Almost Famous Women

by Megan Mayhew Bergman

  He don’t know, Ruby thinks, shaking her head. Tiny’s a prophet. A genius with no education. A lover and a fighter. A performer, through and through. Shit, man, Count Basie and the Duke want her onstage. She’s a star! She can hit a high C!

  A foul smell finds its way into the bus window, the unmistakable smell of pigs, hot shit, and slop that’s all over Carolina. Like rotten eggs. When the Yankee girls get to squishing up their noses about it, asking, “What’s that smell?” Tiny is quick to say, “Smells like money to me.” Ruby smirks. She’s always Tiny’s audience, not that she ever lacks one.

  But no one is awake now. When it’s this quiet, her ears ring. Too much horn. Too many drumbeats. It doesn’t hurt when she plays, just when she listens. More playing then, she thinks, shaking her head a little.

  It’s just me and this long, flat road, Ruby thinks. This big blue moon.

  She notices bread crumbs scattered across the bus floor from dinner; she’ll sweep them up when they stop for breakfast. She can smell old smoke and the bandleader, Anna Mae Winburn’s gardenia perfume, though Anna Mae has long taken off her white gown and plumed hat and fallen asleep in a berth with cold cream on her face.

  Occasionally Ruby passes a farmhouse with the windows thrust open and a light on, and she wonders what people are doing up at three in the morning, if there are sleepless mothers with children or lovers fighting. There’s laundry drying on the lines, the silhouettes of cows in the fields that remind her of the farm her grandfather worked on. More driving. More pine trees. It’s so flat out here, she thinks.

  There’s a paper mill on the horizon, smoke billowing from its stack. She thinks of the people working the late shift. People like her father. And then she thinks of nothing at all, just gives herself over to the soothing vibration of the bus, the terribly slow bus, and smokes.

  She likes smoking. They all do, even the pretty girls. Cigarettes are good for the jazz singer’s voice; they smooth it out.

  Someone taps Ruby on the shoulder. It’s Rae Lee, the manager, lipstick still clinging to her lips in the middle of the night, peering at her through cat-eye glasses.

  “Any trouble?”

  Ruby exhales smoke out of the open window and clenches the cigarette between her teeth. “No trouble.”

  “Anyone ask you any questions?”

  “No questions.”

  “We’ll honor our commitments,” Rae Lee whispers. “We won’t upset the girls with details. Nervous girls are bad performers. Best to keep on, nail our gigs in Kinston and Rocky Mount, then head up 95 through Virginia and over past Washington, where we can rest for a few days away from Jim Crow. We can regroup and pick up some supplies.”

  “Yep,” Ruby says, nodding slowly, eyes fixed on the road. “Fine with me.”

  Rae Lee claps a hand on Ruby’s shoulder, then turns and shuffles back to her seat in her new slippers. She’s the only one with new slippers. “She’s skimming off the pot every gig,” Tiny has whispered to Ruby. Maybe it’s true, Ruby thinks. But I’m not going to say anything. I’m going to look the other way. I’m lucky to be here. I’ll do what I’m told.

  Ruby is the do-anything girl. It’s not the best job in the world, but it’s a job that keeps her close to Tiny and close to music. She sets out dinner or runs errands to buy sanitary napkins and Coca-Cola when the girls practice. She loads and unloads luggage. If Pauline gets sick and can’t play drums, Ruby plays drums. If Johnnie Mae needs a break from piano, which she hardly does, Ruby plays piano. And if the bus driver quits, and several have, because he’s tired of running from the law, Ruby takes the wheel.

  “I can’t do it anymore,” the driver said to Rae Lee last night. “I can’t take sheriff after sheriff banging on the bus door every gig, asking if we have white and colored girls mixing. They know we do. Hell, we advertise it! America’s first integrated all-girl swing band or whatever the hell you call it. I don’t want to go to prison. I’ve got five granddaughters.”

  “The police can’t keep you,” Rae Lee said, hand on hip.

  “They can do anything. And if the police don’t do it, you know who will if we keep talking about ‘the blood of many races’ and whatnot.”

