It was what she wanted now too, now that she was still thinking about Robert. How she could put his skin to good use, be less cautious if she were him. If she could, she would put her voice in his body, in his skin. She would stand on the stage of the Jazzing and listen to the glowing words of the crowd rush back to her, like the memories of her singing on her parents’ table often would. Boy, can she blow. You ain’t never lied.
“Listen, we got a job cleaning the place at night if you want it,” the slender, tall man said, rousing Willie from her thoughts before they could turn dark. “The pay’s okay. Might get you somewhere a little later.”
She took the job on the spot, and when she got home that night she’d told Robert that the Morrises needed her on night duty. She couldn’t tell if he believed her, but he’d nodded. That night, they’d slept with Carson between them. He was starting to say a few words. The other day, when Willie had picked him up from Bess’s apartment to take him up to Joe’s, she’d heard her son call the old woman Mama, and a terrible, immovable lump formed in her throat as she clutched him to her body and took him up the stairs.
“The pay’s okay,” she said to Robert then, pulling Carson’s thumb from his mouth. He started crying. He shouted at her, “No!”
“Hey now, Sonny,” Robert said. “Don’t speak to Mama that way.” Carson put his thumb back into his mouth and stared at his father. “We don’t need the money,” he said. “We’re doing all right, Willie. We can get our own place soon, even. You don’t need to work.”
“Where would we live?” Willie snapped. She hadn’t meant to sound so mean. The idea was appealing to her: her own apartment, more time to spend with Carson. But she knew that she wasn’t meant for that life. She knew that that life wasn’t meant for them.
“There are places, Willie.”
“What place? What world do you think we live in, Robert? It’s a wonder you make it out these doors and out into this world without somebody knocking you down for sleeping with the nigg—”
“Stop!” Robert said. Willie had never heard that much force in his voice before. “Don’t do that.”
He rolled over to face the wall, and Willie stayed on her back, staring at the ceiling above them. The large brown spot on the ceiling was starting to look soft to her, as though the whole thing could come crashing down on them at any moment.
“I haven’t changed, Willie,” Robert said to the wall.
“No, but you ain’t the same neither,” she replied.
They didn’t speak for the rest of the night. Between them, Carson began to snore, louder and louder, like a rumbling from his stomach was escaping through his nose. It sounded like the background music for the falling ceiling, and it started to terrify Willie. If the boy was still a baby, if they were still in Pratt City, she would have wakened him. Here, in Harlem, she could not move. She had to lie there, still, with the rumbling, the falling, the terror.
—
Cleaning the Jazzing was not too difficult. Willie would drop Carson off at Bess’s before dinnertime, and then she would head over to 644 Lenox Avenue.
It was the same work that she did for the Morrises, but different too. The Jazzing audience was whites only. The performers who showed up on the stage every night were like the slender man said: tall, tan, and terrific. Meaning, as far as Willie could see, five foot five, light-skinned, and young. Willie would take out the trash, sweep, wipe the floors, and watch the men as they watched the people onstage. It was all so strange to her.
In one of the shows, an actor had pretended to be lost in an African jungle. He was wearing a grass skirt and had marks painted on his head and arms. Instead of speaking, he would grunt. Periodically, he would flex his pecs and pound his chest. He picked up one of the tall, tan, and terrific girls and draped her over his shoulder like she was a rag doll. The audience had laughed and laughed.
Once, Willie saw a show through the shield of her work that was meant to be a portrayal of the South. The three male actors, the darkest Willie had ever seen in the club, picked cotton onstage. Then one of the actors started complaining. He said that the sun was too hot, the cotton too white. He sat on the edge of the stage, lazily swinging his legs back and forth, back and forth.
The other two went forward and stood with their hands on his shoulders. They started singing a song that Willie had never heard before, one about how grateful they should all be to have such kind masters to take care of them. By the time they finished their singing, they were all standing up again, back to picking cotton.
This wasn’t the South that Willie knew. It wasn’t the South her parents had known either, but she could tell from the voices of the men in the audience that none of them had ever stepped foot in that South. All they wanted was to laugh and drink and whistle at the girls. It made Willie almost glad she was the one cleaning the stage instead of singing on it.
Willie had been working there for two months. She and Robert hadn’t been doing very well since the night she asked him where they would live. Most nights, Robert didn’t come home. When she got back from the club, just hours before sunrise, she would find Carson sleeping alone on the mattress. Joe had been picking him up from Bess’s once he finished teaching and putting him to bed every night. Willie would crawl in next to Carson and wait, wide-eyed, for the sound of Robert’s boots coming down the hall, the clop clop clop that meant she would have her husband that night. If she did hear it, if he did come, she would close her eyes quick, and the two of them would play the game of make-believe, acting like the people onstage at the club did. Robert’s role was to slip in quietly beside her, and hers was to not question, to let him believe that she still believed in him, in them.
Willie went outside the club to put the trash away, and when she came back in, her boss started walking toward her. He looked annoyed, but Willie had never seen him look any other way. He’d been in the war, and he walked with a staggering limp that he liked to say prevented him from getting a more respectable job. The only thing that seemed to make him happy was stepping outside to lean against the ragged brick of the building and smoke cigarette after cigarette after cigarette.
“Someone vomited in the men’s room,” he said, heading out.
Willie just nodded. This happened at least once a week, and she knew the routine without having to be told. She grabbed the bucket and the mop and made her way over. She knocked on the door once, then twice. There was no answer.
“I’m coming in,” she said forcefully. She had discovered weeks before that it was better to enter rooms forcefully than it was to do so timidly, since drunk men had a tendency to lose their hearing.
The man in the bathroom certainly had lost his. He was hunched over, his face in the sink, mumbling to himself.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” Willie said. As she turned to leave, the man looked up, and caught her eye in the mirror.
“Willie?” he asked.
She knew his voice immediately, but she didn’t turn. She didn’t answer him. All she could think about was the fact that she had not recognized him.
There was a time, when they were still just sweethearts dating and at the beginning of their marriage, when Willie thought she knew Robert better than she knew herself. This was more than a matter of knowing what his favorite color was, or knowing what he wanted for dinner without him having to tell her. It was a matter of knowing the things that he could not yet let himself know. Like that he was not the kind of man who could handle invisible hands around his neck. That Carson’s birth had changed him, but not for the better. It had made him deeply afraid of himself, always questioning his choices, never measuring up to a standard of his own making, a standard that was upheld in his own father’s generous love, a love that had made a way for him and his mother, even when the cost had been great. That Willie could recognize these things in Robert, but be unable to recognize his hunched back, his hanging head, frightened her.
Two white men walked into the room, not noticing Willie. One wore a gray suit, and the other a blue one. Willie held her breath.