That was the Ella she wanted to remember. Sometimes it felt like the Ella who returned to Nigeria six years later, the fragile one just out of rehab, wasn’t the same person at all. Sometimes Angie wasn’t sure which version of Ella she mourned. She sat back on her haunches, surveyed her surroundings. She was the only one there. A slight breeze caused a little American flag atop one of the graves to undulate, and an eerie quiet blanketed the landscape. She thought, What’s wrong with me?
The Northland Mall branch of the chain store was one of its busiest. Angie had gotten the job two-and-a-half years before, had worked hard to gain the managers’ respect. They’d hired her out of desperation during the holiday rush, as their policy was to hire only plus-size saleswomen. What Denise said was generally true—customers preferred it that way. And she knew she probably should be working somewhere else—a manager had even offered to transfer her to The Limited, a sister company, but Angie declined. She wowed everyone with her sensitivity and knowledge about what looked good on big women, and what didn’t. She was deft at measuring chest and waist sizes, and she never talked about “hiding” body parts with clothing. She had a knack for helping women play up their assets with color-blocking and good fit and the right bra or girdle. In the two years between their father’s death and Ella’s departure for college, Angie would perch herself in Ella’s room and watch her get dressed for school each morning. Ella was a meticulous, stylish dresser and Angie learned a lot. Sometimes it was Angie’s job to run to the basement and get her big sister’s long-line bra and panties out of the dryer. Other times, she’d sit on the bed, watching as Ella pulled a silken slip over her head, poured baby powder down her chest, then stepped into an A-line skirt or a belted dress. Now, Angie liked the look of surprise on the women’s faces when they saw her genuine interest in wanting them to look good, her total lack of condescension masking as cheerful helpfulness. The truth was, she felt more comfortable among these women than her own slim girlfriends, always in terror that she was going to mention her dead sister, or worse, snap at them for their offhanded fat-girl jokes.
Lana, her manager, borrowed her look from the women of Dynasty, with her pale-colored skirt suits and frosted hair. Today, she and Angie were choosing clothes for the company’s upcoming plus-size fashion show for teens.
Lana nervously chatted nonstop. If this fashion show could be a success, if the girls could really look like they felt good about themselves, then their moms would buy the outfits they wore. And that would be good for business, which could prompt her promotion within the company. She was aiming for a position as buyer.
Angie sorted outfits, grateful for Lana’s chatter, for the chance to busy herself. She was still bothered by the scene at the mall, by Denise’s criticism of her job. She put together an outfit of leggings and an oversized T-shirt with jelly shoes and stepped back, surveyed her choices. This is what I do, she thought. This is how I make a difference. I help chubby girls and overweight women like themselves.
Lana approved of the looks, but instructed Angie to change the jelly shoes to stilettos. “Flat shoes are a no-no for our customers,” she advised. She didn’t like how Angie had paired a Lycra dress with a cropped bolero-style jacket either. “The model won’t like that her tummy pokes out from under that short thing,” she explained, handing Angie a longer, shoulder-padded jacket. “Put this one with it.”
Angie adjusted the outfit, feeling annoyed with herself for not having known these truths on her own. Just how helpful was she?
When she got home from work later, she found her mother upstairs, atop her bed, surrounded by shopping bags, tissue paper lying around her like froth. She showed Angie her new purchases—a floral suitcase with wheels (“This one was prettier to me than that overpriced one Denise wanted me to get.”), a pair of strappy sandals adorned with leather petals, two dresses, and two short nightgowns with lace bodices.
“I thought you preferred long nightgowns,” said Angie.
“I usually do,” admitted her mother. “But Denise convinced me to try something a little different.”
“And where is she?” asked Angie.
“Having dinner with some of her friends from high school. It’s amazing how many she’s still in touch with!”
Angie had lost touch with most of her own high school friends. When Ella died, her friends were all busy with freshman year of college, and didn’t really know what to say to her anyway. And she was fine with that, fine to be left alone with her own grief.
