“Mr. Minor.” Landry’s secretary, a flat pancake-faced girl with sly eyes, stood at the entrance to Landry’s inner office, her hand on the knob, a heel balanced on the opposite shoe. “Mr. Landry will see you now.”
He sat down, determining when he would speak. Landry began first. “Next project, Minor, I’m putting Bainbridge in charge. From now on, you should report to him.”
“Bainbridge?” Ray said in disbelief. Maybe he hadn’t heard right. “You want me to work under Bainbridge? A junior staffer, barely twenty?”
“Well, you’re both junior staff. He’s twenty-five, fresh out of the army, focused. Bethel is a fast-track project. If we’re to be done before Easter, there’ll be a lot of late nights. You have a family to attend.”
“That has nothing to do with it. How can you make him the lead on a project that is my design?”
“Now see here, Minor, you made some notes on a blueprint. That hardly constitutes a design. I took you in because you showed a promise, which frankly has barely panned out. I’ve kept you as long as I have out of deference to your family’s situation.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“I am sorry you lost your children, especially sorry for your wife—”
“You leave her out of this.”
“I’ve made my decision.”
“You wouldn’t have a decision to make were it not for the work that I already did for you.”
Landry’s mouth twitched. He brusquely twisted the curled end of his mustache.
“My dear demented fellow, you seem to think that because you are a Minor, you are somehow entitled. I make decisions based on merit, on what makes for the best team, and you, frankly, are not fitting into it. I was prepared to keep you on in a position, but with this—”
“To hell with your position!” Nigguhs in a haystack. Crabs in a barrel. Pincers clawing at my neck. “You’ve stolen my design without crediting me.”
Landry’s eyebrows rose. “You credit yourself too much, Mr. Minor. Your check will be mailed. Good day.”
Raymond pondered the state of his world going up the wooden back steps. No job. No Nation. Now what? . . . Why not just cross over? He could, on occasion, spot someone he knew was passing—by hair, aura, features, gesture, walk. He would often stroll with his little girl Gabby through the department stores. People marveled at her dark hair and onyx eyes, never knowing, but with Jesse, his mute, clearly colored child, this was not possible. Ray had been so happy to get a son. The ruddy complexion, thick kinky hair, and broad stubborn jaw of his grandfather bound him to an identity, but he loved his boy, right down to the turned-out, flat, narrow feet just like Pap’s. Jesse had been so gleeful, so animated. His one remaining child. Daddy’s home. Now nothing.
Ray had it all the spring before. Job, family, even the flu. It laid him up a couple of days, then he was back to work. When the same bug returned in September, he thought nothing of it as he left for the site. The kids were sniffling a bit, but Elma was there. He stayed late, determined to get the church steeple frame built before the onset of cold. She sent word by Jolly.
He found her flying from child to child. Gabby’s red eyes darted in panic, her shivering face turned purple, gasping for breath. Jesse, with ugly, red welts, skin so hot, he was boiling inside. The little red bubbles in Benna’s saliva flowed like a string of Venetian beads from the corner of her mouth on a bare thread of fetid air. His golden child a grimaced old troll, drowned in his arms. Jesse alone survived, the welts peeled away, a dying man’s skin.
Some scratchy Victrola crooned through the window frozen open on the stairwell, a delta Yellow Dawg ballad, notes hangin’ in the air like crystal.
“He had it all before,
Then Death come knockin’ at the door,
Life looked so good in June,
Then Death come stalkin’ by the winter moon . . .”
Before the key touched the lock, Elma had swung the door open and quickly cupped her arm under Jesse’s stubby thighs as she shifted the boy on her hips. “Look, Jesse, Dah-dah’s home.” The baby’s eyes were vacant. His head jerked backward in an involuntary spasm while his neck, struggling to keep upright, bobbled as a slow spinning plate would on a stick.
“Old man Landry had to cancel the meeting,” hat in hand, he lied, not wanting to hear about a move uptown, apartment with a yard—air. “How is he?”
“His name’s Jesse,” Elma said firmly. “Your son has a name.” Ray put his hand to his forehead, pressed the middle finger on the space between his brows, and closed his eyes. “You should call him by his name,” she softened. “It helps him. Call him by his name.” Straining her shoulders, she handed Ray the child, a jostling sack of loose potatoes.
