The man smoothly rolled a new blunt. “Didn’t we all, brother. Didn’t we all? Name’s Mitchell, Mitch Jackson.”
“Ossie . . . Osceola Turner.”
“Hoss–SEE–o–lah.” Mitch rolled the word over, shifting the accent, and set the seal of a new cigarette with the moist tip of his tongue. “Great, ancient war chief. Lover of black women, defender to the last.” Hoss–SEE–o–lah . . . Hoss, hoss, hoss.”
With each syllable Mitch emitted a perfect smoke ring. In successive sizes, they floated to the center of the jail cell and hovered. He shifted the conversation back to his comrades. “The lieutenant will be along directly. He’s trying to get us reassigned.”
“Never thought I’d say it, but I would give my right toe to be in Detroit right about now.”
“Aw, gimme a beach in San Juan!”
There had already been a few incidents in town. Mitch wondered how the lieutenant was going to take this new situation: the drum major, lead trumpet, oboist, and the entire imported Puerto Rican reed section sitting in the county jail.
“On the positive side, we have not been arrested, only ‘detained.’ ”
“On the positive side, we have not been lynched!”
“We still in jail.”
The local sheriff was holding them he said for their own protection, but how long that safeguard was going to last was anybody’s guess.
The thin caramel man approached. Noble Sissle, the great songwriter-singer, reduced to a twitter. “You think they’ve even notified the camp? Where’s Jimmy? Where’s Colonel Heyward for that matter?” His face was bruised and swollen on one side, his eyelid drooping and black. “What are we going to tell him?”
“Our drum major has to learn to remove his cap,” Mitch teased.
“Wait till the shit happens to you, Jackson!”
“We’re all here, Noble. We’re all here,” Mitch responded wryly.
At that moment, the bandmaster himself entered with papers for their release. The one called Sissle jumped up. “Jimmy!” He stepped back and saluted. “Lieutenant, I mean. I only went into the hotel to buy a newspaper!”
Jim Europe, his arms folded, head lowered into a straight gaze of disapproval, listened patiently as the guard unlocked the cell door and his men exited single file, saluting their lieutenant as they passed. Mitch, the last, casually explained, “Noble got into it with the local hotelier. Claiming he couldn’t stand to be away from New York, he had to have a newspaper.”
“I went to buy a newspaper, damn it!”
“Watch your language, Sergeant Sissle.”
“Damned cracker told me to take my hat off . . . sir.” The reedlike man enunciated every syllable in a crisp high tenor. “I had the paper in one hand and the change in the other. He knocked my hat off!”
“Knocked his hat off,” echoed Mitch.
“I went to pick it up, and he kicked me. Kicked me, Jimmy! Almost took out my eye. Chipped my tooth! Like he wanted to take my head off. If the fellahs hadn’t come in, he might have killed me!”
“Came in to see what was taking you so long, Sis.”
“Go on, keep laughing. I broke a tooth!”
The lieutenant responded like a weary father with a houseful of children, the men clustered around him. “Pull yourselves together, soldiers. We have a gig in two hours. We’re playing the local country club tonight.”
No, uh-uh, the universal cry went up. “I no playin’ in no goddam country club inna inna inna goddam country like these!”
“You have a problem understanding the command, Romero?”
“No sir, Lieutenant Europe, sir.”
Osceola suddenly realized that he was standing before James Reese Europe in the flesh. A Negro, an officer, and leader of the finest band in the world! “Sergeant Sissle can sit out until he gets that tooth fixed,” the lieutenant continued. “If it’s any consolation, the boys back at the barracks stand ready to tear up the town on your behalf, but I have to have your word. No retaliation.”
“No newspaper neither,” mumbled the drum major as he exited the jail.
Mitch idled and gestured with a slant of his head. “Chief, can you spring the kid, too? Don’t think you wanna leave him here.”
The sheriff was only too happy to let Osceola go. Should the good citizens of Spartanburg decide to pay him a visit, he wanted his jail emptied of any colored. Wanted his town that way, too. He spat after them a thick sludge of well-chewed tobacco.
Their hands tucked into their pockets, the band members spilled into the sunlit street. Mitch mimicked a slide trombone wail of George M.’s “Over There!” shifted into a minor key. His fellow band members picked up the variation.
