“You understand what I’m asking you, Lottie.”
“Yes …” Lottie was looking at her lap.
“That’s why you looked so scared when I said I wanted to leave early. Isn’t it?”
Lottie’s reflection didn’t move or answer.
Not for the first time, Sarah longed for real friendship from Lottie, not just loyalty. This woman’s reticence had been such an appealing quality before, giving Lottie an air of refinement and accomplishment Sarah had longed to adopt as her own, but now Sarah needed to communicate with the person underneath. Lottie and Mr. Ransom spent so much time trying to protect her that Sarah had lulled her own self into thinking there was nothing to be protected from. They’d all begun treating her as if she were some kind of fragile object in a curio cabinet. And she’d liked it, too. She’d liked having so many people standing between her and the truth.
“I think,” Lottie began finally, “it’s best you’re going home tonight.”
Sarah closed her eyes for a moment as part of her winced. But she had to push on. “Go on and tell me, Lottie.”
“If he’s at home, it would be the first Saturday night in a long time. So people say.”
People? Sarah cringed to imagine how many people might already know what she was apparently to be the last to hear. But she had heard before, hadn’t she?
“Tell me where I can find him,” Sarah said.
At this, Lottie sighed so hard that Sarah could feel the other woman’s breath puff against the back of her neck. “Are you really certain about that, Madam?”
“That’s right, Lottie, I’m sure as death. Now speak up.”
“The Hopkins Hotel on Indiana Avenue,” Lottie said, then added in barely a whisper: “Room ten.”
At that, Sarah whirled around to look at Lottie with wide eyes. Lottie had spoken those words as fact, not gossip, the sort of fact she had verified on her own—or that she’d heard from someone else who had. Had someone followed C.J.? Lottie herself? Mr. Ransom?
“How long?” Sarah breathed, her heart flipping.
Lottie cast her eyes down toward the book, which she had closed in her lap. “I think … some time after you and Mr. Walker came back from Jackson. Her name is Dora, an Indianapolis girl. She’s one of your agents, Madam. You met her at Tuskegee—”
An agent! Weakly, Sarah held up her trembling palm in a silent plea for Lottie to hush.
Oh, Lord Jesus, help your child. As soon as Lottie said the girl’s name, she’d roared to life in Sarah’s memory. Dora. Dora Larrie. And her face came to her, too: so young! She’d had the sweetest girlish smile, and eyes so hungry with ambition. Sarah had liked those eyes, which had so mirrored her own, reminding her of how she had been hungry to build her life, too.
C.J. with Dora Larrie? How could anyone be so shameless? And right under her nose!
It couldn’t be an accident, Sarah realized. Oh, God, it was painful enough to imagine C.J. filling his nights in a hotel with any random high-yellow who caught his eye … but Dora Larrie! That must mean there was more to it. A hungry woman like Dora was after something else from C.J., and either he was too stupid to see it or—
Sarah fought not to bring the next thought to her consciousness, but it bubbled up all the same. Or C.J. is up to something. C.J. is with her right now, plotting against you.
Then, like a voice from a nightmare, Lottie spoke Sarah’s darkest fears aloud: “Madam, Mr. Ransom has been worried because Mr. Walker knows your formula. This all came to his attention by accident, because there is some money missing Mr. Walker could not account for. Mr. Ransom believes Mr. Walker may be planning a venture of some sort with this woman. He had Mr. Walker followed, and he and the woman have been to Atlanta more than once—”
Sarah let out a loud choking sound as she forced herself to swallow a sob back into her tight throat. She would not cry. Not here. Not on this train, where strangers would hear her.
Sarah had never fainted in her life, even the night she’d lost Moses, but now she could feel her body melting away from her as the train bumped along the tracks. Her stomach surged, then lay as still as a rock. And her face seemed to burst into flames that sent a feverish sensation all the way to her toes. She sat as still as a statue, unable to move.
