Celeste's Harlem Renaissance (30 page)
Too soon, the show was over. Everybody applauded, whistled, and stamped their feet like they did in New York, and rushed to the stage, but nobody threw flowers. After several minutes of waiting, the other kids from our bus left. Angel Mae, Swan, Evalina, and I hung in there. Finally Evalina said we should leave, too, but I shook my head. When we took our eyes off Aunti Val to peer around, the stage lights dimmed, darkening the room. When I looked back, she had disappeared!
“How’d she get away from us so fast?” Swan wailed. “Nobody’s here, Cece. We got to go!”
“I’m staying right here till I talk to my aunt.”
“But if you don’t get on the bus, you’ll be stuck here,” Angel Mae said. “Somebody might grab you in the dark.”
I folded my arms. “I got robbed in the train station in Washington, D.C. I kicked the man who did it. I ain’t scared.” I told them what happened.
“Girl! Ohh!” Swan breathed while Angel Mae just smiled broadly at me, nodding.
“Shoot, I’m scared of you now,” said Evalina. “But even so, you oughta c’mon with us.” I shook my head again and watched my friends leave me in the dark room. Of course I was scared. Just telling them about that thief brought back the fear I’d felt. What if a Kluxer showed up?
“Valentina Chavis,” I called. Nothing. I climbed some steps leading onto the dark stage. What if she had returned to the Stackhouse, or had gone to our house? I didn’t want her and Aunt Society to meet without me there. She might say something to upset Aunt Society. I saw from Aunti Val’s letters that Aunt Society could never talk smart like Momma and Aunti Val did, bless her heart. Now she could barely get out her words. Just then I thought I heard someone say my name, but I couldn’t see anybody as I felt my way around backstage.
Faint voices reached me from somewhere. Following the sounds through shadowy hallways, I reached a sunny bay window in a corner. Aunti Val laughed. Her shapely brown leg, with the silky red dress lying above the knee, slowly swung up and down. The motion caused her pump to bounce on her great toenail. The rest of her was stretched out on a broken-down divan, she had that green feather boa around her shoulders, and she was holding a cigarette! At least it wasn’t lit. A man with a camera and another one with a notebook sat smiling by her on rickety-looking chairs.
When she saw me, she sat up, smiling, and threw open her arms. “Come, come! Gentlemen, my darling niece, Celeste! Oh, it’s so good to see you!” Smelling like cherries and lemons, she swooped down on me and hugged me while the photographer popped pictures. She wore so much powder and lipstick I could see it caked on her skin.
“Aunti, you were marvelous!” I whispered. “I’m so proud of you!”
She introduced the men as being from a Colored newspaper in Charlotte. Remembering my manners, I walked back out into the hallway so they could finish the interview. A tall, skinny, bald-headed boy with long dimples and thick eyelashes stood there smiling at me. My mouth flew open.
“Hey, girl, you move like a cat in the dark,” said Big Willie. “Didn’t you hear me holler for you back there? I came to your aunt’s show ’cause I didn’t know where else I might find you.” He looked me up and down, grinning. “Girl, you look — different. I like it, too.”
“Big Willie!” I threw my hands to my mouth. “I — I — it’s you.” All I could do was smile and smile. Big ole skinny boy, lump of coal still on his handsome dark face.
“Celeste, are you still there?” Aunti Val called.
“Come on, m-meet my aunt,” I stammered. My mind was awhirl. Lord sure knew how to answer prayers. I shyly took his hand. It was warm and hard.
“Oh, my, who do we have here?” Aunti Val said, and I introduced him to her and to the newsmen. “So you’re the young man Celeste has talked about so much. Pleased to meet you.”
He jerked his head at them. “I’m pleased to meet you, too,” he said, and his voice cracked. With a big smile, the photographer told Aunti Val that he would see her later at the Stackhouse, and the newspapermen left.
“I gotta go find Momma and the kids,” Big Willie told me. I turned from Aunti Val to him, not wanting him to leave so soon. “We’ll be right out,” Aunti Val said. “We’ll meet you in front of this building in just a few minutes.”
Big Willie looked at me. “Told you I’d be here,” he said. That long dimple in his right cheek appeared, like a wink.
Aunti patted the divan for me to sit beside her. She was just bubbling. She said Miss D and Gertie and Gertie’s parents were living together in Charleston and might even pop up here for the fair. “Miss D credits you with improving Gertie’s health by having her drink that goat milk and leave Ex-Lax alone,” she said. “And how’s your father and your aunt?”
