Читать книгу The Book of Harlan - Bernice L. McFadden - Страница 8

Chapter 2

In 1915, when the girls were still just teenagers, Lucille went out for and won a bit part in a local musical. On opening night, she walked onto the stage of the Douglass Theatre, barely whispered her one line—“I see a rainbow”—and then belted out a song that brought the house down.

Leonard Harper, the founder of the Leonard Harper Minstrel Stock Company, happened to be there that night. By the time Lucille joined the other actors onstage for a final bow, Harper had already located her parents. When the curtain fell, the ink on the contract he had them sign was still damp.

Weeks later, Harper whisked Lucille off on a seven-month tour of the American South. When she returned home to Macon, the old year was dead, and Lucille was a brand-new woman.

When Emma heard that Lucille was back in town, she immediately rushed over to see her, sweeping into the parlor like a gale. But Emma lost all her bluster when her eyes collided with Lucille’s rouged cheeks, shiny marcelled hair, and painted lips.

“Lu-Lucille?”

“Hey, Em.” Lucille strolled toward her with newly unshackled hips swaying like the screen door of a whorehouse.

“Lucille?” Emma muttered again as she took a cautious backward step.

Lucille wrapped her arms around Emma’s shoulders, smothering her in cinnamon-and-rose-scented perfume. “I missed you so much.”

“Me . . . me too,” Emma stammered in response, as she broke the embrace. “You look different.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Lucille shrugged. “How you been?”

Emma couldn’t stop staring. “Okay.”

“That’s good.” Lucille sauntered over to the piano, sat down, and skipped her fingers over the black and white keys. “You still go down to the river on Saturday afternoons?”

“Nah. They closed that juke joint down.”

Lucille’s eyebrows arched. “Was that your daddy’s doing?”

Now it was Emma’s turn to shrug her shoulders.

“Oh, that’s awful,” Lucille huffed. “That place was the one good thing about this town.”

The statement stabbed at Emma’s heart. They were best friends so shouldn’t she be the one good thing about this town?

Lucille scratched her cheek. “So you just gonna stand there gawking at me?”

“Oh, please,” Emma smirked, “like you something to look at.” She plopped down onto the bench beside Lucille. With her ponytail and plain cotton frock, Emma felt dull and dreary next to the shiny new Lucille. “I swear,” she started out of nowhere, “if I have to listen to one more rag, I’m going to lose my mind.”

Lucille chuckled. “Ragtime ain’t so bad.”

“It is when that’s all there is.”

“Yeah, I guess you’re right.”

Emma’s fingers joined Lucille’s, and together they tapped out a tune.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” Emma said coolly. “Tell me all about it.”

Lucille happily shared about the hypnotic roll of the bus, the mystery of falling asleep under a moon in one town and waking to the sun in another, and the thrill of standing before an audience of strangers shouting her name, begging her to sing just one more song.

She told Emma about Bill Hegamin, the man who wouldn’t have given her the time of day had their paths converged in Macon. But luckily for her, their destinies collided in Jacksonville, Florida, when most of the old Lucille had flaked away along the highways and byways that crisscrossed the Southern states.

“Now,” she concluded with a blushing smile, “he say he wanna give me all the time of day and night.”

Emma nearly choked on the bile of jealousy rising in her throat.