VII. CLAUDINE
France and North America, 1956–1968
33. THEIR EARLY NIGHTS of homelessness were spent in a classic Mercedes-Benz. It had been purchased after a West End gig that toured seven cities, the kind of job, the kind of money, they hadn’t seen in years. The car, Bonnie imagines now, is what allowed her and her mother, Claudine, to park and sleep in good neighborhoods undisturbed. Quiet cobblestone blocks in the sixth arrondissement, where they watched well-dressed white Parisians and their North African maids march in and out of empty shops that had yet to resume their prewar glory. For the year that they went without housing, they discovered the car was also an ideal observatory for stars. They savored the Paris twilight, watching the airborne tumbleweeds of silk scraps that floated out from the open shutters of the textile shops, orbiting the car’s windows like planets and hypnotizing the stray dogs enough to keep them at bay.
Bonnie slept with her mother’s dark legs across her body. Legs that were hairless, the skin taut and cold-smooth. The feet were permanently stained by deep-blue bruises from a past Bonnie knew almost nothing about. The color always looked beautiful to her, a beautiful addition to her darkness.
Claudine had promised to take Bonnie to Marseille for the jazz festival once her military pension arrived. Everything, it seemed, would happen once her military pension arrived. There would be a house with a yard and a real oven, a private school and proper winter clothes.
One day, after a fruitless search about town for a pitying landlord, they visited an old friend. The walk from the front door of Madame Prevert’s apartment to her dining room was a museum tour. A corridor lined with stale, sparkling costumes in glass cases; headless mannequins draped in three or four layers of tulle; stacks on stacks of yellowing pamphlets; posters announcing ballets and operas from another century. Hats made of grass were pinned to the ceiling. Two flappers from the twenties, nude but for socks, kissed on the mantle. Everything was ancient. Bonnie scarfed down Madame Prevert’s nutted cheese, eager to continue her exploration of the house. In a hallway, she discovered photos of her mother, standing far left in a row of white ballerinas, all of them dressed in stiff tutus. Her mother was immediately recognizable; her face and frail frame had not changed. For the first time, Bonnie imagined her mother as young and vulnerable, a feeling that made her worry until she heard the shrill of her mother’s laughter. A rare sound. She rushed back to see Claudine clasping the table, smoke rolling off her long white tongue.
“That’s why she’s gonna be a scientist,” Claudine said, gathering herself, reaching to straighten Bonnie’s skirt and yank her matted plaits as she returned to her mother’s side.
“A couple of ballet solos … a couple of standing ovations … I wanted to dance so much. But it wasn’t worth it. This isn’t a life,” she said, breaking a dry biscuit with two shaky hands. “Would you say it was worth it?”
“Of course!” the woman replied, before sipping from her glass of wine. “Who else can say that their legs ended the war?” The women roared as their glasses clanked, toasting to their pain. To all the promises that life, in the end, had not fulfilled.
Her mother seemed to be a different person in the house of this old dancer. She was eager to share, eager to speak. But before long, the women’s conversation turned sour, an argument that Bonnie has since forgotten, but for a single sentence that burned into her memory:
“I don’t know about you staying here again, Claudine. You already been here once. Is this a pattern with you?”
As Madame Prevert had surmised, there was indeed a pattern to Claudine’s decisions, though it wouldn’t be fair to attribute it to Claudine alone: it ran in the family. The handing over of children to strangers without much hesitation, without a wild contest of emotion, had been common among her kin for generations. Such a tradition probably began several centuries earlier in West Africa, where children in certain classes and ethnic groups were given to other relatives—grandmothers, distant barren aunts, and cousins in infancy—to strengthen family ties or to end rivalries. But no one remembered that now. And anyway, thinking of anything that way always bred more confusion and insecurity than anything else. Connecting Africa to American Blackness in the 1940s, or any decade for that matter, was like staring at your own reflection in a bowl of water and waiting for another face to show.
This pattern, though ancestral, took on another flavor after the events of 1927, when Sylvia King journeyed south with her father for a case and returned home to Boston with his dead body.
After that, Sylvia’s blood moved differently, more slowly, some days depriving her brain of enough sustenance to stand, and by the time it was her turn, it made her first a tired mother, then a bedridden one, next a suicidal one, then a mother called other things. (When asked, Is that your mother? Claudine would answer, She had me.)
