by Paula Guran
I turned around in alarm, but he had tilted his head toward the sky again, and his eyes were closed.
“Indiana,” he said. His voice made the word seem sung. “Moonlight in Vermont. I Thought About You. Flamingo.”
He was deciding what to play during his next set. I went back inside, where twenty or thirty new arrivals, more people than I had ever seen in the club, waited for the music to start. Hat soon reappeared through the door, the other musicians left the bar, and the third set began. Hat played all four of the songs he had named, interspersing them through his standard repertoire during the course of an unusually long set. He was playing as well as I’d ever heard him, maybe better than I’d heard on all the other nights I had come to the club. The Saturday night crowd applauded explosively after every solo. I didn’t know if what I was seeing was genius or desperation.
An obituary in the Sunday New York Times, which I read over breakfast the next morning in the John Jay cafeteria, explained some of what had happened. Early Saturday morning, a thirty-eight year old tenor saxophone player named Grant Kilbert had been killed in an automobile accident. One of the most successful jazz musicians in the world, one of the few jazz musicians, known outside of the immediate circle of fans, Kilbert had probably been Hat’s most prominent disciple. He had certainly been one of my favorite musicians. More importantly, from his first record, Cool Breeze, Kilbert had excited respect and admiration. I looked at the photograph of the handsome young man beaming out over the neck of his saxophone and realized that the first four songs on Cool Breeze were “Indiana,” “Moonlight in Vermont,” “I Thought About You,” and “Flamingo.” Sometime late Saturday afternoon, someone had called up Hat to tell him about Kilbert. What I had seen had not merely been alcoholic eccentricity, it had been grief for a lost son. And when I thought about it, I was sure that the lost son, not himself, had been the important motherfucker he’d apothesized. What I had taken for spaciness and disconnection had all along been irony.
PART TWO
1
On the 31st of October, after calling to make sure he remembered our appointment, I did go to the Albert Hotel, room 821, and interview Hat. That is, I asked him questions and listened to the long, rambling, often obscene responses he gave them. During the long night I spent in his room, he drank the fifth of Gordon’s gin, the “refreshments” I brought with me—all of It, an entire bottle of gin, without tonic, ice, or other dilutants. He just poured it into a tumbler and drank, as if it were water. (I refused his single offer of a “taste.”) I frequently checked to make sure that the tape recorder I’d borrowed from a business student down the hall from me was still working, I changed tapes until they ran out, I made detailed back-up notes with a ballpoint pen in a stenographic notebook. A couple of times, he played me sections of records that he wanted me to hear, and now and then he sang a couple of bars to make sure that I understood what he was telling me. He sat me in his only chair, and during the entire night stationed himself, dressed in his pork pie hat, a dark blue chalk-stripe suit, and white button-down shirt with a black knit tie, on the edge of his bed. This was a formal occasion. When I arrived at nine o’clock, he addressed me as “Mr. Leonard Feather” (the name of a well-known jazz critic), and when he opened his door at six-thirty the next morning, he called me “Miss Rosemary.” By then, I knew that this was an allusion to Rosemary Clooney, whose singing I had learned that he liked, and that the nickname meant he liked me, too. It was not at all certain, however, that he remembered my actual name.
I had three sixty-minute tapes and a notebook filled with handwriting that gradually degenerated from my usual scrawl into loops and wiggles that resembled Arabic more than English. Over the next month, I spent whatever spare time I had transcribing the tapes and trying to decipher my own handwriting. I wasn’t sure that what I had was an interview. My carefully prepared questions had been met either with evasions or blank, silent refusals to answer—he had simply started talking about something else. After about an hour, I realized that this was his interview, not mine, and let him roll.
After my notes had been typed up and the tapes transcribed, I put everything in a drawer and went back to work on my M.A. What I had was even more puzzling than I’d thought, and straightening it out would have taken more time than I could afford. So the rest of that academic year was a long grind of studying for the comprehensive exam and getting a thesis ready. Until I picked up an old Time magazine in the John Jay lounge and saw his name in the “Milestones” columns, I didn’t even know that Hat had died.
