“What?”
“That.” Kitty nodded toward the beach. “Them.” Crossing over was easier when she never had to see her own kind. Then she could pretend that they didn’t exist, that she wasn’t missing anything. When she thought about it, Kitty hadn’t had contact with another Negro person since the train station. Neighborhoods were segregated and far apart, and the lower-wage and hourly jobs around town that would have gone to Negroes (for a lesser wage in the South, of course) went to the rising Irish and Italian immigrant populations. Kitty’s world had become White, save for the occasional passerby.
“No.” Emma sped off as the light turned green. “There was nothing about being Negro that was good for me.”
It would have been easy to assume Emma was ashamed of her race, but Kitty knew it was the circumstances of being Negro that had inflicted the harm. Emma chain-smoked every day to ease her nerves until her nonnegotiable six o’clock drink. Tobacco and gin, like the snuff tobacco Hazel packed in her lip, were her pacifiers. And marrying well was an obsession because she believed that by being some rich man’s wife, she’d no longer be her father’s illegitimate child.
Kitty didn’t hold the hatred toward her past that Emma did. She missed it. Deep inside, Kitty knew her mother would never write back, but it gave her comfort to picture her reading the letters she sent. She wrote her every week, sometimes twice. And each week, Emma emerged from the post office empty-handed.
To feel close to her, Kitty cooked, remembering her moving about their small kitchen. After she fried some chicken for dinner later that week, Emma came in, yelling and slamming the windows Kitty had opened to let out the smoke.
“You can smell it halfway down the street. The whole neighborhood is going to know that Kitty Karr fries chicken.” Her hands went to her hips as she waited for an apology.
Kitty dismissed her worry. “So?”
“How many White women do you know who fry chicken?” she said.
Kitty laughed. “Every single one who has a maid.”
Emma exhaled her exasperation. “You don’t get it.”
“I’ll say our maid taught me if that makes you feel better.”
“I don’t think people are going to suspect us just because you can fry chicken, Kitty,” she said. “I think people are going to start dropping by, inviting themselves in, being nosey about who we are, wanting to get to know us.”
“So, it smells good, is what you’re saying?” Kitty poked a breast with the point of a knife as it sizzled in the cast-iron pan.
“I’m serious.”
“You’re being ridiculous,” Kitty said.
Emma threw her hands up. “Don’t blame me when the whole neighborhood starts ringing our bell.”
“Fine. When I have a taste for it, I’ll just buy it.”
Emma shook a finger at her. “Stay away from the Negro side of town, Kitty.”
“Is that what this is about?” Kitty asked. She honestly hadn’t had the inclination. The influx of Negroes from southern states made her worry a tiny bit. What if someone recognized her? More people knew her than she knew. Sometimes she passed other Negroes on the street and accidentally made eye contact, as she had with the woman in Mitch’s, forgetting that she wasn’t supposed to. The funny thing is that, like that woman, they didn’t look away like they were supposed to. Kitty was always first to break the gaze, and it made her wonder for blocks afterward if they knew she was one of them.
“You seem nostalgic. It’s dangerous.”
“Because I’m frying chicken?”
Emma touched her shoulder. “I know you’re homesick. But you’ve got to get over it. Pretty soon, you’ll start doing things and going places you shouldn’t. Missing things it doesn’t do you any good to miss.”
Kitty pulled her hand away. She would always yearn for home, but that wasn’t the only reason she was frying chicken. Emma didn’t cook much, and when she did, the entire meal came from a can or a box. Kitty was used to more greens and beans, and her stomach had begun to turn on her.
Emma opened the refrigerator.
“You’re not going to eat?”
Emma scoffed as if Kitty had said the most absurd thing. “Of course I am. Just need some hot sauce.”
That night, they dined on hot, crispy chicken, and Kitty drank as many gin and tonics as Emma served. Emma put on Ray Charles and turned up the record player, dancing and twirling around the room, high on liquor. Emma could really dance; she was almost in a trance as she shimmied and shook her body to the melody.
“Can I go dancing with you all the next time?”
“Never.” Emma was serious but still playful. She pulled Kitty to her feet and took her by the waist. “I’ll teach you to dance though.” Kitty started laughing as Emma spun her around like a spinning top. It wasn’t long until the gin started sloshing around, and they both spent the night on the floor of the bathroom.
“This is why you can’t come dancing with us,” Emma explained.
“It was all the spinning.”
“What do you think goes on at those dance halls? People are nearly flying across the room.”
Kitty couldn’t picture it.
“It’s something to see, that’s for sure.”
Kitty wished she’d stopped talking about it if she wasn’t invited.
* * *
On Sunday, Emma commandeered the leftovers and made a sandwich with the last chicken breast. She pulled it out on the beach with some mustard and hot sauce, making Kitty chase her down for a bite.
In these early days, Kitty would sometimes forget that she really wasn’t White. She felt calmer, invincible even. People saw her and acknowledged her in a way they hadn’t when she was Negro. Beauty had been a liability in the Negro world, but in the White one, it was a valuable commodity. It made her popular. She was no longer splintered but someone else entirely. Soon, she’d forget who Mary Magdalene was and relinquish her preferences. Whiteness had always been a tool, and it became a ladder she vowed to keep climbing when, one early September day, Emma handed her the latest issue of Jet. Inside, the picture of the bloated, mutilated body of a Colored boy named Emmett Till made her lose her oatmeal in the kitchen sink.
Word spread quickly at breakfast about the gruesome photos tacked to the message board. Trays of uneaten food went in the trash.
“He should have known better.”
“He was from Chicago. Mississippi is like a whole other country.”
“I wouldn’t know how to act down there.”
Daphne was the last at their table to brave the sight. She’d heard about the murder from a cab driver the other day.
Only with the table empty did Kitty ask, “Did you put those photos on the message board?”
Emma dug into her grapefruit with a soup spoon. “Emmett Till is national news, Kitty. It should have been in their paper.”
For weeks after, Kitty woke to find Emma asleep at the foot of her bed.
CHAPTER 17
Kitty
September 1955
As Emma had predicted, a chain of firings was Nathan’s first order of business. Executives were shuffled, and half the secretaries were gone by his second week. The operators awaited an announcement about interviews, but all that followed was a memo encouraging everyone to take more of an active role in the creative process by attending tapings and castings, reading scripts, and submitting feedback. Nathan envisioned the new Telescope as an incubator of ideas and wanted input from everyone, including the staff. He resumed production on all five of the studio’s television shows but kept all films under evaluation.
Kitty spent her workdays waiting for an opportunity to go to the stages. No one, not even Emma, said anything about her disappearances, so she kept doing it and watched all kinds of rehearsals from the shadows, observing and taking it all in as if the process was the movie itself. She never got bored, no matter how many times they had to start a scene over.