My Soul to Keep (African Immortals)

  “Daddy.”

  For the first time, Dawit notices Rosalie standing at his elbow. She’s wearing a plaid nightgown that reaches her ankles, her jet-black hair hanging loose to her shoulders. She’s tall for eight, looking just like her mother. Damn. That’s right. Christina is spending the night at her parents’ house because her father is sick, which explains why Rosalie is standing here talking to him at this precise moment. She’s going on about something Dawit can’t understand because she’s talking so fast.

  “… Right, Daddy? Remember how you were telling me and Mama about how you saw him in New York last week?”

  “Who?” Dawit asks, confused.

  “Langston Hughes. The poet. You said he came up and—”

  “He always sees the show when we’re in Harlem,” Dawit says, still not comprehending. “What does that have to do with anything?”

  Rosalie smiles, waving a piece of paper in the air. “Our teacher brought us one of his poems in a magazine, and I memorized it already. Want to hear? It’s called ‘Mother to Son.’”

  Lester is giving Dawit one of his vitriolic looks, which means his hands will be jelly on the piano keys for certain. Dawit is stunned; under different circumstances, he might have to laugh. He’s working on a fresh arrangement the night before his group makes its first recording—and they’ve waited long enough, God knows—and this child is standing here reciting a poem.

  “Rosalie,” he interrupts her breathless presentation, his temples tight with anger, “what am I doing?”

  Rosalie is silent, staring at him with a pleading expression.

  “What am I doing?” he asks again, refraining from shouting only because Rufus is asleep. That kid can never keep still, so if he gets up there’ll be no peace the rest of the night.

  “Practicing,” Rosalie whispers.

  “That’s right. And you know good and damn well you’re not supposed to come in here distracting me when I’m working. How many times do I have to say it?”

  “I just wanted to do it for you because I’m going to bed,” Rosalie says, sticking out her lip. She rubs her wrist against her eyelid.

  “Not now,” Dawit tells her. “Go on.”

  Rosalie mumbles something about being sorry and leaves them alone. Dawit glances back at Lester, and the glare is still there behind Lester’s round wire-frame spectacles. “Hey, maybe she can tell us some Brer Rabbit stories, too,” Lester says with flat sarcasm.

  “Sorry.”

  “You know,” Lester says, wiping his fingers on his slacks, “I’d like to git while I still have a home to git to. My house ain’t like yours, where you do what you want. My wife already told me about this, being out here all hours—”

  “I said sorry. Let’s go.”

  One-two, one-two. The new intro is an homage to ragtime; the rest is fresh, modern, improvisational. The piece is snappier, catchier, has more character this way. It’s an entirely different song! It might be innovative enough to draw attention to the record, win The Jazz Brigade a little more notice. Then they’ll be able to get out of the gin mill where they’re gigging—they’re backing up two-bit singers and enjoying only occasional opportunities to showcase the band—and secure something permanent at the Sunset Cafe. Playing it up-tempo, they could open with this one at the Summer Stomp next month. I’m your Forever Man, You drive me crazy …

  The landlord knocks at fifteen minutes to ten. Dawit can see in Lester’s face as he waves goodbye, even though he’s still complaining, that he likes it, too. He won’t admit it, but he knows the music is worth the trouble.

  Dawit doesn’t think he’ll be able to sleep, not with the chord structure playing in his head and his anticipation pumping him full of adrenaline. He sits at the piano for twenty minutes, soundlessly fingering the keys, humming to himself. But he needs to rest.

  On his way to bed, he passes the children’s room, which looks bright from the moonlight between the parted draperies. For some reason, seeing the light across their beds, Dawit stops in their doorway. Rufus is sound asleep, but Rosalie’s hands are folded across her chest and he can see her eyes gleaming.

  Dawit feels a twinge of conscience. His daughter has complained in the past that the music keeps her up; apparently, she doesn’t have Rufus’s talent for sleeping through late rehearsals. Dawit walks into the room, standing in front of the window at the foot of her bed. He gazes down at the dark street, where three automobiles rumble below him in succession. State Street is always busy, no matter what the hour. That’s why he insisted on living here. When Dawit strains, he can hear laughter and even music from the club blocks away. He wishes he were there playing, just to get it—

  Who’s that?

