Saving Savannah

by Tonya Bolden

  First photo: “That’s the Nail and Parker Building. Both Negroes, and Charlie says they own a lot of real estate in Harlem.”

  “Wow!” said Uncle Madison. “Almost an entire block, six stories. Impressive!”

  “And Harlem, he says, is fast becoming the mecca.”

  “So I’ve heard, so I’ve—Is this …?”

  Savannah had just handed him the second photograph. “Villa Lewaro. Charlie was hired for Madam Walker’s Christmas party.”

  “Sublime!”

  “Marble everywhere, Charlie said. Sculptures … I think thirty-four rooms. Her huge library has books bound in Moroccan leather.” Savannah caught herself sounding like Yolande. Shallow. “That was the only room Charlie really cared for. All in all he found Madam Walker’s mansion rather gaudy.”

  “To each his own,” replied Uncle Madison.

  “Charlie says he might visit this spring. But I’m not getting my hopes up. Last year he said he’d come for Christmas.”

  “And I’m sorry, Little Riddle, that it’s been so long since we’ve had one of our secret lunches.”

  Savannah shrugged. “That’s okay.”

  Those lunches had started not long after Charlie began writing and telephoning more.

  Uncle Madison laid the photographs on the table. “You want to talk about last night?”

  “No.”

  “I think you do.”

  Savannah let out a sigh for the ages. “I’m just so tired of, embarrassed by society. Such excess, such extravagance … But I saw you kept plenty busy.”

  “The Sandersons always have a long list of shots they want. Guests want photographs of themselves, ones with other guests, ones with their hosts, of course. And they all want multiple copies of each so they can—”

  “Show off.”

  “More to it than that, I think.”

  Savannah rolled her eyes. “What more could there be?”

  “To inspire. So people perhaps not so well off can see what’s possible.”

  “That it’s possible to have nice cars, fancy clothes, go to lavish parties? Shouldn’t life be about more than that?”

  “Would you rather you lived in a shack with an outhouse out back?”

  “DO NOT tell me how much I have to be grateful for!”

  “But you do.”

  “I know it,” said Savannah through gritted teeth. “I know it, I know it, I know it! I’m not ungrateful. I’m simply …”

  “The Sandersons, your parents, everybody else there last night—these people have worked darn hard for what they have. Why shouldn’t they cherish photographs trumpeting their success?”

  Savannah looked at the back of Uncle Madison’s head, plucked out a remaining cobweb.

  “In the white press, how are we usually seen?”

  “Sambo. Mammy. Criminals.”

  “And dumb as a brick. Most whitefolks don’t want people like the Sandersons or the Riddles for that matter to exist. Let the world believe we’re all servants, sharecroppers, and such.” He took Savannah’s hands in his. “Promise me you won’t think too harshly of people who want photographs of themselves at a fabulous fete.” Uncle Madison cupped a hand to an ear. “I can’t hear you.”

  Savannah smiled. “Promise.”

  “Besides, you seem mighty proud of Charlie’s photographs. Why’s that?”

  “That’s different. That’s art.”

  “And the photographs I took at the Sandersons’ are …?”

  Savannah looked away.

  “Understand that they are dreaming a world, encouraging others to dream too.”

  “At school no one dreams of anything of substance. Dances, fashion, gossip. Girls scheming on who they want to marry. Boys obsessed with taking over their fathers’ businesses or making a killing in something else.”

  “To each his own, Savannah.” Madison frowned. “Besides, I find it hard to believe that everyone at Dunbar is like that. You’re speaking of the circle you swim in, am I right?”

  “Maybe.”

  “And maybe you need to widen your world.”

  “I just don’t want to go to Howard!” Savannah blurted out. “And I don’t want to marry the likes of Cary Sanderson!”

  “Whoa! Where did that come from?”

  Savannah shot up, stalked away, plopped down in the chair behind Uncle Madison’s very messy desk. “How do you find anything?”

  “Believe it or not, Little Riddle, I have a system!”

  Savannah burst out laughing. “System, yeah right!”

  Uncle Madison joined her at the desk. “Do you remember anything I said to you the last time we had lunch?”

