Marsha Hunt - Like Venus Fading

My only memory of our evening arrival is that my sister and I were about to squat behind a bush with its dark leaves and pink flowers, and just as I untied the string on my bloomers to pull them down, a man’s voice suddenly boomed from nowhere, ‘What are you darkies doing over there?’ Mother and Lilian both deny this ever happened, but I will never forget that deep voice with its southern twist calling us darkies, which was half-way polite back then.

Darkies. The three of us had been scorched blue-black by the Mississippi sun, with grains of the Delta grime still caked between our toes. Of course, there would come a time when I would believe I was above toe jam, but those delusions were twenty years down the road. In fact, in 1930 I can’t claim that any of us bathed every week. We probably smelled, but then so did a lot of other people back then.

Only God can really explain why Mother had brought her two little coloured girls to the city that Miss Hortense had called ‘the palace of endless dreams’.

A heatwave was warming up for Sunday but that Saturday night a desert chill had settled in and Mother’s teeth were chattering by the time we found a rooming house which had a small women’s dormitory that was empty but for us.

My mother loved to remind me that she had arrived with two mouths to feed in addition to her own, but no contacts, no job, and only fifteen dollars saved from giving recitations. But for all her complaints about this period in our lives, we were never so hungry that we grew weak. In fact, as soon as I started caring about my figure, I was glad that an empty stomach felt normal to me.

Mamie said that church was the only safe place to begin in a new city, so it was as well that we arrived on a Saturday night with Sunday morning just an arm’s length away.

The next morning while Lil and Mother snored, I ran to the only window to see what surprises the dawn had brought. Like a kid heading for a stocking at Christmas, I expected bliss. I expected to see oranges growing on trees and the big cactus plants that Hortense had described. I expected a great open range, but our dormitory overlooked the back wall of the next bungalow where an overturned trash can was surrounded by garbage. We had slept in a rabbit warren with walls that had never been painted and warped floorboards rife with splinters. A Salvation Army hostel would offer far better these days. But I was young and everything was new and exciting.

Mother was either brave or crazy to face that Sunday in a strange metropolis with two children and no prospects. Maybe that’s why Mamie had said, ‘Ruthie, go straight to church, ’cause Los Angle-less is teeming with okies and thieves, syphilitics and who knows what. And see how they did poor Mabel Normand.’ She was Mamie’s favourite biograph star who clowned with the Keystone Cops and had reputedly died from morphine addiction earlier that year. Mamie had said, ‘Find you some honest church folk and you can’t go too far wrong.’ And mother never challenged Mamie’s word.

Lilian and I sat in that women’s dormitory on those old slats nailed together to make a bed, watching Mother dress carefully for church. As she took her time adjusting her slip and stepping into her brown chemise, I couldn’t resist asking, ‘Can’t I come too?’ Those churches were my stage and I needed to perform, to drink in those stares and be bathed in compliments.

‘Who’ll stay with Lil if you don’t?’

On the journey from Mississippi, my sister had suffered boils under both arms accompanied by a low-grade fever. It annoyed me when she got sick, because I was expected to treat her extra nice, and if playing nursemaid to her meant missing the first church meeting in what was a strange, new place, I didn’t want to. In fact I was temporarily wary of her because she said that the Pope hated Methodists.

While Mother arranged her hat, I was brimming with questions and was still young enough to believe that my mother had every answer. But she was feeling her way in the dark and lacked the cunning of a truly devious woman. However, with us to feed she ploughed on and combined her naïveté with plain old fashioned ignorance to potent means; to know nothing can be more powerful than knowing something. If I had to classify her as a cat, a Persian or Siamese wouldn’t do. No, Ruthie Mae Matthews was a barn cat with kittens.

When Mother returned from church hours later with a long face, Lilian was sleeping.

I knew better than to ask what Mother had seen and done now, because, on the journey to Los Angeles Lilian had burdened her with, ‘What’s going to happen?’ ‘What are we gonna do?’ and I was the one who got it for asking the when-where-and-how of Mother’s plans. She had finally hissed in a dangerously low voice that nobody else could have deciphered, ‘Irene, you put your mouth in all my business! Mamie’s right! I need to take a switch to you and Lilian more often … See kids in Sippy with rags on their back and hands raw from picking cotton. I can’t be messin’ with you, this here’s the Depression!’

This was the reply I had got for asking, ‘How will you find a church when we get to California?’

I hated getting told off more than I hated cod liver oil or going to bed while it was light. Mother’s scolding made me feel small and humiliated, whereas I liked to think that I mattered, that I was important in the scheme of things.

Anyway, when Mother unpinned her hat and threw it on a bed in that dormitory, after a good deal of moping and sighing, she produced an envelope with three names on it. When she said that the minister she met didn’t think there was a Catholic church in the vicinity, I sensed that my sister was awake.

Lilian turned her face to the wall and gave no indication that she heard Mother say, ‘That minister say his niece gives tap dancing to little girls on Sat’days. Her name’s Louise Taylor … He thinks she don’t charge but a nickel a lesson.’

My sister pretended to be asleep and Mother knew as well as I did that she was having one of her moods.

That summer we moved to Los Angeles, Lilian made sure that Mother never forgot that she wanted to go back to Camden. Like a pitbull, my sister could grip the past between clenched teeth. She daydreamed about the nuns and Camden’s changing seasons; the conkers in spring and the june bugs of summer. She even harped on about the scrapple Mother used to buy. Just about everything we’d left behind was deemed irreplaceable.

Admittedly, she was ten that summer of ’30 and had more of a past to cling to than I did, but for some reason she seemed to have pasted all her hopes on a Camden life. Like a toddler clinging to a worn-out teddy. And further to provoke me, she pretended that every shadow was Miss Hortense with the police, coming to drag Mother to prison.

So Lilian didn’t want to adjust and nabbed every chance to question or whine, throwing the thorny head of Christ and the Virgin Mary into every conversation. Even when Mother mentioned tap again.

‘We can’t afford tap and school uniforms,’ Lilian said.

But me? Irene Matthews? I had delusions and had an image of myself writing Miss Hortense a letter to inform her that I was in Hollywood studying tap. I was the same little girl who only ten months earlier had slept on a pile of newspapers, and despite Mother being KO’d every round by poverty and fear, I sensed there was hope in dancing and some victory in the fact that she was even thinking about it. I’d seen the famous Bill Robinson tapping in a film short and watched some big boys on Buchanan Street try to imitate his moves, and the thought of tap excited me more than church recitals. So when my sister told Mother, ‘I don’t want to dance,’ they were both startled when I suddenly laid into Lil, pounding her with both fists.