“And that quote in the papers where you called your white opponent a coward for not criticizing the Viet Nam War, that didn’t help much either,” Lincoln said, enjoying himself.
“The Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party spoke out against the war before King or any of the other high-profile page-one blacks. I said it then, I’d say it again,” Courtland said.
“No, this time you’d accuse him of aiding a policy of genocide,” Macon said.
“Right, this time I’d be more accurate,” Courtland shot back, then quickly drained his wineglass.
“We travel around a lot with the theater,” Jessie said, “and it’s hard to see the changes. I mean I know there are black sheriffs and mayors. But people are still so poor.”
“In some places poorer than before,” Macon added.
“You blaming that on us?” Courtland asked, raising his eyebrows. “We don’t control the economy, set fiscal policy. And what we’ve gained was worth everything we paid for it, and it’s worth more than some folks are willing to admit.”
“The some folks he’s referring to is me,” Macon said. “We argue about this a lot. I say they gave us the Voting Rights Act, Head Start and food stamps.”
“Hell, that’s not bad,” Lincoln said.
“But it’s not enough,” Macon insisted.
“They didn’t give us nothing,” Courtland shouted. “Name a people who through nonviolent tactics, political pressure, appeals to the moral conscience of a nation, smart manipulation of the press and marching with only a small army of private citizens as foot soldiers accomplished as much?
“Maybe we don’t own banks or things,” Jessie said, “but I don’t know any black people anymore who would ever say, like I used to hear folks in Columbus say all the time, that we had all the rights we deserved, that a black man could no more be mayor or sheriff than fly to the moon. We got rid of those chains on our brain. That’s the main thing we did.”
After dinner Jessie and Macon sat on the front porch together, listening to the crickets singing in the shadows of the flowering bushes.
“Lincoln’s talking about moving to New York soon.”
“That makes sense, if you two really want to get into theater. I’ll miss you though,” Macon said.
“We’ve been having a hard time raising money for the theater and Lincoln wants to spend more time writing.”
“And you? What do you want, Jessie?” Macon asked, halting the rocking of her chair against the splintered porch, awaiting her answer.
“I want to act. As long as I can do that, I’m OK.”
“Does it mean so much really?” Macon asked.
“It means more than anything.… How are you and Courtland doing?”
“Fine, fine,” Macon said quickly, reflexively. “He’s away a lot traveling. And I’m busy but I still miss him when he’s gone.”
“What’s it like, being married?” Jessie asked. “With me and Lincoln, just living together feels permanent but I know it’s not.”
Macon had begun rocking again, her head resting against the back of the chair, her gaze thrust skyward, seeking something Jessie wondered if even she could name.
“It’s oh, so, I don’t know,” Macon began. “I feel like we’re starting over every day.”
“Does it feel good?”
“Sometimes. But, oh, Jessie, when it feels bad, it feels worse than anything I ever knew.” Macon shuddered, drawing Jessie’s anxious gaze.
“There’s just so much to Courtland,” Jessie said.
“There’s a lot to me too.” Macon stopped rocking and leaned forward to Jessie, sitting on the top step. “Do you know Courtland has never once said to me, ‘I’m sorry or I was wrong.’ ” Macon told Jessie this, suddenly warm with the anger she felt sometimes when she and Courtland argued and she longed in the aftermath for him to shape the truce that he always assumed she would design. “Never once.”
“Maybe he just feels it but can’t get it out. I’m like that sometimes myself,” Jessie told her.
“You should’ve seen him during the campaign. Something happened to him standing before a crowd of people selling them his version of their dreams,” Macon said. “He burned like a house on fire. I’d listen to him and look at him and recognize him but swear I didn’t know him.”
“But what’s wrong with that?” Jessie asked.
“And after a rally when we were alone,” Macon continued, almost as though talking to herself, “there was just this emptiness, a vacant place. Nothing he said or did to me alone or we did together seemed filled with the same urgency.”
“Maybe he needs all the organizing, the meetings, the efforts to change things. Maybe it gives him something you don’t,” Jessie said softly. “He can still love you and need all the other things too, Macon.”
“Can he, Jessie, can he really?” Macon’s voice was brittle with a skepticism so harsh that it punctured Jessie’s composure and led her to say simply, “Macon, I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
They sat in silence for a while, the voices of their men inside at the dinner table dancing through the screen door, sometimes settling on the porch with them.
As Jessie thought more and more about the possibility of leaving the south she had become obsessed with the idea of telling someone her secret. There was no woman she admired more than Macon, whom she still found herself imitating, using Macon’s tricks, her attitudes, her forceful manner and style in the shaping of a character and sometimes just when she was playing herself. They had remained in close touch. Macon wasn’t just the person she wanted to tell, she was the only person she could tell.
“I want to tell you a secret,” Jessie began, her voice at first too small and unobtrusive for Macon to even hear. There, she had said it. And, as she did, she heard the little voice, but she pushed it back, so far back it couldn’t reach her. “Before I tell you though,” she pushed on, “I want you to forgive me for knowing you all this time and never telling you before. Why I never told you had more to do with me than anything I didn’t trust about you.”
