Inside that house, with its bare wooden floors and its cracked windows and torn lace curtains, only one room of which anybody ever saw, the room she met customers in, Claudie Wiley dressed most of the town’s women, black and white. At least she made the things they wore when they wanted to look their best. She did all the alterations for Grossman’s, and she dressed every bride and bridesmaid and bride’s mother in this town from the time she was fifteen years old.
Her grandmother, who raised her after her mother ran off to California in search of something other than scrubbing floors, said she was born with the gift. At four, she could thread a needle and sew dolls for herself. She made them out of any scraps she could find, dishtowels, burlap bags, old dresses, and they were always smiling, which she almost never did. By the time she was six, she was making her own clothes, dressing herself like a white girl, and it caused some talk. Little motherless colored girl, people said, putting on airs, but still, nobody could fail to be impressed.
Every Easter she put on a real show, and if this town had an Easter Parade, she would have been the star, every year. When she was ten, she started making clothes for other little girls, white girls, and they were fine, even if Claudie always saved her greatest skill for dressing herself. Sometimes she would use a pattern, but a lot of the time, she’d just make something up.
She went to the little school they had at the church, but she didn’t pay attention much, since she was always doing something with a needle and thread while she was supposed to be studying history or numbers, and after a while, her teachers just gave up on her. So, in one way, she was completely ignorant of the world. But in another way, she knew everything she needed to know. Her grandmother worked as a cleaning woman, moving from house to house on different days, and the women in those houses would give her magazines that showed pictures of women of the day in dresses and evening gowns and suits, and the grandmother would give those to Claudie, who would study them as though reading scripture, sometimes practicing with empty hands on invisible material, making invisible clothes just like the ones she saw in the magazines the white women whose floors her mother mopped gave her.
The white women would always say, when Claudie brought them their new dress, “What do I owe you?”
“Whatever you think is right, ma’am,” Claudie would answer, having no idea what clothes cost. And most of the women, admiring the handiwork of this brilliant child, would give her more than they had planned to. So Claudie was clever that way. By the time she was fourteen, she was one of the few black people in town to have a checking and saving account at the bank. So that set her apart as well, along with the color of her skin, pale when almost all of her neighbors were dark, and that way she had of appearing to belong to nobody, to follow no rules except the ones she found useful to her, like her unfailing politeness to customers. She never flattered them, never went out of her way to tell the women or the girls that they looked better than ever. She just left them with a sense that they looked better than they would have if they hadn’t come to Claudie Wiley, and that was enough to open the purses and keep the money coming in.
Her grandmother died when she was fifteen, leaving her mostly unschooled, unable to cook, or even to clean her house. She never blinked an eye. She went on living there, taking up as little space as possible, letting the rest of the house go to ruin, receiving her customers in the one room downstairs that she kept immaculate even as the house fell apart around her.
People were concerned. Black people and white people alike talked in their houses about how something should be done, but nobody could figure out what that thing might be, and their concern rolled off her, left her unmoved. “I’m fine,” she would say to those brave enough to ask. “Don’t you worry about me none.”
And she was fine, as far as anybody could tell. She’d grown up. She wasn’t the scrawny little girl she’d been; she’d grown into a tall woman with a big behind and big bosoms. She wasn’t beautiful, but she was handsome, and her skill gave her a kind of luminosity that made beauty seem irrelevant. You might have thought her ugly, until you saw her expressions when the subject turned to women’s clothes, and then you would have changed your mind. And she had those fingers, those long, thin fingers like the tines of a fork, fingers that did what she wanted before she even told them to.
Women started to come to her from all over, bringing fancier and fancier ideas and more exotic pictures from magazines Claudie had never heard of. She took them all in, treated them with the same distant politeness, judging their figures and their often absurd visions of themselves with the precise eye of a surgeon, gently leading each one away from their fantasies and into what was at least possible for them, and the women were grateful for that. They paid her even more.
One of them, a woman who drove over the mountain every month all the way from Charlottesville, had an idea that Claudie should go away to a fancy fashion school. Claudie had been secretly doing fashion drawings since she was a child, and one day she shyly showed them to this woman, page after page of tall, thin white women in ball gowns and wedding dresses and luncheon suits, and tea dresses for parties that Claudie would never go to. The woman was convinced that Claudie had a great future; she saw a way for her out of this town and this filthy house and this lonely life. She offered Claudie her help and her checkbook.
She did everything for Claudie. She picked the school, way up in Boston. She edited the drawings down to two dozen of the finest and fanciest, she filled out the pages of the school application, even opened and read to Claudie the letter of acceptance that came in the spring. Claudie dreamed that night of furs and hats and jewels, of department stores, things she’d never seen even in pictures, while the Charlottesville woman sat at her own table, served by black servants, and told her husband how important this was, as a moment, to create a new life for Claudie, a life no black woman anywhere had ever had.
