The Black Rose

  She asked him what he was reading, and he said it was a book for college. He had the summer off, but he said he was a student at Walden University in Nashville. “I’m working to save money for schooling. I’m going to be a lawyer, ma’am.” He gave her a sheepish smile.

  “Well, ain’t that somethin’!” Sarah said. Despite his proper way of speaking, she thought she recognized the boy’s accent. “Where’s your family from?”

  “Mississippi,” he said. “I was born in Grenada, and my parents raised sixteen children down there. Do you know where that is?”

  “Yes, I sure do. I thought I heard some Mississippi in you. I grew up in Vicksburg,” Sarah said, her warmth for the boy growing. “What’s your name?”

  “Freeman, ma’am. Freeman Ransom.”

  “Well, I’m gonna remember that name, Freeman Ransom. I’ll keep my eye on you. My name is Sarah McWilliams, and I’m on my way to Denver to start my own hair-growing business. Folks in business need lawyers, don’t they?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” the boy said, his face lighting up with a grin. Then he leaped to his feet and offered to carry Sarah’s suitcase for her. She’d need to hurry to catch the train to Denver, he told her, and he didn’t want her to be late. Walking behind the eager college boy as he led her through the train station’s bustle, Sarah marveled at the truth of the words she’d just spoken to him. She was going to Denver, she thought in disbelief, and she was going to start a business. Maybe she could do as well as C.J. had said, or maybe she’d always be a cook. And maybe this Freeman Ransom would be a lawyer one day, or maybe he’d spend the rest of his days working as a porter on the trains.

  But that didn’t even matter now, she realized. They were a bold pair, the two of them, and the only thing that mattered now was holding tight to their dreams.

  Alex had left his family a modest but modern house that had an indoor flush closet instead of an outhouse, more than Sarah had enjoyed in St. Louis. He’d made enough as a hotel porter to buy a home and support his family, and his widow’s only job, until now, had been to raise their children. But as pleasant as the tastefully furnished house was, the only place Sarah could make a pallet to sleep was in a parlor where she had no door for privacy, just like when she’d been at Mr. William Powell’s house in Vicksburg. Her sister-in-law and four nieces had welcomed her, but Sarah knew the sooner she got a job, the better. She needed a place of her own.

  Denver fascinated Sarah from the moment she arrived. She’d nearly expected to find only an overgrown frontier town, but the city was large and modern, with expensive buildings that looked so stately that she wondered if they were meant to rival the nearby Rocky Mountains. The streets seemed cleaner than they had been in St. Louis, and there was none of the hazy, smoky air from factories. The summer sun was hot, but the heat seemed to have no moisture at all, and it warmed her skin without making her perspire. Sarah definitely felt the difference in the atmosphere when she walked along the city’s streets, because even though the air tasted cleaner, she had a little trouble catching her breath at first.

  Touring through Denver on the “Seeing Denver” streetcar, Sarah learned that Denver considered itself The City Beautiful, and for good reason—she was sure there must be poor folks somewhere, but they were safely hidden away, because every neighborhood she saw looked well kept. When the nearly block-long Tabor Grand Opera House appeared before Sarah with its regal pinnacles and handsomely designed exterior, a smile came to her lips. And right across the street, she saw a name she recognized that made her smile grow even wider: Scholtz Drug Company. Just like C.J. had said!

  Sarah rose early the next morning and went to the Breedloves’ kitchen, determined that this was the day she would win a job with Mr. E.L. Scholtz. The Scholtz ad instructed applicants to reply by telephone or mail, but Sarah wanted to stand out from the others, and she figured the best way to get a cooking job was by cooking. The prime rib of beef she’d had with C.J. at the Rosebud Bar had been good, so she re-created the recipe as best she could from her memories of the spices she’d tasted: garlic, onion, and black pepper. Soon, as she cooked, every corner of the house smelled like prime rib.

  With the prime rib meal wrapped up in a basket to keep it warm and her niece Anjetta on her heels, Sarah set out for the Scholtz Drug Company at the corner of Sixteenth and Curtis streets in downtown Denver. With any luck, she could arrive in time to entice Mr. Scholtz to eat her meal for lunch.

