“Just gimme my pay.”
The attendant sighed and handed Minnie $20. “We are assigning another handler to you. It will take several days to find someone who can handle your . . . temperament.”
Fuck you and your eyebrows. Minnie picked up her guitar case and left.
A team of men in hazmat suits brushed past Minnie as they headed down the hall to the elevators that would take them to the lower levels. All of them were white. Her handlers had all been white. The weighing attendants, the office workers, everyone was white. The SPC sure liked their white folk, which was funny, seeing that the building itself was located on the South Side, where all the black folk had ended up.
When she first started, Minnie had tried to get Lawler as her handler—he had been a lousy recording manager, but he was great with his hands, inside the bedroom and out. The SPC said that handlers had to undergo a vigorous one-year training to learn how to manage the machines, the vacuums, the pumps, the brushes, et cetera. Minnie then asked why she even needed a handler. Seemed like she could learn to do all the work herself without some white man always watching her, making her nervous. The SPC said her job was to focus only on exterminating the stumps. Her voice was too important to exert herself on manual labor. Only handlers with the appropriate training could handle the equipment due to the extreme toxicity of the stumps.
In other words, no niggers need apply.
Minnie reached the large lobby. Posters provided some relief from the monotonous hallways and overbearing lights. On one side were pictures of bright smiling white families in front of tidy houses with the words KEEP YOUR HOME SPORE-FREE—BUY PERCY’S GRADE A FILTERS FOR YOUR WINDOWS—A FILTERED HOME IS A STUMP-FREE HOME. On the other side were posters of “famous” exterminators: Bing Crosby, Marlene Dietrich, two of the Andrews Sisters (but not all three). There was even a separate section of black exterminators in the furthest corner of the lobby: Billie Holliday, Louis Armstrong, Ella Fitzgerald, Marian Anderson.
As usual, the lobby was full of people, mostly black. Many stood in line for various windows to report a stump sighting, arrange for an exterminator, or pick up a free paper mask to filter out spores. A longer line of people snaked in front of a door that had a sign above it in bold yellow letters: DO YOU HAVE WHAT IT TAKES TO BECOME AN EXTERMINATOR?
In the center of the lobby was a television set displaying, in grainy black and white, a young blond woman singing into one end of a long glass tube. At the other was a jar of stump dust insulated inside a thick glass box. A chipper male voice narrated, “If this woman was just a normal person, nothing would happen. But she falls into that one percent of the population that has a ‘unique vocal resonance’ with the spores. Just look at that reaction!” And indeed, the camera cut to show the dust in the jar shimmering and swirling as it coalesced into tiny, indistinct forms. “All from the power of her voice!” the man pronounced in amazement.
The scene changed to show the woman, her hair and clothes perfect, striding into a building with a number of handlers. The narrator gushed about the exciting yet dangerous nature of the exterminator’s life. An exterminator’s voice raised in song could cause a stump to spawn, mature, and ultimately burst in a matter of seconds. An experienced handler was absolutely necessary in knowing when to stop the exterminator from singing to prohibit any more spawning. Inexperience could result in sloppy exterminations, respawning, or even immediate death. Despite the danger, the narrator enthused, exterminators and handlers were paid handsomely, for what they provided was a necessary civic duty for their country.
Minnie snorted. It was all bullshit. She was living proof of that.
She exited the SPC and headed to the bus stop just to the right of the entrance. Setting her case down, she pulled out her weekly copy of the Chicago Defender and flipped to the music section. As usual, there was no mention of her, her records, or the fact that she had been an exterminator for six months now. Count Basie was in town, though—that took up half a page. Big bands were becoming more popular as more singers were being recruited into exterminators. The other half was an ad for Ella Fitzgerald, who became an exterminator in October 1939. Now everyone was buying up her records. The SPC had released a statement that recorded voices had no effect on stump spores, so for some singers, becoming exterminators was their best publicity yet.
