Page 27 of Mazywood

And she had helped hollow him out. She had painted a sunny picture of what their future could look like with a new baby so she would believe it herself. She’d smothered her own shock and terror at the idea of carrying a child again because of course she wanted to have another child—didn’t she? They might have a boy this time. Before she and Johnny got married, despite their fifteen-year age difference, at the outer edge of their comfort zones, Johnny had promised that he wanted to be a father and stay healthy for their children.

And he had kept that promise. Since the night he met her at the Pan African Film Festival, he’d chosen monogamy rather than his past lifestyle with the shallow women he’d partied with through his thirties. He hadn’t touched coke since before they got married, although he’d confided to her that Money threatened to put him in rehab in the nineties because he was coming to the set high. So, no coke anymore. He rarely drank either. He’d cut out pork and fried foods, except for the occasional undeniable plate of french fries. He’d transformed their garage into a gym with a heavy bag and sets of kettlebells he used religiously several times a week. When his blood pressure shot up, he had allowed her to introduce him to yoga and meditation to help bring it down. And he was so good with Sharise and Imani, taking on the uncomfortable role of disciplinarian when it hadn’t been a natural fit for either of them.

And he had never lied to her—or at least she’d never caught him in one. Until tonight.

It’s time, he had said, although his eyes said something very different. His eyes made her realize that between the test results and obstetrician appointments to weigh the risks of a perimenopausal pregnancy for a woman with fibroids, she had robbed him of the question: Do you want to have this baby? The obstetrician, seeing a happily married couple in his office, never mentioned any options except safely taking her pregnancy to term, even as he laid out the risks that she might need bed rest if she bled heavily during the latter months, as she did with Imani.

But she had seen No in his eyes tonight. And although he should have had the courage to say it, she shouldn’t be pretending. They couldn’t pretend it wasn’t a choice, even if Dr. Cortada had been too polite to remind them. Now she had seen his answer, and she wouldn’t be able to unsee it. He was coming apart. His movie was coming apart. Maybe their lives were about to come apart. In twenty years, when this new baby might be in college, Johnny would be eighty years old. How was that fair to a child, to have a father who might not see so much of their future unfold?

Tasha’s phone dinged with a text. She sat in Johnny’s plush leather chair with his ergonomic pad, so tall that her toes barely skated across the floor. She pulled out her cell phone and saw she’d missed several texts from the girls, who were sending her photos of price tags on jackets they liked. Tasha gave a thumbs-up to the jackets under two hundred dollars and typed N-O at a jacket with a faux fur collar and a much higher price. They needed to save money.

The next text from Sharise was a photo: Look what I found today! She looks like you!

Tasha had seen the image online at least once before, but this version was much clearer: a black-and-white photo of Mazelle Washington, about six or seven years old, in the cockpit of a 1920s-era airplane (a movie prop, she guessed), posing happily with her face pressed against an equally happy white dog. Tasha’s arms tingled with gooseflesh. She could be looking at herself as a little girl, with that delicate jawbone. Those bright eyes. She resembled Mazelle as a young woman too. Johnny never mentioned it, of course, but there was no denying the similarities in their features and hues of rich brown.

Leave it to Johnny to marry the very thing he was running away from.

She and Sharise had been asking him more questions about Mazelle Washington in the past few months, ever since Sharise recognized her name in one of her high school film studies books by film historian Donald Bogle. Sharise had asked Johnny why he never told her more about her story, and pulling information out of him was an exercise in frustration. Was his grandmother’s ghost the reason he had flipped out at the meeting? Was one more set of compromises a bridge too far, or was it simply the daily toll for an artist trying to shepherd their talents to the screen?

Amazing! She texted back to Sharise. Who knows what we’ll find at her lodge?

Sharise texted back a huge smiley face. This girl was maturing so fast! That was another thing: Sharise’s life had been a fever of Beyoncé concerts and makeup tutorials since she was Imani’s age, and now she and her older daughter finally had a meeting place that reminded her of when Sharise was younger and more open to sharing Tasha’s interests beyond music.

Tasha scrolled back to the striking photograph of Mazelle as a child, bursting with so much life, fighting for her footing so young at the dawn of Hollywood. Who had she become beyond her scant mentions in film history books and a few photographs online? Unlike with The Little Rascals, Mazelle’s childhood movies had not survived, as far as Tasha knew—but Johnny had mentioned that he had once found old film reels at her lodge. Maybe they were hidden there.

Tasha recognized the way her mind was racing, how she was lingering over every detail of Mazelle Washington’s photo. She had felt the same way about Octavia Estelle Butler before she wrote her PhD dissertation about her and then her academic book on Butler and other early Afrofuturists like Butler’s mentor, Samuel R. Delany. Her research had taken her as far back as W. E. B. Du Bois’s short story “The Comet” from 1920 and Of One Blood by Pauline E. Hopkins as early as 1903. Tasha taught Afrofuturism and Black cinema at UCLA, and any Afrofuturist knew that you couldn’t chart a path to the future without knowing the past.