  “Aunt Sarah, Daddy never told us you were crazy. This here is the biggest drugstore in the West, and Mr. Scholtz is a important man. You can’t just march in there and hand him a plate of food like you’re his mama,” Anjetta said, hesitating outside of the large two-story brick structure that hugged the block in a V shape. Anjetta was slightly younger than Lelia, and much more petite. Sarah could see traces of Alex’s face in her niece’s nearly masculine jawline and closely set eyes, and she could hear Lou and Lelia in her sassy mouth.

  “Why not?” Sarah challenged her.

  Anjetta had no answer, so they walked inside, where Sarah saw the longest soda-fountain counter she’d ever laid eyes on. Nearly two dozen customers sat eating ice cream and drinking fountain drinks at the counter that stretched the length of the narrow room. Undaunted, Sarah stood behind a man on a stool until she got the Negro counterman’s attention.

  “Excuse me, but where do I take lunch for Mr. E.L. Scholtz?” she said.

  That tactic, repeated three times with three different employees, took Sarah through the maze of a building, which included a large pharmacy with endless rows of remedies stacked high; again, she’d never seen a bigger one. One day, she thought, she would have a neat and efficient place to sell her products, too.

  Their last stop was at the desk of Mr. Scholtz’s secretary outside his closed door. “Mr. Scholtz’s lunch is here,” Sarah announced. The young blond-haired woman looked up at Sarah, her fountain pen frozen in mid-stroke. From her face, Sarah knew she had no idea why she was there, but she looked nervous, as if she was supposed to.

  “Er … well, if you’ll just set it on my desk, I’ll take it—”

  “I’d like to deliver it to him myself, if that’s all right,” Sarah said in her best official tone. “He’s run an ad for a new cook, and I intend to be that cook.”

  Then the wooden office door was flung open. Sarah felt Anjetta take a step back, but Sarah only gazed steadily toward the emerging man with her best ready smile. E.L. Scholtz was a ruddy-faced man with graying hair and a slightly portly build, wearing a finely tailored pin-striped suit and vest. Something in his face told Sarah he deserved her respect, but she knew she should not be intimidated by him. “Mr. Scholtz, I hope you’re hungry. I’ve brought you prime rib for lunch,” Sarah told him quickly. “My name is Sarah McWilliams, and—”

  “Oh, no, Sarah,” the young woman cut her off. “You can’t apply here.”

  “I wondered why the most glorious smell was wafting beneath my door …” Mr. Scholtz said pleasantly, hooking his thumbs on his pants pockets. His words landed heavily, with a nearly buried accent Sarah thought might be German. He gazed at Sarah from under his bushy eyebrows, then his eyes rested on the covered basket Sarah held in front of her. “There’s no harm, Lilly. If this tastes as good as it smells, I could hardly do better. What will it cost me?”

  “Not a penny. My address is in this basket, sir,” Sarah said. “If you like the rest of what’s in here, all you have to do is write, and you’ve got yourself a new cook.”

  E.L. Scholtz’s eyes virtually gleamed, and Sarah knew right then she had a job. She’d never won a job more easily.

  Two weeks later she also had a place to live. The attic she’d rented was drafty, with rough walls and grimy windows, but she decided it was a good place to make a start. It was only a ten-minute walk from Alex’s house, and a twenty-minute streetcar ride from Mr. Scholtz’s lavish colonial-style house, where she worked each weekday in his kitchen to prepare his meals. Cooking entailed long hours and was
its own form of drudgery, but Sarah appreciated the creativity she had in the kitchen, testing new recipes on her cheerful new employer. And her evenings were her own, so she ate supper with her relatives. Afterward, she used Alex’s kitchen to prepare the ingredients she could afford for her first new batches of hair formula with her nieces. Soon she would be ready to sell it door-to-door.