The dresses her mother had selected at Saks were lovely, one in sherbet peach, the other the color of honeydew melon, and each with its own matching, sheer cardigan.
“These are pretty,” said Angie, feeling a stab of hurt. Earlier, at work, she’d taken the dresses she’d been holding for her mother in the storage room and put them back on the floor. They couldn’t compare to these.
Her mother baked some chicken, and Angie opened a can of French-cut string beans, doctored them with salt and pepper and tomato juice. “How long are you going to be in Atlanta? I forgot,” she lied.
“A few days,” said her mother. “Not even a week. Just long enough to get a change of scenery.” She hesitated. “There’s a guy I went to high school with who lives there now. I plan to see him.”
“Yeah, Denise told me,” said Angie.
“Did she? OK.” Her mother shrugged. “Denise has a few places picked out for us to go. Then, before you know it, I’ll be back.”
“And Dr. B. didn’t object to your taking the time off?” Angie studied her mother’s reaction closely. She’d been office manager for the handsome, black family doctor for fourteen years, since shortly after their father died. Her mother had run her father’s horse-training business, kept his records from the start, so handling every detail in Dr. Benjamin’s office came easily. He’d become completely dependent on her to keep things running smoothly. Denise often complained that he overworked and underpaid their mother, but it was obvious she loved her job. Or at least Angie always assumed it was the job she loved.
Her mother waved her hand as if swatting a fly. “Louis would not want to object, hard as I work for that man.”
Angie wanted to confront her mother, but she didn’t have the heart.
After dinner, she made her mother’s favorite dessert, buttery toast with strawberry jam, and took it up to her room. She turned on the TV, changed the station to channel four, and propped herself on the bed next to her mother. They’d already missed The Cosby Show and Family Ties. She was sorry she’d gotten hung up at work. The theme song for Cheers started, a comfort every time she heard it. Who wouldn’t want to go where everybody knows your name?
“I thought it would be fun to watch The Colbys tonight,” said her mother. “Denise says it’s a pretty good show.” She shrugged shyly. “Something different.”
“Sure!” said Angie, a little too loud. She jumped up, changed the channel, masking her disappointment. But she felt it, a shift occurring. They always watched NBC’s Thursday night lineup together: The Cosby Show, Family Ties, Cheers, Night Court. Dozing through L.A. Law. Her mother had had no taste for nighttime soap operas, was never into Dallas or Dynasty. Plus she’d shown no interest in traveling before. Now, they watched this Dynasty spin-off while two women, both with big hair, got into a catfight as Angie tried to pinpoint what exactly in their lives had changed.
The phone on the nightstand rang. Nanette answered it on the second ring. “Hello? Oh, hi! How are you?” From the way her mother’s voice went up slightly, with an edge of formality, Angie knew it was the Atlanta man. “Oh, no, not at all. I’m just watching TV with my daughter.”
Angie rose to leave, but her mother motioned for her to stay put. She did, but she felt odd, didn’t want to listen in on the courtship. She watched the commercials, including the PSA with an egg frying while the announcer intoned: This is your brain on drugs. Angie hated that ad. As if it was that e
asy to deter someone from getting high. Druggies want their brains fried. That’s the whole point. Her mother chatted on, and didn’t seem to notice when Angie switched back to channel four. She watched the rest of Cheers. A summer rerun, it turned out to be an episode she’d already seen, the one where Diane feels left out of the gang’s activities, so Frazier plans a day at the opera for her.
Angie had looked forward to this nighttime ritual with her mother all day, and now that it wasn’t what she’d hoped for, now what?
THREE
Angie’s earliest memory: she is at the track with her father and Ella. She is three, sitting atop a milk crate, wrapped in a warm blanket, the smell of coffee and manure and hay under her nose. She sits stock-still and watches as Ella rides a horse, Butterscotch, around the empty track, their father walking beside her, rubbing the chestnut gelding’s rump. She wants to be on a horse too, and she calls out to them, “I wanna ride! I wanna ride!” but her tiny voice gets lost in the treeless wind. Either that, or they ignore her.
