Our neighbors in the apartment below Grace and me were three generations of women: mother, daughter, and granddaughter. It was the daughter Grace and I knew best, Leslie, a middle-aged Black woman whose eyes lit up in recognition the first time she saw Grace. Leslie’s mother, Ellen, had lived in the apartment for nearly four decades, and raised Leslie there, and they had raised Leslie’s own daughter, Nakia, there together.

      “No white man ever lived here before,” Leslie joked to me the first time we met. “It’s the Amazons.”

      I thought about this joke every time I went down the stairs past Leslie’s front door: How I was a sort of guest in the city of Themiscyra, and how the building we lived in, just two full-floor apartments, top and bottom, was a sort of city of its own, a walled fortress of womanhood.

      One of Ellen’s closest friends had owned the building until a year or two before Grace and I moved in. It was an almost daily reminder of the fabric of the neighborhood, how it had changed and been rethreaded by redlining and urban redevelopment greenlit by commissions of white men whom I always imagined conspiring in smoke-filled rooms. It was another instance of a way in which the city had been vacated before my residence, of how the façade of every building disguised an untold history.

      Ellen’s friend had passed away and left the building to her son who had been like a nephew to Ellen until now, with the incentive of money under his nose, Leslie told us. Now, things between the two families had become increasingly contentious. He had stopped responding to their requests to fix a water tap that continuously leaked, Leslie said, even though he was the one responsible for the water bill. This frustrated Grace immensely, since one of the things that had attracted her to the apartment in the first place was the prospect of having a Black landlord, someone who looked like her and so might have her best interests in mind. But he was proving himself to be more of a landlord than anything else, miserly and with nothing in mind other than his own bottom line.

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