Real Estate: pt 2 Big White House

At this moment, and as I have done almost every Thursday since last summer, I am writing across from my friend and colleague, Brian Riedel. “Across” changes its meanings with the seasons, the level of COVID infections in the Houston area, and with our own domestic and professional commitments. We have met to write in parallel on my back porch, at times moving as the sun moves to avoid the glare on our computer screens. Post vaccination, we have met inside my house in my noisy kitchen or my dining room that seems quieter if only because it is bereft of its usual signs of use. We have also met remotely, Zooming from our homes or from our offices, sometimes even from neighboring offices. 

Today, I am in my dining room and Brian is in his house waiting for the mobile dog groomer to finish his work. One of the dogs, the first one to be groomed, is curled up, fur shining, by Brian as he types. While we are writing, I see not Brian, and not his on-screen avatar, his dog, or his kitchen, but a blank document that slowly fills with my words. It is hard not to think of Brian as somehow existing “behind” those words, that second screen. Today, perhaps our 40th meeting, is a landmark. For the first time, we are writing about the same thing. We are writing, differently, about real estate.

My writing is part of my blog, part of what I am writing here. I am composing a sequel to my last entry, the personal story about my personal relation to my family homes. Although that last blog was entitled “real estate,” I only used the term once in the body of a piece that, in capturing my childhood feelings, was emphatically not about mortgages, insurance, or the unequal and pervasive economic and social networks that turn homes into property—in other words, into real estate. The plan for the second piece was to follow childhood memories of staircases and fireplaces into the world of pricing, loans, and real estate agents.

On the other side of the screen, Brian is writing a book about the history of Houston neighborhoods. His book, as yet not officially titled, is a story about sex and race. He has spent years in Houston’s historical archives, untangling—what he would call “surfacing”—the complicated story of how after Reconstruction, black-owned property was bought by white Houstonians, some of them real estate speculators, some of them elected officials, some of them both. These figures, many of them bearing names that are associated with the architecture and topography of Houston today, were crucial in fashioning neighborhoods that still figure on Houston maps and into the evaluative discourse of real estate agents: a neighborhood is affordable or unaffordable, desirable or undesirable. Brian’s work focusses on two neighborhoods with distinct but overlapping racial and sexual histories. He details the transformation of a largely black neighborhood, Freedmantown, into a red-light district called the Reservation, that is now the site of a public housing facility. He also tells the story of the Montrose and its serial transformations from a planned urban haven for white middle-class families, to a vibrant “gayborhood” in the 1960s, to the place of often uneasy cohabitations that it is today.

Today, Brian is working on fleshing out the story of property transmission that shapes the histories of both neighborhoods. I feel this week that I can contribute more than usual, because he is doing what I, as a literary scholar, call a “close-reading” of a series of affidavits that, unlike the deeds and other instruments of property transmission he has examined, contain some traces of the voices and histories of the black Houstonians. When he reads me what he has written I push him to be even more attentive to language, and to the tensions between the official genre of the affidavit and the words of the people that genre designates as “affiants.” Brian probably does not need my reminders and my often over-the-top uses of the scanty evidence. Today I need him more than he needs me: I need to be reminded as I write my story of the names and stories that appear in the affidavits. I cannot hear Brian’s keyboard because, unlike me, he has taken the trouble to learn how to mute the clacking that signals his working presence in a parallel world. I always write better, though, knowing that he is there. Today his silence presence allows me to think about Susan Willis.

Last week, Brian wrote about Susan. Her words appear in an affidavit about the history of Lots 9, 10, and 11, Block 8 of the Hardcastle Addition, which she and her husband together purchased in 1879, some six years after their 1872 marriage, and which she inherited at his death in 1889 and sold to a white speculator in 1891. The affidavit, witnessed by a notary in April 1906, was not recorded with the Harris County clerk until August 1908 – a few months after the City of Houston passed the ordinance creating the Reservation.  Who was it that required a clear title and a clear claim to the property?  By 1908, Susan Willis has no claim to these lots, no dog in this fight. She is a small cog in a chain of transmission, her relation to the property that had been her home long severed, a matter of history. Susan’s testimony opens up a small window to other histories-- not so much into her own life, but into her husband’s. She says: “Simon Willis was my husband, we were married in 1872, he came to Texas from Georgia when he was a boy, with his white people and left his family in Eldridge County, Georgia, he never saw his family anymore, nor did he hear that any of them were living.” Brian is doing the difficult work of providing context for this marriage, this death, and this transmission of ownership. What compels me here, though, is that one sentence, so complexly and ironically about ownership (“his white people,” “my husband”). The notary has joined Willis’s clauses with commas, as if rushing through them to an end that settles a question of property. The sentence does not pause to emphasize a history of enslavement, the movement of slaveholders to Texas, the status of marriage and family among enslaved and formerly enslaved people. These are not the point to which the affidavit is driving. Simon’s family, whom Susan remembers as having once consisted of a “Mother, Brother, and a Sister” live (and die) only for the purposes of real estate. The notary interjects “the affiant does not know whether they are living or dead.” This statement is apparently enough to clear the title.

I am thinking about Susan and about Brian’s work as I type. behind my screen of words, behind Brian’s avatar, frozen into position until he comes to life to discuss with me what we have each written. Susan, Simon, Simons family, Brian, myself, each with their different relations to life and death, presence and absence, agency and power. The critical race theorist and black history scholar, Saidiya Harmann reminds us not to romanticize the “voices” of the enslaved, to claim—and I would say especially as white people—that we can hear them. I cannot tell Susan’s story, or Simon’s, and neither of course—fully—can Brian. I can write briefly about my own encounters with real estate remembering here their names and their marks.

