The artist, it said.
Down the block, Francis’s shoulders were broad inside his Raiders starter jacket. Octavian thought about the day they had bought their coats. It hadn’t even gotten cold yet and Cordelia was already sick, but she took them coat shopping every year, and this year wasn’t going to be any different. Frankie had been nice that day. Octavian remembered he’d even grabbed a hold of Octavian’s hand in the Venture, said he didn’t want him to get lost. Octavian had been grateful for Francis’s strong hand around his. Their mother, who had never been a thin woman, now seemed to disappear inside her sweater, and she walked so slowly through the store that it made Octavian afraid. He’d wondered if Frankie knew he was scared. Maybe he was, too.
Octavian pulled his own coat tighter around himself and followed his brother. At the corner, there was a wide opening in the sidewalk that led down to the sewer system and Octavian crumpled the photo in his fist and threw it in, sending Mina down to the Mississippi.
At home, Octavian quietly put the envelope of photos on Cordelia’s bedside table. The section of the eight-by-ten that was visible showed Octavian’s wide smile, and the nose Francis called wide as all outside. Cordelia opened her heavy eyes. “Hey, baby,” she said and reached out for his hand.
Octavian wanted to fall into her long arms, to have her scratch the hollering out of his head with her crescent moon fingernails. But her eyelids began to droop again and he knew there was no space left in his mother for him to curl up in anymore. He let his small hand drop into her thin, shaking palm. “Got our school pictures back today,” he said.
Cordelia opened her eyes again and pushed herself up. “Let me see,” she said.
Octavian handed her the envelope and she pulled out the eight-by-ten and smiled, showing her bottom teeth that, unlike Mina’s, were perfect and straight. Cordelia traced the side of Octavian’s face in the photograph. There were tears in her eyes, but she was smiling.
“You are the most beautiful boy,” she said, and pulled Octavian into her arms.
He tried not to think about how different it felt from how he wanted it to.
“I love you,” she said.
“I love you too,” he said into the paper skin of her neck.
She sat back on the pillows and Octavian stood up. “You got homework to do?”
“Nah, I finished it already.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I was thinking about drawing a picture of Francis.”
“Now that’s a good idea,” she said, and put the photograph back into the envelope.
Octavian began to walk out of the room. “Hey Tave,” she said, and Octavian turned around.
“You want any of these wallet-sized ones to give to your friends?” She was still elegant. Even though she seemed to be getting dimmer and dimmer every day.
“No thanks, Mama,” he said.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
TRACK 5
Little Red
Corvette
AFTER KANTA SOLD THEIR house in U. City, they stayed in Hermine’s house down the street from their old house while their new house in Clayton was fixed up. “I don’t understand why we had to move or why you took me out of Delmar Harvard in the first place,” Mina said.
“I like our new house,” Kanta said. “It’s in a good neighborhood.”
But this made no sense to Mina, as she’d heard Kanta tell Hermine the other day how much she loved their old neighborhood. She and Hermine were arguing because Hermine had been trying to get Kanta to help her revamp the Freedom of Residence Committee of the 1960s to further integrate their neighborhood.
“Do you realize, Kanta, that there is only one black family in the whole Parkview neighborhood?” Hermine said.
“And Jews still can’t buy real estate in Webster Groves,” Kanta said.
“That’s not true anymore,” Hermine said, and pushed the petition she’d been circulating across the table to Kanta. “I’ve only been able to get three signatures on this thing. I never thought everyone around me could still be a racist.”
“Don’t bother, Hermine,” Kanta said, pushing the petition back. “What with the white people moving out of the school district, it is just a matter of time.”
Mina sat on Hermine’s toilet and wondered, a matter of time before what? Mina stared at one of the many dark brown freckles on her legs. Try as she might, she couldn’t will one to grow bigger and wider, to spread across her pink mottled body until she was all that same dark brown. Still she stared and waited. Nothing happened. She stood up and looked at her stringy hair in her reflection. “Makeba was right,” she said aloud. “You ain’t never gonna be black.”
