Glorious (16 page)
T
he way Dobbs heard it, E.V. Gibbs was a murderer. His secretary, Emma Goodkind, had brought him the news, though he had a hard time understanding her—the size of her breasts had a lot to do with it; they filled the room and muffled the sound of her voice. The blouse she wore that day—white with an explosion of red flowers—only compounded the problem.
“Pardon?”
Emma set the stack of papers down on his desk and then folded her arms under her breasts, training them on him like assault missiles.
“I said that maid of yours is causing quite a stir. Seems she killed some white writer woman up in New York way back in the olden days or something.”
Dobbs blinked. He’d been able to catch the words
maid
,
killed,
and
olden days
, but not much else. He was about to ask her to repeat herself once more, but Emma was swaying out of the office, her laughter trailing behind her like a scarf. Dobbs picked up the black desk phone and dialed his house and was greeted with the blaring sound of a busy signal.
Easter saw the line of cars out front and her first thought was that someone had died. When she entered through the back door and found a throng of people gathered in the kitchen, a camera bulb flashed and her vision was veiled in a shroud of blue and yellow dots. She’d raised her hand in surprise and when she lowered it again she was back in Harlem, standing outside 409 Edgecombe, clutching her suitcase. The reporters had formed a wall around her and pelted questions at her like stones.
“Is it true you stole Meredith Tomas’s story and entered it into the contest as your own?”
“You’ve been accused of being a thief of literature, what is your response to that accusation?”
“Why did you do it, E.V.?”
Why?
When Easter had posed that very same question to her, Meredith had crinkled her brow and tilted her nose up at her.
“What are you insinuating? It is
I
who should be asking you that question.”
And Easter hadn’t had another word to say to her. She went to her bedroom and began to pack.
Rain had scrambled behind her. “I don’t understand what’s happening! What did you do?” she’d cried, grabbing hold of Easter’s arm.
Easter spun around. “What did
I
do?” The look Easter gave her stopped Rain’s heart cold and her hand fell dead away.
And now, in the Eversons’ kitchen, Easter bestowed on the spectators that same look before spitting, “What is this, a lynch mob?”
A gasp went up and Shannon’s face turned crimson. She caught Easter by the hand and led her through the crowd, up the stairs, and into the quiet of her bedroom.
T
he news that E.V. Gibbs, once the literary love child of the Harlem Renaissance, was now nothing but a lowly maid in Waycross, Georgia snaked its way into Tennessee, Kentucky, Ohio, Michigan, and New York. Every day there was a new out-of-state license plate, a new face sitting at the counter of the local diner asking questions and scribbling answers into a notepad. Waycross hadn’t seen this much activity since Viola Sanford’s cockatiel started reciting the Lord’s Prayer. That had been twenty-odd years ago and people still called it a miracle. Well, Dobbs called
this
a miracle too.
He charged a quarter at the door and placed Easter on exhibit, like Ota Benga at the Bronx Zoo, Geronimo at the St. Louis World’s Fair, and Saartjie Baartman before all of Europe. Parents set their babies on her lap and snapped photos. She signed autograph books.
Shannon felt like a movie star. The only things missing were floodlights on the lawn and a red carpet.
All of the reporters asked Easter the same question: “Did you plagiarize Meredith Tomas’s story?”
And Easter’s stock response was always, “God knows the truth and so does Meredith … rest her soul.”
The last journalist to come to speak to Easter was a tall, smooth black man with warm eyes and a neat mustache. His name was Roi Ottley and he’d driven all the way down from New York to interview her for the
Amsterdam News
. Roi Ottley had covered World War II, and was the first Negro correspondent for a major newspaper. He’d even had an audience with the Pope!
Roi placed both of his hands over Easter’s and looked deep into her eyes like she was someone he had been waiting to meet for a very long time. No one had made her feel that way in ages, and she blushed beneath the weight of it.
He said, “Please call me Roi,” when she addressed him as Mr. Ottley.
And she said, “Please call me Easter.” But he didn’t, he called her Miss Easter.
