“They’ve done vaudeville, Wild West shows. They’re good,” Redwood said. Nicolai wouldn’t budge. When she threatened an all-women crew, suddenly he was persuaded.
On a sunny day, Lake Michigan was vast and bright blue, magnificent with white-capped waves kissing golden beaches. Picture perfect. Mr. Powell, George’s lawyer, had brokered an affordable lease on a grand filming spot. Crooked, windswept trees presided over shifting dunes and reminded Redwood of Sapelo, where her mama’s people come from and some of Aidan’s people too.
The lake, however, could also be a temperamental prima donna. Along the end of May, golden sand turned glassy as a demon storm dumped snow on their location, weighing down green branches and freezing buds and blossoms. The Baptist-church set got ruined. They didn’t have much time for repairs or any money to hire extra crew. So, the second frosty night, Redwood laid out a crossroads spell, a devotion to the spirits of this watery place. She should’ve done this first thing. As she blew incense in the four directions, Aidan hung glass bottles in the trees. The sound startled her, still she wasn’t surprised. The church set looked brand new. He’d been working both nights. Redwood waved. He nodded. She’d let him go, but he hadn’t gone far. The bottles tinkled against icy leaves and the dark spit snow in her face. Watching Aidan, hope warmed her cold fingers. She tried to forgive every mean, ornery body and sweep away old pain. She stepped close to him. Fogging the air white with deep breaths, he lit a new fire, and they took a moment to celebrate first fruits. She silently promised the lake to do no harm and asked the crossroads spirits to open the way.
“Why you grinning?” he said finally.
“Forgiveness is the sweetest revenge.”
“Hmm.” He closed his eyes.
In the morning, the snow melted and the lake returned to early summer glory. Frostbitten buds perked up in sunshine, looking ready to pop. Everybody was rehearsed and raring to go — no magic-miracle, just hard labor.
One day scrambled into the next, and even George was impressed with their enterprise. Mr. McGregor drove him out to their remote location as they were finishing up the first week of shooting. Eddie’s villain stabbed Redwood’s schoolteacher and she collapsed in Pirate Saeed’s arms.
“Mr. Minsky said you were shooting the end,” George said. “You can’t end your picture like that!” He looked to Aidan as if for help. Redwood snorted at this and marched away. Before she could take off her schoolteacher dress or untie the scarf on her head, George offered her a handsome sum, which she didn’t have to repay if they lost everything. She was so stunned, she tripped over sand. Aidan waved at Mr. McGregor and vanished, leaving the negotiations up to her.
“Hold your money, George,” Redwood said. “We’re fine now.”
Mr. McGregor pretended not to listen in, but she saw his ears perk up.
“What’s wrong with my money?” Her rich brother cut a fine city figure in his white suit and summer straw hat. The withering look on his country face still called a fire-breathing dragon to mind. “I know I’m an ass sometimes, but you can’t hold that against me when I’m trying to help you, damn it.”
“Is that supposed to be an apology?” Redwood rolled her eyes. “I shouldn’t put up with you, I really shouldn’t. For Mama’s sake I have, but you ain’t my only family.”
“I didn’t throw Coop out. I…” The fire on his breath went to his eyes. “Reginald Jones was good people. I knew him back home. I put up the money for his grocery shop.”
“God rest his soul, but you staked Mr. Jones and not your own sister?”
“Reginald had a family, a legitimate business. And they burned him and his dream.” George sighed. “Maybe they were hitting at me going after him.”
“So why get mad at me? At Aidan? Like we hitting at you too. Maybe they were going after Mr. Jones! You ain’t the only colored success rubbing white folks wrong.”
“How come you didn’t go with Coop when he left?”
She sputtered. “Why’d you leave me back in Georgia when you first come north?”
“I don’t know.” The wind picked up. He blinked away dust. “Let me help you now.” They stared at one another ’til McGregor sneezed. “We’re too stubborn, you and me.” George clenched a fist. “Why end your picture so sad? Why you want to get run through with a sword?”
“I don’t know.” Killing goes both ways. Dying is your own business. “You don’t know how low I feel sometimes. Nobody do.”
“You don’t tell anybody!” He gripped her shoulders like when they were young. “I’m not trying to make you do what I want. Just seem like you want to hurt yourself and… I don’t understand.”
