Joe paused for a moment to listen to the person at the other end of the telephone. “Heh-heh, you know me better than that, Cora Bett,” he said. Then, speaking to both of us again, he continued: “Anyhow, before I had a chance to say anything, the boy asked me, ‘Who are you?’ Now, I’m pretty sure that’s the first time I’ve ever been asked that question in my own bed. So I said, ‘I happen to be the social director here, and I don’t believe we’ve met.’ I wasn’t sure what to do next, but just then the telephone rang, and I learned that I had a busload of tourists coming at noon—forty people—and that I’d have to make lunch for them because the caterer is sick…. Yup, lunch for forty! … They’re all members of a polka-dancing social club from Cleveland. Heh-heh.” Joe smiled as he listened to the voice on the other end.
“Anyhow,” he went on, “my two newest naked friends got dressed. The boy had tattoos on his arms—a Confederate flag on one arm and a marijuana plant on the other. He put on a really swell T-shirt. It had ‘Fuck You’ printed on it. At this very moment, both he and the girl are in the kitchen helping make shrimp salad for forty polka dancers. Jerry’s in there too, cutting Mandy’s hair, and that’s why I say I ain’t bored yet.”
Joe said good-bye and hung up the telephone, and as he did a large blue caftan floated into the room. The caftan was topped by the round, smiling face of a woman of about seventy. She had powder-white skin set off by bright red lipstick, rouge, and mascara. Her jet-black hair was wound into a huge bun that sat on top of her head like a turban. “I’m off to Statesboro to play for the Kiwanis Club,” she said, waving a set of car keys, “and then I have a beauty pageant in Hinesville at six. I should be back in Savannah by nine. But in case I’m late, can you get to the bar early and cover for me?”
“Yes, ma’am,” said Joe, and with that the woman floated away in a rustle of silk and a jangle of keys.
Joe nodded at the spot where she had been standing. “That,” he said, “was one of Georgia’s greatest ladies. Emma Kelly. Come with us tonight and you’ll see her in action. Around these parts she’s known as ‘The Lady of Six Thousand Songs.’”
For the past forty years, Emma Kelly had spent the better part of her waking hours driving across the landscape of south Georgia to play piano wherever she was needed. She played at graduations, weddings, reunions, and church socials. All anyone had to do was ask, and she would be there—in Waynesboro, Swainsboro, Ellabell, Hazlehurst, Newington, Jesup, and Jimps. She had played at senior proms for every high school within a hundred miles of Savannah. On a given day, she might drive to Metter to play for a ladies’ fashion show, then on to Sylvania for a retired teachers’ convention, and then to Wrens for a birthday party. Toward evening she would usually drive to Savannah to play piano at one of several nightspots. But no matter where her engagements took her, she would always be back home in Statesboro—an hour west of Savannah—to play at the Rotary Club lunch on Monday, the Lions on Tuesday, the Kiwanis on Thursday, and the First Baptist Church on Sunday. Emma played old standards and show tunes, blues and waltzes. She was a familiar sight with her flowing caftans and happy coats and that towering turban of black hair held in place by two lacquered chopsticks.
Emma was descended from the earliest English settlers in Georgia and South Carolina. She had met George Kelly when she was four and married him when she was seventeen. He was a sign painter, and by the time he died Emma had borne ten children, “not counting five miscarriages,” as she would always say.
Being a devout Baptist, Emma never drank. But once, after playing at the Fort Stewart officers’ club, she was stopped on suspicion of drunk driving. The M.P. who shined his light through the window told her she had been weaving all over the road for the last three miles. That was true, but the fact of the matter was that Emma had been trying to undo her corset and slip out of it at the time. She squinted into the glare of the flashlight, clutching her unfastened clothes about her and wondering how on earth she was going to step out of the car in this condition and convince the young man she was sober. It was Emma’s good fortune that she had played piano at the M.P.’s senior prom years before. He recognized her and knew she never touched a drop, and in a moment she was on her way.