That night before an all-white crowd of Spartanburg’s finest and the country club’s all-colored waitstaff, James Reese Europe took the bandstand. Dressed in their military finest, pressed and polished, the band members, forty-eight strong, sat forward at attention. Europe crisply called out the number, then leaned into the hotspot and whispered, smiling, “You know, gentlemen, a funny thing about war you’ll discover—it condenses and compresses a whole lotta manhood into a very short period of time. A lotta people wanna know what kind of men are we?” Jim Europe, chest round and tall, his cap cocked low to the head so the men could see his bespectacled eyes without glare, raised his baton and spoke in a barely audible nonchalant baritone. “They tell me they got a medal over there of a naked white woman chained to a big black dick. They wear it round their necks like the iron cross, two, three, four.”
The ensemble struck up a hot tempo that increased in speed and volume and complexity with each riff. James Reese Europe’s 369th. They were soon to be known as Hellfighters. Already Osceola could hear it in their sound. Already the music said they were a tough breed of city cat, out from the shackles of Jim Crow, feeling their own power, feedin’ on it, “Harlem!” the horns howled, a part of town that black people owned or felt like it—livin’ it, smellin’ it, soundin’ it, lovin’ it, tastin’ it, movin’ breathin’ bein’ free! Had they own taverns, tailors, shoe parlors, barbers, broad avenues, newspapers, societies, wage jobs, even unions! By steamer, by wagon, by foot they came, from country to small town to the black metropolis, the field hollahs and the moanin’ blues travelin’ up the New England Constitution, blending with the fast, loud urban rhythms of the factories. Jacksonville to Durham to D.C. to Philly to New York, the Tenderloin, baby, Hell’s Kitchen, and from there to Harlem!! And Music! Bending the notes, spitting them out, diesel fuel gushed forth in great arcs of golden sound with so much power it got everybody movin’! Urban wildcatters, prospectin’ for their future, their tools trumpets, cornets, sax and tuba, violins, clarinets, bass, flute, and drums. Hellfighters—shoot, even before the war, they was raisin’ Cain and the roof! Their leader called himself a continent and built a band to suit the size. When the standard was twenty-eight, Jimmy had forty-eight. He insisted on forty-eight, with Noble Sissle as drum major. Went to Puerto Rico and Cuba to recruit the reed section. While the armies of the world were at stalemate, this big band from Harlem would conquer everywhere it went, killin’ em with the music. While the great world seemed to crumble and fall, they offered the possibility of a wholly unimagined new one, sayin’, “This is what freedom feel like—this, how it sound!”
The country club’s Negro waiters bustled about, unsure of what to make of this bold new music. Ossie was quiet. He stepped out of the truck and stood at the fence listening. A sound so full it could not be contained, a power so rich it could not be resisted. He was a changed man. He had a whole new way of hearing.
When the band struck for the evening, Osceola was surprised that neither Herbie nor Stevie seemed to recognize him. Their drums were drivin’! He intended to tell them as much. Stoking himself, he patted a nervous tempo on his thighs. Herbie stopped packing his gear and cut him a look. When they had left, he was a kid. Now he was almost eyeballin’ them. Maybe that was it. Maybe they remembered him as Deke’s kin and thus no fri
end to them. Ossie smiled back. Yeah, my friend, I’m coming after you. Osceola Turner’s cuttin’ in.
The next morning, he joined the army, signed up right there in Spartanburg. Though he was not yet seventeen, he told the recruiter he was a home birth and gave his age as twenty. They told him he had a week to set his affairs in order. He thought he had signed up for the band.
At first the war had been good to Deke Turner. He provided protection for Pilar’s girls and kept the musicians happy with whatever made them so. The pink-faced new recruits who crowded into the city, the doughboys, flush with innocence and fat with cash, kept the gambling tables busy. For a short while, he was king of the joint, Little Mexico’s chief bandito. But as soon as the country actually entered the fight, things changed. Though the sailors roamed the streets three abreast and twelve deep, there was no action. Little Mexico was near shut down. “They say it because my gals hab VD,” Pilar moaned. “My gals is clean. Got VD? Dem dam sailors brought it widdem. What we gon do, Deke?”
