Chapter Thirteen

Saturdays were usually O’Shea’s Dry Goods’ peak business day. This early July afternoon, however, most of the streets of Denver were deserted, and thus many city businesses, too. A countywide tornado alert was in effect for the entire day. Reports were that funnels had been sighted as close in as Littleton, a Denver suburb.

A blustery morning rainstorm caused extensive damage to trees and property in the morning, while later that day was fraught with intermittent bullet-strength hailstones. Anyone with any sense had stayed safe and sound at home.

Under the circumstances, Angus O’Shea planned to close early. He just hoped that Margaret wasn’t on her way. He’d tried to call his daughter to tell her not to come to the store, but the raging weather downed numerous utility and telephone lines. Radio announcers repeatedly cautioned everyone to stay wherever they were, but Margaret always had been too much like him. Obstinate. She never believed warnings of danger were meant for her.

At just a little before four o’clock, she dashed into the store windblown and nearly drenched. “Hi, Papa. I brought you supper,” she called to Angus as she removed her slicker.

Angus wanted to scold his daughter. Why, he wondered, hadn’t his no good son-in-law not forbidden her to go out in this weather, especially since she was so far along in her pregnancy. Damn him.

Before Angus could reply to Margaret, a young colored woman, with a small boy in tow and an infant in her arms, came into the store as well.

The woman halted just inside the door and looked about nervously. Angus walked toward the woman, but he stopped midway and waited for her to explain herself.

Even on a day with so few sales he didn’t want Negroes to get wrongheaded ideas about his policies. They were supposed to enter through the back. He had tolerated the old woman who came in from time to time, but that was because he had chosen to ignore her in the high hope she would eventually just go away. He crossed himself and thanked his lucky shamrocks he hadn’t seen her lately.

The young woman pulled the little boy holding her hand closer to her side. “My son has a fever,” she said to Angus. “I was hoping we could come in here until it cleared a little outside. We just missed the trolley. I don’t think another one is due for a half-hour.”

Angus extended his arms with his palms held up in the universal gesture for “stop,” but just as he started to send the woman on her way, Margaret stepped in front of her father and interrupted him.

“Of course, you’re welcome to come in,” Margaret said, and reached for the little boy’s free hand. “Sit and rest yourselves. There’s no hurry.”

Margaret sat the little boy on a chair next to the dressing rooms, and kneeled down to unbutton his jacket. The little boy sneezed.

“God bless you,” Margaret said to him.

“Thank you,” he replied quickly.

The woman, and the baby she was holding, settled nervously into another chair, and Margaret and Angus went back to the counter.

“Papa,” Margaret said, just above a whisper, “I think we ought to do something to help them. That woman doesn’t have an umbrella, poor thing, and the little boy’s fever worries me. I touched his forehead and he’s burning up. He needs to get home as soon as possible.”

“Lass, you’d help the entire wide world if it was up to you. I think she’ll be just fine on her own.”

“Papa, what if I was her and had your grandchild with me?” Margaret asked, and put her father’s hand to her pregnant belly. “Wouldn’t you want someone to aid us?”

Angus sighed deeply. “All right, lass. We’ll walk with them to the trolley, but that’s as far as we go. Just know it’s against my better judgment.”

“Thank you, Papa,” Margaret said, and stood on her tiptoes to kiss her father on his ruddy cheek.

⟞ • ⟝

Clang! Clang! The Downing Street trolley screeched to a stop and its doors whooshed open. The colored woman turned to Margaret, took her infant daughter from Margaret’s arms into her own, and lifted her son by his arm onto the trolley’s step, and climbed up after him, leaving Margaret and Angus standing on the sidewalk.

“Wait!” Margaret called to both the woman and the trolley driver as the driver reached for the lever to close the trolley door.

“Papa,” Margaret said, and looked up at her father pleadingly. “We can’t let them ride alone. What if something happens? The little boy really is very sick.”

The trolley driver pitched in his two cents. “You folks coming or not? I got a schedule to keep.”