“What is it, Jessie?” Macon said, moving from the chair to sit next to Jessie on the top step.
The voice in her head was mad now, enraged that she had stifled it, dared to ignore it. And as it puffed itself up, gathered steam, Jessie said, “Just promise me that what I tell you stays between us. You can’t even tell Courtland okay?”
“I promise.” Macon squeezed Jessie’s hand.
“Well,” Jessie said, “it’s something I thought I would just forget one day, but it seems like I can’t do anything but remember.”
BRIGHT LIGHTS
SHE WAS LOSING him. Even as her words filled the cavernous, suddenly lonely room, she was losing him and she didn’t know how she could get him back. The reader sat at a desk before her, his eyes glued to the script speaking the other roles in the scene. Her favorite scene. The role she was born to play. The director stood beside the room’s only window, arms folded across his chest, gazing at her with a studied indifference she could neither decipher nor defeat. Five minutes after her departure he might not remember her name, but inevitably he would recall every flustered line, each unsure move she had made. She had been called back for a second audition, had not slept the night before, had done little in the week since the previous audition except think about this moment. Prepare for it. Pray about it. Now it was here and she was losing it. With every word, each breath, each movement, she was losing the scene and their attention. Had there been a moment in the last ten minutes when she could have reclaimed it?
“Mama, you don’t understand. It’s all a matter of ideas, and God is just one idea I don’t accept. It’s not important. I am not going out and be immoral or commit crimes because I don’t believe in God.”
Ever since she first read the play she had wanted to be Beneatha, had felt she was Beneatha. She would have been, could have been Beneatha too, if she hadn’t been Jessie Foster first.
“I don’t even think a
bout it. It’s just that I get tired of Him getting all the credit for all the things the human race achieves through its own stubborn effort. There simply is no blasted God—there is only man and it is he who makes miracles!”
Why couldn’t they see or hear Beneatha in her? She had allowed some of the girl’s confidence to rub off on her—wanting to be a doctor and talking back to her mama. If they didn’t give her the role, give her what she felt was hers, she’d have to give all that goodness back.
The reader was saying Mama’s lines, the ones that claimed her daughter, retrieving her from independence and blasphemy. Her head rolled back as though slapped, her eyes filled with real, imagined tears, too proud to shed, and then she said, “In my mother’s house there is still God.”
“There are some ideas we ain’t going to have in this house. Not long as I am at the head of this family,” the reader said, his voice dull, detached.
“Yes, ma’am.”
That slap had only made her stronger, that’s what she liked about the girl. Nobody could turn her around. She had gotten Lincoln to work with her on the part, over and over, polishing this scene until he got so sick of it he refused to hear it again. Maybe she had worked on it too much, had wanted it too badly. Was that possible? Not after she had let this girl get under her skin, walk down the street beside her. No, please, Lord, don’t tell me you can lose something just because you wanted it too much!
“Like a child,” the reader was saying, and in response she said, “I see.” She was trying not to see the director’s fidgeting, his eyes moving again and again to his watch. His mildly curious gazes out the window at Broadway below them. She let her voice drop, get real quiet, hurt but not defeated, and said, “I also see that everybody thinks it’s all right for Mama to be a tyrant. But all the tyranny in the world will never put a God in the heavens!”
“Thank you, Miss Moon, thank you very much,” the director said, arch, false, hurrying her out with his glance, urging her to be quick about it, to gather up her things and get out so the next person could come in. She thought she would throw up, she wanted to, right there in the middle of the office, so weak was she with disappointment, fatigue and hurt. But she didn’t, despite the upheaval in her stomach, the horrible air in the closet-sized room, the smoke from the director’s cigarettes, and wondering how she would be able to walk down the four flights of stairs to the street when she wished at that moment to merely stand completely still—still so that she could decide who she would be now and how to stop hurting.
It took her half an hour to walk down the steps to the street, because she kept stopping to think about what she would tell Lincoln, what he would say. She stopped twice and just sat on the cement, dust-caked steps. “Miss Moon,” he had said, “thank you very much.” She was Pearl Moon now. Pearl Moon. It was a name that came to her one night in a dream shortly after they moved to New York. In the dream, she was alone in a small boat rowing toward a horizon that slipped farther and farther away the closer she came to it. She stopped rowing and looked up at the sky and saw the moon glazed with stardust that filtered, sparkling, onto the surface of the water. She started rowing again, and rowed to a point just beneath the moon’s embrace. In the vortex of that luminous, breathless light she felt herself touched by the hand of what she decided to call God.
Nobody would name a child Pearl Moon. A made-up name, a theatrical name, a name too beautiful for a real person. And that’s why she chose it. Because she wanted her life to be filled with ecstatic moments of grace like the one that had come to her in the dream. Pearl Moon. That was the name on the head shots she’d had made, and the postcard résumés that she figured were in the desk or trash can of every casting agent in Manhattan. Pearl Moon.
