Lula’s eyes light up. “Bessie Palmer.”
I inhale deeply, filling my lungs with gratitude. “My great-grandmother.”
EPILOGUE
Thursday, September 20, 1945
Paris, France
Honoree hadn’t thought about Archie Graves, Tony Gallo, or Bessie Palmer, or her last day in Chicago since she moved to Paris in 1926. Not even Ezekiel played through her thoughts until she received his first letter in ’29, and she blamed Trudy Lewis for telling him how to reach her. How she ran into Trudy in Paris was another story altogether.
Honoree didn’t throw his letter away, but she didn’t pay it much heed, either. She buried the letters in the nightstand drawer next to her bed, but they came so often, she purchased a burr cedar box and placed them inside. Ezekiel’s love letters were a diary of his adventures—entertaining, tragic, and hopeful. He wrote about loneliness and the memories that broke his now brittle heart.
After the shootout in Archie’s office, it took years for Ezekiel to heal, and most of those years he spent in Baton Rouge with his brother and Bessie, and Bessie’s baby girl, Margaret Rose. She was named after the sister the Bailey brothers lost to the Spanish flu in 1918.
Once he was able, he went to sea, became a merchant seaman, shoveling coal in the boiler room of a ship. Honoree liked to think of it as his penance. He called it remorse for his stubbornness that kept them apart for a decade. Each letter was another piece of his heart, the feelings he couldn’t stop.
She never replied to his letters. The time for love—youthful, blindly passionate, irresponsible love—was behind her.
She lived in the Montmartre neighborhood, and after a few years of dancing in cabarets and Paris revues, she had opened a jazz club where she was the star attraction. The cafe was small, barely held fifty people, and her jazz band comprised half a dozen journeyman musicians. The club was profitable by 1930, and she had enough to buy a sturdy old French building. Tough enough to withstand the Germans and World War I with only a few broken windows and a dozen or so cracks in the ceiling. Nothing that couldn’t be fixed with a hammer and a nail.
Her nightclub was one of a few jazz spots in Paris featuring colored musicians, despite the Third Reich’s ban of “Neger-musik” in 1935. Honoree had learned in Chicago that whiskey and pretty girls dancing on a stage had a way of attracting a crowd. She named her nightspot, aptly, Danseur Noir Cafe.
In the summer of 1938, before World War II began in Paris, Honoree was standing on the sidewalk outside her cafe when Ezekiel Bailey arrived and claimed his life was not worth living without her.
Dramatic, but the look on his face when he spoke those words made her heart tumble inside her rib cage, giving her a forgotten joy and a passion she hadn’t felt since the night they made love on the roof of the tenement building in Bronzeville.
She didn’t bring him to her bed right away. Love was one thing, forgiving and forgetting was another. He slept in a room in one of the buildings she owned, and industrious Ezekiel found a job working in a clinic shortly after that, helping doctors care for the sick and elderly. No longer a young man, he nonetheless dreamed of returning to school to study medicine.
Finally, the man she had loved since she was twelve was a man she could love at thirty-eight. They married in 1941 during the height of the war in Paris. She’d been indulgent and self-absorbed in her youth, and Ezekiel, bitter, tragic, and vengeful, but his strength, his desires, his selflessness charmed, and strangely, freed her soul. Love was better the third time around.
The city was aglow in the fall of 1945. The Allied Control Council in Germany had repealed the Nazi laws. Honoree was ending her last performance of the night at the cafe with Ezekiel standing in the wings, as he always did. Another man, however, was at his side, a stranger.
The crowd was enthusiastic, and Honoree hated to disappoint an audience. The band, all Caribbean musicians, played swing, and the number of patrons was larger than usual for a Friday. Everything in Paris lately seemed louder, gayer, and bigger since the war ended. Pounding feet, clapping hands, whooping, and hollering, the partiers and jazz enthusiasts all would joyfully continue their revelry until dawn, except for the ordinance that mandated the club to close by midnight. The war might be over, and the Germans defeated, but fear took time to subside.
On a stage, Honoree could find the best light blindfolded. She drew every ounce of magic from every moment. A swing of her leg and a swirl of her hips, and the spotlight was her heaven. She felt ageless.
As the band played the last tune, she danced her final set of the evening, and Honoree got a better look at the man standing next to Ezekiel. A young Negro soldier in a US Army uniform.
She spun across the stage, her jade-and-gold-feathered costume circling her body with a soft but audible swish. The audience shouted, “Bravo!” She bowed and bowed again. Then she raced from the stage.
“Oh, darling, what an audience! Simply divine.” She kissed Ezekiel on the mouth like they hadn’t just seen each other that morning. When she pulled away, she smiled at the young man at Ezekiel’s side.
“Who are you?” Honoree said, catching her breath. “Shouldn’t you be out at one of the cabarets on the Champs-Élysées?”
“Hello, ma’am.” Tall, but not as tall as Ezekiel, he squared his broad soldiers, showing off his uniform proudly.
“He’s come a long way to meet you, Honoree,” Ezekiel said, then turned back to the soldier. “I haven’t even asked your name.”
“Sergeant Norman White of the 761st Tank Battalion.” He extended his hand to Ezekiel and removed his hat, before bowing to Honoree. “You don’t know me, but my mama was Cleo Dalcour’s best friend, and I was asked to bring you a letter, ma’am.” He held an envelope in his hands.
“Would you like me to read it, Honoree?” Ezekiel asked, his tendency to protect her from pain a gallant, but also an obtrusive, trait.
“I’m fine. I can read a letter addressed to me, Ezekiel.”
“I couldn’t give it to you, anyway, sir. I promised to hand-deliver the note to Ms. Dalcour. I mean, Mrs. Bailey.”
Ezekiel shook his head. “Honoree didn’t take my last name. Hers is still Dalcour.”