Angus said nothing, but his look of resignation told Margaret that she’d won him over. They followed the woman onto the trolley and Angus dropped the coins for all of their fares into the glass box.

As the woman tried to guide her son down the trolley aisle, he wanted to stop and watch the coins trickle down the chute. “Ooo,” he said at the musical sound the coins made on their journey to the bottom of the box.

Margaret and Angus waited patiently for his fascination to subside, but his mother cut short his observation and led him past all the empty seats in the front of the trolley to a seat nearer the back of the car. Margaret and Angus chose the seats directly across the aisle from the boy and his mother.

The trolley had only one other rider, an innocent-faced young man who reminded Margaret of her stepson Kyle. She couldn’t help wondering if this young man had also been infected by the Klan’s hate campaign. It sickened her all over again to think of how involved her own husband was in such evil.

Margaret offered a silent prayer of protection for the young man and turned to look out her window. The storm had subsided, for the most part, but the sky was still gray with clouds. Margaret wished that it wasn’t so overcast so that she could see every detail of the neighborhoods the trolley was passing through, because this was the first time she had ever been north of Seventeenth Street or east of City Park.

Angus just sat rigidly and mum, staring straight ahead. The little boy put his head in his mother’s lap and went to sleep, while his mother cooed at the now awake baby.

“I never asked you their names,” Margaret said, looking past her father and across the aisle at the woman.

“Oh, they’re named after my mother’s parents,” the woman said and caressed her son’s coarse hair, “But I always thought the names were too old-fashioned. I shortened his to Gus from Angus, and the baby’s to Lia from Delia.”

Margaret couldn’t help but notice that Angus’s face seemed to drain of blood at hearing the woman’s reply. And he and the little boy had the same first name.

“How adorable,” Margaret said. “I wish I could do the same.” She looked at Angus but he refused her gaze. “I mean,” she continued, “name my baby after one of his or her, grandparents.”

Angus seemed to choke. Margaret grasped her father’s arm and peered into his face. “Papa, what’s wrong?”

It seemed a long while before Angus finally answered.

“Nothing, lass. At least nothing you need vex yourself about. It’s just best that we return home as soon as possible.”

“Of course, Papa. It can’t be much farther now.”

The colored woman had no choice but to overhear Margaret and Angus’s conversation, and offered a solution. “Please, don’t worry about us. We’ll be fine. We just have to go to Thirtieth Avenue in Five Points. We get off at Welton and only have to walk a couple of blocks. If you get off now, the trolley ahead of this one should just be turning around, and you can catch it to go back. You’ve been more than kind to see us this far.”

“Don’t be silly,” Margaret said. “It wouldn’t be right if we didn’t take you to your door. Besides, I’ll feel better knowing we did the right thing for Gus. Papa and I will be able to get back okay.”

Clang! Clang! The trolley came to a stop and the young man who had been on when they boarded, disembarked. The rest of the way, Margaret, Angus, the woman, the boy, and the baby, all rode in silence.

Margaret tried to recall what she’d heard about Five Points. She knew that Walter went there on his days off, but their conversations dealt strictly with his duties as the family butler. Otherwise, all she knew of Five Points was something she’d heard at a debutante tea.

“My dear, Five Points is like a quaint little village,” a large woman who had had on a ridiculous-looking hat with great long feathers sticking out of it had said to her. “And, I’ll tell you how I know. One time I needed my girl to work on her day off. I had to drive to her house to tell her because she didn’t have a telephone. Well, I tell you, I never, in all my life, experienced more uppityness. It was a Sunday and them niggras were promenading up and down Welton dressed like they’d just stepped out of Neusteters or Gano Downs. I mean, really!”

Margaret laughed, not at the memory of the comment, but at the memory of the woman’s ridiculous hat.

⟞ • ⟝

How odd, Margaret thought, as she, her father, and the colored woman with her little son and infant daughter, stepped from the trolley. Five Points looked just like any other neighborhood that was cared about by its residents.

