As Eve made her way to the desk, she was greeted by the same intense stare she had gotten from Deuce.
“I’d like a room, please.” Eve smiled despite the strange look she was receiving.
“Name?” the woman asked.
“Eve Mann,” she said. “With two n’s.”
The woman exhaled slowly and nodded as if resigned to some fate. “Eve Mann, then,” she stated more than questioned. “Hmph.”
Eve cocked her head in confusion. “Yeah. Um, yes ma’am. Do you know me?”
The woman plowed through her greeting, “I’m Ms. Johnita, sole proprietor of Johnita’s Historic Inn. We’ve got you settled on the second floor in room three. Follow me.”
Eve could barely keep up as Johnita whisked from behind the desk and strode through the parlor to the stairs. She paused at a row of framed photographs on the wall. “This is B.B. King!” she exclaimed and added, “And Lucille, his guitar!” pointing at a picture of the bluesman with his guitar slung at his side and one arm draped casually across the shoulders of a younger Johnita.
“Yes, she didn’t have a name back then,” Johnita allowed a chuckle to penetrate her stoic demeanor. “Neither of ’em did back in . . .” she hesitated to place the date and sighed, then said, “Shit, 1940?” It was more question than statement.
Then, casually waving her hand across the photo array, she rattled off names, “They all came through here, mostly to stay. We were listed in that Green Book directory for years. But once they stayed, they’d always end up playing a bit. Back then, this place was more juke than inn.”
A photograph of a fair-skinned woman standing, mouth agape, in front of a microphone caught Eve’s attention. A band consisting of a guitarist, drummer, and saxophone player flanked behind the woman but seemed diminutive in comparison.
“Is that . . .” Eve began before Johnita interrupted.
“No.”
Eve’s face slowly crinkled in confused disbelief. “But you didn’t know who I was going to say.”
“Everyone—well . . .”—Johnita smirked—“everyone who wasn’t alive or was just nursing their mama’s milk think that’s Billie Holiday. But she ain’t . . . She wasn’t.”
Eve nodded. “She’s beautiful. She looks like she sang well.”
Johnita stared at the photo, eyes unblinking. Her voice softened and sounded to Eve as that of an entirely different woman. “Claude definitely had a voice.”
“Claude?”
“Claudette,” Johnita supplied. “My best good friend.”
Johnita abruptly turned on her heels and continued up the staircase, leaving Eve to quickly gather her suitcase and stumble to catch up. In her quick departure, her shoulder bumped a photograph. The black-and-white image of Hezekiah Mann seated between Johnita and a fair-skinned woman at a small table shifted slightly in Eve’s wake. She hadn’t noticed, but on Johnita’s return to the front parlor, she automatically corrected the tilted photo with absentminded resolve. The frames always seemed to get jostled about, even when there were no guests. Frequent vacancies had been the norm since the closing of the train depot. And Ideal, along with Johnita’s Place—as it was known in its juke joint heyday—withered like leaves on a dead vine.
Once checked into her small room, Eve was as exhausted as she was elated. As much as she wanted to follow the map directly to Deuce’s home, she needed to wash away the Greyhound journey and sleep horizontally in a bed. Three complimentary “Welcome to Georgia, y’all” postcards caught her attention on the small desk. As she glanced deeper into the images, Eve realized that the building on the three identical postcards was a younger-looking Johnita’s Inn. If she had to put her finger on a more acute description, she’d say that it looked more vibrant.
Eve scribbled identical “Made it to Macon County” messages on two of the postcards and carefully addressed them. One to Professor LeRoi and the other to her best friend, Nelle. She began to write the third to her aunt but got no further than the “Dear Mama Ann” salutation before her pen faltered, unsure of what more to add to the small blank space.
It was as if the white space perfectly illustrated the unknowingness she’d felt her entire life, and sending a blank card to the person responsible for it seemed appropriate to her. Eve pressed a hand to her temple, took a deep breath, and wrote the same message she had on the previous two and added “I love you” before pushing them all to the corner of the small desk.
Too tired to shower, she lay on the bed, closed her eyes, and fell into sleepful memories of her journey from Chicago.
