A Sign of the Times

The silver-and-red sign announcing “Be a Rebel” put a hitch in Henry Griffin’s step as he climbed the stairs to the barbershop the year before the pandemic. It hadn’t been there the last time he’d come for a haircut. Near a burgeoning suburb in the former heart of the Confederacy twenty miles south of Richmond, Virginia, and while it could have a slogan for any number of things, Henry didn’t like it. Nor was he always comfortable approaching the rear of an old brick farmhouse where the shop was. Black men had been shot for less, but he’d been coming to the shop like clockwork for a haircut for five or six years and more often when he needed a trim for an upcoming trial he was doing. The barber, Karl Albrecht, knew his way around hair: anyone’s and everyone’s hair. They’d also grown up in the same Black Bottom neighborhood in Detroit; only Karl had moved out long before him.

“I’ll be with you in just a minute,” Karl said when he heard the doorbell.

“No hurry,” Henry said and sat down as the barber continued to broom the always spotless linoleum floor. Henry thought it was a miracle of tenacity and willpower that Karl could still work. He had to be in his seventies and had already been through two bouts of cancer, once with polyps in the bowels and once throughout the prostate. No matter if he resembled a giant tortoise with trifocals and short grey hair on top, Karl still turned over the open sign six days a week. He still planned to die as his immigrant father had died: with a trim mustache, a neat shop, and at work.

“Okay, I’m ready for you, Mr. Henry,” Karl said.

“I’m coming.” Henry put down a retro issue of Rolling Stone in the waiting area and went to the brown leather-and-chrome barber’s chair. After settling onto the deep cushion, he could smell the antiseptic surrounding the black combs in a jar on a nearby countertop. A few seconds later, it disappeared in a whoosh of cool air on his broad nose, firm chin, and high cheekbones the color of aged cherry as the barber’s cape settled onto his shoulders. He thought Karl had never shown any signs of prejudice before. The barber had never hesitated around him or held back any of his stories, and Henry told himself again, who knew what the sign meant? Perhaps it was there because Karl played drums in a rock-and-roll band, but it hadn’t been there for the previous ten years. Perhaps it was an advertising slogan for a men’s cologne, but Henry didn’t see any for sale. Perhaps it was a slogan for a motorcycle company. He vaguely remembered a TV ad using it, but even if so, words had the disagreeable habit of meaning different things to different people.

Once I was settled, I asked him if he was still playing with a band.

“Naah, they wanted me to learn how to play a new drumming style. That’s too much work at my age,” Karl said.

“But you would have if you were younger. Right?”

“Yeah, I played with any kind of band growing up. Swing, bebop, rock, popular, it didn’t matter. My Dad said it was the only way for me to learn what I could and couldn’t do. Once, I sat in with a band in Paradise Valley that had a breakneck tempo, and they wanted me to keep time with the cymbals instead of the high hat. I did my best, but it was a struggle at times. They were such great musicians, the best I’ve ever played with, Black or white, and I’ll never forget how they didn’t make me feel like a chump during the session. That wouldn’t happen today.”

“It does seem a simpler time.” Henry shifted his weight beneath the white barber’s cape. He came here more for the stories than the haircut. His fellow lawyers sometimes told fascinating stories, too, but they were different, more often about their latest trial or their child getting accepted into Harvard or Yale than their problems outside of work or their roots. Henry often wondered whether he—or they—lacked something after sitting in the barber chair for over an hour talking about past or present joys and troubles. Sometimes, he and Karl just watched old-time musicians playing and gossiping with old friends. Once, they’d watched a show on drag racing because Karl had co-owned a drag racer in the early sixties before the engineers got into the sport. He hadn’t raced, but it was one more argument that the sign meant something different to him.

“Have you been back to the old neighborhood in Black Bottom lately?”

“Not since the wife and I moved down here. It’s a long drive, and there’s not much there for me.” Karl came around the chair with a shuffling gait, holding his phone out in front of himself. “It looks like a bomb hit it.”

The collar of the barber’s cape tugged on some stubborn neck stubble, causing Henry to wince as he turned his head to look at Karl’s phone. On it, a video of rickety houses with tilting roofs, crumbling sides, and plywood-covered windows played. A swipe or two later, and it was pandemonium. Young women with painted faces and too few clothes strutted for the camera or stared vacantly at nothing. Young men in t-shirts shouted imprecations at cops of various shades, who alternately ignored them or led them away in handcuffs.

