PEACE
“It’s just a three-bedroom apartment,” August says, sometimes. “It’s not going to hurt you.” He reminds me about the high rents in Harlem, and he promises he’ll let the cat in to live with us, though when he says that, he’s careful to add a quick maybe. Still, I can’t believe he’s talking straight: when he asks me to move in, his eyes are trained on lampposts, or sidewalks, or the spray starch commercials on the sides of buses. I can never decide why he won’t look me in the eye, so I never just come out and tell him no.
And he does, of course, love me. He even loves my new wig. I’d always held a country girl’s understanding of hair, a notion that a girl could either enhance her own, or, if her head became too needy, purchase a reasonable facsimile thereof. Any change in color was just silly, and addition of length was dishonesty of the worst sort. Here in New York, wearing one’s own hair is precisely not the point, though I hadn’t yet realized that the costumed self might yet still be the self. A piece of luck, then, that when I went downstairs to the wig shop, the mortician’s wife was there, haggling with the saleslady over a carelessly thinned fall she wanted to buy on discount for one of her deceased. It was a hot summer day, and out the storefront window I could see the liquor store’s two morning regulars holding their paper bags. They stood for hours, in whatever weather, talking incessantly, always. The secretary of Make Me a Herald walked by them on her way into church, pointed down the block to the funeral home, and said, “See that? It’s waiting for you.”
In response, the men didn’t even laugh or heckle her as she turned her key in the church’s little iron door. They simply watched her, and, once the whole of her had disappeared into the storefront, first her hatted head and then her left calf and finally her right hand, they picked up their conversation from the pointless spot at which they’d left it.
The bottom row of wigs, all around the store’s three walls, sat on plastic heads painted with surprised eyes and sad mouths. The top row of heads, in contrast, were faceless white Styrofoam—they could stand to be faceless because they wore the better wigs. I stood on my tiptoes and plucked a long, auburn one from its head, and I was on the bus, looking out the window at the row of shoeshine boys on St. Nicholas, before I realized that I had chosen Caroline’s hair. She was seeing New York with me, then, and when I got off the bus and the watermelon seller outside the theater catcalled as if he didn’t know me, I whispered to my wig, “That’s what they’re like here. Bold.”
Jim and Verner, when I ran into them backstage, didn’t notice. Letty said, simply, “Nice mop. Shiny, even. Must’ve cost half your paycheck.” I’d changed into my costume gown already, and the ends of the wig fell to the sequined straps at my shoulders, but none of the men around melted at the sight of me. The lighting man kept lighting. The sound man kept miking. The Apollo was full of beautiful, talented women, and these were just men at work, rushing around to start the show. I walked past Bob Northern, who was cleaning his mouthpiece, but when I said hello he ignored me. He did glance at me, or perhaps he didn’t—I found his eyes that hard to read. But August, when he saw me, ran his fingers through Caroline’s hair and smiled.
Through the six o’clock show he smiled, and he stopped in the middle of one of the half-time numbers just to run over and kiss all ten of my fingers, one by one. The audience rocked the floor. Letty scissor-stepped over to the piano and gave us a salute, though I know she was just trying to endear herself to the crowd: Letty hates August. “He won’t be working here long,” she tells me, “so don’t get attached.” She calls his demands for more money sheer idiocy, and she says he causes terrible trouble between her and Mr. Schiffman. She says August’s broad back and thick fingers remind her of the dumb, hulking Russian she ran off and married when she was seventeen. He left her right after she grinned into a bowl of tomato soup and told him she was having his baby; she told me she’d been so pregnant she could smell water boil. She drank black cohosh and sat on the root woman’s cold, chipping toilet for hours until she passed the baby, all the while vomiting into a pail because of the pain, and tapping her bare feet against the woman’s gnarled wood floor, painted the most distressing shade of orange. After we all left the stage that Thursday, as August grabbed me around the neck with his free hand and kissed the top of my wig, Letty screeched that the Apollo was going to shit.
