Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil (13 page)

The first time I came to Emma’s, I was just taking my seat when Emma looked in my direction and asked, “What’s your favorite song?” My mind went totally blank, of course. As I looked at her helplessly, a huge freighter came into view over her left shoulder. “Ship!” I said. “My ship has sails that are made of silk!”

“Oh, that’s a lovely song,” said Emma. “Kurt Weill, 1941.” She played it, and from that time on, Emma always played “My Ship” whenever I came into the bar. “Bartenders know customers by the drinks they order,” she said. “I know them by the songs they ask me to play. Whenever regulars walk in the door, I like to play their favorites. It tickles them and makes them feel they’re home.”

Emma had many regulars. There were the four ladies from Estill, South Carolina, who drove in several nights a week with or without their husbands. There was the retired bank clerk Abner Croft, who walked his dog every night before going to bed and more than once kept walking until he got to Emma’s, where, dressed in pajamas and bathrobe and accompanied by the dog, he was shown to his regular table. Just as he was sitting down, Emma would play “Moments Like This,” which was his favorite song. There was Wanda Brooks, a self-appointed greeter-hostess who wore rakish hats and a rhinestone brooch that advertised her telephone number in glittering numerals an inch high. Wanda had been a majorette in junior high school; now she sold tanning beds to suntan parlors in South Carolina
and coastal Georgia. She would call out “Hey!” to perfect strangers, show them to a table, engage them in animated conversation, dance with them, and then move on to chat with others. Wanda was forever foraging in her purse for a lighter, swaying and leaning into the person next to her as she babbled amiably. Inevitably, her ever-present cigarette would tumble from her lips or slip out of her fingers in a shower of glowing ashes, sending the people in her immediate vicinity leaping to their feet and flailing at their clothes. Wanda had platinum-blond hair, and her entrance into Emma’s was always accompanied by the playing of “New York, New York,” which was her favorite song.

Though Emma’s was a popular nightspot, it fell short of expectations in one respect: It failed to keep Emma off the road. She went right on making appearances from one end of south Georgia to the other and driving on to Savannah afterward to play until early morning. Occasionally, she spent the night in Joe Odom’s carriage house after closing, but most of the time she found an excuse to drive home to Statesboro. On Saturday nights, she would drive home no matter what, because her Sundays in Statesboro started very early and ran very late, as I discovered firsthand. Emma invited me to join her one Sunday at church and stay with her throughout the day. This is how it went.

Emma pulled into the parking lot of the First Baptist Church in Statesboro Sunday morning at twenty minutes past eight. She was wearing a purple silk dress, a blue cape, turquoise eye shadow, and a touch of rouge. “Let me see,” she said, “we closed Emma’s at three o’clock last night, and I got home about four. I would have pulled off the highway and taken a fifteen-minute nap under the Ash Branch overpass, like I usually do, but there was a big old truck there ahead of me and it took all the room. So I got to bed by four-thirty, and then at a quarter past seven, Aunt Annalise called to make sure I got up in time for church. She’s ninety.” Emma adjusted the two lacquered chopsticks that anchored her bun. “I can keep going with just a couple hours sleep, but sometimes you can tell. My eyes get puffy.” We went inside the church.

The preacher delivered a sermon entitled “Temptation and Decay from Within.” A deacon then read a report on the forthcoming revival week, the theme of which was to be “Wake Up, America: God Loves You!” The deacon thought too many people were still very much asleep in regard to this message. “There are one hundred and eighty million people in America who do not claim Christ,” he said. “Two million in the state of Georgia. Thousands in Statesboro alone.”

The preacher then addressed the gathering. “Have we got any guests among us today?” Emma whispered that I should stand up. All heads turned. “Welcome,” the preacher said heartily. “So glad you could join us.”

After the service, Emma and I walked to a smaller chapel where the older people were to attend their weekly senior assembly. We were slowed a bit by the dozen or so people who came up to welcome me personally to the church and to ask where I was from. “New York!” a woman said. “My! I had a cousin who went there once.” In the chapel, Emma slipped off her high heels and played the organ as the others came in. Each member of the senior assembly stopped at the organ to greet Emma and then came over to me to say how pleased they were that I had come. Mr. Granger was the first to address the gathering. “I tell you, my wife is doing great,” he said. “I knew last Sunday it was malignant, but I couldn’t tell you, because the doctor had not confirmed it until Tuesday. I really have a heavy heart, but everything is being taken care of as far as I can tell.”

