I'm Glad I Did (14 page)
Authors: Cynthia Weil
“What the hell could that be about?” I asked. “What did she find out?”
Luke put down the page and shoved his carton of food aside. “The worst is yet to come,” he muttered. “She hasn't even met George and Bernie yet.”
“I know.” I bit my lip. “Do you want to stop for a while? I'm a little afraid to go on reading.”
He shook his head. “I'm more afraid not to.”
I nodded. We closed the unfinished containers of Chinese food as the skies darkened outside. The next chapter was called “Getting Out.”
After Lincoln left for college, Marcus Waters became the new quarterback at school. He was handsome and a great athlete, but any resemblance to Lincoln ended there. Marcus was a bad boy, the boy you would least like your daughter to be with. He did everything he wasn't supposed to do. He smoked, he drank, he fooled around with something called dust. In whatever spare time he had, he broke every heart in sight
.
Annie Mae warned me that he was trouble and she would take a strap to me if I ever took up with him. But he was so fine, I couldn't help myself. Every girl in school wanted to be with him, and he wanted me. Before Annie Mae could even figure out what was happening, Marcus and me were doing everything together, and I mean everything
.
That winter I found out I was pregnant. The summer before my sophomore year I had a baby girl. I was fifteen, a year younger than my mama was when she had me. To carry on the family tradition of desertion, Marcus and his family moved away. Annie Mae swore she'd track him to wherever he moved to and beat him to death with her broom. When I told her not to bother, that I never expected him to stick around, she considered taking the broom to me. But she reconsidered when she realized that if I wasn't around, she'd have to take care of the baby herself
.
I named my little girl Rosetta after a singer I saw at a revival meeting. She played guitar and sang in a way that made people cry. She bared her soul with every note. She might have been the bravest woman I ever laid eyes on
.
It was then I realized what I had to do. That woman made me understand that if I was going to do right by my
baby, if I was going to get out of the lifeless life I was living, my voice was the only weapon I had to fight my way out of nowhere
.
“She was right about that,” Luke said, glancing up. “What else could she count on?”
“Nothing,” I murmured.
After that the pace of the writing picked up. It was as if Dulcie wanted to race through that part of her life because it was so painful. It was full of misspellings and sentences that ran on and on, but it sang with the passion that consumed her, the passion to break away from the legacy of failure passed down by the women in her family.
Dulcie had to quit school to take care of Rosetta because Annie Mae insisted that she pay room and board as if she were a tenant, not family. The new mother and her grandmother were at each other's throats most of the time. Dulcie sang at clubs in Raleigh and Charlotte and as far away as Nashville and Knoxville. She graduated from bad boys to bad men. She was hurt and discarded, undervalued and underpaid, used and misused, but she kept on working with any band she could at night, improving her voice and repertoire. It was the only way she could pay Annie Mae and still be home every day to take care of Rosetta.
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 girlâbut 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.”
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.