Free Diary of a Blues Goddess by Erica Orloff Page A

floor. "It's a secret compartment, Dominique. Pull up your slipper and see if it will loosen the board." I urged her.
    She removed her foot from her heeled slipper and tried to pry up the board. It wouldn't fully budge, so she used her fingernail—for about two seconds. "All right. I love you all, but I'm not breaking my nail over a ghost, Georgia Ray. These are a fresh acrylic set, girlfriend."
    "I'll go get a nail file," I said and rushed down the hall to my room, grabbing one from my basket of manicure supplies and racing back, not wanting to be in the hallway alone.
    I pried up the board, with Nan, Jack and Dominique leaning over me. In the hole in the floor, I saw what looked like dusty papers. After shuddering about sticking my hand down into cobwebs, I pulled out two old photos of Nan and her sister, Irene.
    "Nan… it's you," I whispered, handing her the pictures.
    "Will you look at this?" Nan said in amazement, staring at the pictures tenderly.
    "Who'd hide them in here?" I looked down into the dusty hole. "And there's something else." I reached in and pulled out a small package in brown paper and wrapped with twine. I handed it to Nan. She blew the dust off it, unwound the twine and opened the package. Inside was a leather-bound book. She opened it up, and her eyes immediately filled with tears.
    "I can't, Georgia." She handed it to me. "I can't look at this."
    A cold chill fell over me, like a January breeze had whooshed through the room. I opened the front cover. In a woman's tiny handwriting were the words:
     
    The Journal of Honey Walker, year of 1939
     
    "Who's Honey Walker?" Jack asked.
    "My great-aunt Irene. Nan's sister. Honey Walker was her stage name. This was her journal? Did you know she kept one?" I looked at Nan, who shook her head sadly.
    "Georgia, I had no idea."
    "What happened to her?" Dominique asked. She was kneeling. I plopped down on the floor cross-legged next to Jack. Nan sat down in a brocade-covered rocking chair.
    "Irene was five years older than I. We were as close as two sisters could be. But she always had… a sadness about her. Maybe it was that I could pass for white, and she couldn't. Her skin was your color, Dominique. She was just beautiful, but at a time when black
wasn't
beautiful. Far from it. Especially in this city. Everything was measured by how much black you had in you. Octoroon. Quadroon. For just how much of a fraction of you were black, and how black your mama or your grandma was. We both had the same mama, the same father. Just how we came out, I guess."
    "Honey was a singer. A blues singer. Very good." Nan rocked back, remembering. "She just had a way about her that… she was magnificent." Nan looked down at us, her brown eyes grief-filled. "Irene had always been out on the road. Singing. She just up and left when she was of age, left with a man who claimed he could make her a star. Then one year, she came here for the holidays. Just showed up on the doorstep, thin as a rail and tired. Well, of course, I took her in and we just picked up where we left off. She was here for New Year's, 1939, and several months of that year. Then she just disappeared."
    "What do you mean, disappeared?" I asked.
    "One morning I woke up and her bedroom—that was your room, of course, Georgia Ray—was empty. All her things gone. Packed up in the middle of the night and left. And she didn't even leave me a note. Nothing. I never heard from her again."
    "You never told me that, Nan."
    "It still breaks my heart, Georgia. It wasn't but some time after Sadie died. It was a very difficult year for me. When I look back on my life, that year and the months after your grandfather died and then… of course, when your mother died were the hardest times of my life—and I've lived a long time."
    "So whatever happened to her?" Dominique asked.
    "I got word a few years later that she had died. It was all very vague. She passed in her sleep, and I never knew whether it was suicide or just tiredness