“War widow and all, I should think you’d be getting benefits,” Raymond wondered.
“Now, Ray—”
Jolly jumped in, “That’s for the white folks, Minor. Where you been? Seen in the paper yestiddy bout that ship for mothers of guys killed over there. Some say, colored couldn’t go. Colored gotta ride inna second ship. Gotta go steerage. Like they sons shed blood in another color. Only benefit we got is benefit of a doubt.” He laughed at his own joke and slugged down a teacup of whiskey.
Lizzie scooped her child in her arms and rocked her roughly. “Well, I aim to be a first-class performer. That’s the best I can do in his memory. My husband Ossie used to say, ‘Don’t sit there and wait for it. Go out there and make it happen.’ Ain’t that right, Cinn?” Mrs. Jolly’s back straightened. Lizzie rolled her eyes. “It’s Cinnamon, like her color! I didn’t know I was gonna name her that. Can of spice fell off the shelf and there it was. Ain’t she beautiful?” Lizzie rubbed noses with her brown-skinned child, playfully snubbing her nose at the table of would-be Creoles.
“In the old days, if you was a fellah I could send you right up to Marshall’s or the Clef Club,” Jolly advised, sucking on the marrow of a bone, “but when Jim Europe died alla that went. Ray and me been out the life for a while. Action’s shifted uptown. Back in the day had to suffer through coon songs. You too young to know bout that. Me and Minor had a quality act. Ahead of our time. Ain’t that right, Minor?”
Lizzie tapped her foot impatiently, tearing the few last chunks of a biscuit back and stuffing it into her mouth. She watched Ray out of the corner of her eye as Jolly paused, then launched anew, “Minor and Jolly. Class act. Nowdays, any heiffuh can barrel a tune, then cut a record. Call it Blues, and”—he rubbed his fingers together like he was sprinklin’ salt and slithered the word out his mouth—“Jass. Nope. I’m out of it. Action’s movin’ uptown. All this Prohibition stuff. Too much fuh me. Me and the wife opened up a grocery store.” At this, he hugged Mrs. Jolly’s shoulder. She nodded a thin-lipped smile, her nose the perfect angle of a teapot spout. “Irish crew offered to buy me out.” Dropping his voice to a whisper, he mocked his new investors, “ ‘Really tink about where we’se comin’ frum,’ says the quiet one—one with the bad skin, the one called, uh, Cappy Meeks. Little rough town scruff with lifts in his shoes. Fond of pistols, though. Cap yuh soon as whistle. Cap happy,” he laughed. “I said, listen, I don’t wanna know. Asa Jolly is foldin’. It’s a new game now. Action’s uptown where the colored still got some say.”
“Your game still sound pretty good to me, Mr. Jolly.”
Duly flattered, Jolly wrote out the directions uptown with pencil over a news page of stock prices, mapped out New York for her, posturing his knowledge as some influence he still might have. “There’s Happy Rhone’s on 143rd Street and Lenox, black and white, upstairs club. Got a nice floor show. Big white folks I hear comin up in there. Barrymore, Chaplin. Sissle’s the MC. You don’t wanna go up ’fore him till you got some seasonin’, sugar. Same wid PJs, P&J Catagonia. Willie the Lion will eat you alive if you ain’t ready. White musicians play for free just to learn! The Jungle’s at 133rd, Bank’s and Brownie’s, and Leroy’s. Lybia’s fading. Small’s Paradise got a wait list. Can you roller skate? . . . Well, forget that then. Cotton Club, started off as the Douglas, Jack Johnson’s joint. White gangstas got to it, changed the name to Cotton. You know that weren’t no colored folks’ doin’. Don’t think you light enough for them, though. They like ’em like yoah sistuh. If you got talent though, hell, try it. You can take the 35 straight uptown or catch the train at Broadway to 59th and transfer. It’s the simplest city in the world.”
While Elma made a pallet for Lizzie on the living room couch, Ray got Gabby’s old milk crate cradle from the back of the pantry. He had crafted and sanded it himself. Elma threw her arms around him and hugged him from behind. She laid her head on his shoulder blade, next to his heart, beating fast.
“I don’t think she was ever married to that fellah,” Ray said.
“People grieve different, Raymond. She’s young. It was a terrible blow seeing Osceola die like that. More terror in your own country than over there. She just needs a little time to get on her feet.” He patted her hands across his chest. “Please say she can stay,” she pleaded, leaning into the contours of his back.
