Jazz

by Toni Morrison

  Who else were the unarmed ones? The ones who thought they did not need folded blades, packets of lye, shards of glass taped to their hands. Those who bought houses and hoarded money as protection and the means to purchase it. Those attached to armed men. Those who did not carry pistols because they became pistols; did not carry switchblades because they were switchblades cutting through gatherings, shooting down statutes and pointing out the blood and abused flesh. Those who swelled their little unarmed strength into the reckoning one of leagues, clubs, societies, sisterhoods designed to hold or withhold, move or stay put, make a way, solicit, comfort and ease. Bail out, dress the dead, pay the rent, find new rooms, start a school, storm an office, take up collections, rout the block and keep their eyes on all the children. Any other kind of unarmed black woman in 1926 was silent or crazy or dead.

  Alice waited this time, in the month of March, for the woman with the knife. The woman people called Violent now because she had tried to kill what lay in a coffin. She had left notes under Alice’s door every day beginning in January—a week after the funeral—and Alice Manfred knew the kind of Negro that couple was: the kind she trained Dorcas away from. The embarrassing kind. More than unappealing, they were dangerous. The husband shot; the wife stabbed. Nothing. Nothing her niece did or tried could equal the violence done to her. And where there was violence wasn’t there also vice? Gambling. Cursing. A terrible and nasty closeness. Red dresses. Yellow shoes. And, of course, race music to urge them on.

  But Alice was not frightened of her now as she had been in January and as she was in February, the first time she let her in. She’d thought the woman would end up in jail one day—they all did eventually. But easy pickings? Natural prey? “I don’t think so. I don’t think so.”

  At the wake, Malvonne gave her the details. Tried to, anyway. Alice leaned away from the woman and held her breath as though to keep the words at bay.

  “I appreciate your concern,” Alice told her. “Help yourself.” She gestured toward tables crowded with food and the well-wishers circling it. “There’s so much.”

  “I feel so bad,” Malvonne said. “Like it was my own.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You raise other people’s children and it hurts just the same as it would if it was your own. You know about Sweetness, my nephew…?”

  “Excuse me.”

  “Did everything for him. Everything a mother would.”

  “Please. Help yourself. There’s so much. Too much.”

  “Those old reprobates, they live in my building, you know….”

  “Hello, Felice. Nice of you to come…”

  She did not want to hear or know too much then. And she did not want to see that woman they began to call Violent either. The note she slid under Alice’s door offended her, then frightened her. But after a while, having heard how torn up the man was and reading the headlines in the Age, the News, The Messenger, by February she had steeled herself and let the woman in.

  “What could you want from me?”

  “Oh, right now I just want to sit down on your chair,” Violet said.

  “I’m sorry. I just can’t think what good can come of this.”

  “I’m having trouble with my head,” said Violet placing her fingers on the crown of her hat.

  “See a doctor, why don’t you?”

  Violet walked past her, drawn like a magnet to a small side table. “Is that her?”

  Alice didn’t have to look to know what she was staring at.

  “Yes.”

  The long pause that followed, while Violet examined the face that loomed out of the frame, made Alice nervous. Before she got up the courage to ask the woman to leave, she turned away from the photograph saying, “I’m not the one you need to be scared of.”

  “No? Who is?”

  “I don’t know. That’s what hurts my head.”

  “You didn’t come here to say you sorry. I thought maybe you did. You come in here to deliver some of your own evil.”

  “I don’t have no evil of my own.”

  “I think you’d better go.”

  “Let me rest here a minute. I can’t find a place where I can just sit down. That’s her there?”

  “I just told you it was.”

  “She give you a lot of trouble?”

  “No. None. Well. Some.”

  “I was a good girl her age. Never gave a speck of trouble. I did everything anybody told me to. Till I got here. City make you tighten up.”

  Odd-acting, thought Alice, but not bloody-minded. And before she could think not to let it happen, the question was out. “Why did he do such a thing?”

  “Why did she?”