But not for Minnie. She could still sell her records, but they didn’t sell too well; she had always sounded better live. Unfortunately, the SPC banned her from singing lest she activated any stump spores that might be floating about. So no more concerts. No more tours. No more singing in clubs. She tried to do just guitar pickin’ at clubs, but it was annoying with her handler there, watching her every move.
A black Ford sedan pulled up in front of the SPC building. A white man with a derby got out, the words STUMP PREVENTION CONTROL stitched in yellow on the back of his gray trenchcoat. He opened the back door of the car and out stepped a young black woman in a long brown coat rimmed with fur and wearing short heels. She looked familiar.
Minnie glanced back down at the music ads. Ah, right there, toward the bottom: a photo of the same woman, holding a guitar, eyes cast upward in a heavenly gaze. The caption beneath read: “Cheers to Chicago’s very own Sister Rosetta Tharpe as she starts her new life as an exterminator on the South Side.”
So that was the new exterminator. Damn. Girl got a notice in the Defender her first day working at the SPC, while Minnie got squat. Ain’t that a bitch.
As the SPC man pulled a full storage bag that made Minnie’s haul look like a deflated coin purse out of the car’s trunk, the woman caught sight of Minnie. She minced over with eager steps—amazing a big girl like her could stay upright in those short heels.
“Why, hello!” Minnie caught a strong force in her voice held in check, like an ocean wave restrained by a dam. “They said that there was another exterminator who also played guitar just like me. I see you got a guitar. Are you her?” A mole graced her left cheek.
Minnie’s bus rolled up. She tucked the paper under her arm and picked up her case and told the girl, “Mind your own fucking business.”
According to the SPC, the first stump appeared in a corner of a Bronx apartment in April 1938. A German family who had just moved to the apartment assumed it was a statue left by the previous owner. They dusted it, hung clothes on it, and even allowed the children to play on it on occasion, until one day it burst.
By the time the police reached the apartment, two children lay dead, the parents alive but convulsing, bloody foam oozing from their mouths and nostrils. They died minutes later.
As paramedics wheeled the bodies away, they noticed brown lumps forming along the floors and the walls of the apartment. Within the day the lumps had taken on human shape.
They looked very much like the German family who had just died.
Soon reports began to pour in from all around Manhattan. Brooklyn. Queens. Harlem. People called them stumps because in the shapeless form their wood-grain appearance really did make them appear like the stumps of trees. They always took on the form of the deceased people. After a certain period of time, they burst into glossy, light-catching motes the size of dirt particles. These spores were light and easy to spread to any surface: carried on the wind, buried in a dog’s coat, breathed in by an unsuspecting person.
Face masks and dust filters grew in high demand.
In August 1938 the government, already burdened with a war it had entered against its intentions, had the Public Health Service commission a new agency, the Stump Prevention Control (SPC), to investigate and eradicate the stumps. The SPC discovered a small number of individuals contained a unique vocal resonance that could force stumps to mature and burst. This resonance only occurred in a cadence of embellished notes—in other words, singing. Recordings could not produce the resonance. The person had to sing directly to the stump to force a reaction.
At first the SPC recruited well-known celebrities. Many were surprised when Frank Sinatra f
ailed the test. Then there were the Andrews Sisters, where the two older sisters were found to have the resonance, but not the youngest. In September 1939 the SPC expanded the call for anyone with a talent for singing to come to their centers to be tested.
That same month the Reverend Elder W. M. Roberts from the Fortieth Street Church of God in Christ visited Rosetta Tharpe at her apartment on Prairie Street. He sat in her kitchen, looking grave in his Sunday preaching suit. “Sister, it’s been over a year now. Folks say you’ve gotten diminished.”
He paused to let that sink in.
“You’ve been here ever since your mother brought you as a child to our fold. I know you’re hurt, but it’s time for you to start singing again.”
Another pause. He started to pat her folded hands, but one look from her made him change his mind. Instead he said, “Your mother would’ve wanted it that way.”
