And when she hung up it seemed to him she was still there, still on the line, still connected to him and still trying to say something but couldn’t, and didn’t have to because he got the message. He was gone.
He still had the green button accordion, though he’d lost the grille and thrown away the case, couldn’t sell the motherfucker. It sat on the top of the cardboard wardrobe looking at the opposite wall, the eyes always catching some blank light that made it look blind. The strap on the case had broken a few minutes after he struggled off the train at Central Station; it had happened inside the station when he was trying not to seem awed by the arched windows and the oval echoing hall, the restless mass of people with bundles, suitcases, strings of children, and when it hit the marble floor the accordion fell out and went down some steps with a bad sound. Somebody yelled, “hey, man, you drop somethin,” and he fumbled for the instrument, cramming it into the case, furious with embarrassment, everyone gawking at the rube from the south, and he rushed out onto Twelfth Street without knowing where he was, only that he had to find Indiana Avenue. The treble end was cracked. He’d kicked the case away at the station, cursed bitterly, and carried the naked instrument through the streets. He thought Buddy Malefoot might have done something to the handle.
On the street, instinctively he turned south, lugging the instrument and his suitcases, making his way through a cluster of Salvation Army musicians, trumpet, drum, English concertina and a tambourine for the incompetent on the end. He smelled Chicago, the distant animal stink of the stockyards to the southwest, the sharp acidic flavor of exhaust and wafts of hot, greasy frying meat. He passed movie theaters and shoe stores, palmists’ upstairs signs with pointing fingers, a dreadlocked Rastafarian bumping along, storefront churches, “… talkin ’bout the Christ of the bible, am I right? ’bout Solomon’s temple, ’bout the wheel in the middle of the wheel, am I right ’bout it? I know that’s right, ’bout the bridegroom looking forward to the bright mornin, people, you prayin with me? That’s right, I know that’s right, you can’t give off light ’less you on fire…,” heard a thread of blues locked inside a room, the blatting of horns, the rolling hiss of tires, the throat hawk of a doubled-up bum leaning against a wall and from every direction the brittle rap of women’s high heels, the clicking skeins of biped rhythm crossing and recrossing. It was a kind of music. He tried not to walk on the pictures a legless man on a mechanic’s trolley was drawing on the sidewalk with colored chalks, making pictures of Jesus and his adventures in panels like a comic book, the words in yellow chalk, the shapes of the letters curved like bananas.
The best he could do was a basement kitchenette, a dark hole with a hot plate and saturated with a strange, sweetish smell, but cheap. (The building was one of hundreds, green Zs of fire escapes zagging down the stained walls, a glimpse of the lace bridge, factories with glassless windows tipped open, the swollen monograms of graffiti, letters obscuring letters, layered, jumbled, meaningless except the words FORGET IT on a viaduct.) On a shelf in the closet he found a dirty white comb, a yellowed newspaper ad, “get with the rave sound so popular with teenagers …,” and a letter addressed to someone named Euday Brank that said “Flyto nede a sax man, call 721–8881.” The envelope was postmarked Kansas City, 1949. He wondered who Flyto was, had been, dead now maybe, threw the letter in the cardboard box that was his wastebasket, got remembering the cardboard box that was his earliest memory, lying in a dim room and looking at the edge of a box flap, the pale brown color, the row of little dark tunnels that went off into someplace he knew was frightening and strange, saw a tiny red insect appear at the mouth of one of the tunnels, gaze at him with its shining eyes and go back inside.
“You can’t remember that,” his mother told him. “It’s true you in a box, but you a baby. Nobody remember when they a little baby. You grow so fast I put you out of there in a month. It a soapsud box, Rinso White. People come in and see you there and joke about it—I tryin to lighten you up?” Even now the smell of that detergent gave him the ineffably sad feeling he associated with tiny cardboard tunnels.
