I had heard of other girls who had been starved of work, shut out of the industry. Some had gone back to live with their parents in the suburbs, others latched on to their boyfriends and convinced them they were ready to settle down, but a few had hung around until they reached the point of starvation, leaving themselves with few options but to debase themselves in front of whoever they’d upset, hoping for mercy, or move into prostitution. I would not allow any of these things to happen to me. It was time for me to go, but go where?
Melbourne, I decided over the next two days. I learned that, despite its rigid liquor laws, Melbourne had at least one club that hired entertainers, the Forbidden City. I would go there and ask for work.
I had no real ties in Sydney and, having acquitted my rent, I decided to take the train as soon as I was packed. One friend, Jan, was virtually the only person I told I was going. Also an entertainer, Jan was in desperate circumstances herself. After leaving one club job she could not find another and was behind in her rent, so she immediately said she wanted to come with me. She lowered her suitcase to me from the first-floor window of her Victoria Street rooming house because she could not walk out with it past her landlord. We felt like two escapees on the run!
On the train our carriage had few other passengers, so I let Jezebel out of her case. I didn’t like to keep her cramped for too long and the trip to Melbourne seemed endless. When we arrived, however, she didn’t fancy getting back into her box so I had to wrap my coat around her and carry her in a taxi. We had the driver take us directly to the Forbidden City.
I have no idea what the staff thought about us at first. We tumbled, travel-worn, out of the taxi with suitcases, snake box, and a snake wrapped warmly in a big coat. We asked at the front office of the hotel for the entertainment manager. He came out, giving us a look of incredulity but wearing a warm smile, and introduced himself as Ray. I managed to get Jezebel back into her box and he invited us in to watch the show. The club served dinner and the show ran in two parts, the audience consisting of couples and mixed group parties who possibly thought the place gave their evening a nice up-market, slightly risque edge.
Ray was tremendously thoughtful. He realised we were all but broke and homeless, so he contacted people he knew, Mr and Mrs Hall, who ran a boarding house a few streets away in St Kilda. The boarding house seemed to cater almost exclusively to men—scientists and specialists going to and from Antarctic expeditions. Ray arranged with the Halls for us to fix up our rent after we received our first pay from the club.
Mr and Mrs Hall were an elderly, happily married couple who had had no contact with snakes before, and possibly none with a Black woman either. It seemed, however, that very little fazed them. They told me they were quite used to eccentrics. Who else but eccentrics opt to spend a year at the South Pole, snowed in and with virtually no contact with the outside world? The Halls seemed to quietly revel in the idea of meeting people from all walks of life, and they treated everyone well. I lived with them the entire time I was in Melbourne, and they were pleased to come when we invited them to see the show.
Their red-brick home was warm and amicable, and Mrs Hall made friends with Jezebel in no time at all. She delighted in telling her friends that she had two ‘showgirls’ and a snake living with her. At first, some of the lodgers from the men’s quarters weren’t too happy to have their meals with Jezebel around, but they settled down when they saw others stepping over her without any harm coming to them. As it was more difficult in Melbourne than it had been in Sydney to find mice to feed her, Mr and Mrs Hall suggested I buy a pair of mice and let them breed to provide a steady supply of food. This worked well until the lot of them escaped from a wooden box I kept in the bottom of the wardrobe. When I opened the cupboard I discovered they had nibbled their way through most of my underwear. Mrs Hall just laughed and said she’d ask Mr Hall to fit the box with a better lock.
I felt safe in Mrs Hall’s house and even walking to the club. We usually caught a taxi home as it was often midnight, but on the few occasions when I walked, Jezebel’s presence discouraged most people from coming too close. On sunny days I took her to the St Kilda pier and to parks around the area, so many people began to realise that when they saw me, my snake would not be far away.
I was yearning again to see Russel. I had been away from Townsville for almost a year and he had visited me only once during that time. Mum wrote that she had pictures of me up all around the house, and Russel would point and say, ‘Mama’. She said there was no possibility that he would forget who I was, but doubt niggled at me.
Entertainers at the Forbidden City were not permitted to fraternise with guests, not that there were many unaccompanied men in our audiences anyway. In between shows we had a roped-off area at the back of the room where we were served dinner. I was therefore surprised one night when Ray asked me if I would agree to talk with a friend of his, a surgeon, someone he could personally recommend, who had asked to meet me. If anyone else had made such a request I would have refused, but I knew that Ray was entirely on the up and up. He was the ideal person to run an entertainment program, always working for the best interests of both patrons and staff.
Our meeting was brief. The man was clean cut and otherwise nondescript. After our introduction he invited me to join him for coffee at his house one night the following week. I looked over his shoulder and saw Ray nod.
On the night, the gentleman waited in the lobby for me to finish work and took me to a most elegant house with a sweeping driveway. Inside, lights burned and he left his car at the front step rather than drive into the garage. This action assured me that he intended to drive me home in the not too-distant future, and the presence of his housekeeper set my mind completely at rest. A pleasant, grey-haired woman, she brought in a tray with tea, coffee, warm scones, cream and jam. I was also offered an alcoholic drink from a huge cocktail cabinet which seemed to contain every type of drink one can imagine.