Two months after I’d interviewed him, he had begun to hemorrhage on a flight back from France; an ambulance had taken him directly from the airport to a hospital. Five days after his release from the hospital, he had died in his bed at the Albert.
After I earned my degree, I was determined to wrestle something useable from my long night with Hat—I owed it to him. During the first weeks of that summer, I wrote out a version of what Hat had said to me and sent it to the only publication I thought would be interested in it. Downbeat accepted the interview, and it appeared there about six months later. Eventually, it acquired some fame as the last of his rare public statements. I still see lines from the interview quoted in the sort of pieces about Hat never printed during his life. Sometimes they are lines he really did say to me; sometimes they are stitched together from remarks he made at different times; sometimes, they are quotations I invented in order to be able to use other things he did say.
But one section of that interview has never been quoted, because it was never printed. I never figured out what to make of it. Certainly I could not believe all he had said. He had been putting me on, silently laughing at my credulity, for he could not possibly believe that what he was telling me was literal truth. I was a white boy with a tape recorder, it was Halloween, and Hat was having fun with me. He was jiving me.
Now I feel different about his story and about him, too. He was a great man, and I was an unworldly kid. He was drunk, and I was priggishly sober, but in every important way, he was functioning far above my level. Hat had lived forty-nine years as a black man in America, and I’d spent all of my twenty-one years in white suburbs. He was an immensely talented musician, a man who virtually thought in music, and I can’t even hum in tune. That I expected to understand anything at all about him staggers me now. Back then, I didn’t know anything about grief, and Hat wore grief about him daily, like a cloak. Now that I am the age he was then, I see that most of what is called information is interpretation, and interpretation is always partial.
Probably Hat was putting me on, jiving me, though not maliciously. He certainly was not telling me the literal truth, though I have never been able to learn what the literal truth of this case was. It’s possible that even Hat never knew what was the literal truth behind the story he told me—possible, I mean, that he was still trying to work out what the truth was, nearly forty years after the fact.
2
He started telling me the story after we heard what I thought were gunshots from the street. I jumped from the chair and rushed to the windows, which looked out onto Eighth Avenue. “Kids,” Hat said. In the hard yellow light of the street lamps, four or five teenage boys trotted up the Avenue. Three of them carried paper bags. “Kids shooting?” I asked. My amazement tells you how long ago this was.
“Fireworks,” Hat said. “Every Halloween in New York, fool kids run around with bags full of fireworks, trying to blow their hands off.”
Here and in what follows, I am not going to try to represent the way Hat actually spoke. I cannot represent the way his voice glided over certain words and turned others into mushy growls, though he expressed more than half of his meaning by sound; and I don’t want to reproduce his constant, reflexive obscenity. Hat couldn’t utter four words in a row without throwing in a “motherfucker.” Mostly, I have replaced his obscenities with other words, and the reader can imagine what was really said. Also, if I tried to imitate his grammar, I’d sound ra
cist and he would sound stupid. Hat left school in the fourth grade, and his language, though precise, was casual. To add to these difficulties, Hat employed a private language of his own, a code to ensure that he would be understood only by the people he wished to understand him. I have replaced most of his code words with their equivalents.
It must have been around one in the morning, which means that I had been in his room about four hours. Until Hat explained the “gunshots,” I had forgotten that it was Halloween night, and I told him this as I turned away from the window.
“I never forget about Halloween,” Hat said. “If I can, I stay home on Halloween. Don’t want to be out on the street, that night.”
He had already given me proof that he was superstitious, and as he spoke he glanced almost nervously around the room, as if looking for sinister presences.
“You’d feel in danger?” I asked.
He rolled gin around in his mouth and looked at me as he had in the alley behind the club, taking note of qualities I myself did not yet perceive. This did not feel at all judgmental. The nervousness I thought I had seen had disappeared, and his manner seemed marginally more concentrated than earlier in the evening. He swallowed the gin and for a couple of seconds looked at me without speaking.