PART I
One
mercy’s ounce
We’re the daughters of those old dusty things Nana carries
in her tin can. . . . We carry too many scars from the past.
Our past owns us.
—Eula Peazant, Daughters of the Dust, by Julie Dash
Before Every Mann and her aunt moved to the house in Avalon Park, they lived in Bronzeville, a thriving area for Blacks in mid-1950s Chicago. It was before the overcrowding due to large influxes of southern Blacks migrating for jobs. Before the lack of housing options precipitated a real estate decline that wouldn’t begin to reverse itself until the new millennium’s gentrification efforts. Before drastic property tax increases made it impossible for long-term residents to afford their already paid-for homes. Before the evictions of the very senior citizens who in 1955 had been the young and vibrant lifeblood of Bronzeville.
Every’s earliest recollection from that time was of a crush she had on a boy when she was nearing five years old. Ann had often teased her whenever she came home full of stories about what the precocious little boy had done in school. Her aunt thought the crush funny until she saw him one afternoon as she was picking up Every from school. The boy was hanging upside down from the monkey bars, doing his best monkey imitation for his adoring five-year-old fans. His dark skin glistened with sweat, and his wooly hair stood more pronounced as he dangled. The display—already a stereotype—had traveled through centuries of propaganda by the time it greeted Every and her aunt on the playground. Bucked eyes, grotesquely large red lips, and a bulbous nose all planted on a simian-shaped caricature had graced advertisements for everything from nineteenth-century minstrel shows to twentieth-century Lux Soap, which featured the backs of two of such characters, hair drawn explosively outward with the guarantee that Lux Soap “won’t shrink wool.” By the 1950s the chicken and watermelon themes had been firmly entrenched for many decades, and a chain of restaurants used the same stock character with a red-and-black striped bellboy hat perched atop its head and the words “Coon Chicken Inn” inlaid on the teeth of its massive mouth. This was the visage that greeted Ann as she stared with open contempt at the boy. Her horror-stricken eyes darted from him to a couple of white teachers on the playlot. She snatched Every’s hand and charged down the street as quickly as she could, her niece struggling to match her stride. Ann muttered about “colored folk acting like monkeys,” her mind far from events beyond the bubble of Bronzeville, like the Vietnam War, which was just getting underway. She sought to distance Every from boys like this one, who would be shipped off to Vietnam thirteen years later.
Every stopped mentioning the boy to her aunt after the monkey-bars incident. She especially did not disclose their encounter two years later when he said that she could watch him urinate behind the school building. Every stared amazed as he lowered his pants and gently removed his “thing” with pride. Afterward, she watched as his wide eyes narrowed with disappointment when she squatted over a bush to show him that she could also pee outdoors. Her spray, seeming to come from nowhere in particular, lacked the showmanship of the “thing.” Strangely prophetic, this two-year juvenile romance from kindergarten to second grade ended with the disappointment that often results after nudity is introduced into a relationship. Mystery gave way to indifference, and the boy’s attention drifted toward a potato bug before she ha
d even finished.
Every’s childhood memories were packaged in the small Bronzeville apartment that she and her aunt had called home. She had used these times to ask her aunt for information about her deceased parents. When Ann came home exhausted from emptying bedpans days at Michael Reese Hospital and cleaning office buildings nights downtown, she would boil water for a hot toddy, carefully measuring a half shot of the Old Fitzgerald whiskey she kept in the farthest corner of the highest shelf, and sometimes she’d beckon Every to her. Let’s see ’bout that crow’s nest on your head. During those times, Every sat on the floor with her back between her aunt’s legs as Ann carefully took down the plaits in her hair and the warm whiskey and honey coaxed small details of her childhood from her. Every sat, afraid to draw a breath for fear that it would disrupt the flow of information into her hungry ears.