“Poppa’s better, still at the sanitarium. He’s not sure when he can leave. Aunt Society’s — well, her memory’s getting worse. Are you rich yet from Mr. Garvey’s shares?”
“Good gracious, no! The value of those shares sank like rocks thrown in the river. But no matter.” She tapped me on the knee with her fingernail. “Monsieur Le Grande’s teaching me about this New York Stock Exchange, where you can buy all kinds of shares. I’ve bought quite a few, since I’m making good money from
Shuffle Along
and the café. If I do it right, I can be a millionaire by 1930. Isn’t that fabulous?”
I nodded, but shouldn’t losing her money from Mr. Garvey’s shares have taught her to be more careful with her money? “I thought more folks from the show would come.”
She played with her feather boa. “I couldn’t take anybody from the show because it’s still on Broadway. I called it
Stride Along
because I couldn’t use the real name. I can’t keep performing it under that name for long, though.” She leaned closer. “Enough about me. So are you ready to move back with me and go to school in Harlem? You’ll love it, Cece.”
She looked so much like how I remembered Momma.
But Momma always told the truth. “Aunti Val, how were you able to come down here if everybody else is still on Broadway? They let you go, didn’t they?”
Her face froze for a second. “What makes you say that?”
“Because they wouldn’t have let you leave if you were still working for them, would they?”
“But see —” She sighed. “All right. I had a falling-out with one of the leading ladies. The producers were willing to let me do
Stride Along
and return, but that ole jealous heifer raised a stink and made them cut me loose. But it’s all right. I’ll get something else bigger and better. You’ll see. Tell me you’ll come, darling!”
I stared at her. Now I understood. I was so glad I hadn’t told anybody that I was going to go back to Harlem with her. “Because you need me to scrub floors with you again to help pay the rent. I couldn’t go to school all day and scrub floors all night.”
“No, no, it’s not like that. I — I just like having you around, honey. But yes, it would be nice to have your help. We wouldn’t have to scrub floors.” She trailed off. “We could work out something with your schooling.”
“Aunt Society needs my help, too. You could stay with us, get a job here,” I said.
“Celeste, I promised you in my letters I’d come back, and though it took a couple of changes, here I am. I didn’t promise that I’d
move
back. If you misunderstood my promise, I’m sorry. But Society would drive me into hysterics with her criticisms and her country ways. My wings would fall off.” She swung her leg harder.
“She’s been a lot nicer since her sickness,” I said quietly. “But now she’s having memory problems. If I leave, she’s apt to have another set of strokes.”
“Well, that makes sense. Society was crazy about you. She’d never been around baby girls until you came along. She adored you. I never could understand why she got so hard on you. I guess after Elizabeth died and you became her charge, Society got scared. Sometimes folks think being overly strict shows their love.”
And sometimes folks think working you half to death teaches you responsibility,
I said to myself.
And now you’re set to do it again.
“I thank you for the offer, Aunti, but I’d better stay here. Aunt Society and Poppa really need me. I guess I’m just an ole rock, like Miss D said.”
Aunti Val laughed and flicked her boa at me. “That woman believes that everybody’s either a butterfly or a rock. After she got to know me, she said I was a butterfly and Elizabeth was a rock. True, I had a million projects going and I don’t think I completed any. When I moved to New York the first time, I’d planned to make a career there. Then I came back to Raleigh, was miserable, had tragedy, and then I went to Harlem and hooked up with Madame Mercifal. Then I got you and
Shuffle Along,
and now here I am again. So what? That’s life. I love what I’m doing.” She shook her shoulders. “Being a butterfly’s not a bad thing like how Miss D describes them. Butterflies are beautiful, adventurous. We touch the sky!”
She leaned toward me. “Did you know that when you-all started up your club, Elizabeth named it the Butterflies Club after me, for those very reasons?”
“Is that right?” Having a club named after you was a big deal. We loved our club name. Well, that put a different light on her ways. Sort of back to where I had thought of her before I went to New York. I stood up. I didn’t want to miss Big Willie. He might be waiting for me. And I needed to get back to Aunt Society. “Well, Aunti, can you promise me one thing?”
“It depends,” she said slowly.
“That when I’m old enough to be a doctor, you’ll help me get into a doctor’s school in New York, or somewhere?”
“Oh, sure,” she said. “I might have my own mansion and a big fine car. After all, I’ll be a millionaire from the stock market. I might even be able to pay for your schooling.”