  “Why did you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The second time she came, Alice was still pondering over those wild women with their packets of lye, their honed razors, the keloids here, here and there. She was pulling the curtain to cut off the light that smashed right into her visitor’s eyes when she said, “Your husband. Does he hurt you?”

  “Hurt me?” Violet looked puzzled.

  “I mean he seemed so nice, so quiet. Did he beat on you?”

  “Joe? No. He never hurt nothing.”

  “Except Dorcas.”

  “And squirrels.”

  “What?”

  “Rabbits too. Deer. Possum. Pheasant. We ate good down home.”

  “Why’d you leave?”

  “Landowner didn’t want rabbit. He want soft money.”

  “They want money here, too.”

  “But there’s a way to get it here. I did day work when I first came here. Three houses a day got me good money. Joe cleaned fish at night. Took a while before he got hotel work. I got into hairdressing, and Joe…”

  “I don’t want to hear about all that.”

  Violet shut up and stared at the photograph. Alice gave it to her to get her out of the house.

  The next day she was back and looked so bad Alice wanted to slap her. Instead she said, “Take that dress off and I’ll stitch up your cuff.” Violet wore the same dress each time and Alice was irritated by the thread running loose from her sleeve, as well as the coat lining ripped in at least three places she could see.

  Violet sat in her slip with her coat on, while Alice mended the sleeve with the tiniest stitches. At no time did Violet take off her hat.

  “At first I thought you came here to harm me. Then I thought you wanted to offer condolences. Then I thought you wanted to thank me for not calling the law. But none of that is it, is it?”

  “I had to sit down somewhere. I thought I could do it here. That you would let me and you did. I know I didn’t give Joe much reason to stay out of the street. But I wanted to see what kind of girl he’d rather me be.”

  “Foolish. He’d rather you were eighteen, that’s all.”

  “No. Something more.”

  “You don’t know anything about your own husband, I can’t be expected to help you.”

  “You didn’t know they were seeing each other no more than I did and you saw her every day like I did Joe. I know where my mind was. Where was yours?”

  “Don’t chastise me. I won’t let you do that.”

  Alice had finished the sheets and begun the first shirtwaist when Violet knocked on her door. Years and years and years ago she had guided the tip of the iron into the seams of a man’s white shirt. Dampened just so the fabric smoothed and tightened with starch. Those shirts were scraps now. Dust cloths, monthly cloths, rags tied around pipe joints to hinder freezing; pot holders and pieces to test hot irons and wrap their handles. Even wicks for oil lamps; salt bags to scrub the teeth. Now her own shirtwaists got her elegant attentive handcare.

  Two pairs of pillow slips, still warm to the touch, were stacked on the table. So were the two bed sheets. Next week, perhaps, the curtains.

  By now she recognized the knock and never knew if she was eager or angry when she heard it. And she didn’t care.

  When Violet came to visit (and Alic
e never knew when that might be) something opened up.

  The dark hat made her face even darker. Her eyes were round as silver dollars but could slit of a sudden too.

  The thing was how Alice felt and talked in her company. Not like she did with other people. With Violent she was impolite. Sudden. Frugal. No apology or courtesy seemed required or necessary between them. But something else was—clarity, perhaps. The kind of clarity crazy people demand from the not-crazy.

  Violet, her coat lining repaired too now, her cuffs secure, needed only to pay attention to her hose and hat to appear normal. Alice sighed a little sigh, amazed at herself as she opened the door to the only visitor she looked forward to.

  “You look froze.”

  “Near bout,” said Violet.

  “March can put you in the sickbed.”

  “Be a pleasure,” Violet answered. “All my troubles be over if I could get my body sick stead of my head.”

  “Then who would do the fancy women’s hair?”

  Violet laughed. “Nobody. Maybe nobody would do it and nobody would know the difference.”

  “The difference is more than a hairdo.”

  “They’re just women, you know. Like us.”

  “No,” said Alice. “No they’re not. Not like me.”

