Calling the Shots (7 page)

But one sweltering afternoon, Clem was too tired to walk, and no-one had the energy to carry him. So Grace and the children waited in the lengthening shadows of some lime trees, in the hope they’d get a lift to the next town. But no vehicles passed.

The first stars were coming out as a horse-drawn farm wagon pulled up. A young black guy looked down at them. He seemed oddly alarmed to see the family standing there in the dark. He glanced around. “I’m bettin’ you ain’t from around these parts,” he said in a low voice. “Else you’d know it’s dangerous to be out here after sundown.”

I could feel pure physical fear pulsing off him.

Omigosh
, I gulped.
They must have some southern serial killer round here or something
.

Then I got it. This man wasn’t scared of some mad axe murderer. He was scared of Grace! He was terrified that someone would see him talking to a white lady and jump to the wrong conclusion. On the other hand, he felt totally unable to leave her and her kids stranded out in the sticks at the mercy of any passing local weirdo.

“I’d better take you folks into Bournville,” he decided at last. “You better hide yourselves in the back though,” he added in a humorous voice. “Won’t do your reputation no good to be seen with a negro.”

I saw him wonder if he’d gone too far. But Grace gave him one of her warm smiles. “I think our reputation can stand it,” she told him drily. “But the back of the wagon will suit us just fine.”

For over an hour we bumped over potholes in the dark, which gave me plenty of time to digest what had just happened. To be quite honest, I was finding racial attitudes in the American south of the Twenties deeply bewildering. I mean, slavery had been made illegal here like,
decades
ago, yet this kind-hearted guy clearly expected nothing but trouble from mixing with whites.

He stopped his horses on the edge of town and came round to the back of the wagon, holding up a storm lantern. “Where you folks headed?”

“California,” said Clem, blinking in the sudden light.

“I meant where you stopping tonight?” he asked Grace.

“I have absolutely no idea!” She saw the man’s concerned expression and laughed. “We’ll be fine. We always are. Erm, thank you for the lift, Mr…?”

The guy looked startled. I don’t think he was used to white people calling him ‘Mister’. “Glass,” he said. “The name’s Nathan Glass.”

“Are we at California yet?” Clem whimpered.

Nathan sighed and I could see him wondering what he’d got himself into. “Guess I’d better take you to Peaches’ place,” he said reluctantly. “That’s if you don’t mind walking some?”

I could see Clem drooping at the thought. Nathan handed the lantern to Rose. “But you can ride, little man!” He swung Clem up on to his shoulders then took back his lantern.

We followed him across a field and into the woods. If it hadn’t been for Nathan’s lantern it would have been pitch dark. We must have walked for half an hour, hurrying in and out of the trees. It was marshy in places and the local frogs kept up this monotonous backing track, interrupted by the occasional eerie cry of a night bird.

So far as I could tell there wasn’t a house for miles.

Don’t tell me Peaches lives in a tree
, I thought. I suddenly stopped in my tracks. We were in the middle of nowhere, but I was picking up an incredibly buzzy vibe, the kind you get when loads of humans are grooving to the max.

Uh-oh
, I thought.
This is no time to star hallucinating, Melanie
.

Nathan gave a throaty chuckle. “What can you hear?”

“Crickets?” said Rose in an exhausted voice.

“No, it’s music!” said Clem, jigging about on Nathan’s shoulders.

“The blues,” Grace corrected him softly. “Someone’s playing blues.”

“Peaches runs a speakeasy out here,” Nathan explained. “It’s just a shack and a few barrels of moonshine. But we reckon the music is as good as anything they get at Harlem’s Cotton Club.”

“Will there be food?” asked Clem hopefully.

A few minutes later we emerged in a clearing and I saw a rickety wooden shack. Hazy light leaked out from between the planks.

I couldn’t just hear the blues by this time - I could feel it, tingling up through the soles of my feet and into my belly. The shack was literally vibrating from the exuberant partying inside!

There was a break in the music and I heard a woman’s teasing voice, then a roar of laughter. Nathan rapped on a little barred window. It slid open and an eye squinted out through a fog of cigarette smoke.

“Tell Peaches she’s got company!” said Nathan.

The door opened and he bundled us inside. There was a moment’s astonished silence. Then someone said sarcastically, “Sup’n wrong with your eyesight, boy? Or did you just kindly forget to mention they was white?”