In fact, most of the highway patrolmen knew Emma’s car, and when it zoomed past them late at night doing eighty or ninety, they generally let it go. Emma had the greatest compassion for the occasional rookie cop who would unknowingly pull her over, siren blaring, blue lights flashing. She would roll down the window and say softly, “You must be new.” She’d be thinking ahead to the browbeating the young man was about to receive from a groggy sheriff. It would go something along the lines of: “What in blazes you think you doin’, boy, draggin’ Emma Kelly off the road! Tell you what you gone do now! You gone escort this fine lady all the way to Statesboro! See she gets home safe! A million pardons, Miss Emma. It won’t happen again.”
In Savannah, Emma’s fans followed her from nightspot to nightspot like a cheerful caravan—from Whispers to the Pink House to the Fountain to the Live Oak Bowling Alley to the Quality Inn out by the airport. She was good business. Bar receipts always picked up sharply for the duration of her stay and fell off when it was over. For years, Emma’s children had pleaded with her to open her own piano bar and cut down on the driving. After she killed her ninth deer on the highway, they stopped pleading and just plain insisted. “It breaks my heart,” said Emma, “because I love animals so much, not to mention the damage it’s done to the car.” About opening a piano bar, she promised she would think it over.
Joe Odom, who had known Emma all his life, often came to hear her wherever she happened to be performing. At some point after his arrival, Emma would play “Sentimental Journey,” which was the signal for Joe to come up and take over at the piano so she could rest a few minutes. Joe would happily oblige.
The night Emma collided with her tenth deer, she drove to Whispers and played “Sentimental Journey” as soon as Joe set foot in the door. “Go out and see how bad the car is, Joe, will you?” she said. “I can’t bear to look at it myself.” Six months later, she and Joe opened a piano bar in an old cotton warehouse overlooking the river. They called it Emma’s.
Emma’s was a long, narrow room, cozy as a book-filled den. Its tiny dance floor was nestled in the curve of a baby grand piano. A picture window looked out on the river and an occasional containership gliding by. Dozens of framed photographs of family and friends lined the shelves along one wall, and an alcove by the entrance was decorated with memorabilia of Johnny Mercer. It was Mercer, in fact, who had nicknamed Emma “The Lady of Six Thousand Songs.” That was how many songs she knew, according to Mercer’s calculations. He and Emma had paged through a pile of songbooks, Mercer checking off the songs Emma could sing from start to finish. After three years of checking off songs, Mercer made an educated guess as to the store of lyrics in Emma’s head. He put it at six thousand.
The first time I came to Emma’s, I was just taking my seat when Emma looked in my direction and asked, “What’s your favorite song?” My mind went totally blank, of course. As I looked at her helplessly, a huge freighter came into view over her left shoulder. “Ship!” I said. “My ship has sails that are made of silk!”
“Oh, that’s a lovely song,” said Emma. “Kurt Weill, 1941.” She played it, and from that time on, Emma always played “My Ship” whenever I came into the bar. “Bartenders know customers by the drinks they order,” she said. “I know them by the songs they ask me to play. Whenever regulars walk in the door, I like to play their favorites. It tickles them and makes them feel they’re home.”
Emma had many regulars. There were the four ladies from Estill, South Carolina, who drove in several nights a week with or without their husbands. There was the retired bank clerk Abner Croft, who walked his dog every night before going to bed and more than once kept walking until he got to Emma’s, where, dressed in pajamas and bathrobe and accompanied by the dog, he was shown to his regular table. Just as h
e was sitting down, Emma would play “Moments Like This,” which was his favorite song. There was Wanda Brooks, a self-appointed greeter-hostess who wore rakish hats and a rhinestone brooch that advertised her telephone number in glittering numerals an inch high. Wanda had been a majorette in junior high school; now she sold tanning beds to suntan parlors in South Carolina and coastal Georgia. She would call out “Hey!” to perfect strangers, show them to a table, engage them in animated conversation, dance with them, and then move on to chat with others. Wanda was forever foraging in her purse for a lighter, swaying and leaning into the person next to her as she babbled amiably. Inevitably, her ever-present cigarette would tumble from her lips or slip out of her fingers in a shower of glowing ashes, sending the people in her immediate vicinity leaping to their feet and flailing at their clothes. Wanda had platinum-blond hair, and her entrance into Emma’s was always accompanied by the playing of “New York, New York,” which was her favorite song.