Aunti still had her head in the clouds. That was all right, too. Me, I thought I was going to be better off as a rock. Was Big Willie a rock or a butterfly? Coal was closer to rocks than bugs!
I helped Aunti gather up her things, and we walked outside. The warm October autumn sun was setting, but the Negro State Fair was going full swing. I didn’t see Big Willie, but he was around somewhere. I’d find him. “I better get back to check on Aunt Society soon,” I said.
“I plan to stay for a few more days. We’ll go see Taylor. I’ll see Society, too, and some friends around town. There may be something going on here that I don’t know about. You never can tell where butterflies might land. Look, I have something for you.” She dug into her big purse and gave me a small box. I opened it up and laughed. It was Tunisian Dreams, Momma’s cologne.
My challenge in writing
Celeste’s Harlem Renaissance
was that I had not lived in either New York City or Raleigh, North Carolina. I had to study the history of Harlem and North Carolina before I could even begin to write this novel. I had lived in Durham and love that town, but I chose Raleigh because I wanted my character to have the experience of living in the state capital. I practically lived at the North Carolina State Archives, the North Carolina Museum of History, the State Library of North Carolina, and the Wake County Library System’s Olivia Rainey and Richard B. Harrison branches.
In September 2004 my husband Zack E. Hamlett III and I vacationed in Biloxi, Mississippi. I drove to Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to use the University of Southern Mississippi de Grummond Collection, where my repository is. There I read
The Best of the Brownies’ Book
(edited by my friend Dr. Dianne Johnson-Feelings), which profiled the NAACP’s
The Brownies’ Book
, the distinguished African American children’s magazine (1920–21), edited by Jessie Fausett, which Celeste loved. In May 2005 my husband and I spent two hours in Harlem–my first time there. In December 2005 we visited the Indianapolis, Indiana, neighborhood where Madam C. J. Walker operated her hair salon. Two esteemed elder friends, Mrs. Winston Collymore and Mrs. Mary Carter Smith, told me about their unique New York and coal-miner childhoods that I couldn’t have researched otherwise.
To gain authenticity in clothing, buildings, food, and other artifacts of 1921, I turned to fashion books and period photography. The late South Carolina photographer Richard Roberts’ excellent photographs provided assistance, as did old photos of folks at Duke University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Collection of photographs, and those displayed on Web sites like Lee Cook’s. When I e-mailed Dr. John Kenrick (Musicals101.com) for information about the musical
Shuffle Along
, he informed me that the show opened twice—on May 21 for a private audience and on May 23 for the public. Dorothy Phelps Jones’
The End of an Era
, and
Culture Town: Life in Raleigh’s African American Communities
, by Linda Simmons-Henry and Linda Harris Edmisten, were an important part of my North Carolina research. Poppa’s story about the girl and the balloons is based on a dramatic event that allegedly occurred November 15, 1883, in Morehead City, North Carolina, according to a weekly newspaper called
Kind Words
, published by the Home Mission Board of the Southern Baptist Convention of Atlanta, Georgia. I read about it in
A Pictorial Review of Morehead City, 1714–1981
, published in 1982 by the Morehead City Woman’s Club, which recounted the
Kind Words
article and the backstory. Was it true?
Kind Words
seemed to think so.
How can one write historical fiction without including real personalities? Since Celeste is fictional, real people could not have talked to her, of course, but I’ll mention some figures from the book who are important to North Carolina history and that everyone everywhere should know more about: concert singer Caterina Jarboro (born Catherine Yarborough) of Wilmington, North Carolina, who truly was in
Shuffle Along
early in her career; Caleb Bradham of New Bern, North Carolina, who invented Pepsi Cola; Thomas Day, furniture maker; educators Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Berry O’Kelly; Sadie Delany and her father Bishop Delany; North Carolina governor Cameron Morrison, and Raleigh businessman Calvin Lightner. Jerome Whitfield and Ernest Daniels were two African American men lynched in North Carolina in 1921, horrendous murders described in the book. Durham’s North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance Company, and the school known as National Religious Training School and Chautauqua are also real. The school is now the distinguished North Carolina Central University, Durham. Saint Augustine’s School is now Saint Augustine’s College, Raleigh. Its Agnes Hospital ceased operations long ago. Shaw University continues. Big Willie’s account of the clash between coal miners and the sheriff’s men, one of several in American coal mining history, was the Battle of Blair Mountain in August 1921. The North Carolina Negro State Fair closed after 1930.