Jazz (11 page)

For fourteen years Joe listened to these stories and laughed. But he resisted them too, until, abruptly, he changed his mind. No one, not even Violet, knew what it was that permitted him to leave his fields and woods and secret lonely valleys. To give away his fishing pole, his skinning knife—every piece of his gear but one, and borrow a suitcase for their things. Violet never knew what it was that fired him up and made him want—all of a sudden, but later than most—to move to the City. She supposed that the dinner that tickled everybody must have played a part in Joe’s change of mind. If Booker T. was sitting down to eat a chicken sandwich in the President’s house in a city called capital, near where True Belle had had such a good time, then things must be all right, all right. He took his bride on a train ride electric enough to pop their eyes and danced on into the City.

Violet thought it would disappoint them; that it would be less lovely than Baltimore. Joe believed it would be perfect. When they arrived, carrying all of their belongings in one valise, they both knew right away that perfect was not the word. It was better than that.

Joe didn’t want babies either so all those miscarriages—two in the field, only one in her bed—were more inconvenience than loss. And citylife would be so much better without them. Arriving at the train station back in 1906, the smiles they both smiled at the women with little children, strung like beads over suitcases, were touched with pity. They liked children. Loved them even. Especially Joe, who had a way with them. But neither wanted the trouble. Years later, however, when Violet was forty, she was already staring at infants, hesitating in front of toys displayed at Christmas. Quick to anger when a sharp word was flung at a child, or a woman’s hold of a baby seemed awkward or careless. The worst burn she ever made was on the temple of a customer holding a child across her knees. Violet, lost in the woman’s hand-patting and her knee-rocking the little boy, forgot her own hand holding the curling iron. The customer flinched and the skin discolored right away. Violet moaned her apologies and the woman was satisfied until she discovered that the whole curl was singed clean off. Skin healed, but an empty spot in her hairline…Violet had to forgo payment to shut her up.

By and by longing became heavier than sex: a panting, unmanageable craving. She was limp in its thrall or rigid in an effort to dismiss it. That was when she bought herself a present; hid it under the bed to take out in secret when it couldn’t be helped. She began to imagine how old that last miscarried child would be now. A girl, probably. Certainly a girl. Who would she favor? What would her speaking voice sound like? After weaning time, Violet would blow her breath on the babygirl’s food, cooling it down for the tender mouth. Later on they would sing together, Violet taking the alto line, the girl a honeyed soprano. “Don’t you remember, a long time ago, two little babes their names I don’t know, carried away one bright summer’s day, lost in the woods I hear people say that the sun went down and the stars shone their light. Poor babes in the woods they laid down and died. When they were dead a robin so red put strawberry leaves over their heads.” Aw. Aw. Later on Violet would dress her hair for her the way the girls wore it now: short, bangs paper sharp above the eyebrows? Ear curls? Razor-thin part on the side? Hair sliding into careful waves marcelled to a T?

Violet was drowning in it, deep-dreaming. Just when her breasts were finally flat enough not to need the binders the young women wore to sport the chest of a soft boy, just when her nipples had lost their point, mother-hunger had hit her like a hammer. Knocked her down and out. When she woke up, her husband had shot a girl young enough to be that daughter whose hair she had dressed to kill. Who lay there asleep in that coffin? Who posed there awake in the photograph? The scheming bitch who had not considered Violet’s feelings one tiniest bit, who came into a life, took what she wanted and damn the consequences? Or mama’s dumpling girl? Was she the woman who took the man, or the daughter who fled her womb? Washed away on a tide of soap, salt and castor oil. Terrified, perhaps, of so violent a home. Unaware that, had it failed, had she braved mammymade poisons and mammy’s urgent fists, she could have had the best-dressed hair in the City. Instead, she hung around in the fat knees of strangers’ children. In shop windows, and baby carriages left for a moment in the sun. Not realizing that, bitch or dumpling, the two of them, mother and daughter, could have walked Broadway together and ogled the clothes. Could be sitting together, cozy in the kitchen, while Violet did her hair.

“Another time,” she said to Alice Manfred, “another time I would have loved her too. Just like you did. Just like Joe.” She was holding her coat lapels closed, too embarrassed to let her hostess hang it up lest she see the lining.

“Maybe,” said Alice. “Maybe. You’ll never know now, though, will you?”

“I thought she was going to be pretty. Real pretty. She wasn’t.”

“Pretty enough, I’d say.”

“You mean the hair. The skin color.”

“Don’t tell me what I mean.”

“Then what? What he see in her?”

“Shame on you. Grown woman like you asking me that.”

“I have to know.”

