by Libba Bray
“Viola was a fine woman,” Sister Walker had said.
Octavia had sized her up and found her wanting. “Funny, she never mentioned you to me. And we were close as can be.”
“Well, I expect even sisters keep some secrets,” Sister Walker had answered. That hadn’t sat well with Octavia, Memphis could tell.
But when Miss Walker offered to tutor Isaiah in arithmetic, a subject that gave him trouble, and to do it for free, Octavia relented. One day, while Sister Walker used the cards to teach him multiplication, Isaiah started calling out the cards ahead of time, and Sister asked if there were other things he could do. She said it was a skill that might help Isaiah in the world, and she started pushing him to work at it like it was a subject in school. Memphis didn’t see how Isaiah’s skill was something that could move him up in the world, like wailing on a trumpet the way Gabe did or solving mathematical equations like Mrs. Ward up at school could do. And if Octavia ever found out what really went on at Sister Walker’s house, she’d pitch a fit the likes of which they’d never seen. But it mattered to Isaiah. It made him feel special and happy like before, when their mama was alive and playing hide-and-seek with them while hanging the laundry from the clothesline in the garden they’d shared with the Touissants in the house on 145th Street. Memphis could still hear his mother’s laugh as she’d say, “All right, now. Let’s see if you two are as good at putting away these sheets as you are at hiding yourselves in them.”
Those had been good times, their father coming home from his job with the Gerard Lockhart Orchestra with a jovial, “Well, well, well, what have the Campbell brothers been up to today?” Memphis missed the smell of his father’s pipe in the front parlor. Sometimes he’d walk in front of the tobacco shop on Lenox Avenue just to light the memory of it in his mind.
“Watch out for Isaiah,” his mother had said to him. She was skin and bones then, lying in the front room, the sickness robbing her of the playfulness he’d always loved about her. Her eyes had a hollow look. “Promise me.” He’d promised. Three days later, they’d buried her out in Woodlawn Cemetery. The Gerard Lockhart Orchestra relocated to Chicago, and Memphis’s father with it, until he could save enough to send for Memphis and Isaiah. But there never seemed to be enough, and there they stayed, in the back room at Octavia’s. Isaiah was all that was left of those happier times when their family was all together, when you only had to walk through the door to hear somebody laughing or calling out, “Who’s that knocking at my door?” and Memphis held tightly to his brother. If anything happened to Isaiah, he wasn’t sure he could survive it.
But all that was the past, and he wasn’t going to dwell there. The night before with Theta had given him new hope. She was somewhere out there in that city, and Memphis meant to keep looking until he found her again.
At the pharmacy, he and Isaiah took two seats at the counter and Mr. Reggie put their order on, pressing two hamburgers against the grill with a spatula, making a comforting hiss of grease and heat. He scooped them onto plates and served them up, along with a soda for Memphis and a chocolate shake for Isaiah. Isaiah got to work spooning the thick ice cream into his mouth, dribbling half down his chin.
“Looks like I’m just in time.” Gabe dropped onto the stool next to Memphis. He grabbed Memphis’s hamburger and took a generous bite from it. “Mr. Campbell. Just the man I wanted to see. Alma’s having a rent party. We going. Oh, and get us some good hooch.”
Gabe handed him a thick wad of bills.
“Not in front of Isaiah,” Memphis whispered.
“He doesn’t know what we’re talking about. He’s enjoying that shake,” Gabe said.
“Don’t know what?” Isaiah said.
Memphis flashed Gabe a You see? look.
Gabe pursed his lips and folded his arms across his chest. “Little man, you got some kind of magic ears over there?”
Isaiah grinned. “No, but I do have powers.”
“Isaiah,” Memphis warned.
“Oh, do you now? I see how it is,” Gabe teased.
“I bet I know how much money you got in your pocket,” Isaiah said, turning all the way around on his bar stool.
“Isaiah, Gabe doesn’t have time for your games now,” Memphis said sharply. “Eat your food.”
Isaiah’s eyes narrowed. Memphis knew that look well enough to know that trouble generally followed it.
“You got a five, a one, and two quarters. And a address for a lady named Cymbelline.”
Gabe emptied his pocket. His eyebrows shot up. “How’d you know that?”