He could see the dust on the green accordion and he knew dust was bad but he just couldn’t get to wiping it off, couldn’t get to much, he could still play it but he didn’t much want to. He’d played it all the time at first, cracked or not, but it made such a pumping, breathing body sound, like running or hard work, like screwing, and he missing somebody so bad, yeah, made a sound like what a human being would make if it got turned into an instrument, that after a while he couldn’t stand it. Sound like somebody choking. He couldn’t find work. It looked like he going to end up bringing it to the pawnshop and go back home.
“I can’t be satisfy!” he said angrily, blaming himself for the lack of jobs, knowing there was something dead wrong with him, that he wasn’t no good, he didn’t have it, whatever it was.
Guess I’ll hang out
The day came a year or two later when he decided to bring the accordion to the pawnshop, not for a ticket south but because he had a little habit and his paycheck was lagging behind and when you gotta have it you gotta have it. He was staying. He had a job in construction, apprentice carpenter, going to try for his union ticket, no hurry, plenty of work on the new projects filling up with black people as soon as the last windows went in, the whole huge area divided from the city by the Dan Ryan Expressway. All that goddamn talk about integration in the south—they ought to look up here, rock-solid segregation with a moat around it. Could be somebody planned it that way?
He was crazy about two women, feeling good about it, Bo-Jack and Studder come up from down home and got straight into the music scene, they looked up to him, show them where it was at, only half a joke when they called him B.N.I.C., and he took them on a tour of the black-and-tan clubs, down among the cluckheads, down where the pimps coasted by driving their white hogs, slumped in a gangster lean, and when they got out showing their knife-creased pants and gator shoes, walking the pimp limp. Bo-Jack told him Wilma got married, moved away to Atlanta. They wanted to hear something different, some strange sounds. He steered them to the Diamond Dot Club to hear a Nigerian Juju band with a diatonic accordion, sekere, talking drum, cymbals and gongs. Bobby went crazy, boom! became a disciple, and any idea Octave might have had about starting up their old thing again was dead. He didn’t want to anyway. Now he had a little money, enjoying nightlife, buying a big piano accordion on time (two dollars a week) and owning a black silk tunic, a paisley scarf knotted around his head and an ankle-length Afghan coat of some yellow fur, and if not living large, at least larger—certain things a man had to have. A taste for urban blues growing in him, but he still played zydeco, ashamed because it was southern nigger music. He understood one night listening to some cross-eyed fool from down the bayou playing away in a club, nobody paying no attention to his little trembly voice that kept catching and leaving rough patches of silence in every phrase, just caught and held on the nail of a sung word. Even when that fool’s accordion knocked around the beat like a push-button machine he heard it was wrong. What was right was that Louisiana swamp-pop shit, that whitey two-chord E-flat B-flat shit, that was going down. He wouldn’t play it.
He didn’t know why it was, but he had raised a temper, flared into anger at little things that never bothered him in Louisiana, maybe because of the TV, come at you all the time with cars and shoes. He had to keep himself up with plenty of good times, upstairs in the building and down the block, rent parties, card parties, party parties, Saturday night and every night if you had a taste for them and weed and coke and good likker, if you liked that kind of thing. He did. Chicago was jumping. He liked to hear the saxophone and the electric guitar, it was cool, beautiful. He had an unsatisfiable appetite for good times, a scarce commodity in his early life, wouldn’t mind some gold rings and chains. He had a bookshelf and six books on it: The Condensed World Encyclopedia, High School Subjects Self-Taught, Great Men of Color, Female Sexual Anatomy, Riplow’s Universal Rhyming Dictionary, Int
roduction to Musical Scales.
Things were happening, or so it seemed, and then he got laid off and blacklisted and the jobs began to melt away, they just weren’t there anymore. The economy had coiled back on itself. Well, he’d just stick tight and wait for it to come around again. It had to; so many people needed the work.
You got no idea where you come from
His great-great-grandfather had been captured and chained in a coffle of slaves, a bitter irony for he was spiritually intimate with metal, from an ancient line of smiths who beat glowing rods on their anvils (and this made him a prize), transported on a Nantes slaver to New Orleans, then sold to a planter who brought him to the Mississippi delta where he died in early middle age after shaping iron window guards and gates, andirons and trivets, shackles and tools, sometimes working decorative shapes and designs that carried secret harming powers unsuspected by the whites who used the objects and later fell sick.
