Chapter Thirteen
Thirteen
HOW COULD A PLACE SHE was visiting for the first time be a homecoming? From the instant Tasha entered Bear Creek Lodge, the aged wood-frame house felt like hers.
As she walked toward the paneled hallway, the sick feeling in her stomach melted away and she felt…
buoyant. She inhaled gulps of cool air that drove away her nauseous spasms, as if her body knew that she belonged here.
She felt free. Outside, she heard Johnny’s muffled cautioning while the girls squealed with excitement.
This trip was a dream already. Since Johnny and the girls were checking out the slope, Tasha was alone for the first time all day.
Bear Creek Lodge immersed her. Mazelle Washington’s lodge was a treasure: all the pieces of her missing in the Baldwin Hills house on display, hidden in the shadow of Mount Shasta.
Instead of heading to the bathroom, Tasha turned back to the living room and tinkled the high-C piano key on the white baby grand, which sounded more sweet than sour despite the piano’s age.
She didn’t play often, since she’d had children, but this weekend would be a good excuse to dust off her piano skills.
She opened the piano bench and found a stack of yellowing sheet music, mostly jazz standards, one handwritten stack in a rusted paper clip with a signature she could not decipher in its swooping markings.
The music’s cluttered assembly of notes and ambitious chords made her wonder if the signature was Duke Ellington’s.
“Holy shit,” she whispered. Had Johnny ever peeked at the sheet music in the bench? Did he know half of what he had here? Tasha quickly snapped a photo of the signature on her phone. Her department chair probably would know Ellington’s signature on sight, but she would have to wait to ask her.
The stereo console with its 1970s-era jumbo speakers, including an eight-track-tape player, offered more treats on its shelves: an extensive Duke Ellington collection that made her heart race (the signature on the sheet music had to be his!), but also Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughan, Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and too many more to count, at least two hundred LPs in their original sleeves.
A record collector would lose their mind here, she thought.
And the Louis Armstrong What a Wonderful World album had an unmistakable signature in bold black marker across the cover.
Tasha snapped a photo of that too. All of this had been sitting in Mazelle’s lodge virtually unattended for all these years?
She would need to pack up a box of memorabilia to ship back home for safekeeping.
Tasha felt robbed. Johnny had shown her a few snapshots of the lodge, but he’d always downplayed the splendor, instead complaining about how old and dusty the property was.
Even when he’d decided to fix it up, it hadn’t been for her and the girls—he’d planned to open it up to strangers on vacation.
Hell no, Tasha decided. They might partner with a museum or film society, but no vacationers would have access to this place as a careless playground.
Bear Creek Lodge belonged to their family.
History belonged to the world, but it required vigilant custodians.
Mazelle Washington had been Johnny’s grandmother, but a piece of her lived in Tasha too.
She raised her palm to her stomach, as if the unborn child in her generated a warm glow.
Tasha turned on the hallway light switch near the kitchen’s swinging Western-style double doors, and track lighting brought framed one-sheets on the wall to life, a celebration of Mazelle’s filmography.
Lazy Mazy at the Kentucky Derby, the first film in her franchise, famously had an unofficial cameo from Clark Gable.
Then Lazy Mazy Meets a Zombie, with Mazelle’s face alongside Mantan Moreland’s.
Tasha’s heart jumped. (Had she known that Mazelle and Moreland ever starred in a movie together?
She didn’t think so!) And Mazelle’s most famous film, which was also her last major role: Lazy Mazy Goes to New York, with her wide-eyed face inset above the Empire State Building, her hands clapped to her cheeks like Macaulay Culkin in Home Alone.
Mazelle had been a genuine movie star, if only for a gasp of time.
Tears smarted in Tasha’s eyes as she gazed at the posters with warring pride and grief.
This woman must have been so talented to warrant her own film series, a feat Hattie McDaniel had never pulled off after she won the Oscar for Gone with the Wind.
How had she done it? No other Black actress had.
How had Mazelle leveraged her days as a child actor into such a prominent role, using the servant trope to showcase her physical comedy skills long before Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett?
And how had it felt to see her contributions erased when the trope she had been yoked with grew too embarrassing for white people and Black people alike?
