I'm Glad I Did Read online

She kept on this way until Rosetta turned six and was old enough to go to school. Dulcie hated doing what she had to do next, but she rationalized that there was no other way if they were to stand a chance. If they were ever to get out of the rut they were in. Besides, abandonment had been seared into her soul. Part of her believed it was her destiny to commit the same crime. So she took off for New York City, leaving Rosetta with Annie Mae.

  It was 1942, the war was on, and I was singing at Minton’s Playhouse on 118th Street in Harlem. A cat I knew from home named Thelonius Monk was the keyboard player, and he got me the gig with the house band. They even learned a few of my songs and let me sing them. I was barely getting by, missing Rosetta and feeling ready to throw in the towel, when one night a cool blond dude with crazy green eyes asked me to join him at his table.

  That man was George Silver.

  George brought me over to meet his partner, Bernie Rubin. They were starting a music publishing and management company, and they were interested in signing me. They told me that they liked my songs and my sound and thought they could get me a record deal. Nobody else was busting down my door, so I said okay.

  The next day I signed a whole bunch of papers they gave me. Then I played them every song I’d written. The two of them kept smiling at each other. Then they took me out and bought me some really nice dresses and shoes. Once I was all dolled up, they brought me over to sing at a record company. George was especially nice to me. I liked him better than Bernie, who was a little bit gruff. Within a couple of weeks they had a session booked for me for a song I hadn’t written called “Swing Time.”

  I didn’t like it too much, but George said the record company told them that I had to record it. The bosses there told George and Bernie that colored girls like Ella never sang their own songs, so I shouldn’t either. What they didn’t tell me was that the record company owned the publishing rights to the song they loved so much. That’s why they loved it. They were going to collect all the money if it was a hit.

  It wasn’t a hit, and Bernie got all crazy, ranting and raving that my songs were better. George had to calm him down. George was the only person in the world that Bernie would ever listen to. I think he could have calmed down a pack of werewolves if he just talked to them. He was the most charming man I’d ever met.

  Before you know it, he had charmed me. I really liked him. In fact, I more than liked him. He had a tiny limp, because when he was a kid he’d broken his leg, and it was set wrong. That made him 4F, and it also made him seem even more special. He was a very tender man.

  I felt pretty bad about the record being a bomb. George was the only one who knew why I was so sad, why I couldn’t bounce back. He knew what the record meant to me. It wasn’t about becoming a star. It was about being able to bring my little girl to live with me.

  One night he came to the club alone and walked me home with his arm around my shoulder. People stared to see a white man walking like that with a colored girl, and some of them said mean things, but he didn’t care. He came upstairs and we talked. After that, I guess you could say we made beautiful music together. That was how my falling in love with him began.

  I turned to Luke. The sun had long since set. Dulcie’s pages and Luke’s troubled face were only illuminated by the green shaded desk lamp across the room.

  “Wow,” I said. “George and Dulcie. Did you know about that?”

  “No, I didn’t.” Luke’s eyes and voice were distant. “That must have been before he met my mother.”

  “Was your mom a singer?” I asked.

  “Yeah, a background singer. Her name was Gina La Russo. She died right after I was born. Dad never talked about her very much. Just said she was a good woman and very talented. He thought I looked like her, but I never saw it.”

  “Did you ever see a picture of her?”

  Luke pulled a black-and-white snapshot out of his wallet. To tell you the truth, it looked almost like a prop, like the kind of photo a manufacturer puts in a wallet to show people how neatly photos fit in. Luke’s mom had dark curly hair. To me, she looked like a pretty Spanish or Italian girl—but aside from the hair, I agreed with him; they didn’t look alike at all.

  “She’s pretty,” I said.

  “I guess,” Luke answered. He shoved his wallet back into his pocket and picked up the stack of papers where we’d left off.

  Bernie knew about George and me. It was hard to keep it a secret. He could tell by the way I looked at George. He told us both to just keep it quiet. We were something no one wanted to talk about.

  Once when I went to drop a demo off at George’s apartment building on Central Park West, they told me to go up in the service car. They just assumed that I was the maid. Instead of making a fuss, that’s what I did. I knew we had no future. But I couldn’t stop seeing him because he was my manager, and I couldn’t stop loving him because he was George.

  My career was going nowhere until I played George and Bernie a song I wrote called “Good Love Gone Bad.” They both got excited. I was so glad because I was excited, too. Something about it felt special and right for me. They said they were sure it was a hit.

  Things didn’t go smoothly, though. It almost didn’t get made. George and Bernie had to fight with the record company and convince them to let me record it. I was the writer of the words and music, and George and Bernie’s company published it, and both of them produced the record. That meant they hired the arranger and told everyone in the studio what to do. When it was all done, they had me sing a song the record company president wrote to put on the B side, and somehow with that they managed to satisfy everyone.

  And everything just got better. George and Bernie were right. The record of “Good Love Gone Bad” was a smash hit.

  It went all the way to number one on every chart in Billboard and Cashbox.

  First time I heard my voice on the radio singing my own song. I almost cried from happiness. The first time I saw my name on a marquee, I jumped up and down like a little girl.

