Glorious (10 page)
I
n 1922 everything changed again. The Eskimo pie was invented; James Joyce’s
Ulysses
was printed in Paris; snow fell on Mauna Loa, Hawaii; Babe Ruth signed a three-year contract with the New York Yankees; Eugene O’Neill was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; Frederick Douglass’s home was dedicated as a national shrine; former heavyweight champion of the world Jack Johnson invented the wrench; and James Wormley “Jack” Jones was recognized by a former D.C. police officer as he sat in Chumley’s staring down at his cup of coffee.
“Jack?”
Jack looked up and into the dark face hovering over him.
“Jack Jones, right?”
Jack nodded his head as he tried to place the face.
“Benjamin Caruthers,” the man said and sat down. “We worked together in D.C.”
Jack’s lips quivered.
“Wow, it’s been ages,” Benjamin said and presented his hand. Jack took it and they shook. “You still a cop?”
Jack’s eyes wandered around the bar. People were looking. And those who weren’t looking were listening.
“Uhm, no, I’m not.”
“Me neither man,” Benjamin’s voice boomed. “So, how’s the wife and kids?”
Jack’s life spilled out of Benjamin’s mouth, like water from a spout. Every detail of who he really was: a former police officer, husband and father, with a house and mortgage in Maryland.
Jack looked around the bar; it was filled with mostly whites, but that didn’t make Jack feel safe—Garvey had plenty of white sympathizers, nigger lovers, Negrophiles—they were everywhere, and the news that Jack Jones, one of Garvey’s most trusted officers, was not at all who he claimed to be arrived at Garvey’s doorstep wrapped in a red bow.
Within twenty-four hours a special edition of Garvey’s newspaper,
The Negro World
, hit the streets of Harlem. The front page showed a picture of Jack Jones; below that, in bold print, was the word
JUDAS
.
That of course ended Jack’s career as the first ever Negro FBI agent. To tell the truth, James Wormley “Jack” Jones was relieved. He returned to Washington, D.C., handed his gun and badge to his superior, and in return received a handshake and a plaque acknowledging his years of service. And just like that he became James Wormley “Jack” Jones, civilian.
Later that year, Mussolini marched on Rome; the architect Howard Carter entered King Tut’s tomb; the British court sentenced Mahatma Gandhi to six years in prison; Eubie Blake and Noble Sissi’s all-Negro musical
Shuffle Along
premiered on Broadway; Easter was working full time as a laundress and publishing stories in
The Crisis
magazine under the moniker E.V. Gibbs; Harcourt, Brace & Company published Claude McKay’s book of poetry
Harlem Shadows;
and the Harlem Renaissance began.
E
aster arrived on time, dressed in a lime-green taffeta dress she’d borrowed from Mattie Mae—now-Madeline. The dress fit her all wrong; it was too tight across her middle and too large at the top. Madeline had watched with great amusement as Easter squeezed herself into a girdle and then padded the inside of her bra with toilet paper.
Meredith staged the terrace of her penthouse to resemble a Grecian hall, complete with scrolled columns and topiaries of mythical creatures. Servers wore togas and carried silver trays laden with all varieties of delectable offerings.
The party was given in Easter’s honor. She’d become a regular contributor to
The Crisis
, and with each story her popularity with the readers had grown.
Easter moved among the attendees practically unnoticed. She would pause next to groups of people and slyly eavesdrop on their conversations about the explosion of literature flowing out of Harlem. Her heart fluttered excitedly when she came across a gentleman who exclaimed with great exhilaration, “This E.V. Gibbs is something special. Did you read the story “Parliament Road”? It was stunning!”
Easter grinned.
“Escargot, miss?” asked a tall, blond-haired, blue-eyed waiter whose body had been slathered in Max Factor Grease Paint #32 bestowing him with a Mediterranean glow. Easter peered down at the murky-colored balls of flesh. They didn’t appear at all appetizing.
“Escargot?” Easter repeated stupidly. She had no idea what it was. A devilish smile crept over the young man’s face and he leaned over and whispered, “Snails.”
Easter went gray, shook her head, and hurried to the other side of the balcony where a cluster of people stood chatting. Meredith and her husband Eduardo were at the center of the group. Easter stepped behind a column out of sight.
They were a breathtaking, strikingly attractive couple. Movie-star beautiful; Goldwyn-Mayer couldn’t have paired a better romantic duo if it tried.
“Merry, where do you come up with these fantastic tales?” An elegantly adorned Negro woman draped in black silk and dripping with jewels laughed and wagged her index finger at Meredith.
“Oh, A’Lelia, you know it’s all true, darling. It happened at your house!”
The crowd melted into laughter and A’Lelia shook her head in mock dismay.
