Mama could sit on me, but she could not get Pa to hush up. He was so full of himself and somebody’s corn whiskey he went about courting Black Patti from the crowd. I was so embarrassed. I thought I hated him. I’d hate him forever for piercing and smearing the magic of that voice. Folks didn’t just look at us funny, while we tried to leave invisible, with Pa making all that racket. “Ya sho’ lookin’ good for a black one, Miz Patti. This black daddy got something’ll make you sing, too. Don’tcha want to see? I got Gabriel’s trumpet. That’s God talkin’. Ya hear me, I say God’s talkin’ to ya, heifer!” Mama was trying to hold her head up like she could hear nothing, a void, an emptiness around her thick as new cotton, but I could never have held my head up, knowing I had some relation to the ugliness pounding the glory out of Black Patti’s triumph over the clumsiness of the human tongue, the human voice so accustomed to the mire of brittle, quacking sounds. And he was my father, like a murderer of the sacred touch of life.
Had nothin’ to do with bein’ colored, nothin’ at all, Mama told me later. But it did have somethin’ to do with bein’ like my pa. Anythin’ like my pa is bound to bring hurt. That’s all he ever did to my mother: hurt her. Why won’t the sounds of Black Patti’s voice come back to me? Mama said I could always hear them. “I was there,” she said. “You are not your pa. He’s gotta answer to the Lord for himself.” For himself, not me, not me. But I never believed that, Mama. I’ve always answered for Pa’s ways.
Before she put the album away Elma came cross a picture of herself with Lizzie and Bette on the front porch. Lizzie, small bones and hair wild as ever, looking like she’d just stopped running somewhere. Elma wondered how Lizzie had grown, was she still sneaking into Miss Pilar’s to hear music. Elma looked at a younger Ma Bette next to the tree bent by all the dangling bottles to bring good luck, to keep haints away, to protect souls.
Elma carefully folded the yellowing album, trying to wipe her tears while she tied the satin bow around the book Eudora had kept so meticulously for her daughter, for her to remember them while she was away. Somehow Elma always forgot. She forgot what she actually did remember, beguiled by the ribbons, the class photographs and school reports all done up in her mother’s lace work. Her life looked like a fine French lace with the spices of the tropics, her Nana, her sister Lizzie, Mama and Pa dancing ’tween the frenzy of looped threads. Yes, this is what you come from, this is who you are. This is why you sing, Elma thought to herself. And now she was going to do just that with the Fisk Jubilee Singers. But first she had to sing for herself—a devilish bluesy number she learned as a girl from her Pa.
“I’m goin’ away, baby, I won’t be back till fall,
Lord, Lord, Lord!
Goin’ away, baby, won’t be back till fall,
If I find me a good man, I won’t be back at all.
See See Rider, where did you stay last night?
Lord, Lord, Lord!
Your shoes ain’t buttoned, clothes don’t fit you right,
You didn’t come home till the sun was shinin’ bright!”
Elma swayed as if she were on some ship taking her far away from the mournful tones she knew to be her own. Her face was a clutter of tear-strewn blotches, gray as the sky when the sun hides way up inside the clouds, making a mockery of dawn. Elma slid her album back between the sheets at the bottom of her chest at the foot of her bed where she said her prayers and hummed to make sleep come peacefully for once. But not now, not today, Elma decided, as she’d decided as a child to start her day again on her own terms, with her own phrasing and nuance. This is going to be a fine day. A lovely day. All she had to do was hang on to the last clear crescendo of Black Patti’s voice. The last pure beauty she knew.
Elma herself was a beauty. All of the Cherokee, European, and African blood of her forebears blended into a tawny translucent ochre with a tinge of azure or rose depending on her mood. Her hair fell in cascades of black henna ringlets she futilely attempted to train into a bun at the nape of her neck. She knew nothing of how fetching she appeared to others. She knew nothing of the envy the stream of young women of color from all parts of the United States hid from her. After all, they were what DuBois called the Talented Tenth, which unfortunately meant to too many the well-to-do and white-looking tenth of the harried Negro population. Room was made for Elma to be one of them because of her voice, the voice that led the sorority song of the Alpha Kappa Alphas to victory in 1915. Each soror more demure, comely, and coy than the next. In Jubilee Hall they gathered for the last ritual of the summer, attracting possible suitors from as far away as Morehouse and Tuskegee. There was nothing like a Fisk girl to carry home to Mama. Nobody at Spelman or Bennett could hold a candle to them—or a brown paper bag—without seeing the difference.