  And the first time someone recognized me on the street and asked for my autograph, I almost fainted.

  George told me I should treat myself to something nice. He knew I didn’t understand banking and money, but he made sure I had everything I needed whenever I needed it. First thing I did was send the Ebenezer Baptist Church a brand-new organ, and I made sure Annie Mae knew it was from me. I had a little gold plaque made and attached it to the side where the congregation could see it. It said, This organ is a gift from Dulcina Brown, granddaughter of Annie Mae Brown, organist of the Ebenezer Baptist Church.

  Then my life in New York got crazy because the record company and my managers wanted me to go on the road and work and make money. I wanted to stay home and write and be with George. The road was hell. Everything down south was segregated. The trains had colored only and whites only cars. I traveled with a piano player, and he hired musicians in the different towns we played in. I got to come back to New York only when the record company decided they wanted me to record again.

  I didn’t care, though. I was just happy to be back with George. I kept promising myself that I’d bring Rosetta up to live with me as soon as my life got settled.

  Then I started feeling sick. I was tired all the time. It was summertime, and New York was hot as hell, and I figured that’s why.

  But it wasn’t. I was pregnant.

  We kept it hidden for as long as we could. Then George pulled me off the road. He and Bernie made up this story about how I’d gotten into a car accident and needed time to recover. I had a feeling Bernie hated me after that. He hated me for not getting an abortion. He knew these doctors who would do it. But George wanted our child as badly as I did, even though we knew we’d never be able to raise it together.

  All of a sudden, Luke drew in a sharp breath. He doubled over as if in pain. “Oh, my God,” he said in a terrible whisper. “Oh, my God.” He dropped the page he was reading and buried his face in his hands.

  “Luke? What is it?”
My heart started pounding. I picked up the page, but before I could read it, he lifted his head and looked at me, his eyes watering. His olive skin had turned sallow.

  “My dad lied. He lied …” The words stuck in his throat, but he forced himself to speak. “He never told me who I really was. Not even when he knew he was going to die. Don’t you see, JJ? It’s written right there. Dulcie Brown was my mother.”

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  What do you do when you find out you aren’t who you thought you were? When you find out that the person you trusted most in the world lied to you? When your life collapses around you?

  And how do you help someone when all these things happen at once?

  I had no answers for any of these questions, and no one to ask, as I looked into Luke’s ravaged eyes. Everything he had taken for granted had been ripped away from him, gone the instant he read the words that came next on that page.

  Our baby boy, Luke, was born December 10, 1944, at Lenox Hill Hospital.

  I didn’t know what to do, so I did what came naturally. I put my arms around him and held him close. We sat that way for a very long time. Neither of us said a word. There were no words to say.

  My mind spun with thoughts of Dulcie. All the what ifs. What if I had decided to tell her the name of the lyricist? That the words she loved, the song she had sung had been written by Luke Silver, her son? What would she have done? Would she have admitted the truth to Luke, or would she have continued to hide the fact of who he was and who she was to him? Could she have found out somehow? Could it have been a factor in her taking her own life? But no, only he and I knew.

  I glanced at my watch. It was almost eight thirty. Eleven o’clock suddenly seemed very close.

  Finally Luke pulled away from me. “I have to keep reading,” he said, his voice hoarse. “You don’t have to stay.”

  “I want to stay,” I told him. “We can’t stop now.”

  Our baby boy, Luke, was born on December 10, 1944, at Lenox Hill Hospital. I knew there was no way we could raise him together. In the south, there were still separate waiting rooms and ticket windows in bus stations for Negroes and whites, and it was even illegal for them to just live together. In New York City, segregation wasn’t that out in the open, but the races were not supposed to mix. It wasn’t even until two years later that Jackie Robinson would be hired to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers baseball team.

  George and I had created a person together out of our love, but we had made a child who had no real place in the world. So we came up with a plan. It tore my heart out, but it was the only thing we could do. Although my name was on the birth certificate as the mother, George promised me he’d get one with another name on it. We agreed that I would be able to visit Luke but would never tell him who I was. I would just be a friend of his father.

  If his skin remained light enough, he would never know that his mother was a Negro. If his skin turned dark, George would tell him he was adopted. I prayed he would look like George and never know the pain of being a colored person.

  We were lucky that George had enough money and connections to take care of everything that needed to be taken care of. He found a false “mother” and got the birth certificate altered. The woman was a white backup singer he had known for years who was dying from a brain tumor. It was tragic and wrong of us, but she never even knew. She passed away four weeks to the day after Luke was born.

  Maybe I was wrong, too, in keeping my son’s heritage a secret. I was not ashamed of who he was, and neither was George, but the world was not ready for him. It still may not be, even as I write this in the year 1962, but I pray every night that soon that day will come. I hope I live long enough to see it so I can take Luke in my arms and tell him how much his mother loves him and has always loved him.

  Luke sat there without making a sound. I held out my hand and he took it. There was no one in the world but the two of us. Even if eleven o’clock came and went, I knew I wouldn’t abandon him if he weren’t ready to be left alone, no matter what the price I paid at home.

  “I don’t remember her ever coming to see me,” he murmured. “I wonder if she did.”