What journey had this joyful child taken that had led her to this—a grandson who was ashamed to utter her name? A film industry that had all but forgotten her? Maybe, in the end, a book about Mazelle might feel like a gift to Johnny too. A bridge.

Mazelle’s choices in Hollywood hadn’t been her fault. Like Hattie McDaniel said after she won her Oscar for Gone with the Wind, she could have played a maid or been one—literally.

Tasha rubbed her stomach, where it was still too early to feel her child growing inside of her, but she flooded herself with the realization that she was carrying Mazelle’s third great-grandchild. She was a part of this woman’s legacy too. But her hand quickly fell away, as if her belly crackled with static electricity. Maybe she wasn’t ready now, but there would be no going back after they told the girls she was pregnant at Bear Creek Lodge.

Tasha had spent twenty years living in the house Mazelle Washington built.

It was time to make her a part of their family.

Eight

SNOWBOARD. HELMET. GOGGLES. SKI MASK. Gloves. Boots. Check. GoPro camera. Extra batteries. Flashlight. Pocketknife. Firestarter. Phone charger. Check.

Imani Washington mentally cataloged her supplies as she packed her duffel bag with military precision. Mom and Dad had warned them that the lodge was in the middle of nowhere, so she didn’t want to forget anything before their morning flight out of LAX. In her mind’s eye, she memorized every compartment and space in her bag, seeing her new black jacket with electric-pink arm stripes folded beneath her gear. She’d wrapped her snowboard in bubble wrap and packed clothes around her gear for extra padding.

Imani couldn’t believe they were finally going to the woods for real—not playing at going to the woods like in Big Bear, where those rental cabins were just in neighborhoods with a lot of trees. But this! Her great-grandmother’s lodge was in the actual wilderness, the kind she had dreamed of exploring since she first saw an episode of Naked and Afraid two years ago, in fifth grade. Which animals would she see? Were there any berries she could identify from her shelf of Audubon Society books? Did she have the skills to build a simple shelter near the lodge?

She’d been practicing with her flint firestarter in the backyard with piles of twigs like a survivalist, and she was pretty good at getting wisps of smoke that eventually sparked into flames. She’d seen seasoned pros spend hours trying to light a fire in the wild. Don’t let your ego write a check your skills aren’t ready to cash, Mom liked to say when Imani tried ambitious snowboarding tricks. This time, she would get a chance to really practice. Snowboarding. Fire building. Could she convince Dad to take her hunting?

Dad had told her how his uncle Ricky had taken him hunting at the lodge when he was Imani’s age, so why not her? The gun might still be there. She used to hate hunters, but Naked and Afraid had made her realize that humans once had needed to hunt for food or they would starve—all meat eaters did—so hunting was better than buying a piece of meat wrapped in plastic from the store. At least hunting was fairer, since the animals had actual lives and weren’t locked up in the stinking slaughterhouses her family passed when they drove up Interstate 5. Sharise only ate chicken and fish, but Imani still liked burgers, steaks, and chops. She vowed she would never hunt “for fun,” or waste any creature’s life—but what would it feel like to feed Mom and Dad with food she had hunted herself? Would she have the nerve, or would she chicken out? Imani decided that if she had a chance and couldn’t do it, she would stop eating red meat like her sister. She was a total hypocrite if she couldn’t deal with blood. Blood was always the price of a meal, if there was meat.

Holy shit—they were really going on a surprise trip to the mountains! And she would miss Monday’s algebra quiz too! (Mom and Dad didn’t need to know that part, but the timing was divine. Algebra was the devil’s work, and it might be the first class she would barely pass.) Her TikTok would blow up after she posted videos of herself snowboarding with a headline like “Black Girls Board.” She would get an assload of likes and shares. Mount Shasta was ten times more exotic than Big Bear. She could get Sharise to shoot her doing a real backside air, bending back to grab her board beneath her feet mid-flight before she landed. She’d never been able to test herself properly with so many other boarders crowding the slopes.

But no one else would be at Bear Creek Lodge. The resort was private. This slope belonged to her and her family. Once she posted her videos, the fake-ass posers at her school could choke on their jealousy.

Two quick knocks on her door from her sister. Mom or Dad ignored her closed door like it wasn’t there. So annoying. “Yes?” Imani said. She didn’t want to split her attention.

Sharise opened the door, slipped inside, and closed the door behind her. Imani instantly forgot her sister was in the room with her, imagining herself flying high on her snowboard. When she finally looked up, she found Sharise reclined on her bed, texting on her phone beneath Imani’s Kendrick Lamar poster for To Pimp a Butterfly. Sharise’s fingers played in the long curls of her copper-colored weave. Imani never understood why anyone would want long hair—especially hair from someone else’s head. Her own hair was natural, cut short like Mom’s.

“What?” Imani said. “I’m listening. Promise.”