“She still doesn’t act like a war widow.”
“She’s family, Raymond. I am sworn to believe in her no matter what.”
Ray brought Gabby’s old cradle out to Lizzie, who was changing Cinnamon into an old slip, two sizes too big, the straps shortened with slipknots. She thanked him coolly, complimented its beauty, but waited until he had left to set it aside and cuddle her child in her arms. She heard Mah Bette in her thoughts. Death done slept in there.
“Pay panno on my tummy, Mama.” Cinn pulled at Lizzie’s fingers, urging they play the ritual game Lizzie had made up, each different note a different tickling spot. “Charleston, Durham, Kittyhawk! Norfolk, Richmond, New Yawk!” Cinn could sing like a mockingbird, anticipating where each tickle would fall until she laughed herself to sleep.
Night came restless for her mother. A force in the dark grabbed her by the face and pushed her down. Her hair, her dress stuck to the floor. Her body bolted back from a punch to the jaw and another to the chin. Her eye tore open, her body tore in half. She woke with a start at every crack or shift in the wind, a knock or hiss of steam. Likewise, the child often awakened, gasping at an unknown terror.
Elma sat feeding Jesse, spooning the cereal that spilled from his lips back into his mouth. A shadow passed through a shaft of morning light. “Gabby?” Elma looked up, for a moment expecting to see her second daughter. Cinnamon appeared in the kitchen doorway. Holding the night-slip with her chubby fingers, her wispy curls spiked around her head, a sleepy frown stuck to her brow, she seemed a princess shrunken by a spell.
“Well, good morning.”
“Goo mowin’,” the child responded with Elma’s exact same pitch and rhythm. At the sound of a child, Elma’s heart jumped. “Would you like to meet your cousin?” Cinnamon toddled toward her aunt and climbed upon a neighboring chair. “Cinnamon, this is Jesse.”
“Yessee,” the little girl repeated and clapped with delight, then took his hand in hers and released it. Jesse’s arms dropped motionless. Elma joked, as she slipped Cinnamon’s chair closer, “He’s on the quiet side, but he’s very observant. Aren’t you, Jesse?” Cinn put her hands on her hips and brought her face close to his, nose to nose, examining him, then put her arms around the boy as if she would lift him. Jesse’s arms popped up in a seeming reaction, a reflex memory of his reaching for his sisters. Elma felt a fresh surprise of tears collect in her eyes.
Lizzie entered groggily, her night-scarf askew. “Coffee?”
“Morning to you, too.”
Grown up and grown apart, the sisters circled around each other with envy and longing. Elma, not being born into the high-tone class, abandoned by her father, mother a seamstress, had the look to suggest her path was different. She struggled through her pedigree-conscious college freshman year. She had the color, of course, and the hair—“your crown and glory,” Mah Bette would repeat like a mantra as if Elma’s assets were all on the outside. Obviously Tom was not her father, but she never challenged her mother’s stoic silence on the circumstances of her birth. From childhood, Elma exercised a willful ignorance and passivity while Dora used the Diggs family connections to wedge her daughter into acceptable colored circles. Elma thought herself incapable of impulsiveness. Even her elopement with Raymond had calculation. She now had the Minor name, which could have been a stepping stone had Raymond lived up to it.
Lizzie, by contrast, had no one to make her way. Her father’s disappearance had hit her hard, but in losing the parent who favored her, she developed a resiliency and independence of thought Elma would never possess. Lizzie seemed so comfortable with herself. She was a “bold, impudent heiffuh” according to
Bette and a “spiteful, ungrateful wench” in Dora’s opinion. While Elma suffered from too much expectation, Lizzie was burdened with none but her own. The more Dora hurled invectives, the stronger her defiance, a brazen helmet of red hair and a splash of freckles across her sun-bronzed skin. She attached herself to no one but Cinn, and that was a wary partnership, tumbleweed to a dandelion. “Yo Boo,” she greeted her daughter like a pal.
Both sisters, like their mother and great-grandmother before them, simply erased from consciousness facts and experiences they could not face, inventing stories more to their liking and needs. As to talent, each possessed it in abundance, but while Elma sang for comfort and for her children and for God’s glory, Lizzie, with the lesser range, sang anytime—and for money, she would put on a show! Elma sang absently and performed only when asked or prodded. Lizzie used every opportunity to practice. Every experience was fodder for material, every setting a potential audience.
