Diary of a Blues Goddess (10 page)

I rolled my eyes. "Men! You're so big and brave. And foil of shit."

Dominique grabbed Jack's arm. "Well, I for one am glad he's here," she said. "Which room was Sadie's?"

"That one." I pointed to a bedroom we never used down on the right-hand side of the long hallway.

"Are you sure?" Jack asked.

Nan spoke up, "Of course Georgia's sure. That was Sadie's room. I remember it because I was there the night she was murdered. We closed up that room and have never used it."

Jack ran his hand through his messy bed-hair. "But I swear to you the slam came from my side of the hallway."

Dominique agreed, "Me, too. Actually, if I was going to guess, I'd say it was
that
room." She pointed to a back room Nan and I used for storage.

"Well," I said with bravery I didn't feel, "let's go down and take a look."

Dominique wasn't thrilled with the idea. "Now, Georgia, there's a reason
The Exorcist
and
The Omen
and
Rosemary's Baby
only happened to white people. Because black people are too smart and too chicken to go investigating ghosts and—" she dropped her voice and whispered "—the devil."

Nan clutched her green silk robe tighter around her. "Well, I'm half-black, and I'm not afraid. Now… there's four of us. And you two—" she eyed Dominique and Jack "—are big enough to handle just about anything. This is
my
home, and enough is enough. Come on."

Like a bad
Friday the 13th
movie (were there any good ones?), the four of us, half afraid, half brave, edged our way toward the door to which Dominique had pointed. Inch by inch, we crept down the hallway, holding hands, silent. My heart was beating fast as a rabbit's, and my mouth was dry. I'd heard Sadie slam doors before, but never this angrily, this loudly. And no, I'd never had the nerve to investigate before. We just accepted the ethereal life that seemed to reside in the house with us. In a way, Nan liked the company. And maybe I was just a little bit frightened to go challenging Sadie. Nan once held a seance with a guy who turned out to be a major fraud, and Sadie didn't make an appearance. After that, I almost told myself it was all the wind.

The four of us, holding hands, stood in front of the wooden, eight-paneled door.

"Open it," Dominique whispered.

"You!" I elbowed her. Finally, Nan took the worn brass knob in her hand and turned it. We'd been in the storage room a hundred times before—mostly in daylight. Nan flicked on the light. The room was filled with boxes, most of them mine and containing my mother's things. An old, nonworking fireplace. Built-in shelves lined with old books. An ancient push-pedal sewing machine. Boxes of vintage clothes I occasionally raided for an outfit when I hated everything in my closet. Old lamps. Even a box of stuffed animals from my girlhood room, with names like CoCo the Bunny, Miss Prunella the Monkey, and Belinda Bear.

I surveyed the room. "Nothing very interesting," I said aloud, trying to sound confident and walking deeper into the room. "And no ghost."

The four of us looked around. Jack opened a closet. Just more junk. But it was Dominique who stepped on it. Literally.

"My
heel
!" She squealed. We all looked down at her silver-feathered mules, one of which had its heel caught in the floorboard. "Will you look at this?"

There by the fireplace, the floorboard was loose. It didn't align properly, and if you looked closely at it, clearly someone had taken a screwdriver or a knife to it.

I knelt on the floor. "It's a secret compartment, Dominique. Pull up your slipper and see if it will loosen the board." I urged her.

She removed her foot from her heeled slipper and tried to pry up the board. It wouldn't fully budge, so she used her fingernail—for about two seconds. "All right. I love you all, but I'm not breaking my nail over a ghost, Georgia Ray. These are a fresh acrylic set, girlfriend."

"I'll go get a nail file," I said and rushed down the hall to my room, grabbing one from my basket of manicure supplies and racing back, not wanting to be in the hallway alone.

I pried up the board, with Nan, Jack and Dominique leaning over me. In the hole in the floor, I saw what looked like dusty papers. After shuddering about sticking my hand down into cobwebs, I pulled out two old photos of Nan and her sister, Irene.

"Nan… it's you," I whispered, handing her the pictures.

"Will you look at this?" Nan said in amazement, staring at the pictures tenderly.

"Who'd hide them in here?" I looked down into the dusty hole. "And there's something else." I reached in and pulled out a small package in brown paper and wrapped with twine. I handed it to Nan. She blew the dust off it, unwound the twine and opened the package. Inside was a leather-bound book. She opened it up, and her eyes immediately filled with tears.

"I can't, Georgia." She handed it to me. "I can't look at this."

