The Golden Hour

by Beatriz Williams

  “Veryl?”

  He nodded. “She might could stay over with you, until the dust settles.”

  “Oh, for goodness’ sake, Jack. I can’t ask her to do that. There’s nowhere to sleep except the sofa. Anyway, it’s the Bahamas, not the West Indies. They’re not fire-breathers here.” I tucked my pocketbook under my arm. “You just go back to tending bar, Jack, and get out of the advice business, all right? Go back to keeping your ears open and your trap shut.”

  There was this instant of silence, a brief and brittle standoff, eyeball to eyeball. Just long enough, you might say, for me to glimpse the alarming size of Jack’s pupils before he drew back and turned his attention to the drops of condensation left behind by my gin and tonic on his nice clean counter. He took out a dishcloth and mumbled, “Suit yourself.”

  “I will. Have a nice afternoon.”

  I turned to leave, a trifle unsteady. Jack called out softly behind me.

  “Another thing I heard, Mrs. Randolph?”

  I paused and sighed. The room settled back into place around me. “This had better be good, Jack.”

  “I heard a certain fellow’s out of that Miami hospital and back in Nassau. You know the fellow I mean.”

  Just like that, the room started up to spin again, except in a different direction this time, a different rhythm. I looked up at the ceiling to anchor myself, and what did I find but those damned electric fans, whirring and whirring without end.

  “Mrs. Randolph? You heard that one yet?”

  “No,” I whispered. “I hadn’t heard.”

  Of course I knew the fellow he meant. It was the talk of Nassau for weeks, even in the midst of all that fuss over Pearl Harbor and Nancy Oakes’s ball, and while the talk had died down during the course of the spring, his name still came up from time to time.

  Consider the afternoon I learned how he was attacked. I remember how the walls of the room made a kind of tunnel around me, how I went hot and then cold in the course of a few seconds, and I thought I might actually faint. Somebody asked me if I was all right—the voice sounded like it was coming from another room, from another country—and I remembering saying I was fine, just a little shocked, what a terrible thing. I remember asking questions—how had it happened, where was he hurt, who found him, were they sure it was Thorpe—but nobody seemed to know anything more. So I turned back to the hymnal in my hands, the program of service. The chords of the organ, calling the faithful to the miracle of Christmas. That steadied the shaking of my hands and brought me back to the present world, to the substance of the objects around me. Except each time I opened my mouth to sing, I had no breath. I had no voice at all.

  When the service ended, I suggested to Mrs. Gudewill that we put together a few books and treats—a Red Cross parcel, if you will—and deliver them to the hospital. I thought it wouldn’t be so singular if I went with a friend. By the time we reached the hospital with our basket it was past teatime, and the nurse on duty told us that Mr. Thorpe had regained consciousness a little past noon and was out of immediate danger. But we were too late to deliver him any comfort baskets. At that very moment, he was on a boat bound for Miami and the hospital there: a voyage chartered for him by the Duchess of Windsor herself.

  All of which, you might think, was wonderfully good news: the kind of news that ought to make a girl feel better on the spot. Indeed it did. For that first hour or two, I felt as if I’d been loosened from a vise, from one of those devices of medieval torture that turn each limb and organ on its own separate screw, and come to understand at last the true meaning of the word relief. I parted ways with Mrs. Gudewill and made my way to my bungalow to pour myself a festive gin and tonic. But as I sipped at the drink, I discovered that my relief had dissolved into something else. Into emptiness, into a loss of mass, an absence of atoms and molecules I had not known I possessed. There had been something, and now there was nothing. Gone.

  On a boat for Miami: the Gemini, the Windsors’ private yacht.

  The first of June dawned hazy and hot, promising trouble. I woke in a jolt, in the middle of some dream, seized by the conviction that someone was pounding on my front door. But as I lay in bed and stared at the ceiling, the milky air of sunrise, no noise disturbed the stillness except the palaver of birds outside the window.

  There was no point in returning to sleep. I crawled from bed and crept down the hall to the parlor, where the radio rested on the sideboard, tuned to the single Nassau station. I switched it on. A plume of baroque music swept into the room, crackling with static, Bach or something. But no news. I checked the lock on the front door and went back down the hall to run a bath.

