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, my mouth shut, and to never betray a friend. She had come to New York from Memphis, Tennessee, and even though her family begged her to come home after Daddy left, she just couldn’t. Apparently they had told her he was a no-good creep and she’d be sorry for running off with him. Since her parents had died long ago, Mama figured that nothing was left for her back in Memphis but three sisters who were waiting with mouths chock-full of I-told-you-sos.
She was only twenty years old when I was born but sorrow, bitterness, and shock have a way of aging a woman so that by the time Mama was thirty, she looked forty. She and I lived a pretty solitary life. She worked as a cashier for Met Supermarket from the time Daddy left until they tore the store down three years ago. I’ve been supporting her since then and I don’t mind at all.
Mama has a picture of herself taken in Memphis about two years before Daddy came through town and swept her off her feet. Her eyes are glowing with hope, her hair swept up in an elaborate roll, the lips parted, showing perfect teeth.
She is still beautiful but the hope for her own life has been replaced by the pride she feels in my accomplishment.
Mama never told me that we were poor. It took a brief childhood friendship to teach me that.
There was one white girl in my fifth-grade class who was not poor. Her name was Mandy and she, too, lived in a single-parent household. Mandy’s mother acted in TV commercials and received alimony and child support from Mandy’s father, whose occupation I never knew. When Mandy invited me over to her house, which was on 55th Street between Eighth and Ninth Avenue, I had to beg Mama to let me go. I understand now that Mama was trying to protect me from the sting of racism. After my visit, I naturally invited Mandy back to play at our house. Her mother wouldn’t hear of it and our friendship ended soon after.
Their place was huge. Until then, I had never seen an apartment with more than one bathroom. The ceilings were so high that I couldn’t figure out how Mandy’s mother changed the light-bulb. There was thick carpeting on the floors instead of cracked linoleum, pictures in heavy frames on the walls, and floor-to-ceiling bookcases, which held important looking volumes. But it was the air in that living space that made the greatest impression on me. Or rather, what was not in the air. There were no clouds of disappointment, anxiety, desperation, or bitterness in that air and I breathed deeply, trying to fill my lungs with it.
There are particular times in life that you can recall with crystal clarity, and I never forgot that moment in time when I stood in Mandy’s living room with my little chest heaving up and down, trying to gather up enough of that air so I could let some of it out into our place later on.
I tried to explain Mandy’s air to Mama, but she didn’t understand.
On the way over to Craig and Annabelle Murray’s house that Saturday morning, I knew that the air would greet me as soon as I entered their building. I now knew the smell for what it was—the odor of security.
The Murrays lived on Manhattan’s Upper West Side in an enormous, castle-like apartment building called The Dakota. It was built in 1884, boasted a fountain in its courtyard, and folks like Lauren Bacall and Yoko Ono are just two examples of its illustrious tenants.
One of several passenger elevators took me up to their eighth-floor penthouse. The door opened and I was in the vestibule of their apartment. Annabelle answered the bell. She was a tall, leggy blonde in her early forties who looked much younger and was proud that people frequently stopped her on the street asking for an autograph. Annabelle had once won a celebrity look-alike contest for her astonishing resemblance to the actress Daryl Hannah. She was wearing a hunter-green turtleneck sweater, matching slacks, and Prada loafers.
As she embraced me, she said, “Hey, Jackie, come on in! Craig has a big surprise for you!”
Annabelle was one of the best publishers in the business and during the five years I’d worked at Welburn Books, I’d had nothing but respect for her editorial judgment. After she coerced me into helping her husband with his biography of the great Black comedienne, Jackie “Moms” Mabley, I discovered that the old saying, “love is blind,” was totally true. Craig Murray had absolutely no writing talent and Annabelle was too in love with him to see it. The best surprise he could have for me was an announcement that he’d thrown his manuscript in the garbage. But of course I couldn’t say that and expect to remain employed, so I summoned up a bright smile and replied, “This is so exciting. I can’t wait to read the new pages!”
She marched briskly ahead of me through the foyer, a gigantic, unfurnished area with a polished wood floor and dozens of framed pictures of their three-year-old daughter, Dora, on the sea-green walls.
