At first when faced with the funerals, the two diminutive caskets set in the middle of the room, Elma found comfort in the collection of old women mourners from her church. With their rambling talk offering remedies for her condition, they seemed by their own longevity to hold death back. “Liver, ginger, and some tonic, baby,” one elder counseled. “Don’t bind ’em to you till they passed the sixth year,” added another. “Take that baby boy of yours outside. He’ll do jus’ fine. You will have your family yet,” the last solo voice added, accompanied by the choir, “Uhn hmm, yes, that’s right.” Yet . . . there my daughters lay. Stiff curls, powdered skin, painted lips, Elma mused sadly, China dolls. The ritual circle of Bethel A.M.E. women with their wrinkled, down-turned eyes, so consoling when she thought she could not face the day, reminded her of Mah Bette. Old women, Elma thought, dismissing her sorrow as something that would dissolve like sugar in a hot cup of tea.
“No m’am, thank you. I cannot eat another one, Miss Tavineer.” Elma feigned a smile, eschewing the last of her downstairs neighbor’s crystal plate of cinnamon rolls. The weekly prayer circle that had tried to ease Elma through her children’s illness and death was now reduced to one, Miss Tavineer, who lived on the second floor of the four-story Tenderloin walk-up Elma called home. Because the older woman often watched her surviving son, Jesse, while Elma ran her daily errands, she patiently suffered the woman’s company and talentless baking. “Seems the whole congregation, all the good colored folk movin’ on to Harlem,” Miss Tavineer muttered, then heaved a sigh. “Now even the church itself.”
“Yes, they’re making fine progress. It’s hard to believe the groundbreaking was only last spring,” Elma replied. “Raymond tells me they’ve already started on the chapel interior.” She added with a tight-lipped Cheshire smile, “He designed it, you know.”
“It was hard enough getting down to 15th Street,” Miss Tavineer grumbled and shifted in her seat. “I don’t know how I’ll make it to 135th. I don’t know how you manage, raisin’ a child with such troubles on your own in a city as difficult as this. Jesse’s gettin’ so heavy, I cain’t hardly cart him up and down those steps. Maybe you should take the boy and go on back home, least for the rest of the winter.”
Elma stood, indicating that the conversation was done, and saw her neighbor to the door. “You needn’t cart him, Miss Tavineer. I will drop him off and come to fetch him myself as need be, if you can still oblige lookin’ after him from time to time. I’m sure Raymond and I will soon be able to provide some compensation for your trouble.”
In her weekly letter to Lizzie, Elma reiterated the conversation, emboldening her speech. “No sirree! I told her. We’ll not be goin’ back south for a while, or anytime.” Elma resented the old woman’s intrusive advice. Of course she recognized that the crowded mid-Manhattan streets were difficult with Jesse, but she wasn’t about to let anyone else tell her what was best for him. Least of all, some nosy old lady got neither chick nor child. “Though I have lost Benna and Gabby,” she continued in her letter, “many others have suffered greater. Fortunately, our Jesse has come through,” she wished, prayed, lied. This place is loud and cold, gray most every day. “New York!” she went on. “The streets are so colorful. Different languages and smells. People are always taking me for something else, asking Do you speak English? Every day you are greeted with the unexpected. Yesterday, at the bakery, I caught a Chinese man staring at me from the street. I counted to ten like Yum Lee taught us as children—yut, gni, som, se, ng, luk, chut, bak, gow, sup—his eyes went round like silver dollars!” Elma rubbed her own eyes, feathered with lines of worry, and closed the note with borrowed optimism, “As Raymond says, here is where the nation is being built! This is our home.” She sealed the letter and bundled herself up to head out for her morning chores.
She left Jesse with Miss Tavineer, making sure that the “fresh diapers, a change of clothes in case he soils himself, and something for him to nibble on, mashed the way he likes it,” were noted. She decided to get her neighbor some peppermints to make amends for her shortness earlier and descended the narrow stairs to the street.
Asa Jolly and his wife were just opening up for business. Ray’s old partner owned the building and ran a galley-style saloon on the ground floor. “Asa, Lille,” Elma greeted her nominal landlord with a nod through the plate glass window. Asa waved as he taped a handmade sign to the glass, “Last Stop for Your Last Drop!”
“Thank the Lord Raymond’s done with that life,” she thought to herself, “soon to be done with Hell’s Kitchen altogether!”
