Harlem Redux (10 page)
Authors: Persia Walker
“How was it?” she asked.
“Fine. It’s not a bad place, that cemetery. Just far from home.”
She nodded. “Too far.”
She shoved her chair back and stood up, wiping her hands on her apron. Then she rolled up the newspaper, put it into the bag, and set it aside for garbage.
“I’ll just let these soak for a while,” she said, putting the pot of beans on the stove. “Sit down. Rest your feet. You left without eating breakfast this morning. I just made some coffee and I baked a pie, apple, ‘cause I knows
that’s your favorite.”
“Oh, Annie, I—”
“It ain’t no trouble. That’s what I’m here for, to take care you.” She wiped up the table and motioned for him to take a seat. He did. She took down a plate and fork and poured him a cup of coffee. “Before I forget, Miss Rachel stopped by to see you last night.”
He bit back his surprise and forced a smile. “How’d she know I was back?”
“Oh, everybody know you back, Mr. David. Everybody know that.”
He kept his smile plastered in place.
She fetched the pie, set it on the table, and served him a healthy slice. “Miss Rachel helped me nurse Miss Lilian when she was sick.”
“Did she, now?” He picked up his fork. “What did she say?”
“That she wants to see you.”
Keeping his face devoid of expression, he reached for his cup and took a sip. A question hovered on the tip of his tongue. “Did she ever marry?”
Annie looked at him. “No, Mr. David. She never did.”
He flushed at the knowledge in her eyes. Mercifully, she left him, saying she had shopping to do. Alone, he drained the coffeepot. But, although it was delicious, he barely tasted the pie. One name echoed in his mind.
Rachel.
She lived in a tenement building on 130th Street, on Harlem’s southern edge, in an area called “Darktown,” presumably because it had been an area for black residency since the 1890s, when the rest of Harlem was still white. It was a crowded building. Most of the apartments were filled beyond capacity. She was the only resident who could afford the luxury of living in her apartment alone.
She sat on the couch near her parlor window, a small, delicately slim creature in a warm tailored frock. Flipping the pages of a thin photo album, she studied the photos one by one. Pictures of her and the McKay children: of her and Lilian; of her and David; of her, Lilian, and Gem. Studio photos taken over time, paid for by the McKays.
The friendship between the McKays and the Hamiltons went back some twenty years, when both were living in the Tenderloin. The two families had lived only blocks apart. They attended the same church and Rachel went to the same school as the McKay children. Rachel spent many afternoons after school playing with Gem and Lilian. Her mother worked. Mrs. McKay was at home. The arrangement was practical.
No one thought of long-range consequences.
Like the McKays, the Hamiltons started out poor. Unlike them, the Hamiltons stayed that way. While Augustus McKay, a waiter, sunk every extra dime he had into real estate, his buddy Bill Hamilton, a better-earning mortician, drank and gambled away his dollars. David’s fortunes took a decided upswing in 1907 when the Pennsylvania Railroad purchased some of his Seventh Avenue property for more than one hundred thousand dollars. Three years later, in 1910, when the twins were fourteen and David nineteen, the McKays left the miserable, overcrowded Tenderloin and bought property on West 134th Street, joining other prominent blacks in Harlem. It took the Hamiltons, now consisting only of Rachel and her mother, another nine years to achieve the move uptown, and when they did, it was to squeeze into a grimy four-room apartment on West 130th Street with four other families. By then, David was back from the war and the McKays were on the move again, too—this time, into their home on Strivers’ Row. Over the next few years, the McKay property would rapidly rise in value, and the building housing the Hamiltons would just as decidedly decline.
Despite the economic fissure dividing the McKays and the Hamiltons, the friendship that began in the Tenderloin endured. Rachel remained one of the few people outside the McKay family who could tell the twins apart. For nine years, she doggedly made the trip uptown to visit Lilian. The instant affection she’d felt for Lilian in the first grade deepened, as did the instant antipathy she’d felt toward Gem. As for her feelings for David, they were clear even to the blind.
Rachel closed the picture album with an air of finality and put it back on her bookshelf. She looked at her clock. How would he react to her message? Would he come by to see her? Going to her dresser, she eased out the top drawer and dug out a hand mirror. She had spent the better part of the morning preparing for his hoped-for visit. She had marcelled her hair and put on her best dress. It was a cream creation called “champagne beige.” She had bought it from a “hot” man. People said hot men sold stolen goods. Rachel neither asked nor cared. Like most Harlem women who bought from hot men, she spent little mental energy on the ethics of buying possibly pilfered merchandise. If she thought about it at all, she shrugged and said the stores priced the clothes too high anyway, so if something “fell off the truck” or was “rescued from a warehouse,” it was a way of robbing the rich to give to the poor. What she did know, and knew for sure, was that hot men enabled her to dress well and inexpensively. Her earnings were meager as a nurse at Harlem Hospital.
Rachel regarded what little she could see of herself in the mirror coolly, looking for the person she imagined and hoped David would find. Her short hair was groomed using Madame C. J. Walker’s products. Her fingernails were scrubbed and meticulously self-manicured.
Some Georgia plantation owner had passed down vivid green eyes. Otherwise, Rachel’s dark-skinned African forebears had prevailed. Her charcoal complexion unmistakably marked her as one of their own. She knew that people often murmured that she would have been quite pretty if she were not so black, but they raved over her eyes.