“It would help if you talked straight to him. I’m not Dah-dah. I’m . . . his father.”
She had retreated to the stove. “I’ve got fricassee, your favorite.”
Raymond approached her from behind, nuzzled his face in her hair. She turned to him and squeezed his hand. He was amazed that she still blushed. The yellow gaslight hit the timbre of her skin, the pitch of the air a fine-tuned cymbal. Tendrils of black hair framed her neck and face, delicate and fierce as a swan’s.
17
“Look here, she say don’t come north till spring,” Lizzie pointed to Elma’s underlined hand, “specially with a baby.” She lifted her daughter Cinnamon off her lap, her nipple dislodging from the child’s hungry feeding. “Listen, we can’t have no more of that when we get to the city. You goin’ on two, got to be independent.” Lizzie folded the year-old letter and stuffed it in her pocket. It had taken her two springs to get out of Charleston, two years to get the money. Two years to leave behind the memories of her assault, the riot, and Osceola’s death. Nineteen nineteen, a year she wanted to forget, was supposed to have been a good year—soldiers returning, peace, prosperity. It turned out anything but for Lizzie, for most colored folks as a matter of fact. The spring riot that left Ossie and four others dead proved just a taste of the summer terror in store for black folks naïve enough to think that the “war for democracy” would make a place for them at the table. Instead, white ire at such audacity ignited riots across the country that made the flare-up in Charleston look like a barbecue.
The city that had been the gem of the South was never the same afterwards. Charleston’s busy seaport shrank to half. Scores of wharf joints stayed closed after the riot. More when the troops tapered off. Pilar’s was long boarded up. Lizzie found work sparse at the few spots left. People who expected her to play the grieving wife couldn’t see her as the notorious, swivel-hipped hoochie dancer, the Yamma Mamma. And Prohibition put a cramp in her program completely.
She refused to work in the laundry. Mr. Yum Lee wouldn’t have it anyway. “You near burn my place down! Go way, go!” She turned to Flip McKinley, who now ran both the movie theater and the hotel. For old times’ sake, he sometimes gave her work. When the piano tickler for the cinema got tight, she stood in, puttin’ the pedal to the floor, jazzin’ up the movie score. Occasionally she worked as a dishwasher at the hotel. She told him, “Cleanin’ rooms is out, but dishes I’ll do.” The kitchen was next to the garage. Tooling around with the mechanics, she finally bummed a ride with a rumrunner. For once, her having a kid came in handy. Who was going to suspect a family man traveling with wife and child? The bootlegger took them as far as Baltimore. When he finished his last load, the joker told her, “New Yawk’s just a short ways.” By short, Lizzie thought he meant walking distance. She walked for two weeks. “Crossed the whole state of Delaware, as a mattuh uh fact,” but had only gotten as far as Philly.
Picking up income where she could—street performing in Philly, a short gig in Chester, a little bait and switch in the Trenton train washroom—Lizzie finally arrived at her destination. The train pulled into New York’s Penn Station in the spring of 1921.
“Couldn’t leave you with Mah Bette,” Lizzie chattered to her daughter, sitting beside her. “Jars of snakes b
y the door. Mass’s big toe, petrified in the drawer. Haints seepin’ through. We through wid all that slave time hoodoo. We inna trunteth cintry! We gettin’ out of here. We goin’ places! The modern world!”
“Charleston, Durham, Kittyhawk! / Norfolk, Richmond, New Yawk!” the duo sang and giggled together. Lizzie pedaled her legs in the seat as the train slowed and the city skyline came into view. “Look at that, Cinn, look at that! That’s what I’m missin’—New Yawk!” An alchemist’s combination of grease, water, and men’s aftershave on her plaits gave her a Creole crinkle of curls, peaking out of a stolen cloche. “Four dollars.” She patted the rolled paper inside her bra and picked up her twine-held suitcase, a sack of songs on her back. “So what do you think?” she asked the silent tot, standing broad-legged beside her. “We in New Yawk! Harlem, baby! Here I come!” Shafts of sunlight washed through the lattices of the glass-domed station as Lizzie warily mounted the wide granite staircase, the child riding her mother’s hip like an ol’ rockin’ chair. Baby in one arm, suitcase hanging from the other, she twirled in an accelerated medley of steps when they got to the top.
