The Book of Harlan

by Bernice L. McFadden

  In honor of her arrival, Maconites began sprucing up their homes: replacing roof shingles, stripping away dreary weather-beaten paint from shutters and porches, recoating them with light, bright colors.

  New bonnets filled the display window of the millinery shop, colorful spring frocks crammed boutique racks. Flowers sprang from garden beds, lush leaves exploded from the tiny brown nubs of tree limbs. The days stretched and warmed and the cobalt winter sky paled to a powder blue.

  “Mama, we gonna leave next week!”

  Louisa had suspected as much and invited the bright-eyed couple into the drawing room to voice her concern. “I think it would be best to leave the baby here with us,” she said. “Just until you all get settled.”

  Emma went rigid. “You don’t think I . . . we . . . can take care of Harlan on our own?”

  Louisa shook her head. “That’s not at all what I’m saying, Emma. You and Sam are wonderful parents. I just think it would be easier on everyone if Harlan remained in a stable environment.”

  Emma chewed on her bottom lip as she contemplated this.

  Louisa presented cream-colored palms. “Just until you’re settled,” she repeated.

  Upstairs, Harlan started to wail in that languid way of his. With Louisa’s words twirling in her mind, Emma rose from the sofa and started toward the staircase.

  As it stood, they would be staying with Sam’s uncle, Daniel; sleeping on a Murphy bed in a room that was as tiny as an outhouse, or so Sam had told her. Where would she put a crib? And Daniel was an old bachelor, no doubt firmly set in his ways. How would he adjust to having a crying baby in his space? Maybe Louisa was right.

  Halfway up the stairs, Emma paused, glanced at the polished wooden banister, and dropped the decision into her husband’s lap. Whatever Sam decides is okay with me, she thought to herself.

  * * *

  They left Macon on a bright May morning.

  The entire family went to the train station to see them off. Emma and Sam clung to Harlan like a drowning couple to a life raft.

  Harlan, belly full of milk and the tiniest bit of farina, slept straight through the shower of tears.

  The next day, Louisa had Emma’s bedroom painted blue. She swapped out the pink and cream bedding for mint green and white. The dolls and dollhouse were replaced with a wooden rocking horse, softball, bat, and catcher’s mitt, and Harlan and his grandparents settled into life as if it had always been just them three.

  Chapter 12

  They promised to come back for Harlan as soon as they were settled. But they never quite settled.

  In DC, clothed in a smart dress and dainty hat, Emma marched into a cabaret that was advertising for a new pianist. She introduced herself to the manager, a big, black, thick-lipped man, heartily shook his meaty hand, and advised him, quite confidentially, that she was exactly who he was looking for.

  Amused, he rolled his long cigar from one corner of his mouth to the other. “Are you now?”

  “Yes.”

  The man pointed at the piano. “Show me.”

  Back straight, head high, Emma marched to the piano, situated herself on the bench, floated her hands above the keys, and froze. Every note of every song she had ever played flew right out of her head.

  “I’m waiting.”

  Emma shot him a weak smile, cleared her throat, and cracked her knuckles. Still, her mind remained blank.

  She left in tears.

  “Maybe you coming down with something?” Sam said.

  “Maybe.”

  Sam made her a cup of hot tea. “They’ll be other auditions,” he assured her.

  “Yes, I suppose so.”

  There were indeed other auditions and Emma froze each and every time.

  “DC ain’t worth squat,” she declared after the seventh disappointment. “I think I’d do better someplace else. What you think, Sam?”

  Sam thought what Emma thought.

  When they moved to Baltimore, Emma experienced the same paralysis. Philadelphia was no different.

  “Baby, I think you got the stage fright.”

  “That don’t make no sense!” Emma snapped. “I been playing the organ in church ever since I was four years old and this ain’t never happen!”

  “Perhaps,” Sam offered cautiously, “that was because you were doing the Lord’s work. These clubs is the devil’s playground.”

  Emma glared at him. “Now you sounding like my daddy.”

  Sam shrugged his shoulders. “Make sense to me.”

  “God is everywhere!” Emma screamed.

  “Except where He ain’t.”

  “I ain’t hearing this from a man whose sole purpose for attending church was to find a woman.”

  “Not just any woman.” Sam slipped his fingers between hers. “You.”

  Emma melted. “You a stone-cold fool, Sam Elliott.”

  “But I’m your fool, Emma Elliott.”

  * * *

  The couple returned to Macon to celebrate the holidays as well as Harlan’s first birthday.

  They arrived empty-handed, sans luggage. All the moving around had depleted their meager savings. They didn’t even have enough money to buy Christmas and birthday gifts for Harlan. Tenant paid for their train tickets.

  When Emma walked into the house and removed her coat, Louisa almost cried. Emma was thin, her once-full hips now sheared down to the bone; dark half-moons hung beneath her eyes.

  Sam didn’t look much better.