In the hallway, rooted between her world and Mazelle’s, Tasha’s hands clenched tightly as she imagined Mazelle’s mortification and fury at being cast aside.
Her typecasting had trapped her both too far in the past and too far ahead of her time, an impossible quandary.
Tasha’s nails bit into the meat of her palms as she channeled Mazelle’s rage that reminded her of every time she had been underestimated, starting in middle school, when Mrs. Montero had accused her of plagiarizing her handwritten science fiction story because it was “too good.” Tasha didn’t remember it, but her friends told her she’d called Mrs. Montero a racist bitch.
Her father, a single parent by then, had left a hearing to drive to meet Tasha in her principal’s office to show her a stack of Tasha’s stories and tell Mrs. Montero how much she had made an ass of herself.
Stephen Morrison had stood up for her when he was still reeling from the death of his wife.
Tasha wished Mama had been there to tell Mrs. Montero how hearing Tasha read her stories about spaceships and talking cats had made her whole face beam with a smile.
In that moment, flooded with memories of her deepest hurts, Tasha noticed the portrait with its own light at the end of the hall: Mazelle Washington was painted with startling photorealism in a filter of rose and gold in her glamorous furred robe, her hair exquisitely piled high on her head with twin spirals of feathery black locks hanging past her ears.
With glamour makeup emphasizing her eyes and cheekbones, Mazelle could have posed beside Lena Horne or Dorothy Dandridge, her sisters except in complexion.
Mazelle’s image stared down at the watcher from on high with a triumphant smile that harbored a wonderful and terrible secret. Unrepentant. Unbowed.
No wonder Johnny had been afraid of her, Tasha realized. Strength radiated from the portrait, so she could hardly imagine what a force of nature this woman had been. Johnny said she’d been joyless and quick to anger, and Tasha would not have wanted to see Mazelle angry.
The tarnished golden placard with Mazelle’s name beneath the painting told Tasha that the portrait had hung on this wall for years—perhaps by Mazelle herself.
The one-sheets lining the hall had been added more recently, maybe by the decorator Johnny had hired, which made the journey down the long hallway akin to revealing Mazelle’s truth at the end of a tunnel of lies.
This is the real me, the portrait said. And fuck anyone who never saw me.
Tasha reached up to rest her fingertip against the canvas, gently touching a corner of the painted robe; not with the force to leave a smudge or stain, but enough to allow the rough texture to kiss the pad of her finger.
She blinked back tears. Mazelle, as always, could be her twin.
She could be her mother. Or grandmother.
“I’m writing a book about you, Mazelle Washington,” she whispered.
A thunk sounded, and the canvas vibrated.
Tasha jumped away, as if Mazelle’s image had somehow voiced displeasure—but then her rational mind pointed out that the sound had come from behind her, past the wooden saloon-style doors to the kitchen.
The sound had been so loud that it had shaken this side of the house, like an earthquake’s tremor.
Outside, nearby wind chimes jangled with a sound nothing like music.
“Johnny?” she called. Maybe he was trying to get in through the side door.
Tasha nudged her way past the swinging doors into the square-shaped country kitchen, left in darkness by drawn shades across large picture windows.
She reached right and then left to find the light switch, and the strong fluorescent lights above flickered wildly before flaring on.
The floor was loud art deco black-and-white checkerboard tiles.
A rustic wooden table for four sat at the center.
The smallish metallic fridge looked newer and didn’t match the white porcelain of the sink or white tiles on the endless counters.
One thing caught her eye: A small vase of plastic daisies had fallen from a row of a dozen in the windowsill, lying on the counter below. Right beside the door. As if it had just fallen.
The door’s blinds were drawn too. Tasha didn’t look outside before turning the knob with a click, but the door held in place with a deadbolt, as if to chide her. Look outside first, dummy. She pushed the slats aside to take a peek.
A small porch with five steps led to a snowy landscape of two old cabins nestled in woods beside the house, one crushed beneath a fallen branch.
No one in sight. With that, she opened the door and was enveloped in the crisp cold preserved in the shade of the pine trees.
She heard Johnny and their daughters arguing somewhere behind the house, not close enough to have made the loud sound.
“Well, can you just watch us, then?” Imani was saying at full whine.