Lizzie had to settle on a crib joint with pay up front, a neighborly Jamaican, who lived in the building next door to Sparrow. Lizzie was instructed to pick her child up promptly. “I has a day gig, me-self,” the broad-nosed woman spoke pertly, looking over the rim of her smudged reading glasses. “Temple duties. And another set of children comin’ from the day shift.”
There was so much drama in Lizzie’s real life that the revue opening passed without much fanfare. She was anxious to get back to some routine, a dance where she knew the steps, what comes next. Third week into the show run, when she arrived to pick up Cinnamon, she found her daughter tied to a chair with ropes and duct tape over her mouth.
“I tellin’ you I won’t take yerr child inny more. Screamin’ all duh time. Soon as you leave, she ballin’ and kickin’ up a fit. Tellin’ me what for.”
Lizzie stooped to free her child, talking softly to those hysterical eyes. “Oh I’m so sorry, baby, hold on, hold still. I’m so sorry. Did she hurt you?”
The woman stood over them. “You need to put a hurtin’ on her. You’re too free with dot child.”
“What are you talkin’ about, you tied her up?!” Lizzie scooped Cinnamon in her arms, stroking her tear-stained face with her hands.
“You keep her. I don’t care. That little nigger need to learn she place in dis world. You and she both.”
Cinnamon held tight to her mother and pressed her cheek against her mother’s warm neck. Lizzie straightened her shoulders and spoke calmly. “My daughter is a princess. My daughter is a goddess.” Two pairs of eyes locked on the woman. “Cinn,” Lizzie said, “anybody try to touch yuh, juss hollah loud as you can. You can yell as loud and fierce as you wanna. The way my daddy used to call pigs.”
The matron folded her arms across her chest and looked through one lens of her crooked glasses. “Duh boat of yuh get your hinkty royal behinds out me house.”
21
Cinnamon got to know all the girls. The chorus line of Harlem cuties immediately adopted her and in their backstage camaraderie conspired to keep management in the dark. She hid in the back of the dressing room, in a customized bass fiddle case with padding and holes, in case they had to slam it shut if the need arose. She knew all of them, the Cane Break sisterhood. The Club as they called it.
In the first week she learned all of their names. By month’s end, she knew all of their habits. Snowflake was just that, a little light and airy in the thinking department. Ada was the realist, “Auntie, hunh? Does yo’ mama know where your auntie works?” Lois, a white girl from West Virginia, with her limited talent, realized she could get further passin’ for colored. Doe-eyed Dream was always heartbroken, “Marry you a business man, Cinn, not no lowlife musician, horn-playin’ bastard like I done. God bless the child that’s got his own, and then some, I guess.” Murtle dreamed of moving to the country with Diz even though she was allergic to everything under the sun, “Lord, just don’t bring me no flowers. Who brought them flowers in here?” Gail loved to laugh. She could make anything funny. “I say, honey, the toilet’s broke,” she recounted to Cinn, “he goes out and comes back with a plunger in his overcoat. ’Stead of fixin’ the doggone toilet, he looks at it and sticks it on the end of his horn! Wah-wah-wah-Waaah, wahduh yuh want from me?”
Each girl had her own hair and skin ritual—ice to the nipples to make ’em perky, shading the breastbone to give a small chest cleavage—and they all had their superstitions. “Who last touched my costume?” Nightly, Cinnamon was bedazzled by the manufacture of glamour and gossip in the tight galley dressing room.
“I hear Miss Opal gon’ split.”
“Cappy got trouble with Dutch Schultz.”
“Girl, leave that mess at the doah. That’s white folks business.”
“It’s our business if they close this show.”
“What else you hear?”
But they kept her secret, this temporary family. In between numbers, Lizzie always checked back in.
“Mama.”
“Lemme do somethin’ with this hair first, okay.” In the frenzy of her new life, Lizzie had run out of time to visit Jolene’s. She had bought a supply of the goods herself, but had run out of the special rinse. She removed her feathered headdress to reveal a short helmet of brambles. “Lord, today!” She fumbled with her hair, looking for something to improvise, or at least to keep it from breaking off at the roots till she could figure out what to do. Selecting a red bandanna, she tied it haphazardly, talking to Cinn through the mirror, “You call me Auntie in public, you hear? Mama’s just our secret name.” She turned to Cinn and for a moment found herself staring into her own youthful face. “Remember our song though. Our song.”
