Lavinia Westbrook hauled the last of the week’s water up from the truck at first light on a Saturday in September, two barrels of it, filled the evening before at the station on North Virginia where the owner let them draw from his outside tap, and by the time she had the second barrel braced inside the kitchen door her arms were shaking and the sun was over the Virginia Range and the day was already getting hot.
She was thirty-one. She had grown up on Bell Street in Reno, in her mother Eliza’s house near the Bethel church, and she had married Howard Westbrook two years ago and come up here to Black Springs, six miles north of town, to the third-acre lot Howard had bought from the man Sweatt who had sold lots to colored families when no one in Reno or Sparks would sell them a house. There was electricity, run up from the line along North Virginia. There was no water. There was no sewer. There was no road to speak of, only the ruts the men had filled with rock by hand, and when it rained the ruts ran mud and the trip to town that took twenty minutes on a dry day took an hour and a half.
She dipped a pan into the barrel and set it on the stove and started the coffee. Through the window she could see the other houses scattered across the sage, a dozen of them, two dozen, more every season, small frame houses the men built on weekends out of what they could get, with stovepipes and clotheslines and gardens that lived or died on hauled water. The spring the place was named for ran somewhere out in the rock to the north and was not fit to drink. Everyone she knew up here drove to Reno for water in barrels. Everyone she knew up here had an outhouse out back and a child who had been told a hundred times to watch for snakes on the path to it.
Howard came in from the yard with his hands washed at the basin.
“They’re coming at ten,” he said.
“I know it.”
“You have the book.”
“I have the book.”
The book was a ledger she had bought at the stationer’s in town, a real one, bound in black, and she had ruled the columns herself. They had decided, the families who had been meeting all summer in one front room and then another, that they would make a proper thing of it. Not a club. A corporation. They would give it a name and officers and dues and a bank account, the way the county would have to take seriously, because the county did not take seriously a scatter of colored families in the desert asking for water, but it might take seriously a corporation with a charter and a treasurer and minutes written down. Lavinia was to be the treasurer. She had counted, and she had been counting all week, and she knew exactly how much was in the coffee can in the cupboard, and it was not enough, and it was a beginning.
The families came at ten. They came in their good clothes because it was that kind of meeting, the Carthens and the Robinsons and the Turner woman and the rest, and they filled the front room and sat where they could, on the chairs and the bench Howard had brought in and the arms of things, and the children were sent out to the yard, and Lavinia sat at the kitchen table she had carried in, with the black book open and the pen.
Howard stood by the stove and called it to order.
He was not a large man and he did not raise his voice. He said they all knew why they were there. He said they had been hauling water from town since the first of them came up, and that the children were growing up hauling it, and that he had heard the county say, more than once, that the county would not put in a water line or grade a road or do any other thing for Black Springs until Black Springs was brought up to the county’s code, which was the county’s way of saying never, because how was a man to bring a road up to code with a wheelbarrow and a Saturday.
“So we stop asking as families,” Howard said. “We ask as a corporation. We put it on paper. We raise the money ourselves, what we can, and we show them we have raised it, and we make them tell us no in writing instead of telling us no by saying nothing.”
There was a long talk after that, the way there always was, about money and about who would do what, and Lavinia kept the minutes in a fast hand she would write out clean that night. They voted the name. They voted Howard chairman, which he had not asked for and did not want and took. They voted Lavinia treasurer, and she wrote her own name in the book under the office, which felt strange, to write your own name as a thing the room had decided.
Near the end the Carthen man, who was older than most of them and had been up here longest, said the thing that had been sitting under the whole meeting.
“They are not going to read our minutes,” he said. “The commissioners. A book of minutes from us. They will put it in a drawer.”
The room was quiet.
“Then we don’t send minutes,” Lavinia said.
They looked at her, at the table.
“We send a letter,” she said. “One letter. Not a petition with a hundred names they can lose. One letter, in plain words, that says what it is to live six miles from the city of Reno in the year nineteen fifty-four and carry your water in a barrel. And one of us reads it to their faces, standing up, in the room where they sit. They can put a letter in a drawer. They cannot put it back in the drawer after a man has read it out loud to them and the newspaper is sitting there.”
Howard was looking at her.
“Who writes it,” the Carthen man said.
“We all write it,” Lavinia said. “Tonight. And I’ll set it down.”
So when the families had gone, and the children had been collected out of the yard, and the light was going long and gold across the sage and the scattered houses and the bare road they had built out of rock, Lavinia cleared the black ledger to one side and put a clean sheet of paper in front of her on the kitchen table, and Howard sat across from her, and she dipped the pen, and at the top of the sheet, because they had to call it something, she wrote the words A Cry for Help, and then she stopped, with the pen above the paper, and waited for the first true sentence to come.
Black Springs, about six miles north of Reno, was settled beginning in 1948 when the realtor J. E. Sweatt subdivided land and sold lots to Black families who were shut out of housing in Reno and Sparks by racial covenants. The unincorporated community had electricity but no running water, sewer, or graded roads; residents hauled water in barrels from Reno into the late 1950s. Families organized a Civic Improvement Corporation in the mid-1950s, raised money, and pressed Washoe County for services. Running water finally reached homes in Black Springs in 1958. The campaign included a written appeal read aloud to the county commissioners.