I pull my chair up alongside Honoree’s bed.
“Do you have a middle name?”
My spirit is shredding, and I don’t grumble about this out-of-nowhere question. “I have a middle name that I don’t tell people.”
“You better tell me. We made a deal.”
I chuckle. She has a way of making her rudeness feel charming—and, of course, she hasn’t forgotten our challenge.
“If you insist. It’s Langston. My grandmother persuaded my parents to name me after the poet Langston Hughes.”
“Maggie did that?”
“Yes,” I say, but then I add, “Did you ever meet him in the 1920s?”
The corners of her mouth sag. “Probably. Can’t recall.” She wraps a clawlike finger around the bed’s side railing. “Why did she insist? What does she know of Langston Hughes?”
“She knew quite a bit about him.” I lean forward, oddly eager to talk about Maggie’s fifteen minutes, or more like years, of fame. “She met him in 1960 at the NAACP awards. He was accepting an award, and a mutual friend introduced them. She was a poet and had published several books of poetry. Won some awards, too. And was on the governor’s shortlist for California Poet Laureate a few decades ago, until she got sick.”
There is something in Honoree’s eyes—surprise? Sadness? Grief.
“Is she dead?”
“No. No. She’s not dead. I didn’t mean for it to sound like—”
“Fine. Fine.”
The sharp change in her manner shocks me into momentary silence.
“What do you want me to see today?” she asks.
“Well,” I say, regathering my senses as I set up the camcorder, tripod, and spin the tray-top table in front of her. “First, however, I want to share a photo. There are three women in the picture: Lil Hardin Armstrong, Louis’s second wife; Alberta Hunter, the blues singer and composer; and Honoree.”
“I recognize Lil. She played the piano. But who’s the one over there?”
“Her name is Alberta Hunter. A popular blues singer and songwriter in the 1920s and the 1930s. She also made a comeback in the early 1980s and sang at a club in Greenwich Village called the Cookery.”
“How come you know so much about her?”
“I’ve done my research,” I say rather proudly, but then I admit to having help. “Her name, Alberta Hunter, is printed on the back of the photo, along with your name and Lil Hardin’s.” I turn over the picture and perform a little show-and-tell. “So I looked her up.”
“Why are you so sure that’s me? Other than my name printed on the back of the photo?”
“They say the eyes don’t change with age.”
“I heard that, too.” She winks, smiling. “I just wanted you to say it.” She points at the photo, except she’s staring at the back with the names. “Whose handwriting is that?”
I flip it over. “Maggie’s.”
“You sure?”
I studied every photo in the long-ago box, taking for granted Maggie had written all the names and dates. “Why? Why are you asking?”
“This one with Alberta Hunter. The handwriting lines up perfectly. Someone used a ruler to write it.”
I pick up the photo and examine it. Then I remove the other two dozen pictures from my backpack, and like a dog smelling a fox, search for the block-style handwriting. There are only two photos with it. “You have sharp eyes, Miss Honoree.”
I stare at the writing, but my brain isn’t accepting what I’m seeing. “It looks like my sister’s writing or my mother’s. They had similar signatures.” A muscle in my neck throbs as I reel from the possibility Azizi had found Maggie’s long-ago box before me.