“Told you! I got the gift. I can prophecy, too.”
“He can’t do any such thing. Isaiah, quit telling stories,” Memphis said, flashing his brother another warning look.
“I can say whatever I want,” Isaiah snapped back.
“He can say whatever he wants,” Gabe said, grinning. “Tell me something else, little man.”
“I can see people’s futures sometimes.”
“Isaiah. Quit it now. We’ve got to get home, anyway—”
“Hold on, now, brother. Boy’s about to tell me my future. Maybe he knows something about the recording. So tell me, Isaiah, am I going to be Okeh Records’ newest star?”
“I gotta be touching something of yours.”
“Mr. Reggie! Excuse me, Mr. Reggie!” Memphis said quickly. “What do we owe you?”
“Hold on a minute, Memphis,” Mr. Reggie called. He carried two plates of food in his hands.
“Tell me,” Gabe whispered, extending his hand. Isaiah took it in his own and concentrated. After a long moment, he dropped Gabe’s hand very fast and backed away, his eyes big.
“What did you see? Don’t tell me—is she ugly?” Gabe joked.
“I didn’t see nothing,” Isaiah answered, and Memphis didn’t even correct him. He looked up at Memphis with very big eyes, and Memphis knew that whatever Isaiah had seen, it had spooked him.
“Get your coat now, Ice Man.”
But Gabe wouldn’t let it alone. “Come on, now. What do you see for your old pal Gabriel?”
“Under the bridge… don’t walk under the bridge,” Isaiah said softly. “He’s there.”
“What bridge? Him who? What’s gonna happen to me if I do?”
“You’ll die.”
“Isaiah!” Memphis growled. “He doesn’t mean that, brother. He’s just playing around. Say you’re sorry, Isaiah.”
Eyes big, Isaiah looked from Gabe to Memphis and back again. “Sorry, Gabe,” he said in a small voice.
“You just playing, Isaiah?” Gabe asked.
“That’s right,” Isaiah whispered. He kept his head down.
Gabe’s face relaxed into a grin that was part relief, part annoyance. “Little brothers,” he said, shaking his head. He clapped Memphis on the back. “Don’t forget about that other business, Memphis.”
“I won’t,” he said.
Blind Bill Johnson sat in the corner nursing the cup of soup Reggie had been kind enough to give him. The soup was thin but warm, and he had eaten it slowly while the scene at the counter unfolded. Now, his soup finished, he lifted his guitar onto his back with a grunt and tapped his cane out into the streets of Harlem. The air was scented with coming rain. He didn’t like rain. It reminded him of Louisiana, back when he was a sharecropper’s son with two good eyes, picking cotton all day, and the rain would about drown a man just trying to make his quota. It reminded him of the day the owner, Mr. Smith, hit him with a strap for playing guitar instead of picking cotton, and how later, the man’s half of the crops failed—browned to wisps—and they found Mr. Smith’s bloated body in the river, swelled up like a bag of rice gone bad with rot, and the whispers went around that Bill Johnson wasn’t a man to be trusted, that there was something of the Mabouya about him. That he’d stood at the crossroads at midnight and cursed at Papa Legba. That he’d spit upon the cross. That he’d sold his soul to the Devil.
It was raining the day the men in the dark suits came to the
camp. It was the crops that had caught their attention. Word had spread that Bill Johnson might have done it. That he could put an old dog down when it needed mercy or that, when he was angry, he could hold a butterfly in his hand and it would fall dead. The men in dark suits sat, cool and patient as you please, all bland smiles and quiet courtesy, in Mrs. Tate’s parlor, drinking lemonade from sweaty glasses.
Bill was brought to them. He was a strapping man of twenty then, six feet tall, his skin a smooth dark brown and free of the brands his ancestors wore with shame. Bill sat on an old cane chair with his hands on his knees while the men asked questions: Did Bill want to help keep his country safe? Would he like to ride with them and talk?
Bill had wanted out of the fields and out of Louisiana, with its white-hooded men who set the night ablaze with their crosses. He’d gone with the dark-suited men, had ridden in the back of their car with the curtains over the side windows. He’d done the things they’d asked. He’d told them about the toll it was taking on his body, showed them how his spine bowed and his hair grayed. He was only twenty, but he looked fifty. The men had smiled those same bland smiles and said, “Just one more, Bill.”
