“A lot has changed, Z.” She knelt down by a chest in front of her bed. She opened it carefully and brought something out. She stood up and hid it from me behind her back. “I’ve got something for you,” she said, “something I think you forgot.”
She smiled and held out Mama’s baseball glove. I took it from her and put it on my hand, smiling myself. I pounded the pocket with my other hand and rubbed it as I’d done a thousand times before. “I didn’t forget it. I left it so you wouldn’t forget.”
She sat down on the bed and looked directly in my eyes. “That would be impossible,” she whispered.
I sat down on the bed next to her. Everything felt strange, yet familiar. I looked around her room. A few pictures were new, and perfume bottles, and clothes, lots of clothes, but many things were the same. The bed we were on was the same one we had sat on as children. when we were both children. A lot of things were the same, but now I was the only child in the room. I stood up and walked over to one of her pictures and turned around.
“Look,” I said, “I’ve been around a little bit and this place — downstairs I mean — it looks like, well. uh. a whorehouse.”
“Yes. It is,” she said.
Just then, Georgia burst into the room. At first, she didn’t see me. She ran over to Carolina, picked up both of Carolina’s hands, and spread them apart. Then, she waved them back and forth, one at a time, in front of her own face, acting as if Carolina were slapping her. Carolina nodded and took her hands back, then she smiled and pointed to me. Georgia turned and saw me. She cupped her hand over her mouth to stop a scream that never came, never had. She sat down on the bed next to Carolina and stared at me, her eyes welling up with tears.
“How are you, Georgia?”
She didn’t answer, but she looked over at Carolina.
“She can’t hear you,” Carolina said. “She started going deaf about three years ago. Now, she can’t hear a sound. It’s funny, though. It seems the more she gets cut off from the world, the more she gives back. She plays the piano now, real well, and she never did before she went deaf. And she’s the only good thing Mrs. Bennings has got left.”
I looked at Carolina and Georgia. So alike, so different. They were Giza, “the other people,” Mama had said, and I was Meq. But it was like that among us too. So alike, so different. I cleared a place on the floor and sat down. I motioned for them to do the same, like we used to, and they did. I looked at Carolina’s face and thought of my dream.
“Tell me what has happened,” I said.
Carolina glanced at Georgia and Georgia slowly closed and opened her eyes, then nodded her head once. Carolina could still “read” her.
“It happened by degrees,” she said. “After you left, Mrs. Bennings seemed to unravel. I don’t know whether it was you leaving or you taking with you the last reminder of that man you told me about, Solomon. But, either way, she started drinking heavily; drinking to get drunk, and going around more and more with Corsair Bogy.”
I looked at her with alarm and straightened up, unconsciously reaching for the Stones beneath my shirt.
“No, no,” she said, “he hasn’t done anything to us. Yet. But I am scared of him, Z. He’s not a good man and I think he’s hired someone—”
“Wait, Carolina,” I interrupted, “you’re way ahead of me. Tell me the rest. from the beginning.”
She went on. “Mrs. Bennings got worse and worse. Corsair was with her all the time, and for a while, I guess he was good for her. At least he paid attention to her, but in time he sort of took control of her; told her what to do, what to wear, who to see, and who not to see. Georgia and I were in school most of the time and it was during the day, during that time, that I think Mrs. Bennings was finally worn down and let him have complete control of her and this place. Within a year, he had turned it into a house of prostitution and Mrs. Bennings into a madam. A madam with good manners. That was the only thing she insisted on, that all the girls have good manners.
“Corsair is from an old Creole family that lost its money decades ago, but he still has connections and a whole slew of ‘cousins’ in New Orleans. For years, all the girls came from New Orleans. Now, almost all the girls are from here in St. Louis, trained by me.”
I stopped her right there. “You mean, you and Georgia. work here?”
“Of course not,” she said. “We run it.”
I looked in her eyes. She stared back at me. I didn’t know what to say, but I knew there, in her eyes, she hadn’t changed.
“I am not ashamed of what I do, Z. It is a good business and I learned. we learned,” she said, nodding at Georgia, “how to do it well. We are not deprived or made to do anything we don’t want to do. We take good care of our girls and we take good care of our ‘visitors,’ as Mrs. Bennings likes to call them. I like everything about it except for Corsair. He’s got out of hand, Z. Two months ago, he finally talked Mrs. Bennings into marrying him and now he wants control of everything. He’s dangerous. I know he hates me and my influence and lately he’s been slapping Mrs. Bennings for no reason at all.”
“Is that what Georgia was trying to say?”
“Yes.” Carolina stopped talking and gave me a strange look. She pointed her finger at me and made a circling motion. “Z,” she said, “why did you come back now?”
I looked down at the floor, then up at her and Georgia. “I had a dream,” I said. “The rest is a little complicated.”
We sat in silence. I stared in wonder at these two young women, these Giza, sitting on the floor talking like this with a Meq, a child.
“Have you found Sailor?” Carolina asked.
“No,” I said. She turned to Georgia and shook her head, saying no, as if they had talked of this before. “Why did you say Corsair had hired someone?” I asked.
“I said I
“To do what?”
“I don’t know,” she said, “but I’m afraid for Mrs. Bennings.”
I thought about my dream again. I was much more afraid for Carolina. I knew that Corsair Bogy was the source of my fear. Everywhere around me I felt an invisible, prickly net descending. It was a heightened sense of danger; an awareness of it that I was learning, as Geaxi said I would. But it felt like waking up. “Don’t tell Mrs. Bennings I’m back,” I said. “I have a plan.”
It was a simple plan. Corsair Bogy had to be watched; all the time, everywhere he went, inside the house or on the town. But Mrs. Bennings couldn’t be told. Carolina agreed — if I wasn’t here, he wouldn’t see me. We could not alert him. Corsair Bogy was a snake, but he wasn’t stupid; whatever he had in mind for Mrs. Bennings or Carolina, he would not do it himself.
I stood up to leave. I wanted to be gone before anyone in the house saw me. Carolina handed me Mama’s glove. “Don’t forget this,” she said.
“I never have.” They both walked me back through the house to the kitchen door. “Be careful and watch him like a hawk,” I said. “I won’t be far away.”
It was a cold morning, but spring was in the air and I walked into it, glancing back once at the two women I had known so long ago as girls. They were holding hands.
I got a room in the Italian neighborhood known as “the hill,” just off Hampton Avenue. It was a place where I could easily blend in and live cheaply. No one noticed another dark-haired boy on “the hill.”
Every day, I followed Corsair Bogy wherever he went. Most of his time was spent in the saloons or at Sportsman’s Park. The baseball season had started and Bogy had box seats, three rows up on the first base side. I hadn’t seen a baseball game in years, except for a few crude games in the Caribbean, and it was exciting to smell the smells, hear the sounds, and watch the players. Sneaking in was no problem; under Captain Woodget, I had learned to sneak into any place. The Browns were terrible. They had a great slugger at first base, though. His name was Roger Conner and he held the record for most home runs until Babe Ruth broke it. I thought about being a bat boy again, at least for a game or two, but that would make me too visible. Instead, I hung back in the shadows and watched Bogy.
At night, I stayed outside the boardinghouse and spied on those who came and went. I had seen