A few feet away, Dakota Sparrow had been waiting for Huey Jones’s late-ass train, talking to himself. He had told Big Ed that he would stop by the train station on the way from Tin Pan Alley and escort the new player to the club. “That’s fine, but not if the nigguh gonna miss the—Whew!” Dakota Sparrow lost his thought and any memory of his mission as Lizzie Winrow Turner whirled past.
A series of quick-time pirouettes and a perfectly sequenced foxtrot across the marble floor left Lizzie’s child dizzy and giggling, the world meshed into a wash of liquid colors, dancing to the timbre of bells. Someone had tossed them a quarter. Lizzie squeezed her daughter tight, then stooped to pick up the coin. A red-faced rotund policeman approached her from behind and poked her in the side. “Git a move on, girlie.” The child took one look at his big, snarling face and let out a high piercing cry that made people from all directions look toward theirs. “Say! Whatza mattuh!” He threw up his hands, arrested, then collected himself. “Get that brat outta here! Tyke at stoof uptayne. Aff wid yuh.”
Scooting her suitcase before her with her foot, Lizzie sat down and pulled the bag toward her with her calf. She flipped her baby onto her stomach and bounced the wailing small body on her knee, simultaneously leaning to her side to fix her stocking at the toe seam. Lizzie so wanted to impress her citified sister that she had splurged on the skin-toned stockings at two bits a pair. She had greased her legs with Vasoline, removing the excess with a barber’s towel before putting the new stockings on. Her taut, sinewy limbs really did look like silk, she thought, but the toe seam had been bothering her since Newark.
The toddler’s screams quickly descended to a rhythmic self-absorbed chant. “Look, Cinn, the floor shines.” She tapped her toe rhythmically, reached in her purse, and pulled out a cigarette. Her child’s head popped up like a periscope. Cinnamon Turner squirreled off her mother’s lap and attempted to scamper forward on her own. Cigarette dangling from her mouth, Lizzie reached for her child, collected her things, and stood up in one fluid motion. Cinnamon protested by pushing away, planting her sturdy feet on Lizzie’s stomach. Lizzie slapped her into the hip saddle and pointed her finger sternly. “Don’t start!”
“Well, stop a fellah in his tracks! Who is this little pot of gold walkin’ straight into the gaze of one Stretch Dakota Sparrow, talent scout?” The lanky chocolate dandy who had spied them dancing off the escalator now approached Lizzie as she walked ahead of him. “Georgia Peach!”
“Wrong state.”
“Pecan pie.”
“That’s New Orleans.” She stopped and turned, halting him in his tracks with a cold dead stare. “You ain’t never been nowhere South.”
“Been to New Jersey. That’s South enough . . . Hey!” He jumped in front of her. “Flo Ziegfeld roamed New York to find the most beautiful girls in the world for his Follies—I do the same for Harlem!”
“That so?”
He had her attention. “You dance. I can tell by the shape of your legs.” Her eyes rolled up, but she lingered. “And the way you danced around that cop. Pretty good, ain’t yuh?”
“Some say.”
“Ain’t gonna git nowhere with a shorty on yo’ hip, though. Barron Wilkins is hiring sharpies, but no babies allowed—you gotta be twenty-one, which I doesn’t suppose you is neithuh. Hey! I’m trying to give you a break.”
“How’s that? You don’t know a thing about me.”
“I seen the way you dance down the sidewalk with the kid, how you can hoof it, and if your lungs are anything like hers, you can sing, you gotta sing good—total package—I got the eye for talent . . . Hey!”
“What part of get lost don’t you understand?”
“That little part right there where you sorta like me. Side of your upper lip right here.”
“Come on, Cinn,” Lizzie snapped, the still unlit cigarette dangling from her lips.
“Sin, that’s different.”
Lizzie pivoted and strutted away, her hips bumping of their own volition. Riding sidesaddle as nonchalant as Buddha, the kid stared him down over her mother’s shoulder. He stood with his hat over his chest. “That’s Dakota Sparrow. Eye for talent! Name’s Stretch . . . Friendly, ain’t yuh. Say!”