The following week Rosetta went to the SPC office to take the resonance test. She wasn’t surprised when she passed. Momma always did say she had a strong voice.
They gave her six weeks of training. She watched reel after reel of scientists explaining the effects of burst stumps, pointing to bodies that had been exposed to stump dust, noting in clinical terms the bulging eyes, the seized muscles, the froth dripping from their mouths and noses and ears, all in black and white. She learned about filters and masks, spent hours practicing how to put on her specialized mask until she could do it correctly in three seconds.
They also introduced Marty Houchen as her handler. He was easygoing and chatty, and liked wearing derbies and ascots like Cary Grant. “You may not know this,” he gushed at their first meeting, “but I heard you a couple of years ago on the All Colored Hour radio show. You were amazing! And your guitar! I mean, I’m not particularly religious, but after hearing you, I just about got saved that night—”
He stopped gushing when he saw the change in Rosetta’s face. Since then he had never brought up her music career.
Six days out of the week she got up at 4 a.m. and changed the filter on the air purifier, the first major purchase she’d made when she became an exterminator. It was a bulky thing that sat in her living room window, but it allowed her to go about her apartment without needing a face mask.
After washing up, dressing, and a quick bite to eat, she left her apartment to meet Marty, waiting for her outside with a thermos of coffee with a thick plastic straw that could be slipped under her mask. In his car was the extermination gear: the hoses, vacuum, containment bags, brushes, masks—over fifty pounds of gear. After going over the list of addresses that contained stumps in their district, they were off.
They exterminated up to twenty stumps per day. Setup took fifteen minutes, vacuuming a good twenty to forty minutes, depending on the size of the stump. A site containing more than one stump could take up their entire day. Not a single speck of stump could be left behind.
They’d return to the SPC around 8 p.m.—midnight if it was a particularly heavy day. They turned in the stump dust they collected, updated their dockets, and collected payment, splitting it fifty-fifty. Rosetta then left Marty to take the equipment to the fumigation rooms to ride home in one of the ubiquitous SPC yellow vans. She went through her nighttime routine of going over her apartment for stumps, checking each corner, beneath her furniture. She changed the filters inside her vents, washed her face mask with the SPC’s special sanitizing solution. She then took a shower with the same solution, scrubbing, rinsing, and drying every inch of herself. She didn’t mind the work, or the long hours, or the tedious routine. It kept her from thinking too hard.
Sundays were her only day off.
She still attended the Fortieth Street Church of God in Christ. It was the church she grew up in. It was where she first started playing guitar, standing on the piano, dancing while the congregation clapped. Where she met Thomas, fell in love with him, and married him. Where the women elders cried with her after she got the telegram two years ago that broke her life apart.
Now that she was an exterminator, the praise and gospel music, joyful as it was, only painfully reminded her of what she had lost. That and the whispers.
“There goes Sister Tharpe. She was gonna go to New York once, didn’t she?”
“Singing gospel music at the Cotton Club! Like a church!”
“Well, ain’t gonna happen now. God must be judging her. You know she was going to divorce Thomas, right?”
“Well, like the Good Book says, ‘Be sure your sin will find you out.’”
Momma always said to keep your head high when people talk about you, so that was what Rosetta did. She threw herself into ushering, serving in the nursery, helping with dinner before the evening services. But she didn’t sing. Wouldn’t do it, no matter how many times the pastor asked.
How could she when it was her singing that killed Momma?
One day Rosetta left the SPC examination room where she had her weekly throat check and caught sight of the woman who had been so vulgar to her three weeks ago. The woman stood by a stairway door, waiting for a group of men in lab coats to pass. Then, to Rosetta’s surprise, she ducked through the door.
Rosetta paused. After her last encounter, she wasn’t so sure she wanted to face the woman again. But that staircase was off-limits except for authorized personnel. So where was that woman going?