At the end of their visit, Claudine left Bonnie at Madame Prevert’s house. Her mother was always chasing work, following rumors of gigs in other cities, so Bonnie wasn’t worried until one day turned into three. Madame Prevert did not visit her in her room, did not call her down for dinner, but when Bonnie wandered through the dark house and found the woman—reading, writing, drinking alone—she was always kind and courteous and answered Bonnie’s questions.
“Your mother has gone to a city office, to arrange for the payment of her pension.”
“Do you think they’ll really give it to her this time?” Bonnie asked, climbing into the rocking chair across from the woman. The woman seemed surprised by her candor.
“They must. It’s payment for her military service.”
Bonnie stared blankly, so the woman went on.
“We both danced in a ballet troupe for the French army during the Second World War … she never told you any of this?”
Bonnie shook her head.
The woman went back to her book.
Bonnie spent most of her time in the woman’s house in her room. She slept on a futon next to a stack of novels.
Time was lost in difficult books, snacking on olives, sitting inside the small square of sunlight that spread slowly, like honey, on the parquet floors of an otherwise dark room. She read Cendrillon (the French Cinderella) three times, and when she finished all she could read of a French translation of Faust, she curled up in the sunspot beside her olive pits and yearned for her mother.
Madame Prevert woke her up on the fourth morning, a dry, cold hand on her bare neck.
“Your mother is waiting for you.”
The car ride to the airport is silent. Madame Prevert speeds through the empty highway in her stick-shift. She parks, grabs Bonnie’s suitcase, and rushes ahead into the heavy doors. Bonnie struggles to keep up, a bit drowsy and lightheaded—weak from strange hours of sleeping and sporadic eating. Madame Prevert dashes through the endless walkways; she shows Bonnie’s passport and cuts lines. She looks over her shoulder every few minutes to confirm that the child is behind her. Bonnie runs, gripping her large backpack in her hand as it slips off her shoulder. She drags her sweater along the ground, holding her teddy bear under her arm.
Bonnie hears the plane before she sees it. The loud whir of the engine. As Bonnie approaches, she struggles to walk against the wind that the giant propellers push in her direction. She sees Claudine standing by the plane’s stairs. She rushes to her mother, stopping for a moment to turn to Madame Prevert, who’s waving goodbye. Her mother is dressed beautifully, her dark pleated skirt flaring in the heavy wind. Her hands reach for Bonnie, and she holds her to her body for a long time. Claudine is speaking but her voice cannot be heard over the engine. She helps Bonnie mount the steps of the plane, and a smiling flight attendant takes her by the hand. Claudine gathers the things that Bonnie has dropped: her sweater, coloring book. The flight attendant reaches to take Bonnie’s things, but Claudine hesitates, bringing the sweater to her nose, breathing it in.
Bonnie turns, reaching for her mother, but she is walking across the tarmac. Bonnie calls for her, but Claudine continues steadily toward the terminal doors, never looking back.
Bonnie will always remember the walk: slow, mechanical, as if she were in another dimension. Her screaming makes no difference, a wall immediately erected between her and Claudine. And then there is the flight attendant who restrains her, a restraint that morphs into a loving hug. The flight attendant sits in the seat beside her on the plane to New York, holding on until they both are no longer in tears.
34. ABOUT THREE YEARS to the day after she sent Bonnie to live with her mother in New York and checked herself into rehab in Paris, Claudine gets a call from the US. It’s Sylvia. Finally, after at least twenty unanswered calls made earlier that year, several more letters sent. She never gets her mother to acknowledge this, and after they’ve had enough of one another, Sylvia finally puts the girl on the phone.
It is mostly small talk. The girl is polite and guarded. Her voice has dropped an octave, already deep enough to make a good alto, and her words are incredibly fast. It’s hard to keep pace with her mind as she darts from the Olympics to nail polish, pimples to the sordid origin of picnics, never revealing anything personal but sharing so many thoughts. Claudine can’t believe she’s already so smart.
“I want her back,” Claudine says to her mother. She knows, as she wipes her eyes with her paper napkin, that she sounds like a child.
“You clean up and get her a decent place to live, and we’ll see.”
“Put her back on.”
“That’s enough now.”
“One question. Please.”
Sylvia curses under her breath but returns Bonnie to the phone. “Yes?” she says.
“Where would you like to live?”
The girl is quietly umming, and Claudine can tell that she’s trying not to hurt her, or herself.
Claudine rephrases the question. “I mean, what sort of place do you dream of living in?”
“Oh. I like brownstones a whole lot. I like the houses in Park Slope,” she says. “They have gargoyles, and flower gardens, and terraces, and—I’m sorry. Grandma’s calling me.”