From the rear of the chapel a woman said, “Ann McCoy is in Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Savannah. She’s havin’ back problems.”

Another said, “Sally Powell’s sister died.”

Mr. Granger asked, “Is there anyone else?”

“Cliff Bradley,” several people said at once.

“Cliff went home yesterday afternoon, late,” said Mr. Granger. “He seems to be doin’ great.”

“Goldie Smith needs our prayers,” another woman said. “There’s something the matter with her stomach. She’s being fitted with a prosthesis.”

A woman with pink lipstick and gold-rimmed glasses stood up to give a testimonial. “Me and my family weren’t doing too good until I looked down and saw I had a God hole in my chest. We all have a God hole in our chest. You should all do what I did: Turn it over to Jesus.”

When the assembly was over, Emma went to a small room off the chapel where she and a dozen other older women had their Sunday school class. Emma introduced me all over again, and the ladies chirped and mewed little hellos. The leader of the class said she would give a talk about God’s People in a Changing World, but did anybody have any important announcements first.

“Myrtle Foster’s incision is still draining,” said a woman with glasses and a light green suit. “I talked to Rap Nelby last night, and they do not know when she will be able to come home.”

“We’ll have to put her on our prayer list,” said the leader.

A woman with her hair in rows of small blue-white curls said, “Louise saw Mary at the beauty shop on Friday and it seems the two others are not doing well either, so we need to keep them on our list too.” For the next few minutes, the health of several other members of the congregation was discussed, and the prayer list grew by three more names.

The leader then began her talk—“Jesus will never ask you to do anything he wouldn’t do himself”—and Emma reached into her pocketbook and took out a small manila envelope with “Emma Kelly: $24” written across the top. She stood up quietly and put the envelope into a carton with the other ladies’ envelopes. Then, motioning for me to follow, she tiptoed into the hall with the carton. I felt a tug at my jacket. “I hope you enjoyed it,” a lady by the door whispered. “Come back and see us again.”

Emma led the way down the hall. “Now we go to the little children two floors up,” she said. First she went around to a windowless room and handed the carton to two men who were sitting behind a table piled high with little manila envelopes. “Mornin’, Miss Emma,” they said.

Upstairs, about twenty children were seated in a semicircle
around an upright piano waiting for Emma. She accompanied them as they sang the titles of the books of the New Testament to the tune of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”—“Math-thew, Ma-ark, Lu-uke and John, Acts and the Letters to the Romans….” Then she played “Jesus Is a Loving Teacher” all the way through twice. “We can go now,” she said, and we went back down the two flights of stairs and out into the parking lot.

“If the other lady who plays piano can’t go to the nursing home, I go there now,” said Emma. “But she’s there today.” So instead we drove directly to the Forest Heights Country Club, where Emma went to the buffet, put two fried chicken legs on her plate, and sat down at the piano in the dining room. For the next two and a half hours, she played background music and chatted with the diners who came up one by one or in family groups to greet her and pay their respects.

At two-thirty, Emma got up from the piano and said her good-byes. We walked out to the car and drove fifty miles into the bright afternoon sun to Vidalia, home of the sweet Vidalia onion. Emma had been hired to play for a wedding reception at the Serendipity Health and Racquet Club. Upon arriving, she went directly to the ladies’ room and changed into a flowing black-and-gold kimono. The owner of the health club, a large lady with a bouffant blond hairdo, took us on a tour of the spa and showed us the new indoor-outdoor swimming pool and underwater grotto of which she was very proud. The wedding guests began to arrive from the church, but the bride and groom were late. Word had it that they had stopped at a 7-Eleven to get plastic glasses for the champagne they were consuming in the car.

When the wedding couple finally arrived, Emma found out that the name of the groom was Bill, and she announced she had a special song for the occasion. She sang, “Big Bad Bill is Sweet William now … married life has changed him … he washes dishes, mops the floor….” The song was greeted with laughter and set everybody to dancing except the little boys who went out and put a bottle of champagne under the hood of the wedding
couple’s car next to the engine block so it would heat up and explode when they drove away.

