By the summer of 1917 the trio had created rituals of behavior. Hitching a ride on the back of the Red Line trolley, Ossie and Lizzie could easily get from the Neckbone down to the market district and the Bijoux. With Flip as the “Interlocutor,” the rag-tag trio regularly entertained patrons leaving the movie house. “Ladies and Gentlemen! Lizzie Winrow and Osceola Turner’s Colored Troubadours! The Girl made of Rubberbands and the Rubberband Band!”
In the alley behind the Bijoux, Osceola imitated the stride with a comb and a piece of tissue paper while slapping his feet for the rhythm, punctuating it with a bass boom grunt from the back of his throat. Lizzie invented dances and made up lyrics or scat a tight-harmony counterpoint to his instrumental. In exchange for Lizzie showing Flip how to shimmy and walk on his hands and Ossie teaching him to play a little drums, Flip let them sneak into the Bijoux to see the weekly picture show. Since colored weren’t allowed except on “Colored Day,” they hid in the last row in the balcony, where Lizzie demonstrated how to squeeze under the seat until the lights went down.
On other occasions, in the waning days of summer, they would go swimming not far from Lizzie’s old homestead. Dora had rented out a small plot from the Hendersons, the itinerant white family that had bid on and settled on Tom Winrow’s land. There Mah Bette still kept her garden, where the herbs mingled with vegetables and wildflowers.
The Hendersons had proved right decent white folk. They allowed Dora to board the mule and keep some chickens and a fattening hog. They built their own shotgun shack, though, for they didn’t want to live in a house after colored. Except for an old stove, a broken cot, and a wobbly table and chair, the farmhouse where Lizzie was born stood empty, taking on years, the paint chipped away, the shutters fallen to the side and the door disappeared. Lizzie tromped around as if she still lived there. Put out by some low-count, red clay rednecks! Sold off the property and he just gone! That day so long ago.
Reclining on her treetop branch, Lizzie could still see the rooftop in the distance. One leg dangling, she twirled a sprig of lavender against her cheek, breathing in the scent. In these woods, she and her pa had played Union Jack and Johnny Reb. In these woods, he had told her about her grandpa’s pickin’ up a bugle from a dead boy’s hand. “In this land our people are buried. Strangers they were, came and found me, found each other.” Running away, leavin’ behind what you love, Pa, what made you? She could not believe her pa would do that. Every day she expected to see him, every posting she expected to hear. Every time Mr. Sullivan came through the railroad yard, she pried and plied, asking Win’s old friend where he’d been, what he’d seen, was there news, but it was as if Tom Winrow had died. Not even that. Disappeared, vanished like smoke from a chimney, fog off the lake. She couldn’t grieve, daren’t hope, never believed he would leave like that with no word, no reason, nothing, how with no explanation he would just walk away.
“Hey Lizzie, you spozed to be the lookout. What you doin’ up there, daydreamin?” Flip protested, his neck craned toward the perch where she lay.
“Smellin’ up one of her famous pomades,” Ossie laughed. His dimples blossomed when he smiled. “Always experimentin’, lookin’ for the cure-all invention to tackle her hair.” He trilled the air with one finger and with his voice mimicked a trumpet with the mute tight on the bell, signaling delight with a slight jab of his neck. After gorging themselves on wild peaches, the threesome had set up shop on King’s Highway, where it was still a one-lane road. They watched for automobiles cruising down to Florida or the Carolina coast or rumrunner convoys piping their weekend medicine to the city.
Flip and Osceola would disguise a mud slick with palmetto leaves and sand, then watch the city-slickers get their front or back wheels stuck up to the spokes. Flip would then negotiate a tow for a fee. Mr. Lee, the ancient gray-haired mule Lizzie had inherited, had given up being a dancin’ mule in the mature years of his ornery life, but he was pliant only in Ossie’s gentle hands. The single reminder of her life as a child was Mr. Lee. While Ossie harnessed him up, Flip brokered the deal. Lizzie lingered in the treetops as the lookout. She became expert at the makes of cars and the potential for loot. She could easily spot a “Ford, Stutz White, leather seats, tight two-seater!” or a “Buick Touring, B-25! No, a Cadillac Landaulette!” Watching Ossie labor away with Mr. Lee and Flip wrangle the payment, she would idle in her branch and bat the breeze with the wayfarers, getting all the latest news from Savannah or Philly or New York.