Unexpectedly, Lottie clasped Sarah’s hand and pulled it to her breast. Sarah could feel the racing of Lottie’s own heart. “Madam, I’ve prayed so much over it. I wouldn’t know anything at all of this matter, except I overheard a conversation between Mr. Ransom and Mr. Walker. I wanted to say something, I swear to you. It broke my heart to have to keep silent—”
Sarah thought her words would tumble out of her mouth as screams, but instead she could barely hear herself over the whine of the train. “You should have told. Something like this? How could you … ?”
“Mr. Ransom wanted to choose the time, Madam. He forbade me. He’ll be angry I said anything now. He was trying to handle it, and he said he didn’t want to disrupt—”
“You should have told,” Sarah hissed. Those were the only words that came to Sarah’s mind, churning around in her head like the name Dora Larrie. “You should have … told.”
“Oh, my goodness,” Lottie said, her face wrenching with grief. “Madam, I’m s-sorry.”
With a blind flash of anger, Sarah yanked her hand away from Lottie’s grasp. As many times as she’d argued with Lelia and her wild-mouthed niece, Anjetta, she didn’t think she’d wanted to strike anyone as much as she did right now. Not poor Lottie, but someone, anyone. The emotions swamping her were alien to her, stealing her breath and nearly dimming her vision. How could a day that had begun with a routine train ride have turned into this awful moment? Sarah stared at her trembling hand, momentarily not recognizing her own flesh. She would faint now, that was all. She would faint and wake up.
“Should I call a porter to bring you some water—”
“Get up,” Sarah said, still little more than hissing. She already regretted her harsh tones, but she couldn’t help herself. “I said git. Don’t even look at me.”
Her mouth fixed in an agonized O, Lottie frantically gathered her book and handbag together. “Oh, I told Mr. Ransom he was wrong, I swear I did. I told him not to keep it from you. He made me promise… .” Lottie tried to explain, even as she parted the blanket the porter had hung to give them privacy and scurried from her seat.
Something between Sarah’s temples seemed to pop, and her crown suddenly felt weighed down by the worst headache she had ever known. As the train rocked its way toward Indianapolis, Sarah sat rigid in her seat, on the verge of nausea, waiting to faint.
But she never did.
After she walked through her front door, Sarah didn’t bother to turn on any lights in the house, relying on the moonlight streaming through the windows to illuminate her way through the wide hallways. Even in the darkness, her wooden floors gleamed like smoked glass.
Oh, she loved this place! She loved its contours, its shadows, its scents of fresh paint and polished wood and new Oriental rugs. To her, this house always smelled like a new beginning, like the promise of everything she’d spent her life trying to build. But tonight the satisfaction she usually felt when she walked into her home had been smothered by a dread that made her entire frame feel stiff. She didn’t even have to call out to know that no one was home except boarders.
Anjetta had been staying with her, but she remembered her niece was visiting friends in St. Louis this month. And C.J.? Well, she knew better than to expect him to be here. She knew by more than the darkness and quiet.
“C.J.?” she called out nonetheless, still hoping.
She thought she saw a movement, a phantomlike white shirt appearing in the doorway to her office at the end of the hall, but when she blinked she realized it was only a trick of the darkness. There was no one here except her. Sarah’s legs carried her past the Gold Room and the library through the empty doorway that had fooled her. There, in nearly pitch black, she felt her way to the larg
e mahogany rolltop desk where she kept her papers and letters. She opened the bottom drawer on the left side, a drawer she had opened only once, quite accidentally, and never again. This was C.J.’s drawer. Inside that drawer, her fingers were drawn to the metallic cold of the gun’s nozzle. C.J.’s beloved derringer was still here.
She had to find him, and the Hopkins Hotel was in a bad part of town. She might very well need protection.
Without allowing herself to think, Sarah slid the gun into her purse. She bounced it once, enjoying the unfamiliar metallic weight inside. She’d begun to breathe in rasps deep from her chest. It was so hot in here, too, she realized. It felt like none of the windows had been opened in days. A tomb, she thought. That was the word. Her house felt like a tomb.
Sarah went outside to get her automobile.