“Goddam white folks messin’ up everythin’. Half the girls locked up.” Deke had needed that money that Ossie had hidden away. A few months back, he had gotten himself detained in Georgia. Just travelin’ through as he always did with hard cash and half pints to bribe the deputies at the state border, he ran into a roadblock manned by military police with rifles drawn. They commandeered his automobile, put him in cuffs, and threw him in the back of his own car. Before they could discover the seat’s false bottom, he escaped—punched out the driver from behind, jumped out, and rolled into the thick country foliage just in time to see his car, along with five crates of good bourbon, crash into the sentries. He convinced a neighborly sharecropper’s wife to bust the manacles with an ax, then, following the moonlit backroads to Savannah, he hitched a shrimp hauler up the coast to Charleston. He stayed in the Neckbone now, away from the harbor. Now that the U.S. had entered the war, the city was thick with military police. With an out-of-state warrant, he had double cause for concern. He had to make himself scarce, invisible, sittin’ up in Pilar’s like some washed-up pimp. Lost his car, his money, workin’ on his reputation.
Through the curtain of Pilar’s second-floor window, Deke saw his little brother disembark from the trolley and start walking through the square. He watched that gal run and hug up on him. Then she put her hands on her hips and fussed, flirting, he could tell. “Where you been at five whole days?” Osceola grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around as if he had something to tell her. Deke was glad to see the kid was all right, but furious with Osceola for running off. He watched Lizzie put her arms around him. Still grasping hands, they walked toward Pilar’s together.
Deke flew down the steps and met Ossie at the door. He went to crack Ossie in the jaw with the back of his hand, but Osceola blocked the blow and pushed him back.
“Git yo’ hands offa me. I ain’t got to take that from you.” Stunned, Deke started toward Ossie again, but his opponent stood firm. “You lay a hand to a soljah, you goin’ to jail today. I don’t answer to you no mo’. I am property of the United States Army. I enlisted!”
Lizzie grabbed Ossie’s arm and spun him around, “You what?!”
Deke laughed, “You cain’t enlist in nothin’, you dumbass. You underage.”
“Go tell somebody, why don’t you? I signed up in Spartanburg. Gonna serve my country. Gonna join Jim Europe’s band.” Ossie smiled triumphantly.
Deke responded without emotion, “Your girlfriend don’t seem to be too happy ’bout it.” Ossie glanced behind him. Lizzie, a swirl of color, had already disappeared.
Deke sprang. He grabbed the front of Ossie’s shirt and threw him against the wall. “I’ll show you who you serve awright.” He pressed a steel forearm against Ossie’s throat.
Ossie clinched his teeth and spat back, “I’m goin’ inna mornin’. Ain’t nothin’ you can do.”
“Givin’ me lip, boy, huh?” Deke released his hold. Ossie bent over, coughing, massaging his windpipe. “You goin’ down to that office right now and clear this mess up,” Deke continued as he shoved Ossie toward the saloon’s swinging doors. Osceola landed hard on the sawdust floor and scurried to his feet. He skipped off in pain, running after Lizzie. Deke bellowed after him, “Come back here, you little shit! Goddam nigguh, I said come back!”
Ossie didn’t find her at Yum Lee’s. He peeked in the barbershop, but didn’t ask. Didn’t need any more folks all up in his business. He checked at the Bijoux. Flip had not seen her. He searched under the wharf where they first examined each other’s changing anatomies, but he couldn’t find her. He had outgrown Lizzie by five inches, but he still couldn’t catch her, especially if she had a head start, especially if she was mad.
He hitched a ride out King’s Highway, past Lizzie’s scoutin’ tree, the last artifact of their childhood. He found her, sitting on the front stoop of her family’s run-down homestead. Hands in his pockets, he walked up the path flanked by Mah Bette’s garden of herbs, vegetables, and wildflowers. Lizzie was combing her hair, having just washed it. The cans of cotton seed oil, beeswax, and petroleum jelly scented with sandalwood were lined up next to her, denying him a seat. She sectioned off a quadrant of the coppery mesh atop her head and began the process of braiding it. She layered on the oil and the scent and dried the section with a dishtowel, then pulling it taut divided it into three prongs that she laced through the fingers of her two hands. Picking through each dense, resilient lock in silence, she braided nine tight fat plaits that looked like half-smoked cigars. Her movements were slow and deliberate. When she finished, she twisted one braid on top of another till they ringed her skull in a crown.
