Celeste's Harlem Renaissance (2 page)

“Time for you to bake the governor some more pecan pies and Lady Baltimore cake,” Poppa told Mrs. Smithfield, and coughed. “So you can bring us what he doesn’t eat.”

“I’ll do that come Wednesday,” she said. “Taylor, you really ought to do something about that cough.”

“A piece of pecan pie’ll take care of it.” He laughed.

“Say, Taylor, when’s Valentina coming back down to visit?” Mr. Smithfield asked. “That girl must truly love New York. She still living in that mansion and singing and dancing and driving that Pierce-Arrow? Now, that’s a fine car!”

“As far as I know, she’s still doing all that,” Poppa replied. “Be nice to see her, but she loves the big city and the fast life. You know how badly she wants to break into the big time and be on Broadway. She’s doing those little cafés and plays and joints and rent parties and working for that ole fat opera singer.”

“I’d love to see her, too,” I said. “Remember one time when she was here how she showed us those Harlem dances, and let me try on her fake mink fur? She even put a little of her rouge and face powder and perfume on me.” Momma said I looked pretty, but when Aunt Society came over to our house from hers around the corner, she said I looked like a clown. That set off a big fight between her and Aunt Valentina.

“Cece, you wanna live in New York and wear rouge?” Mr. Smithfield laughed.

“Oh, I’d love the rouge, but I’d never leave Poppa!”

“We sure Lord do miss your momma,” Mrs. Smithfield said kindly. “Elizabeth was like a sister to me, too.”

Poppa cleared his throat. “We better get on, girlio. You know how Society hates to wait on us for her supper.”

“Lord have mercy on your taste buds,” Mr. Smithfield said.

Before we reached our house, I told Poppa what Aunt Society had said about my color and the sun. “Seems like she can’t have a good day unless she can say something mean to me.” I kicked a rock.

“Too bad when she was raising me and my brothers back in Morehead City that she didn’t get some practice raising girls, too. Pray for her to have more patience and understanding with you, and you with her.”

“All she likes to do with me is raise Cain,” I fussed. Glancing toward our kitchen window, I lowered my voice. “I’m praying that the Lord’ll find a way for me to not have to be bothered with her clacking tongue!”

“Here, quit that talk. You pray for something like that and you might have it come back on you, and not in a good way. But I know what you mean. She makes me want to pull out every hair of my mustache with her yapping and fussing.”

“She’da had a conniption, too, if she’d heard us bragging on Aunt Valentina,” I added.

After Momma got down sick, Aunt Society started coming over every day to our house from hers to help clean up and cook. She threw out the cosmetics Aunt Valentina had left us. She said they would corrupt us like they had Aunt Valentina. According to that ole bat, Aunt Valentina was a loose woman whose powder, perfume, and hoochie-coochie dancing would send her to the Devil’s Pit of Never-Ending Fire. I figured if somebody as nice as Aunt Valentina had to go down there, Aunt Society would be waiting to meet her.

As soon as we got into the kitchen, Aunt Society started banging the pots and pans and snapping at me. “Didn’t I tell you to wear your bonnet to keep you out of that sun? You don’t listen to a thing I say.” She brushed at a spot of grease on her apron dress.

“Let her be, Society. The sun’s going down,” Poppa said. “Cece, turn on the lights. It’s dark in here.” He winked at me. I smiled back at him, grateful.

After I washed my hands, I poured hot water from the teakettle on the stove into the teapot, and dropped sassafras bark, a stick of cinnamon, and a teaspoon of honey into it for Poppa’s tea. Momma had taught me that sassafras tea strengthened and purified the blood in the spring. Poppa drank it all year long. Then I helped Aunt Society carry supper to the table. Didn’t take us long to eat, because Poppa usually just picked at his food. I knocked mine down quick so I wouldn’t have to waste my taste buds on her rubbery chicken, watery greens, hard corn bread, and mushy turnips. My aunt gobbled hers down, too, but that was because she claimed she liked what she fixed. Nobody talked much at the table. Not since Momma passed. My aunt said she couldn’t stand all that jibber jabber around her food.

Sunday was when Aunt Society let us sit in the parlor. It was the prettiest room in the house, reserved for guests, special occasions, and Sundays, with shelves of our books, the Thomas Day sideboard where we displayed Momma’s fanciest dishes, and our best rocking chairs and couch. Momma’s piano had been in there, too.