  “I know, I know. ‘There has never been a time when there wasn’t misery in the world somewhere.’ ”

  He waved his hands in the air. “If I didn’t have this, I don’t think I’d be able to get out of bed in the morning!” After a pause he added, “As I told you, Little Riddle, you need a passion, a challenge.”

  “I won first prize in an essay contest at school. I wrote about man’s inhumanity to man.”

  “Good for you!” He patted her on the back. “But does that really qualify as a challenge? Isn’t it just doing more of what you’re good at?”

  “Now wait a minute!”

  “Not a putdown. It’s just that everything has always come easy for you, Savannah.”

  “I had a terrible time learning to ride a bike. It took forever, and you and Charlie were both so patient.”

  Uncle Madison frowned. “You learned in a matter of a day—hours, I think.”

  Savannah puzzled. She was certain that it had been a struggle.

  “Did your mother ever find out, by the way?”

  Savannah shook her head.

  “Anyway,” said Uncle Madison, “back to you. Have you ever failed a course?”

  “No.”

  “And friends? Did you ever have to make friends?”

  “Why, of course—”

  “No, no. I didn’t ask if you have friends. Have you ever had to make an effort to get people to like you, to want to be around you? Hasn’t it always been moths to a flame?”

  Savannah lowered her head.

  “Look at me.”

  Reluctantly Savannah obliged, looked up into Uncle Madison’s probing eyes.

  He arched an eyebrow, tapped his Charlie Chaplin mustache. “A challenge, Little Riddle, a challenge, a passion, that’s what you need. I say your problem is that you’re bored. Purpose is a powerful antidote to the doldrums. Get engaged with something, take hold of life, stop being a mere observer.”

  He riffled through papers, found his appointment book, flipped through it. “So what is it that you want to do after high school?”

  Savannah shrugged again, made a cat’s cradle of her hands. “I don’t know—well, yes, I do. I want to move to Harlem, be with Charlie.”

  “Are you really that angry with your parents?”

  “I’m not angry with—well, I’m not angry with Father.”

  Uncle Madison glanced at his wristwatch. “My next appointment will be here soon, so—”

  “I’ll be getting along.”

  “Not necessary.” He walked to the front of the shop, rolled down his shirt sleeves, buttoned his cuffs, grabbed his jacket from the coatrack. “It’s light enough yet. Stay at the desk. Look like you’re doing bookkeeping or something so the customer won’t feel, you know, self-conscious or something.”

  Given the set, those moons and stars, that silver throne, Savannah expected someone in showbiz. A member of a jazz band, like one of The Duke’s Serenaders. Maybe even Duke Ellington himself.

  If not a musician maybe a singer or dancer. Perhaps a vaudeville act. Or the type of man who wears bespoke suits and a chinchilla coat, sports a diamond pinkie ring. When he laughs or smiles wide you see a gold tooth. He struts about U Street with a flashy lady on each arm.

  She never imagined a silver-haired, elderly woman.

  Her black dress, black walking c
oat were simple but expensive, Savannah knew. The wearer, a sprite of a woman, was frail but erect. When she lifted her veil—what fiery, what ancient eyes. If sketching her, Savannah would render her queen of a magical realm. The silver throne, the moons, the stars, they suited her to a tee.

  Uncle Madison led the woman behind a curtain. “Just a dab of rouge,” Savannah heard him say. “Just a touch of powder.” He soon escorted her to the throne, then repositioned lights, adjusted the tripod, fiddled with the camera.

  Savannah spied the woman staring at her.

  Shoot done and the woman’s makeup removed, Uncle Madison helped his customer over to a small writing table and wicker chair. “The other day,” he asked, “when you made the appointment did you say you had only recently moved to the capital?”

  “Only passing through, son. Here until Tuesday next.”

  “And you’re staying at …?”

  “Mrs. Bennett’s Boarding House on T Street.”

  “Savannah, hand me an invoice pad.”

  As she did, Savannah saw the woman staring at her again. Harder.

  “You want five cabinet cards and twenty-five postcards, yes?” asked Uncle Madison.

  “Yes, my dear.”

  Savannah watched Uncle Madison do the tallies in his head, then fill out the top of the form. “Delivery to Mrs. Bennett’s?”