These days the road was just as likely to bear military vehicles and work crews as lost vacationers and local moonshiners. The war raging in Europe for three years had finally spilled over to the U.S. Passersby had less time for small talk and adolescent pranks. “Trucks, flatbeds, red spokes,” she called out. “These here don’t look too friendly.”
“Let me do the talkin’,” Flip admonished. “And you!” he rasped, pointing his skinny finger at her, “stay outta sight.”
Flip had his mother’s big forehead and fine, thin hair the color of dirty dishwater. He compensated for his nondescript face and short stature with a twangy bluster and a presumption of privilege. Lizzie didn’t pay him no mind and was about to let him know as much before Ossie interceded. A lanky, tall youth with a rich sienna complexion, he was uncomfortably thin with a straight narrow frame, his baritone voice a shock to hear. “Flip’s right, you don’t wanna be messin’ with fellahs got war on they minds. Let us men handle dis.”
As the boys walked toward the approaching caravan, warding them off from the slick, Lizzie crossed her eyes and chided them, “Men? Hah!”
From the movie house to the farm to the wharf to the depot past the two-flat on Rose Tree Lane that her mother called home to the workroom behind Yum Lee’s Laundry, her feet were a whir. “Hey, Mah Bette!” Rivulets of sweat cascading down her flushed tawny cheeks, Lizzie placed a big kiss on her great-grandmother’s cheek and gave her a rough tight hug, startling the old woman awake. “Mr. Sullivan sent you this snuff and a little taste just like you asked, and the colored newspaper to boot.” She untucked her blouse from her skirt and removed the prize tobacco, a pint of Irish whiskey, and a wilted folded newspaper. “Chicago Defender! Tellin’ people to go north. Got good jobs with the war comin’,” she added.
“Plenty of work right here. The North ain’t all of that someplace,” her mother scowled without looking up from her worktable. Lizzie saw that another letter had arrived in the post from New York. From Elma. It was no secret that Elma was her mother’s favorite. Elma with her long silky hair and swanlike grace. Always the pretty one, always the praise. Swan uh mean old nasty bird. Pretty on the outside, ugly in. Even in her absence, it seemed Elma sucked up all the glory. Lizzie was a good singer with a strong, husky, belting voice, but Elma’s high soprano with the quivering birdsong vibrato was the one that still garnered all the compliments. “My what a voice yoah sistuh has! So sweet!” church members would marvel, as if Lizzie, the loudest in the choir, had none at all. She shrugged off the slights. Since the church congregation saw no favor in her singing, she saw no reason to favor them with her presence.
“Gone to the Devil!” she laughed to herself. At all cost, she avoided direct comparison with her older sister’s talent, deciding that she preferred instead to dance and dabble with various musical instruments—Mah Bette’s old banjo, spoons, harmonica, and piano, when she could get her hands on one. Once she even had tried playing the old bugle her father had left behind. She wound up killing that ambition with enthusiasm. Trying to get good at it overnight, she played it too long. Whole mouth swole up like a paw-paw. “Nebber pwayin’ dot dang no mo’, look mah lips!”
Poking them out now nearly as far, she stealthily watched Yum Lee toggling back and forth, never sayin’ nothin’, while her cousin Roswell waited at the counter for his order of linens. Now that he had taken over the family funeral business, the younger Roswell was even more intolerable. Some cousin. He shoulda gived that house to us a hundred years ago. She hated the way
Roswell leered at her, as if her father’s not bein’ there gave him license. Claimin’ he fam’ly, always tryin’ to kiss me. She gave him a short closed-lip smile.
The steam and sweat and noise, her mother hunched over that machine like a demon at work—it all made her fidget, stuffing her shirt back in, rolling her ankles to the sides. She hated the way her people tiptoed around their lives, hated how her mother kowtowed to whites and even with Roswell changed her demeanor and tone, hated how her mother preached disdain for white folk, then turned around and valued everything that was most like them. She hated her sister for pretending she had found happiness when the sorrow washed right through the words in her letters, hated how her once proud and mysterious Mah Bette would now occasionally lose her way, wandering around with goober dust and crab claws until Lizzie found her or the police brought her home. She hated the side glances of grown men lusting after the woman she was becoming and sometimes the child that she still was.
