Sassafrass, Cypress & Indigo

by Ntozake Shange

  Mahlon liked Cypress. Even though she was quiet, her body reflected anything she might say. So this was a dancer. Someone whose body interpreted the world. Mahlon felt her mouth draw tight around her teeth. Where she worked, there might not be anyone who moved more than their bowels. If she wore a bright color, the office workers stared at her all day. In the stacks at Columbia, she was always mistaken for the cleaning woman. At Bryn Mawr, they asked for their laundry. Even this afternoon, her secretary had gone on and on about how tragic it must be for her to be so educated when the “Negroes” were so far behind. Mahlon wanted to take the bitch to Chicago, leave her stranded on the South Side somewhere after two A.M. . . . but Towbin had other ideas for the rest of the night.

  “Let’s catch the last set at the Vanguard. I think Betty Carter is there.”

  “No, man, Cypress and I are gonna turn in; artists don’t have any days off, you know.”

  Leroy, back to his gentle self, pinched Cypress’ legs under the table. Cypress, who’d been engrossed in talk with Mahlon about the black people in prep schools, turned to catch Leroy’s hands.

  “You could have told me.”

  Shaken from his jocular mood, Leroy very seriously asked, “Really, Cypress? I could have told you what? When was the last time you met a rich little colored boy?”

  “Why last month I had a taxi driver from Nigeria who was to inherit oil and a noble title!”

  “No, I’m not kidding, Cypress. What do you think would happen to me, if everybody knew?”

  “Why, nothing. A lot of people care about you.”

  Towbin and Mahlon were leaving; hugs and kisses, promises to stay in touch interrupted Leroy’s thoughts. He had to find a way to tell Cypress that he had to be as full a man as his father had been. He worked like he did because he knew that somehow white folks had seen to it that his father and mother just died, just left here. He didn’t want pity; he didn’t even want blood, not the blood out of living bodies. Not the kind of blood white folks understand when they shoot a deaf black man to death, because there are no deer. Not that blood, that you could starve and maim. Leroy wanted the blood of the culture, the songs folks sing, how they move, what they look at, the rhythms of their speech; that was the blood Leroy was after. Blackening up America.

  Cypress was blowing kisses to him from across the table, now that they were alone. “I thought you said we had to turn in early.”

  Leroy slid his tongue to the corner of his mouth so Cypress could barely see it, but would.

  “Want some more champagne, ’fore we go home?” she murmured.

  Leroy pointed to her crotch. “No, I think there’s plenty of champagne up there.”

  Cypress feigned indignation. “Why sir, that’s not very American of you.”

  Leroy leaned toward her, looking directly into her eyes.

  “I’m not a very American guy.”

  Cypress,

  I can’t actually tell you why your daddy went to sea. It’s real clear there wasn’t much work for a skilled Negro carpenter in Charleston, but I figure he never felt at home here on the mainland anyhow. Geechees from the islands don’t take to being called foreigners, or made fun of because they have accents.

  They weren’t the only ones brought from Africa, as you well know, but mainlanders would like to believe that. And years ago folks were much harder on darker members of the race. I suppose he went to sea so he could get away from all that. But don’t you go stirring round dry bones, girl. He’s laid to rest and peaceable by all accounts. Let it alone.

  Leastways, the stories your daddy told you were a world different from anything your little friends heard, and he loved you girls with all his heart. More than that I can’t say, because as his wife, I knew him in another way, a private way.

  Love,

  Mama

  P.S. Here’s an old photo of your father that I was saving, but you keep it. Maybe he’ll make himself clearer to you, if you think on his picture. He’s right smart in that outfit, don’t you think?

  Leroy had been gone nearly two months. At first they thought he’d just be gone for the summer jazz festivals in Europe—Groningen, Moers, Antibes, Berlin, Nice—with a few days in Paris. A whole summer spent on the Trans-Europe Express, watching out not to get paid with counterfeit money; hearing Dutch and Norwegian imitations of Mingus, Leadbelly, Lester Young; with a Japanese band masquerading as the Cecil Taylor Unit. Every which way you turned there were always two things: dope and pussy, both of questionable quality. Leroy was sure there would come a day when no black cats from the States were ever “invited” to these festivals again.

