Memphis: A Novel(26)
“You hush. Me and this girl got some scheming to do. Fetch me those drawings, chile. I’d like to see,” Miss Dawn said.
Joan was gone in a flash, her footsteps echoing down the house’s long, tangled corridors.
Miss Jade, another loyal client, chuckled at the exchange as she sat waiting in a 1950s-vintage fainting chair for a silk press. Jade had been with August since her shop opened. She had been a friend of her mother’s, had helped raise Miriam. She’d run the numbers game in the neighborhood since there had been a neighborhood, it seemed. Always wore a blond mink coat worth a small fortune. Carried a small pistol in her Coach purse. Pearl-handled. Miss Jade looked like anyone’s worried aunt or pushy grandmother. Always wanted her press ’n’ curl. Or a set. Never deviating. But August had refused outright to put a relaxer in Miss Jade’s hair. August was wise. The woman’s hair had grown an entire foot since August had started working her magic.
August had tried to get Miriam to place a number with Miss Jade a week back, when they had sat drunk at the kitchen table.
“Are you insane?” Miriam was wide-eyed. “We’re broke.”
August had laughed, smacked her hand down on the table. The giggles had overtaken her. It was hard for her to breathe. But she choked out, “Meer, you Catholic, but you still a nigga!”
“It’s time for bed, sister.”
“Um, excuse me, Miss August,” a soprano voice said, stepping in from the back porch, “but I been waiting out here thirty minutes. You know I got a date tonight.”
Mika was August’s least-favorite customer, but money was money. And August wasn’t so high and mighty that she wouldn’t take Mika’s. Shit, she needed it now more than ever. A young thing, not more than thirty, Mika would strut into the shop, head bandaged in a silk Gucci scarf, heels on the tiled floor making the same sound as her long acrylic nails on the linoleum counters. And the sound of her voice. God! August didn’t know a Black woman could sound so like a white one.
Yes, Lord knows, August needed the money from Mika’s booked weave appointment, but it took all her strength not to walk out the screen door onto the patio and shake Mika like the crybaby she was. Instead, she asked loudly, “Why? Ain’t it with a white man?”
The shop roared. Broke out into applause and laughter that lasted a long time. Reminded August of Showtime at the Apollo.
“Tell it, August,” a middle-aged woman shouted from underneath a dryer, waving a pink handkerchief in the air to emphasize her point.
“Lord have mercy,” Miss Jade said.
“I was with a white man once,” Miss Dawn said, stunning everyone in the shop. “Oh yes, chile, let me tell you. I killed him many years ago.”
If the shop had erupted before, this was the next great aftershock. Every woman in that shop was clutching herself in laughter. Even Mika cracked a stubborn smile.
Jade said from the settee, “Y’all ain’t right up in here.”
Just then, Joan came rushing back, her arm slung around her sketchbook. August swore she hardly saw the girl long without it.
“No, no, I’m coming, Mika. Give me a moment, hun,” August shouted over the uproar.
But the shop wasn’t done with Mika yet.
“When he unveils that tiny sauerkraut, don’t you just want to bite it off?” a tall, bright woman in line to be shampooed asked loud, hair this way and that.
The framed record covers on the walls shook with the laughter. Laughter that was, in and of itself, Black. Laughter that could break glass. Laughter that could uplift a family. A cacophony of Black female joy in a language private to them.
Joan settled into a seat next to Miss Dawn, her sketch pad open.
August patted Miss Dawn’s shoulder. “I’ll let you two ladies get to it. Duty calls,” she whispered, then rolled her eyes in Mika’s direction.
Right as August turned to Mika, for the smallest of seconds, out the corner of her eye, she saw herself: Her own face was drawn in intricate penciled detail in Joan’s sketchbook.
She was taken aback—by the image of herself, so lifelike, and by the fact that a ten-year-old had drawn it. She has the gift, August considered. Like how she herself had the gift of song. Isn’t that something? How the gifts can travel.
August loved it all. The chaos. Mya jumping onto furniture like all of it was some horse to mount. Even the poverty, the uncertainty. What had happened and what may yet happen between Derek and Joan, she would worry about another day.
Only a few remnants of the laughter remained, now dwindling giggles and suppressed glee, like a symphony in diminuendo. Eventually, a soft quiet descended over the crowded shop. Women went back to reading their Essences, their Jets, their novels. Miss Jade checked the time on her watch. Even the girls settled down, bored, finally, with the jukebox. August saw Joan had finally put down her sketchbook in order to help her sister down from the jukebox.
August began to hum, slow and deep, matching the pitch of laughter that still echoed in her ears. Her voice grew louder, syllables forming words. A song as familiar to the women in the little shop as daughters are to mothers, sisters to sisters. Mya, without having to be told, paused the music coming from the jukebox. Miss Jade joined in. So did Mya. Miss Dawn. Joan. All of the women in the shop. August felt she knew the words better than she knew herself, most times. And when she hit that high note—that high C—even Mika nodded her roller-adorned head and sang along.