When we’d settled into the big leather chairs and exchanged general chit-chat, the doctor got down to business. He had reached an age, he said, when he was looking for a wife. His wife, he continued with a sweep of his arm, would have all this. Was I interested to hear more?
Curious was probably a better word. I had read fiction in books and magazines about completely improbable marriage proposals, and I felt that I’d somehow strayed into such a story. But no, the doctor explained, he led a busy life and was engrossed in his work, too busy to socialise, meet people and go out on dates. On the other hand, the idea of having a wife in his house to be the hostess for his occasional dinner parties, a companion to take holidays and travel with, was becoming increasingly appealing to him. He painted the life on offer as one of luxurious indulgence, and he wanted, he said, a woman of exotic looks and charm.
I had sat silently listening while he told me all this, and it hadn’t really crossed my mind that he had asked me no questions about myself. I was just amazed by the whole strange scene. However, his next words rang my alarm bells.
‘I had a private detective checking up on you this past week,’ he said, and added, ‘I hope you don’t mind.’ I did mind. ‘You come from Townsville, where your mother still lives, and you have two sisters. You are separated from your husband. I understand you have already had a child, a boy, who lives with your mother. Am I right so far?’
He had intruded on my personal territory and I was aghast. I sat shocked. He didn’t seem to notice and, in fact, appeared to be smug in his knowledge, as he continued, ‘You don’t smoke or drink, and you have no criminal record, and you have very good manners,’ he said with a sort of smile, no doubt hoping to be reassuring.
Instead of feeling comforted by this positive assessment of my behaviour, my stomach wrenched. How could anyone, especially a complete stranger, without my knowledge or consent, gather information about me and sail so close to my secret. During the remainder of his talk with me he inferred that Skip was negligent, which I understood to mean that he thought h
e was the father of the child.
Drained by this encounter, coming as it did at the end of a long day and an evening at work, I began to make motions to leave. The housekeeper had disappeared after she had brought in the tray, but I had not heard a car start up so I guessed that she lived in. I was becoming distraught, not about his physical presence but because he had stirred my mind with his detective’s report and his presumptuous manner.
Immediately, he became the concerned host and hastened to take me back to Mrs Hall’s. I was not surprised that I didn’t have to give him the address. Outside the house, where he pulled up and kept the engine gently purring, he asked me to consider going home to talk to my mother about his proposal. He had already outlined a long-term plan, which included a divorce that he would pay for, a diamond ring, which he would purchase six months after the divorce, and intervals at which he would begin putting things in my name if I went along with the plan. The whole idea consisted of a very detailed proposition, and he had obviously spent time and effort working it out. He said he would be happy to finance the trip to Townsville and this would incur no obligation for me to decide in his favour.
In bed that night I came to the conclusion that this meeting had been one of the weirdest things that had ever happened to me. The man had made no effort to touch me, did not so much as even accidentally touch my hand. At the time, I did not think that he may have been camp and was trying to establish a front for himself. Although, still puzzling over it years later this did occur to me as a possibility.
I didn’t take the money he offered for a plane ticket, but I did use the idea of a trip home to see my mother and son as a means to justify leaving. I knew I had no intention of accepting his offer—I was too outraged by his employment of a private detective to check up on me to even consider it. But at the same time, I was somehow flattered. Someone had thought of me as a potentially good wife and partner. This was a far cry from the unhappy circumstances of my marriage to Skip, where his father had offered me money to disappear.
I said my goodbyes to Ray and the Halls, and set off again by train.
3
En route home to Queensland, I arranged to break the trip at Newcastle. During the first few months following my departure from Townsville, Mum had kept me informed of Skip’s whereabouts. At first he had continued working for Hornibrooks, staying at her house on his days off, and he had teetered between wanting me to return and give our marriage another try, and cutting ties with me altogether. I’d asked Mum not to give him my address. She had written that several times he had given her money to send me to use to come home, then taken it back again after a few days. Sometime later he returned to Newcastle. I thought I would stop by there in an effort to finalise things between us.
Jezebel had been showing signs of illness just before I left Melbourne. On one occasion I had put a tiny live mouse into her carry basket for her to devour—she liked to catch her own food—but when I looked in later, I was dismayed to find that, instead of the snake eating the mouse, the mouse had nibbled some of the scales off Jezebel’s back. I put cream on her wounds but I was more worried about her lack of appetite and vigour. But who could I call?
As soon as I arrived in Newcastle I phoned a well-known snake farm in the area and asked for some expert advice. Look in her mouth, I was told, and see if she has canker. Sure enough, I saw the telltale symptoms the man was describing to me. He then told me to give her a certain medication. When I walked into the nearest chemist shop with Jezebel wrapped in a shawl, the chemist scrambled up onto shelves at the back of his store. I apologised and said the snake was ill and wouldn’t, couldn’t, hurt him. Nevertheless, he preferred to remain there and he gave me directions to locate the ointment I needed. Then I rang up the purchase on his till, took the change and left. When I looked back he was climbing gingerly down.
