And Do Remember Me (11 page)

She was nearing Lincoln Center. It was five o’clock and the streets were jammed with traffic, teeming with pedestrians. Gradually, unconsciously, she had abandoned the leisurely gait that had carried her across the terrain of her life in the south. Now Pearl walked, like everybody else in Manhattan, as though her life depended on it. She walked as though in flight from unimaginable, yet certainly impending, danger. She walked as though the essence of life itself lay in the speedy, efficient propulsion of her arms and legs. She walked now, she was sure, with more purpose than she had ever possessed before.

When Pearl opened the door of the Gingerman, she immediately saw Simone at a table near the front window. Simone was wearing a wig so Pearl figured she must have had an audition today, too. Six feet, pecan-colored, possessed of a laugh that could raise the dead, Simone—who only used one name—was pushing forty. She liked to say “pushing it out the way.” A decade earlier, she had come to New York from Kansas City with plans to make it big, and had been only marginally successful, playing small, sporadic roles on a couple of the daytime soap operas, being an understudy for countless roles, doing regional theater. But despite her lack of major success she was determined to “stay in the fight” as she liked to say, because, she often told Pearl, “Honey, I got my pride, and I aim to take a bite out of the apple before it takes a bite outta me.” Simone had started a support group for black actresses, which Pearl had found out about, and they had hit it off. The Shebas met informally once a month and the meetings were part therapy, part crying on shoulders and part sharing of information about what was coming up, developing in the business.

“Well, if you don’t look like hell,” Simone said, when Pearl slumped into the chair across from her. “Was it that bad?”

“Worse. I never had them. Not for one moment during the entire audition. I don’t know what happened.” Pearl kicked off her shoes under the table and rubbed one foot against the other.

“Maybe this wasn’t your part.”

“It
was
, Simone, I swear it was.”

“Well, honey, you and every other black actor in this city or in a two-thousand-mile radius is saying the same thing this evening. A revival of
Raisin in the Sun
, you knew the competition would be crazy. And I warned you a callback don’t mean you got the gig. You ain’t got the part till you standing on stage opening night, and even then watch your back.”

The waiter came to their table and Pearl ordered a glass of wine.

“Well, where are you coming from?”

“Told you I had that audition for the Coca-Cola commercial, right?”

“Yeah, how’d it go?”

“The director told me I didn’t sound black enough. Can you dig that? I didn’t sound black enough. When the bastard’s back was turned I started rolling my eyes, makin em big and bug-eyed and mouthing ‘Mammy.’ Told
me
I didn’t sound black enough. I was sixty seconds away from slapping him.”

The waiter brought her wine and Pearl reached for it eagerly.

“I can see the headlines now,” Pearl said. “Crazed black actress assaults director.”

“Driven over the edge by stereotyped roles,” Simone said.

“Were there a lot of people?”

“Now what do you think? If we’d had some fried chicken and some sangria we could’ve had a party.”

“I just don’t know what to do, Simone. I’m so starved for a role I’d do almost anything.”

“I saw an ad for a role in a porn flick.”

“You know what I mean. I feel like I’m just marking time until my next role. Nothing seems to matter unless it takes place under the lights, on stage.”

“I was a stripper once, between jobs,” Simone confessed, her eyes clouding at the memory. “But since I invested in those singing lessons I can usually rustle something up,” she said brightly. “I tell you, Pearl, you could do worse than to oil them vocal cords, get out there and learn to sing and dance like all good darkies do.”

“Simone, I worked so hard,” Pearl pleaded.

“And, honey, tomorrow is another day. I’m not putting you or your old man down when I say this, but you had it easy, kid, down there in the south. What actress wouldn’t give her right arm to be sleeping with the playwright and the director. The competition for parts in the Renaissance South troupe wasn’t nothing compared to the competition you’re facing now. Maybe you weren’t coddled but you had it a lot easier than most actresses ever get it. I’ve seen you in the workshop productions, and I know you’re
good
, Pearl. But, sister, this is the big time and the streets are crowded. There’s hundreds of hungry brown babies out there and you’re just one.”

