I walked home from the grocery store today and passed a dolly on the side of the road with a stark white piece of paper fluttering in the wind. The word “FREE” was written in giant block letters, and I immediately stopped to give it a once over. I didn’t even hesitate to roll it around and test it out. I almost swung my heavy grocery bag from my shoulder to plop it down in the dolly for the remainder of my walk home. I didn’t even care that the bottom metal portion had been replaced with a bit of particle board. It would do the trick!
It wasn’t until my walking partner side-eyed me after my clear excitement of this find that I realized my reaction to a broken dolly on the side of the road was…unusual. When I wheeled the dolly back to its previous location and continued my way home, I was flooded with memories of other curbside finds, like a VCR I gifted to an undeserving person three years ago and an ancient desk I made my then six-year-old help me carry up the stairs during the pandemic. The thrill of a curbside find will always get me pumped, and it is deeply ingrained in my bloodline, back to at least my grandma Donna.
I grew up on a farm outside of Atlanta in the 90s, back when Atlanta was just the Perimeter and had yet to explode to the larger suburbs outside of I285. My grandma Donna lived in Atlanta with her life partner, Lulu. They had been together since the 70s in Atlanta, which is a feat for a black man and a white woman in that era of the South. Their relationship would become a source of confusion to me as I got older, because he wasn’t my grandfather, but he was always with my grandma. People would ask who he was, and he was simply…Lulu, Grandma’s “friend.” Why my family would never claim him as a member of their family would be revealed over the next thirty years as I realized how racist they are. Lulu (my sister couldn’t say Leroy as a kid) was twenty years younger than my grandma. He was always driving a giant truck and it would always be a different truck every time I saw him. That is saying something because we saw each other at least once a month. He helped raise me on the weekends I would spend with my grandma. And this truck was the source of their income…from curbside finds.
See Atlanta neighborhoods in the 90s were full of rich white people who dumped the stuff they were tired of onto the side of the road. Grandma and Lulu would load up into their truck early every morning and drive through these rich people’s neighborhoods, full of houses they would never be invited into, and grab these items to sell at a booth at the Lakewood flea market once a month. Their lives would revolve around this method of gaining income.
Lulu always had a back brace on because he would load the truck while my grandma watched with vintage coffee tables, giant CRT TVs, headboards, and there was even a waterbed circa 1980s! Nagel posters, piles of smelly clothes, and even a Gameboy! Lulu’s friends would come along and help occasionally. And my sister and I would go on these drives too, always keeping an eye out for “a good pile!” I would be crammed in the back of the truck bed or smashed into the center of the seats (it depended which truck Lulu had that week), surrounded by the castoffs from Atlanta’s elites. Then on Lakewood weekend, we would start early and lay out the items for Grandma to sell to people wandering through the largest flea market in the South. My grandma didn’t have a real booth inside the giant buildings, just a place outside that she would make Lulu throw down rugs they had found and rearrange the furniture in a way that she thought would work. I can still hear her exasperatedly saying “No, Leroy, that won’t work.” She would always handle the money, because “Leroy isn’t good with money.” If Lulu made a sale, he would immediately walk the money over to my grandma’s hands. I would watch my grandma shake her head at people’s offers, seeing the haggling of a professional knower of items’ worth work her magic.
And my sister and I would be there all weekend with Grandma and Lulu. I would crawl under all of the tables of the booths around my grandma’s area, desperately trying to stay out of the Georgia sun. I would be covered in dirt and grime from playing among the trash that the rich people had tossed and all of us had gathered and tried to save. We would walk around for hours looking at all of the cool items people had gathered to sell from around the state. The rugs were always my favorite. We would look for food throughout the day; there was always a good fried dough somewhere and the people making it would always be willing to give Donna’s grandkids some fried bread. And Lulu would pull out his cooler full of shrimp and watermelon to give to my grandma to season so he could grill it up. The smells of charcoal and hot Georgia dust with the mixes of other people’s household goods filled the air.
When I would go home, I would be armed with piles of black trash bags filled with the items my grandma thought I would need. The clothes that people would toss out would make me one of the oddest dressed children in my school. A fur coat, a pink bebe shirt that was too small for me and my stomach showed, strings of pearls, covered in perfume from half opened bottles that rich Atlanta women got tired of wearing, and white cowboy boots. There was a FUBU shirt that my dad threw out because he wouldn’t let me wear clothes from “n-words.” I would look forward to the days Lulu’s truck would pull up and my grandma would say, “Come here, Vannie Poo, I set some stuff aside for you.”
Getting curbside treasures was how Grandma and Lulu made it work for decades, oscillating between trying to make truck payments and trying to not get evicted from not making rent…until their bodies couldn’t do it anymore. The house where I watched my grandma die just a few years ago was filled with curbside items, junk piled high, like my grandma finally got her indoor booth.