She stuck her hands into her muff and headed into the crowded 52nd Street thoroughfare, enveloped by the cacophonous patois of Irish, Russian, Polish, Italian, Yiddish, Southern Negro, and the quick, nasal, percussive speech of Tenderloin natives. She navigated the troughs of ice and sludge, slippery cobblestone, horse shit, and trolley tracks, a hopscotch across the street. Automobile fumes, ash, garbage, sweat, and dreams intermingled, the neighborhood loud and dissonant with impatience.
Routine was her salvation. First, the groceries and produce, then she picked up Raymond’s laundry. “A luxury at ten cents a week, Raymond Minor, but a professional man needs to look the part,” she spoke to the shirt, making sure that the cuff and collars were board stiff and white like he liked them. The visit to the kosher poultry house she saved for last. “Where yah been?” Mr. Ingerman always greeted her. “How’s those beautiful little girls?” he used to add, asking after Gabby and Benna. Elma was thinner and paler and her eyes bespoke the grief she still carried, but she was a stunning woman, a beauty of indeterminate origin. The butcher still flirted with her unabashedly, the normalcy of his banter an awkward gesture of consolation. He always assured her that the hen that she picked was his fattest and the price he quoted was always “a good price, only for you. Okay you turn now,” he announced, amused at her discomfort with the slaughter. Though she had seen her mother and great-grandmother handle the task scores of times, Elma hated the screeching wild rustle of wings, the fierce hysterical pinpoint eyes. She always averted her own as the jocular butcher snatched the hen, wrung its neck, and doused the still-trembling carcass in scalding water. “Plucked clean, only for you, Mrs. Minor.”
“Just enough time to fricassee,” she swallowed and replied, finally opening her eyes to the butcher’s quizzical look. “That’s French, Mr. Ingerman.” She invented a story a ways off from her colored past. “A family recipe for stewed chicken.”
The butcher looked aghast. “Stew! You gonna put this beautiful bird into a pot and turn it into a soup?”
She smiled and held the grocery bag aloft and allowed the delicate aromas to escape. “A rich savory sauce, Mr. Ingerman, with winter vegetables, clove, marjoram, and thyme. The meat just falls off the bone,” she teased. “It’s a feast in a pot. My husband’s favorite.”
The butcher leaned over the counter, mesmerized. “He is a lucky man, your husband, to have a beautiful wife and one who cares what he likes.”
Returning to her building, Elma retrieved her son from Miss Tavineer’s and made her way up the four flights of steep wooden steps with the shopping bag cushioned by the muff in one hand, the laundry under her arm, and Jesse slung on the opposite hip. Her body bent from the weight, she shifted the motionless toddler, hoisting him so that his chin rested more cleanly on her shoulder. “I can see what Miss Tavineer meant, Mr. Minor. You’re gettin’ to be quite a bundle, but we almost there, we almost there . . . A little bit higher, a little bit higher . . .” she began to sing, “I hear music in the air, just above my head, Oh, oh, oh, I hear music in the air, just above my head.” With the creaks in the steps as her chorus, she crooned the familiar spiritual, modulating to a new key with each successive flight. “Each step a bit closer . . . to heaven . . .” She paused at the final stair landing. “Least we got sky, hunh, baby? We still got sky.”
Ridges of frost glazed the windows, the world beyond a pale gray haze. The three-room, top-floor flat at 473 West 52nd Street seemed cavernous in its silence. Her fingers still tingling from the frost, Elma bustled quickly through the living room to the narrow kitchen and propped Jesse up in the corner of his crib so that she could see him while she busied herself preparing dinner.
The skin of the bird had blanched, a few belligerent feathers still wet and limp, the severed neck clotted with blood. She pulled out the innards, then set the bird atop a cutting board and with great efficiency severed the legs and wings at the joints, then cleaved away the rib, back, and breast bones. She dropped the parts into a bubbling broth of onions, spices, rice, and peas. Leaving the dish to simmer, she pushed Jesse’s crib away from the window and opened it wide to take in the afternoon wash of hand-scrubbed laundry among the scalloped rows of clotheslines that ribboned the back alley. The wind bit at her fingers. The clothesline wheel squealed and whined an eerie mechanical protest as Elma drew in the stiff dry clothes, frozen to the touch.