All that summer, her seventeenth year, Claudie sewed the clothes she would need for school in a big city up north. The woman bought her cardigans and little sweaters that went underneath, and gave her a second-rate string of pearls, picked up at the Episcopal Church Bazaar White Elephant table the year before. She gave her knee socks, all of this totally unsuitable to Claudie, who spent most of her days in shapeless dresses and bare feet, with a closetful of clothes she wore alone, in private, clothes that could match any clothes anywhere in the world. But she was excited at the same time, and she worked hard at turning herself into somebody she’d never been, into a fantasy of the woman she might be.
Two days before she was supposed to leave for Boston, the woman drove over from Charlottesville and picked her up. Claudie locked her house and left the town without saying good-bye to a single soul. She spent the night in the woman’s guest room in Charlottesville, not even in the maid’s room, and she slept in the best bed under the best sheets she’d ever felt.
In the middle of the night, she sat for a long time and looked at all her bright new school clothes in her suitcase, so neatly folded, still smelling of the stores they came from. Then she unpacked everything, and hung each piece on hangers in the closet, and then she picked up her empty suitcase and got ready to leave that house and that life and those sheets forever behind her.
She left anything the woman had given her on the dressing table, her train ticket to the future, even the pearls, and walked down through the alien streets of the biggest town she’d ever seen, past the shop windows filled with tweed jackets for the college boys and polite dresses for the faculty wives, marveling at the richness of everything. In the bus station, just another unschooled black country girl, she waited quietly for the first bus to take her back to Brownsburg. The woman and her husband didn’t lift a finger to interfere. Nobody ever messed with Claudie.
So she came home, and she sewed, and nobody ever asked a thing about why she’d come back to that old house. She got older. Somewhere along the way, she had a baby of her own, a little girl she called Evelyn Hope, who was the one wh
o might or might not be some kind of idiot, and nobody ever knew or asked who the father was.
She had to get a telephone, so her customers could call, the first black person in town to have one. She never made a call herself. She got calls. She was making as much money as most white people, but working twice as hard, late into the night, and traveling all over to make these dresses for rich women who no longer had to come to her. She bought herself a car. It was a Packard Super Clipper, two-toned, fancy beyond belief, even if it had been owned before her by Boaty Glass. The boys of the neighborhood washed it every Saturday, and waxed it once a month until its red and silver body sparkled in the sun. She didn’t need anybody or anything, and nobody bothered her, ever. Nobody much talked to her either, except about yardage and pleats and darts, and that was just fine with her. Men were put off by her independence and her obvious lack of need for them, and women were just flat out afraid of her, of any black woman who could make her way in the world, all alone, stitch by stitch.
She drove that car wherever the calls told her to go, pulling up to big houses and going around to the back door, sometimes staying overnight in a maid’s room, making dresses for well-bred women and wide-eyed debutantes all over the state. She was treated no worse than other black people of her generation, and maybe better, because it was clear, even though she didn’t say much, that Claudie was something special, that Claudie had almost witchlike powers when it came to conjuring a dress out of a bolt of cloth.
The brides would walk down the aisle beaming, preceded by bridesmaids who looked themselves like princesses out of a fairy tale. The Garden Club ladies would sit down to lunch in their specially-made outfits, and accept the compliments that came their way, pretending it was nothing special, but passing Claudie’s name and number along to their friends, and their friends would rush home and call. Debutantes would sweep to the floor in dresses made by Claudie Wiley, until their foreheads touched the hardwood, a Texas curtsey at the Jefferson Hotel in Richmond, while silver- and blue-haired men and women plotted the girls’ matrimonial futures and fortunes.
Claudie never thought about Boston, or well-meaning white women, or what she might have done with her life. She was doing what she could, and to think a black woman in those days could do anything else seemed just as foolish to everybody else as it had been frightening to her.
She knew she was capable of great things, and her money was slowly piling up in the bank, more than any other black person in the town, more than a lot of white people, too, although she never thought about how much was there. She just waited for some part of her girlhood’s dream to come true, her imagination firing up only occasionally, her hand reaching for drawing paper on the kitchen table to make a few deft lines, a suggestion of a splendor she had no reason to execute.
Then one day Sylvan Glass walked through her door, seventeen years old, a stack of magazines she’d picked up in Hollywood in her hands, and Claudie knew in a glance who she was and what she was and where she’d come from and what she wanted.
It was like an itching in her fingers.
CHAPTER NINE
I’M SYLVAN GLASS. I’ve come to see about getting some clothes made.”
Claudie took it in, this tall girl standing there on her porch with a clutch of magazines in her hands. She felt some kind of something, some shiver run through her, as though she were looking at the figure she’d drawn on all those pieces of paper all her life. The lines. The curves. The carriage. Now here she was, standing in front of her on the porch next to the rotting old sofa her grandmother had died on. She took it all in, and she saw the clay she’d been waiting for all her life, the clay from which she would build her perfect model of the white women who had both mystified and fascinated her.