As they walked, they passed a barbershop, a florist, a hotel, a clothing store, an insurance agency, a Rexall drugstore, a soda fountain, and a grocery.

Odder still, Margaret realized, was that her father walked like he knew where he was going. He had never mentioned anything about Five Points.

A man they passed seemed as though he were about to speak to Angus, but Angus remained stone-faced, and the man went by without a word. Margaret thought she could sense the man staring at them as they walked on.

A similar experience happened a block later, when a woman exiting a beauty shop acted for a moment as if she recognized Angus, but the woman quickly apologized for her error, and walked ahead.

Their journey along the next block was uneventful, and at the corner the woman turned onto a street lined with modest, but well-kept brick homes.

Although dusk was turning into evening, Margaret could see that someone in one of the houses was peeking at them from behind a lace curtain.

Apparently it was as great a curiosity for an elderly white man, a white woman, and a colored woman with her children to be seen together.

About midway down the block, the colored woman led them up the walkway of a pleasant little house with a porch bordered by bushes of red roses in full bloom. “This is my mother-in-law’s house,” the woman explained. “My husband and I are living with her while he works on the railroad. Sometimes he has to be gone for a week or more, but he makes twice what he could in a factory. Especially with tips and all.”

When they reached the front door, the woman handed the baby to Margaret, and searched her pocketbook for her keys. A handsome brown-skinned man opened the door before she could find them and pulled the woman into his embrace.

“Sugarpie,” the woman hollered. “You’re home!”

⟞ • ⟝

The woman, whose name Margaret finally learned was Betty Jo, invited Margaret and Angus in and introduced them to her husband, Arnold, and her mother-in-law, Mrs. Johnson, who was a war widow.

Angus seemed anxious to leave, but Margaret felt exactly the opposite. Almost instantly, Margaret realized something that had been missing her entire life … What these people had—family and a real home; people who really loved and mattered to each other, and a place to live infused with that love.

These people didn’t call themselves family just because they had the same last name or because they went in and out of the same doors every day. And their house was far more than just a place to eat and sleep. No, these people were an honest-to-goodness family because they truly cared about each other, and their home was where they nurtured and shared that love, where they’d be deeply missed if they weren’t there.

The pale yellow living room was too small for the overstuffed sofa and chairs, which looked like they might have had a first existence in a posh estate, but it was tidy and decorated with taste. The aroma of pot roast and fresh-baked biscuits wafted in from the kitchen.

“I hope you’re staying for dinner,” Mrs. Johnson said. “I knew I cooked extra for some reason. Please just excuse me a minute while I go see how everything is doing.”

Gus pulled loose from Margaret’s hand and followed his grandmother through the adjoining dining room into the kitchen. Margaret wished, with all of her being, that she could follow after them.

Arnold offered Angus and Margaret seats while Betty Jo went upstairs to put Lia down.

At first Angus and Arnold engaged in little more than small talk, but in no time they were swapping stories about cities they’d both seen—Arnold, on his routes as a dining car waiter; Angus during his days as a teamster.

Margaret, meanwhile, made herself at home and studied the collections of framed photographs atop the fireplace mantel and the player piano.

The photos on the wall above the dining room sideboard featured a large gilt-framed sepia photograph of a strikingly good-looking Negro man in an army uniform.

Betty Jo came back downstairs and walked over to Margaret, who was in the dining room staring at the photo of the soldier.

“My father-in-law,” Betty Jo said, indicating the man in the picture. “He was a captain in the army’s 815th all-Negro division. He died on the battlefield in France. My husband still has every one of the hundreds of Parisian newspapers and magazines his father sent him stored in the attic. I keep telling him they’re more fire hazard now than anything, only he still won’t throw them out. He swears he’s going to use them one day to teach himself French.”

Margaret noticed a hint of sorrow on Betty Jo’s face and quickly tried to change the subject. “Your mother-in-law never remarried?”

