do very little, which brings us to the present. You’re overwhelming me with liveliness. Please reduce the throttle a bit.”
I’d gladly laugh—it’s the fastest-drying glue for friendships, and for some uncanny reason I instantly want to exchange intimacies with this person—but I haven’t the strength.
“Whose nightdress is this?”
“Gracious, what a cordial and unexpected W that was. Mine. It’s only cotton, and I lost the ribbon for the eyelets, I’m tragically careless, but there was no way of knowing whether you’d bleed all over it, you understand. You can see it when I allow you mirrors, which is not today.” One side of her mouth slides up, and the opposite side of her granite brow swoops down, and I know she has as many comedic patter songs in her repertoire as lost love ballads. “And I’m ever so much taller than you, Miss James, so don’t take any constitutionals, or you’ll be flat on your ass.”
“Duly noted. Um, regarding one that particularly concerns me . . . where am I?”
“You’re at the Paragon Hotel,” she declares, the tightness from earlier returning to her voice.
“If you’d care to continue?”
“Oh, gladly. But let us make this a bedtime story, for I’m marvelous at those and you look worn threadbare, all right? Let me see, the Paragon opened in nineteen-oh-six, and is full to bursting of decent citizens and lunatic nomads. I admit to being of the latter variety. It is one of the busiest hotels in the city of Portland, and profoundly well-appointed. We’ve six or seven business ventures in the building, so practically anything you like, just ask me to fetch it for you, and you shall have it in a trice.”
“Truly?”
“Of course, honey. And I’ll take you for a tour once you’ve resumed your normal complexion. A complexion which, I must add with regret, is a cause of some concern for us, as the Paragon is simply the only Portland hotel where both the most aristocratic and most hardworking of Negroes are all invited to rest their weary heads. Oh you’re smiling—I mean the only Portland hotel, quite literally,” Blossom adds with a hard glint in her eye. “When it comes to segregation, you may consider yourself free to whistle ‘Dixie’ where the great state of Oregon is concerned. So you present a moral enigma to the establishment, you see, and I always adore those. Better than fresh coffee.”
“Oh.” I meditate on this. “What a shame. You’ll have to chuck me out, and I like it here ever so much.”
The naked truth in my words is audible.
“Gracious, but you are from Harlem, aren’t you? Max was right, the dear lunk of a man. You could be from literally nowhere else in America! How marvelous. Are there any other questions you’d care to pose before you rest?”
Don’t think of it, Nobody.
I disobey myself. I do think of it, and though I’m too dry souled to weep by now, it must show in my face, for Blossom swiftly shifts closer.
“Why did this happen to me?” I ask in a cracked whisper.
“Oh, honey.” She brushes the backs of her fingers over my cheek. “I haven’t the slightest idea. I never do, you know. Not about that.”
◆ Three ◆
THEN
Only on feast days does Little Italy, in Harlem, recall the Bend when it put on its holiday attire. Anything more desolate and disheartening than the unending rows of tenements, all alike and all equally repellent, of the up-town streets, it is hard to imagine.
—JACOB A. RIIS, The Battle with the Slum, 1902
So. Where to begin?
I’ll start from the start, I suppose, that being the traditional technique: I was born on March 23rd of 1896, on the day the Raines law was passed. And thus for the first ten years of my life, I was raised in a so-called Raines law hotel, one called the Step Right Inn.
That still dings my pride. If only the owner had prognosticated all the days when he might be tempted to make a joke, and stayed in bed accordingly.
The Raines law was a liquor tax then, in the same way that Prohibition agents are defenders of justice now. Itchy to curb drinking among the huddled masses and clever enough to notice that the immigrants were only let out of harness on Sundays, the law stated that no one save hotels could serve the giggle juice on the Lord’s day of rest.
Everyone thought that was dreadfully cute.
Sometimes the way to solve a thorny problem is to whack straight through. The saloonkeepers—who were