Ann would share stories about growing up in the church and chores, even a tale or two about a boy she liked back home. James was such a fine boy. Sometimes she’d give Every advice that she claimed had come from her own mother, Gertrude. Daddy used to call her Trudy, Ann had said. I can’t believe I remember that. Nostalgia etched her face like lines of lightning across a dark sky, and then it was gone, as thoughts of her father opened the gate to those she would rather shut out. During those times, she’d start to speak and then falter. Uncle Cornelius taught me . . . Returned to an unknown place, it was repackaged and put away like unwanted Christmas gifts rediscovered, remembered, and rejected. Though often truncated, Ann’s memories extended to everyone but Every’s mother. The only exception was the time she offered her niece solace when she found her gorging on ice cream late at night after viewing a weight-loss advertisement in one of the ladies’ magazines Ann had brought home from work.
“If not eating it makes you lose weight, then maybe I should have it every night,” Every muttered between spoonfuls.
Ann pulled a spoon from the drawer and joined her niece. “You know, your mama had attention from the finest of boys, and she wasn’t but an ounce bigger than you.”
“No,” Every sighed. “I didn’t know.”
Every’s teenage years brought more probing questions. As she grew, the hair-straightening sessions moved to the kitchen. She sat as her aunt parted a small section of hair and oiled it. Every closed her eyes and inhaled the acrid smoke from the steel-toothed comb being heated on the stove’s eye. Then came the muffled thump of her aunt briefly placing the comb on a towel, an attempt to regulate its heat. Every’s muscles clenched as the fire-heated comb moved millimeters away from her scalp and sizzled through her tight curls until they were crisp and straight. The latest sounds of Chess Records on WVON—“Voice of the Negro”—calmed Eve just enough to endure the next pull of the hot comb through her hair.
The weekly hair sessions placed Every’s thoughts on unanswered questions. After each press, she opened her eyes and stared across the kitchen to a wall of framed black-and-white photographs. Every’s glance fell on one photograph in particular. Her gaze often lingered on the black-and-white of the smiling woman in the picture who resembled her so much. Rooted to her chair, her movements limited and eyes only able to either stare ahead at the photographs or close and commit to a mental facsimile of the image, Every was in weekly communion with her unfamiliar heritage. The rare face or eye contact between Every and Ann made it easier for Every to ask those questions as if the thoughts belonged to her eyes, searching the photographs for hidden messages. It was a unique torture—the close physical proximity to the pictures and her aunt hovering above her head with a searing comb—as the conversation allowed her to shift attention from her hair yet threatened to ignite resistance from Ann if she pressed too hard. Don’t press too hard, her frequent admonishments to Ann’s slow draw of the hot comb through her hair also served to remind Eve to exercise care with her questioning.
But her aunt’s tidbits of information dried up. “Leave the past where it is, Every.”
“Mama Ann, please!” she begged. “I’m old enough to know something more.”
“Age don’t got nothin’ to do with it, Every.” Ann tightened her lips. “Some thangs young and old just need to let lie.”
“What things?” Every tried to turn her head but felt the heat of the comb dangerously close.
“Hold still, Every,” Ann hissed. “You know how you get when this grease burns you.”
“Blame it on the grease.”
“What?”
“Nothin’,” Every sighed. “What things need to let lie?”
“Hold still!”
“I am holding still.” Silence swirled upward with the smoke from Eve’s half-pressed hair. “Mama Ann?”
“I cain’t tell you what I don’t know, Every.”
Every paused before delivering her final attempt. “But you know more than what you say.”
“Well,” Ann exhaled slowly, “let that be my cross to bear, then.” Taking note of her niece’s perceptiveness, Ann felt the generations of secrets beginning to swell within her. It happened from time to time. Names, dates, and faces seemed to surge from the pit of her stomach and travel on nerve endings until they nested at her temples between her skull and skin. She would shut her eyes, press her fingertips to her hairline, and will them into submission. Ann opened her eyes, thumped the pressing comb on the folded towel until the smoke subsided and her headache cleared, leaving only the acrid odor of hot hair grease mingled with the stench of words left unsaid.
Dejectedly, Every slid down into the chair. She’d been here before over the years, asking about her mother, father, grandparents, uncles, aunts, if any even still lived or existed—everybody, somebody, anybody. Literacy introduced new worlds in books but also brought an understanding of the unusualness of her name. Every. Not “Avery,” as it seemed to be pronounced on the southern tongues of her aunt and her peers—products of the Great Migration. For Every, there were always more questions than answers.