And when his sight shriveled up to tiny points of blurry light that finally faded to black, they sent him away with nothing but his guitar, a raised scar on his skin, and a handshake of warning to keep quiet. His sight was gone, his body used up and broken. And his gift—if that’s what it could be called—seemed to have deserted him, too. How many times had he railed to the sky and wished he could have the gift back? And then, suddenly, about three months ago, he’d felt the first stirrings of hope. All he needed was the right spark to get it running again.
Now, as the Campbell brothers barreled out of Reggie’s Drugstore, setting the little bell over the door to tolling, Bill could hear them arguing. The younger Campbell brother had the gift—that was perfectly clear—and the older brother wanted to keep it a secret. That was smart. It wasn’t good to let on to anyone about secrets like that. The wrong person might find out. Someone you didn’t even know was dangerous.
The first raindrops splatted against Bill’s dark glasses and he frowned. Damned rain. Without thinking, he rubbed the scar on his left hand and tapped his cane downhill.
A HEAVENLY STAR
Theta was pouting. To anyone else, she probably just looked bored. But Henry knew everything about Theta, and she was most definitely pouting. She was sitting on the edge of the stage in her one-piece shorts outfit and black stockings that showcased her lithe body. She’d tied a green paisley scarf across her forehead in a Bohemian fashion. Her lips were painted red, a bright contrast to her mud-brown eyes and fashionable tan.
Henry sat at the rehearsal piano and watched as she sighed and pouted and swung one leg out and back, out and back.
“Mr. Ziegfeld will be here soon, people,” the stage manager yelled. “He wants to work on the Heavenly Star number in the second act. He thinks it’s getting stale.”
“It is stale. Those jokes were old before my mother was born. And the song is lousy,” Theta snapped, lighting up a cigarette.
“As always, we thank you for your invaluable opinion, Theta,” he shot back. “Perhaps if you spent more time rehearsing your steps and less time complaining, we’d have a show. Take ten, everyone.”
“I could do those steps with both legs broken,” Theta grumbled as she perched next to Henry on the piano bench.
“Somebody’s cranky,” Henry said teasingly, low enough that only Theta could hear.
She rested her seal-black head on his shoulder. “Thanks for the sympathy.”
“You still pining for your mysterious knight in shining armor?”
“If you’d met him, you’d understand.”
“Handsome?” Henry played a sexy trill.
“And how.”
“Gallant?” He switched to a galloping, heroic rhythm.
“Very.”
Henry’s music became soft and romantic. “Charming yet sensitive.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Rich?”
Theta shook her head. “A poet.”
“A poet?” He brought his hands down in a discordant plunk. “Haven’t you heard, darlin’? You’re supposed to marry for money, not love.”
“He has the same dream I do, Hen. He’s seen that crazy eye with the lightning bolt, and the crossroads. What are the odds on that?”
“I’ll admit that’s pretty spooky.” Henry lowered his voice. “Do you think he’s… special, like you and me?”
“I don’t know. There was just something about him, like I’d known him my whole life. I can’t explain it.”
Henry took up a lilting jazz number of his own. “Now you’re starting to make me jealous.”
Theta kissed his cheek. “Nobody’ll ever replace you, Hen. You know that.”
“We could go up to Harlem, try to find him.”
“The Hotsy Totsy is padlocked.”
“Plenty of other clubs to scour. And then you can see which ones are hiring dancers, because you know what Flo would say about your dating a Negro poet numbers runner.”
“Flo doesn’t have to know.”
“Flo knows everything.”
Wally came rushing down the aisles, clapping for attention. “Everybody—places! Mr. Ziegfeld has arrived!”
The rehearsal was long and dispiriting. Mr. Ziegfeld hated everything. He stopped them during every number, shouting, “No, no, no! That might fly at the Scandals, but this is a Ziegfeld show! We stand for something here.”
They’d been running the Heavenly Star number for nearly an hour, and nothing was going right.
“That bit doesn’t land,” Mr. Ziegfeld yelled from the back of the theater. He was an elegant man with combed-back white hair and a neatly trimmed mustache. His suits—and he always wore a suit—were rumored to be made on Savile Row in London. “We need a laugh. Something.”