  “Yes, my dear.”

  Savannah took sneak peeks at the woman as she wrote out a check, rose, stepped over to her. “If you don’t mind my asking, my dear, what is your full name?”

  “Savannah Riddle, ma’am.”

  The woman clutched the pearl-and-diamond butterfly brooch pinned to her high-neck collar. Eyes went tender, misted up. “What a lovely encounter this has been,” she whispered. “A lovely encounter indeed.”

  “My, my.” Uncle Madison seemed truly pleased as he scanned his desk. “Good work!”

  Checks matched with invoices stamped PAID.

  Invoices not paid organized into subsets: 90 days, 60 days, 30 days due.

  Price lists in one neat stack.

  Savannah was proud of her work. Like times, long ago, on a day of no school, when she went with Father to his office. Seated on his swivel chair she tidied his gigantic desk with its sorters, books, pads, and mounds of paper in a room crowded with filing cabinets, bookcases, storage cabinets, a letter-copying press upon a safe, and people at desks, men scribbling, others on the telephone or talking into a dictating machine, women making Underwood typewriters clack, clack, clack.

  “You should come around more often.” Uncle Madison rubbed his chin. “Part-time job, maybe? You could even start to learn the trade. Of course your mother would have me flogged.”

  Savannah smiled, tilted her head to one side. “I don’t think so—I mean, if you ever need me to help out … but I don’t want to learn photography. I don’t want to follow in Charlie’s footsteps. I need to find my own.”

  SO MEAN TO ME

  Dear Uncle Charlie,

  I am once again writing to let you know that Savannah isn’t any better. She is still so down in the mouth most times. Yesterday she gave Cary back his friendship ring and ran out of the Sanderson gala.Can you believe that? And earlier today she was so mean to me.

  I am hoping that maybe you can …

  Months back, when Savannah was out on her balcony sketching, Yolande had spied a letter from Charlie, scribbled his address into her notebook.

  HELL FIGHTERS

  Two Saturdays later, Savannah stared blankly out the kitchen window at the dusting of snow, mindlessly washing blue willow breakfast dishes, searching her mind for something new to do.

  A challenge.

  A passion.

  A knock on the back door.

  On the other side grinned a grimy boy in run-down shoes, a man’s waistcoat over a pilly jacket, and moth-eaten pants. His cap, pushed back, was tattered.

  “Miss Gertie Walcott send me. She say to give wunna dis.” The boy reached into his pocket, brought out a small envelope. It was grimy, too, but the penmanship of the Mrs. Riddle was perfect.

  The boy removed his cap, grinned wider.

  “And what’s your name?”

  The boy thumped his chest. “I name Bim.”

  “Well, you stay right there, Bim.”

  At the cabinet where Mother kept a Lord Calvert tin of coins, Savannah thought to fish out a nickel, then changed her mind. Back at the door she handed Bim a dime.

  “Tank you, Miss Fine Lady!” The boy beamed as if handed two fistfuls of gold.

  “Oh, dear,” said Mother. “Mrs. Walcott is ill. Her daughter, Nella, will come in her stead. Only she can’t come until this evening.”

  When Savannah entered the room, Mother was flicking through her wardrobe trying to decide what to wear to the theater with the Millers.

  Thankfully an adults-only affair.

  “And what will you do while we’re out? Have Yolande over?”

  “No, I need to finish The Call of the Wild.”

  “I’ll leave you some vegetable soup and a nice little sandwich. Some potato salad too. How’s that?”

  “Fine, Mother.”

  “Or would you prefer egg salad?”

  “Either one is fine, Mother, really.”

  Hours later, certain that her parents were gone, really gone, for the evening—that Father hadn’t forgotten this or Mother that, Savannah headed to Father’s study in the basement.

  She had no intention of reading The Call of the Wild. She was dead set on getting her hands on the thing Mother wanted kept from her.

  “For heaven’s sake, please keep the latest issue of the Crisis from her,” Savannah had overheard Mother say. “It’s all about the war, and Lord knows she has been reading enough about that.”

  “But the issue celebrates Negro contributions. It may well lift her spirits.”

  “I doubt that, Wyatt.”