Though Emma’s was a popular nightspot, it fell short of expectations in one respect: It failed to keep Emma off the road. She went right on making appearances from one end of south Georgia to the other and driving on to Savannah afterward to play until early morning. Occasionally, she spent the night in Joe Odom’s carriage house after closing, but most of the time she found an excuse to drive home to Statesboro. On Saturday nights, she would drive home no matter what, because her Sundays in Statesboro started very early and ran very late, as I discovered firsthand. Emma invited me to join her one Sunday at church and stay with her throughout the day. This is how it went.
Emma pulled into the parking lot of the First Baptist Church in Statesboro Sunday morning at twenty minutes past eight. She was wearing a purple silk dress, a blue cape, turquoise eye shadow, and a touch of rouge. “Let me see,” she said, “we closed Emma’s at three o’clock last night, and I got home about four. I would have pulled off the highway and taken a fifteen-minute nap under the Ash Branch overpass, like I usually do, but there was a big old truck there ahead of me and it took all the room. So I got to bed by four-thirty, and then at a quarter past seven, Aunt Annalise called to make sure I got up in time for church. She’s ninety.” Emma adjusted the two lacquered chopsticks that anchored her bun. “I can keep going with just a couple hours sleep, but sometimes you can tell. My eyes get puffy.” We went inside the church.
The preacher delivered a sermon entitled “Temptation and Decay from Within.” A deacon then read a report on the forthcoming revival week, the theme of which was to be “Wake Up, America: God Loves You!” The deacon thought too many people were still very much asleep in regard to this message. “There are one hundred and eighty million people in America who do not claim Christ,” he said. “Two million in the state of Georgia. Thousands in Statesboro alone.”
The preacher then addressed the gathering. “Have we got any guests among us today?” Emma whispered that I should stand up. All heads turned. “Welcome,” the preacher said heartily. “So glad you could join us.”
After the service, Emma and I walked to a smaller chapel where the older people were to attend their weekly senior assembly. We were slowed a bit by the dozen or so people who came up to welcome me personally to the church and to ask where I was from. “New York!” a woman said. “My! I had a cousin who went there once.” In the chapel, Emma slipped off her high heels and played the organ as the others came in. Each member of the senior assembly stopped at the organ to greet Emma and then came over to me to say how pleased they were that I had come. Mr. Granger was the first to address the gathering. “I tell you, my wife is doing great,” he said. “I knew last Sunday it was malignant, but I couldn’t tell you, because the doctor had not confirmed it until Tuesday. I really have a heavy heart, but everything is being taken care of as far as I can tell.”
From the rear of the chapel a woman said, “Ann McCoy is in Saint Joseph’s Hospital in Savannah. She’s havin’ back problems.”
Another said, “Sally Powell’s sister died.”
Mr. Granger asked, “Is there anyone else?”
“Cliff Bradley,” several people said at once.
“Cliff went home yesterday afternoon, late,” said Mr. Granger. “He seems to be doin’ great.”
“Goldie Smith needs our prayers,” another woman said. “There’s something the matter with her stomach. She’s being fitted with a prosthesis.”
A woman with pink lipstick and gold-rimmed glasses stood up to give a testimonial. “Me and my family weren’t doing too good until I looked down and saw I had a God hole in my chest. We all have a God hole in our chest. You should all do what I did: Turn it over to Jesus.”
When the assembly was over, Emma went to a small room off the chapel where she and a dozen other older women had their Sunday school class. Emma introduced me all over again, and the ladies chirped and mewed little hellos. The leader of the class said she would give a talk about God’s People in a Changing World, but did anybody have any important announcements first.
“Myrtle Foster’s incision is still draining,” said a woman with glasses and a light green suit. “I talked to Rap Nelby last night, and they do not know when she will be able to come home.”
“We’ll have to put her on our prayer list,” said the leader.
A woman with her hair in rows of small blue-white curls said, “Louise saw Mary at the beauty shop on Friday and it seems the two others are not doing well either, so we need to keep them on our list too.” For the next few minutes, the health of several other members of the congregation was discussed, and the prayer list grew by three more names.