It was no longer because of Double Dutch or Ms. Fitzgerald that Mina wished she could make herself black. It was because Mina Rose, descendent of Menachem Rosencrantz—who came to America to escape the Russian pogroms and promptly changed his name to Michael Rose—wished more than anything she could be Thelma Evans. The afroed older sister on Good Times was everything that Mina was not. Thelma was beautiful, wise, strong-willed and cool-cool. If Mina were Thelma, she would definitely be able to jump Double Dutch—and it wouldn’t even matter if she couldn’t.
Mina stuck her tongue out at her reflection and walked into Hermine’s study. On her desk was an open pack of Winston Lights and a pile of dollar bills. Mina picked them up. There were fifteen of them. What would it matter if she took four? Hermine would still have eleven whole dollars. With four dollars, she could buy a lot of candy and soda. Or she could get two comics and at least one Milky Way bar, and maybe still have enough for a Pepsi. Mina looked out the window at Limits Walk, the path that divided U. City and St. Louis City, and ran into the Loop. Mina remembered hearing the boys who hung out in front of Delmar Harvard talking about a record store in the Loop that had all the jams. Mina wondered if four dollars enough to buy a record. Mina was sure she had to be better at dancing than she was at Double Dutch and even if she wasn’t, she could still listen to cool music the way Thelma did. Plus, she thought, Octavian lived in U. City, maybe she’d run into him.
Mina folded the money and put it in the back pocket of her jeans and felt bold. She picked up the pack of cigarettes and shook one out and grabbed the lighter, too. These she put carefully in her other pocket.
She smoked the cigarette as she walked and at first, she coughed so hard she thought she was going to throw up. But then she slowed down, took shorter drags and stopped coughing. When she reached the Loop, she put it out. She felt light headed. Light headed and cool. Mina passed a bookshop and a pizza place. There was a store that advertised used instruments for U. City High jazz band students. From another shop, where the front window was filled with pipes and boxes of cigars, a sweet smell spread out from the open door. The marquis at the Tivoli movie theater announced Hitchcock’s Rope Monday through Friday, and Rocky Horror Picture Show on Saturday at midnight.
Out on the sun-drenched boulevard, Mina’s sense of coolness began to fade, as she became aware of the dirt on her sweatshirt, the tape at the end of her frayed shoelaces. She passed nodding junkies leaning on the side of a graffiti-covered building, and skinheads sitting on a brick wall by the parking lot. I am the only ten-year-old girl walking alone here, she thought. Even though she was intimate with her own loneliness, this was the first time she’d seen it out on display for the rest of the world.
She was about to turn around and head back, when the sound of a screeching guitar made her stop. Above the door was a sign that said “Rahsaan’s Records” and next to it was a drawing of a man playing three saxophones at once. In the window, David Bowie’s pensive eyes burned deep from the cover of Young Americans into her own.
She walked in as the music changed to a smooth trumpet and a piano. Mina blinked to adjust to the smoky, dust-filled room. She saw a maze of record shelves and two customers—a black man wearing glasses and a brown leather hat, and a white girl
with heavy blue eyelids and dark hair chopped short. From the ceiling hung signs handwritten in graffiti to mark different sections: Funk, Reggae, Rock, R&B, Classical, Jazz, Pop. On the walls were more posters: Aerosmith’s Live at Kiel Auditorium, Aretha Franklin’s Lady Soul, Johnny Cash at Folsom Prison, John Coltrane’s Blue Train.
“Hey there, girl,” a voice said. “You lost?” A big white man with pale, puffy skin stood behind a high counter. He wore a Cardinals baseball cap pulled down low.
Mina swallowed. “No,” she said.
“Well, perhaps I can help you,” he said.
“Is four dollars enough to buy a record?” she asked.
“That depends on what kind of record you be wantin’,” the man said.
Mina shrugged her thin shoulders. She thought again of the hole in her sneaker, the snarls in her hair. “I don’t know,” she said.
“How old are you, chile?” he asked.
“Ten,” she said.
“Your mama know where you at? And your daddy?”