“Well, you better come in, ma’am.”
Sylvan laughed. “Please don’t call me ma’am. I’m only seventeen. It makes me feel like an old lady. Call me Sylvan. Everybody tells me you can do anything. I’ve been mad to meet you. Simply mad. Here, hold these,” and she thrust the magazines into Claudie’s hands, then ran to the sleek white convertible Boaty had bought her and came back with a dozen bolts of cloth in her arms.
They stepped through the torn screen door and into the dim hallway that led to the workroom. Sylvan took notice of the broken chairs, the dusty box record player tilted on its side, the remnants of other people’s fabrics, the cat smell. She just hoped there weren’t snakes in the house. She’d seen worse, back home. It didn’t bother her at all.
In the workroom there was a big wooden table, and two chairs, and Claudie moved around the room, turning on the lights one by one until the gloom dissolved and Sylvan could see how clean everything was. There was a dress form, an old wooden box filled with every kind of scissor, a sewing box, and an immaculate new Singer sewing machine. There was no sign of life, of living, just the implements of Claudie’s work. Sylvan had heard she had a daughter, but she didn’t see or hear anybody, didn’t sense that anybody did anything in this room except what they were doing now.
“I’ve seen you. You’re married to Mr. Glass.”
“Call me Sylvan.”
“I can’t.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know. It’s not my way. I just can’t. People around here . . . What are you after?”
“Dresses. A suit. Some skirts and blouses. I don’t know if you can make them.”
“I can make anything.”
“I heard that. From a picture?”
“From a picture. From a pattern. From some idea in your head, if you can say it clear.”
“I’ve got pictures,” she pointed to the magazines, dog-eared pages flipped over at the corners. “I just went to Hollywood, California, and I saw so many things. I think I even maybe saw Miss Joan Crawford. Looked like her, anyway. And I got these magazines all about movie stars. Miss Lauren Bacall. She’s married to an old man just like me. Miss Lana Turner. Lots of movie stars. There’s pictures of what they wear to lunch at the Brown Derby, what they wear at home when they have other movie stars over for tea parties or cards, everything.”
“Where do you come from? Not from around here.”
“I actually do. Right near here, out in the county.” She made it sound like she came from some grand plantation, with servants and foxhounds. But Claudie could tell.
“And how was that for you?”
“Well, I’m here in town, aren’t I?”
“You talk like somebody on the radio.”
“I hope so. I been studying that thing a long time. You don’t smile a lot.”
“Haven’t seen anything funny so far.”
“Most of the colored women around here smile at me all the time.”
“They’re not me.”
“No. I guess not.”
“I make clothes. I’m real good at it. Ask anybody. Rest of the time, I just mind my own business. I don’t know who that Crawford woman or any of those other women are. I’ve never been to the movies. Why would I?”
“You’ve never seen such beautiful people. Every one of them. That’s why they call them stars, I guess. They just shine.”
Claudie smiled finally, a broad, sweet smile that made her look fourteen. “How old you say you were?”
“I’m seventeen. But I’m married already. See, you smiled.”
“You wouldn’t believe some of the things I hear, the way some women fool themselves. They think they’re thin when they’re fat, or the other way around. They act like they’re rich when they can’t even pay their old cleaning woman. You. You think I can turn you into somebody you’re not, just somebody you saw who looked like somebody else who makes movies. Well, I like a dreamer. I’m a dreamer. I can’t tell you I can do that, turn you into Miss Cranford or whatever her name is, but I sure can make you some pretty clothes to wear. Let’s see what you’re after. Let’s see those magazines.”
So they sat down and went through Photoplay, Motion Picture, Screenland, and the rest, Sylvan turning the pages as
if they were the pages of an ancient family Bible, her face lit up with longing and hope. She pointed out daytime dresses that were so fanciful they looked like something out of a fairytale. Suits that made Claudie want to reach for the scissors and start cutting. Elegant, lush clothes, alive with desire, worn on rich, full bodies. Claudie felt her heart beat fast in her chest.
Here was a girl who wanted to wear the kind of clothes Claudie wanted to make, who had the kind of full, womanly body she wanted to make them for. She didn’t ask why, or where on earth in this town Sylvan thought she was going to wear them, she just knew this girl had an idea in mind of who she was going to be, and that excited her.
They went through every magazine. As they looked at the pictures, Sylvan told Claudie about this fantastic place she’d been, Hollywood, staying in a hotel called the Roosevelt, with maids who changed the sheets every single day, taking buses and taxis, eating a lobster, going to a movie studio, and actually seeing some of the houses where these impossibly beautiful people lived, at least glimpsing them in the distance through the thickly ivied front gates.
She’d gone to a department store, dragging her husband along. She’d bought so much material for the clothes she wanted they had to buy an extra steamer trunk, yards and yards of stuff even Claudie had never seen before. Silks, and wools so fine you could have pulled a yard through a wedding ring, and linens as sheer as a handkerchief.