“Nope,” Betty Jo answered. “But I think having her sister here really helped. They bought this house together with both their savings. Aunt Euphie’s health has been declining lately. When she comes downstairs for dinner you’ll see that she’s really the strong one.”

“Were they born in Denver?” Margaret asked.

Betty Jo shook her head no. “Virginia. They worked their way west as cooks for a traveling vaudeville troupe. Got to Denver and decided to stay.”

“Betty Jo, child,” said someone coming down the stairs, “now what tales are you telling about me and Baby Sister?”

Margaret had never heard such a loving voice. She quickly turned to see who it belonged to and immediately recognized the old colored woman that had been loitering in her father’s store.

Then her father’s face went ashen and she rushed to where he was sitting. “Papa, are you all right?”

“We have to leave, lass. Now. And don’t argue with me.”

“But Mrs. Johnson is expecting us to stay for dinner.”

“I said not to argue with me. We have to leave now!”

Arnold looked perplexed. “Betty Jo, call Mama from the kitchen. I think Mr. O’Shea might be ill.”

“No, he’s not ailing any,” Aunt Euphie declared as she worked her way slowly to the bottom of the steps. “Are you, Brother?”

Margaret felt the air in the house suddenly become thick and hazy. What was this woman talking about? And how did she have the audacity to call a white man, especially one she didn’t know, brother?

Angus didn’t reply nor move. Margaret didn’t understand. Maybe Devin’s friends were right. Maybe the niggras were getting beside themselves. Then again, perhaps this poor old woman was just dotty.

Margaret turned to Betty Jo and Mrs. Johnson in hope of receiving a rational explanation. Little Gus was standing between them. Margaret whispered to the two women, “Is she touched?”

Betty Jo and Mrs. Johnson, just as perplexed, could only shake their heads. Betty Jo seemed to want to speak, and just hunched her shoulders, instead.

What was going on here?

Angus was still sitting in the same chair with his elbows gored into his knees and his head buried between his hands.

Aunt Euphie went to him and put her hand on his shoulder. “It’s all right, Brother. We’re your family.”

Angus began to sob. Still not looking up, Angus reached for his sister’s hand. Decades of loss, loneliness, and grief poured out through his flood of tears. He didn’t yet realize that his new-found family was anxious to embrace him.

Finally, he stood and wrapped his long lost sister in his arms. His tears started all over again, except that this time they were sobs of relief and even joy.

He held Euphrates back by her shoulders and for a long moment, peered into her face, then held her close again, then held her again at arm’s length to take her all in.

Tears were flowing down both their faces now, and he began to laugh, a free healing laugh.

Euphrates managed to tell him, “And this,” her arms extended — to Margaret’s amazement — to Betty Jo’s mother-in- law, Mrs. Johnson, “is our baby sister, Lee Dora. Dora, come give a hug to my twin brother and your big brother.”

Lee Dora crossed the chasm of the last seventy-plus years in less than a second, and ran to be included in her brother and sister’s embrace and reunion. “If only Mama and Papa could see us now.”

Margaret thought she might faint. She backed away from her father, and stumbled. Betty Jo and Arnold both moved quickly to steady her, then gently guided her to a seat on the sofa.

“Have you known all this time?” Mrs. Johnson asked.

“Yes, except I also knew that Angus was passing for white. If he’d learned about us being here, it would have destroyed his life.”

Euphrates went over to Margaret and put her hand on Margaret’s shoulder.

“More important, I knew that his daughter had been raised to believe that she was white. Why should I have caused her world to fall apart? All I wanted was to see Angus one last time before I die.”

Margaret leaped to her feet, and shouted at Euphrates. “What are you saying? You’re just crazy. A crazy old colored woman.”

Margaret went to her father and tugged on his arm. “Come on, Papa. We have to go. We have to get out of here.”

Instead of budging, Angus placed his hands firmly on Margaret’s shoulders, and gazed into her face for what seemed forever. Finally, he pulled her close and began weeping again.