In private, that night, August begged. “Just unbutton your shirt and show me a little something,” he asked, and I did, because I remember now, always, that I’m not as pretty as Elizabeth Pounds Johnson. I kept my wig on, and I unfastened my bra and showed him. But I won’t let him see not one single sliver of thigh or bloomers again, not anytime soon, because of that voice in my head—Keep your gentlemen above the neck. August doesn’t much feature on that, of course. He says every time he sees me with my blouse unbuttoned and my skirt still wrapped tight around my hips, it seems that I’m getting smaller and smaller, until I’m just about lost. I am getting skinnier, but that’s because I’ve grown an inch taller, and the gowns on my rack at the Apollo have started to hang off my shoulders something frightful. But I’m still all here and of one piece, ready to love him.
New York City is a belching, groaning, swallowing maw. I haven’t seen Mrs. Donald Green in an age. I’ve seen Mr. Green, heard him pounding down the stairs in the evening, then seen him on my ceiling, running across the street to the druggist’s. Edith says their beautiful little girl is ill with polio, though when I told Mrs. Fogle, she said Edith was wrong—it’s rubella. She seemed dismissive, though she hasn’t let Johnny out to play in weeks. Through my ceiling I hear the deaf couple making love, just as loudly as they laugh. I hear their bedsprings squeaking, hear the man grunting as he pushes into her. Since he’s unable to hear his own efforts, he doesn’t realize the rest of us can: he sounds desperate, always, as though he’s trying to climb into his wife’s soul through her body. Other days I hear them fighting, the husband moaning his wordless outrage while he signs, the wife slamming cupboards, breaking glass. The day Mack Parker was found lynched down in Mississippi, I heard the Thorpe brothers crying through my wall. Wednesday nights, when there’s rehearsal but no show, the blocks between St. Nicholas and Lenox fix me under the glare of their streetlamps, trap me in the silt that flows along curbs, dissect me like I’m the lowest animal. Sometimes the moon is full, and the ice around it makes a corona, as if God is blowing the moon through a smoke ring. The streets—their cold, ungiving asphalt, their eleventh-hour emptiness—these are the streets that take me home.
This morning, after work, after Minton’s, after a house party on 123rd Street raucous with marijuana and opium and pipefitters, I catch Edith in my room. I turn the key in the lock and hear my own chair slide across the floor, then open the door and there she is, not going through my things as Reggie Thorpe has imagined, but just standing there, looking at me, turning her own hands. “Letter came for you,” she says. She gestures to the table, where she’s lain the plain white envelope.
“You’re in my home, uninvited,” I tell her.
“Well, I should say not. Of course not invited. It’s eight o’clock on a Monday. When respectable people keep work hours.”
“You’re standing in my home,” I say again, and she walks out my door without closing it.
I sit down and ripped the letter open, and find a lovely paragraph from Caroline, telling me how she’s selling cosmetics and making money, telling me that Sylvia French is set to marry a boy from Cincinnati, a lawyer by the name of Johnathan Troutt. I’m looking forward to the concert, Caroline says, and I feel myself grinning. The next paragraph is in a different color ink, and starts out, Glad to hear all about your famous friends. You wouldn’t believe it but the world turns here too, and I’m still assuming, despite the different inks, that the letter is of one mind, but then she goes on: It ain’t that you want me to see things with you. It’s that you want me to watch you. You always did. But I got people here what needs me. Imagene and Grandmama. And Gordon
Bell. He’s going off to the Army now, but when he gets home, I think he wants to marry me. I think at your age you got to find somebody else what sees your orange.
I count the burls of wood on my floor, shivering when I get to fourteen. I drop off to sleep, but not happily, and when I wake, I’m even less happy, though I can’t decide whether it’s anger or sadness that has taken root and infected me. It’s Monday, the professional musician’s day off, and until August picks me up for the movie, I’ve nowhere to go to save myself. I walk two blocks up to 129th, where the smiling skinned rabbits, hanging upside down from their hooks in the window of Pogue’s, make me weak with psychic jealousy. Two blocks back down to 127th, where five girls stand in a knot on the northeast corner. They’re skipping rope to “Jesus Loves Me”; they make me weep with rage. I’m ricocheting against the universe, its accidents of passion and boredom and fright, all of them with the audacity yet to jostle me with their bread bags. I break west to the less peopled end of the street, take two filthy, hot blocks under the shadow of the elevated train to 125th, where a bench sits in a tiny square of park that makes the housing project happy. I sit for over an hour in the rising heat, with the pigeons and the mice for company. Sit still enough, they forget that I’m an animal, too. It’s only 75 degrees out but I’m sweating. The light coming through the clouds is unbearable.
