Colored Girl’s seventeenth birthday went horribly wrong. She thought she had gotten beyond her mother’s reach by planning a whitewater rafting trip in the high waters of the upper Yough River. She invited four of her most athletic friends. When the mother decided to come, too, Colored Girl wasn’t alarmed. Keeping up appearances was important to the woman. She was probably coming along because one of the girls was a senator’s daughter. The first day, they shot the easy but scenic upper section of the river. The sports team athleticism of the girls eclipsed the older woman’s gym-chiseled strength. They slept in a primitive cabin by the river. In the morning Colored Girl was awakened before dawn, stunned to find the mother caressing one of her breasts with a shimmer-polished finger. The fingernail polish, pale and shiny and the only remaining vestige of Detroit and the sixties, looked anachronistic at all times. In the cabin light it was repugnant. The mother put her hand on the girl’s mouth. The daughter could have screamed and the whole room of girl-women would have come to her defense, but they would have also known. So, she said nothing. Moved nothing. Left her mother to worry if they would get caught and beaten and prayed over. Eventually, the daughter rolled out of the bed to brush the mother out of her teeth and start the day for the ninth time. At the drop-off into the run of the lower part of the river, the guide warned about the treacherous Dimple Rock that must be approached from the right, from precisely the two o’clock angle. The mother, who didn’t believe ordinary rules applied to her, approached Dimple Rock from the left, flipped out of her raft, and vanished. Heads were on swivels as the guide hollered for all to look sharp for the woman overboard. Soon the daughter was laughing. The guide thought it was the laughter of the daughter’s hysterical fear. The girl felt something poking, pushing up on the rubber between her legs. The mother was trying to come up for air. To free her, the daughter had to paddle hard. She had to speak and let the others know where to locate the drowning woman. She was too tired to paddle, too tired to speak. She dropped her oar into the water.
Bette Jean Stanley
PATRON SAINT OF: The Unforgiven, Bad Mothers, and Narcissists
Bette Jean Stanley was something else. Cerebral and audacious, a quick study and innovator, Bette was a pure original. And she was peculiarly private.
Every other woman I knew who was anything like her wanted to do what she did for the stage or the screen. Bette Jean did it for the pleasure of being Bette Jean. She preferred to be her own audience. She rarely troubled herself to critique others. When she did, her most common vicious hiss was “That was an A-1 performance.” She hated seeing anyone desperately try to connect by ratcheting up the humor, or the pathos, or just the sound, looking for an audience.
She didn’t have to look for an audience. Bette attracted attention. She was tall, but not too tall, five foot six and one half, creamy skin that was just brown enough. Her eyes were large and dark. She had naturally straight black hair that she liked to wear cut short, which was particularly provocative because she had sloping shoulders and full breasts and shapely legs. Her stomach was soft, her arms were perfectly plump. She looked good in an Idlewild bathing suit. Bette was something akin to Lena Horne or Gina Lollobrigida. But, and this was the best part, Bette was the kind of beauty who wasn’t sold to the world, because she didn’t have to be. She just sold herself to George and kept on stepping. For herself and Mari.
She didn’t follow the styles, she set them. She read and studied fashion magazines, particularly Vogue. After someone told her about it, she even managed regularly to get her hands on Women’s Wear Daily. She discovered Pucci the first year his clothes were available in the United States. But better than reading to stay ahead of what she saw in the magazines, she would drive down to Detroit Metropolitan Airport and sit in the terminal watching people arrive, studying the fashion jetting in from everywhere. She would go to the car show and look at the colors and the shapes. It was looking at those colors and those shapes that helped her discover her love of shine—she liked frosted polishes, pale pinks, silvers, not apricot. She wore nude lipsticks before they were common; she considered painting her body all over in gold but heard about a model who died trying that stunt. She would go to the Detroit Art Institute and get ideas from paintings for new color combinations for slacks, sweaters, and scarves. She was the one woman in Black Detroit who dragged a shiny black mink. Most others wanted pale champagne or sable brown. She wanted jet black and got it.
The woman shopped as performance art. There were three pillars of her well-curated wardrobe. The first was menswear that flattered her curvy body. She was wearing pants before Mary Tyler Moore did on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Once she met George (he saw her standing at a bus stop on her way to her fancy job at the phone company), she would have his older sister Mary Frances do the retailoring. Before that, Bette did her own alterations by hand. Hooked up with George, she bought haute couture at Hudson’s that became the second pillar of her wardrobe. The third pillar was exotic costumes. Before other people were doing it, Bette and Mari sported ruanas, saris, and caftans. Some days they looked like they had just stepped off the pages of National Geographic magazine. Whatever she wore, it was in the palette she had established for that season’s wardrobe, and it fit her perfectly. You could tell an outfit was a Bette outfit when it was still on a hanger.
She loved details. She loved organization. Her shoe boxes were always labeled and stacked in alphabetical order. To poke into one of her closets was like peering into a clothes library.
She was hard to get close to, chilly, aloof. Some whispered she was color struck, but that wasn’t it. She simply wasn’t interested in anyone but herself. She was so profoundly and so effectively interested in herself that she was often a pleasure and occasionally a help to others—if they could help her. Her mind moved in mathematical and linear ways. She was never distracted by emotions, relationships with men, or dramas with other women. And now I have lost her.
