Let Us Dream

by Alyssa Cole

  Except for the way she looked at your mouth. Remember that?

  Amir did remember. He also remembered the way she had been so close that the scent of her hair had enveloped him, heavy floral musk tucked up primly under that hat of hers. And though he had balked at the way she brought up his religion—as if it would stop him from doing his job—in retrospect, he realized that she was the only employer who had even taken it seriously. He ran his hands over his apron, feeling a different kind of shame at how he’d taken each question as a challenge and reacted accordingly.

  Patha! Stubborn ram, always looking for something to butt his head against. His father had roughed a hand through Amir’s hair each time he repeated what became a common saying in the family, even after he’d needed to reach his hand up to do it. Amir missed that, even though he’d often jerked away, indignant.

  His flatmates called him Pintu, but it wasn’t the same. No one in America knew that daak naam. Patha was buried with his parents.

  Across the kitchen, Cora huffed and put a hand to her stomach. She had been frowning in concentration since the dinner service had started a few hours before, but now a smile illuminated her face.

  “Strong kicker?” Amir ventured. Her head whipped in his direction, but then she dropped her hand and went back to work. She’d eyed him suspiciously since he’d interrupted her training for the Maghrib prayer, making Amir wish he’d asked Bertha where he could do so in private when she had offered. He sighed and sloshed another pan into the soapy water.

  “Feels like he’s tryin’ to kick me to the moon sometimes,” Cora said after a long silence.

  Amir smiled, remembering when Sabiha Auntie had been pregnant with his cousin and let him feel the baby move beneath his hand. Amaan was all grown up now, working in the fire room of a British ship, last he’d heard. On the Kandahar, one fireman had gone mad from the heat and attacked one of the officers, who’d tried to force him back into the inferno of the engine room. It had made Amir wonder about those days when Raahil Uncle had sat slack-mouthed and blank-eyed, staring into the distance.

  “That means he’s anxious to get out and show the world what he can do,” Amir said as he scrubbed. “He’ll be a go-getter, as they say.”

  Cora chuckled. “If he’s anything like my husband Darryl, that’s a sure thing. Fried chicken and greens, order up!”

  They worked in silence for a bit, Amir scrubbing glasses and shoving them into drying racks as Cora bustled about the kitchen. Each time she passed him, he felt a bit more like an ass. He dropped the last glass into the rack and wiped his hands on his apron.

  “I have experience working in a kitchen. Tell me what to do, and you can rest for a bit. Do you need anything prepped?”

  She narrowed her eyes at him, and he could tell she was struggling with giving him even a bit of control over her workspace. He’d never been able to do it in his kitchens, but Cora had extenuating circumstances that he’d never had to consider.

  “I was a cook back home, and on a ship, and since I’ve been here in the States,” he said. “I learned at the side of a man who would not think twice about throwing a hot pan in your direction if you made a mistake and I won’t even tell you how strict my grandmother was. I won’t make a mess of things, if you tell me how you want it done.”

  Cora bit her lip, then glanced at the pile of greens beside the cutting board. “You ever made collards?”

  Amir smiled; his flatmates would get a laugh out of a Bong being asked if he could cook shak. Slightly less insulting than asking if he could cook fish. He still remembered following his Nani through the market each morning, as she bought whatever was cheap and in season, and then into the kitchen as she decided the best way to prepare it. He’d learned at the knee of a master culinary improviser. But Cora had no reason to know that, and he had jumped to enough conclusions for one night. Besides, a good cook was always looking to improve.

  “Can you show me?”

  Amir watched the plate the waitress carried out of the kitchen with more than a bit of pride. He was an accomplished cook, but this Southern style food wasn’t something he’d tried before. Cora had tasted the fried chicken and collards herself, giving him a nod of approval, and then sat down and eaten some during her break. Amir had a small plate of the shak at her urging, and was proud of his attempt. The greens were tender and tangy, infused with a hint of the smoked turkey neck Cora had told him to add for flavor instead of the ham hocks that were part of her own recipe. The chicken was crisp, the combination of spices a perfect complement to the succulent meat beneath. It wasn’t halal, but Amir’s philosophy held that Allah was more forgiving of certain transgressions. On payday, he would head to the kosher butcher, the closest thing to halal, and make a feast for his flatmates. With a bit of panch phoron mixed into the seasoned flour coating, the chicken would be even better.