It didn’t occur to her even once how much she hated to drive herself at night. As she got closer to her destination, navigating her Waverley toward Indiana Avenue, she even forgot to be worried about possibly being recognized by folks who would consider her a strange sight. The woman she was now—with a gun in her purse and a plan in her head that she’d hidden from herself in a darkness not unlike the stifling dark back at her house—couldn’t care less about what such-and-such or so-and-so would think about seeing Madam C.J. Walker tooling around a questionable section of town at this time of night. All she saw were the dim pools of light from her car’s driving lamps and the passing patterns of crushed stone and gravel on the roadway as she drove, her hands tight on the steering wheel. She pressed her foot harder against the stiff pedal, taking the car a hair above the twenty-mile speed limit.
The deserted pharmacies, cafés, law offices, and general stores on Indiana Avenue began to give way to the unseemlier businesses crowded on the opposite end. And the streets, which had been mostly deserted, began to crawl to life. Clumps of colored men, and a few women, appeared on the sidewalks, laughing, chatting, and walking jauntily. More than once Sarah thought she saw C.J. among them. A certain manner of dress. A special tilt of the head. But she stared hard at the faces each time, and as the features came into focus, they were always wrong.
She passed Mooney’s Bar. Avenue Billiards. Then the Liza Hotel, which everyone knew was just a sporting house the law turned a blind eye to, men pooled in a raucous, eager overflow line outside its doors. Another block farther, with a boldly painted red sign, sat a squat brick building called the Hopkins Hotel. There, at the empty curb, Sarah brought her car to a stop. Her engine rumbled and ticked, then died.
Sarah’s breathing had evened out during the drive, but her headache was back.
What am I doing out here? a faint voice in her brain wondered. But then the name Dora Larrie tightened around Sarah’s chest like a vise, and she stumbled out of her car, giving the door a hard slam behind her. She walked past the faceless stream of cologne scents and perspiration-stained shirts to cross the hotel’s threshold.
Inside, the spare, clean hotel was quiet. The only person in sight was the thin counter attendant, who looked so young that Sarah doubted if he was yet a man. The boy had a brush of facial hair above his lip so thin that it was nearly invisible. He raised his head from a magazine, startled to see Sarah. Maybe he recognized her, she thought.
“Is there a Mr. Walker in room ten?” she asked quickly.
“Uhm …” The boy paused, running his index finger across his register. “Ma’am, see, there might be a Mr. Walker in that room, see … but I ain’t sure if …”
“Give me a key. Right now.”
The boy eyed her as if he wanted to protest. She opened her handbag and pulled a five-dollar bill from inside. His eyes widened. Even after she extended the money, he still stared into the handbag. When he looked up at her, he looked as if he were going to be ill.
Taking the money, the boy turned and found a large brass key on one of the hooks hanging on the wall behind his desk. His fingers shook as he gave it to her. “Now, see, this here is a legitimate ’stablishment, and we don’t want no …”
But Sarah had already whirled away from him, and she didn’t hear his words. In fact, she couldn’t hear anything. Her head felt puffed up, and the only thing in her ears was the sound of the blood rushing through her head, welling up from her furiously beating heart. Instinctively, she ignored the hallway on the lower floor and began to climb the hotel’s wooden stairs. She felt as if she knew exactly where the room was, as if she had lived this moment before. With each clumping step on the staircase, her head whirled.
“… Hear that? We don’t want no trouble!” the boy shouted after her.
Well, if I find what I think I’ma find up there, you got some trouble whether you want it or not, Sarah thought. Or maybe she said it aloud. She didn’t know.
Room ten was the third door on her right, at the end of the second-floor hallway. There, as if frozen by the sight of the black number painted in the center of the door, she stopped and caught her breath. Her chest heaved. Then, with her head strangely silent, she wrapped her hand around the butt of the gun, gingerly massaging the trigger with her index finger.
The whole thing was simple, really. If it was the wrong room—and it could be, really, her brain rattled, because there was a chance this was all one big mistake, that it wasn’t Charles Walker in this room but someone else entirely—she would apologize to the occupant, make her way back down to her car, and go home to bed. But if she opened this door and saw C.J. inside, and if he was in there with that scheming little Tuskegee whore, well, she would—
Sarah’s stomach dropped as she heard a low laugh float from beneath the doorway. Warm honey. Like a memory from a dead woman’s life, she heard the sound of her very own warm honey, and yet it wasn’t meant for her ears this time. That laugh had been for Dora.