When she opened the door and walked onto Broadway, Pearl felt the city’s tangible, overwhelming and irresistible presence momentarily snatch her breath. She passed the theaters, their marquees blazing as though neon-lit in the late afternoon July sun. When they had first arrived in New York she had spent whole days just walking around Times Square and the theater district, breathing in its promises, completely unaware of its efficient, perfected cruelty. The fast-food chains, the theaters, the adult bookstores catered to specific, essential appetites. Walking the streets of Times Square, Pearl had discovered her own appetites as well. The building she had just left was like many of the anonymous structures that loomed over Times Square. Sometimes it seemed as if she had been inside most of them; auditioning, trying out for a part, huddled in hallways with hundreds of others, hoping for a miracle in the form of a part. The auditions were terrible, endless periods of exposure unlike anything she had ever known.
In the year since their arrival, she and Lincoln had started virtually from scratch. Nobody cared that he had won a regional award for the trilogy of plays he had written for her, even fewer cared that the Renaissance South Theater had been written up in national magazines and papers. What had they done lately? What had they done in New York? Pearl was a member of the Negro Ensemble Company apprentice program, but she hadn’t been on stage in a year, and she worked as a receptionist in a doctor’s office to pay the rent. Lincoln taught writing at the New School and City College and had an informal but not yet lucrative arrangement with a theater company in Brooklyn to write for them.
She was nearing Lincoln Center. It was five o’clock and the streets were jammed with traffic, teeming with pedestrians. Gradually, unconsciously, she had abandoned the leisurely gait that had carried her across the terrain of her life in the south. Now Pearl walked, like everybody else in Manhattan, as though her life depended on it. She walked as though in flight from unimaginable, yet certainly impending, danger. She walked as though the essence of life itself lay in the speedy, efficient propulsion of her arms and legs. She walked now, she was sure, with more purpose than she had ever possessed before.
When Pearl opened the door of the Gingerman, she immediately saw Simone at a table near the front window. Simone was wearing a wig so Pearl figured she must have had an audition today, too. Six feet, pecan-colored, possessed of a laugh that could raise the dead, Simone—who only used one name—was pushing forty. She liked to say “pushing it out the way.” A decade earlier, she had come to New York from Kansas City with plans to make it big, and had been only marginally successful, playing small, sporadic roles on a couple of the daytime soap operas, being an understudy for countless roles, doing regional theater. But despite her lack of major success she was determined to “stay in the fight” as she liked to say, because, she often told Pearl, “Honey, I got my pride, and I aim to take a bite out of the apple before it takes a bite outta me.” Simone had started a support group for black actresses, which Pearl had found out about, and they had hit it off. The Shebas met informally once a month and the meetings were part therapy, part crying on shoulders and part sharing of information about what was coming up, developing in the business.
“Well, if you don’t look like hell,” Simone said, when Pearl slumped into the chair across from her. “Was it that bad?”
“Worse. I never had them. Not for one moment during the entire audition. I don’t know what happened.” Pearl kicked off her shoes under the table and rubbed one foot against the other.
“Maybe this wasn’t your part.”
“It was, Simone, I swear it was.”
“Well, honey, you and every other black actor in this city or in a two-thousand-mile radius is saying the same thing this evening. A revival of Raisin in the Sun, you knew the competition would be crazy. And I warned you a callback don’t mean you got the gig. You ain’t got the part till you standing on stage opening night, and even then watch your back.”
The waiter came to their table and Pearl ordered a glass of wine.
“Well, where are you coming from?”
“Told you I had that audition for the Coca-Cola commercial, right?”
“Yeah, how’d it go?”
“The director told me I didn’t sound black enough. Can you dig tha
t? I didn’t sound black enough. When the bastard’s back was turned I started rolling my eyes, makin em big and bug-eyed and mouthing ‘Mammy.’ Told me I didn’t sound black enough. I was sixty seconds away from slapping him.”
The waiter brought her wine and Pearl reached for it eagerly.
“I can see the headlines now,” Pearl said. “Crazed black actress assaults director.”
“Driven over the edge by stereotyped roles,” Simone said.
“Were there a lot of people?”
“Now what do you think? If we’d had some fried chicken and some sangria we could’ve had a party.”
“I just don’t know what to do, Simone. I’m so starved for a role I’d do almost anything.”
“I saw an ad for a role in a porn flick.”
“You know what I mean. I feel like I’m just marking time until my next role. Nothing seems to matter unless it takes place under the lights, on stage.”
“I was a stripper once, between jobs,” Simone confessed, her eyes clouding at the memory. “But since I invested in those singing lessons I can usually rustle something up,” she said brightly. “I tell you, Pearl, you could do worse than to oil them vocal cords, get out there and learn to sing and dance like all good darkies do.”
“Simone, I worked so hard,” Pearl pleaded.
“And, honey, tomorrow is another day. I’m not putting you or your old man down when I say this, but you had it easy, kid, down there in the south. What actress wouldn’t give her right arm to be sleeping with the playwright and the director. The competition for parts in the Renaissance South troupe wasn’t nothing compared to the competition you’re facing now. Maybe you weren’t coddled but you had it a lot easier than most actresses ever get it. I’ve seen you in the workshop productions, and I know you’re good, Pearl. But, sister, this is the big time and the streets are crowded. There’s hundreds of hungry brown babies out there and you’re just one.”
And Do Remember Me Page 8