An Excerpt from 'Slapstick Blues', by DC Diamondopolous
Booker La Croix liked nothing better than to put on his best hat, hitch a ride from Huddle Creek up to Baton Rouge, and spend his day off in a dark theatre watching the moving pictures. He paid his seven cents for the ticket, went around the side entrance, and climbed the steps to the balcony. The matinee featured his favorite, Buster Keaton, in The Balloonatic and Our Hospitality, and there would be short movies in-between. It’d be a whole afternoon of laughter, except when he looked over, wishing his sister to be sitting there next to him. With Lila Mae gone, his closest friends were books and the flickers.
His brother Jeremiah thought him crazy to spend his day off watching white folks. The youngest of five boys, Booker was always picked on. His brothers nicknamed him Booker for preferring to read over playing ball and sneaking shots of moonshine. They teased him for working in the parish library and laughed at him when he tried to slick back his hair with brilliantine like Rudolph Valentino, but nothing straightened his thick coiled hair.
He opened the door to the dark interior. The theatre still reeked of sulfur from vaudeville days when the audience threw eggs and tomatoes at bungling performers. His pa took him and Lila Mae back in 1910, when he was six and Lila Mae eight, old enough to hoot and holler at the singers and dancers, acrobats, and magicians. He recalled his favorite, monkeys on roller skates and the sounds of feet thumping across the wooden stage—all of it replaced by the magic of moving pictures.
Since the Odeon became a moving picture theatre, not once did he see another colored person in the balcony. Lila Mae said it was important to see how ofays lived. “Why?” Booker had asked. “Just is.” She hated white people and had good reason. But she loved the flickers as much as he did.
He looked over the ledge at the seats below. He saw children, women in gingham dresses with bow hats, and men in suits. A piano was in front of the stage where a woman would play background music while the pictures moved across the screen.
His shoes stuck to the tacky floor. He found his usual seat. It was a chair still hinged in the third row near the center. In the narrow gallery, he smelled the stench of stale piss. But as the lights dimmed, so did Booker’s resentment of having to sit in the buzzard roost ‘cause of his color. He tried to twist prejudice his way, that he was lucky to sit high above the others, alone and uninterrupted. And for a couple of hours he could escape and leave his blues somewhere next to nowhere.
The curtains pulled away, revealing the white screen. Booker leaned forward. A title card appeared, and the piano player struck the keys in a ragtime ditty. Booker eloped into the high jinx of Buster Keaton. He laughed, slapped his skinny thigh, and wondered if Lila Mae had seen the same moving picture.
The Balloonatic ended and then came a short flicker, another comedy, that drew a few chuckles. He slouched in the chair, critical of the less-than-funny moving picture he had just watched.
Booker was starting to doze when a woman appeared on the screen. She was lakeside, dressed in a bathing suit and had shoulder-length hair with a ribbon tied around it. Booker sat up. A title card appeared: “Want to go for a swim?” Three other girls in bathing suits ran to the lake’s edge. There was a close-up of the stunning woman who pushed one of the girls into the lake, and everyone, including the doused girl, doubled-over in laughter. Booker took off his hat and crushed it with his fists.
He sat through another showing of The Balloonatic just so he could see the short and the bathing beauty at the lake. He had to be certain—to make sure that it was his sister, Lila Mae.
For the second showing, he paid attention as the short opened. A card came on the screen with the words, “Famous Players-Lasky Corporation filmed in Hollywood, California.” When each actress appeared, so did her name in the lower right-hand corner. Lila Mae La Croix was now Bessie Blythe and passing for white.
Images flashed across the screen just like his emotions. He juggled rage and sadness, longing and disgust. How could Lila Mae, who watched as white men dragged poor Henry away, live as one of the very people she despised?
Booker yanked at the brim of his hat and slammed the side door as he went out the theatre. He ran down the steps and into the alley. He kept walking. Thinking.
Lila Mae was like the Mississippi. The tumultuous river flowed clear on top, but underneath was the muddy sludge of slavery not sixty years gone.
Booker and his family were a spectrum of colored hues ranging from dark to high yellow, but Lila Mae’s skin was as pale as if she’d been adopted. Their pa had teased, “This child better darken up or they gonna think we stole her.” “She jus’ come up French Creole,” their mama had said. “But she as African as me, ain’t no one gonna take her and nothin gonna change that.”