  Sarah kept busy, taking little time for reflection and dulling her emotions so she would not feel any doubts or fears about her move to Denver, or miss her friends too much. Often she gazed at the dramatic mountains beyond the city and inhaled the dry, crisp air and felt the distinct sense that she must be dreaming. She was startled to realize one day that she had already been in the new city more than a month. In all that time, she had hoped C.J. would ask after her at the Breedloves’ home, but there were never any messages from him. He had never responded to the thank-you note she’d written him when she first arrived, and she wasn’t about to start running after him like a love-struck girl.

  Despite how well her plans were coming along, Sarah remembered how close she’d felt to C.J. that night they stayed up talking, and especially their marvelous predawn kiss, and she felt pangs of sadness and disappointment. Her time with C.J. at the Rosebud Bar seemed like the last real day of her life, or else the first day of a new one. But that had been months ago.

  At least that sometimey Negro could have asked if I got work or if I’m walkin’ the streets, she thought. Lelia sure was right this time. I don’t know men at all, and I prob’ly don’t want to.

  Sarah was picking through fresh celery stalks at a street-side fruit and vegetable stand on her way home from church one Sunday afternoon when her eyes happened to glance eastward, and she noticed an unmistakable gait, a hitching step she’d seen before: C.J. was walking toward her from the other side of the street with a woman on his arm, fully engaged in conversation. As always, his manner of dress was colorful and handsome, and his flat white summer hat was skewed stylishly to one side. The sight of him momentarily clogged Sarah’s breath. She had forgotten what a striking man he was.

  In that instant, he saw her, too. Sarah felt a current trip up her spine.

  C.J. stopped in his tracks, as startled as she was. He patted the hand of his pretty young escort, saying something close to her ear. Then he left her standing where she was, and scurried out in front of the traffic of horse buggies and wagons to go to Sarah. He was grinning.

  “Sarah!” he greeted her when he reached her, and he kissed her hand.

  “You shouldn’t look so s’prised to see me. You knew I’d moved to town,” Sarah said.

  A shadow of some kind passed across C.J.’s face, but his grin didn’t falter. “Yes, I knew it, all right. But it’s one thing to know it and another to see it with my own eyes.”

  Sarah ventured a quick glance at the woman he’d left across the street; she was thin and lovely, and her arms were folded across her chest with good-natured patience while she waited. Apparently interruptions were not new to her. “I didn’t mean to disturb your afternoon plans,” Sarah said as pleasantly as she could.

  “Yeah … well …” C.J. shrugged, but didn’t elaborate. That was probably for the best, Sarah thought, since it was none of her business. “Listen, Sarah, you sure don’t waste time when you set your mind to something, do you?”

  “Time goes by too fast at my age to waste it. There’s a lot I aim to do.”

  “That there is, I’m sure,” C.J. said, taking off his hat. He sighed, lowering his voice slightly so he would not be overheard by anyone nearby. “The truth is … I’ve been meaning to call on you. But I worried that … well … certain indiscretions of mine that could be blamed on whiskey and a moonlit night, you see, might stand in the way of a … friendship.” She had never heard him fumble so much with his words, but his coppery eyes shone with sincerity.

  Sarah forced herself to smile, glancing again at his waiting escort. “Well, at least I’m glad to hear you call me Sarah,” she said. “Since that’s what friends do.”

  C.J. looked relieved by her response. “Of course they do! I’ve just learned the hard way, Sarah, that when it comes to certain matters of business and such, it’s more than a trifle easier to stick to business all the way through.”

  Sarah nodded. “Oh, I imagine so, C.J.”

  “But lemme hear your plans, if you have time in the next week. I can help you get started out here. Colored folks in Denver can be mighty standoffish and stick to their own circles, but they make good wages, and your product will warm them up to you, believe me.” Sarah had noticed the standoffishness in Denver already, the way better-off people she spoke to at church instantly lost interest in her when she mentioned that she was a cook, no matter how careful she was with her grammar and diction. She needed C.J.’s help, and he wouldn’t offer guidance if he felt uneasy in her presence. If friendship was all they were destined for, then so be it.

  “I’d like that, C.J. I’m at the Breedloves’ most every evening. Come for supper.”

  C.J.’s grin widened. “Well, all right, then,” he said. His gaze lingered on her eyes. “I tell you, it sure is good to see you again. I really did enjoy that talk we had.”