“Woo-Woo,” Cinn looked up at her mother as they sang softly in unison, “Chattanooga Choo-choo/ Someone tell me Who Who/ Is ridin’ in the caboose/ I need to be knowin’/ Where this train is goin’? Got to find that baby of mine/ So tell me where that Chattanooga Choo-choo/ Is goin’ this—”
“Chorus up next! Congo number!” The stage manager stuck his mug through the door. “Get that kid! Is that a kid?” He moved toward them. Lizzie held her hand up, a shield.
“It’s my sister’s kid. Got no place else to take her. Just for today.”
“Get that kid outta here! Go, go, go! Get my ass fired. You know the policy. Congo number! Places! Sunflowers up next!”
Lizzie threw a sequined cape over Cinnamon and trundled her to the kitchen. The cook she remembered from Vee-Vee’s penthouse days agreed to help to watch her, “Just tonight.” She hid Cinnamon behind a rack of dishes, “Stay here!” and flew toward her place on stage.
Lizzie got there too late for her entrance to the Sunflower number. Not only was she supposed to be in the center of a chorus line already on stage, she had put on the bandanna and forgotten the petal headdress. Already in trajectory, she threw herself onto the stage and tumbled into the line of dancing flowers, scattering them whither and nither. The music stopped. The audience roared. Lizzie unfolded her long body and shrugged, “Oops.”
The music picked up again. Lizzie pretended to follow along, mimicking and exaggerating the choreography. For the unified kicks, she kicked her nose. Fan kick, she flipped herself over and landed on her butt. From the wings, the stage manager grabbed his forehead, sweating. “What the—pull her off, get that broad!” Crowned with a garland of ostrich feathers, Queen Opal awaiting her entrance stood behind him. “Leave her be. It’s funny. That gal ain’t got no bones.”
Meanwhile, Cappy Meeks, owner and proprietor of the Cane Break and principal backer of Lew Leslie’s new revue at the club, escorted some high-society guests through the kitchen, giving a backstage tour.
“I would love to take something like this to Paris, Mr. Meeks,” said the group leader, a prominent old-money socialite. “What if I stole one of your girls, would you let me?”
“I would have to charge you. An arm and a leg or two,” the gangster responded with a shallow laugh. The group didn’t get the joke. “I’m sure we can work out some arrangement that will leave you still able to walk. Just kidding.”
“It’s ridiculous a bootlegger can afford Opal Roberts and I can’t. Surely we can make some arrangement.”
Cappy froze, then smiled. “I prefer to think of myself as an independent businessman. Everything’s negotiable.”
While Meeks and his company conversed, Cinn watched from behind the towel rack. The waiters picked up the final order. The cook staff began closing down the kitchen, the pots boiling on the stove before their scrubbing. A squad of Cappy’s men bombarded the doors. The cook tried to say kitchen’s closed, gentlemen. They pushed him aside. Two others dragged one Pinky Alvarez, still in his pajamas, by the neck and the wrist up to Cappy before his startled entourage. “Nice ring,” Cappy said and turned back to his guests. The henchmen slid one screaming Pinky by the heels of his bedroom slippers toward the vats of boiling water. Atop Pinky’s frantic squeals, a shrieking shrill high C scream cut the air li
ke a razor.
“Jeez!”
“Coppers!”
“Raid!”
Quick time, boom, the guns flew out and like magnets all pointed in the direction of the sound . . . at this little chocolate kid, sportin’ a tiara. Just as instantly a honey-faced Banshi appeared, her red bandanna pointing out like horns, shielding, ready to gouge anybody who came near.
Cappy walked over, his heel lifts digging into the floor. “What is this?”
“My sister’s kid. I’m watchin’ her. Took sick. Just temporary.”
He liked her economy of words, her quickness. She didn’t flinch.
Cappy cracked his neck to the side, a signal for his henchmen to loosen their grip on the fat Dominican. “It’s your lucky day, Pinky. Won’t be tomorrow.” He bellowed at the assembled onlookers, “What’s the ruckus in here? Get back to work! We got a club to run!” The crowd quickly dispersed. Cappy Meeks didn’t move. Nor did his men. He pointed his manicured finger at Lizzie and Cinn and back again. “You sure this ain’t your kid?”