After ditching the scarecrow, Lizzie emerged from the station to a wide avenue, congested with model T’s, trucks, garment pushcarts and racks, double-decker buses and crisscrossing trolleys. People were moving fast, talking fast, but the blocks were only two steps long. All slicked down, when she hit the town, Miss Lizzie strutted uptown. She got to Elma’s walk-up in no time. Mr. Jolly greeted her while his wife went to fetch Elma from upstairs. It was a real dumpy place. Elma had described it as a lively tavern, but with Prohibition in effect, it was just a cramped Mom and Pop joint, complete with Mom and Pop. Hardly enough stock on the shelves to make it worth their while. The only traffic seemed to be the delivery boys rolling boxes to the back, giving her the once-over as they passed, their skin sour and pale.
Elma emerged from the back, black stockings and long housedress to her ankles, her hair swooped over her ears in a tangled bun, held with the butcher’s pencil. Her sister looked thin, her once radiant eyes dull with worry, but Lizzie busted out a face-splitting grin, propped Cinnamon on the counter, dropped her bag, and opened her arms. The two women embraced and rocked from side to side, squealing unintelligible delight. Elma pulled back in awe. “Don’t tell me. This your baby?” Little Cinnamon almost fell off the counter, reaching for them. Elma darted and caught her in an embrace.
“Seventeen months,” Lizzie affirmed. “Trying to walk by herself. Trying to dance too. Got her own mind. Almost got us arrested.” Elma kissed Cinnamon’s plump cheek. The little girl startled her with a deep-dimpled, full-lipped smile. When Lizzie tried to take her, Cinnamon shooed her mother away with a grunt. “Well, stay then. Meet your aunt.”
Mrs. Jolly looked on sternly as Asa folded his arms, mesmerized. Then here come the sister, a completely different kettle of fish. Slew-footed, red-boned heiffuh, been around and announcing it. Carrying that plump round-eyed chocolate drop of a kid, danglin’ a cigarette from her lips, lipstick turned purple, jagged ring ’round the tip she done smoked down to the stub. None on her finger. A line of grime on her neck, beat-up patent leather shoes . . . and new silk stockings . . .
As is the Southern custom, Jolly invited the sisters to dinner with him and the missis, an instant welcome meal of leftover red beans. “My people from Tennessee and favor red beans over your Geechee black-eye peas . . . served over my very own dirty rice. The recipe shall never part my lips.” Chicken necks in a fine jerk sauce, the bones cooked down to their softness, and stewed cabbage rounded off the meal. “Mrs. Jolly fixed the biscuits,” Asa acknowledged of his taciturn wife.
Elma ate daintily, mashing food for Jesse, who was seated in her lap. Lizzie ate for three people and told of her plans. Sitting atop a s
tack of newspapers propped on a chair, Cinnamon stalwartly attempted to eat by herself with a spoon. Raymond joined them toward the end of the meal, his eyes still tearing from sleep. “Had to see what all this disturbing laughter was down here.”
Elma joked, “Jolly’s secret recipe It’s the spice.”
“You should have some. It’s too good,” Lizzie added with her mouth full as she reached over and fed her baby from her fork. Elma dabbed the sides of her mouth with her napkin to suggest the practice to Lizzie, who was too animated to pay attention. Lizzie paddled her legs under the table. “I’m looking for some work fast, Mr. Jolly. Y’all been in the business, I thought you could help.” Raymond declined any food, not that there was much left. Cinnamon picked up the fork from his place setting and attempted to spear a series of red beans.
“You could get work as a nice housemaid or body servant, maybe even a nurse,” Mrs. Jolly suggested, observing Lizzie’s pert, full breasts.
“I’m not looking for that. I’m a show artist.”
Ray crossed his legs and leaned back in his chair, wrapping his arm around El. “Any good?”
“I aim to find out!”
“What’s your act?” Jolly interceded. “I can maybe recommend a couple of spots uptown.”
“I’m a ‘total package’—clown, sing, banjo, trumpet. Piano. I do everything.”
“A regular virtuoso.”
“Oh, I forgot to say I dance. Dancin’s my specialty. I sing, too. Not like Elma, but I can get a crowd goin’. Do standards and my own songs—some me and Osceola did together.”