  Furtively avoiding the shock shining in Louisa’s eyes, Emma forced a smile. “Where’s Harlan?”

  “Upstairs napping,” Louisa squeaked.

  In the bedroom, Emma and Sam stood over the crib, marveling at the little life they’d created.

  “He’s getting so big,” Emma whispered in wonderment.

  Sam grinned, reached down, and touched Harlan’s hand. “He’s amazing, Emma, thank you.”

  A lump rose in her throat. “He is, he is,” she managed.

  “Maybe it’s time we take him with us.”

  “Maybe,” Emma said.

  * * *

  Days later, as the family prepared to head out to Christmas Eve service, Tenant turned to Emma and asked if she wouldn’t mind accompanying the choir on the organ. “Like old times.”

  The words barely left his tongue before Emma barked, “No!”

  Tenant flinched at the severity of her response, but said nothing. He had no idea that Emma was damn mad at the Lord for taking away her ability to play in front of an audience of strangers, and so she had ousted God and His religion from her life.

  “S-sorry, Daddy,” Emma mumbled as Tenant shuffled sadly away.

  Chapter 13

  They’d decided that the next best place to start again would be Louisville, Kentucky, home of the Kentucky Derby, the Hot Brown, bourbon, and Sam Elliott.

  “Kentucky?” Tenant scratched his head. “I don’t understand why y’all keep jumping from state to state like a pair of jackrabbits.”

  “I guess we haven’t found the right fit is all,” Emma retorted.

  “Fit?”

  “Yes, Daddy. We trying to find a place that feels like home.”

  “Well, if that’s what you’re looking for, you should just stay right here in Macon. Don’t Macon feel like home?”

  “We’ve already been through this, Daddy.”

  Tenant folded his lips.

  * * *

  During the visit, Emma didn’t spend much time with Harlan. Not the amount of time you’d think a mother would spend with a child she hadn’t seen for seven months. She barely even held him, though that part wasn’t all her fault—whenever she reached for him, Harlan would scream bloody murder.

  And really, what did Emma expect? Louisa was the only mother Harlan knew. She was the one who bathed him, fed him, read him bedtime stories, comforted him when he was scared, spanked him when he was ornery, and kissed him no matter what.

  Who was Emma? Mostly a gray face in a grainy photograph, a na
me scrawled at the end of a letter or on the inside of a sentimental greeting card. Those things didn’t mean anything to Harlan. As far as he was concerned, Louisa was his world.

  Louisa tried her best to comfort Emma. “He’s got to get to know you; that’s all.”

  “But Mama, he don’t behave that way with Sam.”

  It was true; Harlan was always quiet and content in Sam’s arms.

  “Some babies just take to mens easier than they do to womens,” Louisa said, even though she didn’t actually know that to be true. But what else was she to tell her wounded daughter?

  * * *

  The morning of the day Sam and Emma were scheduled to leave, Louisa crept into Emma’s room with Harlan balanced on her hip. Emma was standing over her suitcase, staring solemnly down at the neatly folded clothing.

  “I got his bag all packed,” Louisa announced brightly, even though her heart was breaking.

  “About that,” Emma began without looking up, “where we’ll be staying, there’s barely enough room for Sam and me, I don’t know where we’d put Harlan. So I think it’s best if he stayed here.”

  Emma had gone round and round with Sam about leaving Harlan behind until she’d finally convinced him that it was the best thing for them and their son. Even so, having seen how Emma was (or wasn’t) with Harlan, Sam couldn’t help but ask the dreaded question that had been tormenting him since they’d returned to Macon: “Don’t you love him, Emma?”

  “Sam! Of course I do. How could you ask such a thing?”

  “Because I love him and I want him to be with us. That’s how I can ask.”

  “Well, I love him too, love him so much I’d rather leave him here safe and sound with my parents. Suppose I get a job playing in a club or with an orchestra, huh? With you working days and me working nights, who’s going to look after the baby?”

  Sam knew that was never going to happen, but he loved Emma too much to say so.

  When Emma told her mother she was leaving Harlan behind, Louisa nearly fainted with happiness, but was careful to keep the joy out of her voice. “That’s no problem. We’re happy to have him.”

  Chapter 14

  They hadn’t been in Louisville six weeks before Emma’s hurt feelings riled her roaming spirit, and they were off again. This time, however, Sam chose Grand 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, de
ad 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 had become a custom of theirs, not unlike Saturday-morning pancakes.

  “What y’all in there talking about?” Louisa would tease.

  “Man stuff,” Tenant always replied.

  After the dishes were washed and put away, the family gathered in the sitting room to listen to the Amos ’n’ Andy radio show and laughed themselves to tears.

  Later, Harlan kissed his grandparents goodnight, and headed up to bed—leaving Louisa darning socks and Tenant reading his Bible.

  At eight o’clock Tenant’s eyelids drooped. When Louisa heard him snoring, she patted his knee. “Reverend, you sawing wood.”

  “Am I?”

  “Yes.”