Chapter Seven #4
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.