Somehow Elma had negotiated her place among these aquiline-nosed females without actually knowing she had. No Diggs had to prove anything to anybody. Ask any black person from Chicago to Baltimore, or St. Augustine, for that matter. All she had to do was say her cousins’ name. The more malicious of her classmates couldn’t even say she was money poor and high yellow. She wasn’t. There was simply something foreign in her countenance, something foreign and regal, even though she could sing the gospel or a low-down blues like any dirt farmer’s daughter, which she was.
In her sheer pink gown Angeline Ducet from Baton Rouge hurried over to Elma to tug her arm and whisper about the number of fellows from Meharry Medical School across the way who’d made it their business to hear the girls sing.
Angeline couldn’t contain herself. “Elma, wait till you see them. I hear Meharry men will be sitting in the first five rows of center seats in the auditorium. Sing to them, Elma. Sing like your future doctor husband is out there just waiting for the sound of your voice. You are so lucky to have the solo.” Angeline was referring to Elma’s three-octave range that allowed her to shine in every selection.
Every shade of pink and green, every version of coquette rustled from the podium to meet with family and suitors. Elma was not looking to meet anyone. Her family could barely get her to Fisk, let alone get themselves here to celebrate her successes. Nevertheless a gaiety and relief swept through the hall like sweet scents of summer blossoms hang in the air as the sun goes down. Fisk house-mothers watched their brood carefully, looking for untoward glances, a touch or a couple dashing off behind a willow tree. But since Elma was not looking for anyone, she didn’t realize folks were looking for her, to congratulate her on the quality of her voice and the fine direction she’d given the other girls. Mrs. Waites, her vocal coach, almost squeezed the living daylights out of her, exclaiming, “Oh, Elma, you are blessed! The Lord has put his finger on you, child, I’m telling you! A voice like yours and your feeling for every sound is what makes working with tone-deaf colored folks year after year worth it all. You must never take this gift lightly. Do you hear me?”
Elma was still reeling from the emphatic embrace of Mrs. Waites when she was approached by Dr. Simeon Minor, her biology professor and advisor, who was just as dismayed with Elma’s brilliance as Mrs. Waites was elated. “Elma, you mustn’t let this gloating over a song here or there sway you from a very lucrative and stable career in nursing or teaching. Beggin’ your pardon, but what ‘niggah’ do you know who can’t sing? Tell me that. We need talent like yours to help our people. They don’t need any more entertainin’. What do you want to be, another ‘Black Patti and the Colored Troubadours’?”
Elma’s heart sank deep toward her spine at the mention of her beloved Black Patti, but she simply replied, “Dr. Minor, you know the kind of profession you’re pointing me toward is much too taxing for a woman, even dangerous in the countryside. Plus, it will take half my lifetime just to finish the required studies, and I can’t ask my family to sacrifice any more than they have already. Surely you can understand that. Though I must say that I am flattered by your confidence in me as servant to our people.”
Overhearing more of the conversation than she should have allowed, Mrs. Waites burst
in. “Dr. Minor, you keep your hands off God’s handiwork! This child will die if she doesn’t sing. Can’t you tell that? Wasn’t that concert you just heard scientific proof enough?”
Dr. Minor’s chest puffed up like he was about to implode at the strange mixture of theology and science that Mrs. Waites was arguing. Elma thought that a fine moment to intervene, and something made her need to respond.
“I want to sing,” she murmured as matter-of-factly as she could. “Really, I don’t rightly know if it’s my calling or not, but I’m no fool either. Singing is a gift from the Lord, not a profession. I don’t want to live off of something so precious to me. I want my voice to be free of the pressures of this world. My singing’s not to pay the rent or a grocer’s bill. It is my pleasure and my hope, it’s my love, it’s family. My voice is as natural as a sprig of honeysuckle. We don’t pay for that. We sip it, like God’s nectar, a bit at a time.”
“Well, then, Miss . . . uh . . .”
“Diggs, Elma Diggs.”
“How do you plan to earn your keep, if not by singing for your supper?”