About the age of twelve, a change did happen. Outside of Huddle Creek, Lila Mae’s color was too risky for Booker and his brothers to be seen with. So she walked alone.
Several years back, when they had gone to the Odeon, Booker’s pride did him in. He insisted that they walk together like any brother and sister. They paid for their tickets and went around the theatre to the alley when two punks jumped him. Lila Mae hit the men, screaming, “He’s my brother! You fuckers! Leave him alone!” When they were through with Booker, they turned to Lila Mae. Through swollen eyes, Booker saw her fear—a fear colored women knew well. He took coins from his pocket and threw them at the men. As they stooped to pick them up, Booker grabbed his sister and they ran up the stairs and into the theatre.
When they got home that night and his parents saw his face, he told them it was his doing, but Lila Mae got a good yelling. She shouted back, mad as any she-devil he had read about.
As Lila Mae grew into her teens and as pretty as any moving picture star, she met Henry. One day, they went on a picnic along the bayou. A gang of men came upon them and lynched Henry for being with a white girl, so they said, or maybe they didn’t need a reason. Lila Mae had screamed and shouted, “I’m colored. Leave him alone!” She said Henry had yelled, “Run, Lila Mae, run. I’ll be coming baby.” She did. She ran all the way home sobbing, tearing into the house and telling her brothers to go help Henry. By the time they got there, he’d been strung up. Wasn’t enough to hang him, they had to set him afire too. When told what happened, Lila Mae went hysterical, ranted for days, cried for weeks. She clutched Henry’s pendant that hung on a chain around her neck like it was part of him. Nothing consoled her and not one thing was done to the men for lynching Henry.
Lila Mae had enough hurt to set the world off its axis. It wasn’t her fault, but the neighbors, the relatives and his own family, looked on her like a troublemaker.
One morning a couple of months after the lynching, Booker heard screaming, bawling, and drawers slamming. It sounded like the whole house would come down from the pain within. He dressed and went out on the porch to see his sister crying, suitcase in hand. Mama sobbed. Pa wiped tears off his cheeks. Stoic Jeremiah tried to keep his mouth from twitching.
Booker picked up the luggage and walked with his sister down the dirt road along the railroad tracks that led out of Huddle Creek to the train depot. Lila Mae cursed something fierce. She was furious at Mama and Pa, livid with the white world, angry at her kin, angry at God, just plain angry.
She was so heartbroken that she left him at the parish limits without saying good- bye. He told her he loved her, but her temper was so vicious he didn’t think she heard.
She was walking the dusty road when she dropped her suitcase, turned, and ran back to Booker. She hugged him and kissed him on the forehead and cheek. “Get out of the South, Booker. Go to Harlem. Join our brothers. Keep your nose clean.” “Is that where you’re going?” he asked. “Maybe, maybe not.” Lila Mae was as double-edged as her color. She left, leaving him with a hurt as big as hers.
Before paved streets turned to dirt roads, Booker thought about hitching a ride home, but the walking stretched his muscles, and his reflections stirred compassion.
He trudged along marshy roads that ran along the swamps. Birds sang to each other, and insects hissed and swarmed. He came upon a group of men hauling logs onto trucks, sweat gleaming off their dark skin, making it shine something beautiful.
Booker planned one day to leave, join his brothers in New York, get a job, go to college, hang out at speakeasies, and listen to jazz. He would join the New Negro Movement and had dreams of becoming a writer.
Booker would keep his sister’s secret. When he had enough money, he’d be leaving, but going west to Hollywood, California.
You can read the entirety of this story in the collection Stepping Up.
DC Diamondopolous is an award-winning short story, and flash fiction writer with over 300 stories published internationally in print and online magazines, literary journals, and anthologies. DC's stories have appeared in: Penmen Review, Progenitor, 34th Parallel, So It Goes: The Literary Journal of the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library, Lunch Ticket, and others. DC was nominated twice in 2020 for the Pushcart Prize and in 2020 and 2017 for Sundress Publications’ Best of the Net. DC’s short story collection Stepping Up is published by Impspired. She lives on the California central coast with her wife and animals. dcdiamondopolous.com
Photography by Marcelo Chagas