by Ed Ifkovic
“But what if Bella had come back early?” I asked.
“I thought of that. She thought she’d drugged me—that was how I acted in the morning when I saw Roddy, of course—but I’d say I woke up and went looking for her at an after-hours club, staggering a little, slurring my words. But she wasn’t there.”
Bella grimaced. “Imprisoned by Jed Harris, thank you very much.”
Waters spoke up. “But you and I, the next day, talked with Miss Edna. You agreed that it couldn’t be Skidder. It had to be someone…”
Lawson held up his hand. “I had to agree with you, Waters. What choice did I have? You got so excited with the idea.”
“Lawson, why didn’t you tell someone?” I asked quietly.
“I thought I got away with it.” A pause. “But it didn’t matter. The next day it all hit me, leveled me. I lost all feeling inside me, I kept thinking—confess, confess.” He gasped. “Every night I found myself back on that street.”
“But the book…” Waters began.
Lawson looked at him. “The book didn’t matter. Nothing did. I was hollowed out. When anyone talked of how great it is—how I am!—I got sick inside. I didn’t care. I don’t care. Not anymore. Something died in me. Something ripped out my insides, left me dead. That stupid act, so sudden. I realized I would never have followed through with it. But, strangely, I did. All my ambitions, dreams, hopes…dust. Dust.”
Lawson started sobbing loudly now, a young man shattered. Freddy and Harriet stood up and were looking out the windows. I heard her say, “Now what?”
Lawson went on. “Doesn’t anyone see what happened? I’d put my hopes on Jed Harris, and he squashed them. Worse, he stopped me from having a life in the city. Down here. Broadway. He…” He faltered.
“Lawson,” I said, “stop this now.”
He was looking into my face. “Dust, Miss Ferber. All I had left was dust.”
Epilogue
A sad story for a glorious time. As the decade ended and the much-touted Harlem Renaissance blossomed and then started to fade, the lamentable tale of Roddy and Lawson and the other fledgling writers drifted into the spotlight and then quickly out, footnotes to the sweep and pull of American literature. American life. The Depression hit, and vast monies and innocent lives were lost or spent dancing to the pulse of uptown Harlem, but the clubs, the white-man excursions, and the jazz rhythms soon paled. Yes, the careers of Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston blazed for years, but the decade that followed was a kind of Indian Summer of reflection, a bittersweet time of struggle and melancholy. The face of poverty was everywhere. It was easy to forget a world in which the lyric “I’m just wild about Harry” was replaced with “Brother, can you spare a dime?” The big bass drum beat of nightlife gave way to folks staring at the empty food slots at the Automat on Broadway. Flaming youth burned out. The cat’s meow was suddenly the voice of the turtle crying in the night. Men in rumpled business suits sold apples on street corners. Gaunt faces waited in soup lines.
But not everyone forgot. At least I didn’t. And I wasn’t alone.
Some of you remember the sudden splash when Hell Fighters was published by Knopf in the first full year of the Depression: 1930, that fall. Some of you remember the name Roderick Parsons, though I still think of him as Roddy. It was published to wonderful reviews—Burton Rascoe in the Herald Tribune said “Negro narrative has found its Homer,” hyperbolic but effective—though the economic woes and despair of the decade doomed sales and attention. It created a minor flurry among Negro intelligentsia, the avant-garde uptown, especially with Langston Hughes’ brilliant preface and skillful editing. It won the Spingarn Award from the NAACP. I went to the ceremony at the Civic Club downtown on the arm of Langston Hughes and Carl Van Vechten, and felt out of place. And in the middle of the decade Knopf put out a small edition of Roddy’s poems, Twilight, which was also nicely received, but quietly forgotten. I have both books in my library, and I often take them out, dip into them, remembering. I expect Hell Fighters will be rediscovered some day, in a more auspicious time, and then hailed as a minor classic. If there is any justice in the world…
Now and then some young writer or reader, energized, will make a sentimental pilgrimage to Roddy’s apartment on 138th Street, but Mr. Porter, living alone now that Harriet has left, is none too kind—he has little patience with those who mourn the loss of the gifted young man. According to a piece in the Times, he actually slammed one pilgrim in the shoulder—with his Bible. The reporter also noted that the building was falling into disrepair and the city planned to condemn it.
Lawson was beaten to death in prison. Ironically, at last, he found the fame he’d so coveted when, in 1933, Harriet, working at the Lafayette Theater up in Harlem, discovered a copy of Lawson’s play, the one so cruelly refused by Jed Harris. She mounted a production of Harlem River at the theater, where it flourished. Of course, the publicity surrounding the playwright, then serving time upstate, didn’t hurt sales, though in the end it did have a darker side. Lawson had been maintaining a low profile behind bars, but reporters clamoring for interviews put him in the spotlight. No one knows the whole story, but his sudden celebrity—the pretty boy standing out in the cafeteria or showers, perhaps—led to a skirmish, and Lawson was found slumped over a lunch room table, his handsome face bashed in and a makeshift knife in his ribs. His notorious death simply meant even more tickets were sold for Harlem River. I hear it’s being included in an anthology of New Negro Plays, edited by Wallace Thurman.
Ellie disappeared for a time, ignoring Waters’ repeated phone calls, but then emerged a minor star in a revival of Shuffle Along on Broadway, reprising the Josephine Baker and Florence Mills parts. You’d see her photo in the tabloids, exquisitely dressed, but I always thought she had a scared-of-the-dark look on her face, as though she’d found herself in a wonderful place but feared someone would point and say, “You don’t belong here.” You also saw her in a revival of O’Neill’s All God’s Chillun Got Wings down in Greenwich Village. There was a photo of her riding in a Stutz Bearcat, her face veiled, at a reception for Duke Ellington at the Lincoln Theater. After that, I learned she migrated to Hollywood where she played fawning and comical maids in second-rate talkies, bit parts that had her in frilly French outfits. I saw one in which she played a scaredy-cat maid, mouth agape, hands fluttering, eye balls rolling. I left the theater.