“
Carlo
,” Meredith reached past her husband and took hold of Carl Van Vechten’s wrist, “you remember, don’t you, darling, A’Lelia inviting us over for dinner and serving us hog maws and bathtub gin in the kitchen while Langston, Wallace, and Zora ate roast duck and drank champagne in that grand dining room of hers?”
Carl smiled mischievously and dragged his palm over his slick blond mane. “I don’t remember that gathering, Merry. Are you sure I was there?” He winked at A’Lelia.
“Oh you!” Meredith squealed and dropped his hand. “You are such a scamp!”
The group howled with laughter.
“I’m going to have to say goodnight,” A’Lelia suddenly announced.
“Already? But you’ve only just arrived,” Merry pouted.
“I’ve been here for two whole hours.”
“You know A’Lelia does not stay out long. We’re lucky to have had her for this amount of time,” Carl said as he linked his arm with A’Lelia’s. “I’ll accompany you to your car.”
A’Lelia bid the group goodnight and turned to leave. When she was out of earshot, Meredith whispered, “Poor thing, she has such bad feet, they swell horribly.”
The others nodded sympathetically.
A few moments later Meredith looked up to see Rain strutting toward her.
“Rain!” Meredith’s shrill voice cut through the night air. “You are fashionably late as always!”
An irritated look passed across Eduardo’s face.
The two women hugged.
“I must say, darling, you look delicious!”
Rain beamed. “Thank you, Merry, and might I pay you the same compliment?”
“Why, darling, if you don’t I might never speak to you again!”
They laughed.
“Easter, for heaven’s sake, what are you doing hiding behind that shrub?” Merry cried.
Easter cringed and stepped guiltily out into the open. Rain walked over, took her by the hand, and led her to the center of the group. “This is whom you’ve all come to meet.” Meredith squeezed Easter’s hand. “Easter … I mean, E.V. Gibbs.”
They showered her with a dozen hellos, followed by just as many hands that reached out to shake hers. Meredith made the introductions. There were so many people; Easter knew she would never remember every name.
After too many glasses of champagne, Easter finally slipped away to a quiet section of the patio. She was giddy and she swayed unsteadily on her feet as she stood gazing at the bright city lights. She was humming to herself when a handsome, brown-skinned man approached her.
“I’m so glad to get you all to myself,” he said as he fished out a pack of cigarettes, shook one free, and offered it to Easter.
She thanked him and slipped it between her lips.
“My pleasure,” he said, lighting first her cigarette and then his own. He blew a cloud of smoke into the air and they watched it evaporate. “I wanted to congratulate you on your success and tell you how much I’ve been enjoying your writing.”
A waiter stepped between them. “Cake?”
Her companion gingerly plucked the square of three-layer confection from the tray. His eyes sparkled as he watched the waiter glide away. In that moment his face took on a soft dreamy quality and when he looked in Easter’s direction again, he seemed surprised to see her standing there.
“I’m sorry, you were saying?”
Easter laughed, “I wasn’t saying a thing.”
The man grinned sheepishly, pondered for a moment, and then presented his hand. “I just wanted to introduce myself and tell you that I think you have a great voice. I look forward to reading more of your work.”
Easter placed her hand in his. “And you are?”
“Didn’t I say?”
Easter shook her head.
“Langston. Langston Hughes.”
At around 2 a.m. the crowd began to thin. Groups of people bid their goodbyes, most of whom had no intention of calling it a night. Private cars and hansom cabs collected the guests and then deposited them at the Cotton Club, Bamboo Inn, the Renaissance Casino, and the Savoy.
Those who remained at 409 Edgecombe Avenue were treated to a raucous session of down-home dirty blues from Gladys Bentley, who’d arrived dressed in her signature top hat and tails. When she eased her 250-pound frame down on onto the piano bench, the legs shook. She stroked and pounded the keys of Meredith’s Gerhard Heintzman baby grand piano, and belted out raunchy lyrics. The guests caught a second wind, and Lindy Hopped until dawn.
Easter pushed her way through the revelers, through the French doors, and into the main parlor where she had to step over a man and woman splayed out drunk on the floor. As she moved along, she came across more of the same; there were bodies everywhere, the parlor looked like a killing field. She continued unsteadily down the hall, unsure, in her drunken state, exactly which bedroom belonged to Rain. And so she went from room to room pushing open doors and calling out her friend’s name.
Behind one door she found a woman on her knees, her head hidden between the thick thighs of a man Easter recalled meeting earlier in the evening. The next door she tried revealed the butler standing before a full-length mirror, naked save for the expensive nylons and garter belt he wore. Caught by surprise, he reached for his hairbrush and threw it angrily at her.
