“Sweets, he was talkin’ about your tapsuit. Cobbs hates green.” They sat in a café, sharing a cup of coffee. “Listen, when I hit the numbers, I’ma back your show, your very own, but you got to calm down.”
“You bet too much. Waste your money.”
“I’m bettin’ on you. The Chestnut Filly. You’re unique, Lizzie Turner. Takes time for people to understand that.”
“Don’t nobody else seem to think so. I’m so tired of people judgin’ me.”
“Then you in the wrong business, baby. Besides, you the worst judge I know.”
“I am not.”
“Got something to say bout everybody.”
“Do not.”
“How much you wanna wager?”
It being Monday and her night off from workin’ the Turf, Sparrow took Lizzie to the Crystal Palace weekly “Sashay,” a transvestite ball competition, where the audience was the judge. Greeted by the male-clad pianist and singer Rene, their task would be not only to choose the most beautiful costume, but also to discern which one of the bevy of tall parading figurines was actually a woman. Sparrow thought the rowdy faux atmosphere would cheer her up. Her mind blurred by the morphine-laced tonic Sparrow had given her, Lizzie sat distractedly figuring out how to live on the two dollars a night and the tips she was making. Hardly enough to take care of the kid and still look for a place. Rents in Harlem were twice as much as anywhere else and she would still need childcare. Best make peace and stay with Elma, maybe get a bigger place together. Even though I can’t stand huh huzbin, Elma’s still good with the kid. No way I’m ever gonna let Cinn stay with Mama and Mah Bette. Old clothespin lady.
Over these thoughts, a melody floated in from the pit band accompanying the parade of sequin-clad performers. The tune was without lyrics, but Lizzie immediately recognized it. She blinked back to consciousness and looked toward the bandstand. Osceola? . . .
“Me and Ossie wrote that song!” When she stood up, Sparrow got a bad case of déjà vu. “Say! Where’d you get that song! Stop the music!”
“Lizzie . . . sit your ass down. You don’t wanna make no scene in here. These is drag queens! Hey!” He caught the back of her dress as she flew toward the pit and snatched the sheet music from the nearest music stand. On the jacket: “The Cotton Patch Rag” by Mitch Jackson! The conductor reached up and grabbed the music back with one hand while furiously keeping time with the other, just as Sparrow spied two hefty bouncers headed their way, the tall bronze beauties strutting and fluttering, their eyes popping darts. Only his fast talking kept them from getting tossed out instead of “escorted.”
“Look, you got to calm down.”
“For what! That’s my song! Me and Ossie wrote that—”
“You know if I had a nickel for every chippie come sayin’ that’s my song, I wouldn’t have to play the numbers. I’d be a millionaire.”
“You don’t believe me?”
“I’m not saying that. But, but, but it happens all the time. ‘Alexander’s Ragtime Band,’ Irving Berlin’s biggest hit, his breakthrough. Scott Joplin swore he wrote that, tried to sue. What’d he get? Nothin’, but the clap.”
“I don’t care bout that. That low-down, lyin’ Mitch Jackson stood right up in my face when Ossie told him we—”
“ ‘That’s my song! That’s my song!’ Ain’t gon get you nowhere. You wanna do somethin’ about it, write the publisher.”
“I ain’t writing nobody about my own damn song!” Lizzie jerked away from him and, turning her ankle, stomped, “Ow! Damn! You’re fired!”
“I thought that was your specialty.” Sparrow watched her hobbling zigzag disappear around the corner. “Go easy on the tonic, Slim.”
She stayed in the streets two days. Sipping the tonic until it was gone, a wandering nomad, she stumbled from speakeasy to dance hall to buffet flat, chased by her own memories, afraid to sleep. Through a haze of cheap booze and freely offered miscellaneous drugs, she searched a netherworld of anonymous bodies, looking for Osceola. A smell, a taste, a hand, a knee, eyes. “Wake up. Let me see your eyes.” When she last saw Osceola’s body, he looked asleep. The bleeding was internal, Roswell had said. “The wound just opened up inside.” Hers was the same. If only we had been able to talk, just to talk.
