The Book of Harlan. Bernice L. McFadden
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Rapids, Michigan—there was steady work to be had up there in the furniture factories.
They hitched a ride in a truck owned by a family who were moving to Detroit. The husband and wife had both secured jobs at the Ford Motor Plant.
They arrived in the middle of winter and rented a cold-water flat on the top floor of a four-story clapboard house that was bullied day and night by bone-chilling winds blowing off Lake Michigan and the Grand River.
The streets were covered in snow and ice until April. When spring arrived, Emma’s spirit soared along with the temperature. June, July, and August were more glorious than she could have even hoped for. But after Labor Day, her happiness dulled with the waning light of autumn—a season she’d come to believe was little more than a pretty word yoking September and October.
For a while, Emma made money teaching piano to colored children, but after two or three lessons, the money that was usually wrapped in a handkerchief and pinned to the inside of their jackets or stuffed into their socks was replaced with slips of paper, lettered: IOU.
Before long, the children stopped coming altogether.
* * *
Emma became friendly with a young woman named Maxine Black, who lived in the first-floor apartment with her husband and six children. Maxine took in laundry to supplement her husband’s salary. As a result, her hands were as wrinkled and spotted as a woman three times her age.
Sometimes the two women would visit in Emma’s apartment. Over tea and saltines slathered in jam, they’d gossip and listen to the radio.
Once, after weeks of casting furtive glances at the piano, Maxine finally ambled over and touched the keys.
“You interested?” Emma asked. “If you like, I’ll teach you. No charge.”
The light that flashed in Maxine’s eyes came and went as quickly as a shooting star. She withdrew her hand and swiped it across the skirt of her dress as if she’d touched something dirty. “And when I learn to play, then what?” she scoffed. “Carnegie Hall?” She tossed her head back with laughter. “Like white folks gonna let a nigger on that stage!”
“Well,” Emma responded slowly, “Sissieretta Jones is black, and she sang at Carnegie Hall.”
“Sissy who?”
* * *
When the weather broke, Emma began prowling Main Street, waylaying white women window-shopping with their children.
“That your little girl?”
A nod, a smile.
“She’s stunning.” Emma always started with a compliment. “She’s got lovely long fingers. Great piano-playing fingers.”
The mother beamed.
“Oh, I see where she gets them. You have beautiful hands too.”
More smiles.
“I teach piano,” Emma would say, presenting a business card.
“Oh?”
“Yes ma’am, I do. And I must say that I’m better than most. And I don’t charge much. Just a dollar and a quarter per hour.”
“Is that so?”
“Yes ma’am.”
Some mothers took the cards and dropped them in their purses only to toss them into the first garbage can they came upon. Others laughed openly and mockingly as they walked off.
One woman sneered, “What can you teach my child? Dixie? What in the world is she supposed to do with that?”
Emma’s face warmed. “Ma’am, I assure you I am proficient in the classics—Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, and Chopin.”
“How nice for you.”
* * *
So while they weren’t living like royalty, Sam was making enough money to keep the rent paid, food on the table, and Emma in new dresses and sheet music.
One evening in 1920 Sam came home from work, gray. The whites of his eyes had turned yellow and his knuckles were swollen and painful.
The doctor didn’t know what to make of it. Emma followed him out of the apartment and into the drafty hallway.
“I ain’t never seen nothing like it,” he said. And then as an afterthought: “You got a burial policy on him?”
Emma broke down in tears.
By the end of the month the pantry was empty, the rent was coming due, and Emma needed to refill the prescription medicine that didn’t seem to be helping Sam. She found a dollar in his wallet, sixty cents in the mason jar beneath their bed, and a dime stuck to a forgotten piece of hard candy at the bottom of her purse. Not enough.
Too prideful to ask her father for help, Emma finally decided to look for work. She bought the newspaper and circled jobs seeking women for hire in dress shops and diners. She didn’t know how to type, but couldn’t see it being any more difficult than playing the piano, so she circled those jobs too.
She’d arrive at interviews promptly, wearing a proper dress, hair pulled back into a conservative bun, and only the slightest trace of color on her lips. She was turned away at the dress shops and the fine-dining restaurants; the greasy spoons seemed to have all of the help they needed. If she made it past an office secretary or receptionist, the interviewer wouldn’t even look at her application.
“We don’t hire Negroes. Well, at least not for this position.”
With a notice of eviction burning a hole in her purse, Emma gritted her teeth and succumbed to the very thing she was trying to avoid. “I’ll take whatever job you’ve got for Negroes, then.”
“We don’t have anything here, but I do know a few people who are looking for good help.”
* * *
That first day, Emma wept with shame all over those rich white people’s floors, silverware, and bed linen. And if you had seen what the washboard and Borax did to her lovely hands, you would have cried too.
Emma returned home that evening, dead on her feet and filled with lament. She stripped out of her uniform, climbed into bed, and sobbed into her husband’s chest.
“Look at me, Sam,” she sniffled, “raised in silk and now living in burlap.”
“I’m sorry,” Sam muttered tearfully.
“Aww, it ain’t your fault. I’m the one who dragged us all over creation chasing a stupid dream. You just went along for the ride.”
“So you ready to go back to Macon now?”
“No.”
Meanwhile, Emma’s eldest brother Seth was a well-respected teacher. The middle boys, John Edward and James Henry, had followed in Tenant’s footsteps and were successful ministers in their own right. And Lucille had made a record called Crazy Blues that sold a million copies in under a year. She wouldn’t go down in history as the first blues singer to record, but she would hold second place.
At this point in 1920, Emma wasn’t second place in anything, and she refused to return to Macon until she had accomplished something more spectacular than basic survival.
As it turned out, her return to Macon, two years later, would be spawned from tragedy, not triumph.
Chapter 15
1922
Wednesday, the day Tenant had put aside to visit the sick and shut-ins, he arrived home in a jovial mood. He removed his favorite pair of brown shoes, put on his slippers, washed his hands, and sat down to a supper of roasted lamb, new potatoes, sweet corn, and blueberry pie for dessert. Afterward, he and Harlan went into the study and shut the door.
It