by Paula Guran
“When the paper finally came, there on the front page was a picture of Eleanore Monday, a girl with dark hair and a big nose. She didn’t look anything like the dead woman in the shack. She hadn’t even disappeared on the right day. Eddie Grimes was never going to be able to explain things, because the police had finally cornered him in the old jute warehouse just off Meridian Road next to the general store. I don’t suppose they even bothered trying to arrest him—they weren’t interested in arresting him. He killed a white girl. They wanted revenge, and they got it.
“After I looked at the paper, I got out of the house and ran between the houses to get a took at the jute warehouse. Turned out a lot of folks had the same idea. A big crowd strung out in a long line in front of the warehouse, and cars were parked all along Meridian Road. Right up in front of the warehouse door was a police car, and a big cop stood in the middle of the big doorway, watching people file by. They were walking past the doorway one by one, acting like they were at some kind of exhibit. Nobody was talking. It was a sight I never saw before in that town, whites and colored all lined up together. On the other side of the warehouse, two groups of men stood alongside the road, one colored and one white, talking so quietly you couldn’t hear a word.
“Now I was never one who liked standing in lines, so I figured I’d just dart up there, peek in, and save myself some time. I came around the end of the line and ambled toward the two bunches of men, like I’d already had my look and was just hanging around to enjoy the scene. After I got a little past the warehouse door, I sort of drifted up alongside it. I looked down the row of people, and there was Dee Sparks, just a few yards away from being able to see in. Dee was leaning forward, and when he saw me he almost jumped out of his skin. He looked away as fast as he could. His eyes turned as dead as stones. The cop at the door yelled at me to go to the end of the line. He never would have noticed me at all if Dee hadn’t jumped like someone just shot off a firecracker behind him.
“About half way down the line, Mary Randolph was standing behind some of the ladies from the neighborhood. She looked terrible. Her hair stuck out in raggedy clumps, and her skin was ashy, like she hadn’t slept in a long time. I sped up a little, hoping she wouldn’t notice me, but after I took one more step, Mary Randolph looked down and her eyes hooked into mine. I swear, what was in her eyes almost knocked me down. I couldn’t even tell what it was, unless it was pure hate. Hate and pain. With her eyes hooked into mine like that, I couldn’t look away. It was like I was seeing that miserable, terrible white smear twisting up between the trees on that night in The Backs. Mary let me go, and I almost fell down all over again.
I got to the end of the line and started moving along regular and slow with everybody else. Mary Randolph stayed in my mind and blanked out everything else. When I got up to the door, I barely took in what was inside the warehouse—a wall full of bulletholes and bloodstains all over the place, big slick ones and little drizzly ones. All I could think of was the shack and Mary Randolph sitting next to the dead girl, and I was back there all over again.
“Mary Randolph didn’t show up at the Beergarden dance, so she didn’t hear me play saxophone in public for the first time. I didn’t expect her, either, not after the way she looked out at the warehouse. There’d been a lot of news about Eddie Grimes, who they made out to be less civilized than a gorilla, a crazy man who’d murder anyone as long as he could kill all the white women first. The paper had a picture of what they called Grimes’ ‘lair,’ with busted furniture all over the place and holes in the walls, but they never explained that it was the police tore it up and made it look that way.
“The other thing people got suddenly all hot about was The Backs. Seems the place was even worse than everybody thought. Seems white girls besides Eleanore Monday had been taken out there—according to some, there was even white girls living out there, along with a lot of bad coloreds. The place was a nest of vice, Sodom and Gomorrah. Two days before the town council was supposed to discuss the problem, a gang of white men went out there with guns and clubs and torches and burned every shack in The Backs clear down to the ground. While they were there, they didn’t see a single soul, white, colored, male, female, damned or saved. Everybody who lived in The Backs had skedaddled. And the funny thing was, long as The Backs had existed right outside of Woodland, no one in Woodland could recollect the name of anyone who had ever lived there. They couldn’t even recall the name of anyone who had ever gone there, except for Eddie Grimes. In fact, after the place got burned down, it appeared that it must have been a sin just to say its name, because no one ever mentioned it. You’d think men so fine and moral as to burn down The Backs would be willing to take the credit, but none ever did.
“You could think they must have wanted to get rid of some things out there. Or wanted real bad to forget about things out there. One thing I thought, Dr. Garland and the man I saw leaving that shack had been out there with torches.
“But maybe I didn’t know anything at all. Two weeks later, a couple things happened that shook me good.
“The first one happened three nights before Thanksgiving. I was hurrying home, a little bit late. Nobody else on the street, everybody inside either sitting down to dinner or getting ready for it. When I got to Mary Randolph’s house, some kind of noise coming from inside stopped me. What I thought was, it sounded exactly like somebody trying to scream while someone else was holding a hand over their mouth. Well, that was plain foolish, wasn’t it? How did I know what that would sound like? I moved along a step or two, and then I heard it again. Could be anything, I told myself. Mary Randolph didn’t like me too much, anyway. She wouldn’t be partial to my knocking on her door. Best thing I could do was get out. Which was what I did. Just went home to supper and forgot about it.