  “What shall I tell her if she asks about it?”

  “Tell her … that this month’s issue must have been lost in the mail. Or—or, tell her that you let someone at the office borrow it.”

  “Really, must we lie?”

  “Well, then, take it to the office and make someone borrow it.” After a pause, Mother added, “I do worry about her so.”

  “She’s at that age, darling. Moodiness is to be expected.”

  “I fear that this is more than moodiness. She barely speaks to us. Claire says she’s become quite cold toward Yolande, at moments beastly. The scene at the Sandersons’, breaking off with Cary—and you still insist we not bring it all up?”

  “It wasn’t the end of the world. I say give her time.”

  “But have you noticed how little she eats?”

  “And have you noticed that she is keeping her grades up?”

  “Yes, but as I told you when I went to see Garnet about her progress, he said that all the teachers say that lately she only speaks when called upon.”

  “Please stop worrying, Victoria. It’s just a phase. And these have been trying times.”

  Heading down to the basement, Savannah hoped Father hadn’t taken the Crisis to the office—he could be forgetful at times.

  She searched the drawers of his old-timey oak Chicago C-shape rolltop desk, not far from a corner where Charlie’s old baseball bat was propped up against a wall.

  “Got it!”

  But then, removing the magazine from a bottom desk drawer, Savannah hesitated. Would it drag her into a foul mood? Hadn’t she torn up all those articles that had so battered her heart, made her cry? Then she remembered Father saying it was about Negro contributions.

  Heading back up, Savannah let her eyes linger on the area where Charlie once had his darkroom, now a storage area for things to donate to the next Association or church bazaar.

  In the living room Savannah opened the cabinet of the Edison Amberola, sorted through records—McCormack’s “Keep the Home Fires Burning,” Caruso’s “O Sole Mio,” the Original Dixieland Band’s �
�Tiger Rag” …

  Nah.

  She put the records back, stretched out on the davenport with the Crisis.19

  The man on the cover, starch-stiff in uniform, jackboots and all, looked like nothing in the world could keep him from a goal.

  Past the table of contents, past ads for Wilberforce, Cheyney, Atlanta University, Morehouse, Knoxville College, Wiley, Florida A&M, Clark … Savannah made a mental note to ask Charlie about colleges in New York City the next time she wrote or spoke to him.

  On she flipped past Dr. Du Bois’s editorial, past a poem, past one article, another. She halted at the Men of the Month column.20 All soldiers. Dr. Urbane F. Bass of Fredericksburg, Virginia. Lieutenant Mallalieu W. Rush of Atlanta. Captain Napoleon B. Marshall …

  Did any of them ever open a comfort kit I packed, use a bandage I rolled, put on socks I knitted?

  When Savannah reached “LYNCHING RECORD FOR THE YEAR 1918,”21 she started to skip it.

  But couldn’t.

  “According to The Crisis records there were 64 Negroes, 5 of whom were Negro women, and four white men, lynched in the United States during the year 1918, as compared with 224 persons lynched and killed by mob violence during 1917, 44 of whom were lynchings of Negroes. The record for 1918 follows.…”

  A revolting miasma of dates, places, names.

  Of a Sam Edwards in Hazlehurst, Mississippi, burned to death, charged with the murder of a seventeen-year-old white girl … Of a Jim Hudson in Benton, Louisiana, hanged for living with a white woman … In Collinsville, Illinois, a Robert P. Praeger, white, hanged for making disloyal remarks.

  Praeger, Savannah thought. German, I bet.

  “June 4—Huntsville, Tex., Sarah Cabiness and her six children: George, Peter, Cute, Tenola, Thomas and Bessie, shot: alleged threat by George Cabiness to A.P.W. Allen … August 7—Bastrop, La., ‘Bubber’ Hall, hanged; alleged attack on a white woman.…”

  Yes, thank goodness we live in the capital.

  Savannah couldn’t imagine living farther South. Mother had grown up in Charleston, South Carolina, raised by a wealthy aunt after her parents died of scarlet fever. Savannah wondered if Mother spoke so little of her childhood because she had seen Negroes hanged, burned. Maybe growing up in the Southland is what made her so cautious, quick to worry.