“What do you mean, Miss Honoree?”
“I’ve been thinking about asking you about her for two days.”
“Why?”
“You’re not as mad at her for dying as you used to be.”
I circle to her bedside, wondering how Honoree stepped inside my mind. “How can you tell?”
“Your eyes—they aren’t as sad as when we first met.”
“That was a month ago.”
“I lost someone I loved very much, too. Since you told me about Azizi, I’ll tell you a story.”
“Okay, Miss Honoree.”
“It happened on a Sunday morning in April; the weather was warm and sticky, different from most spring days in Chicago. Papa and I were on our way to the five-and-dime. We’d bought several cans of pork and beans and corn and a bag of flour from the corner grocery. Mama also needed a package of needles and a new spool of black thread. So you could say we were on our way to the five-and-dime because of Mama.”
Honoree pauses to cough and struggles to sit up higher but waves away my helping hands. “We passed a newsstand. I pulled my hand free from Papa’s to look at fashion magazines. I loved fashion. Papa went to grab my hand back, but he never stopped moving his feet, and he stepped off the curb, and the automobile hit him—ripping him from my fingertips forever.” Tears well in her eyes. “Later, Mama said he’d died because of me. Mama cried all the time after Papa died, her heart broken because he was gone, but I believed her for years. Thought it was my fault Papa died.” Honoree looks at me. “But my mama was wrong. An accident took him. Nothing more. Just God’s will.”
“Right. God’s will.” I press my shoulders against the bridge of the chair. “Doesn’t that bother you? What God does from what he doesn’t do? It’s so arbitrary.”
“What do you mean? What’s that word?”
“Arbitrary?” I shrug. “Random. No rhyme or reason. Your father’s death wasn’t your fault. But we can’t control life or death if we’re decent humans. We live our lives and try as hard as we can to do the right thing.” I reach for my backpack, but her grim expression touches me.
A dark longing fills her eyes. “I’ve done some things I regret—lied about a lot of hurtful things, too. I had a reason, most of the time.” She yawns, a body-shaking yawn. “Would you lie for a good reason?”
“A good reason to some might be the equivalent of unplugging a dam to someone else.” I wait to hear what Honoree will say, but I see—and hear—her snoring. She’s dozed off and doesn’t appear to be faking.
As I watch her sleep, in the corner of my mind, I am waiting for Azizi to appear on the bed. But I haven’t seen Azizi’s ghost in what feels like quite some time.
Only a few days have passed, I know, but perhaps, those were the last days.
* * *
The URL drops into my in-box around nine o’clock Chicago time. Before I open the email, I say a little prayer. Then, WTH, I open it.
Hot damn. Hot damn! Confirmed. Authenticated. It is Micheaux’s work—an original. Twenty minutes of film history. The thrill is like reaching a mountaintop, swimming a channel, or breaking the record for the hundred-yard dash.
I open the new file of the footage, not the blurry film clip I showed Honoree that she could barely see. This one will be clear, sharp, visible. I am excited, thrilled to see my great-grandmother, Honoree Dalcour, when she was a girl of nineteen. The girl Maggie hated and would continue to hate until the end of time.
That’s a long time. I don’t see myself capable of disliking someone forever, not even my father. Eventually, I’ll forget we don’t get along. Family isn’t perfect and not always lovable. If you doubt me, let’s check with my mysteriously secretive grandmother, Maggie White.
I stop my musings and hit play. Hallelujah. The images are infinitely better than the pieces of footage I originally salvaged.
I fast-forward to the scene at the Plantation Cafe.
I find it, and I rewind and watch again. That’s when the hammer falls from the sky. Thor’s hammer, too, at least when it comes to family history, and the tall tales people tell.
The young woman in Maggie’s photographs with the name Honoree wears a sleeveless costume; her arm has no scars. No sign of an encounter with a kerosene lamp in her youth. But there is another girl, shorter, rounder, with a darker complexion—her arm is puckered with scars.
I don’t know her—the woman dancing in the film with Honoree Dalcour.
Someone is not the woman I believed her to be.
* * *