She arrived in Detroit out of thin air. I believe she said she came from West Virginia. She had a story about her father being a coal miner and her mother being an Indian squaw, and this was believable because she had a Navajo kind of nose and Cherokee straight black hair. But there was something about the way she thought and acted that had a whiff of plantation about it that made me suspect a far simpler story. Maybe she was some white Alabama judge’s daughter who had been suddenly smuggled north by family who didn’t want to keep the wild and beautiful young Bette around the house. She ended up at Eastern High School, which she navigated the way strong men manage jail. The first time anyone tried to take anything away from her, in this case a kiss, she slapped him so hard she scared him.
Bette’s slap wasn’t a coquettish tease. It was a shock of pain that knocked its victim back to the day they were born. When Bette hit you, it revived the sense you have been thrown out of one world and landed someplace that wasn’t meant for you. I know this because she hit me. You can’t be much around Bette and not sometimes get hit.
What that boy saw in Bette’s eyes scared him. What Bette discovered, emboldened her. The kiss-stealing boy fled, all six foot of him, moved quickly out of her sight and beyond her reach. Then Bette forgot him, immediately, like she forgot everything that wasn’t real. Few people were real to Bette, except Bette. I was one of the few.
She took a fancy to me because I was useful to her. I see that now. I taught her how to walk, and how to turn, and pose, and just a bit of how to work the camera, and yes, she liked appearing in the column, but not too much. She was no G. S. She had zero interest in being the center of general attention. She only wanted to be the center of attention to the ones who were specifically useful to her and to herself.
She wanted the baby. I had thought, like I had wanted Josette. It may have been more like a little girl wants a baby doll for Christmas. Desperately. George didn’t want a child, but soon enough, Bette had Mari and George’s money. All the baby’s clothes came from Saks Fifth Avenue. Every piece. She bought so much clothing for the baby from Saks, the store sent her a charge card without her applying. Every season, twice a year, she bought an entire wardrobe for Mari. The child was an important accessory.
And a disappointment. She was surprised Mari wasn’t more beautiful, was just pretty. I said she was beautiful enough—as beautiful as she had to be. George Stanley’s child had a place no one could debate or best in Black Detroit. That made Bette jealous. I was always sorry I told her that.
It was such a pleasure to go out walking with Bette on my arm, so useful to hear Bette’s ideas about how an act should dress, or a song should be edited, so helpful to have George’s untraceable cash to throw at rising inconveniences or a political campaign, eventually so pleasant for Baby Doll to have another pretty young friend. I embraced Bette’s friendship and accepted the pleasure of a moment with her as a high form of performance art, even while fearing she had become or would become a dangerous mother. I kept Mari close for quite a few reasons.
Then Bette left. Didn’t say a word to me. I mentioned it in the column. Didn’t mention her by name but I referenced the lady’s transit. When Baby Doll told me, that day in October, that Bette was gone, it was like a punch to the head. It was like Bette knew the end of our world had come, knew that Detroit wouldn’t survive the summer of 1967. Bette was getting out while the getting was good.
What were the “Detroit Riots” to me? A rebellion, an uprising, not a riot, but this rebellion was not my rebellion, not my revolution. My revolution was contained in the fires of the forties. Those made me proud. These shamed me. I wanted to build myself up. Wanted to dance. Wanted to play beneath the sun. Wanted to have, not what they had, but what I wanted. And up rose a sea of young folks more bent on stripping them of their power than on building our own beauty. Folks that don’t understand that our safety is born of their not seeing who we are and what we are, as long as we see ourselves clearly and understand that their chatter about us is fully ignorant and not to be considered. The young folks who are hurt by words cannot be redeemed by gestures. We have created a world in which the dance, in which the drums, fail to matter. I did not know that world could be constructed until I was called upon to try to breathe in it.
Bette was one of these gifted and bewildered new young people.
I didn’t believe Bette was gone until I saw her little honey-gold Mustang sitting in the used car lot. They only gave her $800 for it, and then it was sitting in the lot and the man was asking George for $2,000 to buy it back. Bette always was a fool about money.
Nobody knew where she had gone. George interrogated everybody. He hired Massey, and Massey hired detectives. And all anyone knew is that Bette took the daughter and left him the larger of two dogs. He came home and found the immense Bouvier lying despondent on the royal-blue rug all alone where Mari, the poodle, and her canopy bed used to be. Everybody else had that bed set in white trimmed with gold. Mari’s was white trimmed with a perfect gray-blue. Bette had taste. And then she vanished. I suspected she had help from white friends. If she had been helped by anyone Black, within a week we would have known where she was.
It took George nine weeks to find Bette in Washington, DC. Massey found her on New Year’s Day. Never ever would have thought she would go to DC. Makes some wonder if she didn’t have something going on with Ofield Dukes, who used to work for the Michigan Chronicle, then worked for Motown, then moved to DC to work for the vice president of the United States, Hubert Humphrey. Leaving George for anybody would be strange, I know she didn’t leave him for no Ofield. Baby Doll says Bette had her cap set on Bob Dylan.
My best step? Changing trauma into transcendence, in the scented waters of my bath, in the holy aloneness of the Gotham. Bette couldn’t do that backward and in heels, but I was teaching the steps to Mari and she was coming along fast, even if the lesson had been interrupted by Bette, her beautiful beloved nemesis.
LIBATION FOR THE FEAST DAY OF BETTE STANLEY:
Honey-Gold Mustang
Bette’s perfect drink-time accessory matches the color of her skin.
1 pony of Spanish brandy
1 pony of dark crème de cacao
1 pony of whipping cream
Nutmeg for garnish
Add all ingredients to a cocktail shaker. Shake well and strain into a stemmed cocktail glass. Grate nutmeg over top.