“Don’t always know what spell we’re casting ’til after it’s done.”
“Ain’t that the truth.”
“When the picture’s finished, you could maybe see to it that people line up, pay their dime to watch what we’ve done.”
“That’s what I was thinking.” George grinned. “We’ll do it same as a road show.” He was suddenly more excited than she’d seen him in months. “I looked into it.”
“Uh huh.” When it came to money, George had to know everything. “Well, ain’t you goin’ tell me?” Her stomached growled. She couldn’t remember when she ate last.
“Motion pictures are putting traveling stage shows out of business.” George pulled her into the automobile, out of the lake breeze.
“Theatre folk can’t hardly find good work no more.” Redwood sighed. “Pekin Theatre’s been closed almost two years. Magic Theatre ’bout to go dark too.”
George set a picnic basket on the fine leather seat. “The Magic’s showing moving pictures, no more vaudeville shows.”
“That makes you grin?”
“Vaudeville going down is good news for us. They’ll be desperate for pictures. We can do special engagements of Pirate in colored theatres, or matinee and midnight shows in white theatres if we have to.” He unwrapped a spicy-smelling something. “We’ll make more money that way.” He offered her bread and juicy sausages.
“How?” She filled her mouth with one bite, swallowing before she got a good taste.
“Stead of selling a print outright, we get the box office.” George always had a good scheme. “Charge two bits, so they know it’s worth something.”
“Two bits? For a picture show?” She filled her mouth again. “Who can afford that?”
“For a dark hero and a brown-skin sweetheart, for the best seats — high-toned coloreds will, and working folk too.” He handed her a cloth for her greasy face. “Saeed looks colored, all right? Besides that’s how they do. Some producers charge a dollar.”
“Just ’cause that’s what they do, we gotta do it too?”
“We can’t get stuck in the past. This is the future we’re talking.” He glanced out the automobile at the Sea Island cabins sitting near Lake Michigan. “We’re practically in Wisconsin, ain’t we? Lake so wide, can’t see to the end.” He turned back to Redwood, a somber look on his face. “I dropped the rent, okay? I was spending half my profits evicting folks anyhow. Then you go setting my wife against me and Baby Sister too.”
“Clarissa and Iris got minds of their own.”
“Me charging less don’t change nothing. You can feel better taking my money is all.”
“George, George. What we do really does matter.” She hugged her ornery brother. “Even if it don’t change everything. Like you say, we be making the future, now.” She stepped out the automobile and swallowed a burp. Eating too fast gave her indigestion. Mr. McGregor beamed at her. “Thanks for the dinner,” she said.
“You never take care of yourself, Red.” George nodded at Mr. McGregor, who started up the engine. Brother loved having a white man drive him. “We can talk over the ticket price later. I don’t see white folks making big money and us not. Tomorrow’s s’posed to be a better day.” Before she could answer, Mr. McGregor sped off, doing twenty miles per hour for sure.
“What better day?” Redwood was
’fraid to look in the future. Something bad was coming, down in Chicago. It lurked ’round the corner, under burnt-out street lanterns, in sagging doorways and cracked cobblestone streets. She closed her eyes and the El shot off the track, wheels spinning sparks in the dark and setting the air on fire. Angry faces shone in the flame light, dirt-poor folk, supping on somebody else’s misfortune. Redwood didn’t speak her fear to George. He’d laugh. Clarissa would quote the Bible ’bout poor folk and tell her not to be so dramatic. Baby Sister was too young for such a burden. Aidan would’ve understood, yet she just couldn’t bring herself to tell him.
With days of fine weather, The Pirate and the Schoolteacher got ahead of schedule. Redwood avoided thinking on afterward. Rising every morning and doing good work filled her up, pushed away sadness. She drove folks crazy though, doing a scene over and over, ’til each step, gesture, and expression looked grand, ’til broke-down cameras were jury-rigged and running again, ’til the sun up in the sky cooperated. They all grumped at her ’cept Aidan. She’d turn from a sour spat over doing the scene again and catch him grinning. At the breaks, she spied him in a canoe on the lake, playing his banjo, jotting secrets in his journal, and chuckling.
“I’m writing down the movie,” he said to her curious eyes one afternoon. “Words last longer than film. Play a picture enough, it wears out. Read something again and again, it just get better.”