  An hour later, Veryl had not yet arrived. I boiled an egg, toasted bread, started the coffee in the electric percolator. The radio now thrummed with piano. Still no news. I ate breakfast in the kitchen, standing up, because there was no room for a table. I washed and dried the dishes, poured another cup of coffee, and betook myself to my work, such as it was.

  For some time, I sat at my typewriter and stared out the window, toward that small sliver of sea visible between the nearby houses, trying to think of some clever angle from which to relate the story of Nancy Oakes and her shocking elopement with Alfred de Marigny, while the radio played tinny, crackling Beethoven and the birds continued their confabulation in the trees and the sun climbed the hazy blue sky. Stay away from politics, advised Lightfoot, and I’d given him what he asked for, hadn’t I, given it to him in spades, in monthly servings of tittle and tattle. He was going to love this scoop about Nancy Oakes and Alfred de Marigny. All I had to do was return to the typewriter and finish it, slip it into its manila envelope, carry it to the post office and collect my two hundred dollars to keep body and soul together.

  In the vase next to the typewriter, right in the middle of a pool of sunshine, Veryl had set a spray of pink frangipani from the shrub outside. The scent was enough to drown me. The electric fan tossed my hair across my forehead. I rested my thumb on the rim of the coffee cup and glanced down at the newspaper under my arm, the Nassau Observer, headlines bristling. The labor question raged, the laborers raged, the affairs of the world hurtled along the course of history. Outside my window, the sun climbed over Nassau, hotter by the minute.

  Still no sign of Veryl.

  I set down the cup and went to collect my bicycle from the lean-to shed. As I pedaled hatless into town, the atmosphere was silent, eerily so, as if an invisible force had sucked away every living creature, leaving behind nothing but sunshine and heat and dread.

  They called it Burma Road, the trail newly cut through the scrub and the pine forest to connect the airfield being built at the western end of the island with Oakes Field in Nassau. The name represented some wry reference to that legendary seven-hundred-mile route across the Himalayas, down which the British had recently retreated from the Japanese forces in China. Everyone’s got a sense of humor, I guess. Anyway, the airfield laborers had built Burma Road themselves, and upon Burma Road they traveled to work each day, and on Burma Road they now gathered up a few fragrant pine branches for clubs and marched back into Nassau, right past Government House—the Windsors were visiting Washington, remember—to Bay Street, down Bay Street to Rawson Square where the House of Assembly stood. I knew this because I could hear the shouting ahead, the singsong chanting, something about Conchie Joe. Burma Road declare war on de Conchie Joe.

  And that’s when I knew it was trouble, all right, because Conchie Joe was the white man, Conchie Joe was the fifteen percent of the Bahamian population allowed within the walls of high-class joints like the British Colonial and the Emerald Beach Hotel, to say nothing of the front door of Government House. Conchie Joe was the foreman on the airfield project, the merchant on Bay Street, the lawyer, the doctor, the owner of virtually all property. The legislator in Parliament, passing laws on himself and the other eighty-five percent of the population. Until now, I had always understood the word as a term of needling affection. But words, you know, they’
re funny things. You wake up one sultry, troublesome morning, and their meanings invert. Over and over, louder and louder, the laborers sang. Burma Road declare war on de Conchie Joe, do nigger don’t you lick nobody, don’t lick nobody . . .

  A mass of humanity like that, you could hear them and smell them and feel them before you saw them. The reek of perspiration, the buzz of nervous energy. The trace of fresh pine. Nassau Street was motionless. So was George Street, stretching up to pink Government House on its hill. Not until I reached the corner of Parliament Street, not until the plaza opened up before me, the palm trees and the white-columned pink facades that constituted the seat of Bahamas government, did I discover the crowd, the hundreds of black men, a few women too, maybe a thousand or maybe even more. I braked the bicycle and touched my toe to the pavement. It was just past nine o’clock, according to the clock on the tower, and the chanting had died away into that thing called expectant silence, as if the men—having marched into the very heart of Conchie Joe’s domain—now prepared themselves to listen to somebody. That was nice. Somebody who? Who the devil was in charge around here, while the Duke of Windsor was away? The colonial secretary, maybe? The crowd, rustling and grumbling, had turned toward a square pink building on the corner of Bank Lane, where some white men seemed to be standing on the steps, sweating in their suits.