She wouldn’t let anyone else prepare his body. She told Diggs, her voice flat and determined, “I’ll do this.” When he asked, “Would that be appropriate?” she snickered. “People already presume we been inappropriate. I don’t think a little bit more matters.” Sensing her cousin’s hesitancy, she softened, “I’m the closest he got to family,” and added, “Osceola and me snuck in this same room to hear Jim Europe on your new Victrola.” Roswell retreated, taking that last bit of laughter. The escapade had been their last joyful time together. So much had transpired for both of them in the thirteen months that followed.
His hair was cut different. His face had matured. Always so dramatic, never veiled, his face had never seemed conflicted until he saw her on the stoop that day. A face now without expression had been so alive, always with intent, alternately challenging and courting, their fighting mixed with play like young cubs wrestling to test and prepare. She picked up his hand and cupped it in hers. His knuckles were bloodied and bruised from the fight, but his fingernails were shaped and polished with a clear glaze. He had just treated himself to a manicure. She had envied those hands for their span of twelve notes. They had been her connection to the culture of men who made the music, the secret society of mentors willing to take on a youngblood like Ossie, dismissing her childhood aspiration as rebellion that would pass when she settled down. Ossie, the proselyte, defied the order and showed her the techniques just plucked from itinerant elders, willingly challenging his own mastery by exposing it to her boldness and innovation. She never appreciated the beauty of his hands until she held one feather-light and curled around her palm. Still warm. At Musicians’ Hall he would have had the best-lookin’ hands. She caressed his palm, kissed his lifeline which extended across it, then laid the hand back by his side.
She smiled to herself, remembering the last time they played at Pilar’s dance hall, rousting Jocelyn from his favored seat, only time they beat him in a cuttin’ contest. The Professor gloated as he bested the contestant before them, “Ain’t a person alive good enough to beat me tonight.” Ossie held back as she approached the bandstand, blurted out the challenge, “Yeah, but two of us is!” She had grabbed his hand, pulling him up.
They played as a duet that night, Osceola Turner and Lizzie Winrow, their four youthful hands with pint-sized virtuosity, making up for Jocelyn’s famed long-fingered, thirteen-note stretch. It got so good, Lizzie lost her shoe. She kicked her right foot up and planted it on the keys, ticklin’ the top notes with her toes. Osceola did the same, his left foot slammin’ on the deep bass notes while he carried the boogie with his fingers. The crowd went wild, sloshing beer and throwing down shots, clamoring over their wagers, hootin’ and carryin’ on—a literal stomp. Jocelyn damned near jumped on the bandstand and slammed the key cover shut. “Puttin’ yo dirty toes on my ivories! Get on outta here!”
“Took four hands and two feet, but we bested Professor Jocelyn that night, huh, baby? The two of us.”
She removed his uniform, still pressed and proud beneath the scuffs and footprints of the brawling thugs he had battled outside the streetcar. She pulled his tee-shirt over him from behind. The clothing clung to him as the last trace of warmth departed his body, his weight falling into her. She held him to her, shook her head to dispel the expectation of a return embrace, then laid him back down. She was startled by the fresh scars from his war wound. Mimicking the explosion that caused them, the shiny, keloid welts of molten flesh crisscrossed his torso in jagged furrows of trauma and the rapid, sloppy sutures of a beleaguered base camp surgeon. She ran her hand along the filigrees of stitches. She could scarcely imagine, but then she could.
By comparison, the place where she had nicked him in the arm with her tambourine, a tiny,
clean half-inch scar, seemed a mere birthmark. She had flung the instrument at him when he started seeing a neighborhood girl who was known for giving it up. He had stood Lizzie up for rehearsal, then tried to escort both girls home after their last set at the St. John’s Island Harvest Social, dropping Lizzie off first. She screamed and cried a fury, less at the knowledge that he had a girl and more at his denial of it. Lizzie had no interest or enthusiasm for such activity. She fancied herself indifferent to human touch, instead finding sensuality in movement, the pulse of a rhythm in her body, a melody in her ear, the vibrato in her throat as she sang or the embrace of cool creek water on her naked skin as she dove beneath the surface. She, who loathed human touch, now found herself holding him with longing. He had kissed her just before he left, sending a shock of sensations through her body.