“That’s all right. We’ll talk soon.”
“OK. Bye, Mama.”
For a while, the calls continue, Sylvia comforted by Bonnie’s new joy. But in the end, what Sylvia has always been most afraid of happens. Claudine cannot deliver on her promise of moving, a series of excuses that Sylvia refuses to believe. Of course, she could not confess her ill-confidence, the simple truth that she needed a moment to earn back, at least, her own respect. The following spring, the next time Claudine calls, Sylvia does not answer. And when she does finally pick up, Sylvia won’t let her speak to the child, the girl apparently asleep.
Months pass, until, one day, Claudine watches from the TV as America burns. A story on Philly. Vacant houses abandoned in the midst of the riots that resulted from years of tension with police. She calls an old acquaintance from a pay phone, and, within twenty-four hours, she has a quote on a Philly brownstone for an unreasonably low price. Seven floors, ten rooms, six fireplaces, and a dumbwaiter. In need of much repair and in a terrible neighborhood, but the owner wants out. She wires the down payment that night, knowing she’ll have to wait a little while and earn the money back before she can fly home.
35. WITHIN AN HOUR of arriving in Philly in 1964, Claudine is squatting below the parlor windows in her underwear, smothering a hissing cocktail bomb with her only dress. When her eyes finally adjust to the smoke, she gets a better look at the thing that was hurled through the glass of her window.
It is a pitiful little thing, more like some homemade fireworks than a weapon. She tastes its liquid on her fingertip: What was the vinegar for? She knows then that the perpetrators are even younger than they sound. That they believe the recipes in the funnies or on the Johnny Carson show. She retreats to the room’s center, away from the windows.
Their silhouettes hover on her block for what seems to be hours. Plotting in whispers but never moving an inch. Whenever she returns to the window for a little peek, there they are, standing still and far enough apart that their shadows resemble a group of ghosts that are too shy to slow dance and are waiting for the music to change. She wonders if she should show herself, to let them know that she, a Black woman, is the new owner of this house. Before she turns away again, she hears one speak.
“This one’s for Odessa Bradford, motherfucker!” they shout as another Corona-bottle-wannabe-bomb comes flying through her window. This time she’s ready, has her dress opened like a tarp to catch it.
She launches it back at them and crouches, waiting to hear it explode. Then she hears laughter.
“You betta teach ’em! Goddamn, woman! Where the hell you come from rollin’ like that?” The voice of a man, sitting just outside her shattered window. She knows, from the place inside herself that war helped her hone, that the man is not dangerous. He’s just drunk. She carries on.
The gossipy Italian realtor said that brownstone’s previous owner, the neighborhood’s last white resident, ran from the house the night before she arrived—scrambling out of the service entrance, half-dressed, cradling a wheelchair-bound son, demanding that they leave with whatever they could fit in the Volkswagen. Many things have been left behind. Claudine finds a gun in the drawer of the master bedroom. The bed is unmade, and the comforters, thick and red, lie there in a cool heap.
That night, for some reason, she relapses. Just as she’d done the night before and the night before that, she drinks rum straight until she feels calm.
A quake on the fifth floor rouses her. Emptiness, her favorite symptom of drunkenness, vanishes in a single second, like a heavy blanket has been snatched from her legs. She follows the sound with the gun in hand. She could be dreaming, but she can’t always tell the difference, and trying to is the only time she feels as crazy as she’s been told she is.
She hadn’t felt like this before the war, true. The war, her doctor warned her, is what attracted her to chaos, violence. To the bottle. To images of these riots on television. What has driven her to return to America and move into a house right in the thick of it. You’re reliving your trauma, he said. It’s not about your daughter. You told me yourself that you never wanted her. Don’t you remember? She’d hung up the phone.
Months later, as she dresses to go to Sylvia’s assisted-living facility, she does remember saying that. She remembers the rape that brought her Bonnie too. It’s why she can’t finish the flower garden in the backyard of the brownstone.
The smell of earth. He’d held her face to the ground.
Her new boyfriend, Daniel (Cuban, twenty years her junior, her carpenter turned dance partner—a story for another time) drives her to meet her daughter. Claudine buys a new dress for the occasion. White with a thick black belt. It’s the first thing she’s worn in years that doesn’t make her body look oblong. She chews through a pack of gum on the highway, trying to erase the smell of rum on her breath, and her guilt.
