“Not another goddamn shoeshine boy and his jive dance!” He pointed to a scene in the script. “Clayton Strong is right, Cecil B. DeMille needs a couple of Nubian kings, and a lot of slaves to build the goddamned pyramids, but otherwise?” He pointed to the page. “Where are we? Chopping cotton and singing ‘My Old Kentucky Home.’ We’re prim Aunt Jemimas or cuddly Uncle Toms, or kids doing tap dances for an extra nickel from ‘de good ole white gentleman.’”

I glanced at the scene on the page, seeing it suddenly with new eyes. No wonder Terrence’s life wasn’t reflected in film.

“Your Church of Rick and Ilsa, it’s the Beverly Hills Country Club. Whites Only.”

“One day movies won’t be like that.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“Really? You think one day you’ll find a screenwriter who’ll tell a story like Up from Slavery? Like James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son?”

These were books I’d only just read this summer—writers, honestly, I had only heard of since I’d met Terrence, never mind the private schools and Mills College. “Why don’t you write something that powerful? That true. No, really. You write it, Terrence. I’ll sell it.”

He scoffed. “You really think your granddaddy would buy a script by a black man? That any of your people—I mean it, Liza—from those Poverty Row cats, to the head of Paramount—would any of them produce a script by a man who looked like me?”

“We could say someone else wrote it, put another name on it. No one would have to know. Happens all the time.” I looked at him expectantly.

His expression suddenly changed, and his eyes narrowed. “Do you have some secret, Liza Jane—I mean other than the secret we’re keeping right here, right now? The two of us.”

I went back to the kitchen, turned off the stove, poured us both a stiff drink, and sat on the couch, my feet in his lap, while I told him the whole story, not just about Max and Thelma and Kathleen Hilyard coming to me, but the whole long story about the men whose names were on the movie posters in this living room. I told him who had died or fled the country or been shamed or professionally maimed, everything I had not told him that first day. Full dark had fallen by the time I finished.

Terrence stood and paced. He was a restless sort of man. “I gotta ask, why did you do it, Roxanne? I don’t mean finding fronts for your old friends, I dig it, you got gumption, girl. No, I mean, why take Max’s work to Leon?”