Read The Blues Walked In by Kathleen George…

Kathleen George is the author of The Johnstown Girls, a novel about the famous Johnstown flood. She has also written seven mysteries set in Pittsburgh: A Measure of Blood, Simple, The Odds (which was nominated for the Edgar® Award from the Mystery Writers of America), Hideout, Afterimage, Fallen, and Taken. George is also the author of the short story collection The Man in the Buick and editor of another collection, Pittsburgh Noir. She is a professor of theater arts and creative writing at the University of Pittsburgh.

Q&A

Don’t miss out: George will be launching her latest novel, The Blues Walked In, at the Main branch of the Carnegie Library (in Oakland) on May 22!

Launch Party

From the Publisher: “In 1936, life on the road means sleeping on the bus or in hotels for blacks only. After finishing her tour with Nobel Sissel’s orchestra, nineteen-year-old Lena Horne is walking the last few blocks to her father’s hotel in Pittsburgh’s Hill District. She stops at a lemonade stand and meets a Lebanese American girl, Marie David. Marie loves movies and adores Lena, and their chance meeting sparks a relationship that will intertwine their lives forever. Lena also meets Josiah Conner, a charismatic teenager who helps out at her father Teddy’s hotel. Josiah often skips school, dreams of being a Hollywood director, and has a crush on Lena. Although the three are linked by a determination to be somebody, issues of race, class, family, and education threaten to disrupt their lives and the bonds between them.

Lena’s father wants her to settle down and give up show business, but she’s entranced by the music and culture of the Hill. It’s a mecca for jazz singers and musicians, and nightspots like the Crawford Grill attract crowds of blacks and whites. Lena table-hops with local jazzmen as her father chaperones her through the clubs where she‘ll later perform. Singing makes her feel alive, and to her father’s dismay, reviewers can’t get enough of her. Duke Ellington adores her, Billy Strayhorn can’t wait to meet her, and she becomes ‘all the rage’ in clubs and Hollywood for her beauty and almost-whiteness. Her signature version of ‘Stormy Weather‘ makes her a legend. But after sitting around for years at MGM as the studio heads try to figure out what to do with her, she isn’t quite sure what she’s worth.

Marie and Josiah follow Lena’s career in Hollywood and New York through movie magazines and the Pittsburgh Courier. Years pass until their lives are brought together again when Josiah is arrested for the murder of a white man. Marie and Lena decide they must get Josiah out of prison — whatever the personal cost….”

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1936

 
When she walked up Fullerton, everybody looked. Partly it was the New York clothes, that suit with the little check pattern in brown and olive green, the olive green shoes, the olive leather handbag, and the cocky little hat, a sort of brown disc, like an upside down bowl with a sprig of green leaves bobbing out to the right. She carried a suitcase that hobbled her walk some — but it was of a good quality straw and leather and she didn’t want to leave it anywhere. Two trunks would come later.

People looked. She was used to it. Those clubs she sang at, the Cotton Club especially, that’s what she’d been on stage for — to be looked at, and then, even off-stage, she couldn’t help herself, she kept getting decked out so that when they did look, what they saw was good.

White and black, both looked at her. Her father hadn’t come to the station — he told her in advance he probably couldn’t and if she didn’t see him, she should take a cab. But she didn’t find a cab, not one that would take her, and there were no jitneys around, so she caught a streetcar partway and began walking.

She was thinking about getting married, learning humility, none of this sassiness of hers, wanting to be someone special. Her mother thought she should work to be famous and it was tempting, but her father had made a serious speech, the last time she saw him, saying life was about making breakfast, having kids, taking care of them. And there was the fact that was she was not some Ethel Waters, not some Billie Holiday. They had style. Her own successes came from being pretty, and almost, almost white. The voices in her head included her grandmother saying, “You come from a family with class. Show business is low,” while her mother (who didn’t get along with her mother-in-law) was saying, “Nothing like it, glamour, show business,” and her father was shaking his head, murmuring, “All that craziness. You could just stop and settle down.”