Easter stumbled along, giggling at the madness surrounding her. She turned another doorknob, peered into the room, and recognized Rain’s silk robe tossed across the bed. Easter stepped in and pulled the door shut behind her. She kicked off her shoes, ran across the plush carpet, and swan dived onto the king bed.
The sound of running water cackled beyond the bathroom door. “Can you believe it? All of this for me?” Easter hugged herself. “You hear me, girl? … Rain,” she called as she climbed off the bed.
When she stood up the blood rushed rapidly from her head and she crumpled to the floor laughing, and commenced to crawl to the bathroom.
“Rain?” Easter squinted through the steam. “You hear me—”
The vision hurdled Easter back in time, back to the tent, back to the kiss that drove a stake through her heart. There were Meredith and Rain, standing naked in the tub, wrapped in a lovers’ embrace beneath the spray of water.
Easter did not remember charging at them, arms wheeling like propellers. Nor did she recall them trying to fend her off but failing, and slipping on the smooth porcelain belly of the tub, and crashing into a heap. She did not remember walking down the hallway, or the scent of Eduardo’s cigar, or his wide startled eyes. She did remember the walls turning into custard and the floor breaking away beneath her feet and the stink of her vomit as it spewed from her mouth.
When she woke up the next evening in one of the many spare rooms, Rain was sitting at her bedside. Easter felt angry and ashamed, but Rain patted her hand like an understanding mother and said, “Girl, you gonna have to shake those feelings for me.” And then she pointed to the blue and green shiner under her left eye. “Or one of us going to end up dead.”
Her voice was filled with humor, but the seriousness of the matter was bright in her eyes.
Easter whispered, “Did I do that?”
Rain nodded her head. “You think I don’t love you. But I do. I love you with all my heart.” She softly thumped her chest. “Cause I sleep with Meredith don’t mean that I love her more, it just mean that we light a fire in one another that we can’t control. That’s all.”
Easter tried to turn her head away, but Rain caught her by the chin and held it firm.
“Like the fire Colin lit in you.” She paused and searched Easter’s face for some understanding. “You don’t light that particular type of fire in me. You light a different fire. Don’t you see how I glow when you walk in the room? You calming to me like a easy summer day, you my rock, Easter, don’t you know that?”
Easter didn’t even try to fight back the tears.
“What you and I have, Meredith and I will never have. Me and you,” Rain pointed at herself and then turned her finger back on Easter, “we ace boon coons forever.”
T
he
Daily Tattler
, the gossip rag of the era, printed a story that cast Meredith in the most ghastly of lights. It claimed that she—Meredith Tomas—the beautiful and elegant socialite wife of the wealthy Cuban tobacco maverick—Eduardo Tomas—had gone off to Atlantic City and wed the openly homosexual, chocolate-colored, piano-playing blues singer Gladys Bentley. A photograph accompanied the glaring headline. It had been snapped months earlier at the party thrown in Easter’s honor. The scandalous photograph pictured Meredith seated on Gladys’s lap, her arms thrown provocatively around Gladys’s neck, their lips just millimeters apart.
Someone, no one knew who, had inserted a copy of the
Tattler
between the pages of Eduardo’s regular morning paper, and placed it on the breakfast table next to his cup of coffee. Eduardo sat down, lit a cigarette, took three quick sips of his coffee, and picked up the newspaper. The gossip rag slid out and onto the table. Meredith and Gladys had made the front page.
When Meredith strolled into the room, she didn’t spot the
Tattler
resting on his plate, and failed to notice the rage on his face. When Meredith bent to give Eduardo his morning kiss, he pulled his arm back as far as it would go and brought it forward with such ferocity that when his palm made contact with her cheek, the blow lifted her out of her slippers and sent her flying across the room into the buffet. When the butler peeked out from behind the kitchen door, Meredith was cradling her cheek and crawling along the floorboards.
Lesbiana! Lesbiana!
” Eduardo screeched as he “stormed through the apartment toward Rain’s bedroom. He kicked in the door, snatched the sleeping Rain from the bed, and bounced her against the wall, stunning her into submission. When Meredith reached the parlor, Eduardo was dragging Rain across the floor toward the butler who was smiling smugly as he dutifully unbolted the locks of the front door.
Eduardo tossed Rain out into the hallway like common trash and then returned to his breakfast. The butler poured him a fresh cup of coffee and Meredith sat quietly watching the square of butter melt slowly away on her toast.
A month later Eduardo stepped off the train in Detroit and sucked in the biting cold Michigan air. His mistress Anna rushed across the platform, threw her arms around his neck, and showered his face with kisses. Eduardo opened his mouth to speak, but instead took his last breath, and dropped dead right where he stood.
