Naleighna Kai's Literary Cafe Magazine January 2018 New Year, New You | Page 77

Don’t Blame the Devil
by Pat G’Orge-Walker
Chapter One - The Beginning before there was a Delilah
N
ine months ago she was the darling of the Apollo Theater. A gorgeous
R&B chanteuse and often mistaken for a Dorothy Dandridge look-a-
like. Nine months ago Claudine Dupree-Jewel was someone on the verge of
stardom because she’d made it into the downtown Manhattan nightclub scene.
Downtown was where the white folks with money and connections migrated and
played the queen-making game for some lucky Negress.
Nine months later Claudine was an angry fame chasing and maternally
lacking, pregnant and unmarried, nineteen year-old.
It was 1947 and it came to a head during a snow blizzard in Westchester
County, New York. She’d never completed high school and barely existing on the
little money she’d made and saved before she began to show. Nobody would hire
a big belly singer no matter how good the singer was.
In no time she the money dwindled. Claudine didn’t’t have money for the
crowded vermin-infested room she’d rented and barely enough to pay for a
bus ride. But Claudine had what she called Street Smarts, so she made a plan.
She couldn’t’t afford prenatal care so she’d just simply planned to wait until a
few days from when Mother Luke; an elderly church mother who rented one
of the other cockroach motel rooms, suggested she’d give birth go to a nearby
emergency room.
But Mother Luke’s old custom of placing a hand on the belly and sizing up
the dark line that ran from the navel to the pubic hairline wasn’t’t quite scientific
enough. If the pains that racked Claudine’s back meant the baby was coming,
then the old church mother was off by a couple of weeks.
So armed with just enough bus fare and towels crammed into her underwear
to catch the birth water she stood crushed between others who didn’t’t care if she
were pregnant or not. Twenty minutes later, a young and alone Claudine Dupree-
Jewel barely made it across the street after she’d stepped off the bus. Within fifteen
minutes after arriving and some ignorant doctor yelling, “Don’t push,” while the
blizzard howled louder covering her screams, she gave birth in a small hospital
labor room in Mount Vernon, New York. Shortly after since she’d registered as a
charity case and the bed needed for paying patients, there’d been not too subtle
hints tossed her way indicating that her stay would be short.
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