A cold chill fell over me, like a January breeze had whooshed through the room. I opened the front cover. In a woman's tiny handwriting were the words:

The Journal of Honey Walker, year of 1939

"Who's Honey Walker?" Jack asked.

"My great-aunt Irene. Nan's sister. Honey Walker was her stage name. This was her journal? Did you know she kept one?" I looked at Nan, who shook her head sadly.

"Georgia, I had no idea."

"What happened to her?" Dominique asked. She was kneeling. I plopped down on the floor cross-legged next to Jack. Nan sat down in a brocade-covered rocking chair.

"Irene was five years older than I. We were as close as two sisters could be. But she always had… a sadness about her. Maybe it was that I could pass for white, and she couldn't. Her skin was your color, Dominique. She was just beautiful, but at a time when black
wasn't
beautiful. Far from it. Especially in this city. Everything was measured by how much black you had in you. Octoroon. Quadroon. For just how much of a fraction of you were black, and how black your mama or your grandma was. We both had the same mama, the same father. Just how we came out, I guess."

"Honey was a singer. A blues singer. Very good." Nan rocked back, remembering. "She just had a way about her that… she was magnificent." Nan looked down at us, her brown eyes grief-filled. "Irene had always been out on the road. Singing. She just up and left when she was of age, left with a man who claimed he could make her a star. Then one year, she came here for the holidays. Just showed up on the doorstep, thin as a rail and tired. Well, of course, I took her in and we just picked up where we left off. She was here for New Year's, 1939, and several months of that year. Then she just disappeared."

"What do you mean, disappeared?" I asked.

"One morning I woke up and her bedroom—that was your room, of course, Georgia Ray—was empty. All her things gone. Packed up in the middle of the night and left. And she didn't even leave me a note. Nothing. I never heard from her again."

"You never told me that, Nan."

"It still breaks my heart, Georgia. It wasn't but some time after Sadie died. It was a very difficult year for me. When I look back on my life, that year and the months after your grandfather died and then… of course, when your mother died were the hardest times of my life—and I've lived a long time."

"So whatever happened to her?" Dominique asked.

"I got word a few years later that she had died. It was all very vague. She passed in her sleep, and I never knew whether it was suicide or just tiredness with life. Maybe a weak heart. But we were never reconciled. Her lover at the time had her buried in New York, not here with the rest of the family. I didn't even find out until a musician friend of hers passed through town and stopped by to tell me. I think Irene left here hating me, and I never knew why."

"But maybe this journal will explain why she left," Jack offered. "Maybe it will… give you closure."

"Maybe." She stood up. "But I just can't read it. I can't…" I loved my sister. She was so dear to me, and I grieved her leaving here a long time. But the real grief never goes away. It just gets hard, like a little scar, and then something happens, and it opens it up again. "You read the diary, Georgia. You read it and tell me what it says." Her eyes were moist as she looked at me. "I'm going to bed. There's been more than enough excitement for one night." She kissed the top of my head and then shuffled off to her bedroom, the ballet slippers she wore almost silent on the wooden floor.

"Well?" Dominique looked at me.

"We're going to read it, right?" Jack asked, rising.

"Hell, yeah. Come on!" I stood up, and we turned off the light and hurried down the hall to my bed, where the three of us flopped down on our stomachs and opened the diary.

January 1, 1939

Happy New Year.

Here I am… at home, after bein' a wanderer for a long time. I've left Joe for good and come to my sister's house
—
of course, this used to be my house, too. When I was a girl. But I've come home
.

We had a party last night until all hours, and I slept in. It's nearly supper time, and I'm just gettin' up. That's pretty typical in this house. Always something goin' on all hours. But it is January first
—
even if it is late in the day. A time for new beginnings. Is that possible for me
?

Arrived at Myra's sportin' house two days ago. Always when I return to New Orleans, I feel the music. Here it seems as if the entire world converges. Like four corners of the earth meeting in one spot. Here. This one city. Spanish, Creole, French, American, colored, white, music spilling into the streets and out of windows. Music in the graveyards, and music in the houses, Jazz from every corner. Trumpets and pianos. Trombones play in' the back beat. Drums and the deep sounds of the bass. Singers. Such singers, Jazz, blues, music that comes from the Gypsies. Music that comes from the churches. Music. Converging here… Only New Orleans embodies this. I think of New Orleans as Mother Music. She is my city, my home, my birthplace. She gave my music life. She gave my voice a life.

I'm tired, first rode a bus a long, long time, touring for seems like nickels and dimes while white singers play in fine places where they are treated right. Might as well put me back on the plantations. Bend and pick cotton.