Rachel often wondered how an emblem of sexual and racial degradation had become a badge of honor. It was perverse to idolize the legacy of a white slave-owner’s lust. But all rational analysis aside, Rachel loved her jade eyes, too. Her sooty complexion was another matter.
She knew the frustration that compelled some dark-skinned women to try to lighten their complexions. Her friends went from slathering their faces with bleaching creams to swallowing arsenic wafers. She scorned such solutions. She knew they weren’t effective; her pride would’ve kept her from using them even if they were. Unlike her friends, Rachel didn’t blindly worship light skin, but she did see the practical advantages of having it. If she caught herself wishing she’d been born with beige skin, it wasn’t necessarily because she found it beautiful but convenient. “Whiter” meant “righter” in the world she knew.
Take the McKays. Their buttermilk beauty added much to their prestige. Even during the Tenderloin days, the McKays seemed set apart. They were admired and envied. Invitations to their home were rare and highly coveted. Everywhere they went, they were warmly received.
Once upon a time, she dreamed of becoming a David. She had loved David since they were children, but she’d never dared hope for his love in return. Four years ago, it seemed as though he had fallen in love with her. They’d met secretly. She’d given him her heart, her body. She’d trusted him completely. Then one day he had gone away, on Movement business, and failed to return.
Desperate, Rachel went to see an old West Indian conjure woman and paid her some hard-earned cash. The woman told her to take a pair of David’s shoes and sprinkle a little “come on home powder” on top of the toes. If he’d gone south, then she should swing the shoes around and set them down with the toes pointing north.
“He’ll be back in seven days, honey.”
Rachel had a time getting a hold of David’s bedroom slippers—that’s all he’d left behind—but she managed to do it. She sprinkled the slippers generously and followed the conjure woman’s instructions to the letter.
“But it didn’t help. He didn’t come back,” Rachel complained, returning to the woman.
“Well, somebody somewhere is working mo’ powerful magic than you.”
The old woman chuckled and shut the door in her face. Rachel was nearly broke, but she cared little about the money. She wanted David back.
Now he was again in Harlem. She shook her head at her earlier foolish fantasies. She wouldn’t make the same mistake twice. Life had taught her hard and bitter lessons. It simply didn’t pay to be naive.
David climbed the steps to Rachel’s building uneasily. As Lilian’s best friend, she could probably help him, but would she be willing to? What had his disappearance meant to her? They had been young. He could barely remember the person he’d been when he’d last seen her. The life he’d led, the pain he’d felt and witnessed since then, had changed him irrevocably. Rachel represented a life he had been forced to leave behind. Surely, she must see that neither of them could take their love affair seriously. That it was better to consign it to the brief but intense passions of youth. That it was better not to ask whether it could have endured.
He carried a bouquet of pale pink roses, difficult to find that time of year and expensive. After a moment’s hesitation, he rang her bell and went in the building’s entrance. He found her second-floor apartment easily and had just raised his hand to knock when the door was yanked open. His breath caught at the sight of her. She had changed.
She was still very pretty, but so thin. Gray circles ringed her eyes and faint hollows touched her cheeks. The years had added an air of fragility. Something inside him fluttered and his vision of her reverted to what it once was. No longer was she the woman he had abandoned, with all the guilt that entailed. She was, first and foremost, a dear friend. And he had missed her. Suddenly, he was glad, very glad, that he had come. Her face broke into a heart-wrenching smile and she threw her slender arms around him.
“I’m so sorry about Lilian,” she whispered.
Seated on her sofa, the two them shared a warm drink and homemade apple betty. Rachel had displayed his flowers prominently in a vase on her coffee table. Glancing around, David admired the soothing atmosphere of her apartment. She had chosen her furniture with an eye for comfort as well as beauty. He saw too that she had been influenced by his mother’s tastes, but discerned that she had adapted them to fit her own personality. How could Rachel live so well on a nurse’s salary? Smiling gently, he told her that he was glad to see her. He’d heard that she’d gone away.
“I had to come back,” she said. “Two years ago. I had to. Just like you.”
His smile faltered. “It’s not the same. You came back because you wanted to. I returned because I had to. Lilian’s death is the only reason I’m here.”
He saw the flash of pain in her eyes and instantly regretted his words. She knew he had not come back because of her. No need to remind her. Once again, his eyes went over her. The bleakness in her gaze; the sag in her shoulders: What had happened to her? He started to ask, then stopped. If he inquired about her last four years, she might inquire about his.
She asked if he planned to move back into the house. Her voice was full of hopeful expectation, but when he shook his head, she seemed more relieved than disappointed. “So you’ll be selling your half to Sweet?”
“I don’t see why I should.”
“But if you don’t want to live there—”
“That house was Daddy’s pride. I’m not giving it up.”
“I see.”
Did she? He’d never been able to fully read Rachel.
She gazed down thoughtfully at her small, neat hands, which lay folded in her lap. “So how long
will
you be staying?”
“Not long.”
She gave him a long, intent look. Behind her beautiful eyes battled love and pride. “And there’s no way you can move back?”
“No way at all. As soon as I’m done, I’m catching the first thing smoking.”