“Until the next day, anyhow, when a friend of Mary’s walked in her front door and found her lying dead with her throat cut and a knife in her hand. A cut of fatback, we heard, had boiled away to cinders on her stove. I didn’t tell anybody about what I heard the night before. Too scared. I couldn’t do anything but wait to see what the police did.
“To the police, it was all real clear. Mary killed herself, plain and simple.
“When our minister went across town to ask why a lady who intended to commit suicide had bothered to start cooking her supper, the chief told him that a female bent on killing herself probably didn’t care what happened to the food on her stove. Then I suppose Mary Randolph nearly managed to cut her own head off, said the minister. A female in despair possesses a godawful strength, said the chief. And asked, wouldn’t she have screamed if she’d been attacked? And added, couldn’t it be that maybe this female here had secrets in her life connected to the late savage murderer named Eddie Grimes? We might all be better off if these secrets get buried with your Mary Randolph, said the chief. I’m sure you understand me, Reverend. And yes, the Reverend did understand, he surely did. So Mary Randolph got laid away in the cemetery, and nobody ever said her name again. She was put away out of mind, like The Backs.
“The second thing that shook me up and proved to me that I didn’t know anything, that I was no better than a blind dog, happened on Thanksgiving day. My daddy played piano in church, and on special days, we played our instruments along with the gospel songs. I got to church early with the rest of my family, and we practiced with the choir. Afterwards, I went to fooling around outside until the people came, and saw a big car come up into the church parking lot. Must have been the biggest, fanciest car I’d ever seen. Miller’s Hill was written all over that vehicle. I couldn’t have told you why, but the sight of it made my heart stop. The front door opened, and out stepped a colored man in a fancy gray uniform with a smart cap. He didn’t so much as dirty his eyes by looking at me, or at the church, or at anything around him. He stepped around the front of the car and opened the rear door on my side. A young woman was in the passenger seat, and when she got out of the car, the sun fell on her blond hair and the little fur jacket she
was wearing. I couldn’t see more than the top of her head, her shoulders under the jacket, and her legs. Then she straightened up, and her eyes lighted right on me. She smiled, but I couldn’t smile back. I couldn’t even begin to move.
“It was Abbey Montgomery, delivering baskets of food to our church, the way she did every Thanksgiving and Christmas. She looked older and thinner than the last time I’d seen her alive—older and thinner, but more than that, like there was no fun at all in her life anymore. She walked to the trunk of the car, and the driver opened it up, leaned in, and brought out a great big basket of food. He took into the church by the back way and came back for another one. Abbey Montgomery just stood still and watched him carry the baskets. She looked—she looked like she was just going through the motions, like going through the motions was all she was ever going to do from now on, and she knew it. Once she smiled at the driver, but the smile was so sad that the driver didn’t even try to smile back. When he was done, he closed the trunk and let her into the passenger seat, got behind the wheel, and drove away.
“I was thinking, Dee Sparks was right, she was alive all the time. Then I thought, No, Mary Randolph brought her back, too, like she did Eddie Grimes. But it didn’t work right, and only part of her came back.
“And that’s the whole thing, except that Abbey Montgomery didn’t deliver food to our church, that Christmas—she was traveling out of the country, with her aunt. And she didn’t bring food the next Thanksgiving, either, just sent her driver with the baskets. By that time, we didn’t expect her, because we’d already heard that, soon as she got back to town, Abbey Montgomery stopped leaving her house. That girl shut herself up and never came out. I heard from somebody who probably didn’t know any more than I did that she eventually got so she wouldn’t even leave her room. Five years later, she passed away. Twenty-six years old, and they said she looked to be at least fifty.”
4
Hat fell silent, and I sat with my pen ready over the notebook, waiting, for more. When I realized that he had finished, I asked, “What did she die of?”
“Nobody ever told me.”
“And nobody ever found who had killed Mary Randolph.”
The limpid, colorless eyes momentarily rested on me. “Was she killed?”
“Did you ever become friends with Dee Sparks again? Did you at least talk about it with him?”
“Surely did not. Nothing to talk about.”
This was a remarkable statement, considering that for an hour he had done nothing but talk about what had happened to the two of them, but I let it go. Hat was still looking at me with his unreadable eyes. His face had become particularly bland, almost immobile. It was not possible to imagine this man as an active eleven-year-old boy. “Now you heard me out, answer my question,” he said.
I couldn’t remember the question.
“Did we find what we were looking for?”
Scares—that was what they had been looking for. “I think you found a lot more than that,” I said.
He nodded slowly. “That’s right. It was more.”
Then I asked him some question about his family’s band, he lubricated himself with another swallow of gin, and the interview returned to more typical matters. But the experience of listening to him had changed. After I had heard the long, unresolved tale of his Halloween night, everything Hat said seemed to have two separate meanings, the daylight meaning created by sequences of ordinary English words, and another, nighttime meaning, far less determined and knowable. He was like a man discoursing with eerie rationality in the midst of a surreal dream—like a man carrying on an ordinary conversation with one foot placed on solid ground and the other suspended above a bottomless abyss. I focused on the rationality, on the foot placed in the context I understood; the rest was unsettling to the point of being frightening. By six-thirty, when he kindly called me “Miss Rosemary” and opened his door, I felt as if I’d spent several weeks, if not whole months, in his room.