“I
THINK WE
can do it, man, I really think we can,” Raj said, picking up Lincoln’s manuscript, thumbing through it and then tossing it onto his desk. “It’s powerful. With the grant we just finished doing the paperwork on we could mount it in a couple
of months.” The phone rang, and Raj boomed into the receiver, “Yeah I been waiting to hear from you. Where you been?” He settled back into his chair and propped his feet on his desk. Gaining Raj’s attention for a moment, Lincoln pointed to the theater area and began easing out of the office quietly.

From Raj’s office Lincoln walked onto the stage of the three-hundred-seat theater. It was ninety-eight degrees outside but the theater was as drafty as a barn. The seats faced Lincoln in various stages of disrepair, some with ripped covers, others soiled and stained. An odorous fog of plaster and paint hung over the theater from the constant need to patch and repair the building inside and out. Still it was a theater, and soon his play would unfold on its stage.

When he and Pearl arrived in New York the play possessed the same soft, rounded edges that had always characterized his work. But he had hooked up with Raj and taken the temperature of the city, talked to some other playwrights. Soon he could see and feel his work becoming bolder, edgier. Already he had notes for a more radical play, one set in a post-black-revolutionary America. Maybe the stage was the only place the revolution would happen. If that was the way it turned out he wanted to be one of the people who at least made it happen there.

Lincoln and Raj had hit it off immediately. Raj was familiar with his work, thought well of it, but, when they first met, he was between grants and had no money to bring on a resident playwright. So they just hung out together. Lincoln would stop by and they’d sit in Raj’s office or go to a nearby bar for a drink and talk for hours.

Raj Ali was a gargantuan, bearded man whose face was as pliable and surprising as a mask. Moods flitted across his visage with a volatile, frightening speed. His jokes possessed the brusqueness of a threat and his praise hungered for entry into
whatever secrets the recipient had not yet revealed. Raj had served time in prison but wouldn’t talk about why, though Lincoln had heard rumors of a murder charge. While Lincoln was developing plays in the south, Raj was reading his poetry in bars, and writing over a dozen experimental/third-stream plays with themes that were rooted in African mythology and history, metaphysics and astrology, all of which he had studied in prison. With a band of supporters he had squatted in the building that now housed the theater company and Mau-Maued the borough president’s office into turning it over to them to use for a community theater.

Raj eased his huge frame onto the edge of the stage beside Lincoln and sat down.

“We’re gonna be hellified, Lincoln, you and me, just hellified,” he promised. “You just got to get a little more angry, get mad, brother, mad as hell. Black rage is the thing,” he laughed.

“Yeah, folks’ll pay to hear it but they just won’t listen,” Lincoln agreed.

“So what? I consider myself a revolutionary but there’s only so much plays can do, ask Mao or Fidel, they’ll tell you where real power comes from. But right now, Lincoln, you got the chance to be a hero. Everywhere you look the heroes are the cultural folk. And whites financing it all. Lining up on Broadway to hear us tell them to kiss our ass, now can you dig that? Only in America, man, only in America. You got bloods performing African rituals on the stage in Harlem, shuffling and jiving and slapping palms on Forty-seventh Street, casting spells and traditional dramas down in the Village and raising political hell in Brooklyn. Man, I got out of jail just in time.”

Yeah, only in America, Lincoln thought. He saw as many dashikis as three-piece suits. Every black person he knew who was in the system claimed he was only on the inside so he could change it.

Hustler, political idealogue, manipulator, call him what you like, and Lincoln had heard Raj called that and more, they sat at that moment on the stage of a theater that Raj controlled and was waiting for the city to loan him the money to renovate.

Raj had lent him books on African philosophy, history, metaphysics, as well as a copy of the Egyptian
Book of the Dead
. Lincoln often wondered if this intellectual and cultural exchange was Raj’s way of justifying his own choices.

The woman a man chooses to love, how many women he needs to possess, was, Lincoln felt, as accurate a barometer of his politics as the vote he cast. Raj Ali was the father of five children. The husband to two wives. Though they were not Muslim, his wives, whenever Lincoln saw them, were veiled, and long clothes swathed their bodies. Their faces were cut in two by cloth, their eyes and forehead a stunning half-moon. Yet even beneath the veils the women were not extinguished. Their uniqueness had resisted suppression. Malika’s reticent composure was elegant and staunch. She crossed the room like a Masai, her face possessing a fragile, Ethiopian beauty. Fundi’s vitality turned her veil into a kind of regalia encasing but not diluting the aura of sexual intensity that hovered around her like a perfume. Prurient interest, and plain curiosity, had blazed inside Lincoln when he’d learned of Raj’s polygamous marriage.