Poppa lay down on the couch with his tea. “Turn on the Westrand, Cece,” he said. That was Poppa’s radio. He called it “the Westrand” like he owned the whole company. I carefully fiddled with the knobs, trying to bring in the
Sunday Evening Serenade
program from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, while the radio popped, screeched, and spat static. “Maybe one day we’ll hear Aunt Valentina singing on a New York station,” I murmured to Poppa.

Aunt Society rolled in in her wheelchair, with her lap full of muslin cloth to make into sheets. She was the only person I knew who loved to sit in a wheelchair, even though she didn’t need to. When she went to her own or a sewing customer’s house, she set everything in her wheelchair and pushed it where she needed to go.

She poked me on the shoulder. “Straighten that thing out,” she said, pointing to the Westrand.

“I’m trying.” I rubbed my arm. Her bony fingers felt as sharp as her sewing needles. By the time I had the Westrand right, the show was already on. I wrapped myself in Momma’s ivory-colored cashmere shawl and curled up in her rocking chair. “Isn’t that one of James Reese Europe’s songs, Poppa?”

“Cece, be quiet so we can hear,” Aunt Society ordered. “That Mr. Europe was our most famous Colored composer and conductor,” she added. She poked her sewing needle in and out of the cloth in time to the music. “He performed in New York and Boston before the war, and in France during it. Your Poppa saw Mr. Europe and his band.”

You ole jabbering thing, you forgot you just told me to be quiet!
I cupped my hand to my ear to hear better. She got the message and hushed up. The solemn notes of “Clair de Lune,” one of my favorite songs, swept into the room. I stretched out in the rocker to better embrace the sound.

“Celeste, sit up like a lady,” she barked. I sat up, trying not to frown. Scott Joplin’s “Maple Leaf Rag” bounced over the airwaves next. I tapped my foot and snapped my fingers until she told me to stop. “Taylor, your child’s soul will go straight to the Devil’s Pit if she keeps listening to that new ragtime stuff. Turn it off till another song comes on.”

“Nothing’s wrong with ragtime. I guess she takes after me, ’cause I like it,” Poppa replied. While Aunt Society grunted and humphed, I went back to tapping and snapping until the song ended.

After the last notes in the program faded, Aunt Society told me to turn off the Westrand and the electric lights. Momma kept our frosted carnival glass chandelier lights blazing and the radio on all Sunday evening. People used to drop in to talk and laugh. “Sunday used to be fun,” I said.

“Sunday’s supposed to be set aside for the Lord, and ain’t nothing fun about that,” Aunt Society replied as she lit the oil lamps. Greasy oil stink flared up around me. My clothes always reeked of it. The oil funked up my bed worse than the lard she slicked down on what was left of my thin hair.

I wiggled onto the couch beside Poppa. On this pretty spring night I wasn’t ready to go to bed with a cloud of oily smoke dangling over my head yet. “Poppa, tell me that balloon story again.”

Aunt Society looked up from her sewing. “Not that old stale tale again, Taylor. You need to rest.”

“I been resting since I got home,” Poppa told her. He turned to me. “In 1883 a little girl and her folks were staying at the Morehead Hotel by the bay. This child wasn’t more than two or three years old. Her daddy bought her a bunch of red balloons from a vendor fella and gave ’em to her. He tied the strings around her waist. Right off those balloons lifted her clear up in the air! They carried her over trees, church steeples, the lighthouse, over the bay. She screamed and screamed. Her daddy ran in circles, jumping up to grab after her. Her momma fainted.” He paused, shaking his head.

“Some fishermen hopped into boats and paddled after her, but their boats couldn’t keep up with that wind blowing those balloons so hard. There was only one thing left to do. Know what it was?” He raised his eyebrows at me, then continued. “Shoot the balloons one by one, and bring her down before she got blown out to sea.”

I wrapped my arms around Poppa’s right arm and laid my cheek against his shoulder, feeling his bones against my face. What if Poppa changed the story, and the men shot
her
instead of the balloons? I imagined myself clutching balloons above the waves while poisonous Portuguese man-of-war jellyfish circled hungrily beneath me.

“Each balloon they shot brought the girl closer to the water. Suddenly she disappeared. The men paddled around and called out her name. But it was like the tide had swept her out to sea, and the sea had sucked her down.

“Feeling sad, they headed back to shore. That’s when they saw her sittin’ on the sand, wet and scared but all right. The people back at the Morehead Hotel saw the men returning with the little girl and cheered so hard her momma came out of her faint. When they put her child in her arms, Momma fainted again, and so did her daddy.”