Black men and women of all ages were staring at the Bloomfields with stony expressions, plainly not too thrilled to have a white lady and her kids in their backwoods hangout. I saw Nathan talking and gesturing earnestly to a big curvy woman I guessed was Peaches.

She sauntered over, looking perfectly serene. “Hi, honey,” she said to Grace. “Nathan says you need a place for the night. Sit yourselves right down and I’ll send someone to get you some food.”

The customers blinked at this. You could see them thinking, well, if Peaches thinks it’s OK… And gradually everyone forgot about the white strangers and got on with having a good time.

Someone appeared with food, and Grace and the children gratefully tucked into pork and greens and cornbread.

Peaches was telling her customers about two prohibition agents, Izzy and Mo, who travelled around America trying to catch anyone breaking the law by making or selling illicit alcohol. “There’s nothing those devils won’t do to get their man!” she chuckled. “They’ll dress up in stupid disguises. Play mean tricks. You know, this one time, one of them actually stood out in the snow until he was blue with cold? His partner dragged him into a bar and begged them to give him some brandy to revive him. The poor fool brought it, and you know what Izzy says then? ‘Dere’s sa-ad news!’”

“Why’d he say that?” asked someone in a puzzled voice.

“Mo and Izzy always say that, when they bust someone,” she explained, laughing. “I told you, those guys are devils!”

Clem gave a drowsy giggle. “Dere’s sa-ad news,” he repeated. Minutes later he was asleep on Grace’s lap.

Someone started to play a guitar in a style and rhythm I have never ever heard before and an old man began to sing in a cracked growly voice. I can’t explain why it was so beautiful. It was raw and filled with human pain. But it wasn’t like the singer was just bellyaching about his own personal troubles. It was like he was singing for every human on Earth who’d ever suffered.

I found myself picturing all the faces I’d seen since I’d been in America: Cissie baking cookies with Clem, Grace watching her children’s sleeping faces the night their father died, the yearning eyes of the woman in the hobo town by the railway tracks, and old Isaac rocking in his chair.

I saw Honesty watching intently. There was a new softness in her face and I knew that for just a moment, the pain and suffering in the old blues singer’s voice had reached her too.

It was past midnight when the last customer left. Peaches gave the family some clean flour sacks for blankets, then she and Nathan went home.

Grace and her girls spread their sacks on the floor and were fast asleep in minutes. And I thought, how come an illegal speakeasy in the middle of the woods feels so safe and peaceful?

We made good progress over the next few days, travelling up through Alabama and Mississippi and into Arkansas. The Angel Academy began to seem like a far-off dream. I occasionally wondered what Lola and Reuben were getting up to, but I only wondered in a detached sort of way. I was starting to feel as if I’d been travelling across the United States of America for ever.

One morning a farmer dropped us off at a town called Freshwater.

Grace and her children went into the drugstore to buy breakfast. And standing at the counter, buying about a zillion cups of coffee, was Lenny!

The Bloomfield family had a highly emotional reunion. Even Honesty gave her brother a wintry little hug.

“So have you gone into the coffee business now?” Rose teased him.

But Lenny proudly insisted that he was in the movie business. “I might be fetching and carrying at present, but eventually it will lead to bigger things. Come with me and I’ll introduce you to the crew.”

We found the film people in their truck, waiting morosely for their morning caffeine fix. The director seemed to be having a major temper tantrum about their sloppy attitudes or whatever. He caught sight of us, and his expression changed so dramatically I thought he was going to have a stroke.

“Mr Mantovani, are you OK?” Lenny faltered.

The director got out of the truck. He was gazing at Rose as if he was in some kind of trance. He held up his hands, forming an imaginary camera lens, panning this way and that, peering at her startled face. “What’s your name, doll?” he barked suddenly.

Rose looked annoyed. “Rose Bloomfield.”

He shook his head. “Sounds like a firm of hick florists. Suppose we call you Rosa Bloom? Now that’s classy.”

“Maybe, but I’m happy with the name I’ve got,” said Rose.

Without a word, Mr Mantovani reached out and removed Rose’s little owl glasses.

“Hey!” she protested.

“I knew it!” he said triumphantly. “Under those hideous spectacles, you have the face of an angel. I promise you, with make-up and fancy clothes, you’ll be sensational!”