Despite my letter and subsequent phone call, during which Skip had sounded enthusiastic about seeing me, he failed to meet with me during my stopover. I was disappointed but not surprised. My time there had been well spent gaining advice and medication for Jezebel. I caught the next train to Brisbane where Jezebel and I spent the day at Aunty Glad’s before resuming our long journey.
At home in Townsville I found that Arthur had moved his barber shop out of the poolroom to a shopfront along Flinders Street, and that he and Mum, and whoever else they could get in to help, were running a hamburger store in the shop next door. They had put beds in the rooms at the back of the store, plus a cot for Russel to take a nap in during the day.
Jezebel caused a minor kerfuffle when I first introduced her, but everyone soon settled down when they saw how tame she was. I kept her in her basket at night but during the day she was given free reign throughout the back of the shop. One night she crept out of the basket and disappeared. We couldn’t find her anywhere, and I was afraid someone may have seen her outside and, in needless panic, killed her. She was over ten feet long so the first sight of her often alarmed people. We put a sign up in the front window, offering a reward for a sighting. A photographer from the Townsville Daily Bulletin arrived to take a photo of the sign, but otherwise we received no response. Fortunately, two days later we found her. She had wriggled up, or perhaps down, a drainpipe on the outside of the shop. Again I put her in her basket at night, but she’d discovered how to push open the lid so there was no keeping her still. I resorted to putting her in her wooden box at night, for fear that she’d frighten someone and be killed as a result.
Perhaps my treatment of her canker was inadequate, or maybe she had a mishap that I didn’t know about, such as someone accidentally stepping on her, because after a few weeks she died. I had thought that she would enjoy the warmer environment of the north, as I did, and recover her old self again. I was very upset by her death and was surprised when even Mum shared my distress. Mum said she had never liked snakes until she’d met Jezebel, and that she’d grown used to her and liked having her around. She made people feel safe.
I had learned a great deal about the nature of society and the wide spectrum of the human condition after spending a year living in the south and working in the entertainment industry. I had not, however, found a place for myself in that society. I was very much a loner, often struggling against suicidal urges as a response to feeling worthless and unvalued, or as was often the case, when things looked impossible for me. Despite my own shaky survival on the stage, I had witnessed the racism and sexism which permeated that area of work, and did not feel that I wanted to continue in that direction. For a Black woman, the stage held no real future. Audiences wanted to watch me because of my ‘exotic’ looks and were amazed by my rapport with snakes, but no one wanted to hear what I was thinking. To me, dancing was a physical expression of my emotions, of my pain, as well as a means to release the tension created by my pain, but it was a way of maintaining, not of progressing. I felt the need to go forward, but to where? Also, I realised how deeply I had missed Russel. Mum’s physical care for him was excellent but he was quickly growing and reaching the age where his character would need to be moulded. This, I thought, had to be my challenge. Although he had been thrust upon me the child was not to blame, and he had a right to his mother’s care and attention.
As always, one was roped into work whenever they were around at Mum’s, so Dellie, Leonie and I all took turns at running the shop, making the hamburgers and milkshakes, and doing the million other chores involved. One night when Dellie and I had just closed up the store, two youths came up and banged on the door. We were planning to go out to the Norgate, where young people hung out at night, so we didn’t want to open the store after we’d locked everything up. We could hear the young men cursing us as we turned out the lights.
William Sykes, an Englishman, and his friend were on their way to Mt Isa to look for work. After his arrival in Australia, William had been involved in a car accident, and they were making the trip with funds from his small compensation settlement. He said they had heard there was work aplent
y out west, although conditions were harsh. After he recovered from being snubbed at the hamburger shop, William and I hit it off. When they were leaving to continue their journey, he asked if I’d like to go along with them and I agreed. Mum told me she had worked in the canteen at Mt Isa before I was born, and she encouraged me to go because she had enjoyed high wages and the different lifestyle while she was there.
A bonus about living in Mt Isa was that William agreed that Russel should be with me. William’s friend, however, found the work and rough conditions not to his liking, and split. There was work, though it was hot and tough, but the main problem was lack of accommodation. After living in a flimsy caravan for weeks, William found a family with a very basic house that they wanted to share as a means of halving their expenses. I managed to find a job in a steam laundry, where the work was hard and heavy, and the boss cursed and constantly and crudely insulted the women who worked for him. I stuck it out for as long as I could, but when I thought about it, I weighed up my distress at being abused daily, the cost of childcare for Russel, and the difficulties involved in both of us getting to and from work with just one car between us. The idea that I should stay at home, keep house and look after Russel, ferry William backwards and forwards to work, and use the car to get to the supermarket from our inconvenient location was not only wiser but economically sound too.
Snake Dancing Page 6