Third Girl from the Left by Martha Southgate

Author:Martha Southgate
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

14

IN 1954 CARMEN JONES WAS RELEASED AND DOROTHY Dandridge became the first black woman ever nominated for a best-actress Academy Award. She smiled from the cover of Life and Ebony, adorned in the finest designs, her skin the color of desire. The magazines praised her beauty and poise, her elegance and modesty. They didn’t write about the failed marriage to Harold Nicholas, the autistic daughter banished to an institution, the back doors she was forced to enter and the dining rooms she was not permitted to eat in, the pills, the sorrow that would eventually consume her. They wrote only about the exquisite surface. The week that Carmen Jones played at the Dreamland, Mildred walked to town every day while the children were in school and Johnny Lee was at work. One day, she asked a neighbor to take Angie to her afternoon kindergarten and then went to the early show and saw it twice. She didn’t tell anyone and the ticket taker figured it was none of his beeswax what she did. She sat there, barely breathing, watching the brilliant colors swirl about the frame and Dandridge sashay with the glory of the blessed through the center of the screen. Mildred cried every time she saw it. It was like being at church when everybody was singing and she couldn’t catch her breath. Like the dirt under her hands as she worked in the garden, the sun on her neck as she hung out the wash. Like the flowers by the roadside that made her long for a way to scoop the color up and keep it inside her.

She’d learned, after that day in 1921, that there was no time for dreaming or wondering, no time for listening for the fairies only you could hear scampering across the earth around you. You had to keep moving on, had to keep yourself in check. Keep everything neat. It couldn’t keep the terror away, but it kept your hands busy and your body busy so you didn’t just lie down in your sadness and not get up. So you didn’t fall into the sky, never to return. So she gave her family what she could, gave her husband, Johnny Lee, her order and affection, her children her presence and the occasional smile. But none of them knew that she was a person who would go see Carmen Jones six times in a week and cry every time. They didn’t know about the colors. And she didn’t know how to tell them.

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