“Then ask the one who does know. You see him every day.”

“Don’t get mad.”

“Will if I want to.”

“All right. But I don’t want to ask him. I don’t want to hear what he has to say about it. You know what I’m asking.”

“Forgiveness is what you’re asking and I can’t give you that. It’s not in my power.”

“No, not that. That’s not it, forgiveness.”

“What, then? Don’t get pitiful. I won’t stand for you getting pitiful, hear me?”

“We born around the same time, me and you,” said Violet. “We women, me and you. Tell me something real. Don’t just say I’m grown and ought to know. I don’t. I’m fifty and I don’t know nothing. What about it? Do I stay with him? I want to, I think. I want…well, I didn’t always…now I want. I want some fat in this life.”

“Wake up. Fat or lean, you got just one. This is it.”

“You don’t know either, do you?”

“I know enough to know how to behave.”

“Is that it? Is that all it is?”

“Is that all what is?”

“Oh shoot! Where the grown people? Is it us?”

“Oh, Mama.” Alice Manfred blurted it out and then covered her mouth.

Violet had the same thought: Mama. Mama? Is this where you got to and couldn’t do it no more? The place of shade without trees where you know you are not and never again will be loved by anybody who can choose to do it? Where everything is over but the talking?

They looked away from each other then. The silence went on and on until Alice Manfred said, “Give me that coat. I can’t look at that lining another minute.”

Violet stood up and took off her coat, carefully pulling her arms trapped in frayed silk. Then she sat down and watched the seamstress go to work.

“All I could think of was to step out on him like he did me.”

“Fool,” said Alice and broke the thread.

“Couldn’t name him if my life depended on it.”

“Bet he can name you.”

“Let him.”

“What did you think that was going to solve?”

Violet didn’t answer.

“Did it get you your husband’s attention?”

“No.”

“Open my niece’s grave?”

“No.”

“Do I have to say it again?”

“Fool? No. No, but tell me, I mean, listen. Everybody I grew up with is down home. We don’t have children. He’s what I got. He’s what I got.”

“Doesn’t look so,” said Alice. Her stitches were invisible to the eye.

Late in March, sitting in Duggie’s drugstore, Violet played with a spoon, recalling the visit she had paid to Alice that morning. She had come early. Chore time and Violet wasn’t doing any.

“It’s different from what I thought,” she said. “Different.”

Violet meant twenty years of life in a City better than perfect, but Alice did not ask her what she meant. Did not ask her whether the City, with its streets all laid out, aroused jealousy too late for anything but foolishness. Or if it was the City that produced a crooked kind of mourning for a rival young enough to be a daughter.

They had been talking about prostitutes and fighting women—Alice nettled; Violet indifferent. Then silence while Violet drank tea and listened to the hissing iron. By this time the women had become so easy with each other talk wasn’t always necessary. Alice ironed and Violet watched. From time to time one murmured something—to herself or to the other.

“I used to love that stuff,” said Violet.

Alice smiled, knowing without looking up that Violet meant the starch. “Me too,” she said. “Drove my husband crazy.”

“Is it the crunch? Couldn’t be the taste.”

Alice shrugged. “Only the body knows.”

The iron hissed at the damp fabric. Violet leaned her cheek on her palm. “You iron like my grandmother. Yoke last.”

“That’s the test of a first-class ironing.”

“Some do it yoke first.”

“And have to do it over. I hate a lazy ironing.”

“Where you learn to sew like that?”

“They kept us children busy. Idle hands, you know.”

“We picked cotton, chopped wood, plowed. I never knew what it was to fold my hands. This here is as close as I ever been to watching my hands do nothing.”

Eating starch, choosing when to tackle the yoke, sewing, picking, cooking, chopping. Violet thought about it all and sighed. “I thought it would be bigger than this. I knew it wouldn’t last, but I did think it’d be bigger.”

Alice refolded the cloth around the handle of the pressing iron. “He’ll do it again, you know. And again and again and again.”

“In that case I’d better throw him out now.”

“Then what?”

Violet shook her head. “Watch the floorboards, I guess.”

“You want a real thing?” asked Alice. “I’ll tell you a real one. You got anything left to you to love, anything at all, do it.”

Violet raised her head. “And when he does it again? Don’t mind what people think?”

“Mind what’s left to you.”

“You saying take it? Don’t fight?”