She surveyed the rows of empty, frost-sealed windows. In the fluid community of immigrant women around her, who had the cleanest wash had once been a fierce competition, but she had lost more of her neighbors across the alley, women whose chiding boastful laughter and waves she had grown to anticipate and enjoy. She heard Kitty had gotten a job as a secretary and Mrs. Marrano now worked in the garment district. Little Demetrice, who had occasionally babysat for Gabby and Benna, was now a salesgirl at Gimbels. They could buy things, go to the nickelodeon or café. Even Jolly’s wife worked at the tavern. But Raymond wouldn’t allow her, wouldn’t think of it. How could she anyway? Money for the household but none of my own. Ten cents for collars and cuffs. Her hands cracked and tingled as she folded and sorted the clothes. Her knuckles looked weathered and gnarled. My beautiful hands just like Mama’s now. Red with flecks of skin peeling away, her hands used to glide across a piano. The melody of a sonata she used to play drifted into her mind, reminiscent of her year at Fisk, her year of promise—when she soloed with the Jubilee Singers, her crisp wool skirt, taken in at the waist, white ruffled blouse with a broad straw hat ribboned in the colors of the school, marching in line with the other girls, her long braid whipping behind her.
Beyond the occasional, ephemeral image, she had lost any sensation of that confident student. She had seen in Jolly’s newspaper that one of her old choir mates from college had moved to New York. She thought for a moment to make contact, but What would I say, what would I wear? Instinctively, Elma adjusted an errant lock that had fallen into her eye. Mrs. Marrano, already selling clothes boosted off the racks from her new job in the garment district, had shown her a pink satin dress with a ruffle collar about four inches wide around and cloth-covered buttons down the front. The scalloped skirt had framed her body like a flower, revealing a hint of ankle. How beautiful it would have looked with the garnet earrings, Ray’s present to her on their wedding day. She had stifled her urge to possess it and disdained the purchase. That pink was too youthful, the collar too low, the price too high, and the dress was probably stolen. Besides, who would wear pink in New York? She reddened at the confused rush of desire, guilt, anger. Educated for grace, trained to do nothing. Shouldn’t even be thinking of myself. “Jesse? You awake?”
She checked on her silent child and patted his stomach, “Always hungry, that’s one thing,” then doggedly continued about her tasks. “I know you hear me over there playin’ possum. Don’t pretend you don’t. You can fool someone else, but not me, Jesse Minor, not your mother,” she called over her shoulder. As she sifted flour, she softly sang to him, “I hear music in the air/ Just above my head/ Oh-oh-oh, I hear music in the air/ Just above my head . . .” While the rumbling subterranean trains rattled the windowpanes, Elma pounded the lump of sugar into a fine powder, and ground the spice for the cobbler. Buoyed by the upbeat rhythm of the spiritual, the harmonies that accompanied her in her mind, she sat down to pare the apples, consuming the bruised parts and skin, preserving the clean white slices in lemon juice. Humming to herself, she rocked side to side in her seat, the motion mirroring an internal tension of defiance and surrender.
Raymond had told her that he wanted to build things—that he was putting himself through school by working the show circuit, but she came to understand that he actually liked that life on the road, the street life: Common people. Common had been such a bad word back in Charleston. As a girl in Charleston she had been forbidden to play with the children in the street, and even go near Miss Pilar’s. Now here she was a grown woman with a husband and a child still livin’ above a saloon. “Just till we get settled,” Raymond had said, years ago. Hell’s Kitchen. For the damned. She hated it when these thoughts invaded her. She would dispel them with a flash of lightning from her crown of raven hair. Vow don’t say maybe. Vow say forever. She had burdened him, she decided. Babies dyin’, me laid up for weeks, now Jesse. Distracted, she nicked her thumb. Instinctively, she drew the small pool of blood to her lips. The dank green smell of the hospital corridor for the colored wafted through her memory. A rat had nearly run over her foot the last visit. A whole crew of them zigzagged across the sidewalk in a devil’s reel, a feral taunt. This was their home, too. The indifferent attendant sat her next to a pair of bent shoulders coughing up blood, then four hours later gave her a cream for Jesse’s mottled skin and sent her home, pity and disgust in her eyes, not for the boy, but for Elma. “Colored. What a shame.”
The dinner tasks completed, she heated the water for Jesse’s bath and sat down to scour the daily newspaper borrowed from Mr. Jolly, looking for any advice or news on childcare. The information was so conflicting. One article had said babies needed rest and quiet, another that they needed exercise. “Children grow best when breastfed,” this one said, but her milk had dried from worry. “When weaning, you may want to mix the milk with barley. Milk from Holstein cows is preferred to that of Jersey cows.” Elma laughed once in her belly and folded the paper. None of this spoke to her concern. Could her son even hear her? Surviving scarlet fever right behind the influenza, her one remaining child now was over two and did not speak, walk, or smile. The fever had left him with no voice although he used to stand on his tiptoes at the window, announcing, “Daddy come home.”