“No,” he finally said. “Not exactly. But I wouldn’t feel safe, either.”
I sat with my pen half an inch from the page of my notebook, uncertain whether or not to write this down.
“I’m from Mississippi, you know.”
I nodded.
“Funny things happen down there. Back when I was a little kid, it was a whole different world. Know what I mean?”
“I can guess,” I said.
He nodded. “Sometimes people disappeared. They’d be gone. All kinds of stuff used to happen, stuff you wouldn’t even believe in now. I met a witch-lady once who could put curses on you, make you go blind and crazy. Another time, I saw a mean, murdering son of a bitch named Eddie Grimes die and come back to life—he got shot to death at a dance we were playing, he was dead, and a woman went down and whispered to him, and Eddie Grimes stood right back up on his feet. The man who shot him took off double-quick and he must have kept on going, because we never saw him after that.”
“Did you start playing again?” I asked, taking notes as fast as I could.
“We never stopped,” Hat said. “You let the people deal with what’s going on, but you gotta keep on playing.”
“Did you live in the country?” I asked, thinking that all of this sounded like Dogpatch—witches and walking dead men.
He shook his head. “I was brought up in town, Woodland, Mississippi. On the river. Where we lived was called Darktown, you know, but most of Woodland was white, with nice houses and all. Lots of our people did the cooking and washing in the big houses on Miller’s Hill, that kind of work. In fact, we lived in a pretty nice house, for Darktown—the band always did well, and my father had a couple of other jobs on top of that. He was a good piano player, mainly, but he could play any kind of instrument. And he was a big, strong guy, nice-looking, real light-complected, so he was called Red, which was what that meant in those days. People respected him.”
Another long, rattling burst of explosions came from Eighth Avenue. I wanted to ask him again about leaving his father’s band, but Hat once more gave his little room a quick inspection, swallowed another mouthful of gin, and went on talking.
“We even went out trick or treating on Halloween, you know, like the white kids. I guess our people didn’t do that everywhere, but we did. Naturally, we stuck to our neighborhood, and probably we got a lot less than the kids from Miller’s Hill, but they didn’t have anything up there that tasted as good as the apples and candy we brought home in our bags. Around us, people made instead of bought, and that’s the difference.” He smiled at either the memory or the unexpected sentimentality he had just revealed—for a moment, he looked both lost in time and uneasy with himself for having said too much. “Or maybe I just remember it that way, you know? Anyhow, we used to raise some hell, too. You were supposed to raise hell, on Halloween.”
“You went out with your brothers?” I asked.
“No, no, they were—” He flipped his hand in the air, dismissing whatever it was that his brothers had been. “I was always apart, you dig? Me, I was always into my own little things. I was that way right from the beginning. I play like that—never play like anyone else, don’t even play like myself. You gotta find new places for yourself, or else nothing’s happening, isn’t that right? Don’t want to be a repeater pencil.” He saluted this declaration with another swallow of gin. “Back in those days, I used to go out with a boy named Rodney Sparks—we called him Dee, short for Demon, ’cause’ Dee Sparks would do anything that came into his head. That boy was the bravest little bastard I ever knew. He’d wrassle a mad dog. And the reason was, Dee was the preacher’s boy. If you happen to be the preacher’s boy, seems like you gotta prove every way you can that you’re no Buster Brown, you know? So I hung with Dee, because I wasn’t any Buster Brown, either. This is when we were eleven, around then—the time when you talk about girls, you know, but you still aren’t too sure what that’s about. You don’t know what anything’s about, to tell the truth. You along for the ride, you trying to pack in as much fun as possible. So Dee was my right hand, and when I went out on Halloween in Woodland, I went out with him.”
