She sat down across from Marcus with a folder of paperwork that she'd kept meticulously, every letter and denial notices organized by date in a manila folder that she'd been carrying around waiting for someone to look at it. Marcus looked at it. He went through every document with her carefully, asked the right questions, explained what each denial meant legally, and what her options were. And by the end of the conversation, he'd flagged her case for inclusion in the federal remediation review, and given her the specific name and contact information for the federal intake coordinator handling cases from her zip code. She looked at him across the table when they were done.
How do you know all this? She asked. I used to administer this program, he said, from the other side. She looked at him for a moment. And they fired you for helping people?
They fired me for noticing, he said. "There's a difference. I'm still working on the helping part." She left with the paperwork she needed and a follow-up appointment scheduled for the following week. Marcus sat at the folding table and looked at the empty chair and thought about the distance between that chair and the place where he'd been standing 5 years ago, how far he'd traveled, how little of that distance had been his own forward motion, and how much of it had been the accumulated weight of everyone else deciding who he was allowed to be.
And then he stopped thinking about the distance and picked up the next file. Because there was work to do. Evelyn showed up 6 weeks after the doors opened. Not announced. Not with any particular ceremony.
She came on a Tuesday afternoon and knocked on the open door of the community center room and stood there in clothes that were neither the CEO wardrobe nor the disguise. Just clothes, regular clothes, the kind a person wears when they're not performing anything for anyone. Marcus looked up from the desk. He wasn't surprised to see her. He'd wondered when she would come.
"You didn't call," he said. "I didn't want you to feel like you had to say yes," she said. "I figured if I showed up and you needed me to leave, it would be easier to say so in person." He looked at her for a moment. "What do you want to do?"
She looked at the room, the folding table, the two chairs, the hand-lettered sign that Deshawn had painted a sun on because he said every office needed a sun. "Whatever needs doing," she said, "filing, phones, coffee runs. I have no useful skills in this context that I'm aware of, but I learn fast." "You know housing law," he said. "I know it from the developer side," she said.
"That's probably more useful for knowing how it gets violated than how it gets enforced." "That's actually exactly what we need," he said. He nodded at the chair across from his desk. "Sit down," she said. He handed her a file.
Dorothy Simmons, he said. Her remediation review is scheduled for next month. I need someone to go through her denial correspondence and identify every procedural irregularity under fair housing statute. Can you do that? She opened the file.