While his bath water cooled, Elma walked her son around the corners of the living room, crooning to him softly, avoiding the center where the caskets had sat.
“There’s a very pretty moon tonight,
And I never saw a prettier sight,
Than the girl upon my arm,
I am smitten by her charm,
And the very pretty moon tonight . . .”
She danced the two-step with her tiny partner, holding his diapered bottom as Raymond had held her waist, her cheek on the slope of his neck, his free hand bracing her back. She conjured the Raymond she fell in love with, their meeting and courtship, the rush of sensations in her body as he swirled her around and around, his liquid voice bearing love’s nectar to her lips. The child slumped in her arms, his breathing heavy.
Elma cradled her son’s head and lowered him into a tin tub beside the kitchen sink. Dimpled rolls of fat spilled over the sides of the basin, and his feet slouched limply on the counter. If not in mind, he was certainly growing in body. She changed him into his bedclothes by the stove, then, having warmed his sheets with a hot water bottle, placed him under the covers of the oversized cradle Raymond had made at her insistence. She gazed at her son for a moment, hoping for some sign of recognition, then turned to check the table setting and reheat the dinner. The hour was late, but her courage would not be dampened. Elma Winrow Minor was a warrior. “Where’s your chutzpah?” she demanded, appropriating the neighborhood Yiddish phrase. She would use the lace cloth and the silverware Mah Bette had given her from the remains of Sweet Tamarind, the utensils, if unmatched, at least two to each side. Tonight is a celebration. Deliverance is at hand!
When Bethel A.M.E.’s move to Harlem was just talk, Elma had dragged Raymond to the church on 15th Street. During the fellowship after the service, Elma mentioned to her pastor that Raymond had studied the building trades in college. “Near the top of his class, you know.” The intercession had led to an introduction to Arthur Landry, founder of Landry and Sons, one of only three Negro architectural firms in the city. Mr. Landry sat on the church board. “I know of your uncle,” Landry had said to Raymond, “a fine teacher and scholar.”
It was the break that Raymond needed, that she had prayed for. Though she had prodded him to accompany her to the service and guided him through the songs in the hymnal, Ray had needed no prompting to talk up his ideas. Landry had been so impressed that he offered Ray an associate position. Now, after all the false starts, in less than a year, Ray was poised to take on the premiere assignment of supervising the construction of the church’s new home in Harlem. Elma straightened the doily on the armchair where Miss Tavineer had sat earlier. I can’t wait to offer that old biddy some good news for a change. Once construction was under way, she was sure her family could relocate to an uptown address like the respectable people were doing. The anticipation filled her with a joy that verged on the devilish. The Lord works in mysterious ways! Elma laughed to herself. If only the congregation knew that Raymond had actually gotten his ideas for their new House of God from his stint in burlesque.
“Run-down, no-count, secondhand place fulluh nigguhs!” he would fume. The few months she had shared with him on the road, she often huddled in a cold-water flat, awaiting his return, only to endure his fussing about the construction of the colored circuit houses where he and Jolly most often played. He would bluster and pace. “Wing space, the place had no wing space! Dressing room’s a broom closet.” He often complained that people who built the theaters didn’t have to work in them. “No depth of stage, and those seats! No room for your knees. Aisles on the outside! Every latecomer makes a bigger scene than me and Jolly put together. Complete parallel walls. The sound bounced around like a pool shark’s eight ball.”
“Raymond, the things you say!”
While Raymond was speaking with Landry at the fellowship dinner, Elma fluttered and hovered nearby, praying Ray would just talk about his ideas and not where they came from. And her husband had ideas! “Harlem has promise,” he said. “Harlem could be that great invention,” he went on, “the showplace of the Negro people!” Elma was filled with hope that he had finally found his stride. Each step, a bit closer. A little bit higher, a little bit higher . . .
They had taken the whole family to the spring groundbreaking ceremony, Elma’s face shielded by a broad summer hat. Gabby and Benna raced down the small hills in the cleared corner lot while Jesse squawked loudly in her arms. She watched proudly as Raymond, with his dark brows glowering in the sun, stood with the design team of Harlem’s only colored architect, his foot on the shovel next to the assistant pastor. After the ceremony, Mr. Landry invited the family for a private toast “for a few close associates” at his home around the corner.