He had a presence about him and Easter knew immediately that he was an island man because he wore his pride wrapped around his shoulders like a cape.
She asked, “Where were you born?”
“New York City, but my parents are from Grenada.”
He spoke in a tone that was just above a whisper, and preferred to sit on the hassock at her feet instead of on the sofa. She felt like a queen.
“You are one of my favorite writers from the Harlem Renaissance,” he said, “and I thought
Glorious
was brave and beautiful.”
Brave and beautiful? Her little story about a slave girl who escapes to the north and swan dives into the deep end of life? Brave and beautiful … Easter beamed with pride.
He asked, “Where have you been all these years?”
Easter leaned back into her chair, folded her hands in her lap, and thought. She’d been so many places, had seen so many things. She had left Harlem, of course. She couldn’t stay there, not after what Meredith had done to her, branding her as a plagiarist, a liar, a thief. She left Harlem and went to Brooklyn, where she briefly secured a job as a maid for a wealthy widow, and then the stock market crashed, forcing her to join the masses of disenfranchised people in a shantytown—a Hooverville in Red Hook. During the day she looked for work, in the evening she stood in soup lines, at night she slept under a box on a bed of newspaper. It was the worst time of her life. Someone stole her shoes right off her feet, she watched a woman die while giving birth. When the soup kitchens ran out of food Easter rummaged for scraps in the garbage. Many a day she dined on her own spit and anger. So destitute was she that pride was an unaffordable luxury; and so she claimed a street corner and begged for change.
She heard about work in Detroit and somehow made her way there and secured a job cleaning toilets at the Ford Motor Company auto plant. On Jefferson Avenue she shared a room with four other women; there were only two beds, so they rotated and every fifth night Easter slept in the tub. When things began to take a turn for the better she bought a ticket to see the Oscar Micheaux film
Murder in Harlem
, and in the velvety darkness of the theater she thought she saw Rain, still stunningly beautiful, smiling out at her from the background, and Easter began to weep.
One year folded into the next, wars were fought and won, fought and lost, people died, babies were born—life churned on and now she was back home in Waycross, Georgia.
Roi pulled a handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit jacket and held it out to her. Easter stared at the white square of cloth for a long time, not sure why he was giving it to her, and then she licked her lips and tasted her salty tears. She hadn’t realized she was crying.
“Oh Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” she sighed as she dabbed at her eyes. “Look what you got me doing. I’m so embarrassed.”
“Don’t be,” Roi said, and waited patiently for her to compose herself before he leaned in and asked, “Are you still writing?”
Easter shifted her eyes away from his piercing stare and shook her head. “No, no,” she answered emphatically, “I don’t do that anymore.”
A still and steady silence fell over them. It was a deep and mournful quiet usually reserved for the dead. It was appropriate.
Roi asked, “Do you know what ever became of Nella or Zora?”
Easter sniffed and shrugged her shoulders. She hadn’t known Nella and had only met Zora’s acquaintance once or twice. “No, I don’t.”
Roi looked sad about that. He took Easter’s palm in his, raised it to his lips, and planted a chivalrous kiss on the back of her hand. “Miss Easter, it was my immense pleasure to have been in your company. You are an extraordinary woman, and an exceptional writer. I will remember this time with you for the rest of my days.”
Easter walked him to the door and watched as he descended the stairs.
When he reached the bottom, he snapped his fingers and spun around. “My goodness, I almost forgot!” he exclaimed. “Langston sends his regards. He says to tell you that he misses you, that Harlem misses you, and that the world of literature is a better place because of you.”
After Roi left, Easter cleared away the plate of cookies, the water glasses ringed with daises, and the napkins they had used to wipe their mouths. She brushed the crumbs from the table into the palm of her hand and dropped them into the pocket of her dress. She returned the hassock to its rightful place, fluffed the pillows on the sofa, lowered the shades in the parlor, and turned on the lamp. She prepared and served dinner, cleared and washed the dishes … She did all of this as if in a dream.