“My mom, she knows. I don’t have a father.”
“Mhmm hmmm,” he said. “What’s your name?”
“I’m Mina Rose,” she said. “Who are you?”
He held a hand to his heart in mock disbelief. “Baby girl, you mean to tell me you don’t know who I am?”
Mina shook her head seriously.
He laughed. “My given name’s Jimmy, baby, but my friends call me Bones, so you call me Bones, aight? This your first time here at Rahsaan’s?”
Mina nodded.
Bones looked around proudly and said, “Well, welcome. And now that we friends, you gonna tell me what kind of record is you lookin for?”
Mina swallowed. “You wouldn’t happen to know what kind of music Thelma Evans listens to, would you?” she asked.
Bones slapped the counter with his fleshy palms. “Thelma? From Good Times?”
Mina looked him right in the eye and said, “She’s cool-cool.”
Bones nodded. “Cool-cool is right. And finer than frog hair.”
“So do you know what kind of music she listens to?”
“Let me think on that now,” Bones said. “Hey Freddy,” he yelled to a tall man in the corner who was hanging up a Tito Puente poster.
“What’s up, Bones?” he said.
“You got any idea what kinda music Thelma from Good Times might listen to?”
Fred scratched his head. “I know it was Blinky Williams and Jim Gilstrap that did the theme song. But, I’ve never thought about it otherwise.” Fred looked at Mina and gave her a gentle wave. She waved back.
“I’ve got an idea,” Bones said. He took the jazz record off the player that was behind the counter and eased the needle down on a different record. A slow synthesized beat came out of the speakers.
“I know this song,” Mina said. “It’s about a car.”
Bones laughed again. “This is Prince. What you know about Prince, girl?”
“I like this song. Do you think Thelma likes Prince?”
“You God damn right,” Bones said, his eyes twinkling down at her.
“Can I buy this record, the one with this song on it, for four dollars?”
Bones pointed Mina toward the section under the FUNK sign and said, “The Prince records are over there. Look for the one called 1999.” Mina wound her way through the record shelves to the Funk section. Her hands flipped slowly through the records until she found 1999 with its purple cover. She turned it over and read the names of the songs. “‘Little Red Corvette.’ That’s this song, right?” Mina asked over her shoulder.
“Right,” Bones said, and stuck a cigarette between his lips.
“The price tag says $6.99,” Mina said, walking back to him. “I told you, I only have four dollars.”
Bones took the record from her and put it into a brown bag. “Listen here,” he said. “Ima give it to you for fo’ dollars, but you got to make me a deal.”
Mina looked at him with her sharp gray eyes and waited.
“You gotta promise me you won’t just listen to ‘Little Red Corvette’ over and over and then cut the record off. You gotta listen to the whole thing from beginning to end. Matter of fact, there’s two records in there. If you gotta stop, then you start again right where you left off. You hear?”
“Why?”
“Because that’s how Prince meant for it to be listened to,” Bones said. “And, because that’s what Thelma Evans would do. Okay?”
Mina considered this. “I can do that,” she said.
“Then it’s yours.”
Mina took the folded bills out of her back pocket and pushed them across the counter. Bones picked them up and slowly smoothed them before putting them into the cash register. “Thank you, madam,” he said. “You come on back whenever you want, you hear?”
Mina shrugged and said, “Can’t.”
“Now why’s that?”
“We don’t live in the neighborhood anymore. My mother said it was only a matter of time. We’re moving to Clayton.”
“Hmmmm…she let you ride the Bi-State?”
“Probably. She pretty much lets me do whatever I want.”
“The number seventy-three from Clayton brings you right there,” he said and pointed to the bus stop in front of the store.
Mina smiled at him, showing her row of crooked teeth on the bottom. “Alright,” she said. “The number seventy-three?”
Bones nodded. “Cost you a quarter,” he said.
She started to turn away and then turned back. “Thank you, Mr. Bones,” she said.
“Mmmm hmmm. I’ll be seeing you.”
“See you,” Mina said.
