Chapter Twenty-One
Twenty-One
LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA
THE GATES OF HELL WERE yawning open.
A sea of white men, women, and children resembled fleeing phantoms as their feet stirred up a cloud of red dust choking the crowded street.
They shrieked and shouted, grabbing loved ones by the hand, some of them tripping in their hurry.
Horse-drawn wagons weaved through the chaos carrying hurriedly packed belongings, from chicken coops to a golden harp flaring in the sunlight.
Nearby, an explosion sounded, inciting a chorus of screams.
Mazelle covered her ears where she stood beneath an awning, just out of the path of the chaos.
Since it was her first day on the set, her stunned expression wasn’t acting.
After hours of milling around and tiresome instructions from the director and his assistants trying to keep everyone in place while they set up their equipment, the frenzied motion on cue made Mazelle forget about the oversized new color motion picture cameras planted around them like strange, towering black beasts, the boom microphones swinging like giant tentacles above them.
Mazelle felt slightly dizzy, slipping out of time.
She was in Atlanta, not Los Angeles. The women’s petticoats and the gray uniforms of the white men marching in formation as they advanced against the tide of panicked townspeople convinced her that she was in the 1860s watching Atlanta fall in the Civil War.
Be careful what you wish. She reminded herself of this at least once a day. More.
Only last week, Mazelle had been miserable at her desk at Thomas Jefferson High, dreaming of her graduation so she could finally pursue acting again the way her parents promised. Now she was on the set of the production the whole country was talking about: Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind!
Mother’s diligent calls to Charles Butler at central casting had finally paid off.
Mazelle had hoped to audition for Prissy, the youngest Negro woman with a speaking part, but that role had gone to Butterfly McQueen long before Mazelle graduated.
Working as an extra was the best she could do—playing a newly freed slave for five dollars a day.
She’d heard the white extras made more, but she calculated that if she got called for even five days, she could afford to buy Daddy the large, padded reclining rocker she’d seen in a Sears catalog he needed in order to sit comfortably.
She hated the way her father was always in pain.
Motion on the street churned until “Cut!” blared from a loudspeaker, echoing against the hollow storefronts, and shouts passed up and down the crowd until everyone stopped and began milling again.
Mr. Fleming, the director, sat high above on his platform, with little below him missing his eye.
Dogs barked, children cried, and horses dropped piles of manure.
Mazelle stood watching it all in a bedraggled dress that looked like a castoff from a plantation missus, dust from the dirt road coating her hair and clothes.
Mazelle hadn’t realized she was smiling, but her cheeks hurt from grinning.
“You better wipe that grin off your face ’fore Mr. Fleming sees it,” another Negro extra, Otis, told her.
He was a couple years older than Mazelle and a man, so he’d gotten a much better part, marching with a contingent of Negroes singing “Go Down, Moses.” He wore a straw hat and was carrying his prop shovel over his shoulder.
Like her, he had been performing since he was young.
“Why shouldn’t we be happy?” Mazelle said. “We’re free now!”
“Sure, they was happy back then,” he said. “But this picture’s for white folks.”
Mazelle stifled a laugh behind her palm, but it quickly died as the wind shifted, bringing particles of road dust flying into her eyes. She had heard someone say that crushed bricks had been used to replicate an orange Georgia road, and she tried to blink the dust away.
“That’s more like it,” Otis teased her. “Look sad. That’s why it’s called acting.”
Her sight came back into focus as she blinked: The massive Atlanta street sets—a dry goods store, bakery, and blacksmith, all with meticulous details—felt too real for comfort. The haze of red-clay dust reminded her of Gracetown, and thoughts of Gracetown only made her sad.
“Nobody’s spending all these millions on a movie about slaves happy to be free,” Otis said. “Millions, you hear me? You didn’t read the book, huh?”
“That book weighs a ton,” Mazelle said. “I bet the stars didn’t even read it.”
Mazelle and Otis waited beneath the awning of the set’s prominent hardware store, watching the hundreds of white extras.
Mazelle noticed that a few of them were wearing trousers or shoes they had just bought, too new and nothing like the nineteenth century.
Charles Butler had warned Mother that Mazelle should not wear anything that looked modern, so she was wearing Gram’s scuffed old black ankle boots. Close enough.
Otis told her he had just stepped off the train when he got the job offer from central casting.