  Ruby knew who the driver was talking about. She’d watched men walk right up to the bus, tucking vicious notes underneath the windshield wipers: How can you sleep, eat, and work together? You disgust me. Leave town or you’ll burn while you sleep. Black, white, Jewish, Mexican, Asian, Hawaiian, mixed up—the International Sweethearts had it all. The girls were chased out of diners and gas stations, refused restrooms, had shop doors closed in their faces. And yet the lines of people still wrapped around the clubs every night, though when the gigs were over Ruby half-expected to see torches coming for the bus. She was always looking over her shoulder now. She was often left alone with the bus, or laundering uniforms in some back-alley place. If someone was looking to pick a fight or make a point, she was an easy target.

  Not afraid to use that blade I keep in my back pocket, she thinks. Not above raking it down some man’s face, especially if he’s got a white pointy hat on.

  Tiny had the Klan on Ruby’s brain. Last night she got going about it as soon as she got the mic in front of her face. When I think of the South—I think of something southern. Like magnolia blossoms . . . chittlins . . . hush puppies . . . and those three bad brothers, Klu, Kluck, and Klan.

  “You can’t go talking about the KKK into a microphone,” Rae Lee hissed when Tiny finished her second encore. “You can be funny but you can’t be outrageous. You can’t put us all in danger like that.”

  “You’ve got to entertain or go home,” Tiny says, shrugging Rae Lee off. “You gotta take the audience someplace.”

  “You’ve got to keep it clean.”

  “I’m giving them all of me. Take it or leave it, baby.”

  No one was going to leave it and Tiny knew as much, Ruby thinks. Sure the band is hot right now, but it’s Tiny that gets the people on their feet. When Anna Mae’s pretty ballads are done and Tiny gets up there all fat and loud with her horn, people go crazy.

  Ruby hears footsteps behind her. Finally, she thinks, smiling as she catches Tiny’s eyes in the rearview mirror. This is the high point of every long night. Tiny in her cheetah-print silk pajamas and wrapped hair wandering to the front of the bus, two hundred and thirty pounds but quiet as a panther when she wants to be.

  Tiny crouches over her shoulder and whispers in her ear. “You and me, baby. We’re going to break off from these uptight girls and do our own thing. Vegas for a while. The seediest clubs in Brooklyn. Just bide our time and then we’ll jump.”

  “Yeah,” Ruby says, heart beating fast. “I’d like that.” Ruby knows Tiny is all talk, all hustle, keeping her options open, but God, it feels good to think about having her to herself, living a little lighter, a little faster. Managing themselves, their time, their songs.

  Tiny squeezes Ruby’s shoulder. The tips of her fingers rest on Ruby’s skin, but only for a few seconds; she’s gone again. Rae Lee and the girls know about Tiny and Ruby, but they don’t want to see it. They know but they don’t know.

  It was no small thing, driving that bus. It was hard on her nerves. Even tonight, even when the bus can’t exceed the speed limit, Ruby waits for the blue lights in the window. Maybe someone will wake up soon and keep her company. Or maybe there will be more hours like this, alone, her hands on the wheel.

  Ruby pulls the bus into a quiet-looking Gulf station around six in the morning in a little town called Dunn. The station is small but rambling, as if it used to be a house and has been added on to and forgotten throughout the years. The windows are dirty and there are signs for dry goods, notions, and oil changes. A few crows caw from the red tin roof, and cicadas are going in the dense brush surrounding the place.

  “Dunn ain’t nothing but sticks and dip,” Tiny mutters, surveying the scene as she exits the bus onto the gravel lot. “Guess y’all gon’ have to buy my sandwiches.”

  Ruby
always stops places where you can’t buy much, because it’s better for Tiny’s business. Tiny doesn’t have to ask.

  Sixteen girls plus Rae Lee and Ruby file out of the bus, most of them in sleeveless cotton shifts, hopelessly wrinkled until they find a place to iron. While the girls brush their teeth in the woods and stretch their legs, Ruby sets out seventeen folding chairs, then a card table with bread, jam, and instant coffee. She works fast, swigging black coffee between tasks.

  “Get your damn shoes on,” Rae Lee tells Johnnie, the pianist. She’s last to get off the bus, and her eyes are sleepier than usual. She coughs into her hand. Johnnie, like half of the girls, comes from the Piney Woods School, a place for colored orphans. Right off the Mississippi farm, they’d all learned to play on banged-up instruments. Some of them had been on the road since they were sixteen. They didn’t know any different, only that life on the bus was better than what they’d been trained for, which was pretty much cleaning house and sewing.