“Where did you find that?” Henry didn’t move, but he let his eyes lose their focus. This moment was nothing compared to the sound of Dada coughing out his lungs when he came home from shoveling coal at the Rouge before he died or hearing the rat-tat-tat of machine gun fire as young, scared National Guard soldiers sprayed bullets into a suspected snipers’ nest that proved only to be someone’s home during the 1967 Uprising. Henry had been only ten then, and his Mamma had held him tight. That was before she remarried an apothecary who bought them a better home in Indian Village. His new stepfather, whom he eventually called just Pops, always said to give people the benefit of the doubt, and whatever he did, not to go burning places down. Build them up right instead.

“I don’t know. Someplace,” Karl said as he punched and scrolled through websites on his phone. “I get so many texts and emails, I can’t remember them all.”

“I’ll bet.”

“What do you mean by that?”

“Nothing. I get so many emails and texts that I don’t know what to do, too.”

“That’s what I mean.”

Karl stopped playing with his phone and looked at Henry, who said, “Are you asking me what I think?”

“Yaah.”

“Those young people need a hand up, not a night in jail.”

“Huh.” Karl withdrew the phone and soon pressed a buzzing electric razor into and around Henry’s large ears, bending them over as he shaved off a few errant hairs. He turned the vibrating device off with a click and said, “The wife is after me to help out her grandson from her first marriage. She’s worried about him.”

“Oh?”

“He’s spent a night or two in jail, and he’s only a freshman in high school.”

“That’s what I’m saying. A night or two in jail does no one any good at that age.”

“You sound like my wife. She says he needs my help and that he looks up to me, but he pours gas into the motor oil reserve on the tractor instead of the gas tank and then doesn’t tell me about it, as if there’s anyone else to blame. And when I ask him to dig a hole for a new oak I’m planting, I find him playing games on his cell phone instead. Doesn’t have a job but has a cell phone somehow. And he’s been arrested for selling some weed, too.”

“How old is he again?”

“Fifteen.”

Henry shifted in the chair before saying, “My son tried weed when he was that age. It’s a time for experimenting.”

“And?”

“He stopped when I told him if he were caught again, I’d ground him for the rest of high school.”

“That’s what I mean. His dad is of no account himself, always drinking and whoring, leaving the apartment a mess, so there’s no help there.”

As he was trained as a lawyer to show no surprise, Henry didn’t at learning that Karl was a stepfather and grandfather. But he was. Karl had never mentioned progeny before despite sharing his spouse’s divorce, her youth spent picking cotton, and her need for a wheelchair. Karl criticized her only once: when she’d insisted he move an azalea bush that took him four hours to plant. It had galled Karl the more because he’d planted it for her. But it’d happened only once, and Henry had liked Karl better for being human enough to make one complaint but honorable enough not to make two. Henry wished he could say the same. However, that was all in the past now, and the question on the floor was whether and, if so, how much more help Karl should provide in raising her grandson. Henry doubted he should be the one to answer those questions. He wasn’t a professional psychologist. His surprise at Karl having a step-grandson showed how little he really knew about the barber, but Henry wanted to help the child.

“If you’re asking what I think again—I could be wrong—but I’d say all that is why he needs your help.”

“I don’t know about that. He doesn’t listen to anything I say."

“How so?” Henry thought he knew from earlier in the conversation, but Karl needed to talk.

“I tell him to rake out the lawn in one place, and he does it for a minute or two before quitting, saying the job is done when it isn’t, not by a long shot. All he wants to do is stand around and listen to his tunes, as he calls them.”

Henry noticed how the story had changed some, but not so much as to mention outside of a courtroom. The gist was the same. “That doesn’t seem unusual for a teenager either.”

“My dad had a second-grade education from the old country, but he knew enough to put me to work in the grocery store when I was nine.”

“You were lucky; your step-grandson doesn’t have the benefit of a good father, you said. You’ll have to step in.”

“I tried. I told him to put some oil in the riding mower, and he put it in the crankcase instead.”

Henry chuckled once and then stopped. It wasn’t a laughing matter to Karl, and Henry supposed he was right, “That’s unfortunate, but I’d hate to tell you what I did on my first job as a dishwasher. Dropped two armloads of dishes and got fired.”

“You did?”

“Pops just told me to start applying for another job.”

“And?”