Alice put down her iron, hard. “Fight what, who? Some mishandled child who saw her parents burn up? Who knew better than you or me or anybody just how small and quick this little bitty life is? Or maybe you want to stomp somebody with three kids and one pair of shoes. Somebody in a raggedy dress, the hem dragging in the mud. Somebody wanting arms just like you do and you want to go over there and hold her but her dress is muddy at the hem and the people standing around wouldn’t understand how could anybody’s eyes go so flat, how could they? Nobody’s asking you to take it. I’m sayin make it, make it!”

It took her a moment to notice that Violet was staring. Following her gaze Alice lifted the iron and saw what Violet saw: the black and smoking ship burned clear through the yoke.

“Shit!” Alice shouted. “Oh, shit!”

Violet was the first to smile. Then Alice. In no time laughter was rocking them both. Violet was reminded of True Belle, who entered the single room of their cabin and laughed to beat the band. They were hunched like mice near a can fire, not even a stove, on the floor, hungry and irritable. True Belle looked at them and had to lean against the wall to keep her laughter from pulling her down to the floor with them. They should have hated her. Gotten up from the floor and hated her. But what they felt was better. Not beaten, not lost. Better. They laughed too, even Rose Dear shook her head and smiled, and suddenly the world was right side up. Violet learned then what she had forgotten until this moment: that laughter is serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.

Crumpled over, shoulders shaking, Violet thought about now she must have looked at the funeral, at what her mission was. The sight of herself trying to do something bluesy, something hep, fumbling the knife, too late anyway… She laughed till she coughed and Alice had to make them both a cup of settling tea.

Committed as Violet was to hip development, even she couldn’t drink the remaining malt—watery, warm and flat-tasting. She buttoned her coat and left the drugstore and noticed, at the same moment as
that
Violet did, that it was spring. In the City.

A
nd when spring comes to the City people notice one another in the road; notice the strangers with whom they share aisles and tables and the space where intimate garments are laundered. Going in and out, in and out the same door, they handle the handle; on trolleys and park benches they settle thighs on a seat in which hundreds have done it too. Copper coins dropped in the palm have been swallowed by children and tested by gypsies, but it’s still money and people smile at that. It’s the time of year when the City urges contradiction most, encouraging you to buy street food when you have no appetite at all; giving you a taste for a single room occupied by you alone as well as a craving to share it with someone you passed in the street. Really there is no contradiction—rather it’s a condition: the range of what an artful City can do. What can beat bricks warming up to the sun? The return of awnings. The removal of blankets from horses’ backs. Tar softens under the heel and the darkness under bridges changes from gloom to cooling shade. After a light rain, when the leaves have come, tree limbs are like wet fingers playing in woolly green hair. Motor cars become black jet boxes gliding behind hoodlights weakened by mist. On sidewalks turned to satin figures move shoulder first, the crowns of their heads angled shields against the light buckshot that the raindrops are. The faces of children glimpsed at windows appear to be crying, but it is the glass pane dripping that makes it seem so.

In the spring of 1926, on a rainy afternoon, anybody passing through the alley next to a certain apartment house on Lenox might have looked up and seen, not a child but a grown man’s face crying along with the glass pane. A strange sight you hardly ever see: men crying so openly. It’s not a thing they do. Strange as it was, people finally got used to him, wiping his face and nose with an engineer’s red handkerchief while he sat month after month by the window without view or on the stoop, first in the snow and later in the sun. I’d say Violet washed and ironed those handkerchiefs because, crazy as she was, raggedy as she became, she couldn’t abide dirty laundry. But it tired everybody out waiting to see what else Violet would do besides try to kill a dead girl and keep her husband in tidy handkerchiefs. My own opinion was that one day she would stack up those handkerchiefs, take them to the dresser drawer, tuck them in and then go light his hair with a matchstick. She didn’t but maybe that would have been better than what she did do. Meaning to or not meaning to, she got him to go through it again—at springtime when it’s clearer then than as at no other time that citylife is streetlife.

Blind men thrum and hum in the soft air as they inch steadily down the walk. They don’t want to stand near and compete with the old uncles positioning themselves in the middle of the block to play a six-string guitar.

Blues man. Black and bluesman. Blacktherefore blue man.

Everybody knows your name.

Where-did-she-go-and-why man. So-lonesome-I-could-die man.

Everybody knows your name.