Bella’s destiny seemed written in the stars. For a while she plagued Jed Harris, who rebuffed her and finally threatened her. She even stopped in at his Ziegfeld office and created a scene, escorted out by the police. Her wildly exotic good looks no longer served as entry into cabaret society, and, according to Waters, she did a succession of minor roles in Harlem theaters, often playing the decadent femme fatale who comes to a bitter if obligatory end. One time she aped Josephine Baker’s la danse savage in a silly review called Black Manhattan. But she had a reputation for being hard, unyielding, if not downright malicious, and the roles quickly evaporated. One of the last ones I saw was with Waters and Rebecca, a madcap comedy called Flaming Youth, staged in a backwater hall up on Convent Avenue, a theater group of youngsters. She played an older woman—she was barely thirty then—but the sloppy stage makeup exaggerated her brutally hard looks, and her voice was like hail on a tin roof. At one point she forgot her lines, and the audience hooted and howled.
Waters showed me a few of her short poems in The Crisis, but I never cared for them: terse, epigrammatic, and mostly enigmatic, meditations on the dark side of the moon, imitations of Stephen Crane’s naturalistic snapshots of life. One was dedicated to Countee Cullen, though for the life of me I didn’t know why. She’d always stated her dislike of his verse. When I last saw her, she was hostess at a Harlem nightclub. I’d gone with Noël Coward and Aleck Woollcott, against my will, to hear a favored drummer there, and Bella had seated us. Dressed in some oriental silk dress, with butterflies and sequins, chopsti
cks in her hair, she looked like a geisha girl without a compass. She nodded at me, but then turned her back, avoiding conversation. When we left the place hours later, she was not at the entrance. And I was happy that I didn’t have to say goodbye.
Harriet and Freddy got married, which surprised no one. Once Freddy relinquished his obsession with the aloof Ellie—no one knows exactly how that happened, but Harriet obviously played a role in his reeducation—both settled into a good, productive life. Freddy, ever the social rebel, gained a reputation for his fiery, if beautifully written, essays for The Crisis, as well as his social-realism poetry of the long Depression, one of which was printed in American Mercury, and has been much anthologized. Harriet gained some fame as a columnist for the Amsterdam News, and wrote and performed some one-act plays for a small Negro ensemble in Greenwich Village. They bought an interest in a small Harlem movie house in the early days of talkies, struggled to make a go of it, but obviously did. A decade later, they moved into one of the grand Stanford White houses on 159th Street—Strivers Row. Very posh, indeed. They had one son named Macklin, a musical prodigy, and she sent me black-and-white snapshots, including a profile of the brilliant lad that appeared in the Times. Strangely, she is the one who keeps in touch with me over the years, with breezy, chatty notes arriving every so often. That surprised, but also thrilled me. Always formal—Dear Miss Ferber, though I sign my notes back to her Edna—she talks of playwriting, of movies, of politics—she became a fierce FDR supporter, as was I, of course—even chats about her love of being a mother. Her devotion to Freddy—he published his book of essays under the name “Frederick Holder, Jr.”—is unwavering and beautiful. They’re a happy couple. A happy family. What she never mentions is Roddy, Lawson, Bella, or Ellie.
Show Boat and The Royal Family were huge successes. Show Boat ran for 572 standing-room-only performances, and was almost immediately revived. The Royal Family, though it struggled a bit at first, ran for 345 laudable performances and was soon made into an unwatchable movie. Both plays, I hope, are enduring pieces of American culture.
As for Jed Harris, I never stopped blaming him for his part in the tragedy, though, of course, he never agreed with me. But his overweening hubris, not only for his theatrical acumen but also for his attempt to use his suave good looks and charm to wheedle his way into the history books, ultimately faltered. His cold, hard worldview, his cutthroat dealings, his cruelty, led to a shipload of enemies, though I wasn’t one. For years, he called me, talked like a magpie. His voice got more and more frantic, oily, demanding. Eventually I put a stop to it, which ruffled his feathers. But by this time his wunderkind star was fast dimming on Broadway, the hits suddenly faltered, and Jed Harris himself became a theatrical footnote to the helter-skelter decades before the Second World War. That vicious war changed everything, including me. That madman Hitler had a way of stunting my voice, though he broadened my heart for what was good and just and true.
Yet I end on a happy note. Rebecca’s son Waters Turpin never lost sight of his own vision. Returned to school that January, finishing high school, he went onto college, though summers he was in the city and often helped me at parties and chores. For a while he worked in Harlem as a porter-clerk in a deli, then for the WPA, but by then Harlem, to him, was “a painted, glittering jade” that promised much and gave back so little. And in 1937, with no help from me though I sang his praises to everyone, he published These Low Grounds, a saga based on four generations of family memory and lore, life in old Maryland, though it looked back to the Old South, to slavery, lynchings, to…“these low grounds of sin and sorrow.”
On the Sunday morning the New York Times bestowed tons of deserved praise on the novel, lauding its verisimilitude and its power and its evocation of real Negro lives, well, on that morning his mother Rebecca, humming to herself in my kitchen, routinely served me light and airy pancakes slathered in maple syrup and surrounded by plump strawberries, with piping hot coffee and fresh-squeezed orange juice. But she did such a culinary feast every Sunday morning. Yet that Sunday was special. You could tell it by her sprightly step, the tilt of her head, the dip of her smile. And by the song that came, involuntarily, from her throat. She was, after all, a proud woman.
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