Like Venus Fading. Marsha Hunt
My sister and I wore enormous red bows in our hair but Lil made me refuse to wear her white Holy Communion dress. ‘Suppose it gets ruined,’ she’d whispered so that Mother couldn’t hear. ‘You’d have nothing for your Communion.’
Of course, I hadn’t forgotten that I’d missed mine. In fact it’s what troubled me most nights. That and Mother selling Hortense’s things …
If Lilian kept the torch of our Roman faith burning, Mamie McMichael kindled another flame. She kept us thinking about our presence before a crowd. How to smile and charm and to test our new-found skill, was like a fix. We learned to pick out eyes in the churches and work to them. We learned to modulate our voices and sell songs, even if they were only children’s hymns, and the buzz of getting ready for our performances was more fun than any game of chase or ‘Simon Says’. Performing is a vanity, but Mamie taught us that it was righteous. Being examined and admired and then getting paid by a ‘little collection from the congregation’ hit my sister like an addiction. Maybe that’s why she turned to drink after we split in ’42 and she couldn’t get a singing job.
Sure, Mamie gets some credit for my success, but it was the dollar signs rather than God that interested her. Yet tonight I’d give anything to hear her play that version of ‘Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy’ that she’d arranged for Lil and me. Nobody could play it like Mamie McMichael.
It was soon after Mamie’s mule had to be shot when Mother announced that we were moving to Los Angeles, and Lil and I were speechless, because California hadn’t been mentioned since it fell from Miss Hortense’s lips. But after our two short months of performing in churches, Mamie had devised a plan which meant moving west, and while the details were never shared with us, we were about to live them.
We were luckier to get out of Mississippi than I realized, because for decades to come what had happened to Buster would be nothing out of the ordinary. In fact when Mamie would down a glass of sweet Mogen David wine once in a while, she’d reminisce about old times and end up saying, ‘Least they didn’t slice off Buster’s dick, and they left his eyes.’
Mamie believed that I owed her everything for my success because I couldn’t credit the white men who made me bend over or lay down before they would provide a few yards of the sticky tarmac that led me to stardom. Acting schools should offer a course in how best to be degraded by the studio bigwigs. It would be way more useful than Shakespeare. But if Mamie were alive, she’d chastize me for suggesting that anything more than luck and talent helps girls get ahead. She’s owed, but less for her music than for lending Mother the fare that got us to California that August of 1930.
Our trip from Mississippi took days longer than Mother had expected, because we kept missing connections, and although I can’t recall our eight-day journey or name the states that we passed through, I’m positive it was in Texas Mother, Lil and me huddled together like three hobos waiting for a bus that didn’t come until dawn. When we finally reached Los Angle-less as Mamie pronounced it, it was a Saturday night and the slim crescent moon didn’t light our way from the bus station to downtown. Before the Koreans and the Mexicans took over that part of town, anybody not white was welcome. Mamie had warned Mother that the city was as segregated as any below the Mason-Dixon line, so we arrived fully aware that our ‘place’ in the scheme of things was going to be ‘no place’. When we couldn’t find a ‘Coloureds Only’ sign on any of the toilet doors in the train depot, Mother made us pee behind a bush outside.
My only memory of our evening arrival is that my sister and I were about to squat behind a bush with its dark leaves and pink flowers, and just as I untied the string on my bloomers to pull them down, a man’s voice suddenly boomed from nowhere, ‘What are you darkies doing over there?’ Mother and Lilian both deny this ever happened, but I will never forget that deep voice with its southern twist calling us darkies, which was half-way polite back then.
Darkies. The three of us had been scorched blue-black by the Mississippi sun, with grains of the Delta grime still caked between our toes. Of course, there would come a time when I would believe I was above toe jam, but those delusions were twenty years down the road. In fact, in 1930 I can’t claim that any of us bathed every week. We probably smelled, but then so did a lot of other people back then.
Only God can really explain why Mother had brought her two little coloured girls to the city that Miss Hortense had called ‘the palace of endless dreams’.
A heatwave was warming up for Sunday but that Saturday night a desert chill had settled in and Mother’s teeth were chattering by the time we found a rooming house which had a small women’s dormitory that was empty but for us.
My mother loved to remind me that she had arrived with two mouths to feed in addition to her own, but no contacts, no job, and only fifteen dollars saved from giving recitations. But for all her complaints about this period in our lives, we were never so hungry that we grew weak. In fact, as soon as I started caring about my figure, I was glad that an empty stomach felt normal to me.
Mamie said that church was the only safe place to begin in a new city, so it was as well that we arrived on a Saturday night with Sunday morning just an arm’s length away.
The next morning while Lil and Mother snored, I ran to the only window to see what surprises the dawn had brought. Like a kid heading for a stocking at Christmas, I expected bliss. I expected to see oranges growing on trees and the big cactus plants that Hortense had described. I expected a great open range, but our dormitory overlooked the back wall of the next bungalow where an overturned trash can was surrounded by garbage. We had slept in a rabbit warren with walls that had never been painted and warped floorboards rife with splinters. A Salvation Army hostel would offer far better these days. But I was young and everything was new and exciting.
Mother was either brave or crazy to face that Sunday in a strange metropolis with two children and no prospects. Maybe that’s why Mamie had said, ‘Ruthie, go straight to church, ’cause Los Angle-less is teeming with okies and thieves, syphilitics and who knows what. And see how they did poor Mabel Normand.’ She was Mamie’s favourite biograph star who clowned with the Keystone Cops and had reputedly died from morphine addiction earlier that year. Mamie had said, ‘Find you some honest church folk and you can’t go too far wrong.’ And mother never challenged Mamie’s word.
Lilian and I sat in that women’s dormitory on those old slats nailed together to make a bed, watching Mother dress carefully for church. As she took her time adjusting her slip and stepping into her brown chemise, I couldn’t resist asking, ‘Can’t I come too?’ Those churches were my stage and I needed to perform, to drink in those stares and be bathed in compliments.
‘Who’ll stay with Lil if you don’t?’
On the journey from Mississippi, my sister had suffered boils under both arms accompanied by a low-grade fever. It annoyed me when she got sick, because I was expected to treat her extra nice, and if playing nursemaid to her meant missing the first church meeting in what was a strange, new place, I didn’t want to. In fact I was temporarily wary of her because she said that the Pope hated Methodists.
While Mother arranged her hat, I was brimming with questions and was still young enough to believe that my mother had every answer. But she was feeling her way in the dark and lacked the cunning of a truly devious woman. However, with us to feed she ploughed on and combined her naïveté with plain old fashioned ignorance to potent means; to know nothing can be more powerful than knowing something. If I had to classify her as a cat, a Persian or Siamese wouldn’t do. No, Ruthie Mae Matthews was a barn cat with kittens.
When Mother returned from church hours later with a long face, Lilian was sleeping.
I knew better than to ask what Mother had seen and done now, because, on the journey to Los Angeles Lilian had burdened her with, ‘What’s going to happen?’ ‘What are we gonna do?’