Chapter Five #4
The true story behind Aunt Ruby’s death was the first major bad secret in Mazelle Washington’s life, but it was far from the last. Over time, her memory blended the story she’d made up with the true events, and she almost forgot them herself.
Almost. Years later, she would tell an interviewer that her childhood ended when she was nine.
Although she didn’t elaborate, in that moment she’d genuinely believed it was because that was how old she’d been when she first realized that the producers of Li’l Gumshoes thought of her as a darky.
Mother was never as energetic and cheerful as she’d been before her hospitalization.
Her cough followed her, just as Daddy never found a cure for his back pain, forcing him to walk with a cane too young in life.
Mother mourned the death of Aunt Ruby, who she said had been like a second mother to her, but she forever reminded Mazelle that accidents happen—and she should never, ever blame herself.
But of course Mazelle did.
To help her family, Mazelle fully embraced her work.
Mother and Millie Sharpe helped Mazelle master Hollywood Plantation dialect, and she transitioned to talkies better than most. For the next two years, Little Mazy and Scout the Wonder Dog threatened to eclipse the popularity of Our Gang, which was forever Li’l Gumshoes’s rival.
Mazelle Washington became one of the most famous stars in Hollywood—of any age, of any race.
Her wish was fulfilled. For a time.
But Mazelle had a growth spurt when she was eleven, her body’s new bumps and height betraying her. Despite Scout’s popularity, Mr. Lorenzo did not renew her contract, bringing in a younger colored child—a boy this time—with a trained black dog they called Blackie.
By then, Mazelle was happy to leave Li’l Gumshoes.
With Scout as a worldwide celebrity, her agent had turned down dozens of bids to buy Scout and was sitting on acting offers from studios and directors.
Charlie Chaplin had kept writing that he wanted to star in a picture with her, but he was planning a world tour away from Hollywood by the time Mazelle’s contract was up.
Buster Keaton and Marion Davies had also contacted her agent, but he said they were just trying to salvage their careers after talkies.
Instead, her agent met with studio heads about signing Mazelle and Scout to make their own pictures.
(Mazelle had learned from Mother that she was vastly underpaid and that Mr. Lorenzo had refused to allow anyone else to work with her while she was under contract, not just Charlie Chaplin.)
Finally, she was free.
But only three days after Mazelle’s contract expired, she went to the sunporch to walk Scout—and his doghouse was empty.
The security guard who parked at their curb overnight hadn’t seen anything unusual.
The porch door was still closed, with no sign of tampering with the screen, but Scout was gone.
Mazelle was inconsolable, and the nation mourned with her. Thousands of people helped search for Scout when his disappearance went public, but although dozens of people brought look-alikes, lured by a promised reward, raising Mazelle’s hopes many times, no one ever found him.
The only clue left behind was one Mazelle didn’t share, because who would believe her?
On the day of his disappearance, deep in a corner of her backyard, under Scout’s favorite orange tree he marked on every walk, she’d found a mudhole.
The mudhole reminded her of the muddy rim of the Wishing Pool she had visited so many years before, as if there had been a rainstorm or someone had left the garden hose running overnight.
But all the grass and leaves around the mudhole were parched from the summer sun.
Only the mudhole was wet, with a single paw print that might have been brand-new, or might have been as old as her wish in Gracetown.
Without Scout, all of Mazelle’s picture offers went away.
Her agent dropped her within three months, so Mother and Dottie went on the road with her instead.
Mazelle could not get booked in most white vaudeville theaters, although she had some early success on the Chitlin’ Circuit because of her famous name.
But just as Aunt Ruby had predicted, even on the stage Mazelle’s talents weren’t enough to sustain her without Scout.
Her backflips and somersaults and splits did not seem as cute from an older child, and her tap dancing was only fair.
Her parents said that Dottie and Doris could be her role models: After years of persistence, the Washington Twins landed a regular singing gig at a Central Avenue nightclub—not their names in lights as they had imagined, but it was work.
(They still had no luck in pictures because central casting said their ginger skin made them too fair to play maids, who were always darker skinned like Mazelle, and they were too skinny and “pretty” for Hollywood.)
By the time Mazelle was thirteen, Mother and Daddy insisted that she enroll in public school to get a more proper education, saying she could take another run at show business when she was older.
Mazelle walked listlessly in hallways and sat bored at her desk while the other children snickered at her and left anonymous notes on her desk with a word she grew to loathe: Coon.
To her, that word was worse than what Aunt Ruby had called her.
The Depression stormed through colored Los Angeles and the nation, with jobs harder to find and hold.
Daddy’s back made him unsuitable for most jobs, although he still did dance instruction in the living room as much as he was able, correcting form even if he couldn’t dance long himself.
Mother took a job as a rich family’s cook for a few months, but one day she asked Mazelle if the family could dip into her trust fund from Li’l Gumshoes to keep the house that Aunt Ruby had helped them buy.
Mazelle was glad to be able to help her family, but losing so much money from her early stardom worried her.
She knew better than her parents that she probably would never be that lucky again.
Would she have to cook for a family one day too?
Of course, no pain in Mazelle’s life rivaled losing Scout.
For years, when she walked to school, or to the store, she nearly staggered with grief when she spotted any white dog of a similar size.
Scout really had been her best friend, a part of her, and he had carried away pieces of her when he left.
Scout’s absence felt as surreal as his presence had been.
His happy eyes. His wagging tail. Yes, his protective growl that made her feel cared for. And the rest—the part no one had dared to stare at straight-on—Scout had been inside of her head, and she had been in his. Now her mind was flailing, always searching for him.
This was the price of his unnatural bond.
Sitting in her classroom at the bland school, Mazelle wondered why her life had grown so ordinary and her wish had turned so rotten.
Sometimes she wanted to ask her parents to take her back to Gracetown so she could wish for Scout again, but wishes were tricky—and she was afraid of what might crawl out of the muddy water.
Had she accidentally touched the Wishing Pool and ruined her wish from the start?
Or had killing Aunt Ruby been a curse against them? Maybe Scout was gone because, as much as she’d loved Scout, he made her a little afraid. Afraid of Scout—and afraid of herself.
Mazelle never stopped dreaming about Aunt Ruby’s broken body.
And her dead, empty eyes.