“So I whip around, and it’s the biggest policeman I ever seen, pokin’ me in the ribs like that. Now I had told Cinn, anytime somebody touch you, anytime you see somebody come upon Mama, you hollah, you hollah good. Taught her to squeal like Papa used to when he was callin’ to the pigs. She takes one look at this big joker, sizes him up, poking me with that stick, and lets out a hollah you could hear back on King’s Highway, Charleston!” Lizzie sipped the last of her second cup, flailing her hands around, imitating her daughter, who now giggled with delight and clapped her hands, squealing in high decibels. “Talk about making a scene. Fifteen minutes in New Yawk and we gon’ get arrested. White folks looking at me, saying what she doin’ to that child. Colored passin’ by, movin’ out the way, sayin’ she bettuh shut her up!” Cinnamon stood beside her, the perfect partner in the reenactment.
Elma, still holding Jesse in her lap, simultaneously laughed and shushed them. Cinn looked to her in confusion. “Your uncle Raymond’s asleep,” Elma cautioned quietly. “He’s got the night shift, workin’ on a tunnel to New Jersey.”
Lizzie crossed her eyes and explained the dampening of their fun, “Aunty Elma has a huzbin.”
“How’s Mama?”
“Mama’s fine.” Lizzie sat down. “Mama’s always fine. Cousin Diggs is just fit to be tied, though. He’s been escortin’ Mama for years now.”
“Better her than me,” Elma replied, still wincing from her mother’s attempt to pawn her off to their wealthy cousin.
“Amen to that, sistuh. But, you know, the Chinaman’s building a house next door.”
“Get out!” Elma laughed, a parakeet with bells on its swing.
“Mama says she don’t know who to choose, the undertaker or the laundryman.” Lizzie put her hands to her face in mock dismay.
“After all these years? Yum Lee?”
“Yut, gni, som, se, ng, luk, chut, bak, gow, sup!” Expecting applause, Cinnamon glowed at how well she had repeated the phrase taught to yet another generation of Mayfield girls, reminding them that the laundry owner’s business and friendship had been one of the most consistent the family had known. The two sisters simply gawked in amazement and burst out laughing anew. Elma put her fingers to her lips, “Shhh! Sh! Ray . . .”
Cinnamon immediately mimicked her, shooshing Lizzie with firmness, an erect pudgy index finger pressed to her lips, “Aunty El say Shhh!”
Elma marveled, “Oh, Lizzie, she’s so smart.”
“Thank God for that! You know, otherwise Mah Bette couldn’t take no brown-skinned child. As much as she loved her baby, she have her ways. I came home, found my child with a clothespin on her nose. Woman say, jus’ get a little bridge up there and she’ll be fine. I told her, this bridge is closed. Her nose is just wonderfully pugnacious as it is.”
Lizzie saw her sister’s countenance change. Elma had not prepared her for Jesse. Lizzie reached for her nephew and picked him up. “Now this little bundle would be more to her liking. You a handsome son of a gun, Jesse Minor. We ain’t never had no men in our family. That stayed for no time, anyway.” Cinnamon started crying, reaching for Jesse and stomping her feet. “Your cousin think you her baby doll. That’s what I’ma call you, Baby Doll . . . That’s all right?” looking to Elma.
“Oh Liz . . .” Elma’s body crumpled where she sat.
“Listen, your fam’ly’s here now. Things gon change.”
“Each day, prayin’ for a miracle.”
“Never know. Miracles happen every day. You watch, I’ma get one today. By the time I come back tonight, I’ll have me a job. Gotta find someone to look after my pal, though.”
“Don’t worry about that. Miss Cinnamon and I are already good friends. Don’t think you oughta call her Cinn, though. You see how people misunderstand.”
“Yeah, well, that ain’t my problem.”
Jolly reiterated his maxim, “Easiest city in the world,” as Lizzie walked out into the late morning rush. The loudness, the rhythms, the cacophony delighted her. As soon as she got to the corner, she balled up Jolly’s directions, threw them into the gutter, and struck out on foot. She figured if the streets were all numbered, all she had to do was follow them uptown.