When Scott and I first moved to Houston, we crossed a culturally significant line. Scott’s story of home and homing will of course be different from mine, but this is importantly a story of a publicly identifiable unit: a white heterosexual couple with secure academic jobs and a new marriage certificate, which no one ever asked to see. Each of our stories—Scott’s and mine—is bound up in being perceived as a unit. Our whiteness, our job security, our ability to use (if we chose) the words “wife” and “husband” made us recognizable to others and to ourselves as potential property owners. In many ways, our real estate agent informed us, we were ideal buyers; she would even, she explained, sometimes break with her practice of keeping her clients out of the sellers’ way because she felt we would make a good impression. People would want to sell to us. There was a caveat. We were not, she hinted, ideal in every way—there was something about us that made us look young, perhaps too young to be fully legible as the professionals we were. She was, after a while, able to put her finger on it: Scott tended to wear shorts in the Houston heat; I was bare-legged and never planned on wearing pantyhose again. My skirts were too long, they read perhaps as countercultural. Herself the wife of an academic, our agent assured us that sellers would understand that we were a little different, but she did not sound entirely convinced. None of this—the bare legs, the flat sandals, the unruly hair-- ultimately made a difference. People seemed happy to sell to us, apparently able to ignore what was dicey on the surface and to penetrate to the structures that mattered, the implacable categories of sex and race. I was reminded of that implacability only last year when I told my son Paul that our Hispanic neighbors seemed surprised and relieved that we were Democrats. The signs of self-presentation that would, in my mind, signal our politics were so legible and, indeed, definitional to me (a now-older woman still in long skirts, wearing flat sandals, with un-blow-dried hair) were not significant to everyone.  “To them,” Paul said. “You are the white lady in the big white house.”

At the beginning of our path to the big white house—the fourth home we have owned  in Houston—we relied far too much on our agent to identify suitable neighborhoods for our “starter home.” She did not show us anything in Freedmantown, or even the Heights, where we now live, because the schools were “not good enough” for any children we might have. Montrose was also out, the schools once agin an alibi for race, and, in this case, for sexuality. The schools were bad, it seemed, because of the “lack of families” in the neighborhood. Both unaffordable and undesirable, Montrose was nonetheless the place we always met at a café or restaurant to plan our viewing itinerary. It was after leaving Goode Company Barbeque that our agent made her point about the neighborhood most clearly. “You don’t want that,” she said, gesturing towards a house on a side street. We were moving too fast for me to fully grasp what “that” might be: a man, a black man in casual clothes, sitting on a stoop who could have been a member of the “homeless” we had been warned against, or, more likely, someone sitting on his own front stairs. This— or rather that— is the salient lesson at the heart of our search for a home: one cannot look for a house in Houston or anywhere without encountering the racism at the heart of the project real estate. 

As we sped by the man I said something to the agent in the way of protest, but I don’t remember what it was. It was met at any rate with silence, and it was not enough. Not enough at that moment, and not enough to help stop the stories that accrue with every passing week. The son of a professional baseball player shot in on his front lawn in the Bellaire city-within-a city in Houston because they did not believe he lived there. The internationally-renowned Harvard Professor of Black Studies detained by the police for “breaking in” to his own house in Massachusetts. The black homeowner in Indiana whose property was repeatedly under-appraised until she had a white friend act as the potential seller. The black man in Michigan, arrested with his black real estate agent as they viewed a property together.

Scott and I made and got accepted an offer on a home on Bluebonnet Boulevard. It was in many ways a strange choice because the house, originally probably quite a nondescript ranch house in a resolutely suburban in-burb of Houston, had been remodeled so that it resembled a home in Santa Fe, complete with pink stucco, lots of tile, and even a Kokopelli figure on the pale wash of the kitchen wall. Although it was a beautiful house and we loved living in it, it clashed horribly with our furniture and we were never able to live up to its insistent aesthetic.

The point here, of course, is “choice,” no matter what (small) regrets we might have had afterwards. And choice, in real estate, is, unless you are very affluent indeed, ultimately about loans. Although I knew then about the process of redlining—the discriminatory practice by which banks identify certain, usually minority, neighborhoods as too risky for loans—and had briefly volunteered for an anti-relining organization, I did not give the practice a thought in my attempt to become a homeowner. My mind was on other lines on other kinds of maps: the distance from home to work represented by the straight black line of Holcombe Boulevard; the meandering blue line of Braes Bayou that looked deceptively beautiful on brochures. When we started the loan process, we were overwhelmed by what was then literally paperwork; when we were approved for the loan amount (with PMI insurance) the renter in me was a little shocked. In our more recent real estate dealings, we have become more blasé; as our loan history stretches out behind us, as we have “built” credit, the anxiety and suspense of applying for a loan or refinancing has diminished—although the annoyance has not. Annoyance, in this case, is a sign of privilege; those who can get loans and good rates can feel frustrated, even alienated, but they are not fundamentally alien to the process, which lets them in through acts of often ritual gatekeeping. 

My story—and Susan’s and Simon’s to the extent we know them—are not primarily stories of individual racism. Our real estate agent was no different than our second in participating in racist structures, structural racism. My own complicity makes me less apt to point a finger at any one person or interaction, although some of these stick in my memory as lessons to be learned. While Scott and I were thinking about location, and furniture, and deciding which room would be our very first guest room, our choices that seemed so individual to us were of course part of a much larger master-narrative that allowed us to live in a relatively safe neighborhood near work, to build wealth over our lifetimes, and to pass it on to the next generation.