Upstate South Carolina Before the Great Collapse
Solomon tinkered with the toaster in front of him. It had been giving him trouble all day and he was about done with it. Who even used toasters anymore anyway?
The answer was no one, of course. This was more pity work. More brothers getting things they didn't need fixed fixed for five dollars to help another brother's business out in the community.
Solomon hated it. He figured it was better than a hand out, though, and it was all the business he had these days.
His knobby black hands twisted the phillips head screw driver trying to get the ceased screw to come lose. He thought about giving up.
Just tell them you can't fix it. They don't care anyway. It's not worth the five bucks.
But he sighed and persisted. Outside his shop window the street was dead as usual. It wasn't because of the virus, it had been like that before. A different kind of virus had taken out his hometown: progress, or what they called that. The bypass. The Wal-Mart selling cheap Chinese goods made for pennies on the dollar. The factories that had closed and moved the jobs overseas to make those cheap goods to be sold at the Wal-Mart...
Outside the dried husks of palmetto trees that lined the side walks of abandoned buildings stood at attention, baking in the late day sun. This once proud hamlet of Upstate South Carolina had been reduced to piles of abandoned brick, stone and wood mausoleums to a dead past.
There were only three businesses left on the main street. His business, Solomon's Electronic and Appliance Repair, King's Beauty Supply and a Sweepstakes location, which was a chain of computer casinos that poisoned the community and that took up wherever they could and had found a loophole that allowed them to exist.
Another virus in a time of many destroying our community and those within, Solomon thought to himself, sighing.
A couple of miles down the road there was a Dollar General. Those things were fucking everywhere and a shorter distance in the opposite direction was the Kwik Stop, formally Joe's Store.
Old Joe had been a pillar of the community. He'd been there over 50 years. Everyone knew him and respected him. A local black small business owner. He'd been the first in town and would be the only one for over two decades after that. The store had been a fucking institution and everyone had memories of going there and stories about Old Joe.
But 7 years nearly to the day some no good negros giving good black folks like Solomon and Old Joe a bad name had come in and robbed Joe. Joe wasn't no bitch, he was old school, and he pulled the pump on them and blew one into pieces but the other one got Joe in the stomach before he could take that one out too.
No one found Joe for at least 5 hours. He almost bled out on that tile floor. But Joe was a fighter like no other and he survived, and even recovered. Six months later he was back and work and smiling.
But what no one knew was Joe had gotten into bad debt with the bank because of his accident and a couple years later he was forced to sell to a couple of towel head brothers from Kuwait. Two months later Joe was dead -- another gun shot, but this one to his head and he'd been the one pulling the trigger. That store had been his everything and once it was gone he had no reason left.
The worst part was how fast niggas seemed to forget about Old Joe. They just went right on shopping there like nothing had happened.
Solomon shook his head. He felt a tinge of guilt. He had to admit they'd fixed up the store pretty good and one of the brothers, Khaled, had always been friendly to him. It wasn't their fault. He knew who's fault it was but he'd struggled his entire life to blame his own people for plight.
It had to be the white man. It had to be anyone else but the brothers.
Solomon put down the screw driver and rubbed his forehead. He'd given up on the toaster.
Behind him sat other welfare business: a microwave, a CR-TV... there was a time when things were made well and expensive. If they did break, you wanted to get them fixed. Now they were disposable. If it broke it was cheaper to just go buy a new one.
He wasn't even suppose to be open. The Governor didn't consider his business "essential". But no one was going to tell Solomon he couldn't run his business. So he stayed open. The virus was really a non-issue here anyway. This was rural South Carolina. People were continuing on with their lives. Solomon didn't know anyone who was sick. Things just worked differently here.
Save that lockdown shit for the city boys, he told himself.
He looked outside. The sun was getting lower. He yawned. That was enough for today.
He grabbed his stick and used it to lift himself from the old office chair with a groan and hobbled to the door to lock it.
He'd had the hobble for about 20 years now. One night he'd been coming out of the Piggly Wiggly -- when there still was a Piggly Wiggly -- and some young niggas ran up on him. There were four of them and they wanted his wallet, but Solomon wasn't no bitch. When he'd been drafted into 'Nam, Charlie hadn't made him their bitch and he'd be damned if these little coons were going to do that to him. So he'd fought back and they shot him three times and left him for dead. But like Old Joe years later he'd survived. The incident had left him with a permanent hobble. He'd used a four legged metal cane at first but one day it broke and his health insurance wouldn't cover a new one. So he went to the woods cut off an oak limb that had been wrapped by a sumac vine and made a cane out of it. It worked so well he wondered why he hadn't done it in the first place and hadn't looked back since.
But unlike Joe he hadn't just come out and said it was three niggas that had attacked him. He'd told a big lie. At the time, it felt like the right thing to do. Why disparage his people further and hurt their reputation more? Besides, one of them he'd known: a young kid of only 16 named Jaycee. He'd gone to school with his grandmama.
So he said it was three redneck boys in a pick-up truck with a Confederate flag on the back. He'd kept it vague to keep anyone from actually getting in trouble. Pick-up trucks with the rebel flag were a dime a dozen in these parts. The problem was he'd underestimated how much people actually would care. Black folks got out the pitch forks and torches. They demanded justice. They looked at the lie he told as part of the hundreds of years of injustice they had endured. What followed was riots in the streets. Business windows were broken. Fights broke out. People were hurt, but thankfully no one was killed.