Her first thought when they arrive is that it doesn’t look like Brooklyn, not the Brooklyn she remembers from a decade ago. Claudine walks up the hill toward the entrance to the facility, expecting to have time to gather herself, but her mother is outside, sitting in a lawn chair, waiting for her. Her mother is still beautiful, a little wrinkled, and much, much smaller, half the size Claudine remembers. Her white hat is enormous, further dwarfing her demure frame.
Claudine isn’t surprised when she doesn’t see Bonnie. She’d expected to have to fight her way past the dragon. At least the dragon has shrunk.
36. “YOU LOOK SO DIFFERENT,” Sylvia says. “My God.” She extends her hand, and Claudine leans forward. Her mother touches her face.
“Want some lemonade?”
“Water. Please.”
Sylvia pours her a glass, hands it to her. Claudine places the cup on the table with a shaky hand.
Sylvia giggles to herself. She’s staring straight ahead, not looking at Claudine.
“You write like you never set foot in Howard. Good Lord. That last letter was terrible,” she says.
Claudine scoffs, shaking her head.
“So you read them?” she asks.
“Read what, dear?”
“My letters.”
“Some of them, yes.” Sylvia sips lemonade, steady. “But I’m very busy with the girl. She takes everything out of me. These aren’t supposed to be the parenting years, you know.”
They are silent.
“I brought this for my daughter.”
Claudine places a teddy bear on the table between them.
“I know you did, dear,” Sylvia mutters with a hint of pity. “But she’s not the age she was when you sent her here. She’s got a mind that could build a city. She doesn’t need toys anymore.”
As soon as she says this, Sylvia, sensing Claudine’s breakdown, grabs her wrist. Claudine begins to cry. Sylvia goes on.
“It’s natural, dear. We always want to keep them young. Same way I wanted to with you. But you were so talented, I couldn’t hold you back. I’m sorry it all … wasn’t what you’d hoped for.”
Sylvia releases Claudine, pats her leg carefully, and pulls her hands back into her own lap, watching the hills ahead again. She hums to herself.
“Mother, I bought a house. In Philadelphia. I’m ready. I wanna take Bonnie home with me. Today.”
Sylvia leans closer and lifts her sunglasses.
“I smell it on you, dear. And I will not let that sweet girl think that this is an option.”
Claudine retorts in her mind: Hey, Mother, remember when me and Dad visited you in the psych ward? Remember when you tried to burn the house down with me in it? Remember when you believed that people were watching you in the shower?
Claudine cannot say any of these words without taking things from bad to worse and further delaying her reunion with her child. So she stands up and takes her bear, walks down the hill, and gets back into her boyfriend’s car, berating his driving all the way home.
37. FOR EVERYONE BUT CLAUDINE, the last straw was a rumor about a New York hotel booting Sammy Davis Jr. from his penthouse suite over a bounced check. Everyone was perplexed because he’d just appeared on the Playboy show with his voice and performance as smooth as they’d ever been.
After that, Claudine watched the other dancers around town lose their morale and humble themselves. If Sammy wasn’t working, they didn’t have a chance. The clubs didn’t want them. The theaters didn’t either. No one had seen a marquee advertising a tap act in at least a decade. And the marquees that did pop up around town were sloppy, handwritten without care, nailed illegally to lampposts in the night.
It seemed to the others that it was time to accept that they’d been replaced, by television and, more offensively, an endless supply of singing groups (That damn Motown). To retell the slander something like it was said: country-ass choir members, gyrating through terrible arrangements of the same harmonies, hair grease and hand gestures of the acts that had preceded them.
Claudine saw her best friends—talented tappers—straight up wrestle the police and preachers in bitter rivalries over sidewalks and street corners. Even during remarkably treacherous winters, dancers could be seen at 5:00 a.m., sprinkling the concrete with sawdust and shuffling for victory in tap battles that were understood less and less by anyone among the living. They were battling not for the hot dog change the tourists dropped into their cups but for their place in their own cities, in their own world. They didn’t mean to inspire the B-boys or the jazz musicians (who took their club jobs) in rhythm. But that happened too.
Ultimately, most of them accepted that the culture had moved on, desired to express itself in other ways. But Claudine refused.
She had to work. She had to earn her daughter back from Sylvia.
She fought the tide of the times with whatever was at her disposal. Her legs still called attention everywhere they went, and so she wore them proudly to crowded theater parties, to rancid Subway stations, to an audition for an abandoned revival of In Dahomey, quitting on the spot when the young Austrian director came to the edge of the stage and offered to lick her calves.