“I found one in a music store. I could play a mean saxophone for a high schooler. No, not like you. I never appeared on stage at clubs like you did when you were growing up. The best I ever did was my senior recital on my high school stage. I certainly never toured the country like you did. But I wasn’t bad for sixteen. Maybe your step-grandson can find a music store to work in, if such things exist anymore in an online world.”

“There are a few used music stores around, but nobody will hire him, what with his record.” Karl’s lips curled further upside down, accentuating the lines running from his bottom lip to his chin.

“They won’t know about it. The court keeps juvenile records sealed. Nobody knows about them.”

Karl stood, wondering, absorbing the information, and then said, “I don’t know what he can do.”

“Something he likes. Something that he can dream about, say, becoming a famous rapper. They all want to do that now, just like we wanted to be rock stars. He doesn’t believe it, however, not in his heart of hearts. You have to show him it’s possible, just like your dream of becoming a drummer.”

“It’s not easy. I can still remember Dad taking me to the Grand Ballroom on the near west side. We heard Buddy Rich, Max Roach, and Benny Benjamin drumming with their bands. They could lift their bands to the next level with a single beat. You could see it. Hear it. One was all it took. It was amazing. I wanted to be like them when I grew up.”

“That’s what I mean. Tell him about that.”

“Dad had a reason for taking me, though. He let me see for myself what it took to be a great drummer. See, he was trying to tell me something, that I’d better be ready because the bus only stopped once for kids like me, if it came at all, but I wasn’t hearing him.”

“You did eventually, though. Right? That’s what your step-grandson needs. Wisdom but support first. Your step-grandson needs to believe he can do something meaningful for the rest of his life. I bet he’d love touring the country like you did.”

“Two years of cheap hotels, constant practice, and clubs filled with drunks and cheaters. That was enough for me. We weren’t going to make it, not ever, so I quit in the middle of some cornfield in Iowa and headed home.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t get me wrong, I was good, but I wasn’t good enough for the bus to stop.”

“Maybe you should tell him that exact story after you help him some. Don’t tell him what to do. He knows what he’s supposed to do. He just can’t do it, yet.”

“I don’t know. It could be a long time.”

“Probably will be, but you must give him a dream first. Teach him some rap rhythms on your drums. I bet he’d like that.”

“I’m not young anymore,” Karl said, shaking his head.

“It doesn’t have to be much. Just some of the most basic rhythms. He might not even know common time. Once you do that, then show him how to maintain a mower and let him do it several times as you watch. You’ll have to be careful not to overdo it. Anymore, they’re sensitive at his age, and he’ll be more so than others because he hasn’t succeeded at anything.”

“I don’t know. I can’t help him with schoolwork. My brother was the one who could do schoolwork. He even went to college, and his son is a lawyer. I barely got by except for music and band.”

“You’re tougher to convince than some of the juries I faced as an assistant prosecutor in Detroit.”

“You were an assistant prosecutor trying to convict criminals?”

“For a while. It was the quickest way to gain trial experience, and that’s what I wanted most of all as a young attorney.” It was what he’d told others now, those he didn’t want to explain the complicated reasoning that had led him to choose to prosecute criminals rather than go into the legal defender’s office. It was also true, but he’d also viewed the world through the certainties of youth and family. It was years before he saw the other side of the argument and quit.

“I would never have guessed.”

“I can’t believe it now, but that’s not important. What’s important is not whether you can help your step-grandson learn math and English. It’s whether you can find someone who can. I’ve got to believe that the school system has academic counselors specializing in students like him, and most teachers are more than happy to help a student who tries.”

“I suppose, but that’s the problem.”

“I got you. The question is how to show him that he needs to do so. That’s where you come in. Tell how your time in the band and school improved your drumming. Something that kept you in school until you graduated.”

“That was my dad.”

“And it will be his step-grandfather.” Henry felt the conversation slipping away into the past, but he didn’t know what to do about it. He’d made his pitch several times and been rejected. Or maybe not. Who could tell anything? Maybe Karl would help his step-grandson. He hoped so.

“Don’t get me wrong. I hated schoolwork. I hated sitting at a desk listening to a teacher drone on when I could be playing music. Still do. After I quit the band, I drove a truck cross-country rather than go to school. I got to see the country: I’d pull out from Napa Valley with a load of lettuce—the giant heads that the restaurants liked for their burgers—and drop off my load two or three days later at Eastern Market or sometimes at a store in New York in the middle of the night. I was my own man, but it wasn’t the easiest life. A man could lose his rig when his refrigerator gave out. A whole load of strawberries might melt. I saw it happen once. Thick red ooze just came out of the back of the trailer door. The man never drove a truck again, and you’d better believe I pulled off and checked the temperature every few hours after that.”