Some boys my age pass on their way to the train and avoid looking at me, but when they’re past, one of them whispers something to the other and they both laugh, too loud for politeness, unloosing their baseball caps with a synchronized toss of their heads. They’re walking home from their first week of senior high school maybe, just finished lapping the gymnasium at basketball practice, or sharpening chalk as punishment. I’m not them anymore, but I’m not what they think I am, either. I’m a pianist. Quite a talent, actually. I’m just sweating on a park bench.
Three, four, five eastbound buses pass me, a mouse runs across the toe of my shoe and through the sickly vegetation, and when the eighth bus comes, the five-thirty, I get on and ride to 123rd, where August is already sitting on Edith’s stoop, waiting.
“Where’ve you been?” he asks.
“Nowhere.” It’s not a lie exactly, but it floats out into the afternoon and pours a vast, unanswered sea between us. “August,” I ask him, “what happened to your face?”
“You writing a newspaper article?”
“Sorry. Just making small talk, that’s all.”
He smiles as if he were joking. “Stitches,” he says. “Right here.” And he shoots an imaginary line down the left part of his face, as if I’d had anywhere else in mind.
We’re walking fast to make the show, and I have to catch my breath to ask him, “But what happened?”
“String popped off my fiddle at a lesson. It’s why I kept playing. Mama said I couldn’t let the violin lick me.”
“Well, did it?”
“What do you think?” he asks.
“You’re still playing, so I guess it depends on how you look at it.”
The outside of the ticket booth is washed a beautiful shade of violet, as would be the front door of a dollhouse, and the boy and girl working inside, taking money and cutting tickets, move their hands fast as falling dominoes. I add up the number of tickets they cut, stop when I get to sixteen, close my eyes for a minute and open them again. The boy and girl both wear blue, sandwich-sized hats with white shirts creased along the sleeves, and when August hands them his money and the boy hands him two tickets, I’m filled with anticipation. I can’t wait for the film to flood my mind with something unreal, if only for the afternoon. The film is Imitation of Life. If it’s really good, I’ll forgive Caroline. I’ll write to her and tell her she must see it.
“So what made you keep playing?” August asks, as we hurry past the concession stand and into the darkness of the theater beyond the double doors.
“Nothing kept me playing,” I say, as we stand in the aisle, searching. Despite our hurry we’re late, and what’s left are two seats in the middle of the second row, three separated seats in the front row. “I kept playing,” I whisper, as we squeeze past half a row of annoyed people, tucking our rear ends away from their faces, “because I didn’t have anything else on my mind. I’m nothing special. I just keep playing, is all.”
We’re lucky enough that the newsreel stops, for one precious and nerve-wracking moment, leaving the theater in pitch blackness. August takes my chin in his hand and brings his face close to mine so I’ll hear him. “You are unreal, you know that?” he whispers. “You think you’re nothing special, but you make that piano sound like its mama done died. All these other New York girls been out in the world so long, all they can come up with is how to get from point A to point B, but you’re cosmic. You don’t even pay attention to how the world is trying to tie you down. And anybody who can get along with mean-ass Letty Jones is special, with a capital S. Please,” he says, taking my right hand in his left, strong hand, the one he uses to press his bass’s heavy strings to its neck, “live with me. Come be with me and I’ll let you interview me every day if you want.”