She tried hiding, crawling under the bleachers, determined to make them think she’d gone missing. But they didn’t come looking for her and finally she left her hiding place, returned to her spot on the bleachers, and watched her big sister and daddy circle the track again and again, still hoping for a turn.
“You gotta squeeze tight,” their father said to Ella. “Until you feel her heartbeat in your own legs.”
Another day. More riding lessons. The giant saucer of a track stretched out in revolutions, kicked-up dust hazy in the early morning light. Butterscotch stood erect beside their father as he held the reins. The night before, the entire family had watched this horse race with elegant speed, lithe rider crouched above in a perfect arc, Butterscotch’s slim ankles a blur of motion. She came in third.
“You cannot show hesitation,” said their father. “You gotta show her that you trust her above all else. You trust her with your life. She’s trusting you with hers.”
Angie was in nursery school, too young to ride the horses. But she wanted to know that feeling her father described. Of pure trust. She watched in awe as he climbed onto the penny-colored horse and galloped off. He was the size of a jockey himself with his small frame, short stature. Angie wondered had he ever done that, raced horses rather than train them.
Just Angie, Ella and Daddy, together. Denise hated nearly everything about the racetrack. She hated the ever-shitting horses and their startling neighs, the harsh-looking grooms and exercise boys with their dirty dungarees and stinky stall smell. Their mother loved the races themselves, but beyond that didn’t need to see more, not at this point thank you.
When their father returned from his lap around the track, he climbed off Butterscotch and Ella climbed on. He studied her closely as she rode around. Angie envied her sister as she watched her lean in low, chest rubbing against the horse’s back. Ella hadn’t discovered the diet pills yet, and her wide, strong thighs spread across the sweat-stained saddle.
“You look good up there,” their father told Ella. “You look a little heavy on her, though. Gotta get some of that weight off.”
His words hanging there, Ella kicked the horse’s haunches and took off, bouncing up and down clumsily as Butterscotch ran around the inside track. Angie winced when Ella slapped harder at the horse’s rump.
Their father shook his head as she made her way around the first bend. “She has no patience,” he said. “She wants everything right away.” And when Ella rode back up, he put his hand out for her to climb down, and said, “Don’t try to tell her what to do. Guide her, but don’t try to control her.” He laughed. “You may be smart, girl, but you can’t outsmart a horse.”
For as long as she could remember, Angie spent her weekend days at the raceway alongside her father and Ella. Adele, the secretary in the front office, the exercise boys, the stable-hands, the jocks, the hangers-on, everyone knew her father, each greeting him brightly as they passed by, “Hey, Mr. Mackenzie!” Angie could get whatever she wanted from the concession stand—hot chocolate and pizza and popcorn—and just say, “I’m Samson Mackenzie’s daughter,” and she paid for nothing. After he’d done his work, her father would walk them along the shed row, pointing out each horse’s potential and peculiarities. “This one here, Whisper, she’s a sweetheart.” He stroked her nose. “But she needs a sugar cube every time to motivate her.” And at the next stall, “Now Shadowboxer, he’s a good one. Will do whatever you ask of him. Whatever.” He moved on to yet another stall. “And Double or Nothing, she got the right name ‘cause she been all nothing. I’m waiting on the double.”
Angie held her father’s rough hand, and as he rubbed the horses behind their ears and patted them between the eyes, she felt his bliss. These were as much his children as she and Ella and Denise were. Swishing tails and soft snorts punctuated the quiet, and the sweet smell from straw beds and oats engulfed her. Behind every stall’s door was an enchanted little world for horse lovers. She wished her father the horseman was inside a children’s book, so she could share him with her friends.
But he needed a winner. He hadn’t had a horse pay a big purse since Thumbsucker. That horse was a mythical figure to Angie. He’d won the state’s version of the Kentucky Derby, the Michigan Mile, years before she was born. “A horse trainer is only as good as his winners,” Samson would say to Nanette, worry in his voice.
“You’re one of a handful of Negro trainers in the country,” Nanette would tell him. “That means something, Samson.”
