Chicago, they were playwrights, and Kylie Ballantine was a choreographer. Shirley Graham-she was DuBois’s wife and a well-known stage director. They did some pretty amazing things the Swing Mikado was the most famous, but Ward wrote something called the Big White Fog about the real state of race relations in this country. Then the Republicans in Congress got freaked, almost like they were today’s fossils screaming about the NEA: they claimed the Federal Theater Project was a Communist front and shut it down after only about two years.”
“Was it, do you think?” I was curious.
She leaned forward, the brown check of her jacket sleeves straining against her plump forearms. “See, this was when Gone With the Wind was published, and everyone-well, a lot of white America-was buying Margaret Mitchell’s idea that we were all contented little pickaninnies until the evil Yankees came and ended slavery. There were definitely some fellow travelers in the project, but mostly it was people for some brief time getting a chance to put real theater on real stages, instead of having to do minstrel shows or play mammies and Stepin Fetchit.”
“So what was Mr. Whitby’s interest? The ideological battles?”
She shook her head so vigorously her short curls danced. “No. Some folks think the NTP-the Negro Theater Project was just a chance for the white bourgeoisie to exploit black artists, but Marc wasn’t interested in the ideological angle. He wanted to follow the Chicago Writers Workshop that a lot of these artists belonged to, to see what happened to them. And he was especially interested in Kylie Ballantine. She was so complex, she danced, she did choreography, but she also was an anthropologist and wrote books on African dance and ritual. She had a studio in her home in Bronzeville. Marc tried to buy her house-he’s been hoping to turn it into a museum-had been,” she corrected herself mournfully, “but the new owner cut it up into a bunch of little apartments and refused to sell. So Marc bought a place close to hers, then he started a campaign to get her home in the national register of historic buildings. Maybe I’ll try to take that over.”
She gave a little hiccup and busied herself with her notebook for a minute. I waited until she regained her composure, then asked if she knew how much of Kylie Ballantine’s story Marcus had finished.
“It was more like, how much he was cutting it back. He had so much material on Kylie, he was turning it into a book. The piece for T-square was almost finished. He’s been doing occasional pieces on the history of Bronzeville, you see. You know Bronzeville, right?”
I made an apologetic grimace. “Not really. It was the corridor along Cottage Grove Avenue where African- Americans were restricted when they started moving to Chicago in large numbers after the First World War, I think.”
“Not exactly,” she said, with a friendly smile that made me glad it was she, not Delaney or Simon Hendricks who was educating me. “You’re right that we were pushed into that narrow stretch along Cottage on the South Side. But Bronzeville-oh, in some ways it was a state of mind-it included the wonderful mansions on King Drive, you know, a bit west of Cottage-that’s where Ida B. Wells lived, for instance, and Richard Wright when he was here, and Daniel Hale, he had a clinic there because even though he did the first open-heart surgery in the world none of the white hospitals would let him practice. But also, because the downtown stores were segregated there was a shopping district around Thirtyfifth Street. No one misses segregation, but it’s really sad all those stores and little businesses disappeared.”
We were both quiet for a minute, mourning the passing of the little shops, or perhaps the passing of Marcus Whitby.
Aretha gave her curls another shake. “Anyway, Marc was fascinated by Bronzeville. He came from Atlanta, so he had such a different experience-better in some ways, worse in others, but definitely different-and he felt like he had a mission to preserve and record Bronzeville. Then he fell in love with Kylie.”
“She isn’t still alive, is she?” I asked, startled.
“Oh, no. She died in 1979. But you know how you can be so fascinated by a dead person that they feel really present for you. I used to tease Marc about it, about how I could never-” She dissolved suddenly into tears.
I pulled some clean tissues from the stack I’d packed before starting out today, but didn’t try to stop her crying. She’d loved him when he was alive, that much was clear, and now she was likely to have her own dead hero to keep alive.