Elma gathered their brood. Raymond bounced Jesse, already wanting to catch up to his sisters gaily skipping ahead of them. They strolled onto a block lined with carefully potted young trees. The row of neat, connected brownstones looked unassuming and small, but Ray explained they were Stanford White’s, brilliant in simplicity and line, deceptive in size. When she entered the mahogany vestibule, as the stained glass inlays caught the last rays of the morning sun, the housewife from a fourth-floor Hell’s Kitchen walk-up felt herself delivered to heaven. Brass sconces lined the intricately carved, wood-paneled halls. Chandelier crystals danced in the light. Elma couldn’t wait to move to Harlem! She took Jesse from Raymond and watched their two little daughters shadow their father around the gathering. Though she had not been able to afford a new dress, she wore her hair in a crown, wound into spiral coils over each ear like Guinevere, the garnet-drop earrings Raymond had given her just visible. Mr. Landry approached her and gushed, “My dear, I don’t believe you realize you’re the most beautiful woman in the room.”
“My husband is due far greater compliments than I, sir.”
“Yes, but he’s not my type,” Landry quipped mischievously. To her look of bewilderment, he chuckled, “Call me Arthur, please.”
On the subway ride home, while her cheeks were still warm from the sip of sherry she allowed herself, Raymond paced the car. “What did you call yourself doing?”
“I was just singing your praises.”
That was spring, a world ago. Elma gazed out the kitchen window at the darkening twilight, crystal veins of frost forming on the panes.
Early turns of fortune in his Chesapeake childhood created in Raymond Minor a fundamental imbalance that made him prone to pendulum swings of action most of his life. While his grandfather had held a lesser federal Reconstruction office, Raymond’s mother was a Baltimore whore. She died when he was seven and he was brought to Washington to live with his high-toned colored relatives, the Minors—respectable, high-class folks descended of Reconstruction legislators, freedmen and mechanics, scholars and teachers, men of letters and breeding and ladies of class and culture. “All refined, all free people of color,” his grandmother would say as she stooped to hang her own wash in the brown grass backyard, “not a slave among them!” All the while covering her barely brown arms with long white gloves so as never to darken.
The whole family, a guarded people within the narrow range from taupe to alabaster, could not accept, refused to discuss, didn’t dare imagine his parents’ union. However brief and whatever the circumstances, which he never came to know, it had shaken the very foundation upon which their reality was built. Raymond’s grandmother took every opportunity to berate him for his father’s “shackin’ up with that low-bred, street-walkin’ mother of yours,” as if the fall from grace were a disease he had brought upon the whole family, tree rot down to the root.
By the time Raymond was twelve, his grandfather had shrunk in stature as well. The old man squandered his pennies in drink and golden tales of olden days, bewailing the Jim Crow squeeze that had removed even peripheral government jobs from colored hands, even as his had given over to tremors. Reduced to managing a neighborhood burlesque house that featured dames just like Raymond’s mother, his grandpap could be found most often by the stage door, a soused and passed-out sentry.
His uncle, who had matriculated through a small Southern college and remained there as professor of music, rescued him. Childless himself, his uncle, Professor Minor, sought to steer Raymond away from his forebears’ profligate course toward the next generation of Negro leadership, but Ray chafed under the insular rigidity, the pastoral setting, and the chasms of caste and class between the light-skinned self-designated Talented Tenth and their darker-hued brethren demanding autonomy and a share of authority. He discovered in the small land grant colored college the same pretentious posturing of his grandparents, the same small-minded, narrow vision, the same pattern of mistrust and betrayal that had so bedeviled his youth. “Nigguhs in a haystack, crabs in a barrel.”
He was invited to join the No Nations Club, those so fair-skinned that their racial path required decision. Every year a dozen or so disappeared into whiteness. Instead, Ray quit the college, thumbed his nose at his uncle’s expectation that he would become a builder for a fling at a life in song and dance, staving off his ambivalence with a lacquer treatment of burnt cork, cavalierly aiming to travel, a white-faced fraud by day, a black-faced clown by night, following the rambling path of his confusion, a drunkard sailor stumbling along from one strange foreign port to another. Then he saw Elma, then he heard her sing, a melody like a breeze across his face. That damned singing.
They lost their first child in stillbirth, on a stopover in Cleveland. Raymond came back to the boarding house to find Elma sitting in a tub of cold crimson water. He had not even realized. Clearly she was too fragile for the road. His commitment to show business being faint, when his partner Jolly decided to pull out—“Got myself this brownstone,” he said, “gon’ turn the bottom floor into a saloon, a men’s drinking joint”—Raymond followed and settled in New York, letting the upstairs flat. Then Gabriela was born with rich purple curls and golden Benna, named after his grandfather. Then Jesse, who would peek out the window, already trying to stand up.