When she finally awoke, Alice was standing beside her, holding the tin in her hands. Easter looked down at the girl, down at the tin. “Oh there you are,” she breathed, and Alice didn’t know if Easter meant her or the ancient object she held.
Alice had used Ivory soap and warm water to clean away the dirt and then polished the metal to a sheen with Vaseline. Easter smiled at the care and effort.
“Did you look inside?”
Alice nodded ashamedly.
“Hmm,” Easter sounded as she took it, pried the lid off, removed the tiny bit of paper, and crushed it in her fist. “Hand me them box of matches,” she said before tossing the ball of paper into the sink.
They stood—past and future, side by side, hands linked—and watched the flame until there was nothing left but a curl of gray ash.
God balances the sheet in time.
—Zora Neale Hurston
The arrival of this book has been six years coming. The story first came to me in 2004 as I sat in my kitchen sipping tea, when suddenly I was aware of the presence of two women, who I will contend until the day I die were the spirits of Zora Neale Hurston and Nella Larsen. I listened to what they had to say and then went into my office and typed out the first twenty pages of what would become this novel.
It was no easy journey. The road from that first day to here was a long, arduous one paved with rejection letters, the death of my father, a near foreclosure, an emotional breakdown, and oceans and oceans of tears.
But we don’t do anything in this life alone, and without the love and support of my family, friends, fellow scribes, guides, readers, and God, this book would not have made it into your loving hands.
Author and educator Gloria Wades-Gayle published a book of essays entitled
Rooted Against the Wind
. In it she writes about cultural memory being the “root” and the “polarization of class and race” being the fierce winds.
I write to breath life back into memory to remind African-Americans of our rich and textured history. I also see myself as a “root,” and for me the “fierce winds” include the marginalization—the downright segregation—of literature written by people of color.
Whether I am unwilling or unable to conform to the requirements of mainstream publishing is not the question. My only path is to continue to produce works that contribute to the canon of literature created by those writers who came before me. It is, as the young people say, a no-brainer.
Legacies are delicate things. They must be tended to as one would tend an orchid so that it will continue to flourish and provide beautiful blooms. The legacy of African-American literature has been neglected, the works of brilliant writers both published and aspiring—ignored. But I believe that the tides are about to change.
In 1928 Wallace Thurman, the Harlem Renaissance writer and literary radical, said, “The time has come now, when the Negro artist can be his true self and pander to the stupidities of no one, either white or black.”
That time has come again.
***
The following books were invaluable to me in writing
Glorious
:
When Harlem Was in Vogue
by David Levering Lewis
On Her Own Ground: The Life and Times of Madam C.J. Walker
by A’Lelia Bundles
Wrapped in Rainbows: The Life of Zora Neale Hurston
by Valerie Boyd
In Search of Nella Larsen: A Biography of the Color Line
by George Hutchinson
Negro with a Hat: The Rise and Fall of Marcus Garvey
by Colin Grant
As Wonderful as All That? Henry Crowder’s Memoir of His Affair with Nancy Cunard 1928–1935
by Henry Crowder and Hugo Speck
Rough Amusements: The True Story of A’Lelia Walker, Patroness of the
Harlem Renaissance’s Down-Low Culture
by Ben Neihart
Look For Me All Around You: Anglophone Caribbean Immigrants in the Harlem Renaissance
by Louis J. Parascandola
Ota Benga: The Pygmy in the Zoo
by Phillips Verner Bradford and Harvey Blume
I would also like to thank the following individuals and organizations: the MacDowell Colony, which provided me peace, quiet, and the serenity to become one with the story; authors Donna Hill, Margaret Johnson Hodge, and Carleen Brice, who supported me on a multitude of levels and cheered the loudest when I finally found a home for this novel; the entire cast of the Harlem Renaissance and especially Zora and Nella; my publisher Johnny Temple and the staff at Akashic Books, who took the project on when others wouldn’t and offered me a publishing experience that is inclusive and collaborative; my ancestors, spirit guides, and God.
And I thank all of you, the readers who continue to support my work.
I stubbornly remain, rooted against the wind …