  “Nobody’s watching,” Tiny says, the only one brave enough to talk back to Rae Lee. “There’s no audience here.” But Johnnie has already run back onto the bus for her shoes and reemerges, still bleary-eyed. Ruby hands her coffee in a Styrofoam cup, and Johnnie takes a sip, wincing.

  She looks sick, Ruby thinks. Please be sick. God forgive me for these thoughts, but I want to get up on that stage and play.

  Johnnie sneezes and wipes her nose on her elbow.

  “Johnnie Mae, are you able to play tonight?” Rae Lee asks. “Ruby can stand in.”

  “Johnnie’s fine,” Tiny snaps. “Let her be.”

  Ruby turns away, then boards the bus. She stands next to the driver’s seat, one hand on the pockmarked leather, heart pounding. Why did Tiny’s words feel like a betrayal? She’s just standing up for Johnnie, Ruby thinks, opening her eyes wide then blinking to rid them of the tears threatening to fall.

  You’re not a crying woman, she tells herself, just as her own mother used to. You’re a patient woman. Hardworking. So get out there and work.

  That afternoon they arrive in Kinston, Ruby steering the bus to a spot behind the armory. The girls are already in their dresses and jackets, hair curled, their faces made up for the Tobacco Festival. The brass instruments are shined and the sheet music is organized. Anna Mae sits away from the fray in her white column gown, trying to stay clean. Her eyes are closed, but Ruby can see her lips moving, practicing her set. Further back Tiny is running through finger exercises, her trumpet silent, her fingers arched and limber.

  “We’re going to start with ‘Jump Children,’ ” Rae Lee is saying at the front of the bus, clipboard in hand. “And if anyone gets to asking you about what race you are, you just smile and pretend you can’t hear a word, understand?”

  As the girls file out of the bus, Ruby bringing up the rear, she can smell barbecue, hear the twangy vocals coming from the festival’s center stage. A line of food carts and tobacco vendors flanks the railroad tracks. Men in coveralls stand over amber-colored bales of tobacco, auctioneers fast-talking their way into sales.

  God, I’m tired, she thinks. Just a two-hour nap and another long night ahead.

  A crowd is gathering on Main Street for the parade, bunched in front of the old Paramount Theater, children on shoulders. A blue balloon goes free from a child’s loose fingers, lifting up and further up still, into the warm air.

  There’s a bandstand waiting for the Sweethearts, a series of white music stands and boxes, and they know how to make it work; they can make anything work. They file in and tune up. To Ruby this is a painful wheeze of a sound, a breathing in before you can breathe out. The cymbals shake. Vi and Roz run the scales on the sax. Anna Mae gives the cue and turns to the crowd with her soprano:

  When you’re feelin’ low and you don’t know what to do . . .

  Soon a truck creeps slowly toward the stage with a white float hitched to the back. Ruby cranes her neck to see a young white girl in a sparkling white bathing suit. She has a crown on her head, long brown hair cascading down her shoulders, and she’s waving, one arm around a large white plastic deer. The ribbon around her neck reads: “Miss Tobacco Queen, 1944.” She’s surrounded by girls in high heels perched on top of tobacco bales, waving brown, crinkled leaves like handkerchiefs.

  We’re too good for this, Ruby thinks. Too good.

  “Little white girl with a plastic deer,” Tiny says, leaning into the mic after the song is finished. “How about that. A round of applause for that pretty girl and her deer.”

  Ruby takes a sharp breath. Did anyone notice Tiny’s disdain?

  “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man.” “Sweet Georgia Brown.” “Lady Be Good.” Soon the set is finished, the sun has faded, and the girls are whisked away for drinks at a fancy house down the road. There’s a white man in a nice suit talking to Rae Lee. “Bring your instruments!” he says, grinning.

  “Can’t just visit,” Tiny mutters. “Gotta work for you, huh?”

  Ruby looks at Johnnie’s face, then Pauline’s. The girls are tired, but Rae Lee’s answer is always the same. Yes.