  “See, Cypress, every headlining black group is on a bill with three or four all-European bands. How long do you think it’s gonna take them to say, ‘We play just as good as those niggers; we know what they are doing with the music; we don’t need to bring them over here any more. We play jazz now.’ ”

  Cypress had laughed till she cried as Leroy mimicked the European producers who were always telling Afro-Americans what they didn’t need. “ ‘Oh, you don’t need to rehearse, it’s natural with you.’ ‘Don’t bother about accommodations, we have some nice tents and outhouses.’ ” But it wasn’t funny. Because it was still true that coverage in Jazz Hot and Le Jazz or records on a French label opened doors that would never open in the States. So Leroy went to Europe.

  Cypress fought admitting it, but Leroy had mediated her relationship with the City of New York. She couldn’t stand it when he was gone. His horns and his arms had offered her horizons where she was free to see what she chose, feel what she had to, be what she dreamed. Now she was constrained by cement, noise, thousands of people she’d never had to take seriously. Whole blocks of black people without trees. Dance studios that looked into other dance studios. Or vacant lots crammed with tires, garbage, used strollers, broken bottles, and stench. Leroy alone had shielded her from this. Now her landscape had no natural elements. In California, one was cognizant of the planet: that the earth and sea were forces to contend with. New York without Leroy was bereft of any humility, dwarfing the sun, violating the waters, crowding nature into a yard called Central Park.

  Through Mahlon, Cypress discovered alternative landscapes in the middle of Manhattan. Mahlon was a collector. She took Cypress with her to artists’ studios, openings, and exhibits. Cypress lived among the bones and Sambos of Betye Saar’s altars. She wrapped herself in the gauze and twigs of Gina Hamilton’s country vistas. She made magic with the sorceress who haunted Romare Bearden’s hills; pried open the cupboards in the shacks where spirit-faces long dead led her in Carolinian nights. Cypress retreated from the shadows of skyscrapers trapping the light for the wealthy; she ignored the noises of the City in shadows: people bumping, pummeling one another because they could not see. She danced to McArthur Binion’s “Drawn Symphony,” insisting that she didn’t need to read music, she had climbed into it; over the hard edges of crayon erupting from aluminum surfaces, she’d set up camp and heard Celia Cruz in the back Mississippi woods, as colored boys denied crayons made marks on cardboard with sticks, their visions you could feel. When Cypress went out into the streets, she donned Mel Edwards’ “Five Black Face Images” to bring the colors of her ancestry to the garment district in something other than brogands and calloused hands pushing racks of the latest fashions. What dreams she found, she moved into. From David Hammons’ body prints that left her trembling, bloody, bound to walls by her shadows, following her hair wound round branches weighted down by death, to Barbara Chase-Riboud’s bronze and wool lands, offering her cliffs, ravines, quiet ponds of braid, paths to reach the other side.

  Cypress reconsidered Leroy’s easiness in the world. He wasn’t in the world, not like Towbin or Mahlon who worked in it, not even like Idrina, who forced changes. Leroy’s reality was bounded by his memories of his father, the flames outside Independence. His horizons eclipsed the evening news, his version of the world left the white folks out. Exiles, she and Leroy. They didn’t need to
go to Paris; that would do no good. What’s the point of being spat on in France? What could they do in Rio, where black people are a mythological presence? No, the frontiers in Leroy’s destiny were the sounds he heard and gave back as music; for Cypress the terrain of the new world was art. Her dance, like her people before her, adapted to the contours of her new land. She choreographed for the wilderness and the metropoli of the Saars, Binions, and Edwards, who let her have space, a natural element.

  Going up 7th Avenue from the 50th Street local stop toward that collection of dance schools catering to gypsies, troopers, and novices on the way to Broadway choruses, regional musicals, and the Folies Bergères in Las Vegas, Cypress protected herself from hawkers for live sex shows, 24-hour topless dancers, and cries of “Boys, boys, boys . . . we got boys,” immersed in visions of a dance. This dance was to take place inside a woven environment, “Code” by Allen and Dotty Fannin.