The singer is hard to miss, sitting as he does on a fruit crate in the center of the sidewalk. His peg leg is stretched out comfy; his real one is carrying both the beat and the guitar’s weight. Joe probably thinks that the song is about him. He’d like believing it. I know him so well. Have seen him feed small animals nobody else paid any attention to, but I was never deceived. I remember the way he used to fix his hat when he left the apartment building; how he moved it forward and a bit to the left. Whether stooping to remove a pile of horse flop or sauntering off to his swank hotel, his hat had to be just so. Not a tilt exactly, but a definite slant, you could say. The sweater under his suit jacket would be buttoned all the way up, but I know his thoughts are not—they are loose. He cuts his eyes over to the sweetbacks lounging on the corner. There is something they have he wants. Very little in his case of Cleopatra is something men would want to buy—except for aftershave dusting powder, most of it is for women. Women he can get to talk to, look at, flirt with and who knows what else is on his mind? And if she gives him more than the time of day with a look, the watching eyes of the sweetbacks are more satisfying than hers.

Or else he feels sorry about himself for being faithful in the first place. And if that virtue is unappreciated, and nobody jumps up to congratulate him on it, his self-pity turns to resentment which he has trouble understanding but no trouble focusing on the young sheiks, radiant and brutal, standing on street corners. Look out. Look out for a faithful man near fifty. Because he has never messed with another woman; because he selected that young girl to love, he thinks he is free. Not free to break loaves or feed the world on a fish. Nor to raise the war dead, but free to do something wild.

Take my word for it, he is bound to the track. It pulls him like a needle through the groove of a Bluebird record. Round and round about the town. That’s the way the City spins you. Makes you do what it wants, go where the laid-out roads say to. All the while letting you think you’re free; that you can jump into thickets because you feel like it. There are no thickets here and if mowed grass is okay to walk on the City will let you know. You can’t get off the track a City lays for you. Whatever happens, whether you get rich or stay poor, ruin your health or live to old age, you always end up back where you started: hungry for the one thing everybody loses—young loving.

That was Dorcas, all right. Young but wise. She was Joe’s personal sweet—like candy. It was the best thing, if you were young and had just got to the City. That and the clarinets and even they were called licorice sticks. But Joe has been in the City twenty years and isn’t young anymore. I imagine him as one of those men who stop somewhere around sixteen. Inside. So even though he wears button-up-the-front sweaters and round-toed shoes, he’s a kid, a strapling, and candy could still make him smile. He likes those peppermint things last the live-long day, and thinks everybody else does too. Passes them out to Gistan’s boys clowning on the curb. You could tell they’d rather chocolate or something with peanuts.

Makes me wonder about Joe. All those good things he gets from the Windemere, and he pays almost as much money for stale and sticky peppermint as he does for the room he rents to fuck in. Where his private candy box opens for him.

Rat. No wonder it ended the way it did. But it didn’t have to, and if he had stopped trailing that little fast thing all over town long enough to tell Stuck or Gistan or some neighbor who might be interested, who knows how it would go?

“It’s not a thing you tell to another man. I know most men can’t wait to tell each other about what they got going on the side. Put all their business in the street. They do it because the woman don’t matter all that much and they don’t care what folks think about her. The most I did was halfway tell Malvonne and there was no way not to. But tell another man? No. Anyhow Gistan would just laugh and try to get out of hearing it. Stuck would look at his feet, swear I’d been fixed and tell me how much high john I need to remedy myself. Neither one of them I’d talk to about her. It’s not a thing you tell except maybe to a tight friend, somebody you knew from before, long time ago like Victory, but even if I had the chance I don’t believe I could have told him and if I couldn’t tell Victory it was because I couldn’t tell myself because I didn’t know all about it. All I know is I saw her buying candy and the whole thing was sweet. Not just the candy—the whole thing and picture of it. Candy’s something you lick, suck on, and then swallow and it’s gone. No. This was something else. More like blue water and white flowers, and sugar in the air. I needed to be there, where it was all mixed up together just right, and where that was, was Dorcas.

“When I got to the apartment I had no name to put to the face I’d seen in the drugstore, and her face wasn’t on my mind right then. But she opened the door, opened it right up to me. I smelled pound cake and disguised chicken. The women gathered around and I showed them what I had while they laughed and did the things women do: flicked lint off my jacket, pressed me on the shoulder to make me sit down. It’s a way they have of mending you, fixing what they think needs repair.

“She didn’t give me a look or say anything. But I knew where she was standing and how, every minute. She leaned her hip on the back of a chair in the parlor, while the women streamed out of the dining room to mend me and joke me. Then somebody called out her name. Dorcas. I didn’t hear much else, but I stayed there and showed them all my stuff, smiling, not selling but letting them sell themselves.

“I sell trust; I make things easy. That’s the best way. Never push. Like at the Windemere when I wait tables. I’m there but only if you want me. Or when I work the rooms, bringing up the whiskey hidden so it looks like coffee. Just there when you need me and right on time. You get to know the woman who wants four glasses of something, but doesn’t want to ask four times; so you wait till her glass is two-thirds down and fill it up again. That way, she’s drinking one glass while he is buying four. The quiet money whispers twice: once when I slide it in my pocket; once when I slide it out.

