“Willie, what you need to do is let yourself sing, girl,” Sister Bertha said. Willie had come in straight from cleaning a house. She’d rushed to remove her apron as she walked in, but, though she didn’t know it, a smear of chicken grease still lined her forehead.
Carson was sitting in the audience. Bored, Willie figured. He kept asking her about school, but she couldn’t let him go until baby Josephine got old enough to go. He narrowed his eyes at her when she told him, and sometimes she dreamed about sending him down south to stay with her sister, Hazel. Maybe she wouldn’t mind a child with that much hate floating around in his eyes. But Willie knew she could never actually do it. In her letters down home, she wrote about how things were going well, how Robert was getting on nicely. Hazel would write back that she would come visit soon, but Willie knew she never would. The South was hers. She wanted no part of the North.
“Yes, what you need to do is let the Lord take that cross you carryin’,” Sister Dora said.
Willie smiled. She hummed the alto line.
“You ready to go?” she asked Carson when she got offstage.
“Been ready,” he said.
She and Carson left the church. It was a cold fall day, a crisp wind coming toward them from the river. There were a few cars on the street, and Willie saw a rich, mahogany-colored woman walk by in a raccoon coat that looked as soft as a cloud. On Lenox, every other marquee said that Duke Ellington would be playing there: Thursday, Friday, Saturday.
“Let’s walk a little longer,” Willie said, and Carson shrugged, but he took his hands out of his pockets and his step picked up, so she could see that she had finally said the right thing.
They stopped to let some cars pass, and Willie looked up to see six little children looking down at her from an apartment building window. It was a pyramid of children, the oldest, tallest, lining the back row, the youngest in front. Willie reached her hand up and waved, but then a woman snatched them away and closed the curtains. She and Carson crossed the street. It seemed like there were hundreds of people out in Harlem that day. Thousands, even. The sidewalks were sinking with the weight, some literally cracking beneath them. Willie saw a man the color of milky tea singing on the street. Beside him a tree-bark woman clapped her hands and bounced her head. Harlem felt like a big black band with so many heavy instruments, the city stage was collapsing.
They turned south on Seventh, past the barbershop that Willie swept from time to time to earn a few cents, past several bars and one ice cream parlor. Wille reached into her purse and felt around until her hand hit metal. She tossed a nickel to Carson, and the boy smiled at her for what seemed like the first time in years. The sweetness of the smile was bitter too, for it reminded Willie of the days of his endless crying. The days when there was no one in the world except for the two of them, and she was not enough for him. She was barely enough for herself. He raced in to buy a cone, and when he came back out with it, the two of them kept walking.
If Willie could have taken Seventh Avenue south all the way back down to Pratt City, she probably would have. Carson licked his ice cream cone delicately, sculpting that round shape with his own tongue. He would lick all the way around, and then look at it carefully, lick again. She couldn’t remember the last time she had seen him so happy, and how easy it was to make him that way. All it took was a nickel and a walk. If they walked forever, maybe she would start to get happy too. She might be able to forget how she’d wound up in Harlem, away from Pratt City, away from home.
—
Willie wasn’t coal black. She’d seen enough coal in her lifetime to know that for sure. But the day Robert Clifton came with his father to the union meeting to hear Willie sing, all she could think was that he was the whitest black boy she had ever seen, and because she thought that, her own skin had started to look to her more and more like the thing her father brought home from the mines, under his fingernails and dusting his clothes, every single day.
Willie had been singing the national anthem at union meetings for the past year and a half. Her father, H, was the union leader, so it hadn’t been very hard to convince him to let her sing.
The day Robert came in, Willie was in the back room of the church, practicing her scales.
“You ready?” her daddy asked. Before Willie had begged to sing, there was no anthem sung at union meetings.
Willie nodded and went out to the sanctuary, where all the union members were waiting. She was young, but she already knew that she was the best singer in Pratt City, maybe even in all of Birmingham. Everyone, women and children alike, came to the meetings just to hear that old world-weary voice come out of her ten-year-old body.
“Please stand for the anthem,” H said to the crowd, and they did. Willie’s father teared up the first time she’d sung it. Afterward, Willie could hear a man say, “Look at old Two-Shovel. Getting soft, ain’t he?”
Now Willie sang the anthem, and the crowd watched, beaming. She imagined that the sound came from a cave at the very bottom of her gut, that like her father and all the men in front of her, she was a miner reaching deep down inside of her to pull something valuable out. When she finished, everyone in the room stood and clapped and whistled, and that was how she knew she had reached the rock at the bottom of the cave. Afterward, the miners went on with their meeting and Willie sat in her father’s lap, bored, wishing she could sing again.
“Willie, you sang awfully pretty tonight,” a man said after the meeting ended. Willie was standing with her little sister, Hazel, outside of the church, watching the people walk home while H closed up. Willie didn’t recognize the man. He was new, an ex-con who’d worked the railroads before coming to work as a free man in the mines. “I’d like you to meet my son, Robert,” the man said. “He’s shy, but boy does he love to hear you sing.”
Robert stepped out from behind his father.
“You go on and play for a bit,” the man said, pushing Robert forward a little before walking on home.
His father was the color of coffee, but Robert was the color of cream. Willie was used to seeing white and black together in Pratt City, but she’d never seen both things in one family, both in one person.
“You got a nice voice,” Robert said. He looked at the ground as he spoke, and kicked up a bit of dust. “I been coming to hear you sing.”
“Thanks,” Willie said. Finally, Robert looked at her and smiled, relieved, it seemed, to have spoken. Willie was startled by his eyes.
“Why your eyes look like that?” Willie asked while Hazel hid behind her leg, eyeing Robert from behind the bend of Willie’s knee.
“Like what?” Robert asked.
Willie searched for the word, but realized there wasn’t one word to describe it. His eyes looked like a lot of things. Like the clear puddles that stood over the mud that she and Hazel liked to jump in, or like the shimmering body of a golden ant she had once seen carrying a blade of grass across a hill. His eyes were changing before hers, and she didn’t know how to tell him this, so instead she just shrugged.
“You a white man?” Hazel asked, and Willie pushed her.
“No. Mama say we got a lot of white in our blood, though. Sometimes it take a while to show up.”
“That ain’t right,” Hazel said, shaking her head.
“Yo daddy’s old as dirt. That ain’t right neither,” Robert said, and before Willie knew what she was doing, she pushed him. He stumbled, fell down onto his butt, and looked up at Willie with surprise in his brown, green, gold eyes, but she didn’t care. Her daddy was one of the best miners Birmingham had ever seen. He was the light of Willie’s life, and she was his. He told her all the time how he waited and waited and waited to have her, and when she’d come, he’d been so happy his big coal heart had melted.
Robert stood back up and dusted himself off.
“Ooh,” Hazel said, turning toward Willie, never missing an opportunity to shame her. “I’m telling Mama on you!”