  * * *

  SUNSHIP JAZZBUNKER

  Boomjeskade 11, Rotterdam

  vr 10 juni - 10 uur

  Leroy McCullough Quintet

  & The Butch Morris Trio

  * * *

  * * *

  FESTIVAL MOERS - DUCS

  Pfingsten, im Schlosspark/ 27 mai 18.00 uhr

  Joseph Jarman & Roscoe Mitchell

  Bobo Shaw & Andrew Cyrille

  Leroy McCullough &Baikida Carroll

  The Brecker Brothers

  * * *

  * * *

  Grand Auditorium

  Radio France

  lundi

  13 juillet

  FM

  France Musique

  JAZZ VIVANT/ THE GREAT BLACK MUSIC

  l’Art Ensemble de Chicago

  et

  le Quintette de Leroy McCullough

  * * *

  * * *

  “. . . Leroy McCullough’s debut in Europe is the most startling event since John Coltrane worked with Miles Davis. The complexity and rigor of McCullough’s compositions force me to wonder where this man, an American Negro, actually comes from . . .”

  Guy Sorel, “Revues”

  LE JAZZ MODERNE

  * * *

  * * *

  “Leroy McCullough, saxophonist and composer, broke the humdrum of the evening with accomplished yet fervent solos that played against the pageantry of his group, which is an answer to the contradictions of Sun-Ra, The Art Ensemble, and The Cecil Taylor Unit; throw in some Coleman, Young, Ayler, and every major twentieth-century classical composer, which is to say that McCullough is definitively the most singular of black musicians: a virtuoso. The European jazz scene can only be invigorated by his presence. May France make him welcome . . .”

  Juliette Bienaimee,

  “La Musique Noir”

  CADENCE NOUVELLE

  * * *

  Cypress saw three women clad in paisley aprons about to begin household movements: scrubbing, hanging, straightening. Then, the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s “Chicongo” would start. The women would resist the hipness of the rhythms, scrub, hang, and straighten more intensely, until one began to take on another personality, that of the lady of the house . . . but a colored house. Cypress enjoyed commanding this woman’s fantasies, her desire to make the others work harder while she adopted the airs of Hollywood stars. Marlene Dietrich in Shanghai Express. Billie Burke in Ziegfeld Follies. But who the lady of the house was would change from moment to moment so that all three of the dancers would interrupt one another’s housework, each more bizarrely grand, grotesque than the others. As the music faded out, the women were trying to hang, scrub, and straighten to stop the relentless profanity of women of leisure; the Busby Berkeley nightmares in mirrors and kaleidoscopes, idle, coy, and useless. One by one, they would step out of the closed unspun rayon, drop their aprons, and become themselves.

  Aside from the chores, the movement would be based in classic images of women from Giselle to Appalachian Spring, with Lena Home in Stormy Weather, Eartha Kitt as herself, and as a Charlestonian, Cypress couldn’t leave out Scarlett O’Hara. The divas of femininity bewitched too many generations, convinced them that the joys of women were deceit and dependence.

  “Hi, sweetheart!” Cypress heard a shout that made her walk faster. Maybe she was being recruited for one of the blow-job massage parlors. She plunged into the crowd, making diagonals, the shortest distance between two points, etc., but the “Hi, sweetheart” stayed on her ass. At the light she had to wait for a Con Ed truck to make a left turn. Somebody grabbed her shoulder. Cypress turned to knock whoever in the hell it was into the ground, underneath the ground, off the planet, but it was Ariel Moröe of The Kushites Returned, looking like he had been on an excursion in hell.

  Several of his front teeth were missing. There were keloids from knife slashes around his eyes, his neck, and upper chest. The twenty pounds he’d lost left his bones peeking through everything he had on, including the skin-tight black leather pants with zippers up the legs. He looked like a middle-aged pixie suffering from anorexia. Cypress couldn’t get over the change. Why, Ariel had been so vital, so magnificent in his capes and panache. Talking as if he still had all his teeth, he said,

  “Hi, Cypress. We haven’t seen you in such a long time. Where you been keeping yourself, girl?”

  But Cypress only wanted to know what had happened. “Ariel, what have you done to yourself?” He ignored that, and lit a Sherman.

  “We’re going back to San Francisco next week. Would really be good to have you back. New York’s taken its toll on my first-line soloists.”