He rolled his eyes toward the window and said, “Yeah.” An expression I could not read at all took over his face. By the standards of ordinary people, Hat almost always looked detached, even impassive, tuned to some private wavelength, and this sense of detachment had intensified. I thought he was changing mental gears, dismissing his childhood, and opened my mouth to ask him about Grant Kilbert. But he raised his glass to his mouth again and rolled his eyes back to me, and the quality of his gaze told me to keep quiet.
“I didn’t know it,” he said, “but I was getting ready to stop being a little boy. To stop believing in little boy things and start seeing like a grown-up. I guess that’s part of what I liked about Dee Sparks—he seemed like he was a lot more grown-up than I was, shows you what my head was like. The age we were, this would have been the last time we went out on Halloween to get apples and candy. From then on, we would have gone out mainly to raise hell. Scare the shit out of the little kids. But the way it turned out, it was the last time we ever went out on Halloween.”
He finished off the gin in his glass and reached down to pick the bottle off the floor and pour another few inches into the tumbler. “Here I am, sitting in this room. There’s my horn over there. Here’s this bottle. You know what I’m saying?”
I didn’t. I had no idea what he was saying. The hint of fatality clung to his earlier statement, and for a second I thought he was going to say that he was here but Dee Sparks was nowhere because Dee Sparks had died in Woodland, Mississippi, at the age of eleven on Halloween night. Hat was looking at me with a steady curiosity which compelled a response. “What happened?” I asked.
Now I know that he was saying It has come down to just this, my room, my horn, my bottle. My question was as good as any other response.
“If I was to tell you everything that happened, we’d have to stay in this room for a month.” He smiled and straightened up on the bed. His ankles were crossed, and for the first time I noticed that his feet, shod in dark suede shoes with crepe soles, did not quite touch the floor. “And, you know, I never tell anybody everything, I always have to keep something back for myself. Things turned out all right. Only thing I mind is, I should have earned more money. Grant Kilbert, he earned a lot of money, and some of that was mine, you know.”
“Were you friends?” I asked.
“I knew the man.” He tilted his head and stared at the ceiling for so long that eventually I looked up at it, too. It was not a remarkable ceiling. A circular section near the center had been replastered not long before.
“No matter where you live, there are plac
es you’re not supposed to go,” he said, still gazing up. “And sooner or later, you’re gonna wind up there.” He smiled at me again. “Where we lived, the place you weren’t supposed to go was called The Backs. Out of town, stuck in the woods on one little path. In Darktown, we had all kinds from preachers on down. We had washerwomen and blacksmiths and carpenters, and we had some no-good thieving trash, too, like Eddie Grimes, that man who came back from being dead. In The Backs, they started with trash like Eddie Grimes, and went down from there. Sometimes, our people went out there to buy a jug, and sometimes they went there to get a woman, but they never talked about it. The Backs was rough. What they had was rough.” He rolled his eyes at me and said, “That witch-lady I told you about, she lived in The Backs.” He snickered. “Man, they were a mean bunch of people. They’d cut you, you looked at ’em bad. But one thing funny about the place, white and colored lived there just the same—it was integrated. Backs people were so evil, color didn’t make no difference to them. They hated everybody anyhow, on principle.” Hat pointed his glass at me, tilted his head, and narrowed his eyes. “At least, that was what everybody said. So this particular Halloween, Dee Sparks says to me after we finish with Darktown, we ought to head out to The Backs and see what the place is really like. Maybe we can have some fun.
“The idea of going out to The Backs kind of scared me, but being scared was part of the fun—Halloween, right? And if anyplace in Woodland was perfect for all that Halloween shit, you know, someplace where you might really see a ghost or a goblin, The Backs was better than the graveyard.” Hat shook his head, holding the glass out at a right angle to his body. A silvery amusement momentarily transformed him, and it struck me that his native elegance, the product of his character and bearing much more than of the handsome suit and the suede shoes, had in effect been paid for by the surviving of a thousand unimaginable difficulties, each painful to a varying degree. Then I realized that what I meant by elegance was really dignity, that for the first time I had recognized actual dignity in another human being, and that dignity was nothing like the self-congratulatory superiority people usually mistook for it.