“Lizabeth.” Roswell tipped his hat, his laundry package stuffed tightly under his arm.
“It’s Lizzie,” she glowered and stepped back with emphasis, allowing him free room to exit.
“Don’t stand on the sides of your shoes like that,” Dora snapped when the three women were alone. “They cost good money.”
“I’m goin’ out.”
“You stay right there till I say you could move.”
In defiance of her mother and to Mah Bette’s secret delight, Lizzie jabbed her neck back and forth in rapid staccato, perfectly capturing a chicken pecking at grain. Mah Bette laughed aloud. The sewing machine stopped abruptly. Dora flashed a silent glare. Lizzie poked her neck back in place and stood still as a statue.
Each make up she own mind bout tings, Mah Bette mused. Each tink she need nuttin’ from th’other, an expect less. Dora hold she head up high. Folks tink she nose inna air. My Lizzie, stickin’ she nose all de time where it got no place bein’.
Lizzie casually palmed her sister’s letter from the side of the table. Turning away from her mother, she plied it from the envelope and began to read it. Elma’s letters were always cheerful and short. Life with Raymond was getting better. New York, where buildings touched the sky, things were always looking up. Lizzie could read through the lines. She could see within the picture, a photo from Easter—two toddlers by her side, another one on the way, Elma standing on a Manhattan rooftop framed by the New York City skyline. Her sister was gaunt, a smile forced on her thin lips, her large dark eyes wide and frightened, one fist clenched at the end of an arm seemingly bound to her side, her beautiful mane of hair pulled close to her head. Elma, too proud to ask, but always tacitly accepting the few dollars her mother dutifully sent.
Dora had overpowered her shame and shaped her older daughter with a fierce, unbending pride. Perforce, she had overlooked Lizzie, did not have room to see her. “Make yourself useful and fold some of those pieces for packin’.”
Lizzie quickly put the letter back on the table, then flexed her feet and dug her heels into the floor. As she slapped the sleeve parts together sloppily her mother started in on her again. “It wouldn’t hurt to be civil to your cousin. Don’t you roll your eyes at me! The idea!”
Sensing a brewing summer storm, Yum Lee looked to Mah Bette and silently glided from the room. The sewing machine stopped and started as Dora stomped on the pedal with each new thought building to crescendo. “You want people to talk!? I always held my head up high. Made sure if people was gonna talk, I was looking straight at them and now! Waltzin’ in here. Lookin’ like that! My own daughter? Gallavantin’ with that no-count waterfront trash!”
“We ain’t no trash! We got us a good act! We gon be famous!”
“That nigguh ain’t eben thinking ’bout you,” Dora snapped, her shoulders hunched over the sewing machine. “When I was your age, I had my own growing business. I slave like crazy to make a decent life and what do I get? My own daughter! Hangin’ inna trees like a monkey! Smellin’ like a mule! Singin’ on street corners like a common heiffuh!”
“I make good money same as you!”
Dora slammed her hand on the table. “Oh, you are a headstrong, willful, good-for-nuthin’! I swear you take after your father for spite!”
“I take after my daddy cuz he’s my daddy. I should take after him for real and leave this doggone place!”
“Chile, you better not let me get up from here and get my hands on you. You ain’t makin’ nothin’ but a mess outta that. Go on and refill the kerosene for the lamp.”
“Ain’t you never heard of ’lectricity?”
Dora made a gesture as if she would rise up from her chair. Lizzie darted out.
“No-good heiffuh.”
“That’s hoofuh!” Lizzie retorted and stomped an angry rhythm pattern on the landing as Dora’s sewing box hit the screen door. Lizzie hated when her mother worked late for the Chinaman, the room close and hot, stinking of sweat and starch. Her eyes brimming with tears and fury, she stomped round back the building to the storm cellar. “Bending over that machine till she nearly blind! He so cheap won’t even turn on no lights!” All had gone. All she knew as her family. Her father, never to be seen again. Then Elma. Elma used to send letters addressed especially to her. The last was in April and here it was July. She lifted one of the heavy cellar doors. The air within was cool and clammy. The cellar would be damp with soot and cobwebs. “Wouldn’t have to cart no lamp up the steps if you’d git some doggone lights. I’mo get outta this backward doggone beat-up town.”
