No rules, one could be whoever they wanted to be here, take on another persona.
Junie had all eyes on her. Her green sequinned dress whipped in the air as she swooshed around Dex. She never once took her eyes off his as she swirled around him. At one point, mid-dance move, she stroked the top of his left ear and it was right then and there that Dex knew he was in love.
1971
Junie stood on her balcony overlooking the city. Her city. The large cement blocks bigger than anything she’d seen. The screeching sounds of heavy machinery whining, and drilling, and sawing were enough to make her eyes tear up. Whatever they were building whipped this city clean on its back. This neighbourhood and the people no longer belong or have space to exist.
“I’m not living in cement,” Junie lets the steam from her tea fog her glasses. The blur of her city rested on her eyelids until a short gust of wind dropped the city to the ground in a cloud of rubble and dust.
Junie walked back into her tiny apartment, closed the patio door and admired her latest work. She peeled the canvas back from the easel and laid the painting flat. When it dried she rolled that painting up tightly with sturdy hands. She pulled out the drawer of her vanity and rooted around for an elastic to tie it up with. pushing aside old tubes of barely used lipstick, tarnished costume jewellery and scraps of paper, Junie’s fingers grazed an old yellow ribbon. She ran the fabric over and under her fingers for a moment before removing it from its hiding place. She closed her eyes and pulled it out from the drawer and looped it around the paper four times before expertly bringing the two strands together, bending one over the other, pulling firmly, forming the two loose ends into a neat bow. No threat of unravelling. »