His wife in Chicago was so excited that she was already making plans to join him in Los Angeles, believing his career was charmed, since newspapers were printing constant stories about the casting and shooting of Gone with the Wind.
Mazelle was disappointed to hear that sweet-faced Otis was already married—and she had never been on a real date!
She felt more convinced that life had left her behind while she was trapped in school.
“This your first time working on a picture?” Otis asked.
Year by year, fewer people recognized Mazelle as she got older, her face thinning as she grew taller—at five eight, she stood over Mother now.
Mazelle enjoyed erasing Little Mazy and reclaiming herself.
She remembered how well she had imitated Millie Sharpe’s darky voice and even improved upon it, her lip drooping with mushy words.
Little Mazy had been almost as bad a lie as the sad slave she had now been hired to play.
“Yeah,” Mazelle said. “First one.”
Otis grinned at her like Brother would. “Look at us, huh?” He was bursting with pride.
Mazelle stared down at her shredded dress the costumer had given her when she arrived on the lot of Selznick International Studios just after dawn, worse than anything she’d ever worn on Li’l Gumshoes. “Yeah, I’m looking—we’re dressed like slaves,” Mazelle said.
“Freed slaves,” he corrected her. Otis’s lips fought his smile as he gazed across the massive set, basking in his good luck.
But Mazelle had lost her mood for smiling.
Gram had been born a slave in Georgia, and when Mazelle was six, she had asked her what it was like to be enslaved as a little girl.
Mazelle hadn’t known much about slavery beyond the power of the word to make grown-ups frown, and she had a vague idea it might mean you had to do a lot of chores because her sisters complained that their parents “worked them like slaves.”
Gram had patted Mazelle’s head with teary eyes, as if the question itself had cast her back to her childhood.
They sold my mama away. Pulled me out of her arms. It still hurts, was all Gram had said.
Mazelle didn’t remember much she and Gram talked about before she died, but she remembered that.
What would Gram think if she could see her now?
Mazelle’s eyes clouded with tears borrowed from Gram. Warm moisture washed the dust on her cheek. But Otis was too excited to notice, daydreaming about his future in Hollywood.
“Say,” Otis said. “You wanna meet Hattie McDaniel?”
Hattie McDaniel was a long way from Central Avenue.
The fragrant gardenia bushes along the path made Mazelle wish she’d chosen a flower with a more pleasing scent, not just colors.
Her pulse was quick in her palm clutching the bouquet as she approached the whitewashed door.
Otis was boarding with Hattie McDaniel because she knew his parents, but she hoped Otis hadn’t overstepped his role to invite her to dinner.
She smelled what she thought might be stewing chicken. Her stomach growled.
Before Mazelle could knock, the door flung open—and Hattie McDaniel stood there wearing a silk robe with a fur collar that hung loosely across her large frame.
Her bright red lipstick was the only visible makeup, but the splash of color made her round face glow with a natural beauty and joy the cameras did not capture.
“Look at you—all grown up!” Hattie McDaniel squealed.
She gave Mazelle a hug against her soft, fleshy bosom.
Mazelle was surprised at how close she came to crying.
Mother might have come too, except she’d been having a coughing spell.
Mazelle hated to admit how many of her experiences didn’t feel quite real without Mother and Daddy at her side.
Otis appeared behind Hattie McDaniel, his arms folded. He was even more handsome in his contemporary clothing: high black slacks and a plaid slipover sports shirt. “Thought you didn’t know her,” Otis said to Mazelle over his hostess’s shoulder. Was that a spark of envy?
“You don’t know Little Mazy?” Hattie McDaniel said. “This child ran that whole show. It sure is good to meet you, Mazelle Washington. I was thrilled when Otis said you got hired.” Mazelle noted that, like her, Hattie McDaniel’s natural voice was very different from her roles.
Mazelle’s face flashed hot. “Well… we’re just extras…”
“God put you there for a reason,” she said. “Maybe one of those reasons was me.”
Mazelle stole glances around the living room, trying not to be obvious as she gawked.
The rose-colored sofa and matching chairs all looked new.
She glimpsed a copy of a poetry book Mother also owned on a reading table: Paul Laurence Dunbar’s Lyrics of Lowly Life.
But although it wasn’t ostentatious, there was nothing “lowly” about this house.