She left the unfilled lamp on the ledge and in the last hint of twilight ran off to find Ossie at Pilar’s.
Osceola watched her create an improvised dance, her body lithe with no seeming rules of behavior as she scaled the brick wall like a cat. Her feet disappeared through the jimmied window. He hesitated. “Don’t think it’s right, dancin’ up where the dead lay.”
“Ain’t no dead people in here tonight. Besides, is that all you want to do—walk around behind Mr. Jocelyn, carryin’ his hat? Where you gon go with that?” She flashed him the prize possession concealed under her shirt. “Looky hyeah, a Victrola attachment!” Her knees propped on the sill, she extended her hand, “Come on, reach!” she whispered. “We gon make some music of our own tonight.”
They had snuck into the private office of her cousin Roswell’s funeral parlor. Roswell had bought a Victrola to entertain his men friends with the latest Jass recordings when their wives thought they were having a Brown Society Benevolence Committee meeting. Twisting his lanky body to get through the tiny stairwell window, Ossie cautiously lowered himself onto the landing. Lizzie arched her back and pursed her lips. “Cousin Roswell be ovuh to Sundie dinnuh, sayin’, ‘Jass is the Ruination!’ Then he sneak over here, snapping his finguhs and smokin’ cigars.”
Lizzie considered this minor breaking and entry a repayment for the grief Roswell regularly bestowed upon her family. Her first efforts were foiled. Roswell had kept the stylus attachment locked and hidden away in his roller desk. Without it, the mahogany box with its golden rimmed horn was beautiful to behold, but unplayable. Now that Lizzie had procured the exclusive Victrola attachment from Mr. Sullivan, “only for one dollah,” she was ecstatic.
“A dollah?! Lizzie, we need be savin’ our money. I’ll keep it, ’fo you spend it on somethin’ else stupid like them tap shoes.”
“I need these shoes,” she protested as she clicked her new patent leather, black-bowed flats around the sparkling parquet floors of the funeral parlor.
“Put bottle caps on the bottom like everybody else,” Ossie rebutted.
“I ain’t like everybody else. I’m Lizzie Winrow.”
Her kinship with Ossie was genuine. He was a natural. He played multiple instruments, as adept at rhythm as melody as she was, and he laughed at her jokes, admired her dances. She could be herself. “Just the same,” he said, “I’ll keep the money.”
“Whatever. We gon have us our own Victrola Party tonight!” Ossie’s contri
bution to the evening was a new set of treasured Red Seal records. He had procured them off a sailor who owed his brother Deke some money. The two vandals watched transfixed as the needle rested against the rotating black disc. Miraculously, a cornucopia of sound washed over the room.
Ossie’s hands went up in panic. “Oh Lawd, they gon hear us!”
Lizzie transformed her voice into a ducklike churl, crossed her eyes, and drew her knees together. Enunciating each syllable with exaggeration, she conjured her spinster cousin Francina to a tee. “Osceola! I know for a verifiable fact that cousin Rrrrrossssswell is burying Mr. Portas tonight. I know, also for a fact,” she shifted to her regular slang, “he buryin’ the husband an sleepin’ widda widda.”
Ossie frowned in embarrassment. “You got a dirty mouf, you know.”
“I tell the truth, is all. Can’t help if it hurt to hear it. Come to think of it, Roswell and the widow Portas? Hurt to think about that!”
A selection called the Castle Walk began.
“These folks—the Castles—goin’ all over the world teachin’ folks how to dance our dances,” she continued.
“It say Castle Walk, Lizzie, not Cake Walk.”
Lizzie fanned herself with the box cover. “White folks, dancin’ roun’ the world—got a colored band leader.”
“You lyin’. Lemme see.”
“Why, you cain’t read.”
“Gimme it.”
“You wish.”
“Who told you he was colored? Ain’t no colored people makin’ no records.”
“Uh-huh! Mr. Sullivan say when I brung him Mah Bette’s charm and he give me the Victrola needle I asked him fuh. ‘Same one as usual, Lizzie. Gimme Spell Number Seven,’ he say.” She handed him the weathered, folded newspaper that had been read by people many times over and continued, “These folks here, the Castles, goin’ all over country, national tour, teachin’ folks how to dance. Got a colored band leader on stage with em. Come on!” She held out her arms, expecting Ossie to dance with her.