“It isn’t fair. He was so smart and so loving, he didn’t deserve to die,” she gulped out. “I don’t believe he killed himself. I know people like Delaney laughed at me, just the way I laugh at her with her stupid crush on Simon Hendricks, but Marc was different, he was special, he never would have gotten drunk and jumped into a creepy old pond.”
“That’s what his sister thinks, too-that he wouldn’t have done that, I mean,” I said when Aretha’s sobs had died down and she’d wiped her face. “No, don’t apologize. Grief keeps hitting us at unexpected moments, knocking the wind out… But do you know why Marc-Mr. Whitbywent out there? Did Kylie have a house in New Solway?”
She swallowed the rest of her Coke. “No, she only ever lived in Bronzeville, except the years she spent in Africa. And she didn’t have any family in those western suburbs: I did a search through Marc’s notes, because I wondered the same thing.”
“Did Mr. Whitby ever mention Calvin Bayard?” I asked.
“Is he in charge of Bayard Publishing? We’re not supposed to go to them; Mr. Hendricks is afraid they’ll scoop our stories because they own magazines with tons more reporters and money than we have. Marc would have known that.” She stopped. “Oh. Does Mr. Bayard live in New Solway? Do you think Mare went out to see him without telling us because he knew it would annoy Mr. Hendricks?”
I shook my head. “At this point, I don’t know enough to have theories. But it sounds like one possibility.”
“I can look through his notes and see if Marc says anything about Bayard, but he never mentioned, well, either Mr. Bayard, or Bayard Publishing to me.”
“Could I see Marc’s notes?” I tried not to sound like Peppy with a rabbit in view.
She wrinkled her face up in doubt. “I don’t think Mr. Hendricks would like it if I let his stuff leave the building. But I can see what Marc left at his desk if you’ll read it here.”
I followed her out of the conference room and on down the hall. Like most offices, the floor was laid out in a square around the elevators and bathrooms. We ended up at the corner near where we’d started, at a row of cubicles facing an interior wall. A few people were working at their desks,
but most were leaning over the edges of the carrels talking to each other. They stared frankly at me, but didn’t interrupt their conversations.
Marcus Whitby’s name was on a black plaque two from the end. Unlike most of the other desks I’d seen, his was extraordinarily tidy-no stacks of paper on the floor, no leaning towers of files. I asked Aretha if she’d cleaned up after his death.
“No. Marc was just a neatness freak. Everybody teased him about it.” Her voice wobbled but didn’t break.
“That’s right.” A man in the adjacent carrel who’d been talking to his far neighbor leaned in our direction. “Whitby was Mr. Anal Compulsive. You couldn’t borrow anything from him if you hadn’t returned what you took last week. You his lawyer?”
“No-why? Did he need one?”
The man grinned. “Just a guess. Know you’re not with the magazine. Jason Tompkin.”
“V I. Warshawski. I’m an investigator, hired by the family to see how he died. Did he ever mention going out to New Solway to you?”
Tompkin shook his head. “But Marc was a solo operator. Most people here share and share alike-you know, you’re stuck, you want an opening, you bring your buddies up to speed on what you’re doing. Not Marc. He owned his material.”
“He was happy to help people,” Aretha snapped. “You’re just lazy, J.T, and you know it.”
Tompkin grinned. “You ought to be a perch, Aretha, you rise faster to the bait than anyone I ever met. But you can’t deny Whitby didn’t let people in on what he was doing. Simon and he had a few words about it now and then.”
“Is that why Mr. Hendricks was reluctant to let me know what Mr. Whitby was working on?” I asked.
Tompkin thought that was funny enough to laugh about, but, when Aretha glared at him, he subsided and returned to his other neighbor. Aretha rifled quickly through a plastic disk holder. “Here’s Bronzeville, but I know Marc kept most of his Kyle Ballantine stuff at home. His notes, his notebook-he did stuff by hand-I don’t see that. But he probably had that
at home, too. A lot of the writers do most of their work at home. Can you imagine trying to work with Jason Tompkin blaring away all day?”