  From where I balanced on my bicycle, looking up Parliament Street from the harbor walk, I couldn’t tell what anybody was saying. I thought one of the white men was speaking—if I strained, I could hear a high, indignant voice—but the words got lost among the perspiring bodies and the pink walls and the heavy air.

  My hair stuck to my temples. The sun burned my neck, stuck the dress to my back. I dismounted the bicycle and walked it forward, up Parliament Street, to where the stragglers milled about, trying to find a better vantage. One of them saw me and shook his head. He called out—and his voice surprised me, it was so gentle—“You gwine home, miss. Ain’t you business here. Gwine home.”

  Of course I didn’t obey him. I edged instead around the fringe of the crowd, craning for some view, some channel of clear sound to reach me. Whoever this fellow was, whatever he was saying, the crowd didn’t like it. A murmuring rumbled the atmosphere, a discontent, a shifting of hot, perspiring bodies and impatient skin. Couple more shouts, somebody calling out the first notes of that chant, Burma Road declare war on de Conchie Joe, do nigger don’t you lick—then SMASH. Holy God. An explosion of broken glass, too sudden and too cataclysmic even to say which direction it had come from.

  I flinched and ducked, and the next instant craned my neck to see what the devil, where the devil, and the square trembled with shouts and footsteps, everybody turning at once, pelting down Bay Street, where the shops and offices of Conchie Joe lined the way, all hell broken loose and tumbling free, armed with clubs cut from the pines of Burma Road.

  I don’t know if you’ve ever seen a riot before, up close. It’s not so much a sight or a sound as a feeling, a mayhem. A kaleidoscope, too many sensations all crammed into your brain at once, so you can’t remember what happened when. I recall stumbling back from the stampede, someone grabbing my arm and dragging me away, and when I looked up I saw the man who had spoken to me before. His eyes were wide and white-rimmed, his skin blacker than I remembered it. He shoved the handlebars of the bicycle toward me and yelled, Gwine, I said! Gwine outta here, before you gets kilt!

  “What did he say?” I demanded. “What was he saying up there?”

  Gwine outta here, crazy lady! He pushed my backside. Go, get!

  “But what—”

  And he was gone, just like that, threw himself right into the pell-mell and disappeared. I stood shaking under the portico where he left me, scared to death, and yet underneath all that fear lay something more like excitement. Some charge that drew me forth, step by step, from underneath the portico to get a better vantage, to watch this extraordinary thing, this riot, this tumult of angry men, these placid Bahamians—Oh, they’d never revolt here, they know their place, the coloreds here—exploding into fury. Men shouting and glass smashing, the beat of two thousand feet on the sun-bleached pavement of Bay Street, drumming, hollering, howling mad, because they got paid four shillings a day to labor under the broiling sun while the white Americans got twelve, all laid out in a contract negotiated by the Bahamian government, by Conchie Joe, and they were sick and tired of that. Sick and tired.

  This is big, I thought. Heart thumping.

  And then: I need my camera.

  I thought if I could maybe cross this stampede alive, I could head up Parliament Street to higher ground. I could skirt along parallel to the action—the laborers meant to smash up Bay Street, symbol of Conchie Joe’s power, that was obvious—and pedal home fast to fetch my Kodak. I could take photos of this, astonishing photos, write it all up and send it to my editor, an exclusive on-the-scene account of an unprecedented race riot in Nassau, Bahamas, a spark lit to a pile of bone-dry tinder. Real news, vital news. News that was not filtered through the peculiar lens of royal privilege but was raw and genuine and needful.

  I gripped the handlebars of my bicycle and pushed forward.

