China Doll
What China Doll remembers from before they met her father is being sick and being carried from place to place, sleeping in a strange spot, often not a bed, almost every night and often the music and voices loud from the next room. If it was her mother singing it was easier to sleep, knowing for sure she was still out there. They said it was rheumatic fever and that it could kill her so she shouldn’t be running around with the other kids or worry her heart about anything. Mostly her knees and elbows hurt really bad. Staying in away from the other kids gave her lots of time to sit alone and dream up stories, some of them about the places she might go and things she might do and others about good things that could happen. One of her favorites was about a big, nice, handsome man who would come to marry her mother and be her father and all of a sudden there he was.
At first she was supposed to call him “Mr. Pinetop” or just “Sir” but once, after he’d been around for awhile but before they left Shreveport for Alabama and there was the wedding she called him Daddy and was afraid it was a mistake but he just turned and said “What is it, baby?”. She has worked extra hard in school, has helped out as much as she can at the club to make him proud of her and he never gets impatient when her weak heart slows her down. Most important of all, before him her mother was sad all the time, not just when she was singing about it but all the time, and now she’s not.
China Doll likes to work with hair and likes how different it is on everybody’s head, likes how different the people are, and likes to think of herself doing heads all over the country and maybe out in the world beyond it. She knows the local boys too well from school and now the older ones from how they act when they come into the Honeydripper, and she is not impressed. She’d like to skip past the being sad all the time part and go right to where she meets the big, nice, handsome man. He doesn’t have to be a musician, but it wouldn’t hurt.