He’d told the girls his story: Been in the horse life since he was in short pants. Skipped school to hang around horses at the state fairgrounds. Ran away from home at thirteen to be part of that life. Took off with a horseman who gave him his first job, cleaning horseshoes, shoveling shit. He spent many a year working as an exerciser, taking the horses out on the track, letting them stretch out. He was a man of thirty and still the men he worked for called him “boy.” “That there Niggra over there, now he’s my exercise boy. Hard worker.” Times when, running horses on southern tracks, places with no motels for coloreds, he slept in barns at night, bunching together the hay into straw pallets. Moved his family north, worked long hours at Hazel Park Raceway, got noticed for his intuition. Convinced a couple owners to trust him, got them decent wins, and finally hung out his shingle, “Samson Mackenzie Stables.”
It was a hard life. Staying up nights worrying about a sick horse, ever fearful of one dropping dead, tough conversations with irate owners. And a life on the road, one that Angie came to believe cost him, the way it kept him from his wife and girls. Six months at the track in Florida every year, then six months at Detroit’s track, with short stints to other tracks across the country. Keeping tabs, scouting, ever searching for the perfect Thoroughbred for his picky owners.
“You can do something else for a while,” their mother said.
“Like what? Set up in some factory, putting left doors on Mustangs or Cadillacs?” said Samson. “I’d rather die first.”
It was a hard life, and he would never give it up. He loved it.
Saturday morning, a sunny day not long after they’d pumped Ella’s stomach. She’s atop Nightshade, a dark brown horse with sandy-colored circles just above her haunches and white socks on her legs. They’re done for the day and Nightshade trots slowly off the track, Angie and their father walking beside her. A man stalks toward them, obviously an owner—tall, middle-aged, white, wearing his air of privilege and presumption like a tight vest.
“Samson, you and me need to talk.”
“How you doing, Mr. Jamison?” Samson asks, taking in the man’s body language. “Nightshade here is looking good,” he says, rubbing her nose.
“Not to me she ain’t, goddammit.” He nods toward the horse. “I wanna know what’s up with the bitch? Coming in fourth in that last race, now what is that about? Might as well got claimed. I paid for a Thoroughbred, and you told me that’
s what I got. You didn’t lie to me now, did you?”
“Ain’t nothing to lie about,” says Samson. “Only problem you got with her is you running her too much.”
“Hell, what I’m gon’ wait for, huh? I want my money’s worth. I bought her to run her.”
Their father nods. “She will do right by you if you let her rest up a bit. She don’t have the same stamina as these younger ones. She’s a good horse, ain’t peaked yet or nothing. She needs time to recover between races is all.”
“I don’t know, Samson. I trusted you, didn’t I? Friends say, ‘What you doing with a colored as your trainer?’ But I said, ‘Nah, this here is 1970; I believe he can handle it.’ Now I’m wondering.” He pauses. “You not one of them lying niggas, are you?”
At the sound of that word, Ella abruptly turns Nightshade back toward the track and takes off, startling Mr. Jamison.
“What the—”
Nightshade and Ella glide around the half-mile track with precision, the horse’s graceful legs angled like a dancer’s. Their father’s look of worry shifts to elation. He whistles. “I will be damned!”
Ella takes the track with a confidence she’d never shown before. She grips the reins just so, leans in on the corners and rises up from the saddle at the stretch. Angie cheers her on in her head, Go, Go! One lap. Please do it right. Two laps. Don’t mess up! Third lap and Ella returns, hair blown back. Nightshade gallops up to them, stops at attention, proud. Yay!
“Mr. Jamison,” says Ella, out of breath. “You got an amazing racehorse here, and if you don’t want her anymore, let me know. I can think of a few people who’d be happy to take her off your hands.”
Mr. Jamison shields his eyes from the sun as he looks up at her. “I’ll keep that in mind, young gal.” He turns to their father. “Let’s see how things go, Samson. I’m a set tight for a spell.” He nods his head toward Ella. “Look like you got you a jockey in the family.”
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