  He was contemplating variations on Cora’s recipe when a sound that seemed distinctly out of place at the Cashmere reached his ears. He still wasn’t used to the loud music, but most of it had been enjoyable enough that it had him tapping his feet or moving his head in time. He hadn’t expected this.

  He stood, drawn toward the main section of the club by the familiar sound of fingers plucking skillfully at the taut strings of a sitar, the blows of palms against a tabla setting a driving percussive beat. Those were the sounds of home, coming from the stage of this Harlem hole in the wall.

  He got to the door and stopped. Dishwashers weren’t allowed out front at most places, and he was sure the Cashmere was no exception.

  “Go ahead and peek,” Cora said. “Nobody gonna be looking this way now. Not while Miss Hines is up there.”

  He pushed the door open a crack and was surprised to see some White faces in the crowd, along with the varying shades of brown. That was no small thing, given the way segregation was so strictly enforced in the States. Cora was correct: the women with their sleek hair and the men in their sharp suits, all of them were staring toward the front of the club, enraptured. He pressed the door open a bit more so that the stage came into view and he saw exactly why.

  Cora had said it was Bertha on the stage, but for a moment Amir knew she had to be wrong. A woman clad in an elegant sari stood there, her long, dark hair falling over her shoulder in waves and her arms curving up and over her head. Her stance meant that her cropped choli was lifted perilously high, revealing bare brown skin from her waist to approximately three rib bones short of Jannah. Beneath the flowing fabric of her loose skirt, one dainty foot was on point. Her knee was bent and pressing against the skirt in a way that somehow made you quite aware that it was bare skin pressing against smooth fabric. She just stood there, drawing it out until Amir found himself willing her to move.

  When the tension in the room was about to teeter into unbearable, she turned her head abruptly toward the audience, teasing, just as her hips began to sway. Her eyes were lined with dark kohl, making them seem large and enticing. Her lips were red, luscious, but the smile that rested on them was relaxed and mysterious.

  Jewelry was draped over her hair and encircling her forehead, sparkling gold to match the earrings that dripped from her ears, the temple necklace that circled over her collarbones, and the bangles that lined her wrists.

  The plucking of the sitar strings began to pick up pace and Bertha launched fully into her dance. Amir watched, annoyance, amusement, and something dangerously close to lust swirling in his mind as she whirled before him. The dance was delicate and feminine and powerful all at once, but more than anything it was seductive. What it was not, was an actual Indian dance.

  Most classical dance was rooted in Hinduism, but Amir’s village had been one in which religion had generally been no barrier to friendship and community; he had learned classical dance from neighborhood festivities and annual celebrations with friends, and this wasn’t it. There were bits and pieces mashed together—she completed some mudras, striking the hand poses fairly accurately; others were things he supposed she ha
d created on her own. He could see hints of ballet in the way she jumped and swayed, and he supposed other styles were mixed in too. Her arms moved languidly, and her feet followed familiar patterns—to an outsider she looked like she knew what she was doing. Her shoulders jumped and her bangles shook in time to the music. But the way she moved her hips was something entirely American.

  The day before Amir had boarded the Kandahar, he had come across a street performance near the docks in Calcutta. An old woman beside him had huffed, “Nachinir lajja nei dekhunir lajja.” The dancer isn’t ashamed, but the onlooker is. He was definitely not ashamed as he watched Bertha, though other sentiments stirred in him. He should have been offended at yet another bastardization of his culture, but he felt a kind of wonder as she whirled and swayed. Perhaps it was because the woman on the stage was so open and free, compared to the stiff-backed woman he’d met in the kitchen.

