Homegoing(74)

What “being here” meant for Willie: Every morning, she and Robert would wake up. She would get Carson ready to take downstairs to an old woman named Bess who watched all the building’s babies for a small fee. Robert would shave, comb down his hair, button his shirt. Then the two of them would walk out into Harlem to look for work, Robert in his fancy clothes and Willie in her plain ones.

Being here meant they no longer walked together on the sidewalk. Robert always walked a little ahead of her, and they never touched. She never called his name anymore. Even if she was falling into the street or a man was robbing her or a car was coming at her, she knew not to call his name. She’d done it once, and Robert had turned, and everyone had stared.

At first, they both looked for jobs in Harlem. One store had even hired Robert, but after a week there was a misunderstanding when a white customer had leaned in close to Robert to ask him how he could resist taking any one of the Negro women who frequented the store for himself. And Robert came home that night crying to Willie that it could have been her the man was talking about, and so he’d quit.



The next day, they both went searching again. This time they only walked so far south before splitting off, and Willie lost Robert to the rest of Manhattan. He looked so white now, it only took a few seconds for her to lose him completely, just one white face among the many, all bustling up and down the sidewalks. After two weeks in Manhattan, Robert found a job.

It took Willie three more months to find work, but by December she was a housekeeper for the Morrises, a wealthy black family who lived on the southern edge of Harlem. The family had not yet resigned themselves to their own blackness, so they crept as close to the white folks as the city would allow. They could go no further, their skin too dark to get an apartment just one street down.

During the day, Willie took care of the Morrises’ son. She fed him and bathed him and laid him down for his nap. Then she cleaned the apartment from top to bottom, making sure to wipe under the candelabra because Mrs. Morris always checked. In the early evening she would begin cooking. The Morrises had been in New York since before the Great Migration, but they ate as though the South was a place in their kitchen instead of one that was miles and miles away. Mrs. Morris usually came home first. She worked as a seamstress, and her hands were often pricked and bleeding. Once she got home, Willie would leave for her auditions.

She was too dark to sing at the Jazzing. That’s what they told her the night she’d come in ready to audition. A very slender and tall man held a paper bag up to her cheek.

“Too dark,” he said.

Wille shook her head. “But I can sing, see.” She opened her mouth and took a deep breath, filling up the balloon of her belly, but then the man put two fingers to her, pushed the air out.

“Too dark,” he repeated. “Jazzing’s only for the light girls.”

“I saw a man dark as midnight walk in with a trombone.”

“I said girls, honey. If you were a man, maybe.”

If she were Robert, Willie thought. Robert could have any job he wanted, but she knew he was too scared to try. Scared he’d be found out or scared that he didn’t have enough education. The other night he’d told her that a man had asked him why he spoke “that way,” and he’d become scared to talk. He would not tell her exactly what he did for a living, but he came back home to her smelling like the sea and meat, and he made more money in a month than she had ever seen in her entire life.



Robert was cautious, but she was wild. It had always been that way. The first night he had lain with her, he’d been so nervous that his penis had rested against his left leg, a log on the river of his quivering thigh.

“Your daddy’s gon’ kill me,” he’d said. They were sixteen, their parents at a union meeting.

“I’m not thinkin’ ’bout my daddy right now, Robert,” she’d said, trying to stand the log. She’d put each of his fingers into her mouth one by one and had bitten the tips, watching him all the while. She’d eased him into her and moved on top of him until he was begging her: to stop, to not stop, to quicken, to slow. When he closed his eyes, she’d bidden him to open them, to look at her. She liked to be the star of the show.

It was what she wanted now too, now that she was still thinking about Robert. How she could put his skin to good use, be less cautious if she were him. If she could, she would put her voice in his body, in his skin. She would stand on the stage of the Jazzing and listen to the glowing words of the crowd rush back to her, like the memories of her singing on her parents’ table often would. Boy, can she blow. You ain’t never lied.

“Listen, we got a job cleaning the place at night if you want it,” the slender, tall man said, rousing Willie from her thoughts before they could turn dark. “The pay’s okay. Might get you somewhere a little later.”

She took the job on the spot, and when she got home that night she’d told Robert that the Morrises needed her on night duty. She couldn’t tell if he believed her, but he’d nodded. That night, they’d slept with Carson between them. He was starting to say a few words. The other day, when Willie had picked him up from Bess’s apartment to take him up to Joe’s, she’d heard her son call the old woman Mama, and a terrible, immovable lump formed in her throat as she clutched him to her body and took him up the stairs.