  “Someone’s got to stay here and clean up,” Rae Lee says.

  “Ruby has it under control,” Tiny says.

  And so, as the girls follow the man in the nice suit with all the instruments they can carry, Ruby does as she always does. She takes down the drum kit, wipes it clean, loads it into the bus. She folds the stands and files away the music. One last night on the road, she thinks, and then a motel. Finally, a motel.

  She isn’t old, but her bones ache and her head hurts, mostly from sleep deprivation. As she moves from the bus to the bandstand, she catches sight of a man in her peripheral vision, a man in a not-so-nice suit and a brown cap. He comes closer, and closer, until finally she wipes her hands on her pants and asks him, “Can I do something for you?”

  “There’s a white girl in that band,” he says. “Ain’t there.”

  Ruby shrugs. “Who knows?” she says, moving back toward the bandstand. But he grabs her arm. “You know,” he says.

  Ruby pulls away, but she doesn’t dare speak. Speaking is inviting trouble. They stand there like that at an impasse, the festival quieting down behind them, bales of tobacco being packed away, the pungent golden scent still lingering in the air.

  “I don’t know where you’re from,” he says. “But we do things differently down here. We don’t mix. It ain’t allowed.”

  “I understand,” Ruby says, backing away.

  “We’ll make you understand,” he says. Ruby waits for more, but there isn’t any more, not tonight. She drives the bus back to the armory, folds her arms across her chest, and waits for sleep that doesn’t come.

  She’s driving again, back on 95, almost always 95. Nodding off, jolting upright, pinching her face, biting her fingers to stay awake. Just another half hour and she can park in Rocky Mount. Just another half hour and she can stop having a conversation with herself.

  What am I good for? she wonders.

  A lot of things. I can play music by ear. But you can’t read it.

  I can learn it quickly. But you can’t perfect it. If you could, you’d be on that stage, not driving this bus.

  Who cares about me? Tiny does, sometimes.

  Rae Lee settles into the seat behind her, yawning. “Too much champagne,” she says, touching her temples.

  Ruby grits her teeth.

  “Any trouble?” Rae Lee asks.

  “A little,” Ruby says.

  “Not the law?”

  “Just another man upset that we’ve got white girls onstage. Upset about mixing.”

  Rae Lee nods. “We’ll get through tonight, rest, and then next month we’ll be back at the clubs. It’s safer at the clubs. They don’t mind so much.”

  “The good ones don’t,” Ruby says. She opens and closes her jaw, trying to wake up. Sweat drips down her back. She presses on.

  The band is due onstage at the Cotton Ball in one hour, and Roz, the Jewish girl from up north, is
a mess. She’s looking at herself in the bathroom mirror, frowning, lip quivering.

  “Here,” she says, handing Tiny a compact with dark foundation in it. “I want you to put this on my face.”

  “Not me,” Tiny says, walking away, holding up a hand. “I don’t want nothing to do with that business.”

  “Someone,” Roz says, tears in her eyes. “Help.”

  Pauline steps up and wipes a sponge through the dark makeup. “Here you go,” she says. “Just don’t get worked up now and smudge things.”

  Tiny comes closer to have a look. “I know you mean well,” she says. “But you’re awfully hard to look at.”

  “All the better,” Roz says, sniffling. “I don’t want anyone to notice me. I don’t want to get anyone in trouble. Not tonight.”

  Rae Lee, for once, doesn’t have anything to say. She watches the girls over her cat-eye glasses from the corner of the dressing room, then looks back down at the set list on the clipboard.

  “You and me next year,” Tiny whispers to Ruby. “Bad as we are, on the road, no crying.”

  Ruby nods her head, rocking a little on her stool as she laughs. She likes her laugh, low and throaty. It’s a jazz singer’s laugh, even if she’s not much of a singer.

  “Could you put some tea on?” Rae Lee asks Ruby. “Girls, have a little tea before the set. We want to do our best, see if we can get this gig next year. It’s worth two nights at the club, if you know what I mean.”

  After preparing tea, Ruby heads out in front of the band to lay down the sheet music. The ballroom is beautiful. There are white flower arrangements everywhere, white lights, white linens, white tufts of cotton, white marble. White, white, and more white.