The name in my 1983 ledger was Little Darnell P., age nine, every Saturday from 1983 to 1989, and next to it, every single week, I had written, no charge, mama cannot pay.
I remembered him. Skinny kid, shoes with holes, his mother cleaning offices downtown. I cut his hair for free for six years and gave him a dollar for the bus. The council chamber went dead silent. A reporter from the Free Press stood up and asked, Councilman, is that you in the ledger.
Darnell Price did not answer that. Instead he said something nobody expected. Mr. Jenkins, he said, there is a page in 1989 I need you to not read out loud.
He called me a dinosaur and condemned my building, and the proof of who I was had his own name in it, every Saturday, for six years.
The page in 1989 was the last time Little Darnell came in. I had written more than no charge that week. I had written that his mama had passed, and that I gave the boy a suit of my own sons clothes for the funeral, and twenty dollars, and told him to come back anytime, for the rest of his life, free. He never did come back. He went off and made something of himself, and I was proud when I saw his name on the ballot, and I never said a word about the shop.
Darnell Price called the recess, and when he came back he was a different man. He told the council the whole of it, himself, and asked them to pull the condemnation. There were no structural concerns. There never had been. There was a developer and a councilman in a hurry, and a barber who had once cut his hair for free.
My building still stands on Gratiot Avenue. Fifty-two years in the same chair. Councilman Price gets his hair cut there now, in public, and he pays, and he tips too much, and we do not talk about 1989 unless it is just the two of us.