“I’m Lula Kent.” She extends a hand, and we awkwardly shake, touching fingertips only. “I’m a nurse’s assistant here.”
“Ms. Kent, or may I call you Lula?”
The go-to-hell expression answers my question.
“Okay, then, Ms. Kent. I only need a few minutes of her time.”
Her side-eye is a steel blade cutting across my face into my chest. Now, what did I do?
“Who gave you permission to visit Miss Honoree? I missed that part when I was eavesdropping at the reception desk.”
I like her for admitting to the flaw of nosiness, but I need a second to think. Truth is, my grandmother isn’t aware of my trip to Chicago, let alone my visit to the Bronzeville Senior Living Facility. Or that I borrowed a few items from her long-ago box, my nickname for the storage bin she keeps in her attic.
From the look in Lula’s eyes, I can’t dodge the question. I have to say something. I nod toward the woman in the bed. “My grandmother has been paying her expenses since 1985. I think the receptionist felt obligated to let me in.”
Lula cranes her neck. “Mrs. Margaret Hendrickson is your grandmother?”
“Yes, and Honoree’s guardian angel, you might say.”
Lula visibly grits her teeth. “Her name is Ms. Dalcour or Miss Honoree. It is disrespectful to call your elders by only their first names, especially when you’ve never been introduced.” She returns to her cart and wraps her fingers around the handlebar, thinking about my throat, I imagine.
“Don’t stay too long,” she orders. “Miss Honoree needs her rest.”
CHAPTER 2
HONOREE
Friday, October 23, 1925
Chicago
Honoree Dalcour sashayed into the basement of Miss Hattie’s Garden Cafe a little after seven o’clock in the evening. A squirrel-collared coat hung over her arm, and a box purse dangled from her wrist. Weaving through crates of bootleg whiskey and burlap bags of sweet potatoes, she swung her hips with an extra oomph. It made the rhinestones on her drop-waist dress crackle—just like she wanted them to and with good reason.
The proprietor of the Dreamland Cafe, the ritziest black-and-tan nightclub on the Stroll, was holding a midnight audition at his establishment on State Street. Only girls Mr. Buttons had seen dance with his own eyes—and wanted to hire bad enough to risk a beef with another club owner—received an invitation. Rumor on the Stroll was an invite guaranteed a spot in the Dreamland chorus.
Honoree was no dumb Dora—and didn’t believe every note of chin music she heard—but this once, she ab-so-lute-ly, positively believed. And why not? An invitation had been pushed under her front door that very afternoon.
Hot diggity dog!
After three years of dance lessons, tap classes, practicing all day, peeling potatoes all night, and selling policy player dream books (a pamphlet of lucky numbers for gamblers) while keeping her boss, Archie Graves, and his fat fingers from creeping too far up her shift, and, well—just like that—she was on her way to the Dreamland Cafe.
All she had to do was stay clear of Archie, which shouldn’t be too tough. It was Friday, and he spent every Friday through Saturday morning in his office with an alderman, a madam, and, of late, an automobile dealer from Kenosha, playing poker, guzzling hooch, and smoking marijuana.
With Archie preoccupied, Honoree could skip the midnight show without too much trouble—and she’d had her share of trouble with Archie Graves. A small bone in her jaw still ached from the last time she was on the wrong side of his troublesome left hand.
Soon, she wouldn’t have to worry about the goons at Miss Hattie’s. A better class of coloreds patronized the Dreamland Cafe. Educated. Proud Black people. Fearless people. People who spat in the face of Jim Crow, not just getting by butlivingtheir lives.
The late Booker T. Washington had written the bookA New Negro for a New Century, and Honoree kept a copy in her shopping bag. It was a gift from her childhood sweetheart, Ezekiel Bailey, given to her three years ago, before he disappeared.
She was sixteen at the time, and, of course, Ezekiel broke her heart. She didn’t cry the blues like most of the flappers in the neighborhood because her man ran off. She was better than that. Better than any of the chorus girls at Miss Hattie’s who wept over a man, good or bad, for months.
Honoree was a sharecropper’s daughter, accustomed to hard work and hard times. She had no desire to have a man for the sake of having one, and not for better or for worse, and she made no apologies for her independent mind. Just like she had no qualms about dancing at a ghetto speakeasy every night of the week, except Sundays because she had plans.
She glided over the sawdust floor, moving effortlessly down the hall toward the dressing room. Light as a feather, she twirled by the freshly stoked coal furnace, sweat dripping down her back, but the heat couldn’t stop her feet from dancing: step, shuffle, ball change, step, shuffle, ball change.
With a swing of her hip, the dressing room door opened, and the woodsy, damp smell of sawdust and talc powder filled her nostrils.
A dim bulb in the hallway bathed the sawdust floor in pools of light, and a tune came to Honoree’s mind fromShuffle Along, the all-Negro Broadway musical she planned to headline in one day, when it returned to New York City.