While Yum Lee washed and pressed his uniform, she searched Osceola’s duffle bag for some good underwear. Beneath the dress he had brought her from Paris, she found a stack of music charts, their songs transcribed. She leafed through the titles—Zombi Stomp, Cotton Patch Rag, Tamarind Trot and the Geechee Town Ball, Gulley Bird Rag, Strut Miss Lizzie—her lyrics scratched beneath the mad scramble of notes, not simply for piano, but for a whole band. Osceola had learned to write music and arrange it! Just as he had vowed, he had gone off to war to find Jim Europe and returned a disciple.
She ran her fingers along the black flagged dots and measured bars, an archeologist of her own hieroglyphics or a blind man, understanding for the first time how the raised markings on a page represented a language and permanence that sound and memory could not offer. All her life, she had been the bold one. She had been the one to push, but now he was teaching her, leading her through the music they had made together. Here, in these charts, she could see his confidence grow with corrections and occasional splotches giving way to clear, unfettered, spirited strokes. Like the mirrored surface water of Oshun catching both her own reflection and a glimpse of Agwe’s ocean depth, there was in the deep, rich India ink notations in his hand something of him and something of hers, indelibly intertwined.
As she sat there, contemplating a world without him, a slow bluesy rhythm slid from her lips, a song from deep within her body, a simple range of notes that flowed into each other, more a chant than melody, her voice floating on the wind. She rocked to and fro to her foot’s slow scrape and step on the plain wood. An economy of gesture compressed emotion and held it taut till it broke over her in a wail. The sun well set, her sweat-soaked arms swept him into an embrace.
After she had washed him down, she swathed his body with scented water and oiled him with the treatment he used to like so much in her hair, trying to preserve the deep red hues of his graying skin. Her body heavy with life growing inside her, she heard only the quality of the silence—the archipelago of treble notes, water wrung from the washrag into a tin pail while outside the carpenter’s hammer in fragmented four-four time crafted a new pine coffin. The baby stirred in her womb. She placed his hand on the point of pain. Where two children had snuck in to hear Jim Europe on a new Victrola two short years before, inseparable friends skipped lovers to become wife to husband. “I make this your child. Our child, Osceola Turner.”
With the soft hiss of the radiator, and the tingling filament of a bare electric light, her memory of Ossie ebbing, she breathed in the morning and sat up in the strange apartment. The wallpaper was moldy with mildew spots, the bed creaking and stained. Except for maybe the slope of his shoulder, the young stevedore passed out beside her looked nothing like her love. Wake up. Open your eyes. She slipped into her dress and coat and broken shoe and walked out to a gray, empty street toward the subway. Sittin’ in the depot in the pourin’ rain/ Waiting for anothuh mornin’ train/ To carry me far from where I come from/ Carry me way from what I done done/ Nobody here even know my name/ Nobody here even know my shame/ Don’t know how I keep goin’ on/ When everythin’ I done loved done gone/ I say, everythin’ I done loved keep dyin’/ Seem even the day—Cain’t stop cry-y-y-y-y-in’ . . . For the first time—doubt.
Raymond’s fist clamped around the slingshot. “He says your sister taught him.”
Elma sighed as she wiped her brow and continued stirring the evening meal of okra in tomato sauce, sipping it for taste. “I wouldn’t put too much stock in that. Mrs. Marrano’s kids are all a bit hooligan.”
Ray leaned toward her and shook the makeshift weapon in Elma’s face. “It’s made outta his mama’s garters.”
Elma turned to him, bemused. “That’s the way she used to make them, all right.” She closed her eyes and breathed in the aroma familiar from her youth.
Ray walked away and returned. “One of her many talents. That kid coulda took my eye out.”
“Taken, it’s taken, Ray,” she said softly as he paced behind her.
“Comin’ in all hours of the night. Sleepin’ through half the day.” They talked over each other, the argument escalating.
“So do you.”
“I work!”
“So does she. She works in a nightclub, Ray.”
“That’s what you call that two-bit dive? You don’t see? Your ears too delicate to hear it?”
“What, Ray, what?”
Stuffing his hands in his pockets, he mumbled loud enough to hear, “Fornicatin’ and whore mongerin’, that’s what!”