Omigosh
, I thought.
She’s been discovered!

I looked at her with new interest and I thought the director had a point. Honesty’s sister only needed a string of beads to twirl and she could have been one of those enigmatic ‘It’ girls I’d seen in Honesty’s mum’s magazines. In the Twenties, ‘It’ meant sex appeal. Girls like Clara Bow and Louise Brooks had ‘It’. And according to Cissie, Rudolf Valentino had ‘It’. (But having seen a picture, I personally prefer my male heartthrobs
without
eyeliner.)

You could tell that Rose felt totally naked without her spectacles. She grabbed them back. “What’s he talking about?” she asked.

Lenny looked envious. “I think he wants to put you in his movie.”

Rose gave a nervous laugh, realised Lenny was serious and turned as pink as a tulip.

Mr Mantovani acted offended. “Girls would kill for this opportunity, doll. I’m asking you to be my new leading lady.”

“Oh thanks a bunch,” said a girl in film make-up. “What am I now? Chopped liver?”

“You’re a very nice girl, Ingrid,” Mr Mantovani said patronisingly. “But Rosa here is the mysterious beauty I’ve been searching for my whole life.”

It went on like that for ages, with Rose insisting she wasn’t interested, and Mr Mantovani totally refusing to take no for an answer.

Suddenly Rose said, “How much do you pay?”

“Ha!” snorted the former leading lady.

Mr Mantovani looked shifty. “Doll, what is money, compared with the birth of a new art form?”

“Then forget it,” said Rose firmly. “I need to get my family to San Francisco.”

The director frowned. “I can’t give you the money, doll,” he admitted. “But I could definitely get you to California.”

She briskly extended her hand. “It’s a deal.”

I was SO proud of her. Acting and film-making were completely not Rose’s thing, yet she had decided to go with the flow just to help her family.

Mr Mantovani’s style people gave Honesty’s sister a radical makeover. They took away her tiny owl spectacles and cut her long hair into a swingy, mischievous-looking bob. They plucked her bushy eyebrows until she was left with just two startled little crescents. The make-up artist painted Rose’s sharp clever little face with Twenties-style film makeup, which instantly made her look v. mysterious and geisha-like. Finally the dresser buttoned her into a low-waisted Charleston dress with exquisite beading on the hem.

When they finally let Rose see herself in the mirror, she gasped and I felt genuinely moved.

I have seen about a zillion TV makeover shows in my time but I’ve never ever seen such a miraculous transformation. Rose Bloomfield had totally vanished and in her place was Rosa Bloom, a smoulderingly sexy movie star!

Boy, Melanie
, I told myself,
the Agency certainly moves in mysterious ways!
In my scenario it was Honesty who got talent-spotted. Never in a million years did I think it would be geeky little Rose!

Clem got a part too. He played the cute curly kid with the puppy. Honesty could have been in the film if she played her cards right, but she was in full zombie mode, which didn’t exactly make the film people warm to her, and eventually they left her well alone.

Can you believe it only took a week to make Mr Mantovani’s film! Actually, compared with film making in my time, the process seemed really amateurish. Movies were silent then, so the actors just did loads of cheesy miming and face-pulling. To be honest, Rose didn’t have that much to do in Dangerous Pearls (that was the name of Mr Mantovani’s movie), except look scared and pretty while the hero rescued her and her precious pearls from a string of evil villains. I know, I know, it wasn’t much of a plot, but like Mr Mantovani said, the film industry was still in its infancy.

I have to admit to a bad moment when they tied Rose to the train tracks. OK, it wasn’t quite as dangerous as it sounds. Lenny was crouching just out of shot with a pen knife ready to cut her free, in case an express train suddenly came roaring out of the tunnel. But to be on the safe side, I crouched beside the rails too and surrounded Rose with protective angel vibes.

A funny sound made me look up and I saw Honesty trembling uncontrollably. I realised that she was totally convinced her sister was going to be horribly mashed by a train. She started moaning, “Cut her free. Quick, quick! Cut her free!”

Deep down I’d known that sneery zombie girl wasn’t really my Honesty. That’s why I’d sat up with her night after night beaming vibes, trying to reach her. But now for the first time I glimpsed the terrible vulnerability she’d been so desperately trying to hide, and it shocked me right to the core.