  But before Sarah could even answer him, his eyes had darted quickly away.

  Chapter Twenty

  C.J. Walker quickly became a fixture in the Breedloves’ home, dropping by three or four nights a week to have supper with them—charming the table with his jokes and stories about his travels—and then staying up talking with Sarah in the parlor until late. Sarah eagerly awaited those evenings, taking special care with her appearance, and the sessions took on a magical quality even though they never discussed anything except business. Still, Sarah imagined that she and C.J. were like two fireflies meeting in the night, lighting each other in their excited glow. There was nothing the least businesslike about C.J.’s heavy gaze when he talked to her; he offered her ideas the way a lover would offer promises.

  “See, Sarah, first off you need a strategy, or else your business won’t grow the way you want,” he told her one night, nearly breathless. First, he said, she needed to have a system so she could have plenty of formula on hand when the time came. Next, she needed to introduce herself around town and build excitement. And lastly, he said, he needed to design ads for her so people could order her hair grower through the mail.

  With a few extra dollars from C.J., Sarah paid a steelworker to design a comb for her that was exactly what she wanted; the teeth were much closer together than the comb the French woman had given her, and they turned slightly away from the scalp because experience had taught her that it would be easier to manage that way. If she was happy with the comb, C.J. told her, she would one day need to order dozens of them, even hundreds. It was very important for her pressing comb to be of her own design, he’d said, because that would help protect her against people who would try to imitate her once she was better known.

  “And believe me, my dear, they’ll imitate,” C.J. said, reclining in the broad parlor chair where Alex had once sat. Like all of the Breedloves’ furniture, the parlor chairs were simple but tasteful in a way Sarah had never had time to strive for in her own furniture in St. Louis. She never had extra money for furniture that wasn’t absolutely essential. The crimson-colored seat cushions were badly faded, indicating that Mrs. Breedlove had probably bought her family’s parlor suite secondhand at a reduced price. “But first, we gotta bring in the customers, Sarah.”

  “In St. Louis,” Sarah said, “I never got so much fuss as one time when I combed out a lady’s hair on her front porch. Folks came and carried on ’til you’d think it was a circus act.”

  “That’s right!” C.J. said. “That’s what you need to do here. Do your demonstrations in public places as much as you can. Have chairs so folks passing can take a seat an’ even drink a cup of coffee while they watch. We want to get to the point where folks pass by and say, ‘Oh, look, there’s Sarah McWilliams! She’s that lady who grows
hair!’ And that brings me to the ads… . Sarah, you told me how your hair was falling out. Do you have any photographs showing the way you used to look before?”

  Surprised, Sarah paused. “Well … I might have one hid somewhere… .”

  “See, here’s what I’m thinking: You know why you were so big at that church picnic in St. Louis when you let your hair down? ’Cause those folks knew you when you were having those troubles. They could see the difference and say, ‘Damn, I gotta have some o’ that.’ So if we put a photograph in the newspaper showing the way you used to look—”

  Sarah shook her head firmly. She’d taken such care with her thick hair, which grew to her shoulders when it was combed out and pressed, and now he expected her to show the whole city what she’d looked like in the midst of her misery. She wouldn’t even want C.J. to see how she’d looked then! A cruel, careless voice seeped into her memory: Ain’t nobody here but that baldhead washerwoman.

  “I’d be so ashamed, C.J.”

  “Yes, Sarah, but right next to it we’ll put a photograph showing how you look now. You don’t think it would sell hair grower if everyone could see the difference just like in St. Louis?”

  Sarah’s heart surged. He was right! If people saw the way she looked now and compared her hair to the patchy, tangled mess in a photograph Etta had talked her into taking a long way back, they would have to believe her hair grower worked. She was the proof!

  C.J. grinned at her, seeing her mind at work. “Now you got it! See what I’m talkin’ ’bout? There ain’t nothin’ to be ’shamed of if it sells your product. That’s the first rule. Next, you need a name for it.”

  “Wonderful Hair Grower!” Sarah said quickly. She’d been thinking about that for some time, and she liked the sound of it.