in Saint Louis? Maybe the old man can send for help. Then she decides against it, after everything Daniel has said. The eminent Jonathan D. Watkins would never take the word of a fallen woman like her.
Jessie drags Wing Sing out of Kelly’s, rips the aurelia off her collar.
“That mine!” Wing Sing cries.
“You’re just gonna sell it for dope.”
“No, Jade Eyes say it for me. For me and my daughter.”
Jessie slaps the girl’s belly. “Liar. You’re not really pregnant.”
“But I am, Miss Malone. I not get monthlies.”
“That’s just the opium, you fool.”
“No, I make little girl. Jade Eyes say.”
Jessie’s fingers curl around the gold, the diamonds. The bauble feels hot, but she refuses to drop it or hand over such a valuable thing to a tramp like Wing Sing. Anyway, it’s too beautiful for the likes of her.
“Tell you what. I’ll keep it safe for you.”
In July of 1896, Wing Sing gives birth to an underweight female infant and dies three days later of internal hemorrhaging. Jessie takes the infant to Donaldina Cameron at the Presbyterian mission. It’s the least she can do in memory of Zhu Wong, who had cared so much for the baby’s pathetic mother. Not that Jessie likes the Bible thumper, but who else will raise a Chinese girl with nothing but the clothes on her back in anything like decency?
That summer, Chee Song Tong escalates the war with Hop Sing Tong. On Bastille Day, an assassin hacks the eyepatch to death with a butterfly knife in Bartlett Alley. On that same day, Mr. Heald suffers a heart attack and dies alone in Sutter Hospital. Jessie’s new connection to the mayor’s office quadruples her civic contributions.
In September of 1896, Mariah invites Jessie to go with her to the National American Woman Suffrage Association meeting. It turns out that Mariah has been stealing away from the boardinghouse over the years to attend meetings of the local chapter. Jessie declines the invitation, pleading exhaustion, though secretly she believes Mariah’s friends won’t take kindly to her. During the rest of that autumn, Mariah works every spare moment she has on the committee supporting the state referendum for woman suffrage in California but, to her bitter disappointment, the measure is defeated.
In the spring of 1897, Mariah leaves San Francisco for good, having hoarded her salary in a savings account at Wells Fargo Bank. She returns to her family in Boston—Jessie never knew Mariah was from Boston—opens up her own boardinghouse, and begins to write for The Woman’s Era. She is appointed by Josephine St. Pierre Ruffin to be the treasurer of the National Federation of Afro-American Women, which in the summer of 1897 renames itself the National Association of Colored Women.
Short on cash in July of 1897, Jessie takes the aurelia down to Colonel Andrews’ Diamond Palace, intending to pawn the thing. The good colonel, supercilious as ever in his immaculate tuxedo and top hat, tells her the piece is old-fashioned and tenders a ridiculously low offer. Jessie tosses the aurelia into her handbag and stalks out, mightily displeased.
On Columbus Day of 1897, the police call Jessie down to the morgue to identify a blond prostitute who has been found beaten to death outside of Kelly’s. Jessie cannot positively tell if the thin poxy corpse is that of Li’l Lucy. The face is too disfigured, the arms riddled with needle tracks. If it is, Li’l Lucy didn’t live to see her twenty-first birthday.
Eight years after the turn of the century and endless trouble with the police, the clientele, the girls, and her unflagging appetites, Jessie learns that she is ill with liver cancer. It’s bad. Her doctor tells her she has a month, maybe two months, left to live.
And that is when Miss Jessie Malone, her face and bosom fallen, her waist excruciating beneath the corset that is still fashionably in style, deeply in debt, deeply in drink, and unable to rest by night or by day, goes up to Nine Twenty Sacramento Street.
The forbidding red brick edifice looks exactly as it always has.
Donaldina Cameron, much grayer and much more gaunt, answers the door.
“I got something,” Jessie says, wheezing from the uphill climb, “for the kid.”
“I will not let you near her,” Cameron says. “Not after what you did to her mother.”
“Miss Cameron,” Jessie says. “It’s her goddamn inheritance. I was keeping it safe for her mother. Sure and I don’t need it no more as I’m about to kick the bucket.”
Cameron’s eyes soften and she reluctantly lets the old