  He’d seen baiji women perform their dances for the sahebs in Calcutta, had also seen the sahebs demand to be taught in one breath and decry the dances as repulsive and lewd with the next. He scorned the British for taking every bit of his culture and steeping it in their own ways until it was to their taste, dashing out what wasn’t. But watching Bertha elicited something else in him. Something that made his heart race and also hit him with a wave of homesickness stronger than the sea churned by the rage of a monsoon.

  He felt Cora come stand beside him but he couldn’t tear his gaze away from the woman on the stage. The same woman who’d talked down to him like he was a cur who had wandered in from the alley, begging for a scrap of meat. Amir considered that perhaps he had been wrong to be offended by her show of superiority earlier: he and every other person in the audience were quite ready to prostrate themselves before her as she whirled toward the finale of the song.

  “She don’t perform as much anymore since she took over the place,” Cora whispered. “But I sure love when she does.”

  Bertha spun into a dramatic pose, back bent, hands supplicant, dark-rimmed eyes turned towards the heavens as if she begged for redemption. The music stopped and the audience went wild, cheering and hooting, begging for an encore.

  Bertha finally left her pose and graced the crowd with a smile. Someone handed her a microphone, and she spoke in that velvety voice of hers that had stroked over Amir during their first encounter.

  “Thank you, everyone, for coming to the Cashmere tonight. We’ve got a ragtime group from Louisiana up after this intermission, so I hope I’ll see you all dancing yourselves. Especially you over there, with those rubber legs of yours.” Amir couldn’t see who she extended her arm toward, but low laughter rumbled through the crowd. “I do have a special message for all of the men in the crowd, tonight,” she said. Her voice dropped low, husky, and every man in the crowd leaned closer, as if she were talking to him and him alone. Amir did, too, then leaned back, annoyed that he could be taken in by her ploy. He watched the hungry expressions of the men closest to him, and felt a serpentine motion inside of him that had nothing—or everything—to do with how Bertha’s sinuous hips had entranced him.

  “Fellas,” she said, voice intimate like she was speaking to her lover across a pillow. “Did you enjoy my dance tonight?”

  The crowd broke out into more hoots, hollers, and whistles.

  “Why’d you make us wait so long for it?” a man called out, followed by a chorus of agreement.

  She smiled, her gaze slipping in the direction of the outburst, then to the ground, all coyness. Amir felt himself leaning toward her again, and he didn’t fight it this time.

  “Oh, you want me to dance again?” she asked.

  More shouts, more applause, and then she lifted her head and pinned the crowd with a look that made Amir’s throat go tight and his pulse race.

  “Remember that when you go to the ballot box one month from now. Because I’ve got a hankering to vote and the only one who can help with that is you men. Vote yes for women’s suffrage, because until she gets the right to vote, this nautch girl is retired.”

  She capped her statement with a wink, and then sauntered backstage, ignoring the incredulous shouts interspersed with laughter that followed in her wake. Men jumped up in their seats and women reached across tables to touch fingertips with their friends as they shared knowing looks. Amir simply stared at the curtain that had closed behind her.

  “Ain’t she something?” Cora hooted, slapping Amir’s shoulder.

  “Yes,” Amir responded. “Something, indeed.”

  Chapter 3

  “I still don’t understand why we have to be here today. I’m still exhausted from Saturday.” Janie crossed her arms on the table directly in front of the stage and rested her head on it. Her face was clean, make-up free, reminding Bertha that she was younger than she appeared when she was glammed up and working the crowd. Janie was always exhausted, but that was to be expected when a girl had a movie star face and an hour glass figure to match. Her services were always in demand, both at the Cashmere and with the sugar daddies she had in rotation outside the club’s walls.

  “We’re here today because the vote is happening less than a month from now,” Bertha said, pacing back and forth on the stage. “I’m glad you decided to show up this time. I got up early the other day and you all stood me up.”