Ann had to exorcise her own demons of the past, leaving Every with nothing but a sense of weightlessness.
“Sit up, baby,” her aunt spoke gently. “You should be happy you can make your own past. What you do from here on is up to you, Every.”
This was no consolation. Every sighed and stared at the woman in the photograph and wondered how she managed to look slender and sophisticated. In it, her mother was laughing, and her pose—unlike the stoic, unsmiling ones of the other black-and-whites—was full of motion. Her hands rested protectively on her stomach, cradling its secret, and her head was slightly thrown back. She was seated in a wooden chair with one foot resting on the stretcher. Only her eyes, staring directly into the camera, revealed that the shot was not candid but posed. It was as though the antiquated camera, in a feat to match that of its successors, had caught Mercy in a fit of boisterous laughter. It was unblurred. Seven years later, it seemed that her mother’s eyes and laugh belied her knowledge of many things. If Every stared hard enough, she could imagine Mercy’s skirt moving slightly in the draft. Still gazing, her hands self-consciously tugged her knee socks over her narrow calves.
Every longed for the warmth of reminiscent feelings. Although she could think back on countless activities with her aunt, her main memories involved the probing questions of her classmates during the earlier years of childhood. “Ain’t you got a daddy?” Not a daddy. Not an uncle. Ironically, the Mann family had a shortage of men. Thinking of her aunt’s words emphasizing that she was in control of her own life, Every began to make a very conscious step to assert that control.
It is said that in the early 1960s, Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad used a white ghost buyer to purchase twenty-six homes in the southeast neighborhood of Avalon Park. The brick ranch-style houses and impressive Georgians were sprinkled in a quaint area extending eastward from Stony Island Avenue to the lakefront and ended south at the boundary of the Pill Hill neighborhood, so named for the number of white doctors resid
ing there.
The purchase placed a Muhammad on nearly every block. As the Nation of Islam grew, so did the financial prosperity of the Muhammads and, by extension, middle-class Blacks, who further integrated the neighborhood in the wake of their Black Muslim neighbors. The flight of white residents from Avalon Park, Pill Hill, and other Chicago neighborhoods, was a form of mobile segregation. Black folks moved in, and white folks moved out. Nineteen sixty-five brought the Chicago Freedom Movement, the collaborative effort of Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Council to end slums in the city. While King moved his family into a North Lawndale slum in protest, Every and Ann were taking advantage of the South Side’s Muhammad legacy.
In 1965 Ann purchased one of the recently constructed brick ranch homes. They’d always lived frugally, and although Ann no longer lived in the South, she adhered to Black southern financial planning learned from her upbringing: don’t trust banks, and own your home. Every bragged about how “fly” it was to her best friend, Nelle. Ann testified in church to how “blessed” she was to be just “a stone’s throw down yonder from Pill Hill.” She hadn’t forgotten the sight of that boy hanging like a monkey in the Bronzeville playlot and felt that her niece needed to grow up with a yard of her own. Some place away from the dangers of the city and, in Ann’s mind, little nappy-headed boys who would grow up to be hoodlums.
Every flourished in the house, dancing with carefree abandon in front of the new black-and-white television to Red Hot and Blues, the early show that featured in-studio Black dancers and music, and a precursor to Soul Train, where Black dancers of every shape contorted in tune to the latest rhythm and blues. With the change of home and school and a figure that had inherited Mercy’s ounce, fourteen-year-old Every began to develop.
One evening while her aunt worked the hospital night shift, Every and her best friend, Nelle, snuck out to a basement party where she had her first kiss from a shy brown-skinned boy named Jericho. His lips were soft, and she would have continued to press against them had she not been caught by the surprise of his tongue wiggling into her mouth. It was weird. It was wet. But later that night, it had been all she could think about as she hugged her pillow and willed sleep to stifle the shivers that pulsated downward from her abdomen. This new confidence—nurtured by her friendship with Nelle and a burgeoning young, gifted, and Black climate—was creating a desire for change.
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