  Now, I suppose you might think this sense of adventure—this journalistic curiosity, anyway—was in my blood. Maybe that’s so. I’m told I take after my father. So said my mother, anyway, whenever she caught me in some kind of mischief, like leading innocents—say, my kid brother and sister, for example—into the neighbor’s orchard and climbing the trees, one by one, to drop apples into a basket held by my anxious companions. Or else that time I took the Long Island Rail Road into Manhattan all by myself, aged thirteen, and stormed into the Metropolitan offices to visit my father, so he could settle what you might call a domestic dispute between my mother and me. (As it turned out, my father was in a very important meeting and couldn’t see me. His secretary called a taxi to drive me home.) As for the time I walked into a Columbia mixer and walked out with a certain Mr. Randolph, well, she wasn’t around to scold me. But I feel sure that she would have blamed my father for that too. Certainly the shrinks would’ve agreed with her.

  Anyway, where was I? Yes, that’s right—my journalistic curiosity, my propensity for trouble, whatever you care to call it. Whatever it was that propelled me forward on my bicycle that morning, not backward; whatever it was that made me advance into the riot, not retreat. I don’t know where it came from, whether it was the clamor of my Lightfoot blood or some quality particular to me, Lulu. As I recall the scene—as I watch myself from a distance, reckless girl-woman on a bicycle in wartime Nassau—I think of what my mother said, when I arrived home in the taxi Lightfoot’s secretary had called for me, that day I absconded to Manhattan. She didn’t take me in her arms and shower me with kisses or anything like that, because she wasn’t that kind of mother. She came up to the taxi window and paid the driver and then marched me into the house, into the kitchen, where Leo and Vanessa sat in their pajamas, eyes like pies. Mama took my plate of supper from the oven and set it before me. Meat loaf and canned peas, I remember that. Also the familiar blue floral pattern along the rim of the plate, and the chip on the side near the peas. As I ate, she watched me, and when I was nearly finished she said (now this is important, so pay attention): I don’t know what you’re looking for, Lulu, but whatever it is, it’s going to kill you before you ever find it. And the tone of her voice was that of someone reading her own eulogy.

  I think of my mother’s words often, because they hung over me from that day onward, and they sometimes return to me still, as when I recall the Burma Road riot. Certainly I had never in my life felt more vulnerable than when I pushed my bicycle into that crowd of black Bahamian men making their way down Bay Street with their pine clubs and their fury. I had also never felt more alive, more filled with purpose.

  I kept my head down and drove forward. I focused my determination on the lamppost across the street, while men poured around me and into me, shouting and chanting, and the sound of s
mashing glass went off like a series of bombs. I don’t think they even noticed me; they were intent on a larger purpose than one foolish white woman and her damn bicycle. Someone stumbled into my rear wheel and swore and moved on. A shoulder banged against mine, but I think that was an accident. As I reached the other side of the street, I looked up and traced the stream of humanity down Bay Street. About a hundred yards away, a truck bearing the Coca-Cola logo was parked against the curb. A man stood at its open rear door, handing out crates and crates of bottles, and the rioters were pitching them through windows, into walls. I clapped my hand over my mouth and turned back, but in that moment of inattention, a force took hold of my bicycle. I looked up into someone’s ferocious face.

  “That’s mine!” I snapped.

  He didn’t bother to reply. Why should he? He was twice as big as I was, propelled by rage. Without any effort he tore the bicycle from my hands, lifted it above his head, and carried it down the sidewalk. I darted after him, shouting incoherent, laughable things about property and rights. A Coca-Cola bottle sailed past my ear. The man stopped, as if he’d found what he was looking for, and hurled my bicycle right into a beautiful plate glass window that had gone untouched until now.

  “Oh, you bastard!” I screeched. Glass covered the sidewalk, razor sharp, and my bicycle lay just inside the broken window, in the middle of a display of fine leather goods. Already a man was picking his way inside. Blood streamed down the side of his face and stained his shirt. He bent down, kicked aside my bicycle, and gathered up an armful of pocketbooks.

  Well, I wasn’t going to stand for that, was I? That was my damn bicycle. And I had work to do, I had my camera to collect, I had news to report, a whole world waiting for this story! Without a thought, I stepped forward onto that mess of broken glass and bent over the ruined window frame to grab the bent front wheel.