The young man to whom this melodious baritone voice belonged was cocksure of himself and not a mite less handsome than Adonis, or some pure Seminole buck out of Florida. Only the mass of blue-black waves curling ’round his cheekbones gave away his hybrid genealogy. Everything about him was blue-black, his suit, his hair, his eyes. Everything but his color. Elma was taken aback just by the sight of him, let alone the familiarity of his initial contact.
“Well, I certainly do not intend to sing for my supper, uh . . . uh.”
At that moment, Dr. Minor looked at Elma as though he wanted to apologize. Instead he stared hard into the eyes of the cavalier interloper, saying, “Miss Diggs, I, ah. Well, to get to the point, this is my nephew, Raymond Minor.” Dr. Minor looked at the boy like he wanted to spit on his slightly too elegant attire and gesture, but his chest puffed up again and he walked away as if nothing would help him do anything but acknowledge the young man as his kin.
Mrs. Waites had no hesitation about interrupting the young dandy’s obvious intentions toward her prodigy. “Yes, Raymond Minor. This is Elma Diggs of the Charleston Diggses. And the last thing she’ll ever have to do is sing for her supper, or for the likes of you,” she grumbled. Elma stood mute and slightly amused.
“Mrs. Waites, you know how much I hold you in esteem. I certainly had no way of knowing this lovely woman was one of the Diggses of Charleston.”
Mrs. Waites was now truly annoyed. “You certainly wouldn’t. She doesn’t go around flaunting her background. She was as hard a scholar and a credit to the race as any student Fisk’s ever turned out. You, young man, could learn something from her about how the truly genteel class of Negro people conduct themselves.” With that, Mrs. Waites seemed to regain her composure. “Now, Elma, you just stay your sweet self. Don’t let this young whippersnapper turn your head,” and off she went.
Elma couldn’t help but chuckle a little. “We surely have stirred up a little bit of temperament, don’t you think?”
“Elma, my classmate at Tuskegee was a Benjamen Diggs, but I had thought his sister was much, much older than you.”
Elma’s body released her from gravity, and she reached for Raymond’s arm, which he gladly offered. “Are you feeling all right, Miss Diggs?” he asked, very concerned.
“I most certainly am. It must be all this excitement, and the joy singing gives me does sometimes lift me right off my feet,” Elma tried to joke.
There was a brief but dense moment when the two said not a word. Then Elma confided to Raymond in an almost singing sotto voce, “I’m Benjamen’s, uh, cousin. A ward of his father.”
Ebullient, Raymond grabbed Elma’s hand to join in the dancing. “Listen to me, my sweet Southern belle, a Diggs is a Diggs. That’s all you ever need to think about. I don’t ever want to hear you excuse your right to your own name, not ever again! And I intend to know you, Miss Elma Diggs, for a long, long time.”
Then Raymond, in true character, had Elma swirling about the dance floor as if they had partnered each other for years. Elma discovered then and there that her voice wasn’t the only gift the Lord had bestowed upon her. She learned that in the arms of Raymond Minor she could fly to music as well. The farmer’s daughter in her even found room for a jazzy two-step Raymond coaxed her to do. Neither Mrs. Waites nor the disgruntled Dr. Minor was able to come between the couple. Elma had found a new beauteous thing, the melody of romance, the magic of a star-strewn Tennessee night.
The same orange-rose dawn that Elma sleepily flirted with in Nashville nudged little Lizzie Winrow from one chore to the next back on the Carolina farm. Lizzie’s favorite hen, Turkey, kept sneaking ’tween her legs, trying to get lifted off the barnyard grounds and back to Lizzie’s soft bed where the child had hidden her for so many months. She was called Turkey ’cause Tom Winrow had shouted, “That’s what that damn hen woulda been, one dead turkey if she wasn’t a chicken.”
That drunken logic sometimes confused Lizzie, but most of the time it worked to her favor. Since Turkey wasn’t a turkey but a chicken, Turkey wouldn’t have her neck wrung for Thanksgiving, which was a fine outcome to the noisy commotion Turkey created when Tom and Eudora came to put Lizzie to bed one night and found a chicken instead of their sweet baby girl nestled all comfy on the pillow like a reg’lar human bein’. This while the real child was out trying to break in her pony, Amarillo, which was a nice name for Lizzie’s yellow-red skin that mean folks callt rhiny or red-boned, but Amarillo and Lizzie blended together just fine, only Lizzie couldn’t get the pony to hold still long enough for her to get a good cantor goin’, so Lizzie put Turkey to bed in her nightshirt and went about breaking Amarillo whenever the moonlight allowed.