Ossie stood there the whole time. He scuffed at the dusty soil. “I didn’t mean fuh yuh to find out like that, Lizzie. Meant to tell you myself. I had to do somethin’, somethin’ to get away from Deke.”
“From me too, look like.”
“I just know this is the right thing to do. Yo’ Mah Bette always talkin’ ’bout signs. I seen Jim Europe and I signed up. I’ma git inna band. You watch!”
“I ain’t watchin nothin’. Leave my great-gran’mama outta this! We coulda had a job with Black Patti if not for yo’ sorry behind. Shiverin’ like a yellah dawg. I don’t need you, Osceola Turner. You was holdin’ me back.”
“I just come to say good-bye, then.”
“Why? I got nothin’ to say to you. Nobody give a shit about you.”
“. . . Ain’t like I’mo be gone forever.”
“Just give me my half of our money.”
“Deke took it.”
“What?”
“That’s why I run off in the first place. I—”
She jumped up. “You let that nigguh take our money!”
“Don’t do nothin’ stupid!”
“Stupid? You got that pretty much covered on your own. You told me you was the best one to be keepin’ it. What kinda moron leave a stash so easy to find?! You just gonna let him do that?”
He stood beside her and grabbed her arms. She squirmed and tried to pull away. He held her fast, his eyes piercing and earnest. “Listen, Lizzie, I can do this. We won’t have to stash no money. In New York, Jim Europe got a musicians’ union. Colored run every band in the city. That’s a better connection than waitin’ for any ol’ touring show comin’ through town. Black Patti’s the past, Jim Europe’s the future. We could make it to New York on our own! New York, Lizzie. You dancin’ and me leadin’ the band? Our band. Be just like the Castles and James Reese Europe. Lizzie Winrow and Osceola Turner’s Colored Troubadours!”
“What about our money? You just gon run?”
“I ain’t runnin’ no more. I’m just goin’ cross the water for a minute. I’ll be back. I’ll send you my earnings.”
“Keep it.” She pulled away, collected her things, and marched off toward the woods. “You’re goin’ to chase your dream, Osceola Turner, didn’t ask nothin’ ’bout mine.”
That night he couldn’t sleep. He wanted to kee
p his anger at her fresh, but it plagued him through the night and into the morning. His drumsticks in his back pocket, he beat out his anxiety with a hambone, quick-paced paradiddles and syncopated wordless speech, till his thighs and ribs were bruised. He stayed out of Deke’s sight until the birds announced a new day.
Waiting on the depot platform for the local train to take him to camp, he saw her approaching. She stood beside him without looking at him, the air dancing between them.
“I got a letter from muh sister yesterday,” she began, “from New York. She got two girls and a baby boy now. I thought to myself, Mama kin send me up there to help out. I’ll be in New York and see my sister, too. But then I thought, naw, I’mo stay here with Ossie. We gon have us a show. We gon work on it. I was willing to give up what I wanted for you. You didn’t think so much of me, I spose.”
She was carrying the regular charm to deliver to Sullivan when he arrived on the 5:15 Daybreaker from Richmond. She reached inside her blouse and gave the charm to Osceola instead. “Mah Bette sent this for to keep you safe.”
14
Absurdity and its consequences. Nations fell into war like stampeding cattle over a cliff. No retreat or advance, just a perpetual stalemate, the lines of defense and offense shifting back and forth a mere two hundred miles in four years. Four years and four million dead. By the time Private Osceola Turner hit the shore, the Germans had pulled in the Turks, the Brits the Australians, the French the Senegalese, and Europe was punch-drunk and weary, staggering at the prospect of relief. The Americans arrived, so fresh, they called them doughboys. The black ones they called sable for the shine of their skin in the sunlight.
Hard livin’ and hittin’ full force on the coasts of France, the original four hundred colored stevedores working the port towns of Brest, Navarre, Marseilles, and Nice swelled to fifty thousand in a matter of three months. But this was no tour of the Riviera, the colored soldiers joked. The Service and Supply Corps stood for “S.O.S.! Niggas need he’p! Stead of a rifle or a shiv, give you a shovel an a pick,” they chanted, “Say, Service and Supply, mean S.O.S.! Niggas need he’p!”