“Sure.”
“You have any brothers or sisters?”
“I thought your husband checked me out.”
Lace shook her head slightly in a kind of small apology. “I almost forgot. You grew up in an orphanage, didn’t you?”
Durant nodded.
“You and Mr. Wu?”
“Yes.”
“What’s it like, growing up without knowing who your folks are?”
“You usually get used to it.”
“And if you don’t?”
“Then you invent something.”
“Like Mr. Wu?”
“He didn’t invent anything.”
“You mean he’s really the pretender to the Emperor’s throne?”
Durant nodded slowly. “When he needs to be, he is.”
There was a silence for a moment as Lace examined Durant’s answer. “I think I understand what you’re saying,” she said after a moment.
Durant smiled. “Maybe you do.”
“But Silk,” she said. “To understand Silk I reckon you’d have to understand how we grew up.” She started putting out her barely smoked cigarette in an ashtray. She did it carefully, turning it into a painstaking task as she thought about what she was going to say. “We grew up poor on eighty acres in the Arkansas Ozarks that my papa called the Black Mountain Folk School. My husband always calls it the bomb-throwing school.”
“Was it?”
Lace smiled. “No. My papa was a socialist and a preacher, but looking back on it now, I reckon that what he was most of all was a teacher. He thought there had to be some place in the United States that taught all the things that were dying out. You know, folklore and crafts. Things like how to make a chair out of white oak splits. How to cure the itch with just sulfur and lard. How to cure a bee sting with mashed ragweed. How to build a log cabin, even. How to cook possum. You ever eat possum?”
“Never.”
“It’s good — if you cook it right. The head’s the best part. When we were little, Ivory, Silk, and I’d fight over who got the head. You eat everything but the eyes. Well, anyway, during the Depression when Papa was still single he traveled all over the South preaching wherever he could, but mostly back in the mountains, and he learned all this stuff and wrote a lot of it down. And songs, too. He collected songs. He could play almost any instrument there was, and of course, he never had a lesson in his life. And sing! He had one of those big old fine country church baritones that you could hear damn near over in Joplin. ‘Loud, girls,’ is what he used to tell us. ‘Folks don’t care much what you sing as long as you sing it good and loud.’ ” She stopped and smiled at Durant. “Maybe you remember how we used to sing.”
Durant smiled back. “Good,” he said, “and loud.”
“Well, anyway, Papa wound up in Arkansas in 1940 when he was about thirty-two or — three, I reckon. He had this idea for a folk school even then, so when he met Mama he set to courting her, not just because she was the prettiest girl in three counties, but also because she just happened to own an eighty-acre farm that her folks had died and left her. Well, they got married and Papa founded the school.”
“Who came to it?” Durant said.
“That’s the funny part. Mostly city people came. Papa had the idea that it’d be mostly country folks, but not many of them seemed too interested. Then word sort of got around and people started coming from the cities — New York especially, Chicago, Boston, Saint Louis, all over. After a while, even some college professors. Of course, almost nobody ever had enough noney to pay the whole tuition, although, God knows, it wasn’t much. But that didn’t bother Papa as long as they could pay just some, or if they couldn’t even do that, well, he’d let them help out around the school. Those who did come then were talkers, and sometimes I think Silk must have listened to every word.”
“Even as a child?” Durant said.
“Even then. She drank it in. And then in early 1960, well, she and] Vorv and I sang at that fair in Fort Smith and Don Pennington heard us signed us up with Papa’s blessing and we became Ivory, Lace, and Silk and that fall, just before Papa died, we went on the Sullivan show and after that you know what happened. We got rich and famous.”
“You were very good,” Durant said. “Some of those songs were tremendous.”
“That was Ivory. She wrote all of our really good ones. She was actually a poet, I suppose, and terribly shy. Silk had the brains and the voice, and I... well, I always sang loud and wanted to be someone else, which is how I wound up in films, I reckon. I don’t know, but sometimes I think that if it hadn’t been for Vietnam, we’d all still be back in Arkansas.”
“But you were doing well in the early ’60s, before anyone really gave a damn about Vietnam.”
“We were singing pure folk then. All those old songs that Papa had collected over the years. Then in ’63 Ivory wrote that song about Kennedy after he got killed, and after that we really took off. Funny when you think about it — how we made all that money off of assassination and war. I think that’s what really got to Ivory finally. She just couldn’t do it anymore. So we broke it up, and Silk went on as a single and really got into the antiwar movement, and Ivory — well, you know what happened to Ivory.”
“Yes,” Durant said. “I’m sorry. Would you like some more coffee?”
“I sure would,” she said.
Durant rose, picked up the cups, and started for the kitchen, but paused. “How’d your sister meet the Congressman?” he said, and went on into the kitchen.
Lace Armitage raised her voice a little. “He used to be a cop, you know.”
“So I recall,” Durant said, pouring two more cups of coffee. He came back into the living room and handed her one of the mugs. “I don’t think I got them mixed up.” He sat back down on the couch. “Floyd Ranshaw, the singing cop — wasn’t that what they called him?”
“He wasn’t bad, either,” she said. “Not good, but not bad. He sang his way through college, club dates, weddings, what have you, and then joined the cops in Pelican Bay and became the youngest lieutenant in its history — the padrón of the East Side. It’s almost pure ghetto over there, you know. Part black, part Chicano, part poor white. And he knew them all. Or a lot of them, anyhow, and they liked him because he was honest and fair, and on Saturday night he had this radio program where he’d sing, play the music they liked, and take calls from anybody who wanted to bitch about something. City Hall didn’t bother him because he didn’t interfere with their graft, and besides, he was helping keep the East Side quiet. Well, in 1968 the Congressman from that district up and died, and Ranshaw decided to run. He didn’t have any money, and there were fifteen in the race. But he came in second, and so they had to have a runoff. The man who came in first was the pet of City Hall. Well, just ten days before the runoff election Ranshaw came up with a briefcase full of solid evidence that could’ve put his opponent away for twenty years. Or so they say. Well, there was a quiet meeting and the opponent withdrew four days before the election for reasons of ill health and Ranshaw found himself elected.”
“Where’d your sister meet him?”
“At an antiwar rally in Washington in ’72. Somebody came up with the cute idea of having Silk and the Congressman sing a protest song together. Well, you know how those things go. They started seeing each other, and then the Congressman left his wife, and he and Silk set up light housekeeping about a year ago, sometimes in Washington, sometimes out here. She was mostly working Vegas and New York at the time. Then something happened in Pelican Bay and the Congressman started spending more and more time out here.”