Elma slapped the serving spoon on the counter and turned with her hand on her hip. “Stop it, Ray! I won’t let you say that. Lizzie’s a sensible girl, a good girl.”
“Oh give me a break. Dress hiked up to her knees.”
“It’s the style, ’sides, who says you should be looking?!”
“Parading around. It’s disgraceful!”
“To whom?! Who in this neighborhood cares?”
“You said your sister needed a place to stay. All she was looking for was a place to dump her kid!”
“Leave Cinn out of this. She’s no trouble. She’s a help to Jesse, as if you cared a damn!”
“What are you sayin’, huh? What are you sayin’?!”
“Lizzie’s had no breaks, no money, no father!”
“She’s a tramp! Your poor sister in mourning.”
“What do you know about it?! What do you know about it?!”
“War widow hasn’t shed one tear.”
“Have you? Have you?!”
“This is my house!”
“Your house?”
“I’ll not have it. Not under my roof. Walkin’ around actin’ the whore!”
He threw the slingshot in Elma’s direction.
She whipped around. “That’s my sister you’re talking about. At least she’s bringing some money up in here.”
Raymond paused and laughed, ran his fingers through his hair. He walked away, stuffing his hands in his pockets.
Elma nursed her throbbing temple. “What is wrong with you?”
He had come so close to punching her. A trembling booze-laced swipe across the face. He couldn’t believe how close he had come.
When Lizzie showed back up at Big Ed’s, he didn’t want to take her back. “Miss Big Time—too big for me! I got a business to run. Think you can show up when you want to?”
“Give me a break, Ed.”
“I done gave you a break and you break mah heart. Already replaced you. Hot young thang from Kansas City Sparrow brought in.”
“Sparrow?!”
“You think you the only show in town? Eye fo’ talent got more n one eye. Toah up the place, she did.” Big Ed walked ahead of her, talking over his shoulder, wheezing from his weight. “Juss gon run off, gon be a big star—told you I’d school you. Lesson number four hundred twenty-two.” He turned and waved a fried wing in her face. “Nevuh spite the hand that feeds yuh. You can eat chicken or you can eat crow.”
“Come on, Ed. I need this job.”
“Like I care. I’m dockin’ yuh pay. Twenty dollahs. You in the last set. We got competition. Rash of clubs. Coal Pit. Dreamland. Every nigga with a basem
ent think he got a club. You all that, make it up in tips. Well, don’t stand there. Get snappin’. Got fifteen minutes.”
The hot young thang from Kansas City had taken Lizzie’s spot in the dressing room. She would have pitched the girl’s makeup on the floor had Sparrow not been there to intercede.
“What do you want?” Lizzie demanded.
“You might thank me for saving your spot.”
“Yeah? How do you figure that?” She simultaneously rummaged through a heap of costumes on the floor and wiggled out of her street clothes. “Dog bite it, where my kicks?”
He dangled her silver slippers from his index finger. “Lookin’ fuh these? Big Ed’s main act, a complete no-show. You should be out of more than a pair of tap shoes.”
She snatched them from him and leaned against the counter to put them on. He slapped his knee. Lizzie sucked her teeth as she looked away and contritely extended her pointed foot for him to fasten the buckle. “I . . . apologize, okay? I had troubles . . . of a personal nature. A row with Ray,” she confessed as she proffered her other foot. “Boy, I would get outta that place if I could.” She stood up and slipped into her costume, oblivious to Sparrow standing there.
He leaned on the door frame watching her. “I’m the one should apologize.”
“How you figure that? I’m the one lost the gig,” she said. “Can’t seem to keep one.”
“I shoulda warned you about the tonic. You ain’t got the constitution. Ease the pain but cause some other. Make you do things you regret later. Don’t wanna get yourself hooked on that. I worried about you.”
“Well, don’t.”
“I can take care of myself,” they spoke in unison, her serious, him mocking. She turned for him to zip her up. He whispered in her ear, “When I hit the numbers, gon set you up right. Back your own revue.”
“Oh, please. You ain’t got pot to piss in neithuh. You’re addicted to them numbers. Just throwin’ your money away.”
“Take a chance on me, then.”
“You need to see Miss Kansas City ’bout that. I already told you. I just shake my tail. I don’t leave it nowhere.”