At the funeral, Elma sat on the side of the bed, her crying incessant, her face unrecognizable. He tried as he knew to reach her, to help her get dressed. “We should make another child,” he said as he held her by the shoulders. She fell upon the ground, her body quaking, her back arched, hands distended till the bones nearly popped from her skin. “Another, a-nuth-er ch-child!” she stuttered. “Don’t touch me! Lord! Don’t! Leave me be!” then curled up like a stone and never cried again. The loss of iron, they said, had turned Elma’s once warm skin to a sallow bruised hue, deep circles under her wide dry eyes. Like the sirens offering rescue, then dashing mariners to their deaths, the passion that she riled in him had brought only misery, guilt, and anger.
As he walked home from Landry’s office in Harlem, traces of her melody teased him through the howling January winds. Iced wind-shears cracked his skin. White breath caps punctuated his heavy stride. Ray crossed the near abandoned intersection of 52nd and Eighth, the neighborhood gypsters, whores, gypsies, garage attendants, and pushcart owners having taken shelter in the ubiquitous taverns and saloons, and arrived at Jolly’s Place.
His nostrils reluctantly breathed in the familiar, warm, musky tavern air. Jolly was telling one of his stories, looking for a chorus. “Face the orchestra, damn it! I’d say,” he hollered above the din. “Never used to understand it. He’d stand there with that big old silver head of wiry hair of his and conduct just as graceful.” Jolly waved his arms above his head in pert comical curlicues. Beckoning Ray with two middle fingers, he continued one of his standard tales of the “World’s worst pit conductor! Facing the audience, his back to the band, like he was the star!” Laughter sidled through the chain of men, punctuated with clicks and taps and shouting.
Ray eased his way through the crowd. The narrow galley could neatly accommodate fifty customers. They were two and three deep tonight, leaning over the counter. It was January 1920. The Volstead Act was due to take effect in a few days. Both regulars and newcomers were guzzling mugs of beer and throwing down shots as if their bodies could stock up. The joint was bulging. The room had the loud boisterous gaiety of a blue-collar wake. “Another round?! — Aye! — Drink up, boys! Make room for my partner, so’s he can catch up!”
“Man’s gotta right,” a regular halfheartedly argued. “It’s interfering with the states. New York got rights.” He hiccupped. “Won’t hold.”
“Damn hillbillies,” Jolly snapped as he mopped down the mahogany bar top and slapped a shot on the counter for Ray, “moonshinin’ for a hunnud years, now gonna dictate to the nation! Just got the joint goin’ and here they come, pullin’ the rug right from under me like a bad comedy routine.”
In their show act, Ray, the straight man, had always followed the wisecracking Jolly onto the stage. When Jolly gave up the life, Ray did likewise. Ray told himself it was for Elma’s sake. For Jolly the reason was simpler. Between road feuds and living hand to mouth, he couldn’t take the food. “Hospital stay in Cincinnati and some bad barbecue in Denver, after that, took my earnings and bought me something steady,” he would tell anybody. He ran a saloon with regular eats at 52nd, between Seventh and Eighth. Jolly contentedly cooked for himself and the small world of show people, mostly musicians, who often stopped by. Bookended by Marshall’s and the Clef Club on 53rd Street, his tavern was becoming the hub of the colored music scene until Irish dives like Bucket of Blood moving up from the Five Points and the push south from San Juan Hill started squeezing out the colored from the Tenderloin. “Colored feelin’ unwelcome, even in the slum,” Jolly joked. The old German Jewish neighborhood of Harlem on the Upper West Side had begun to lure the upscale folk, their churches, and the few remaining high rollers. Still, Jolly owned his building square and was reluctant to leave. Always a realist, he kept a billy club and a shotgun behind the counter and a pistol in the garter of his sock.
“Fellah from Rothsteins’ come in yestiddy, say could keep me in supply—told me tuh serve it in teacups. Say cops, city already hooked up. Trucks loaded and routes mapped out. Business as usual.”
His wife, Lille, looked up, frowning.
“What you looking at, missy?” he joked. “Can’t you see we got customers here?” He leaned into Ray, “Gotta treat em like that to keep em sassy,” then reared back and bellowed, “When my illustrious colleagues go to Tin Pan Alley to get fleeced, here in Hell’s Kitchen, we got eats which they can still afford. Call it Ten-der-loin!” He elongated the word with relish and laughed so that his shoulders shook. Jolly, who was stocky and muscular, walked on his toes, not so much to compensate for his height, but more to demonstrate a quickness and sharpness. He was tight. Even with his protruding belly, you could still see the curve of his haunch through his pants.
