Sara Paretsky - Blacklist

“I see, Ms.”- he glanced at my card-“Warshawski. So the family believes you can tell them something the police can’t? They have actually hired you to conduct this investigation?” He sounded as though it was about as likely as my being asked to pinch-hit for Sammy Sosa.

“Your guard dog here spoke with Harriet Whitby,” I said. “And the family believes it, yes, or they wouldn’t have asked me to do the job.”

He and Delaney both stiffened at the “guard dog” title, but Hendricks merely said coldly, “And what do you expect to learn from Mr. Whitby’s current assignments?”

I again went through my song and dance about trying to understand what had taken Whitby to New Solway.

“We’d all like to know that, Ms.-uh. I don’t believe it was connected to his work. You spoke to Whitby’s sister, Delaney? You’re convinced it really was the sister?”

Delaney murmured a respectful assent.

Hendricks picked up a sheaf of papers: the busy man interrupted middecision. “Mr. Whitby was working on a story on the writers in the Federal Negro Theater Project. You know what that is?”

When I repeated the little knowledge I’d picked up from Whitby’s articles, Hendricks curled his lip. “I see. I would have thought the family-but I suppose they know their own business best. Very well, Ms.-uh… You’re welcome to look at the proposal he gave me, but he hadn’t turned in the completed story. Nothing in the proposal would have taken him to the western suburbs. And I don’t know of anything else he was working on that would have done so. He did freelance work, but he always cleared such projects with me, to make sure they didn’t conflict with anything we were doing here. Delaney, take her out to talk to Aretha. And give her a copy of the proposal.”

He returned to the printout in front of him before we’d left the room. When I asked Delaney who Aretha was, she said tersely, “Research assistant and fact checker who worked with Mr. Whitby”

The coldness I was meeting was riling me, and I braced myself for a confrontation with the fact checker. To my relief, Aretha Cummings turned out to be the opposite of Delaney in everything, from her height-about five feet tall in her pumps-through her plump, curvy body, and her warm energy.

“We’re all devastated here,” she said when Delaney had minced off in her three-inch heels. “Even Delaney, although she won’t admit it. She has such a crush on Mr. Hendricks, so she thinks she has to act like him to get him to like her. I could give her a few tips, but she isn’t the kind to invite them, and anyway she intimidates me. But I’m glad Marc’s sister had the sense to bring someone in to investigate his death. He was a wonderful, wonderful man, a really inspired reporter. He’d had offers from Esquire and Vanity Fair, but he wanted to stay here. I think sometimes Mr. Hendricks sat on him because he was frightened that Marc would show him up. Not that Marc wanted an administrative job, he loved writing and tracking down sources.”

All the time she was talking, she’d been motoring down the hall on her worn pumps, moving as fast as me, even though she took two steps for each one of mine. We passed cubicles and offices, all of them filled with paper.

I spied production schedules pinned to different doors, shelves stacked with old issues of Llewellyn publications, reference books, a supply room where a woman and a man were arguing in fierce undertones.

We finally landed in a conference room, barren of everything but a scarred deal table and a couple of folding chairs. “This is where the writers get to meet,” Aretha explained. “Nothing fancy for them or for us RAs. The editors have mahogany and a refrigerator and everything, but I can get you a soft drink or coffee from the vending machine.”

My throat was dry; lemon soda sounded better than vending machine coffee. While Aretha was out of the room, I read through the proposal Delaney had handed me. The single page assumed the reader knew what the Federal Negro Theater Project was; Whitby was proposing to look at several Chicago contributors-“… not the well-known Theodore Ward or Shirley Graham, but some who should be as well known, especially Kylie Ballantine. Their stories will be woven into the ongoing history of Bronzeville.”

I read it through twice. When Aretha came back, I was studying an erasable board on the wall. It was covered with arrows and bullet points about Halle Berry and Denzel Washington and the upcoming Oscars.

She grinned. “Of course we’re sending a couple of writers to the Oscars. I wish one of them was me, I adore Halle Berry. I suppose winning an Oscar is in line with the Talented Tenth, even if it’s not the same as the Nobel Prize. We scooped everyone with our stories on Toni Morrison and Derek Walcott.”

Oh. T-Square. W. E. B. DuBois’s Talented Tenth of the Negro Race turned into a celebrity magazine.

“Were you helping Marcus Whitby with his story on the Federal Negro Theater Project? I don’t really know much about it.”

“It was part of the WPA, see, in the thirties, the federal theater project that FDR set up for out-of-work performers. They were trying to provide work for artists and playwrights, and they had this idea of people’s theater. Can you imagine the government today doing something like that?” She grinned engagingly.

“So there was a Yiddish theater, experimental puppets, a lot of different things, including Negro theater, which existed in twenty-two cities, although they were only really productive in three, Chicago and New York,

and, for some reason I don’t understand, Seattle. So we had Richard Wright and Theodore Ward here in 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.”