  “I don’t mean the trade. I mean the women.”

  “Oh, please,” said Alice. “Let’s get off that. I’m steeping you some tea.”

  “They were good to me when nobody else was. Me and Joe eat because of them.”

  “Don’t tell me about it.”

  “Anytime I come close to borrowing or need extra, I can work all day any day on their heads.”

  “Don’t tell me, I said. I don’t want to hear about it and where their money comes from. You want tea or not?”

  “Yeah. Okay. Why not? Why can’t you hear about it?”

  “Oh. The men. The nasty life. Don’t they fight all the time? When you do their hair, you’re not afraid they might start fighting?”

  “Only when they sober.” Violet smiled.

  “Oh, well.”

  “They share men, fight them and fight over them, too.”

  “No woman should live like that.”

  “No. No woman should have to.”

  “Killing people.” Alice sucked her teeth. “Makes me sick to my stomach.” She poured the tea, then lifting cup and saucer, held it back while she looked at Violet.

  “If you had found out about them before he killed her, would you have?”

  “I wonder.”

  Alice handed her the tea. “I don’t understand women like you. Women with knives.” She snatched up a long-sleeved blouse and smoothed it over the ironing board.

  “I wasn’t born with a knife.”

  “No, but you picked one up.”

  “You never did?” Violet blew ripples into the tea.

  “No, I never did. Even when my husband ran off I never did that. And you. You didn’t even have a worthy enemy. Somebody worth killing. You picked up a knife to insult a dead girl.”

  “But that’s better, ain’t it? The harm was already done.”

  “She wasn’t the enemy.”

  “Oh, yes she is. She’s my enemy. Then, when I didn’t know it, and now too.”

  “Why? Because she was young and pretty and took your husband away from you?”

  Violet sipped her tea and did not answer. After a long silence, and after their talk had turned to trifles then on to the narrowness of life, Violet said to Alice Manfred, “Wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t fight for your man?”

  Seeded in childhood, watered every day since, fear had sprouted through her veins all her life. Thinking war thoughts it had gathered, blossomed into another thing. Now, as she looked at this woman, Alice heard her question like the pop of a toy gun.

  Somewhere in Springfield only the teeth were left. Maybe the skull, maybe not. If she dug down deep enough and tore off the top, she could be sure that the teeth would certainly be there. No lips to share with the woman she had shared them with. No fingers to lift her hips as he had lifted others. Just the teeth exposed now, nothing like the smile that had made her say, “Choose.” And he did.

  What she told Violet was true. She had never picked up a knife. What she neglected to say—what came flooding back to her now—was also true: every day and every night for seven months she, Alice Manfred, was starving for blood. Not his. Oh, no. For him she planned sugar in his motor, scissors to his tie, burned suits, slashed shoes, ripped socks. Vicious, childish acts of violence to inconvenience him, remind him. But no blood. Her craving settled on the red liquid coursing through the other woman’s veins. An ice pick stuck in and pulled up would get it. Would a clothesline rope circling her neck and yanked with all Alice’s strength make her spit it up? Her favorite, however, the dream that plumped her pillow at night, was seeing herself mount a horse, then ride it and find the woman alone on a road and gallop till she ran her down under four iron hooves; then back again, and again until there was nothing left but tormented road dirt signaling where the hussy had been.

  He had chosen; so would she. And maybe after galloping through seven months of nights on a horse she neither owned nor knew how to ride, over the twitching, pulpy body of a woman who wore white shoes in winter, laughed loud as a child, and who had never seen a marriage license—maybe she would have done something wild. But after seven months she had to choose something else. The suit, the tie, the shirt he liked best. They suggested she not waste the shoes. No one would see them. But socks? Surely he has to have socks? Of course, said the mortician. Socks, of course. And what difference did it make that one of the mourners was her sworn and hated enemy laying white roses on the coffin, taking away one the color of her dress. For thirty years he was turning into teeth in Springfield, and neither she nor the mourner in the inappropriate dress could do a thing about it.