“You sound happy,” she said.
“Look who’s talking.” He gave her a devilish swamp grin.
Did her good to see him this way, and whenever Clarissa or Iris asked how was she really, she’d reply, “I’m having the time of my life.” It was only half a lie.
When they had just a few big scenes left to shoot, Redwood got nervous. Afterward was getting too close. So when blue-black clouds rolled in from the northwest on her twenty-sixth birthday, she didn’t start cussing with Nicolai. She smiled as the sun got swallowed, the lake turned gray, and a wildcat wind chopped up the waves. A rained-out day meant another sunny one to look forward to, more time to figure out the ending, more time before afterward.
“Happy Birthday.” Milton caught her staring a hole in nothing. A bushy gray beard matched the frosty hair on his head. The minister suit made him stand up and stride. “The older you get, the more honey you need to taste sweet, the duller the colors of sunset, and the shorter each minute of your life. Memory starts looking better than right now. You’re too young for all that.” He still read her like a favorite poem. “Life’s ahead of you, not behind.” He slipped a book into the pocket of her costume. “Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man — an anonymous tome, but it’s good. Thanks for this show.”
“Thank you.” She hugged him close, smelling coffee on his lips, tobacco too, and the oil she gave him to ease his joints. “Thanks for all the shows, for seeing me through.”
Milton strutted away, glowing at the edges. Redwood undid her boots and thrust aching feet in the lake. Cold-water waves lapped her toes and churned sand to froth.
“Somebody in a lion suit and mask?” Iris surprised Redwood from behind. Despite her schoolgirl costume, she was such a grown-up young lady now. “Like The Wizard of Oz. Mr. Saeed would make a grand lion, or even Mr. O’Reilly. Nobody would have to get hurt, and we wouldn’t torment a real lion.”
“Why you so set on a lion eating the villain?” Redwood said. “Explain me that and maybe we can do something.”
“Why you get stabbed to death? And then they all get off with their lives! That ain’t right.”
“You’re as bad as Brother. This world ain’t right.”
Iris did a heavy stage sigh and stomped away. Redwood envied Baby Sister’s innocence, her free hold on life. It was spooky how, almost grown-up, Iris didn’t lose her wild self. Raindrops hit Redwood’s eyelashes, and she blinked off hard thoughts.
“If it’s storming over there, Nicolai, it’ll be storming here soon. We have to stop.”
“See why all big companies leaving Chicago.” Nicolai stood over her and then shouted a string of Russian, probably more cussing. “In California, warm sunny days all year. No Mr. Edison beating sets, clobbering cameramen. Nobody pinching lights.”
“No one clobbers you here.” Redwood sighed. “Not yet. No one cares what we do.”
“Mr. Edison is not joke, Sequoia.” Nicolai always used her stage name. “Edison want to squeeze everything in his fist, strong-hand us all. But I hear this Cecile B. DeMille fellow making Squaw Man in California.” He squinted at the clouds coming faster now, covering the sky. “I could be working his picture, making dollars and dollars every day.” Fat drops broke on their faces.
“Squaw Man?” Redwood shook her head. “From the play?”
“A real Indian — Princess Red Wing — playing the squaw.”
“Killing herself for a white man.” Redwood snorted. “Everybody has real Indians and real colored people too.”
“Is dime-novel foolishness, I know, but no snow, no rain, and —”
“Then you couldn’t complain and you wouldn’t be happy.”
Redwood pressed Nicolai’s arm and turned to go as Aidan paddled to shore in a canoe. He wore a white shirt with loose sleeves and full dark pants. His hair was pulled back, and a turban of purple and orange cloth was set at a jaunty angle. His hair puffed at the open center. Hanging from his waist were his daddy’s alligator pouch and Maskókî hunting knife. Redwood felt an ache between her thighs; she ran her tongue over dry lips. Aidan wouldn’t be nearly so handsome and colorful on screen.
“I’ve got to run,” Redwood said to Nicolai. “See you tomorrow.”
The clouds bust open right on them.
“My destiny…dark storms.” Nicolai covered his camera and motioned to the crew. “They say you are a witch with a bright dream, and I am blind cameraman.”