She paused for a while, winded, put down the suitcase and sat on it. She’d sat on worse. On the last bus she and the musicians toured in, the seats were so worn, she got poked by rusty springs. She’d sat on a crate in a restaurant, one of the few that let her in, and she was grateful enough for the crate even though there were vacant chairs around. She’d sat in filth and washed her good clothes in rooms that stank of former occupants. She was not supposed to be tired at her age, a year shy of twenty, but she felt a bone-weariness from always trying so hard, adapting to things.

Winded, she put down the suitcase and sat on it. “Comfortable?” a man asked, passing her.

“If I work at it.” She always tried hard, at everything.

Some fifty feet away, she saw what looked like an older and a younger teenager selling lemonade on the street, the one instructing the other. She squinted and hurried forward. Lemonade sounded mighty good to her. She wobbled a few steps and then found her swing again. The two girls were staring at her wide-eyed. “Is business good?” she asked them.

The younger one, twelve, fourteen, shook her head and shifted position once. She was wearing a faded blue dress and shoes with socks.

“Could I buy some of that cool drink?” Please God, she said, don’t let them refuse me.

They had an assortment of glasses and chipped cups. Would they let her spend a nickel, then break the cup after? Did white kids with lemonade stands learn that lesson too?

The girls, both of them, had curly dark hair and they were fairly well suntanned, but she could tell they were white. And they surely had her categorized as Negro. It usually took a moment. Something about her confused people and then they looked again and made up their minds.

“Are you famous?” the older one asked.

“Slightly,” she laughed. “Only slightly.”

While the younger girl poured, the older one angled to take in her outfit, down to the shoes.

She put a nickel on the table. The little girl took it and carefully, balancing to avoid a spill, handed her a chipped cup that had a row of gray diamonds around the rim and a missing handle.

Lena drank thirstily.

“I love your shoes!” the older girl said. “And all your clothes.”

“Thank you.” The hat was slipping down toward her left eye, but she wasn’t of a mind to take it off and reposition it.

The older girl asked timidly, “Are you a movie star?”

What an idea! Not that she hadn’t had it herself. She shook her head, sorry to disappoint them.

“You have to be discovered. That’s what they say.”

“I suppose that’s it.”

Her father was only two blocks away. She couldn’t wait to see him, so she hauled up the suitcase, which held as many pieces of clothing as it could bear without springing open.

“Thank you, honey, for the cool drink.” If she hurried, she wouldn’t know if they broke the cup.
 

* * *
 
Marie and her thirteen-year-old sister (the one with the lemonade business) had parents who’d come from Lebanon, though they mostly just said Syria because so few non-Middle Easterners made the distinction. The family had a grocery store, which they all worked. Also the girls had cleaning jobs. Their father worked in the steel mill when he wasn’t watching the store. The brother, Freddie, was off in the army. Nobody in the family questioned the idea of working eighteen hours a day; it was simply what you did. Marie’s family got up and smelled coffee, not roses, never would have thought to smell the latter.

Marie was a skinny thing, sixteen but often appeared younger. Her mother had chopped her hair awkwardly a year ago because she’d got lice — horrible lice, she shuddered to remember. The bugs must have gotten on her sweater when she cleaned a house where there were four little kids who were all infected. Her mother’s ungentle hands got hold of Marie’s head, chopped her hair, and doused her with a liquid she’d got from the hardware store. Marie was rid of bugs and eggs in a matter of hours, but also rid of a lot of her hair. Now the hair was grown in enough that Marie could work it to make the sections blend though today she hadn’t had time to do it before setting up the lemonade table.

She was considered the family beauty. It was funny the way people always talked about beauty and responded to it — she did too. It wasn’t exactly fair. Her little sister was not pretty and it affected the way she did everything.

Marie’s mother had told her that when she was a little girl, a married couple offered money for her, to take her away and raise her as their own.

“Why?”

“They say because you pretty.”

Her parents had managed to say no.

As soon as she got home from helping Selma at the lemonade stand, Marie took her place behind the counter of the little store her family owned. “Everything all right, Ummah?” she asked.

Her mother nodded curtly and went back to the kitchen. Marie looked at the clock they had hanging up in the store. Was her mother’s nod a reprimand? She hadn’t been gone long.