  Cypress thought, “New York’s taken its toll on more than your first line, buddy,” yet Ariel continued to project into the future, all the wonderful things he’d do when he got his group back to San Francisco. Finally, Cypress blurted, “Ariel, can you still dance? I mean are you strong enough yet?”

  “Oh, this.” Ariel felt the most protruding scars on his face with his free hand. “Yeah, I’m not where I usedta be, but it’s not as bad as it looks, darling.”

  Cypress felt like slapping him, but she couldn’t bring herself to strike anything as fragile as Ariel appeared right then.

  “How’d this happen, Ariel? You look awful. My god.”

  “I made a mistake, that’s all. A bad choice of character, you know. I thought he was such a sweet boy, but look . . .” Ariel pulled up the sleeve of his flowered shirt. A hunk of flesh was missing and a hollow shape etched by teeth marks remained. Keloids there, too. Cypress felt nauseous.

  “Doggish, huh?” Ariel chimed.

  Cypress remembered all those nights in $1.00 cover/2-drink minimum discos and after-hours bars she’d been in with Ariel and his fellas. The quick pick-ups of boys still childlike, yet mean. She saw Ariel fussing over these illiterate, dressed-up hustlers, fawning over them, while they spent his money, snorted his coke. They had laughed at him: “Shut up, old man” . . . “Suck me, old man” . . . “No, honey, let me wear that.” Cypress wanted to scream. They had no right; they had no right. Even if Ariel was a fool, thinking anyone could be bought and paid for without some fetid, vicious aftermath, Ariel Moröe was still gifted. He’d trained her to perform; to make her body speak. And now he could barely walk without revealing the cruelty of the company he kept.

  Cypress left Ariel on the corner where he’d caught up with her. She had to cut her conversation short when some young thug, in clothes she recognized as Ariel’s, sidled up, tapped Ariel on the behind and gave her that “Well bitch, don’t you have something to do” look. Cypress moved right on. There was no need to think about The Kushites Returned. The Kushites were destroyed.

  Two-thirty jazz class; studio A, Cypress did her warm-ups with a vengeance. She couldn’t get away from flashes of Ariel’s beating, his wounds, the glory his company had known. She pulled her head toward her knees, through her legs. Stretch. Release. Again. Stretch. Release. And toe-ball-heel, toe-ball-heel. Point. Point.

  “On the floor. Ladies. On the floor. Now, off. And one-and-two
, and that’s it. Pick up the tempo, would you?”

  Cypress was working her body so obsessively she didn’t realize Idrina was teaching class, until it was time to go across the floor. Idrina called her for the first line, lustily.

  “Cypress, give it all you got! Lay-ups into parallel turns as many as you can handle.”

  Idrina demonstrated. Cypress followed, triumphant. She arched her back to the floor, opening chest, arms reaching for the windows, head at her heel, leg pulling toward the farthest corner. That breath, as all her body expanded in different directions, that moment was for Ariel in his prime. The impulse to turn, catch her shadow still in preparation, was so accurately executed the eloquence forced Idrina to step back. Cypress had learned so well, there was nothing more for Idrina to teach her.

  Cypress danced like there was no tomorrow. No kicks were high enough for her; no triplets crisp enough. Why didn’t Leroy come home, so she could stop living inside paintings? Why did she have to know Ariel? Or Idrina for that matter, who was apparently smitten with some red-headed wisp of a girl who’d studied ballet too long?

  Her emotional circuits overloaded, Cypress pushed her body into street clothes. Her pants wouldn’t come over her hips easily; she was still sweating. Her blouse clung to her back like someone chasing her. The day had been too full of old people; people she’d thrown away and let die somewhere nobody would find them, but somehow they came around anyway. Came around full-faced, familiar, and old. Cypress wondered if old memories could make you smell different, make you not know what you were doing. She took deep breaths on a slow ten-beat, and exhaled. In this meditative state, she came upon visions of Mel Edward’s “Curtain for William and Peter.” She wrapped herself in the delicate barbed wire, winding the chains around her arms. She became a landscape of braided, looped metal, daring some more old, dead, killed-off creatures to cross her path. But some things aren’t intimidated by steel and threats to flesh.