“You know what you’ve seen, Nicolai,” Redwood said. “You faced the lioness, looked her in the eyes, didn’t flinch at her fangs.”
“Nyet, my dear Sequoia, that was you, a brave actress with bright destiny.”
Where’d he get that from? Destiny didn’t seem bright, but dull and cold. Brave? She was a coward, ’fraid of her own self. Needles of rain stabbed her. High brown waves pounded the beach. Nicolai’s crew cradled bulky cameras like babies and ran to vehicles borrowed from Clarissa’s crowd.
Aidan heaved the canoe beyond a breakwater. “Still want to touch the fury?”
“Ha!” she replied.
Brave and powerful was an act she’d been playing since Jerome Williams broke her apart on a dirt road in Georgia. Back then and now too, she acted as if she could just get up from anything and go on. Yet every time she turned ’round — staring out filthy windows on the El, pulling weeds from the herb garden and smelling fresh dirt on the roots, looking at the moon sailing along the starway or hanging in a morning sky — she missed Aidan so bad she wanted to scream. Yesterday, helping a new life tumble into this world, buying a book from Mr. Kaufman’s shop, listening to Nicolai explain a new gadget, she wondered, what would Aidan think? Didn’t she have umpteen articles saved for him? She pulled them from her bag and tossed them in the rain.
Japanese in Seattle Arrange Tuskegee Scholarship
Wanamaker Expedition Returns after Obtaining the Allegiance of All Indian Tribes
William Foster’s All-Colored Railroad Porter a Sensation, but Distribution a Problem
Lady Liberty to be Joined by Indian Chief in New York Harbor
Aidan collected the soggy newsprint, poking his fingers through a few articles. He stuffed the paper inside his shirt. She threw more at him.
Aida Overton-Walker, Brownskin Songstress Taken Ill
Anti-Miscegenation Bill Passes House
Illinois Women Can Vote for the President but not the Governor
Redwood had nobody to talk to like Aidan, nobody to fight with over Martians, poetry, over what Dr. Dubois or Mr. Eastman meant. Aidan helped her make sense. Maybe he felt something bad coming too. Maybe he d
idn’t need her to be brave and powerful no matter what.
“What’s on your mind, ’fore the rain washes us away?” Aidan grabbed the last paper floating in the rain.
Are Those Really Canals on Mars?
“Pauline Hopkins made her plays come true for colored people, and this year Zitkala-Sa did the Sun Dance Opera in Utah with real Indians. Who ever heard of a Sioux woman writing a grand opera? She did it though, for her people. I’m not the only woman trying for…a bright destiny.”
“You’re the one I know.” Aidan moved close.
“I’m jealous of Iris. Brother think I slipped the noose. She’s the one.”
“Yes, Iris goin’ live in the future we hoped for, worked for.” Aidan looked through the rain into the coming days. “Can you see her? Meeting a delegation from Mars, making sure we don’t make the mistakes of yesteryears?”
Redwood nodded and drank tears down the back of her throat. The trouble between her and Aidan was her fault, and she could fix it. She could go on and be intimate with him. Even if she didn’t feel nothing or her skin started crawling, she could act as if it was the time of her life. Everybody said Sequoia Phipps was a great performer, said that Sequoia could act anything. If it was torment for Aidan to be close and not close, she’d perform like Elaine at the Cherokee Bordello, only she’d do it for love, not for money.
“I’m goin’ fly,” she said. “I’m warning you.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. But watch out.” She skipped off.
“Wait!”
Aidan ran to keep up with Redwood. She was a streak of color in gray fog, an aeroplane ’bout to take off in a day made night by a storm. It was a good ways to the road where the borrowed vehicles were parked, which Aidan didn’t usually mind. He and Redwood were always the last to go. He relished a few moments, walking alone with her at the end of the day. They didn’t talk much, too worn out, too skittish. Still he treasured the words they traded. Storms usually didn’t make him no nevermind either. Today he wanted to cuss the muddy road, the sharp wind, and the greasy rain off the lake — half water, half factory spew. Chilly rivulets were running down his back, splashing his behind, making his muscles clench. Redwood was prickly too, static popping off her skin, out her hair. He knew her like the back of his breath. She was holding something back. Or maybe that was his energy crackling between them — so much he wasn’t saying, and he should’ve been able to tell her anything.
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