One afternoon he had gone to meet Raj at his house and the youngest wife, Malika, had answered the door. Though she immediately turned her head when Lincoln entered, he still saw the bruises beneath her eyes and the puffiness of her cheeks. He followed her into the living room. Moments later Raj entered the room and hurried Lincoln toward the door, saying casually over his shoulder, “I’ll be back later this evening.”

Outside in front of Raj’s car, Lincoln asked, “What happened to Malika, man, what happened?” Raj turned on Lincoln, his
eyes ramming into him. “What do you mean, man, what do you mean, what happened?” The militant denial that curled in Raj’s voice, the combativeness of his stance as he stood gripping the car door, waiting for Lincoln to say more, doused Lincoln’s nascent sense of outrage at what he suspected. In a moment of cowardice that he would always remember, he shrugged and merely mumbled, “Nothing, man, forget it.” But the sight of Malika haunted him the rest of that evening.

B
Y THE TIME
Pearl left the Ginger Man she was radiating the cozy reassuring glow that several glasses of wine shared with a friend produced. She and Simone walked to the Fifty-ninth Street subway and said good-bye in the station before heading off to catch different trains.

Later, walking along the sweltering summer streets of Harlem, Pearl fumbled in her bag and found a breath mint and popped it in her mouth. Lincoln had begun calling her a lush, making comments about the two or three glasses of wine she sometimes drank before bed, or when she came home from work, or when she was preparing for an audition. She couldn’t bear the thought of a fight about that tonight. Not with everything else. So she decided to try two mints and prayed they worked. Sometimes, she now knew from experience, they didn’t.

All the actors she’d met had something, some fix, some mantra, some charm, to get them through the bloody awfulness of their lives—the constant rejection, the requirement to sell themselves, to hustle, to always look great, to act as if they didn’t need a job when they were really desperate for work.

Some were into yoga, others meditation; some did drugs, drank; there were Jesus freaks, actors who’d been in therapy for years trying to find out why they hadn’t made it yet. She even knew some who used sex to ease the pain.

As she let herself into the lobby of their apartment building, she stopped to retrieve from the mailbox several bills, a magazine and two letters. Pearl opened Macon’s letter and read it as she trudged up the three flights to their apartment. Macon wrote that she and Courtland were thinking of leaving Greenwood to move to Boston. Courtland had applied to Harvard’s law school and she was sending out for catalogues to study sociology. She wondered in the letter how relevant school, college, would be again after all the years “in the real world.” But she finished by saying that they both felt they had to get certain pieces of paper to do the things they wanted politically.

There was also a letter from her sister, Mae Ann. When she sat down at the kitchen table, Pearl noticed that the envelope of Mae Ann’s letter was stained and wrinkled, the stamp pasted on upside down. The letter looked as though the journey to reach her had been as tortured as the feelings it evoked in Pearl. She propped it against the sugar bowl, trying to gather the courage to open it. She had fled home, family, kith and kin, changed her name, but looking at that letter she knew none of it mattered, that she would live and die Jessie Foster.

Before leaving Atlanta, Pearl had traveled back to Columbus to say good-bye to her sister. Mae Ann and Tyrone Marshall had married a year after their first child was born and now they had two other children. Tyrone was a trucker, hauling grocery items across the south for a major chain store. A quiet young man, Tyrone was as steady and as predictable, Mae Ann complained, as a tree. He made good money but was away much of the time.

When she entered Mae Ann’s house that day, Jessie had found her brother Willie sitting on the sofa in the living room in
a starched and pressed army uniform, sipping a beer. When he saw Jessie, he leaped from the sofa and hugged her saying, “My sistuh, the famous actress. Hey, yall, come, look who’s here,” he shouted to the back of the house. Mae Ann came out of the kitchen and hugged Jessie warmly.