The metalsmith’s son, Cordozar (great-grandfather to Octave, Ida and Marie-Pearl), born a slave and trained by his father to forge work, made off for Canada at age twenty-seven, hiding out in the swamps with the Indians and traveling by night. He had promised his woman that if he made it he would work it so she could escape and follow with the baby, Zephyr, join him in the north. But he had been in Toronto only a few months when the Civil War erupted and, on fire, he went down to Boston and enlisted, burning to shoot, fought from Pennsylvania to Virginia, wounded twice, drove an ambulance wagon and seemed to forget the woman and child. Two years after Appomattox he went west with the Tenth Cavalry, one of two black mounted regiments, and died on Prairie Dog Creek when his horse, gut-shot by a twelve-year-old Sioux, reared and fell on him.
The girl he left behind him
The child Zephyr grew up sharecropping cotton and picking banjo in Vanilla, Mississippi, living the poor, hard delta life from furnish to settle, on one of the richest alluvial soil deposits in the world, cheated annually of the money he earned, deprived of arithmetic and literacy, healing his sicknesses and injuries with bean blossoms and prayer. He got out of it for a few years playing banjo with a carnival show touring the territories, doubling as the African Dodger, his head through a hole in a sheet, winking and grinning at the crowd of white men and boys who one by one, arms cocked, hurled a ball at him, while a Victrola cranked out “Dancin’ Nigger.” The carnival broke up in some hard Nevada sheep town and he was stranded, forced to sell his banjo for two dollars which bought him a train ticket halfway to Vanilla. He walked the last half, coming home footsore, back in the sharecropping cycle for good, taking his small allotment of pleasure in sex, drink and music. A white man from the Farm Security Administration took his photograph in the 1930s, standing there in his work clothes, a strange suit of rags sewed on rags sewed on rags, hundreds of fluttering threads and frayed ends, a hat of moth-laced felt. He got children on four women and let them shift for themselves. He owned a no-breed blind dog, Cotton Eye, who cured wounds by licking them, a service for which Zephyr charged a nickel. During one mean, yellow year a pigweed of inordinate size grew in his garden. He gave it extra water, suffered no other plant in its territory, admired its hugeness, its stalk as thick as two thumbs. It reached a great height of ten feet, then toppled of its own weight, the mightiest pigweed ever seen, remembered by all who saw it.
He spoke little, except through the banjo, never talked from the secret side of his mouth, never said what he thought, only what he wanted, and he wanted only what he could have until, after he saw a demonstration of the new International Harvester cotton-picking machine, after Mr. Pelf told him at settle time he’d made only three dollars on a year’s work, he made a final monthly funeral payment, lay down on his ragged bed and called for roast beef and champagne (two dietary articles he had elevated to iconic status having tasted them once fifty years earlier on the Fourth of July when the carnival boss had a feast sent out by jitney from a fine restaurant in Des Moines, paying with counterfeit bills). His daughter Lamb, the only surviving one of his children who still lived in Vanilla, brought him a saucer of fried fatback and a glass of cloudy water. He was eighty-three, worn out and so wrinkled he looked quilted.
“No,” he said, and he rolled up in the grey blanket and faced the wall, closed his eyes and did not move or speak, dead in two days, worn out by the grand tradition of struggle.
Bayou Féroce
Lamb stopped the alarm clock on the windowsill, covered the clouded mirror with a sweater, took the photographs of her children off the dresser and folded them in paper. After the old man’s funeral, in May 1955, Lamb and her three children, Octave, Ida and Marie-Pearl, moved to Bayou Féroce, Louisiana, with her boyfriend, Warfield Dunks (pale brown eyes circled with a rim of purest blue), where they bought a radio and began to listen to Professor Bob, king of the turntable, out of Shreveport. The first hour in the rented shack, Marie-Pearl got into a yellow-jacket nest and came tearing through the weeds in her old flowered dress, jumping great wild jumps, leaping high, her thin stung girl’s legs shining in the sunlight.