  “I don’t think we remember much of anything before we’re three. Actually, my mother told me that when she was arguing some case where it was brought into evidence.” I sighed. “Dulcie might have come before then.”

  “Maybe she’ll tell us.” He picked up the remaining stack of pages.

  I ached for my children, the one I’d left behind and the one I could never hold, and I hated my life. I hated having to hide my relationship with the man I loved. I couldn’t come up with anything that sounded like a hit song, so I felt I was letting George down. The record company was driving him and Bernie nuts, pressuring them for another hit. Bernie knew about Luke, of course, so he understood why I couldn’t concentrate. But he wasn’t exactly sympathetic. Bernie was all business and told me I had to write a follow-up to “Good Love Gone Bad” and record it, or the record buying public would forget me.

  “Get off your beautiful ass and get the job done,” he used to say.

  I wanted to do what he said. I wanted it more than I’d even wanted that first hit. When I finally wrote another song that everyone liked, I didn’t know whether we’d waited too long to release it. Or maybe it just wasn’t as good as we thought it was. It barely crawled onto the charts and hung there by its fingertips. Each record after that did a little worse, and I began feeling a lot worse about myself.

  One night after a session, one of the musicians saw how low I was and offered me some of that dust that Marcus used to use. This cat called it nose candy. “Take a snort,” he said. “You’ll feel better, and you won’t get hooked.” So I thought, Why not? I needed relief from this feeling inside, this ache that wouldn’t fade.

  I did feel better for a little while, he was right about that. But that’s all he was right about.

  I glanced at Luke, unsure of how he would feel about reading about the intimate details of his mother’s slide into drug addiction. He picked up the pace, skimming a little, but he never stopped handing the pages to me.

  Dulcie went on about how she began to depend on cocaine to pick her up when she was down and how she would crash after the cocaine wore off, so the cycle would begin again. She always needed more to pick her up. She hit up George for cash. She threw fits when he refused to feed her habit by not giving her money. She knew she was behaving badly, not showing up for shows or record sessions on time or in such bad shape that her voice sounded “like sandpaper,” but she couldn’t help herself. She couldn’t stop.

  When the record company dropped her, Bernie flipped out. He said George could handle her alone. Bernie was done with Dulcie Brown, and even George forbade her to see Luke while she was using. He thought that might get her to quit. But not being able to see her son just made her feel so terrible that she used even more. Finally, George was unable to get her a deal, unable to book her, and ultimately unable to deal with the junkie she had become. In the end, he gave up like Bernie and refused to manage her—although he continued to give her money to keep her from starving or becoming homeless.

  It was now 1951. Sweet Dulcie Brown thought she’d lost everything she had to lose.

  I don’t remember much of the next few years, but in 1952 or early ’53, I was singing at a dive up in Harlem. To tell you the truth, I was not doing that much singing. What I was doing a lot of was sitting with customers, pushing cheap champagne and occasionally going home with one of them. I was a mess. When I had cocaine, I was on a manic high, and when I didn’t have it, I was so far down the gutter looked like up to me.

  That was the year my sixteen-year-old baby girl, Rosetta, decided to run away from home and come to visit me. Her timing couldn’t have been worse. She came to find the mother she dreamed about all her life, someone who would open loving arms and hold her close. She deserved a mother like that. But I couldn’t take care of myself, much less take care of her.

  For
as long as I live, I’ll have to live with the look in her eyes when I gave her a bus ticket back to North Carolina and dropped her off at the Greyhound Station. I don’t know if she took that bus, but I know that I lost her back then. I wish I could go back and talk to that girl. To tell her that today, after four years of being clean, I am ready to be the mother she wanted. Maybe I still can make things right. I only hope I’m not too late.

  Luke rubbed his eyes. He looked drained.

  “Those are the words of someone with a plan for the future,” I said. Then I bit my lip, wondering if I’d said the wrong thing. Luke had every reason to be enraged at both his father and his mother. He had every reason to toss her manuscript and her memory into the garbage, along with his father’s paper trail of fraud and deception.

  “You’re right.” Luke said, his voice weary. “I don’t believe Dulcie killed herself, and if she didn’t, I want to find out what really happened to her.”

  I stared at him a moment. “You’re really brave,” I whispered.

  “You think?” he asked with a sad half-smile. “Because right now I feel scared to death.”

  “Listen, Luke,” I told him, “I’m with you on this. I need to know what happened to her, too. I hadn’t known her that long, but there was something … I loved her. That’s as plain as I can put it. I loved the Dulcie I knew.”

  Luke looked into my eyes. It seemed as if he had aged a few years in just a few hours. He took my hand. “We haven’t known each other very long either,” he said softly. “But I don’t know what I would have done without you tonight.”

  All I could do was nod in agreement. The truth was, I was scared to death, too. Not only of what I’d find out about Dulcie, but of what I felt for Luke Silver.

  “Then we’re in this together?” Luke whispered in the silence.

  “You don’t know how together,” I breathed as I squeezed his hand back. Afraid of what I’d do if I lingered an instant longer, I let go and stood. “Now, I gotta get home by eleven, or I turn into a bagel.”