Just go, a voice inside her pleaded. Stop this foolishness and go back home.
She didn’t want to fit the key into the lock and open the door. She didn’t want to see the lamplit, startled faces in the bed, or the quiver of the woman’s plump, bare breast before she flung the bedsheet over her nakedness. She didn’t want to see C.J.’s shamed, trapped eyes. And she didn’t want to inhale the stench of their mingled sweat.
But she did. In one swift motion, as her body defied what was left of her mind, Sarah walked into that room and saw exactly what she didn’t want to see. A glimpse of the skin she had caressed. A flash of his sloe-eyed tramp’s perfect, heavy breasts, the slender waist that had never borne a child. She didn’t even remember why Dora was cowering behind C.J. with a fit of screams until she looked down at her own hand and saw the gun.
“Now b-baby … what you gon’ do with that?” C.J. said, his voice weighted down with fright. He held both palms out toward her as if to push the sight of her away. “What you bring that here for? Huh?” His voice was part cooing and coaxing, part panic. His handsomeness slapped her face, and in that instant she truly hated him.
“Why you look so surprised, C.J.?” Every word tore a hole in Sarah’s throat. “Look like you must’ve wanted me to know. Didn’t you? You got it so everybody in town knows. Well, ain’t this what you wanted? You wanted me to find you with your yellow bitch. Ain’t that right?” She prodded at him with the gun, and he flinched back. “Ain’t that why you made it so easy for me? Ain’t it?”
Struck dumb, C.J. could only shake his head back and forth. He mouthed the words No, Sarah, and tears sprang to his eyes.
“You’re a goddamn liar!” she screamed at him. “You know you did!”
At that moment, C.J. uttered what Sarah would later remember as both the most courageous and damnable words she had ever heard come from his lips. Not blinking despite his tears, he lowered his chin and met her gaze dead-on. “Woman,” he said in a soft, shaking voice, “since when do you care what the hell I want?”
Dora screamed again, as if she was certain C.J. had just become a conspirator in her murder. “This ain’t nothin’!” she cried through her screams. “M-madam, this ain’t n-nothin
’!”
Sarah’s finger tightened on the trigger.
Since when do you care what the hell I want?
Once again, as she had on the train earlier, Sarah felt something in her head go pop. But this time it wasn’t the prelude to a headache—although her headache was alive and well. This time she felt as if she’d suddenly snapped back into herself, and she could see the scene in the hotel room from a detached place high above. C.J. was lying in this tiny bed with some ninny. And Sarah Breedlove Walker was standing before them with a gun in her hand, aching to end his life and her own by firing it.
It was a sad, absurd sight. Almost like something from Shakespeare himself, ain’t it? Look at that fine woman, the Madam C.J. Walker, so exquisitely dressed, about to throw away her own name and anything good that had come to be associated with it. Her company. Her freedom. Her whole life, potentially. What would Booker T. Washington say? Or Mary McLeod Bethune? It’s such a shock! I’d just met Madam C.J. Walker, and I thought she was a fine example for the race!
And over what? Sarah suddenly realized that this man with a laugh like warm honey lying in this strange bed had nothing at all to do with her and her name. Madam C.J. Walker belonged to her now. Only her.
Sarah gasped as her rage gave way to anguish. She could barely breathe. “Nigger,” she said, the hated word like poison in her mouth, “you ain’t even worth this bullet. Y’all go on and do what you want. I’ll pay you back every cent you ever lent me, plus interest, but if I find out you’ve stolen any money, you won’t get nothin’ else from me except another trip to jail, hear? I don’t care if you live or die, C.J., so long as you stay away from my company. And God help you if you don’t.” Still watching the scene from above, Sarah saw Madam C.J. Walker turn around and walk briskly away through the open door. She came to the stairs so quickly that she nearly stumbled as she descended. For the first time all day, tears streamed freely down her face and she didn’t give a damn who heard her sobs.