Tom knew he was bewitched ’cause he had a chicken callt Turkey and a child and a horse looked like one creature from a distance, like a bronze statue from near town where the white folks paraded their translucent-skinned offspring under parasols and fans. Ever since he’d married that woman, everything or some one small thing seemed to go wrong, or if not wrong, then funny in a bad way. Eudora might have meant happiness to somebody, but it sho’ ’nough bought Tom Winrow a lotta grief, ’cept for his darlin’ Lizzie who was as wily as he was but he’d never say that. Always blame it on the Mama, that was safer.
Lizzie was sliding from right to left on Amarillo’s back, but managing to hold on as the pony meandered toward the barn. Lizzie wasn’t falling off the animal, losing control, she was falling asleep, but Tom Winrow was wide awake, deciding if he should act like he was coming from the barn or going to it. No matter what he did, he couldn’t keep the blazing morning sun from playing darts with his eyes. Blinking, holding his left hand just above his ebony eyebrows that curled inward toward his nose, Tom made out some figures moving toward him sometimes and sometimes ’way from him. Not sure if he’d come upon a haint or an interloper, Tom seized Lizzie by the waist. The drowsy little girl instinctively wrestled the wind, the arm ’round her body keeping her from doing what her mind told her to do: “Get up on your feet and run away from here fast as ya can.” Amarillo, unaccustomed to his touch, pulled her head back from Tom’s grasp, his unsteady lead, while Lizzie callt out to Jesus and Mary and her Pa to come to her aid. When she recognized Tom’s laughter she relaxed. “Oh, Pa, I thought you was a evil somebody come to carry me off.”
Tom set his child on the dry, dusty ground and Lizzie’s knees ’most buckled right under her. Tom caught her, stood her up straight, and said ever so proudly, “Well, it looks like I’ve got me a brand-new pony! Whatchu think I should call him?”
Lizzie futilely rammed Tom’s body with her head, punching him with her small fists. “You can’t have my pony, Pa. That’s my pony. Give him back to me now. Please, Pa. That’s my pony.”
Tom saw Lizzie’s face get redder and redder, tears streaking down her cheeks, and relented.
“Okay, the pony’s yours this time. But remember, you
can’t ride no horse with your eyes closed. That’s always been true. Why, I came right up ’longside you, bold as could be, took your animal’s reins, and was ’bout to be on my way, I was.”
Lizzie was not too impressed with Tom’s feat, just annoyed that she’d been had and her pony almost taken. “Aw, Pa, you wasn’t going nowhere, were you?”
“No, but that’s ’cause I love you and I just didn’t, not ’cause I couldn’t’ve if I’d wanted.”
Lizzie really didn’t like that notion, and kicked the dirt ’neath her till the dust almost surrounded her wild mane of hair. “Whoa, there, girl. It’s not my fault you nodded off to dreamland and I just came along and did the natural thing—took your animal right from under you. Why, you’re not the first person something like this has happened to.”
“I’m not?” Lizzie asked, dejected, feeling terribly foolish.
“ ’Course not.”
“How do you know, Pa?”
“Well, once there was a boy . . .”
“What was his name, Pa?”
“Well, I’m not rightly sho’ I know that,” Tom said, as he helped Lizzie brush her pony down, being sure not to be too expert or too quick, leaving the child some pride. “Anyway, he was just some ol’ farmhand who was ever so sleepy till he got woke up by the Devil.”
“The Devil?” Lizzie dropped the brush and was reaching ’tween Amarillo’s legs for it. When her father brusquely interrupted, “What’d I tell you ’bout gettin’ ’tween a horse and his legs, Lizzie? You move the horse, not yourself. You hear me?”
“Yes, Pa.”
“Anyway, this ol’ boy is shaking in his boots ’cause he’s looking right at the Devil, you know?”
“Uh huh?”
“And the Devil takes his good time ’fore he says a thing. And that scared the ol’ boy even more. Then the Devil gets to flappin’ his mouth. ‘Well, youngun, if you want me to let you go, you’ve got to give me somethin’. I think I want some grain.’ And the ol’ boy replies, ‘Ain’t got no grain, the field’s dried up, sir.’ ”