Lille methodically rinsed glasses and mugs, then just as methodically dried them, then turned to dish up plates of Jolly’s famous rib-tips. Tall, with a turned-up nose, she talked little. To her consternation, her common-law husband Asa “Ace” Jolly used to play a decent stride piano, and even then talked all the time.
“You gonna take the offer?” Ray asked.
“Don’t much think so. Considering opening up a little grocery store, though. Say, you could design it for me! Drawing it up and such . . . Last round before supper, everybody! Last round, Last Supper!” he shouted down the galley. He slapped Ray on the side of the arm and served him a sympathy shot on the house. “Drink up, my friend. Two more days of freedom, then we all got to think another game.”
Ray slugged down the shot in one angry motion. “Got fired today.”
Jolly rolled his eyes. “Again?” Jolly, who presumed all people were cutthroat and out to destroy, seemed to contradict himself with his loyalty to Ray. He stuck by his old partner—“Rubbing shoulders with the aristocracy,” he called it, “the golden days of Reconstruction, first taste of liberty, schools, gov’ment, and all that, when black folks walked the halls of Congress as lawmakers, not as butlers”—while he secretly delighted in Ray’s floundering. The dependency seemed a marker of his own increased capacity.
But then there was Elma, rare and delicate as an orchid. Raymond had no appreciation, he was sure. “College man ain’t got a clue what to do with that.” When she started losing the children, Asa’s envy turned to pity. Everybody lost children, especially in the Tenderloin, but the couple’s inability to recover he attributed to a weakness in their blood, an inherited self-absorption he found fascinating.
Ray huddled over the bar; his long legs straddled the corner seat. “What am I going to tell Elle?”
“Fuck that. What you gonna do?” Jolly retorted, his dishrag balled up in his fist. Jolly looked over toward his wife, then palmed Ray some cash. “Just till you get straight. Consider it a down payment on the build. My new grocery store.” He threw up his hands to Ray’s refusal. “I’m good, I’m good. Till it goes into effect, Prohibition’s the best thing ever happened to me.”
The Tenderloin, despite its poverty and reputation, or maybe because of it, offered mobility. During the war, with immigration down and single men on the front, Ray got work easily. With his swarthy looks and his knack for capturing accents, he could fall in with various pick-up crews. He spoke a few phrases of Italian and a lovely Irish brogue. Black Irish, they called him, not knowing the half. Redeploying his theatrical skills, he navigated around the unions’ barring of blacks and the clannishness of the trade guilds, inventing characters and backgrounds to suit the moment. The masquerade worked beautifully when work was plentiful and the skilled labor pool scarce.
A wave of great inventions—electric lights, moving pictures, telephones, phonographs, human flight, automobiles for the common man—had made the world suddenly exhilarated and confusing, wide-eyed with hope and an unconditional faith in possibility, speeding into the future. Intoxicated by these new ways of thinking, Raymond chose experiences that gave him the best exposure, new ways of seeing space and structure—subway tunneling, bridge construction, skyscrapers. While others quaked at the thought of working the tall girders, arms akimbo, Ray stood flat-footed on the steel beams, breathing in the light atmospheric clouds like ether. His dream of becoming an architect rekindled, Raymond volunteered to make the blueprint copies and change orders, listening, observing, asking questions, practicing his drafting. He had ideas, but invariably he would undercut himself and irritate the wrong guy, threaten with the wrong question, challenge at the wrong time. Man of No Nation, when he got to the portal of choice, he would freeze or fold or turn trickster on himself, a skyscraper worker who could trip up a flight of stairs.
Harlem was Elma’s choice, not his, but Landry’s firm, one of three Negro architects in the city, had appeared to be the opportunity he was seeking.
The construction of A.M.E. Bethel was well ahead of schedule. Even unfinished it had become a showplace. Standing in the frame of the steeple, Ray had watched Landry take a group of church and city representatives on a tour of the construction site. He could tell from the hand gestures that Landry clearly had absorbed some of Raymond’s ideas. He was even using Raymond’s language. “The pulpit will be extended to thirty feet, and the audience will have a center aisle and two to each side. Notice how the walls are beveled to improve acoustics.” As winter set in, work on the plans had given Raymond grounding, a focus outside the mourning. Breath.
“Mr. Minor.” Landry’s secretary, a flat pancake-faced girl with sly eyes, stood at the entrance to Landry’s inner office, her hand on the knob, a heel balanced on the opposite shoe. “Mr. Landry will see you now.”