When she got to the door, Bones called out, “Hey, Mina girl.”
She stopped and turned around.
“You cool-cool, just like Thelma Evans. Don’t never want to be nobody but you, you hear?”
Mina nodded and walked out of the door. The sun was going down on Delmar Boulevard, but Mina was no longer afraid. She skip-walked back to Hermine’s, unaware of anything other than the record that she held tight to her chest. When she got to the house, Kanta and Hermine were still out and Mina opened the back door with the key Kanta had tied to a piece of twine and put around Mina’s neck.
Mina took the record from the bag and pulled out the sleeve. It had a photo of a barely covered Prince lying on a purple expanse, with an untouched set of watercolors in front of him. The center of the record was filled with a darkly lined eye and Mina put it on Hermine’s record player and lowered the needle. She lay down on her stomach on the rug with her feet in the air and listened.
From the beginning, Prince told her in a computerized, God-like voice not to worry, that he wouldn’t hurt her, that he only wanted her to have some fun. Mina kept her promise to Bones and listened to both albums from start to finish and, as the sun went down and one song blended into the next, Mina dissolved into a funk-induced trance. For a second time that day, she saw herself in a new way. This time through Prince’s eyes: black and white, boy and girl, and cool-cool, Double Dutching so fast, she couldn’t even see her own feet.
TRACK 6
Stolen Moments
ON A LATE SUMMER night in 1972, over a decade before Mina walked in Rahsaan’s Records, Bones heard his first jazz recording. He was sitting in his uncle’s car parked in the red-light district of Memphis and ever since, he’d dedicated his life to chasing the feeling he got that night. It was like the door to his soul came unbolted and the hollow and angry spaces got filled up with the closest thing he would ever know to God. From that moment forward, the only thing he cared about was finding a way to make sure the lock stayed broken forever.
Back then, Bones was seventeen and wasn’t called Bones yet. He was still Little Jimmy. Even though the only thing that was little about him was what he knew. Otherwise, Little Jimmy was big—big head, big calves, big wrists, big red pimples across his big wide face. His only
friend was his uncle Floyd. Floyd was ten years older than Jimmy, but he was what back then was called slow, and that made him more like a cousin than an uncle. Floyd had recently won a personal injury claim against the local plastics company where he worked, so he had more money than anyone in the family, but he didn’t have a job. One Saturday, Floyd came over still drunk from the night before, and told Jimmy to come with him to get some pussy. Jimmy had no intention of getting anything, but he didn’t want Floyd to drive. He’d busted up his car too many times that year as it was.
In the twilight of the late-summer evening on a reckless street on the other side of town, Jimmy watched as Floyd walked up the block and took hold of a prostitute’s hand with something sort of kin to tenderness. She wore a red feather in her ragged wig and Jimmy watched the backs of her dark-brown legs, thin and worn down as she followed Floyd into one of the many crumbling buildings.
Jimmy sank down in the seat so as not to be seen, turned on the car and pressed in the lighter. He checked to be sure the doors were locked and that the windows were rolled up and thought about how his mother would kill Floyd if she knew he’d left her son alone in the car over on the black side of town. Jimmy jumped when the lighter popped and he scolded himself as he pressed the hot orange circle to the end of his cigarette. He switched on the radio, thinking a little music might calm him down, but he couldn’t get reception on the stations he knew.
Down the block, a storefront was lit from within and the sign in the window read WKWK 1080AM. Jimmy turned the dial and the car filled with sounds Jimmy had never heard before. There were proud horns, thick stand-up bass lines, rolling drum beats, and a gentle hi-hat. He was mesmerized and turned up the volume, no longer afraid of what was happening outside the locked car door.
The song ended and a man’s honeyed voice came through the speakers. “That, my friends, was The Oliver Nelson Sextet featuring none other than Bill Evans, Roy Haynes, Eric Dolphy, Paul Chambers and Freddie Hubbard, from one of my favorite albums, The Blues and the Abstract Truth. And if that record ain’t truth, I don’t know what is.”
There You Are Page 7