  Dawit’s eyes shift to the spot directly beneath his building, searching for a movement; he was certain he’d seen a man dressed in white, someone standing against the railing, but he is gone.

  Could it be … ? Dawit won’t permit himself to think it.

  Not yet. Not now. It’s too soon.

  “Rosalie,” he says quietly, still peering outside, not turning to her, “I’m really excited about this record.”

  “I know,” Rosalie says.

  Why is it so difficult to apologize to her? Dawit can barely think of words. “Well … That’s what made me so short with you. I’d like to hear Langston’s poem, though. Maybe tomorrow, you know, at breakfast, you can recite it. Early.”

  “I can say it now,” she whispers.

  Dawit glances at Rufus, who hasn’t stirred, curled up and facing the wall in a fetal position. It’s better not to risk waking him. “No, not now. It’s late. I’ll listen to it tomorrow.”

  “’Kay,” Rosalie says. She is smiling, satisfied. It takes so little to please her, Dawit realizes, awed. He wonders why he so rarely takes notice of what a pretty child she is.

  “It must be difficult, having a musician for a daddy,” he says, thinking aloud.

  Rosalie doesn’t say anything, shrugging beneath her bedsheet, so they are wordless for a long time in the moonlight. Dawit leans across the sill and sweeps his eyes from one end of the street to the other. The man he thought he’d seen is not there. It must have been his imagination.

  Forever Man, I don’t mean maybe …

  Dawit is still hearing his song. He taps the beat on the windowsill with his index finger and hums. The time for The Jazz Brigade has dawned, he realizes. So get accustomed to it, Rosalie, Dawit thinks as he gazes at the anxious night. It’s going to get worse before it gets better. He could no more control his destiny than he could the luminescence of the moon or the path of a tropical storm.

  In that instant, startling himself, Dawit feels sad, even panicked, in a way he doesn’t understand immediately. He has something to lose now, in this life he has made for himself. How frightening it is, he realizes, when fate is at liberty to take over what will has begun. He leans over Rosalie to kiss her forehead, and his lips linger on his beautiful child’s smooth skin.

  “Good night, Duchess.” He pauses. “Love you.”

  Rosalie’s eyes are closed, and Dawit is glad. She must, at last, be falling asleep, savoring the temporary silence.

  17

  William Emmet Gillis had seen many things in his eighty years of life. As a boy of six, alone with his mother in their lean-to outside Macon, he saw his baby sister born feet first from between her bloody thighs. During the war, liberating a concentration camp, he saw walking skeletons with tattooed numbers on their paper-thin white skin—the work of Satan himself. He’d lived to see his parents, his wife, his daughter, his sister, and his two nephews go on to Glory before him.

  But until this very day, he’d never seen a ghost.

  There was no denying it was a ghost in the photograph, staring him dead in the face with a wide smile. The ghost was wearing a white tuxedo and bow tie, and he held before him, in both hands, a dark clarinet.

  It was Jessica’s husband, David. Same pretty face, comely as a woman’s. Same skin that looked like it
had never seen a blackhead. Same perfect, perfect teeth. And those eyes that always looked like they were somewhere else, even when they were on you. Uncle Billy swore those eyes had always given him bone-chills, since he first met the boy. Dead eyes. Except when he talked about music, when they sprang to life.

  It was David in the photo, eyes and all. The thing was, according to the date painted on the bass drum in the far right corner, the yellowing black-and-white photograph was from The Jazz Brigade’s Summer Stomp, 1926. The ghost looked about thirty, just like David looked now. He was holding up well for a man going on a hundred years old. Damn well.

  This was a good day for seeing ghosts. He’d seen another one just that morning, when he woke up and noticed a woman standing at the foot of his bed in the not-yet morning light. He’d have known her even without the white calico dress she was wearing, the best she’d been able to afford for their wedding sixty-two years before. It was his dead wife, Sadie, smiling at him and reaching out her hand as if to touch him.