After taking my coat, Annabelle waved me on. “Craig is waiting for you in the library. I’ll see you in an hour or two. Dora and I are going to Bloomingdale’s.”
Craig is basically a nice guy but I couldn’t tolerate his literary pretensions on a full bladder, so a quick stop in the bathroom was in order. I knew from my first tour of Annabelle’s ten-room apartment that this bathroom, which was all pink—including tile, marble floor, octagon-shaped tub, and double-basin sink—was the guest bathroom and as I sat on the baby-pink toilet, I marveled at the fact that the space was bigger than my bedroom.
The library was exactly that. Floor-to-ceiling bookshelves made up the four walls and there was a long conference-room sized table in the middle of the room with six chairs on each side of it. The floor had a red carpet which was the only hint of color in the very functional research-and-reading space. Craig was already seated, pencil behind his ear, shuffling papers around. He stood up and welcomed me with a smile that showed the huge gap between his two front teeth. He was a tall, gangly man with dirty yellow hair that hung to his shoulders, hippie style, who had been wearing jeans and a white tee shirt every time we met. That day was no exception.
“Craig, good to see you!” I waved him back down, sat across the table from him, and pulled my Filofax and a pen out of my tote bag to take notes. “I hear you have a surprise for me.”
He slapped the table and laughed. “Annabelle just can’t keep a secret. Yes, Jackie, it’s true. I’ve finished the last hundred pages of All About Moms. My wife has read them and pronounced me brilliant. Of course, she is prejudiced in my favor.”
He chuckled. I chuckled.
“So, I’m going to leave you alone to peruse this lengthy piece of prose while I rustle us up some grub, okay?” Craig slid the stack of paper across the table, gave me the thumbs-up sign, and left me alone in the library, closing the door behind him. It took me an hour to get through his latest twaddle and by that time, my annoyance had changed to heated resentment.
From the beginning, Craig’s narrative had shown that he did not understand the humor of Jackie Mabley, life on the chitlin’ circuit where she was forced to earn her living during the early years of her career, or why present-day African-American comics like Chris Rock and Eddie Murphy revered her.
Now, at the end of his book, Craig was blaming one of the funniest women in the world for “not reaching the white audience which could have made her a superstar because, instead of running after this golden purse, Moms preferred to pursue young black men, as evidenced by one of her most famous jokes: The only thing an old man can do for me is show me which way a young one went.
I felt like flipping one of the pages over and using it to write my resignation from Welburn Books. Instead, I opened my Filofax, blocked out a few hours of time to edit the pages, sent up a silent prayer for sister Mabley, and, like a good Corporate Negro, kept my eyes on the executive editor prize.
4
A THIN PINK LINE
Craig and I munched on homemade pizza and drank cold Welch’s grape juice in the Murrays’ cavernous dining room. Although we made small talk about an assortment of innocent topics—the history of The Dakota apartment building, Dora’s ballet lessons, carpeted versus wood floors, the Disneyfication of Times Square, jogging, new restaurants, yo-yo dieting, the latest releases from Welburn Books, and the like—we were surreptitiously killing time until Annabelle returned to lead the book discussion.
Craig apparently knew quite a bit about my work. He made it clear that Annabelle respected the passionate way I shepherded the books in my care through the maze of individual fiefdoms that were the marketing, art, and subsidiary rights departments. He tactfully avoided the fact that I focused exclusively on books by African-American authors, but it wouldn’t have bothered me if he had mentioned it. It was my choice—one that I’d made eight years before while working as an editorial assistant at Brigsbay Press.
He told me what I already knew from the office grapevine—that he had come to New York from a small town in Wisconsin thirteen years ago with dreams of becoming a famous painter. He had met Annabelle Welburn when she attended a reception in his honor at a small art gallery downtown in Soho. They married six months later and he continued the struggling artist bit for five more years before giving it up to write biographies of unsung Americans. What he did not tell me—but what I already knew—was that he wrote two books, one on Sylvia Plath and the other about Allan Ginsberg, which had been rejected by every publishing house in the country—before picking on poor Moms Mabley.