“Does she look like mine?”
“. . . Sounds like you. I never forget a song. Have her gone by tomorrow night. Or you be, too. It’s policy.”
Lizzie hurried down 135th Street, pushing her way through the Harlem symphony, an open-air garden of wandering prophets, speculators, moneymen, race men, God’s voices, governments, theories of luck, economics, and daily numbers. Snowflake had agreed to watch Cinnamon for the morning. Lizzie was determined to find an apartment and a place for Cinn before the afternoon pick-up rehearsal. She avoided the library across Lenox, looking like a courthouse. People were arriving for a poetry reading where she knew Haviland would be. Jolly had told her when she went back to collect the rest of her things that Ray and Elma had moved. “To the Bronx,” he said like it was a foreign country. She couldn’t stay with Sparrow indefinitely. She had to find something quick. I got as much right to the Tree of Hope as anybody.
The three-digit local lottery, based on the daily stock exchange, conceived by a West Indian businessman with the unlikely name of Sydney Holstein, grew exponentially in Harlem, sprouting several cottage industries and subsidiaries. Illegal until the practice was later appropriated by over twenty of these United States, “the numbers” was the largest private homegrown enterprise in the colored world—next to funerals, churches, and hair treatments, of course. Liquor stores would come later, the illegal Prohibition trade being strictly in the hands of first- and second-generation castaways and sharpies from Liverpool, Dublin, Sicily, and the Russian pogroms.
Sparrow was addicted to playing the numbers. When Lizzie complained of her financial straits, that was his solution. She would have none of it. “I told you I ain’t got enough money. Why I’ma throw it away?” Yet here she was applying for an apartment from the Policy King’s daughter. She didn’t see any reason why Haviland’s living there should keep her from getting a decently priced rent. The family sponsored literary contests, a black-owned recording studio, movies, and real estate. Why not an aspiring showgirl?
The rental office was crowded. Harlem was bursting with new arrivals every day. “Wait here,” the receptionist said, appraising her. The way the woman smiled made Lizzie think she was not going to get the apartment. She looked down to pray. Shoot! Dirty fingernails. Cuticles bitten pink and raw in places. She sat on her hands. The young woman reappeared. “This way, Mrs. Turner, Miss Iolanthe will see you now.”
The young woman led Lizzie down the hallway to a room with muted gray walls and stately mahogany furniture. Sunlight twinkled through a trio of stained glass windows. A tall, chiseled, even younger woman with large dark eyes greeted her, a slight West Indian lilt to her voice. “Mrs. Turner, please come in, sit down.” Her broad mouth smiled without showing her teeth as she took the chair beside Lizzie. The air stirred with the scent of orchids. “I am Iolanthe Holstein.”
If the numbers racket can get alla this, I’m in the wrong line of work. This chippie looks to be younger than me. Lizzie clasped one hand over the other and bent her fingers inward to conceal her stubby nails.
Iolanthe crossed her legs. Her long shins touched, one ankle neatly gracing the other. “There are a few things I must ask you about your application.”
Before she could be scrutinized, Lizzie went on the attack. “I hear you got apartments for artists.”
“Yes, for poets and artists.” Iolanthe shifted in her seat, her eyes downcast, looking at Lizzie’s hands. “I am a big supporter of the arts for Negro people. We must support the artists.”
How ’bout artists who support themselves. Why she lookin’ at me like that? “I write songs,” Lizzie replied, conjuring her first conversation with Haviland. “That’s a kinda poetry. A painter told me that. One of your tenants, Haviland Remick.”
“Ah, you know Mr. Remick?” Iolanthe’s eyes brightened. “A fine artist, great promise, if a little eccentric. You’re friends?”
“I—we—well, I haven’t seen him lately. I’ve been workin’. Down at the Cane Break, the new club downtown, a new revue, they featuring one of my songs. Queen Opal’s gonna cut a record, got a great write-up in the paper,” she blurted in one breath. Talkin’ too fast, sayin’ too much and nothin’ at all.
Iolanthe folded her hands across her lap, tranquil as a praying mantis. “It says here you want an apartment for two? Your husband?”