Karl still held his phone, but instead of looking at it, he searched out Henry’s eyes. The latter lifted his face a half inch and met the barber’s blue-gray eyes. What a life Karl had led! So unlike Henry’s own. He said, “Stands to reason.”

“It got to be that after a while, however, you couldn’t make a living without joining up with a big company, and the folks were getting older, so I got rid of my rig. I just left it and the keys in front of the bank because I couldn’t pay off the loan. But they never came after me.” Karl paused, his chin down and his eyes closed.

“Then I started barbering. Took money from the mob to open my shop but didn’t know it at the time. I just thought a guy saw a good investment and decided to go for it. And Dad was happy with me barbering, too. You see, he didn’t care what I did as long as I had a steady trade. But the world has changed. He needs to stay in school.”

“I got you. The question is how. Your step-grandson needs someone he respects to tell him to stay in school. For me, it was Mamma. When I wanted to stop after high school, she insisted on my going to college. Perhaps that’s you. But all that is in the future. Someone has to get him through high school first.” Henry tried one last time. He owed it to the child if no one else.

“I don’t know. The world has changed. It’s not like when we were growing up. Dad lived in the same house with Mom for thirty years.”

“In Black Bottom? I thought they moved out of the city sooner,” Maybe he’d misjudged Henry and his family. It wouldn’t be the first time. An attorney had to make snap judgments to survive at trial, and he was good at it. Better than most, at least, but sometimes it misled him in everyday life.

“No. They moved to Linwood in ‘65 so I could go to a better high school. I couldn’t get into Cass Tech like my brother, you see. They only left the city itself after the riot, when the criminals began taking over the streets. It got so bad that Mom couldn’t walk down the street by herself, and Dad had to keep a shotgun in the store. Here, let me show you.”

As Karl fiddled with the phone again, Henry’s back became rigid and hard. His hands seized the chair’s arm. He remembered the time. How could he forget? The police chief had created an elite strike force, purportedly to reduce rising crime rates in the city, after the city disbanded the Big Four squad cars that enforced the color line more than busting up gangs as they were supposed to do. However, the new force proved no different: It raided nightclubs and homes across Black Bottom and the changing neighborhoods further northwest. It trashed Pops’s new shop on the word of an unnamed informant that it processed heroin. It broke down doors at two in the morning and unleashed a hail of bullets on a man defending his home, all without bothering about warrants. It was only disbanded after Coleman Young defeated the police chief and became the city’s first African American mayor.

Whether because Karl sensed that movement or because he remembered the earlier disagreement, he stopped and put the phone down on the counter. Instead, he picked up a mirror and held it for Henry to see the back of his head, proclaiming, “You look brand spanking new! Your wife won’t know you.”

“Excellent as always.”

Karl didn’t respond except to whisk the cape off. After paying him, Henry walked out the door into the sweet, musty, peppery, cloying smell of azaleas in the summer heat. Stopping, he saw lawn mower patterns crisscrossing a perfect green lawn of Bermuda grass—the only kind that the barber said he could get to grow after trying two other types—and a frilly, white gazebo with a perfectly arching path of pavers to its entrance. The dark green of a pyramidal magnolia tree highlighted its bright, snowy flowers. Everywhere he looked, from the white picket fence to the covered pile of clippings behind the garage, was order, method, and beauty.

Henry started walking to his car on a gravel road, its stones jutting against the soles of his Oxford shoes, before realizing he hadn’t asked about the sign. He considered returning to the shop to ask about it before deciding not to do so. His not asking the question was an answer in and of itself. Getting in and leaving, he paused at the property’s gate to look around as his eyes unexpectedly blinked. But his mouth formed a narrow line bending downward at one end as he pulled onto an empty, silvery road shining in the sun.

BIO: Todd Adams is a retired attorney living in Chapel Hill, NC. His publications include a short story, “As the Law Is Written,” which placed second in an annual writing contest; microfiction on Literary Veganism and The Academy of Hearts and Minds; and the legal thriller Suspect Justice, available on Amazon and elsewhere. He writes about movies and novels at https://toddbadams.substack.com/publish/home.