was sort of addicted to sleepers, like most stars I knew in the 60s. If we didn’t want to deal with life, it was natural to want to sleep for fourteen, fifteen hours at a stretch. But Charlie refused to bring sleepers into the house.
Marijuana, yes. LSD, yes. Morphine, even. But sleeping pills, no.
Louise Taylor’s Saturday-morning tap-dancing class was held in the room behind her father’s bar and grill, sadly bulldozed after the war in a rezoning scheme. Mr Taylor’s brother, Derville, also had his shoeshine stand there, so it was a busy corner. Sociable. Where people who didn’t go to church could meet. Laugh and gossip and show off their week’s pay in some loud Saturday-night togs.
Louise, who we all called Miss Taylor, had been a chorine at the Cotton Club in Harlem the year before, but I didn’t know that was something for her students to brag about. I didn’t know that the Cotton Club was the night spot where New York’s arty set, like Carl van Vechten and F. Scott Fitzgerald, went to rub shoulders with what they called the Darktown Strutters, and it would be years before I discovered that real Harlemites turned their noses up at the Cotton Club …
Miss Taylor was all of eighteen, though her flapper’s bob made her look older, especially the first time I saw her in that deep-rose sack dress. Her pockmarked skin, a pale olive colour, wasn’t the sole reason she could have passed for white; she also had straggly light brown hair and a completely flat backside.
Inching my way into the shabby back room for my first tap lesson, my head was as full of fantasies as the other eight girls. Including Lil. I’m sure we all imagined that we would emerge from day one like the sophisticate that Miss Taylor was. (I didn’t think she was gawky like my sister claimed. In fact, I saw Louise as stylish and graceful. Her flat chest and boyish hips suited the Jazz-Age clothes she wore, and her long, sure stride was sort of elegant. Although it’s true that in those days it was considered unfortunate for a girl to be so tall.)
I loved Miss Taylor for having such lean, muscular calves, because for the first time my own seemed less pitiful. They were the thinnest in her class but she’d remind us all, ‘Bless the Lord for your legs, and oil those feet!’
She couldn’t afford a pianist so she produced rhythms for us to dance to with a long baton that she beat against a wooden mallet. Class lasted forty minutes and we knew it was nearly over when she clapped her hands and wiped the moustache of perspiration from her top lip. That was the signal for us to close our eyes and listen to her dance, before we put on our street shoes for home. To have us hear the rhythm of her feet rather than watch them move was her own progressive idea … Her steps were as rhythmic as a typist reeling off sixty words a minute. Clack-clack-clickety-clack-clack. Clack-click-clackety-clack-click. The syncopation was like fireworks and got under my skin so, I couldn’t wait to imitate the sound with my own feet.
I didn’t have what they call a natural talent, but I tried to make up for it in sheer determination. It was during Miss Taylor’s fourth session that I discovered that by concentrating on my rhythm, I could manipulate her smile. To get her to glance at me was like eating Mack’s caramels at the bottom of the stairs. I didn’t want to share her attention … Had Mother known, she would have whipped me without my understanding why. She would have said that I had to share everything with Lil, but that’s not quite how the showing-off thing works. So I kept the admiration that I’d spotted in Miss Taylor’s eyes to myself.
I’ve since seen men study me with that glance, those starry eyes that soon go hand-in-glove with infatuation. Whereas Louise’s seemed to say something like, ‘When you try, I find you adorable.’
I did everything to get her undivided attention, and what started as a game became a compulsion. Some of her girls wanted to be dancers, but little Irene wanted to be noticed. So, wherever and whenever I could, I’d slip on my tap dancing shoes to practise … Clack-clack-clickety, clack-clack-clack. It’s a wonder that Mother didn’t go mad.
Los Angeles erased my vaguest need to return to Camden. Especially after Mother got us a ride to Venice Beach to celebrate my eighth birthday. I smelled the ocean before I heard it, and heard it before I saw it; the Pacific gets credit for being my first glimpse of what other people refer to as ‘Nature’. The waves. The vastness. I squealed louder than a baby gull when I saw the way that water spread out to meet the sky. It was a clear November day and I threw my arms out to spin ’round and ’round.
Like this display of stars tonight, the ocean made me feel that I was everything and nothing.
The day I turned eight, had anybody told Mother that twenty-six years on she’d be waiting backstage with me at the Oscars to hear if my name was called for best supporting actress, she would never have believed it. Because in 1930 all I seemed destined to be was another little nappy-headed child; Negroes had as much hope of taking on Hollywood as a roach. In fact, on my eighth birthday, Mother couldn’t believe that we were allowed to take our shoes off and walk the beach that Armistice Day. So we didn’t.
After Lil and I had been taking tap for several weeks, it was the Saturday before Thanksgiving, Miss Taylor brought a short but imposing-looking friend to watch our class. I noticed the woman eyeing me, so I sensed that something was up, and sure enough, after class, Louise called me aside and said, ‘Would you and your big sister like to split a sweet potato in Daddy’s place?’
Not a slice of cake or pie.
A sweet potato. And how lucky we were to get the offer.
We may have been taking tap, but food was still a treat and hard to come by.
That occasion marked the first time Lil and I went to an eating place, and as Louise led us to the booth which her father had motioned her to take, I couldn’t have been more nervous had I been asked to take communion at a high mass. I dared not look at Lilian for fear of giggling. I was giddy with self-importance. Anybody would have thought I was about to dine at the Ritz.
It was so hot that Saturday that two men, perched on stools at the counter, were in undershirts. With pots of collards and potatoes simmering on the stove it was hotter inside than out.
Lil and I each got half of a bright, orange sweet potato smeared with butter and, as we nibbled timidly, afraid to look up, Louise passed me a slip of paper with joined-up writing scribbled on it and said, ‘I’ll be going back East at Christmas and my friend who came to class today said to give y’all’s mama this.’
I couldn’t yet read joined-up writing anyway, but Lil and I didn’t consider inspecting it until Miss Taylor had waved us goodbye. I feared it was about money, because money was always the worse thing that I could think of – owing it. Needing it. The word money seemed to be on grown-up lips all the time and it had a harrowing effect on me.
When I tried to goad my sister into reading the contents to me, she said, ‘This is Mother’s and you know it’s a sin to read her mail.’
I wonder what would have happened had I listened to her?
It’s possible that had we not known what those few words had said the course of our lives might have been different.
The sun was glorious that afternoon and we had a lot to be thankful for by all accounts. It was a Saturday. No school, a tap class, that warm feeling of tummies satisfied with a sugary sweet potato. And we’d just been sitting like grown-ups in Taylor’s Café and Grill. With our tap shoes under our arms, it should have been enough for us two to hold hands and dawdle to the room that was temporarily home.
But that note had tickled my curiosity.
‘If I could read joined-up writing, I’d read it to you. Suppose it’s about money?’
My sister put her tap shoes on the ground and opened the note reluctantly. It went against her nature to do anything sinful. We could have been in the middle of an orange