Читать книгу Guilty When Black - Carol Mersch - Страница 8

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Life in Section 8

MIASHAH and her younger sister, Keahmiee, 19, moved to London Square only two months before the fire. Miashah worked mornings at the Tulsa Transit Station, and Keahmiee worked afternoons as a housekeeper at Hillcrest Hospital. While Keahmiee worked, Miashah cared for Noni and Nylah, who by all accounts were crazy about their “Auntie Moe.”

The cramped two-bedroom apartment where the sisters lived together was Section 8 housing, subsidized housing for low-income families who live below the poverty line as Miashah and Keahmiee did. It wasn’t the Hilton, but the aging housing complex was affordable and located in a decent part of town near the scenic midtown area. Miashah and Keahmiee were close and glad finally to be out from under their parents’ roof.

Keahmiee was a petite girl with smooth, shoulder-length hair and the winsome face of a kewpie doll. Miashah was the opposite: five-foot-two, stocky, and soft-spoken with the boyish appearance of a 12-year-old, which was roughly her age when she began caring for the family babies. Between her six siblings and the extended family, there was always a baby in the house. Miashah was the one who cared for them, juggling homework and diaper changes, then jumping out of bed the next morning to make the opening bell at McKinley Elementary School. She was already making meatloaf at the age of seven.

Feeding and caring for Moses family babies became a way of life for Miashah. She babysat family children all through high school, which eventually included Keahmiee’s two children. An unwed mother at 15, Keahmiee was ill-prepared to manage a young child and, as usual, her big sister stepped in to help as she had always done. Miashah had cared for Noni and Nylah since the day they were born. It was a role she came to relish.

Photos of her at her high school graduation show a bright-eyed, exuberant girl in a cap and gown, laughing and waving to onlookers. All she wanted to do was get a job and live her life with joy. Always a tomboy, she loved shooting hoops in the driveway with her younger brother. Family gatherings at the Moses house were jubilant, with smiling Miashah outgoing and talkative, a bright light at the center of things.

Miashah Moses 2009 High School Graduation (Photo: Tulsa Public Schools)

When Keahmiee leased the London Square apartment, it seemed only natural that Miashah would move in with her and help take care of the children. “That’s all I knew, was those kids,” Miashah said. “I had been taking care of them their whole life.”

The apartment complex occupied a square block and consisted of seven two-story buildings numbered from 100 to 700, each with 20 to 30 apartments housing families of a variety of ages and ethnicities. The sisters occupied a corner unit on the second floor of building 700 directly across from the entrance and vending machines. Their large second-story balcony overlooked a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood street, offering a breath of fresh air on quiet nights.

But certain things about apartment #716 were amiss. Of particular concern was the wooden railing along the second-floor walkway just outside their door, which was missing several slats. Noni was prone to let her little sister out for a walk, and there was ample room for a toddler to squeeze through and plummet to the sidewalk below. Since Noni was able to reach and unlock the door from the inside, Keahmiee and Miashah were careful to lock the dead bolt with their keys from the outside when leaving the apartment, even for a few minutes.

London Square missing slats outside Miashah’s apartment (Photo: Carol Mersch)

Also, the dials on the electric stove didn’t align with heat levels, and you could never be certain if a burner was on or off. The sisters learned that the only way to turn a burner off was to twist the knob to the right until it stopped, something their neighbor, Tina, was keenly aware of since her stove dials had no heat level markers at all. “They had all worn off,” she said. “There’s supposed to be a light that turns on when the burner’s on, but there’s been times when the light’s not on, but I know the burner is on because I feel the heat coming off.”34

There were other issues. The apartment didn’t have a smoke detector, and the fire extinguisher outside on the walkway had an expired inspection sticker. Exposed wiring could be seen sprawled along the upstairs walkway and dangling from exterior walls.

Tina worried that the wiring in the aging complex was antiquated and overloaded. The lights in her ceiling fan flickered and wouldn’t work at the same time as the fan. Finally, the entire fixture blew. The light in the bathroom short-circuited one day and threw the breaker. Then, when she plugged in a nearby oscillating fan, it sparked and blew the circuits in all three bedrooms. She hesitated to call the supervisor, since, she said, if tenants complained too much about problems, they were threatened with eviction.35

Jon Hodges and his girlfriend, Andrea, lived in the apartment below Miashah and had electrical problems of their own. “We had to have our entire apartment rewired because we had several electrical fires,” Hodges said. “Like we would be watching TV and all of the sudden the TV would go out and we would see smoke coming out of the wall. There was one time we could actually see a black line starting to burn up the side of the wall.” At that point, he threw all the breakers and called the manager.36

Nekesha Richards had recently leased an upstairs apartment in building 300. Her stove dials all had heat level markers, but the burners didn’t always turn off when she turned the dial to the “off” mark. An exposed lightbulb and its wiring could be seen hanging from the vent hood next to the grease trap directly over the burners. A single mother with two young daughters, a 4-year-old and a 1-month-old, she was frustrated with other issues in the apartment, such as a recurring infestation of bed bugs in her unit that she couldn’t seem to get rid of—a problem shared by another tenant across the way in building 700 whose child was often covered with bed bug bites.

While conditions in London Square weren’t perfect, Miashah and Keahmiee had never lived outside their home before, so they really didn’t know what to expect.

Keahmiee with Nylah and Noni, 2013