  It had pained Uncle Billy to see her, especially looking as young and pretty as she did, as fresh as their wedding day, but something held him back from wanting to touch her. He knew what that touch would mean. He’d had a blinding headache the day before, and his breaths were starting to feel stopped up in his throat. He slept with the humidifier on to try to clear out his lungs, but it didn’t seem to help; less and less seemed to ease his ailments the older he got. Since the stroke, his body had never been near right. The doctor said he could still be having ministrokes, even if he couldn’t feel them, and he figured the tiny shocks were wearing his old body down.

  Seeing Sadie, he knew what she was there for. It wasn’t that he was afraid; and Lord knows he was weary. He just couldn’t bring himself to try to sit up in the bed and swing his good arm over to touch her just then. Just couldn’t.

  Later, when her figure vanished, he’d felt ashamed. Glory wasn’t anything to shy away from. No, Lord. Not if it meant being with Sadie, and she’d made a special trip to fetch him. Better for him to be out of poor Bea’s hair. He decided that the next time he saw Sadie, he would go with her.

  Then, he saw the second ghost, and he understood it all.

  Going through the last box from his closet right after lunch, he’d found the photo. He’d just put down the phone from talking to David when he pulled that rare Jazz Brigade record out of its faded jacket and the photograph fell out. His father must have put it there for safekeeping and forgotten it. His father’s gaunt figure was in the middle of the picture, the young man he’d been back then with pomade in his hair, surrounded by the grinning musicians. His father, Uncle Billy remembered, had been beside himself when his favorite jazz group agreed to pose for this photograph with him after their show. Excited as he could be.

  David, the ghost, was at his father’s side.

  It scared Uncle Billy so much at first that he’d dropped the photo on the floor. It landed faceup, staring right back at him. No mistaking who it was, what it meant. His journey to Glory had begun as far back as when Bea carried him down here to stay with her. It had begun the moment David first shook his hand and said hello.

  You were in Chicago in the ‘twenties? Ever hear of The Jazz Brigade?

  He’d forgone Sadie’s ghost, the gentle ghost. He would have to go with this one, the one who’d been toying with him all this time, who was tired of waiting. He would be here soon.

  Uncle Billy was wearing only his robe, which he’d worn at lunch with Bea before she ran off to her church to lead the choir practice for Sunday’s Easter service. He would bathe himself today. No sense in a fully grown man waiting for some woman to bathe him.

  He was wheeling toward the bathroom when he heard David’s knock, his fingertips tapping across the jalousie windows at the door leading out to the backyard. He saw a muddy shadow.

  Uncle Billy figured he could forget about his bath. David’s coming here would probably change everything.

  “Uncle Billy?” David’s voice called.

  “Open,” Uncle Billy called back, his voice hoarse.

  David walked in, grinning at him. “Bea’s car is gone,” he observed. “You’re not in here making trouble, are you?”

  Uncle Billy didn’t answer, looking David up and down. It was one thing to see him in the photograph, but another to see him in the flesh. Spider Tillis was right here in the room with him, real as could be. Gazing back at the picture in his lap, Uncle Billy felt his bare toes tingling on the footrests of his wheelchair.

  “You all right?” David asked.

  Without speaking, Uncle Billy lifted the photo with his good hand and held it out to David. Let him see for himself.

  David took the photograph, grasping it with both hands. His grin disappeared real quick, soon as he saw it. Whole face changed, in fact. He looked scared at first, glancing at Uncle Billy, then his eyes went back to the photo and Uncle Billy could see how his jawline was getting hard. He didn’t move.

  “Where’d you find this, Uncle Billy?” David asked from where he stood two feet in front of the wheelchair.

  David’s eyes were alive now, too, but with a calm that was too calm, more like a mask for something else. When Uncle Billy didn’t answer him, David asked two more times, the same exact words. Seemed like he was losing his patience.

  Three times, Uncle Billy didn’t answer. He sat in his wheelchair and studied David’s eyes. He’d never really stopped to stare a ghost in the eye before, and he figured it was an opportunity he should make the most of. His left arm was tickling, the way it always did since the stroke, itching to move but forgetting how. He should have left the humidifier on. His lungs still felt tight, like no air could come in or out.

