She burst out laughing,
“What?”
Marguerite was hugging herself, crying. “I’m sorry,” she gasped.
“I make Joshua laugh too.”
“It’s an expression, like ofay. It means you’re a white gal.”
“Oh,” I said, feeling dim all over again. “Why are there so many white people here? I thought Harlem was—”
“The Capital of Black America?”
I nodded because I’d heard Joshua and his friends say so.
“It is and it isn’t. This is Black Broadway, Seventh Avenue. This is where we promenade.”
Marguerite nodded at three women passing, arm in arm, in fancy clobber and shiny lipstick.
“Look at the theatres, restaurants, billiard halls, speakeasies, saloons, nightclubs. Entertainment and joy everywhere. Sparkling glass, gleaming chrome, and the hottest jazz on the planet. Negro Heaven!”
I’d never seen folks dressed so fine, automobiles so shiny. In the Hills there were more horses and carts than motor cars. Horse dung piled high in the streets.
“White people come to Harlem because we dance, we sing, jive and strut better than them. We’re color, they’re grey. We’re movement, they’re stasis. We’re fire, they’re ashes.”
Marguerite’s cheeks were flushed, her hands flying. I wanted to tell her she should be a writer like Joshua.
“Who do you think owns all this? Who owns the Renaissance? The Lafayette? The Cotton Club? Who owns Negro Heaven?”
“Your pa?”
“White people, that’s who. Blumstein’s is the biggest store and we can’t work there, not behind the counters, smiling and selling those fine wares. They charge us sky-high rents, won’t give us jobs, and won’t let us in the best clubs, excepting as the floor show! Black Harlem? We live here, but it ain’t ours.”
I wanted to ask her about Mr Irving. He owned their huge house and the funeral home. Eula said he owned an apartment block and two stores as well.
“But why—”
A white man grabbed Marguerite’s arm hard.
“Hey,” I said.
“What’re you doing with this one?” he said, looking at me. “Pretty little white gal like you.”
“She’s my sister!” I said. “Let her go!”
“Begging your pardon, sir, but my sis ain’t white,” Marguerite said, being polite, even though he was hurting her.
He wasn’t half as fancy as Marguerite. His teeth were yellow, his eyes bloodshot.
“Look at her hair,” Marguerite said. “You know she didn’t come by those curls any place white.”
“White people can have curly hair!” he protested.
“No, sir. Show me a white with curls; I’ll show you a coloured passing.”
He didn’t know what to say to that.
“She sounds British.”
“She’s from the islands, sir.”
“That’s right,” I said. “Sir.”
Marguerite slid from his grasp, kept walking, pulling me along, kicking up her heels. I did likewise, swaying my hips.
I snuck a peek behind. The horrible white man was staring.
“You’ll do,” Marguerite said. “Just don’t leave Harlem. Can you imagine? Us strolling along 42nd Street holding hands? They’d quail. Are they both coloured or both white?, they’d be thinking, how can we tell the difference?”
“I can’t,” I confessed.
“White people can rarely tell light from white.”
“Joshua says being white is a state of mind.”
“Hardly. It’s a matter of law and power.”
“And the colour of your skin.”
“Sometimes that too.”
Marguerite took me to see her brother, Otis, and his wife, Jesse. They lived in a two-room apartment, up three flights of rickety stairs.
Otis was tall and handsome like Joshua, with an even bigger smile.
“We’ve been hearing about you.” He pulled me into a bear hug. No one in my family had ever hugged me like that. Otis was affectionate and protective mixed together. It made me want to cry.
Jesse sat in a chair by a wall of framed photos. She was smiling, with her hands resting on her belly.
“You’re having a baby too!” I exclaimed.
She smiled wider than Otis. She was beautiful, with high cheekbones and big soft eyes. I wanted to tell her. Instead I touched her shoulder.
“No need to be shy. I’ve been wanting to meet you,” Jesse said, pulling me into a hug as warm as Marguerite’s. “I hear Mama Irving hates you almost as much as she hates me. I’m too dark, you’re too white.”
She was darker skinned than Joshua, Marguerite, Otis, than their parents. She was darker than Eula.
Colour struck, Marguerite had said. Now I knew what that meant.
“That’s why she hates you? Because you’re dark?”
“And poor and not from Harlem.”
“I’m trash,” I told her. “She said so.”
But Mrs Irving let me stay in the house. She thought white and poor was better than dark and poor. It made my head spin.
“Me too.” Jesse laughed.
“Whatcha gunna call the bub?”
Mrs Irving unbent after her first grandchildren were born.
Enough to let Jesse, Otis and Ebony move into the third floor.
But not all the way. She spoke to me and Jesse only about our children. She asked for translations of what I said, long after all traces of the Hills had worn away. She recommended Jesse bathe in lemon juice and didn’t speak to her for a month when Jesse laughed.
But sometimes, almost accidentally, she’d look at me or Jesse and smile.
When Joshua returned—from Paris it turned out—he took our baby in his arms and the grin didn’t leave his face for weeks.
“Did you name her like I asked?”
I nodded.
“Lisette,” he whispered. “She’s perfect.”
“You’ve changed,” he said, hours later when Lisette was asleep on our bed. “You look like a Harlemite.”
My hair was up in a rag the way Eula did, because I’d been helping her in the kitchen. I was wearing Marguerite’s scent and her way of walking too.
“You shouldn’t’ve done it,” I said. “Dragged me all this way to spite your ma.”
“I know,” he said. “I wanted to hurt her the way she hurt Otis. I shouldn’t have dragged you in. Not without telling you.”
He looked at me, and it felt like he was truly seeing me.
“I’m sorry.”
I bit my lip to keep from blubbing. I blubbed anyways.
Joshua held me till the waterworks stopped.
“I’m glad,” I said, between sniffles. “I like your sister and your brother. Jesse, Eula and Zee too.” Better than my blood family, not that that meant much. “I like Harlem. I love our