But what I want is for him to explain Caroline’s letter, and for him to tell me why the world doesn’t just get tired of worshipping the sun and spin off into the universe. What Dr. Maynard’s housekeeper’s name is, and whether, when she bathes her four children at night, she hates them. Why condensation doesn’t form on me even though the theater is cooler than the oustide, why Sonnyboy went downtown and told those White people his entire truth, how people carry on without knowing why they do. How babies can see the ugly parts of their mamas and still claim blood kin. Why some people are born talented and everyone else is born happy. I don’t know that August can tell me any of this. I don’t know the first thing about him. But I do know that he kissed all ten of my fingers on a Thursday, and I do know that three bedrooms, a living room, a dining room, a bath, and a fire escape is a place where a body can breathe. And that those motorboats on the Hudson, choking on their own gas, are something like peace.
SNOW
“Of course you are,” August says. “It’s what every country chitlin’ does with their first big check.”
“What’s that?”
“Spend every penny of it immediately.”
He flips a page of the Amsterdam News and reflattens the paper against the kitchen table, but he seems more amused than angry. Anyway, I don’t care. I’m buying a burgundy Cartier suitcase—the one on display this week at Blumstein’s—to take home with me. Instead of the thin country dresses that came with me to New York, I’m packing two black dress suits and a powder blue jacket from Macy’s. I’m not, either, getting anywhere near the L&N depot—I’m flying to Standiford Field. When I remembered my journey to Manhattan, I thought about the Negro train porters in the cars, the ones not that long moved to New York themselves. I thought about those men, warming baby bottles and carrying the rotting burlap bags of all those grandmamas from Alabama. I thought of them having constantly to manage the transport of others, and I got tired: I decided that I just don’t even want to see it. Better to float in my powder blue jacket through an airport, where no one is storing their entire catalog of hopes in an overhead compartment, or carrying half their life down a concrete platform in Pittsburgh.
August looks up from the paper. “A plane ticket, though,” he says, as if reading my mind. “It’s a little extravagant.”
“It seems unnecessary to you because you’re not the one taking the trip.”
“It’s nothing I’d ever do.”
“Only because you’d never have to. Your mother lives in the next borough.” Though I’ve never seen his mother, or even her apartment building. August has kept me studiously away from her, and the few times he’s mentioned her, something in his eyes has pressed me not to ask for more information. Once we found ourselves on her block, in a taxi heading toward the East River Drive, and he asked the driver whether he couldn’t move faster.
“Look, baby, i
f you felt like a true Harlemite, you wouldn’t be wasting all this money trying to look like a fake one. Now what can I do to make that happen?”
“Nothing,” I say. Marry me, I think. “I’ve got to go. I’m meeting Letty.”
“Hm. All that innovation on the piano, and you couldn’t come up with one reason not to meet that woman on a Sunday morning.”
I don’t comprehend the enmity between them, though I’m afraid, somehow, that I’m supposed to. I’m supposed to understand just how important is twenty dollars in one hand versus fifteen dollars in another, and the way love and hate, in the city, is so easily determined, because it has nothing to do with feelings and everything to do with money. My failure of understanding is a country girl’s naïveté, I suppose, an innocence I must end if I’m ever to make it here.
“Bye,” I tell him, and I go behind his chair and lean over to kiss him on the cheek. He grabs my arm, and there’s a heat there, between us, that’s apart from the bodily contact. He smiles at me, and I flush everywhere, even at the follicles on my head. “Bye,” he says.
Over the months, I’ve come to make sense of Letty, and while I’m riding down August’s elevator and then taking the bus to the shop, I think this: in New York people either pity you or envy you, but Letty does neither. She’s going with Mr. Schiffman, who she actually calls “Mr. Schiffman,” and it isn’t a question of loving him. She says she’s a kept woman, even if she’s the hardest working kept woman in three states. She’d say the very same thing to Schiffman’s face, I’ll bet, because with Letty, what you see is what you get. She doesn’t care one way or another about the unreality of being geniune. She just is.
Of course when it comes to meddling in my love life, more and more in the by and by, Letty just isn’t. At the soda shop, when I tell her what happened to August’s face, she laughs so hard she spits out her cream, and the other couple in the shop—a father and his young daughter—turn and stare. “You believe that?” Letty says, as a milky rivulet streams down her chin. “As long as you’ve been living in New York, child-friend, and you’re still that green?”
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