  Wah Ming, who went by Jade to the men at the club who were flummoxed by two simple syllables, brushed her blunt bangs out of her eyes before lighting the cigarette Janie had just rolled for her. “That’s because you scheduled it for the morning after a party with all the Tammany big-wigs. We were beat!”

  “That you all are invited to these kinds of parties is one reason why I’m giving these courses,” Bertha said. “Look, I’ve told you already, the vote will be here before we know it. Any man who isn’t absolutely voting yes has to be convinced otherwise.”

  From the corner of her eye, she saw the kitchen door open half way. Amir’s head popped through and he held up a hand in greeting. She’d asked him to come in and do some repair work if he wanted to take home a bit more money. He’d been obliging, shockingly so, considering the way he’d squared off with her when he first arrived. After that first day, he’d been reserved with her but not sullen. Cora seemed sweet on him after a few shifts together, a first for the Cashmere kitchen. He was a good worker, and that was all that mattered, anyway; everyone knew Bertha Hines didn’t play in her own yard, or anyone’s yard, when it came down to it.

  Some said she did it to keep men panting after her, which was partially true. Men wanted nothing more than what they couldn’t have, and if that kept them coming to the Cashmere, that was fine with her. But after years of being groped up and put down, Bertha mostly wanted peace of mind.

  She chucked her chin in Amir’s direction to acknowledge him and he slipped back into the kitchen.

  “I’m no suffragette,” a woman from the back called out, saying the word the same way most suffragettes would refer to her profession. She received grumbles of approval from the small crowd of girls Bertha hired as waitresses—and rented her back rooms to for their other work, with the offer of protection.

  Bertha sighed. “Do you want laws that protect you from the police officers who hit you up for bribes? From the people who won’t hire you for jobs and never gave you the opportunity for schooling?”

  There was a sulky silence in the room but no dissent, and Bertha smiled. “Then you are suffragettes. We need to get this vote and we need to know what to do with it once we have it. Today we’ll be going over local government and a few recent laws that have had a negative impact on you.”

  “Like the hotel law?” Janie asked sleepily. The law had been passed to make it harder for prostitutes to rent rooms, meaning more women had to hustle on the streets or give up their earnings to pimps.

  “Yes, like that. We’ll examine who voted for the laws and what political parties they come from.” Bertha felt the slightest spark of hope. “Now, none of you are fools. I’ve seen you hold conversations wi
th every type of man in the Apple, from shoe shiners to senators. There’s no reason you shouldn’t have some say in what happens in this city and this country.”

  “No one cares what we think,” another woman, Cathy, called out. “Half these suffragettes think we dragging down the race. Way they tell it, if we just dressed nice and stopped whoring around, people would treat us right.”

  “And I still won’t be allowed to vote, even if women get suffrage,” Wah Ming added. “Remember? My kind isn’t wanted here.” She stubbed her cigarette out into an ashtray.

  Bertha understood their frustration; when the decks were stacked against you, playing felt futile. “Many people would be glad if none of us in this room existed, and if we never got the right to vote. That would work out real nice for them, wouldn’t it? If we never had the chance to take them to task for treating us like shit?”

  She took a deep breath. Cussing aloud wasn’t part of the image of control she tried to project, but it had many of the girls sitting up and paying attention.

  “But what if we get the vote and nothing changes?” someone asked. The voice was so quiet it could have been the nagging one that kept her up at night. Bertha looked at the women before her; some were happy with their lot in life, some were not. The majority had not been given much of a choice. All had lived with disappointment as a constant companion; such was the fate of any woman in the United States, and especially ones born some shade darker than porcelain white.

  “If we get the vote, everything will already have changed,” Bertha said. “And once we have it, we’ll keep voting until we get every damn thing we deserve from this country.” She let the words hang there. “We fight in a hundred ways just to get through every day. Let’s see what happens when we try fighting one hundred and one, okay?”

  Bertha looked out at the women, not sure if she’d let her natural flair for the dramatic push them too far, too fast.