He sat down, determining when he would speak. Landry began first. “Next project, Minor, I’m putting Bainbridge in charge. From now on, you should report to him.”
“Bainbridge?” Ray said in disbelief. Maybe he hadn’t heard right. “You want me to work under Bainbridge? A junior staffer, barely twenty?”
“Well, you’re both junior staff. He’s twenty-five, fresh out of the army, focused. Bethel is a fast-track project. If we’re to be done before Easter, there’ll be a lot of late nights. You have a family to attend.”
“That has nothing to do with it. How can you make him the lead on a project that is my design?”
“Now see here, Minor, you made some notes on a blueprint. That hardly constitutes a design. I took you in because you showed a promise, which frankly has barely panned out. I’ve kept you as long as I have out of deference to your family’s situation.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“I am sorry you lost your children, especially sorry for your wife—”
“You leave her out of this.”
“I’ve made my decision.”
“You wouldn’t have a decision to make were it not for the work that I already did for you.”
Landry’s mouth twitched. He brusquely twisted the curled end of his mustache.
“My dear demented fellow, you seem to think that because you are a Minor, you are somehow entitled. I make decisions based on merit, on what makes for the best team, and you, frankly, are not fitting into it. I was prepared to keep you on in a position, but with this—”
“To hell with your position!” Nigguhs in a haystack. Crabs in a barrel. Pincers clawing at my neck. “You’ve stolen my design without crediting me.”
Landry’s eyebrows rose. “You credit yourself too much, Mr. Minor. Your check will be mailed. Good day.”
Raymond pondered the state of his world going up the wooden back steps. No job. No Nation. Now what? . . . Why not just cross over? He could, on occasion, spot someone he knew was passing—by hair, aura, features, gesture, walk. He would often stroll with his little girl Gabby through the department stores. People marveled at her dark hair and onyx eyes, never knowing, but with Jesse, his mute, clearly colored child, this was not possible. Ray had been so happy to get a son. The ruddy complexion, thick kinky hair, and broad stubborn jaw of his grandfather bound him to an identity, but he loved his boy, right down to the turned-out, flat, narrow feet just like Pap’s. Jesse had been so gleeful, so animated. His one remaining child. Daddy’s home. Now nothing.
Ray had it all the spring before. Job, family, even the flu. It laid him up a couple of days, then he was back to work. When the same bug returned in September, he thought nothing of it as he left for the site. The kids were sniffling a bit, but Elma was there. He stayed late, determined to get the church steeple frame built before the onset of cold. She sent word by Jolly.
He found her flying from child to child. Gabby’s red eyes darted in panic, her shivering face turned purple, gasping for breath. Jesse, with ugly, red welts, skin so hot, he was boiling inside. The little red bubbles in Benna’s saliva flowed like a string of Venetian beads from the corner of her mouth on a bare thread of fetid air. His golden child a grimaced old troll, drowned in his arms. Jesse alone survived, the welts peeled away, a dying man’s skin.
Some scratchy Victrola crooned through the window frozen open on the stairwell, a delta Yellow Dawg ballad, notes hangin’ in the air like crystal.
“He had it all before,
Then Death come knockin’ at the door,
Life looked so good in June,
Then Death come stalkin’ by the winter moon . . .”
Before the key touched the lock, Elma had swung the door open and quickly cupped her arm under Jesse’s stubby thighs as she shifted the boy on her hips. “Look, Jesse, Dah-dah’s home.” The baby’s eyes were vacant. His head jerked backward in an involuntary spasm while his neck, struggling to keep upright, bobbled as a slow spinning plate would on a stick.
“Old man Landry had to cancel the meeting,” hat in hand, he lied, not wanting to hear about a move uptown, apartment with a yard—air. “How is he?”
“His name’s Jesse,” Elma said firmly. “Your son has a name.” Ray put his hand to his forehead, pressed the middle finger on the space between his brows, and closed his eyes. “You should call him by his name,” she softened. “It helps him. Call him by his name.” Straining her shoulders, she handed Ray the child, a jostling sack of loose potatoes.
“It would help if you talked straight to him. I’m not Dah-dah. I’m . . . his father.”
She had retreated to the stove. “I’ve got fricassee, your favorite.”
Raymond approached her from behind, nuzzled his face in her hair. She turned to him and squeezed his hand. He was amazed that she still blushed. The yellow gaslight hit the timbre of her skin, the pitch of the air a fine-tuned cymbal. Tendrils of black hair framed her neck and face, delicate and fierce as a swan’s.