“No, I’m a widow. My husband died in the war. Well, just after. It’s me and my daughter, but she’s no trouble. She’s large for her age. Figure to pass her off for five and get her into school.” Lizzie’s heart sank with regret. Why did she feel compelled to tell this arrogant, pampered woman anything? She had expected an interview, not a cross-examination.
“I see . . . And your references? You haven’t listed any.”
“I just moved up from Charleston and started workin’ the next day. I ain’t had time fuh references.” Lizzie stood abruptly. Her shoulders jiggled with irritation as if she could shake this woman’s judgment off. “I’ve been working two jobs, Miss Holstein. Was livin’ with my sister until, but . . .”
Iolanthe leaned forward in her seat, “So is this the address you are living at now?”
“Look, Miss Holstein, I’m a hard-workin’, decent woman and I need a place. If you can’t see your way to rent me one, I got to be on my way.”
Iolanthe stood and placed a warm hand on Lizzie’s arm. “Mrs. Turner, I just needed to ask you some questions for clarity.” She smiled and extended her other hand toward the door. “I’m sure we can accommodate you. I just need to check one more thing. Please, come with me.”
With a breath of relief, Lizzie followed Iolanthe into a barbershop adjoining the realty office. The large, well-equipped room was lively with customers and conversation, each red leather chair occupied.
“Well, what makes you say that? You don’t know that! You don’t know that,” the manicurist said as she filed the nails of her patron, the head barber circling with comb and shears. “I could be ridin’ uh aeroplane,” she continued, “I could do somethin’ like that. Black Eagle did. You saying I can’t cuz I’m uh woman?”
“Some Black Eagle,” the barber laughed dismissively, “landed on a telephone pole! Powder blue jumpsuit, looked like a cholie inna Cotton Club show.”
“You juss jealous!” chuckled the woman. “I work, Miss Holstein work. A woman can do anything. Ain’t that right, boss?”
“All right, now, sh sh shshsh. Simmer down,” said the man in the chair, “settle it down.” He removed a steaming towel from his face with his left hand, the fingers of the right one sitting in a little bowl. The water started trembling to his laughter.
That voice. Lizzie knew that voice.
“Sweetheart, look who it is,” Iolanthe said, putting her arm around the man in the barber chair and kissing him. “Tell me this isn’t your brother Osceola’s wife.”
Deacon Turner could see her face in the mirror. “Good to see you, Lizzie.”
Soun
d stopped. Shock waves traveled through her body. Her neck, her ear, her temple, her hand, her back, her eyes, her gut, her heart—all spasmed in pain. Lizzie backed out of the room and ran, then stopped. I wrote down Sparrow’s address! Damn! She ran as fast as she could, grabbed Cinn from Snowflake’s arms and ran.
When she got to Sparrow’s apartment, Deacon’s black Duesenberg was already parked outside.
“Your brother’s wife,” Lizzie spewed with disgust. She drew Cinnamon fast to her side, her fingers digging into the child’s flesh. “Get away from me before I call the police and have them lock you up for what you done to me. Keep away from me! You think you can come up here and act like somebody. You ain’t nobody. Loser, and always will be.”
“I see you brought the child,” Deacon said.
She scooped Cinn up so fast she snatched the child’s breath and slammed the door in his face. He won’t touch her.
“Hear me out.” He spoke through the letter drop. “Open the door.”
“Fuck you.”
“For Ossie’s sake . . . Fuh mine. Wasn’t until Ossie was dyin’ I stopped and looked around. A man came up and started talking to me, and that’s how I met Mr. Holstein. I came and heard what he had to say. What he said I never heard it before, never understood. It made me think about my life. What I been till then. What I done with it, my life. What I had done to you . . .”
Cinn could feel her mother shaking. She could see the man’s shiny buttons, the starch of his shirt, the smoothness of the skin on his hands. He smiled at her through the hatch and continued, “Lizzie, Lizzie, I’m running a business. Legit. Barbershop. Real estate. You met my wife,” he laughed softly, then sobered. “Lizzie? At least let me . . . I’m in a position to do something for the child. At least let me do something for the child.” He was scaring her mother. She was shaking, frozen. Lizzie held on to Cinn, held her fast by the mouth until the last scrape of his shoe hit the steps as he left.