On this June morning of 1968, she doesn’t even remember whose idea it had been to try some other cities. It was so humid that Claudine kept her hair in pins the whole time she rowed a canoe across a stagnant, smelly green swamp to a Miami beachfront club seeking talent while still under construction. Though she’d toured Europe, though she’d danced in the world’s finest opera houses before the war, she agreed to start her tap routine a fifth time for the club owner, who was busy counting the mosquitoes he’d smashed into her headshot. She shuffled hard on wooden planks while twelve-year-old Negro boys in prison stripes catcalled louder than she could tap as they worked the grounds.
The club owner said no.
But she didn’t stop.
That same week, she was the only middle-aged colored woman costumed in polka dots and sequins, trying to cut the endless open-call line on a smoky Hollywood lot, her tap shoes softening on the kettle-hot asphalt, when she bumped into the Texan that became her manager.
The gigs had been flowing ever since.
She’d been in love with Daniel for a while, but they remained unmarried. They did not want any more children, nor to live any farther than within a fifteen-mile radius of a theater of some kind, maintaining a diet mostly of vegetables. From the day she returned to America, Claudine had taken great pains to remain in the dancer’s life however she could: ushering at Lincoln Center while her house in Philly was being repaired; acting, for five weeks, for a tenement-based community theater where the playwright-directors required talent to memorize the Ten-Point Program and learn to shoot a gun.
She was forty-something by the time she ended up on Broadway for ten months, and so today, after two months in LA shooting a pilot that was not picked up and teaching a tap class at the Negro Ensemble Company, on the way to catch a train back to Philadelphia, Claudine collapses in the middle of Fourteenth Street.
Her fall is slow. She gives up at least two chances to break it, wills it in a way that is impossible for even her to understand. Upon falling, she lets herself lie in the street for several seconds. If cars are honking, she doesn’t hear them, and if she does, it makes no difference. In some half-hearted effort to steady herself, she pulled down a young white girl with her. The girl is sympathetic and, with the help of a drag queen, carries Claudine to the sidewalk. She sits on the curb, eye level with the tires of a bus that, once it pulls off, reveals ads for goat cheese and adoption across the street.
All of the working, the hard-earned sobriety, and the mansion she bought with cash and renovated has not been enough to regain custody of Bonnie. Nothing has made a difference to Sylvia. She has long stopped replying to letters. For being abandoned and having abandoned, Claudine’s pain remains strong, undiluted by time.
Even though she’s long stopped claiming the identity of mother, in conversations with young dancers and actresses with whom she shares dressing rooms, complaining about their own children, and the back talk, the slacking in school, she cannot be free of this desperate feeling. And after years of resistance, it has once again consumed her. Last July signaled the end of possibility. It was the month in which the child turned eighteen, and thus was officially emancipated from Sylvia and impossible to locate.
Her battle with alcohol; the voluntary relinquishing of her child to her mother, Sylvia; an attempt to regain custody that ended in her mother threatening to call the police before she got to see the child: it now makes the street move in waves beneath her feet. A loud ring starts in her ears.
She begins to walk again. Taking her time, gripping the streetlight poles on every block along the way. She feels better as she gets closer to Penn Station. They are side by side, so she makes herself go into the record store instead of the liquor store.
Immediately she spots an album in the contemporary-jazz section with her face on it. She is indifferent to the gawks of others as she crouches down on the floor, staring at the record while the world around her grows dark and quiet.
She would recognize the style anywhere. It’s Bonnie’s hand. Her left hand: steady, impressionistic. On the cover, Claudine looks ethereal and ecstatic, thin braids over her face, her hand at her mouth with the fingers stretched wide. The features that mother and daughter share have been exaggerated: the lips, the eyes, the mole. It looks like Claudine, yes, but it feels so much like her: pride and shame wedded in her eyes. And how strange, that in spite of her mother’s best efforts, the years and distance between them, that Bonnie had, in the end, seen Claudine for exactly who she was.
She buys several copies of the record, asks the store clerk what he knows about the album, the artist, the label, and where she can catch them in concert. He tells her she’s got the worst luck.
All their shows in town have been canceled as of last week.
“What on earth happened?”
“One of the band members died,” he says.
She takes the albums home, reading the liner notes, the credits, the lyrics, the bios, never seeing Bonnie’s name. When she sleeps, she dreams of Mansour. Her sleep is steady and rich. For she knows that she is finally very, very close.