When the news reached Meredith she was sitting in the drawing room of her lavish apartment, lazily filing her nails and wondering about dinner. Dolly entered, handed her the telegram, and Meredith used the metal fingernail file to slice open the envelope. She read the telegram three times before folding the paper and sliding it back into the envelope. She dropped the envelope onto the sofa table, retrieved the nail file, and resumed her task, with a small, satisfied smile resting on her lips.
The repast was an extravagant affair. Because red was Eduardo’s favorite color, Meredith wore a ruby chiffon dress embellished with elaborate beadwork, complete with a trailing sash. She hired the Cuban bandleader Xavier Cugat to provide the music. The menu consisted of black bean salad, empanadas, mango bread, fried platanos, arroz con pollo, roasted pork, and shrimp casserole.
A reporter from the
Daily Tattler
bribed her way in and the next day recounted the spectacle for her dedicated readers:
As Eduardo Tomas’s coffin sat on the 42nd Street pier, waiting to be hoisted onto the steamer
Alabama,
which sailed for Cuba that night, his widow Meredith Tomas celebrated his demise in grand style. Meredith and her guests ate, drank, and cha-cha’d late into the night.Rumor has it that Meredith stands to inherit six million clams as a result of her husband’s death.
Six million?
Well I guess that is something to celebrate—but she could have at least pretended like she was going to miss him!
Meredith finished reading the piece, folded the paper, and flung it across the room where it landed on the floor at the butler’s feet.
“They say such nasty things about me,” she whined as she whipped her celery stick around her Bloody Mary. “Easter, nobody wrote garish things about you when your husband … umm …” Meredith struggled to find the right word. “Died.”
Easter looked up from her plate of poached eggs and bacon and said, “Just ignore it, Meredith.”
After Eduardo tossed Rain out into the hall and onto the streets, she’d gone to stay with Easter. Meredith went to visit as often as she could and Easter would allow them their privacy, leaving them alone in the apartment while she took long walks through Harlem. During those outings her mind wandered over her life, her family, and Colin, and sometimes the memories pressed down on her and left her wet-eyed and blue. In order to shake the funk she and Rain would go to the cabarets to drink and sing along to the bawdy songs as they danced, flinging their hands up into the air and viciously thrusting their hips this way and that as if the very movement could rid them of their miseries.
Eduardo’s death was a shock to everyone and Rain and Easter rushed to their friend’s side. Meredith cried and told them that she couldn’t be alone, she needed them to be there with her or else she didn’t know what she might do. And so Rain moved back in and Easter came along too.
When word got out that Easter had moved to 409 Edgecombe Avenue—the place where no other Negro lived as far as anyone knew—the women at the laundry where she worked looked at Easter and asked themselves,
Why her?
No matter how many times they bathed, the smell of detergent clung stubbornly to their hair and skin, yet Easter arrived every day smelling of expensive perfume.
Why did she continue to work there? Was it to rub their faces in her happiness and good fortune? Was she some kind of sadist? Maybe, they mused over their midday cigarettes, she needed to come. After all she was Meredith Tomas’s
girl
, wasn’t she? Maybe Meredith Tomas loaned Easter out to the laundry the way whites had loaned their slaves out to other plantations.
“Is it true,” one stout woman asked in a mocking tone, “that she keeps you locked in a gilded cage, and that you perform tricks for her guests?”
Easter rolled her eyes.
Another said, “So you think you better than me because you can read and write?”
She didn’t think that at all.
Easter tried not to take it personal, she understood why they taunted and ridiculed her the way they did—it distracted them from their own sorrows.
But if they knew the realities of her life at 409 Edgecombe, those women would have pressed their lips together and swallowed their nasty remarks because they all knew what it felt like to love someone who loved someone else. It was like eating ground glass.
At 409 Edgecombe Avenue, Easter stuck her fingers in her ears and hummed the national anthem when the sounds of Meredith and Rain’s lovemaking echoed down the hallway and clamored at her bedroom door. When they gazed lovingly into one another’s eyes or touched in an intimate way, Easter averted her gaze to the blades of sunshine cutting across the hardwood floors. The effort it took to contain her emotions often left her melancholy and agitated. But God was not always unkind and every now and again justice was done, when Meredith would look up from whatever it was she was doing, touch the pad of her index finger to her chin, and coyly announce, “I think I’m in the mood for Chinese tonight.”
Chinese did not mean cuisine; it was Meredith’s code word for her desire to be with a man. Rain would bristle and charge from the room. And it was during those times that the stake in Easter’s heart would pull back a bit and she would watch with glee as Rain was relegated to standing in her shoes; Easter hoped to God they pinched.