Poor Warfield died a highway death after they had been there a year when he stopped to watch a six-hundred-pound wild boar running down the midline of the highway and a Chevrolet driven by an elderly white woman struck him from behind. Lamb was working in the kitchen of a white college president’s house (permission to take home skin, fat, feet and heads of pot chickens, potato peelings and the heels of stale loaves) at five dollars and fifty cents a week. She hoped someday she’d get a chance at the upstairs, snap out the cream linen sheets, dust the pale windowsills, arrange the pairs of Mrs. Astraddle’s shoes on slanted shelves. Her children were growing up. Octave, almost a man, was fishing in the Gulf. He needed a better boat, one that didn’t require bailing every ten minutes, one with a good motor. She prayed that Marie-Pearl would keep out of trouble, though it didn’t seem likely, she was so good-looking and so boy-crazy. The real trouble was Ida, six foot two and almost three hundred pounds at eighteen, homely and dark black, with a big potato nose and gap teeth, always the one to turn the rope when the girls played double Dutch jump rope. She should have been a boy. She had a disposition to fight, a stentorian voice. She might get happy after she had her first babies, might not, swearing the way she did that she hated men and wouldn’t have no babies, said no man was ever gonna get on top of her, knock her around or up, and the space under her bed was piled with old books and yellowy magazines, the dustiest mess Lamb had ever seen. Old ladies knocked on the door day and night bringing her more junk.
“Way you look, don’t worry,” said Lamb. “No man gonna worry you.”
“I know how I look. You been tellin me since I could stand up and walk.”
Hair pulling
In the eighth grade Ida got her friend Tamonette to go downtown with her and pull white people’s hair. They walked the dusty road holding hands and singing “Jesus on the Phone Line.” They shared a dangerous humor, the sort where laughter must be stifled to avoid implication of guilt. Tamonette was thin and short, felt an obligation to be daring because of her grandmother’s sister, Maraline Brull, who had gone to Paris in the 1920s as a white family’s maid and there learned to fly an airplane, returned to the south as a crop duster until a white farmer shot her out of the sky in 1931; even then she went fiercely, aiming the diving fiery plane at the man in the field with the rifle, and got him, too.
“What kind of jeans you wearin,” said Tamonette critically.
“Ask me no questions, I’ll tell you the answers. Whatever,” said Ida, twisting to look at the label.
“You fool, that’s the kind got the KKK behind it, making money off us. They behind that fried chicken you like, too. You better get rid them ugly old jeans.”
“Tamonette. How you know?”
“Everybody know, fool.”
It was four miles to Féroce and the town frightened them with its cars and sidewalks and traffic lights. Every white person seemed to be looking their way, reading their minds.
“Now listen,” she said. “Only one hair—you don’t be grabbin a whole bunch, just one hair—then if you get called on it you say ‘sorry, ma’am, musta got caught in my watch strap.’”
“You don’t got no watch and me neither.”
“That’s right, but you say it. Remember, just one hair. It hurt more.”
Crane’s Department Store with its crowds was the place, but not the main floor near the escalator. They needed to ease away and get lost as soon as they did it. Tamonette pointed with her eyes at the Returns & Check Approval counter, white people crowded five deep waiting to return defective junk they’d wasted money on, all of them jostled together talking and straining to see if the ones at the counter were almost done or not.
Ida picked out two fat women, Number One, with white hair and a man’s face, in a big pink dress, talking to Number Two, potbellied, with violet clustered curls. She edged close enough, heard their talk.
“Doesn’t Elsie belong to the Daughters?”
“Sugar, she did but gave it up.”
“Her family lived in Mississippi for the longest old time.”
“Will you look at the short skirt on that one?”
“Those skirts, I think they’d be cold.”
“Oh, the styles are just awful.”
“I’d like a new dress, but I can’t … well …”
“You know Elsie’s car? I always bump my head when I get in her car.”
“I always do that! I’m glad to hear somebody else besides—OW!” Both hands flew up to the back of her head, she looked right and left, up at the ceiling, wondering about a canary loose from the pet department.
“Well, honey, a hairpin must of hit a nerve—”