The leader then began her talk—“Jesus will never ask you to do anything he wouldn’t do himself”—and Emma reached into her pocketbook and took out a small manila envelope with “Emma Kelly: $24” written across the top. She stood up quietly and put the envelope into a carton with the other ladies’ envelopes. Then, motioning for me to follow, she tiptoed into the hall with the carton. I felt a tug at my jacket. “I hope you enjoyed it,” a lady by the door whispered. “Come back and see us again.”
Emma led the way down the hall. “Now we go to the little children two floors up,” she said. First she went around to a windowless room and handed the carton to two men who were sitting behind a table piled high with little manila envelopes. “Mornin’, Miss Emma,” they said.
Upstairs, about twenty children were seated in a semicircle around an upright piano waiting for Emma. She accompanied them as they sang the titles of the books of the New Testament to the tune of “Onward, Christian Soldiers”—“Math-thew, Ma-ark, Lu-uke and John, Acts and the Letters to the Romans….” Then she played “Jesus Is a Loving Teacher” all the way through twice. “We can go now,” she said, and we went back down the two flights of stairs and out into the parking lot.
“If the other lady who plays piano can’t go to the nursing home, I go there now,” said Emma. “But she’s there today.” So instead we drove directly to the Forest Heights Country Club, where Emma went to the buffet, put two fried chicken legs on her plate, and sat down at the piano in the dining room. For the next two and a half hours, she played background music and chatted with the diners who came up one by one or in family groups to greet her and pay their respects.
At two-thirty, Emma got up from the piano and said her good-byes. We walked out to the car and drove fifty miles into the bright afternoon sun to Vidalia, home of the sweet Vidalia onion. Emma had been hired to play for a wedding reception at the Serendipity Health and Racquet Club. Upon arriving, she went directly to the ladies’ room and changed into a flowing black-and-gold kimono. The owner of the health club, a large lady with a bouffant blond hairdo, took us on a tour of the spa and showed us the new indoor-outdoor swimming pool and underwater grotto of which she was very proud. The wedding guests began to arrive from the church, but the bride and groom were late. Word had it that they had stopped at a 7-Eleven to get plastic glasses for the champagne they were consuming in the car.
When th
e wedding couple finally arrived, Emma found out that the name of the groom was Bill, and she announced she had a special song for the occasion. She sang, “Big Bad Bill is Sweet William now … married life has changed him … he washes dishes, mops the floor….” The song was greeted with laughter and set everybody to dancing except the little boys who went out and put a bottle of champagne under the hood of the wedding couple’s car next to the engine block so it would heat up and explode when they drove away.
At six-thirty, after Emma had played for two hours, we got back into her car for the drive back to Statesboro. If she was tired, she did not show it. She was not only wide awake but smiling. “Someone once wrote that musicians are touched on the shoulder by God,” she said, “and I think it’s true. You can make other people happy with music, but you can make yourself happy too. Because of my music, I have never known loneliness and never been depressed.
“When I was growing up, I used to put the radio under the covers with me at night. That’s how I learned so many different songs. In fact, it was because I knew so many songs that I got to know Johnny Mercer in the first place. We met over the telephone twenty years ago. I was playing at a dinner party in Savannah, and a young man kept requesting Johnny Mercer songs. He was kind of surprised when I knew every one. Then I played some he hadn’t heard before, and he was astonished. ‘I’m Johnny Mercer’s nephew,’ he said. ‘I want him to meet you. Let’s call him now.’ So he called Bel Air, California, and told Johnny he’d met this lady who knew every song he’d ever written. Then he put me on the phone. Johnny didn’t even say hello. He just said, ‘Sing the first eight bars of “If You Were Mine.”’ Now, that’s not a well-known song, but it was one that meant a lot to Johnny. I sang it without any hesitation, and we were friends from then on.”
The sun was beginning to set. “To me, the words are as important as the music,” said Emma. “Johnny and I liked to compare our favorite phrases. We both loved the lyric ‘Too dear to lose, too sweet to last’ from the song ‘While We’re Young’ and the line from ‘Handful of Stars’ that goes ‘Oh! What things unspoken trembled in the air.’