Maneuvering through the bustle, she suddenly understood the changes in Osceola’s music, the sheet music recovered from his duffle bag. There were traces of her melodies, songs they had crafted together, but there were full orchestrations—horns, drums, brass—modern, wild, jazzed. In the drone and percussion of the traffic, the point and counterpoint of the city’s rhythms, she heard the band in his thinking. In the traps of a sputtering motorcar, the timpani of a delivery truck, the warbling whistle of a street cop’s ballad, Caruso bellowing from a tenement window, the blue note stride of a Beale Street sideman, in the stray notes of barkers, newsboys, and bagmen—“Hot dogs, Sauerkraut! Now, you listen! HelloooooOOOH, Temptation! Extrah!”—she saw where he was headed had he lived. A song of wandering outcasts, people of faith in a minor key, the tempo of the street, it was hot. She was home! “Ossie, you was right. We could have owned this town.”
She ran into Sparrow, on 72nd Street, walking a string of West Side collared dogs in his green and yellow bellhop suit, the little pillbox hat sitting on the side of his head. “Hey Charleston!”
“Eye for talent, eh?” She stopped with her hands on her hips. “You book dogs, too?”
“This just my day gig. But you never know. That’s Irene Castle’s Pekinese right there. Hey, where you goin’?”
“Harlem, where you think?”
“You cain’t walk to Harlem!” She continued walking uptown as he followed, dragging the mélange of pets with him. “You new in town, you need to know the layout. And something called the transit system. Besides, it’s too dangerous. You walkin’ in some neighborhoods they as soon cut you as speak.”
“I can take care of myself, Scarecrow.”
“That’s Sparrow. I can’t believe—you walked through San Juan Hill? You crazy? African boxer went up in there, world champion of the world—Sipi—with a leopard. Walked up in there, they killed him and the cat! . . . Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, you need to save those legs for tonight! Wait till I git off work at six o’clock.”
“Six? What I’ma do fuh foah hours?”
He looked at her with his eyes to one side. “Got uh empty ballroom with a piano. You could practice . . . Hardwood floors . . .” He did a quick time step. “Great for taps.”
She looked him up and down. Sparrow’s chiseled body seemed attached with wrenches. Smoothly oiled, moving gears, he was all angles. “Let’s get one thing straight,” she said, “I don’t mess around.”
“So where you get the shorty, then . . . No, no, no. Come on, come on, come on. I promise, just dancin’ and singin’, legit. Strictly hands off.” With that he raised both hands as if under arrest. Impatient canines flew in all directions, their leashes snaking behind them.
Lizzie sat on the stone wall rimming the park while Sparrow collected his charges—she wasn’t about to risk a run in her new stockings. She didn’t k
now this guy, but figured she could handle him and she could use a little touching up before her first tryouts in Harlem. She followed him to the servant entrance of the upscale residential hotel where he worked. Waiting for him to let her in from the inside, she quickly grew impatient. “I didn’t come to New Yawk to stand in no alley.” She briefly entertained the notion of practicing some trapeze flips on the low-hanging fire escape, but the thought of her stockings got the better of her again. “Lizzie Turner, what are you doin’?!” Just as she started to bolt, the heavy kitchen entrance door flew open. Sparrow popped out like a jack-in-the-box.
“Come on, sugar.”
“Don’t call me sugar,” she blurted as she brushed by him. “My name’s Lizzie Turner.”
She emerged from the washroom, her dance clothes concealed with an unbuttoned, oversized maid’s outfit. Sparrow ushered her into a small, empty mirrored room with a shiny black baby grand. He crossed his legs and arms and leaned against its hollow. “Let’s see what you got.”
Lizzie tried not to act impressed, but her mouth salivated over the patent leather finish of the instrument’s body. She ran her left hand across the keys, a lover stroking a long-missed cheek, her right foot angled on the volume pedal. Her first pounding set of chords threw Sparrow across the room. She launched into a strong left-hand stride, skating over the ivories, her voice clear as a bell, her command absolute, her sass-talking, brass-squawkin’ Yamma Mama’s Zombie Stomp! Not realizing that she would be that loud, Sparrow nervously looked toward the door, but then it got good to him, too good for him to care. His head commenced to wigglin’, his foot tappin’, fingers snappin’, the boogie coming out of every pore. Suddenly, Lizzie stopped time, shifting pace and pitch. Her body arched into a backwards C and she snapped off the uniform.
“Damn!”
“This is where I go into my dance,” she paused to explain, encouraging Sparrow to keep up the rhythm as she scatted through the next verse, imitating her backup band. She was just a green bean of a girl, but doggone if she didn’t have the shapeliest legs he had ever seen move in more directions than he thought humanly possible. Though her hips were slim, the way she bumped em around sure made you wanna watch. Dakota Stretch Sparrow tipped his cap back. “To heck with the job. I got me a star!”