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Racial tensions were at a high for a couple years. Solomon never confessed to his lie and they looked at him as some sort of martyr. It was just a pile of guilt he carried around with him and kept inside that ate at him daily. Now almost 20 years later it was such a distant memory few people seem to even remember why he walked with the hobble in the first place, but to Solomon that shit seemed like yesterday.
He'd always thought how crazy it all was: if he'd just told the truth, no one would have cared. Black on black crime was just something that that happened. Somehow it was just excusable. But let a white man do the same thing to a black man... hell no. Solomon didn't see the difference but he'd lied because he'd known they did. If Old Joe had been shot by whitey, it would have been race wars all over again.
There was a silver lining to it all, Solomon supposed. That boy Jaycee had gotten his life together after that. Went off to Georgia State to get a degree and never came back... except once, when his grandmama died he'd come home for the funeral. Solomon had come too and when he saw him he'd expected Jaycee would be the one to avoid him, but it was the opposite. Jaycee kept trying to get near Solomon and Solomon would hobble out of sight. But finally Jaycee had him cornered.
"Why'd you do it?" Jaycee asked him point blank.
Solomon had considered his words carefully, then responded: "One more nigga in the Penn isn't doing nothin' for us. You going to prison wouldn't have gotten the bullets out of my body".
Jaycee had considered this and nodded.
"I owe, then".
"You don't owe me shit, boy. Now get out of my way".
Solomon had hobbled past him, pushing him aside and left. He went straight towards the red dots and purchased a fifth to numb the guilt and forget again.
That was a long time ago, he thought to himself as he reached the door.
His mama had died still working at 80 years old at the textile mill. She'd refused to require. She lived to work. She'd been crushed when a pallet came off a fork lift just three months before it was announced all the jobs were moving to China.
His family was from Louisiana originally. His grandmama was into voodoo and she'd given all her "spell book" to Solomon when she was on her death bed from cancer. His father was a heavy drinker and worked for a local peach farmer. He had beat his mama pretty bad and him too until one day Solomon was too big to beat up anymore. Shortly after that he'd ran off with a younger woman never to be seen again. That was fine with Solomon, but even with the beatings, his mama took it hard. He hadn't heard from his sister in years. She'd gotten out and never come back. His brother was a year old and had gotten drafted too but he didn't come back. Charlie had got him.
After the war Solomon had met a beautiful girl. She was from Orangeburg and worked at the Moonlight Diner, which had been torn down years earlier after being abandoned since the late 80's. He got her pregnant which in the South meant they had to get married. They'd made it work for awhile, but she had dreams and those dreams had been crushed. One day he was coming home from work and she was heading to her station wagon with suit cases. He tried to reason with her, begged her to stay but she left him and little Tyrone to fend for themselves.
Solomon tried to be a good daddy, but he guess he'd failed because as soon as Tyrone turned 18 he took off and they hadn't spoken in years. Last he'd heard he was living out in Colorado.
All of these things were terrible in their own way, but he wanted them to define him more than the lie he'd told so many years ago.
He was about to head out the door and lock up when a familiar face covered with a mask popped in.
"Hello Solomon, it's good to see you!"
It was King, who ran the Beauty Supply. He was Vietnamese and had lived in the U.S. for decades, but while he wasn't fresh off the boat, the boat hadn't quite left port as he still spoke in an accent heavy, slightly broken English. These days it was muffled as well, since he always had a damn mask on. He'd figured it was just an Asian thing at first, but then he realized it was a way to make money: he required them to be worn to shop in his store and it just so happened he sold them too. It was smart, Solomon gave him that. In truth, he liked King. When he was in 'Nam, lots of South Vietnamese were kind to him when he was in country and King was from the South.
He did think it was bizarre cultural appropriation that an Asian man ran a shop that sold weaves and beauty products for black folks, mostly women, but King knew his stuff.
Still, Muslims were running Old Joe's store. A slopehead was selling black beauty supplies. What was this world coming to?
"King" Soloman grunted. "I'm just locking up for the day".
He waited for the joke to come but it didn't. King would always make a King Solomon joke about how their names went together and Solomon would make say "Very funny, what's next you going to put pee pee in my Coke?" It was just something they did, but not this time. Even through the mask Solomon could tell by King's expression something was wrong.
"Oh I see" King said, then immediately switching topics: "You here about what happening down the road?"
Solomon shook his head.
"Those boys from the Middle East down there have put a road block up and say no one can come in it is there territory now..."
"What?" Solomon said, looking up. "You mean Khaled and his brother?"
King shook his head.
"No, no, the other ones..."
Solomon knew he was talking about the Saudis. A group of them had moved into an old trailer park outside of town a couple of years ago and turned it into a compound of sorts. It had raised a lot of eyebrows. People were saying it was Al Queda or ISIS. But people said the same thing about the Kuwaitis.
"They beat Khaled up" King said as if on cue.
"What?" Solomon asked again, not sure if he'd heard right. Maybe the mask had made the words sound wrong.
"Khaled confronted them and said they needed to move the road block. That they couldn't do that and they beat him up. His brother got him out of there and he okay now but worse for wear..."
Solomon squinted his eyes together and with a grunt grabbed his old army jacket from its hook.
"Take me there" he told King. "Let's see what these ragheads are up to..."