Margaret wanted nothing to do with this madness. She just wanted to go home. She pushed herself away from her father and hurried to the door. “For the last time, Papa, it’s time for us to go home. This is all such insanity.”

“No, lass, it was insanity that I was spending all these past years pretending I was something I wasn’t. I’m not white. I’m colored. Up till now, my life has been nothing but lies, boldfaced lies. I even believed them myself.”

“Papa, stop it!” Margaret pleaded and held her hands to her ears. “I don’t want to hear any of this foolishness. Please, let’s just get out of this house. Everything will be fine again as soon as we get some fresh air.”

“No, daughter, it’s not fresh air that we need. It’s truth that you and I need, however bitter. Try to calm down so that we can all make sense of this together.”

“Make sense of what? Are you trying to tell me that I’m colored? You, all of you, tear my life apart, and you want me to just calm down. Maybe you’re all crazy.”

With that, Margaret ran out the front door into the night. She didn’t know where she was running to, but she knew it had to be somewhere away from her crazy father, and those colored people.

⟞ • ⟝

A single streetlight at the corner gave Margaret the only hint of what direction to take. She could hear her father calling her from the porch of the house, but nothing could ever make her go back.

She prayed to be sent in the right direction and pressed forward. By the time she reached Downing Street, a trolley car was coming. She ran to the stop.

She was grateful that she didn’t have to wait, but she had no money with her. The driver, in no humor for tall tales, insisted she disembark immediately.

She might as well have been lost in a foreign country. She started walking. A colored man approached from the opposite direction. Her heart pounded and her heart constricted. As she and the man neared each other, she could hear him whistling.

He continued past her and his music faded into the night. He hadn’t even tipped his hat to her. How dare he show a white woman such disrespect? Could it be that he somehow knew that she was—she couldn’t bring herself to say it—a colored woman?

She placed her hands out in front of her and examined them. Nothing about them seemed to have changed. She still looked white, so wasn’t she?

Light from the inside of a storefront illuminated the patch of sidewalk she was about to cross. She peered into the storefront window.

Seven or eight colored men and women were stationed at individual easels arranged in a large circle. Each person was sketching a model in the center of the circle; a twentyish colored man in a tweed jacket sitting in a chair reading a book.

The model, the young man, raised his head slightly and smiled at Margaret, but by the time someone else looked to see who was there, Margaret had moved on.

Farther up the street, a stream of merrymakers was going into a building with an awning that extended from the door to the street. The words “Caf... Society” were scrolled across the front of the awning.

From a closer vantage, Margaret could see that many of the people entering the place were white. Also, some of the couples were colored men with white women, and, white men with colored women. The Negroes with other Negroes seemed to be the equals of whites. It was all very strange.

What kind of nightmare, or dream, was she having? Maybe she was crazy too. She considered for a moment to go inside, but decided instead to watch from across the street from the deeply shadowed doorway of a closed business office.

Every time the door to the club opened, she could hear laughter, and music. Jazz, hot piano jazz.

She felt disoriented, and terribly afraid. Only, of whom? Of what? No one had harmed her. She’d barely been noticed.

It occurred to her that the home she’d just been in wasn’t any different than the homes of white people. And except that the people in that house were Negroes, they acted the same as anyone else.

The only difference had been the array of their skin colors—Sable, tan, coffee, olive, bronze, even alabaster—some even had blue eyes.

She decided to go back to the storefront. She was an artist too. What was there to be afraid of if she went in and asked for their help?

Looking in the window she saw that the people were packing up, and on their way out.

Thankfully, there was a church on the far corner. She could go inside and sit until she figured out what to do next. She crossed the street, went up the church steps, and was relieved to find the front doors unlocked.

She entered the vestibule and immediately felt a sense of relief. The sanctuary doors were unlocked as well. She approached the altar and knelt. Her tears dropped onto the altar railing.

“Dear, Lord ... Who am I? What am I?”