“No such thing happened, Cece.” Aunt Society shook her head, as always. “Filling your girl’s head full of such nonsense.”

“You weren’t any older than that girl, so how would you know? Society, you can sure kill a happy mood. Girlio, why you like that story so?”

“ ’Cause I love balloons.”

“I do, too.” He laughed until he started to cough.

After we told each other good night, I ladled out hot water from the pot on the stove into a basin and carried it into my room to wash up. It was warmer there than in our tiny lavatory. Afterward, I took out Dede and, thinking about the balloon girl and Poppa, softly played my song poem, “Forsythia.” How awful it would be if something happened so that Poppa and I couldn’t get to each other! I thought about that and played louder and slower until Aunt Society yelled, “Put down that thing and go to bed, Celeste!”

“Yes, ma’am.” In bed I decided that the next time I wrote in my journal, I’d draw a picture of Momma in heaven dressed in white, with wings and a halo. Poppa and I’d hold yellow and red balloons, floating in the sky after her. And at the bottom of the page I’d draw Aunt Society in her wheelchair, sewing, and crying, “Come back, Celeste, come back!”

Chapter
Two

W
ednesday after school found me working with Poppa at the Stackhouse Hotel drugstore. I’d make fifty cents today and on Saturdays, sweeping and scrubbing the floor, washing containers, and dusting and straightening everything. Right now, though, I was skimming through our Colored newspapers — the Raleigh
Independent,
the
Baltimore Afro-American,
the
New York Age,
and the
Chicago Defender.
I always searched through the
New York Age
to check for articles about the
Brownies’ Book
magazine contest that we Butterflies Club writers had entered. We still hadn’t received any word of the results.

Besides newspapers and medicine, people bought white sugar, Mrs. Smithfield’s Lady Baltimore cakes and cinnamon loaves, fragrant Parisian soaps wrapped in dainty lavender paper, men’s socks and ladies’ silk stockings, hair baubles and ribbons, needles and thread, teeth cleaning powder, decorative pencils and writing tablets, mints, red and black licorice, peppermint sticks, and sodas. Part of my money came right back to the pharmacy because I loved to buy licorice, pencils, and paper. Being employed in the pharmacy was more fun than work.

When I finished skimming the papers, I stepped over to the corner to get the broom. Mr. Hodges, the pharmacist, was talking to Poppa. “No, Taylor, you go see Dr. Pope right away. Your cough’s getting worse. That’s not mustard gas. That’s galloping consumption. I can’t have you spreading disease among my customers.”

“But you don’t understand,” Poppa said. I had to strain to hear him. “I can’t afford to take off any more time.”

“Better go while you can, before you get flat on your back sick and can’t. You can’t keep fooling me. Or Stack, either.”

“Well, he hasn’t said anything to me,” Poppa said. I knew that “Stack” was Mr. Stackhouse.

“Consumption lays quiet in you for years, until you get sick from something else,” Mr. Hodges went on. “Or run-down. You’re a pile of bones, man! If Dr. Pope says you have it, we can get you into Coopers Colored Sanitarium outside of Oxford. We’ll try to make do here till you get back. You should have Cece and Society looked at, too.”

Poppa leave me? For how long? What would happen to him? What would happen to me? Was tuberculosis galloping around in me, too? Heart fluttering, I grabbed up the broom and began sweeping just any which way. My broom handle knocked a glass beaker to the floor, where it shattered.

“Pay attention to what you’re doing,” Poppa said, looking up from where he was filling small white envelopes with powder.

“Yes, sir. Sorry.” As I cleaned up the glass, I felt like I was brushing up pieces of my heart. How could I pay attention to anything with Poppa sick and maybe leaving me — like Momma did? I pulled the medical encyclopedia from the bookcase. Galloping consumption germs passed through cough droplets spread through the air, I read. It could affect not just the lungs but almost any other organ in the body. Sick people’s breath, handkerchiefs, hands, and homes were crawling with germs. Working at the drugstore, Poppa shook sick folks’ hands, talked with sick folks, and made deliveries to sick folks’ homes. And he sure hadn’t been eating right since Momma left us, not with Aunt Society cooking. After sliding the book back, I began dusting, but it was hard to keep my mind on what I was doing.

As we walked home, I kept glancing at Poppa. “I’m sorry I broke that beaker. You can keep the money I made today. Will that be enough?”