  Alice slammed the pressing iron down. “You don’t know what loss is,” she said, and listened as closely to what she was saying as did the woman sitting by her ironing board in a hat in the morning.

  The hat, pushed back on her forehead, gave Violet a scatty look. The calming effect of the tea Alice Manfred had given her did not last long. Afterward she sat in the drugstore sucking malt through a straw wondering who on earth that other Violet was that walked about the City in her skin; peeped out through her eyes and saw other things. Where she saw a lonesome chair left like an orphan in a park strip facing the river that other Violet saw how the ice skim gave the railing’s black poles a weapony glint. Where she, last in line at the car stop, noticed a child’s cold wrist jutting out of a too-short, hand-me-down coat, that Violet slammed past a whitewoman into the seat of a trolley four minutes late. And if she turned away from faces looking past her through restaurant windows, that Violet heard the clack of the plate glass in mean March wind. She forgot which way to turn the key in the lock; that Violet not only knew the knife was in the parrot’s cage and not in the kitchen drawer, that Violet remembered what she did not: scraping marble from the parrot’s claws and beak weeks ago. She had been looking for that knife for a month. Couldn’t for the life of her think what she’d done with it. But that Violet knew and went right to it. Knew too where the funeral was going on, although it could not have been but one of two places, come to think of it. Still, that Violet knew which of the two, and the right time to get there. Just before the closing of the casket, when the people who were going to faint fainted and the women in white dresses were fanning them. And the ushers, young men the same age as the deceased—from the dead girl’s junior high school class, with freshly barbered heads and ghost-white gloves—gathered; first in a tight knot of six and then separated into two lines of three, they moved down the aisle from the back where they had assembled and surrounded the bier. They were the ones that Violet had to push aside, elbow her way into. And they did. Step aside, thinking maybe this was some last-minute love desperate to make itself known before it couldn’t see and might forget the
sleeping face it treasured. The ushers saw the knife before she did. Before she knew what was going on, the boy ushers’ hard hands—knuckle-tough from marbles and steelies, from snowballs packed to bullet strength, from years of sticks sending hardballs over the hoods of motor cars, into lots with high fences and even into the open windows as well as the closed of people living four floors up, hands that had held the boys’ whole body weight from the iron railings of El bridges—these hands were reaching toward the blade she had not seen for a month at least and was surprised to see now aimed at the girl’s haughty, secret face.

  It bounced off, making a little dent under her earlobe, like a fold in the skin that was hardly a disfigurement at all. She could have left it at that: the fold under the earlobe, but that Violet, unsatisfied, fought with the hard-handed usher boys and was time enough for them, almost. They had to forget right away that this was a fifty-year-old woman in a fur-collared coat and a hat pulled down so far over her right eye it was a wonder she saw the door to the church not to speak of the right place to aim her knife. They had to abandon the teachings they had had all their lives about the respect due their elders. Lessons learned from the old folks whose milky-light eyes watched everything they did, commented on it, and told each other what it was. Lessons they had learned from the younger old folks (like her) who could be their auntie, their grandmother, their mother, or their mother’s best friend, who not only could tell on them, but could tell them; could stop them cold with a word, with a “Cut that mess out!” shouted from any window, doorway or street curb in a two-block radius. And they would cut it out, or take it downstairs behind the trunks, or off in a neglected park, or better still, in the shadow of the El where no lights lit what these women did not allow, don’t care whose child it was. But they did it nevertheless. Forgot the lessons of a lifetime, and concentrated on the wide, shining blade, because who knew? Maybe she had more than one cutting in mind. Or maybe they could see themselves hangdog at the dinner table trying to explain to these same women or even, Jesus! the men, the fathers and uncles, and grown cousins, friends and neighbors, why they had just stood there like streetlights and let this woman in a fur-collared coat make fools of them and ruin the honorable job they had worn white gloves for. They had to wrestle her to the floor before she let go. And the sound that came from her mouth belonged to something wearing a pelt instead of a coat.