At six-thirty, after Emma had played for two hours, we got back into her car for the drive back to Statesboro. If she was tired, she did not show it. She was not only wide awake but smiling. “Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God,” she said, “and I think it’s true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too. Because of my music, I have never known loneliness and never been depressed.

“When I was growing up, I used to put the radio under the covers with me at night. That’s how I learned so many different songs. In fact, it was because I knew so many songs that I got to know Johnny Mercer in the first place. We met over the telephone twenty years ago. I was playing at a dinner party in Savannah, and a young man kept requesting Johnny Mercer songs. He was kind of surprised when I knew every one. Then I played some he hadn’t heard before, and he was astonished. ‘I’m Johnny Mercer’s nephew,’ he said. ‘I want him to meet you. Let’s call him now.’ So he called Bel Air, California, and told Johnny he’d met this lady who knew every song he’d ever written. Then he put me on the phone. Johnny didn’t even say hello. He just said, ‘Sing the first eight bars of “If You Were Mine.”’ Now, that’s not a well-known song, but it was one that meant a lot to Johnny. I sang it without any hesitation, and we were friends from then on.”

The sun was beginning to set. “To me, the words are as important as the music,” said Emma. “Johnny and I liked to compare our favorite phrases. We both loved the lyric ‘Too dear to lose, too sweet to last’ from the song ‘While We’re Young’ and the line from ‘Handful of Stars’ that goes ‘Oh! What things unspoken trembled in the air.’

“Johnny’s own lyrics are the best, though. It’s hard to think of anything more beautiful than ‘When an early autumn walks the land and chills the breeze and touches with her hand the summer trees….’ That’s poetry. And ‘Like painted kites the days and
nights went flying by. The world was new beneath a blue umbrella sky.’”

It was because of Johnny Mercer that Emma started singing. Until she met him she played the piano and that was all. Mercer kept telling her, “Go ahead and sing.” But she was afraid. She told him she had no range. “That’s all right,” he said, “just sing softly. You don’t have to hit every note. Sing low and skip and cheat a lot. If you can’t reach it or don’t know it, skip it.” He showed her how she could change keys instead of going up an octave for the second verse of “I Love Paris.” He even helped her cheat with one of his own songs. She was having trouble with the line “I wanna be around to pick up the pieces when somebody breaks your heart”—she could not drop down for the second syllable of “somebody.” Mercer told her to sing the same note for all three syllables.

She was still dubious about singing, though. Then one evening she started an engagement at the Quality Inn and found a microphone and sound system all set up. “Oh, look,” Mercer told her, “you’ve got a mike. Now you can sing.” And she did. Years later she found out that Mercer had arranged for the mike to be there and paid for it too.

Emma recalled how over the years she had played piano for plain folks and dignitaries, for three presidents, twenty governors, and countless mayors. She had jammed with Tommy Dorsey and accompanied Robert Goulet. She recalled the day, years ago, when playing piano every day of her life had become a necessity. It had happened on a Sunday morning when her youngest son, upset about having broken up with his girlfriend, dropped Emma and her husband at church and then drove into the woods, set a rifle butt against the floorboards, turned the barrel to his chest, and fired. He collapsed on the steering wheel, sounding the horn. Someone heard the horn and came running. The boy lost a lung, but his life was saved, at a cost of $40,000. Emma had to work day and night to pay the bills. The near tragedy only served to intensify her faith. “What if the bullet had gone just a fraction of an inch to the left or right? What if he had not fallen on the steering wheel? The Lord must have been
with him,” Emma said. “I have to go on believing for that reason alone.” Even after she had paid the hospital bills, Emma continued her nightly appearances. It had become her life.

We arrived back in Statesboro shortly after seven-thirty. Before going home, Emma stopped at the home of her ninety-year-old aunt to bring her a box of food she had taken with her from the country club. Her aunt came to the door in her nightgown and nightcap; she’d been listening to the radio broadcast of the evening sermon at the Baptist church. Emma went inside for a few minutes and tucked her in bed. Then, more than twelve hours after her day had begun, she drove home.