PART THREE
1
Although I did get my M.A. at Columbia, I didn’t have enough money to stay on for a Ph.D., so I never became a college professor. I never became a jazz critic, either, or anything else very interesting. For a couple of years after Columbia, I taught English in a high school, until I quit to take the job I have now, which involves a lot of traveling and pays a little bit better than teaching. Maybe even quite a bit better, but that’s not saying much, especially when you consider my expenses. I own a nice little house in the Chicago suburbs, my marriage held up against everything life did to it, and my twenty-two year old son, a young man who never once in his life for the purpose of pleasure read a novel, looked at a painting, visited a museum, or listened to anything but the most readily available music, recently announced to his mother and myself that he has decided to become an artist, actual type of art to be determined later, but probably to include aspects of photography, video tape, and the creation of “installations.” I take this as proof that he was raised in a manner that left his self-esteem intact.
I no longer provide my life with a perpetual sound track (though my son, who has moved back in with us, does), in part because my income does not permit the purchase of a great many compact discs. (A friend presented me with a CD player on my forty-fifth birthday.) And these days, I’m as interested in classical music as in jazz. Of course, I never go to jazz clubs when I am home. Are there still people, apart from New Yorkers, who patronize jazz nightclubs in their own hometowns? The concept seems faintly retrograde, even somehow illicit. But when I am out on the road, living in airplanes and hotel rooms, I often check the jazz listings in the local papers to see if I can find some way to fill my evenings. Many of the legends of my youth are still out there, in most cases playing at least as well as before. Some months ago, while I was San Francisco, I came across John Hawes’ name in this fashion. He was working in a club so close to my hotel that I could walk to it.
His appearance in any club at all was surprising. Hawes had ceased performing jazz in public years before. He had earned a great deal of fame (and undoubtedly, a great deal of money) writing film scores, and in the past decade, he had begun to appear in swallow-tail coat and white tie as a conductor of the standard classical repertoire. I believe he had a permanent post in some city like Seattle, or perhaps Salt Lake City. If he was spending a week playing jazz with a trio in San Francisco, it must have been for the sheer pleasure of it.
I turned up just before the beginning of the first set, and got a table toward the back of the club. Most of the tables were filled—Hawes’ celebrity had guaranteed him a good house. Only a few minutes after the announced time of the first set, Hawes emerged through a door at the front of the club and moved toward the piano, followed by his bassist and drummer. He looked like a more successful version of the younger man I had seen in New York, and the only indications of the extra years were his silvergray hair, still abundant, and a little paunch. His playing, too, seemed essentially unchanged, but I could not hear it in the way I once had. He was still a good pianist—no doubt about that—but he seemed to be skating over the surface of the songs he played, using his wonderful technique and good time merely to decorate their melodies. It was the sort of playing that becomes less impressive the more attention you give it—if you were listening with half an ear, it probably sounded like Art Tatum. I wondered if John Hawes had always had this superficial streak in him, or if he had lost a certain necessary passion during his years away from jazz. Certainly he had not sounded superficial when I had heard him with Hat.
Hawes, too, might have been thinking about his old employer, because in the first set he played “Love Walked In,” “Too Marvelous For Words,” and “Up Jumped Hat.” In the last of these, inner gears seemed to mesh, the rhythm simultaneously relaxed and intensified, and the music turned into real, not imitation, jazz. Hawes looked pleased with himself when he stood up from the piano bench, and half a dozen fans moved to greet him as he stepped off the bandstand. Most of them w
ere carrying old records they wished him to sign.
A few minutes later, I saw Hawes standing by himself at the end of the bar, drinking what appeared to be club soda, in proximity to his musicians but not actually speaking with them. Wondering if his allusions to Hat had been deliberate, I left my table and walked toward the bar. Hawes watched me approach out of the side of his eye, neither encouraging nor discouraging me. When I introduced myself, he smiled nicely and shook my hand and waited for whatever I wanted to say to him.
At first, I made some inane comment about the difference between playing in clubs and conducting in concert halls, and he replied with the non-committal and equally banal agreement that yes, the two experiences were very different.
Then I told him that I had seen him play with Hat all those years ago in New York, and he turned to me with genuine pleasure in his face. “Did you? At that little club on St Mark’s Place? That sure was fun. I guess I must have been thinking about it, because I played some of those songs we used to do.”
“That was why I came over,” I said. “I guess that was one of the best musical experiences I ever had.”
“You and me both.” Hawes smiled to himself. “Sometimes, I just couldn’t believe what he was doing.”
“It showed,” I said.
“Well.” His eyes slid away from mine. “Great character. Completely otherworldly.”
“I saw some of that,” I said. “I did that interview with him that turns up now and then, the one in Downbeat.”
“Oh!” Hawes gave me his first genuinely interested look so far. “Well, that was him, all right.”