  David took a step toward him, then sat at the edge of Uncle Billy’s made bed. He didn’t say anything, making Uncle Billy remember his grade-school teacher Mr. Morley, who used to allow five minutes to pass without saying a word when the class disappointed him or didn’t act right, letting his eyes sweep across the room like a judgment. Same as Mr. Morley, David seemed to be mulling over just which punishment best fit the crime.

  David let out a long, hard sigh. He looked toward the window, out at the empty clothesline in the backyard. Bea had taken in the wash just before she left, saying, “I’d better do this now in case of rain. I’ll be a long while, Uncle Billy. You sure you don’t want me to call for a day nurse?”

  Uncle Billy just about cursed her out then. Hell, no, he didn’t need no damn day nurse to be alone for a few hours. Get your smart behind out that door, he said to Bea. He’d made her laugh. That was the last thing he’d heard before the door slammed shut behind her, a girlish-sounding laugh that reminded him of Sadie.

  “Let’s talk about this picture, Uncle Billy,” the ghost said. He was trying to sound patient, but he couldn’t quite pull it off. Uncle Billy could see through that nonsense. He wasn’t a fool.

  “Ain’t nothing to say,” Uncle Billy said.

  “Well, you can’t possibly believe this is me.”

  “Didn’t say a word about you, now did I?” Uncle Billy answered. He had him there.

  David waited a moment before speaking again. “You just seem disturbed,” he said. “That’s what led me to think perhaps something was bothering you.”

  Lord, sometimes this boy strung sentences together in ways that made no kind of sense, like he had to search for the longest way around to the end of his thoughts. Keeping company with white folks, that was where it came from, and all those universities besides.

  “I ain’t disturbed about a thing,” Uncle Billy said.

  There. Uncle Billy saw it that time, a flinching in David’s jaw. His teeth must be grinding hard, ready to crack.

  “You see,” David said, speaking syrup-slow, “this photograph was taken in nineteen twenty-six. That was seventy-one years ago. Do you see now why that can’t be me? That would have to be my grandfather, wouldn’t it? Can we come to that understanding, Uncle Billy? And I’ll just take t
his home.”

  Understanding? What did he mean by that? Some trickery?

  “All I know is what I see; what I see is what I know,” Uncle Billy said. Suddenly, he felt bold. “Tell the truth, I knew there was something funny with you the first time I laid eyes on you. I sure did. Just ask Bea. I even told her, I said, ‘That sure is a strange one got your youngest daughter, ain’t it, Bea?’ And she said, ‘What you mean?’ And I said, ‘It’s just what I see. I ain’t got much else, but I got eyes.’”

  Uncle Billy felt good to say it, to bring it out in the open. “So I guess you got to do what you got to do,” he said as clear as he could muster.

  The ghost wrung his hands between his knees and sat staring down at the colorful carpet Bea bought Uncle Billy, a Moroccan woven rug she’d found on sale. Uncle Billy had never before had a rug—or anything else, for that matter—from Morocco. He’d had nothing but the most special treatment since he’d moved in with her. He couldn’t complain about a thing.

  David sat, not moving, for what seemed like a long time. Something was working hard in his mind, knitting his brow. Hell, the man looked like he was about to cry.

  Without saying anything, David stood and picked up the Jazz Brigade record from the stack in front of Uncle Billy’s wheelchair. He ran his finger across the hard vinyl edge, then he made his way to the Victrola on top of the bureau. When he put the record on, the music was nearly covered over by the noise from age. The music sounded far, far away, like this ghost’s sullen brown eyes.

  Uncle Billy didn’t know the name of the song that was playing, but he’d heard it many times before, in Chicago, when his father used to play it. His father was never so proud as when that record came out, and he played it every night when he came home from bellhopping at the hotels. These boys are like family, his father used to say. I remember them when they was nothing. Now, look. And he’d put it on again.

  Uncle Billy hadn’t remembered a conversation with his father for a long, long time. Maybe the remembering was all a part of it.