“I was prepared to wait, to have her ignore me. I didn’t have a plan and couldn’t have carried it out if I did. I felt dizzy with a lightheadedness I thought came from the heavy lemon flavoring, the face powder and that light woman-sweat. Salty. Not bitter like a man’s is. I don’t know to this day what made me speak to her on the way out the door.

“I can conjure what people say. That I treated Violet like a piece of furniture you favor although it needed something every day to keep it steady and upright. I don’t know. But since Victory, I never got too close to anybody. Gistan and Stuck, we close, but not like it is with somebody knew you from when you was born and you got to manhood at the same time. I would have told Victory how it was. Gistan, Stuck, whatever I said to them would be something near, but not the way it really was. I couldn’t talk to anybody but Dorcas and I told her things I hadn’t told myself. With her I was fresh, new again. Before I met her I’d changed into new seven times. The first time was when I named my own self, since nobody did it for me, since nobody knew what it could or should have been.

“I was born and raised in Vesper County, Virginia, in 1873. Little place called Vienna. Rhoda and Frank Williams took me in right away and raised me along with six of their own. Her last child was three months old when Mrs. Rhoda took me in, and me and him were closer than many brothers I’ve seen. Victory was his name. Victory Williams. Mrs. Rhoda named me Joseph after her father, but neither she nor Mr. Frank either thought to give me a last name. She never pretended I was her natural child. When she parceled out chores or favors she’d say, ‘You are just like my own.’ That ‘like’ I guess it was made me ask her—I don’t believe I was three yet—where my real parents were. She looked down at me, over her shoulder, and gave me the sweetest smile, but sad someway, and told me, O honey, they disappeared without a trace. The way I heard it I understood her to mean the ‘trace’ they disappeared without was me.

“The first day I got to school I had to have two names. I told the teacher Joseph Trace. Victory turned his whole self around in the seat.

“‘Why you tell her that?’ he asked me.

“‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Cause.’

“‘Mama be mad. Pappy too.’

“We were outside in the school yard. It was nice, packed dirt but a lot of nails and things were in it. Both of us barefoot. I was struggling to pick a bit of glass from the sole of my foot, so I didn’t have to look up at him. ‘No they won’t,’ I said. ‘Your mama ain’t my mama.’

“‘If she ain’t, who is?’

“‘Another woman. She be back. She coming back for me. My daddy too.’ That was the first time I knew I thought that, or wished it.

“Victory said, ‘They know where they left you. They come back to our place. Williams place is where they know you at.’ He was trying to walk double-jointed like his sister. She was good at it and bragged so much Victory practiced every chance he got. I remember his shadow darting in the dirt in front of me. ‘They know you at Williams place, Williams is what you ought to call yourself.’

“I said, ‘They got to pick me out. From all of you all, they got to pick me. I’m Trace, what they went off without.’

“‘Ain’t that a bitch?’

“Victory laughed at me and wrapped his arm around my neck wrassling me to the ground. I don’t know what happened to the speck of glass. I never did get it out. And nobody came looking for me either. I never knew my own daddy. And my mother, well, I heard a woman in the hotel dining room say the confoundest thing. She was talking to two other women while I poured the coffee. ‘I am bad for my children,’ she said. ‘I don’t mean to be, but there is something in me that makes it so. I’m a good mother but they do better away from me; as long as they’re by my side nothing good can come to them. The ones that leave seem to flower; the ones that stay have such a hard time. You can imagine how bad I feel knowing that, can’t you?’

“I had to sneak a look at her. It took strength to say that. Admit that.

“The second change came when I was picked out and trained to be a man. To live independent and feed myself no matter what. I didn’t miss having a daddy because first off there was Mr. Frank. Steady as a rock, and showed no difference among any of us children. But the big thing was, I was picked, Victory too, by the best man in Vesper County to go hunting with. Talk about proud-making. He was the best in the county and he picked me and Victory to teach and hunt with. He was so good they say he just carried the rifle for the hell of it because he knew way before what the prey would do, how to fool snakes, bend twigs and string to catch rabbits, groundhog; make a sound waterfowl couldn’t resist. Whitefolks said he was a witch doctor, but they said that so they wouldn’t have to say he was smart. A hunter’s hunter, that’s what he was. Smart as they come. Taught me two lessons I lived by all my life. One was the secret of kindness from whitepeople—they had to pity a thing before they could like it. The other—well, I forgot it.