Rosetta pretended to rummage in her purse while the lab coats passed her, deep in their conversation:
“—tests only showed two percent growth rate—”
“So should we increase the sample area?”
When they had turned the corner of the hall, she also slipped through the stairway door. It didn’t go down to the lower levels. Only up.
A few minutes of huffing and puffing led her out onto the roof. It was graveled, edgeless, and loud—the roof was dotted with large metallic curved ducts rising from the gravel. Unseen machinery hummed and whined, drawing air into the ducts; like Rosetta’s air purifier, but much louder.
The other woman stood next to a duct, her back to the stairwell, watching the sun sink into rosy-hued clouds and the rocky landscape of buildings.
Rosetta adjusted her face mask and walked toward her, careful to place her feet—this roof was not meant for short heels. The ducts were loud enough that the woman didn’t hear her approach, but as Rosetta drew near, a different sound, just underneath the duct’s whoosh, made her stop in surprise.
The woman was singing.
Rosetta couldn’t pick out the words. Something slow and bluesy. The woman rocked back and forth, keeping time by tapping her foot as her voice rose and fell, a low controlled caterwaul that wound itself around the ducts like a hungry cat, then slinked down into a growl before evening out again. The SPC had been so adamant about Rosetta not singing at all, and here was this woman right on the roof of the SPC, flaunting her voice. She wasn’t even wearing a face mask. Her face was bare, open. Exposed.
The smart thing to do was to go back downstairs and report her to the nearest SPC agent.
But despite herself, Rosetta found herself rooted in place. She found herself thinking back to when she was eight and was sick with a bad fever, and how she had woken up in the middle of the night to Momma sitting by her bedside, laying cool cloths on Rosetta’s forehead and humming nonstop, the vocalization of her worry vibrating through her lungs and chest like prayer.
It had been so long since she heard anything like that.
The memory burst when the woman in front of Rosetta broke off from her singing to hawk a wad of something brown and wet onto the roof. She pulled a handkerchief from her coat pocket and was lightly dabbing her lips when she finally caught sight of Rosetta. She turned, sticking her hands back in the pockets of her tweed coat. “Well, well, well. Whaddy’we got here?”
Rosetta replied with the same nonchalance as the woman. “You’re singing.”
“That’s right. I am.” Her speaking voice was a cross between a drawl and a growl. She was an older woman. Not as old a
s Momma had been, but maybe late thirties, early forties, with a hardness in her eyes and mouth that had nothing to do with age. “Watcha gonna do about it?”
Rosetta blurted the first thing that came into her mind. “Ain’tcha scared?”
The woman blinked, clearly not expecting the question. “Huh?”
“You’re out here, in the open. There could be stump spores floating around us right now—”
“Oh, that’s what got you all worried?” She pointed to the ducts. “This here’s probably the safest place in the whole city. Them things is sucking all the air into the building. If’n there be any spores, they get stuck in them fancy filters they got in there. Course, with you charging up behind me without closing the door, there’s probably a whole team of SPC agents charging up the steps right now.”
Rosetta threw a panicked look at the stairwell—but then she heard a squeal of laughter from the woman. “Oh, girl, look at your face. Got you good there, didn’t I?” She bent double, slapping her knee, chuckling and snorting in a most unladylike manner. Her teeth flashed gold, not just a trick of the fading light but real gold teeth.
Rosetta pressed her lips tight, then started toward the stairwell. “Hey,” the woman gasped. “Come on, I was just kidding. Hey!” She reached for Rosetta’s sleeve, but Rosetta snatched her arm away.
“Look, if you don’t want me up here, just say so. I was just listening. Haven’t heard good singing since—” Rosetta stopped as her eyes suddenly stung with tears. Had it really been that long?
The woman sighed, then stuck out her hand. “Lizzie Douglas. But you can call me Memphis Minnie.”
“Sister Rosetta Tharpe.” Rosetta searched the woman’s hand, looking for tobacco stains, before finally giving it a shake.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 Page 21