As soon as her mother passed through the beaded curtain, Marie slipped the one movie magazine they carried from its place on the counter and turned to the article she’d been reading. It was about why movie stars fell out of love so easily; it was called “Losing at Love.” Loretta Young and Jean Harlow and all of the women who talked about their heartbreaks were astoundingly beautiful. And yet they claimed they had lost at love.

There was a string of customers that particular day just when she got to the part about how playing love scenes could be emotionally confusing — you could persuade yourself to fall in love with your co-star and when the movie was over, so was the feeling.

One woman wanted two cans of kidney beans and a bag of penny candy. The store was down to the last three loaves of bread when another woman took two of them, saying she had relatives coming to visit the next day. She also bought most of the oranges and bananas and three cans of tuna for the lunch she had to make. Marie added up the purchases in her head. “A dollar seven cents,” she said.

“How do you know? Would you write it down?”

“Sure.” She tore off a strip of paper and detailed the items. The woman, not a regular customer, stretched to look at what Marie had written. “Oh. That’s right,” she said, surprised.

There were boys who, displaying nickels and pennies, wanted candy.

“Saw you in school a couple of times,” the one boy said, hanging back after his friends had gone out to the street. “What’s your name?”

“Marie.”

“Italian?”

“No. Syrian.”

“I thought Italian. That’s what I am. What classes you have next year?”

“I quit.”

“Quit school?”

She nodded. “My family needs me.”

“Lucky you. I hate school.” He paused at the door for a minute. “See you around.”

She slipped a tootsie roll from the case and chewed. She was learning that Loretta Young had eloped when she was seventeen (one year older than Marie) but then had it annulled.

The articles were often about people who were doing something ordinary, changing a tire, hanging clothes on a line, when someone decided to put them in movies. It could happen to the beautiful woman she saw today even if she wasn’t all dressed up. She could be taking off a shoe to rub a blister. Carole Lombard had been discovered playing baseball on the street.

The little bell on the door dinged. She looked up.

“Hello.”

He looked familiar — from school, yes. He was a Negro boy. “Sorry to disturb,” he said.

“My mother doesn’t like me reading in the store. She wants me to just stand here and keep dusting. This keeps me from going crazy.”

He laughed and nodded toward her magazine. “I read about movies all the time. But I like to read about the directors. And the writers.”

She hadn’t thought about them.

“I need three cans of soup. Two tomato and one chicken noodle.”

She put the Campbell’s cans on the counter. They kept one of the ads for the soup tacked to the shelf. It showed tomato soup with crackers and the print said, ‘A Bowlful of Goodness.’

“That’s it. My father has soup for lunch every day — even in this weather. I don’t understand, but that’s what he likes.”

“Some people do take them, even in summer.”

Marie put the cans in a bag while the boy slid coins across the counter to her.

“Thank you,” he said and left. Josiah. Right. Josiah Conner. Nice kid.

It seemed forever until finally her older sister Fran got home to take her shift. Fran had spent the day cleaning a big house in the Oakland area, but that was only her summer job. Usually she worked at the high school, in the front office but they didn’t need her for a couple more weeks.

Fran was short. She had startling and memorable features. Black shiny hair, big brown eyes, sizable nose, full lips. And she was expressive. It was as if she needed a bigger body to fit all of her in. “What a house I cleaned!” she said now. “Some people are dirty.” Her voice went up on “dirty.” She dabbed at her forehead with her sleeve. “My turn. Anything good in the magazine?”

“Loretta Young.”

“Where’s Selma?’

“Ought to be coming home soon. She did lemonade today.”

“In the heat. Not so easy.”

Marie went up to the room Fran now slept in, little more than a closet, and she snitched Fran’s lipstick and put it on before wiping it off. Then she went to the room she shared with Selma. She messed with her hair, this way and that, over the forehead, straight back. With a hand mirror she checked her profile from both sides. There was supposed to be a good side, the one you made people look at. Actresses in movies had a camera side and they could even have it written into contracts that that was the side to use.
 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zJvYo5pZEfE
 
Excerpted from The Blues Walked In by Kathleen George. Copyright © 2018. Excerpted by permission of the University of Pittsburgh Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.