“Well, we could bring Mr. Rogers back,” Wally said.
“I’m not worried about Will Rogers. Will Rogers could gargle and it would be funny! I’m worried about this number!”
Everyone was on edge. When Mr. Ziegfeld wasn’t happy, no one was happy. He might fire them all and hire a new chorus, turning the whole thing into a publicity stunt.
“Again!” the great Ziegfeld barked.
Henry launched into the music. The star of the piece, an arrogant crooner named Don, descended the long, wide staircase, singing with melodramatic vibrato: “Stars up in heaven, fall from the sky. So tell me, my darling, why can’t I fall into your arms like a heavenly star, and live there forever just as you are…”
At the piano, Henry rolled his eyes as Theta looked his way. Constipaaaation, he mouthed, and Theta tried not to laugh. Arms out, the girls began their elegant descent. Out in the audience, Flo looked as if he’d been sucking on a dill pickle. They’d end up doing it again, Theta could tell. But no amount of rehearsal could ever make the number work. It was lousy—sentimental and cheap. As her feet felt for each step, she remembered a piece of advice she’d gotten in vaudeville: If you want a laugh, do the unexpected.
As the girls strutted gracefully forward down the long staircase, Theta intentionally went the wrong way, gliding to the left like a deranged Isadora Duncan, screwing up the other girls, who had to scramble to get around her.
“Hey, watch it!” Daisy griped.
“Sorry, Mother,” Theta said, eliciting snorts from some of the other girls.
“Theta! What are you doing? Get back in line!” Wally shouted.
Theta kept going. She bumped into a glittery hanging star. “Oh!” she said, petting it as if she were a drunken flapper. “Sorry, Mr. Rogers.”
The company glanced nervously at Theta and then out again to Mr. Ziegfeld sitting in the audience. Don, the stick in the mud, picked up the song again, glaring at Theta with a tight smile. Theta stumbled down the stairs, humming loudly. “Don’t stop, Don, honey. You’re doing swell! Even Mr. Rogers liked it,” she said,
gesturing to the glittery star. “Oh, Henry!”
Theta raced to Henry’s side near the wings and threw her arms around his neck, giving him a passionate kiss. “Oh, it’s okay. He’s my brother.”
“Just don’t tell our mothers,” Henry quipped, and this time everyone laughed, except for Don, Daisy, and Wally, whose cheeks reddened.
“Miss Knight! I think we’ve had quite enough of your bad behavior—”
“Gee, Wally, that’s not what you said last night,” Theta cracked. She was skirting dangerously close to the edge. She might have even gone over. For all she knew, she’d be out on the street in a minute. Somewhere in the dark, Flo was watching, waiting to pass judgment.
“Mr. Ziegfeld, I can’t work under these conditions,” Don huffed.
A hush fell over the entire company as the great Florenz Ziegfeld marched down the center aisle. “Fine, Don. You don’t have to. I can always get someone else.” Mr. Ziegfeld looked at Theta, his eyes narrowed. Slowly, he broke into a grin, applauding her performance. “Now, that was entertaining!”
Theta let out the breath she’d been holding.
Ziegfeld pointed at the stage manager, talking as fast as New York traffic. “Wally, add that bit in. Build an act around it. And get me an item planted in the gossip rags: ‘Ziegfeld discovers new star in…’ ” He smiled at Theta.
“Theta. Theta Knight.”
“Miss Theta Knight!”
“And her brother, Henry DuBois,” Theta added.
The chorus girls giggled anew at this, except for Daisy, who had sided with Don. She stared daggers at Theta.
“And her brother,” Flo echoed. “I like this kid. Where you from, honey?”
“Connecticut,” Theta lied.
“Connecticut? Who’s from Connecticut?” The great Ziegfeld made a face like he’d tasted sour milk. He paced near the orchestra pit, thinking. “You’re a long-lost member of the Russian nobility whose parents were killed by communists—that’ll win hearts. You were smuggled out of the country by loyal servants in a daring midnight escape and sent on a ship to America, land of dreams. Wally, let’s get some shots of her on a ship. Put a bow on her head. A big bow. Blue. No, red! No, blue. Sweetheart, give me a forlorn look.”