Gumbo

by E. Lynn Harris

  Somebody before now played this road—someone heard by some, or maybe never whispered—so drive this Lincoln like holding the family photographs, and when it rolls in, brother, stride right.

  It is some time after the turn of the year: Say it's 1965, or a year later, maybe years ealier. There's no stick to this moment, but it will echo. Don't need a year to know this story is old. The trip has been made by many: like making good time in a '31 Hudson from Baton Rouge to Chi-town. Been in moments like this, riding with hay discs strapped to the slatboards of a flatbed International Harvester, bound for Macon. Been up to and down from Ft. Worth for a summer of Saturday nights. Skylark was the ride in those days. Chickory, pork chops, grits, a skillet of cornbread cooling in the pantry every morning. In and out of icehouses of all sorts, sometimes even those for WHITES ONLY. Been asked back to and booed out of every juke joint on the Chit'lin Circuit, Southern route that splits cats who are down from those who ain't, and if you miss the A train, you have missed the quickest way to Harlem.

  No matter the year, it is winter. The plains are a hard, gray-brown bed nobody wants. For long breaths the road is lost in angry wind and tired snow, and the only thing that keeps the car on track is the tenor player at the wheel, working through Moody's “Tin Tin Deo,” Afro-Latino jam, up from beneath the underdog's fatback jawbone. A downbeat, thick like adobado sauce to go with that arroz con pollo; the band chanting . . . oh, tin tin deo . . . and now the conga is in it . . . oh, tin tin deo . . . cowbell, crisp like momma's catfish . . . oh, tin tin deo, oh, tin tin deo . . . a four-four swing gone East Harlem bebop, the rhythm something you know, but the rattle is new: stick on a can, good groove under the Lexington Avenue local, 104th Street.

  Long after the tune leaves his humming, the tenor thinks he still hears it . . . oh, tin tin deo . . . on his last breath, from the backseat, deep in somebody's chest, or fifty miles back. Wind keeps rhythm. White sky stained gray like old bone. The fields empty. More snow coming. Bourbon is passed from backseat to front, and somebody says if there's a God out in all of that, he best be blowin' for us. Then all is quiet.

  Not much to say once you hear the call. A body has been waiting a long time for that call, through the passage of centuries, through all the rent party nights and ten-cent coffee hours. Time was when days were three shifts: some of one spent sleeping and practicing, most of two spent working or looking for work. Word spreads down the Sante Fe line, an ad cut from the Kansas City Call, letter from a cousin in Pueblo, an auntie in the parlor with the phone pressed to the radio: a “jazz-endorsed” P.S.A. from WVBA, the disc jockey calling out from far away, late night, low and steady, like a talking drum across the bend of the savannah's horizon:

  Are there any musicians left out there? Here's this from the Rossonian Auditorium, Denver's best kept secret: Management would like to remind you there's always a stage for great talent at the Rossonian. Maybe you have got a talent that we would want to showcase. Perhaps you're the next swinging sensation, ready to strike it big back East. Go East, young man, but swing in the West! Give us a call—Albion-6867—tell us your name and address, and let us know what your talent is: horn, piano, vocals? Have you got a band? Call soon, Albion-6867, or write us, Management, The Rossonian Auditorium, 2640 Welton, Denver, Colorado. Tell us what you can do . . .

  Many places are right for moments like this, but the moments are fewer than the places. Where it's at is now: the band, the car, the road, and where all three will stop. So Kansas City is gone. The gig is at The Rossonian. In Denver. On Five Points. Where Welton meets Washington. Come night, the people are there, roasting ribs and frying catfish, domino games in front rooms, Cadillacs angled to the curbs like Crisscrafts. Five Points, where it has been and is. It's not Beale Street or Eighteenth and Vine, but it wants to be.

  The Saturday night local headliner is bound to pack it tighter than the mickeys allow anyplace else. Nobody has a care, except for showing up and showing out their hard-earned, store-bought clothes, ones that won't do Sunday morning, but do it right on Saturday night. Can't roll up to that scene in some small-money ride. Nobody will take the scene for serious. These days, cats are pulling out their best jive; everybody who's nobody is hustlin'. Everybody can blow a horn son, but what can you do? So drive the Points in the soft-top Lincoln, Continental convertible, shag top shiny in a stingy man's winter. Drive up in some sorry vehicle, that's what folks remember.

  They remember Andy Kirk and Mary Lou Williams—When you hear the saxes ride, what's the thing that makes them glide? It's the lady who swings the band! Basie and Jimmy Rushing. They remember Charlie Parker. But Bird didn't need no car to break out of K.C. Mary and Andy floated in style through the West with the Twelve Clouds of Joy. And elders are quick to say ain't nobody worth a damn come out of Missouri since the thirties . . .

  But it is 1960, give or take some years back or forward and the arrangement of players doesn't matter—a piano man, tenor and trumpet players, drums, double-bass man, maybe a trombone, maybe a singer—no one knows their name.

  It doesn't matter, but everything matters: Bebop has died, straight ahead Jazz is dying. The small traveling band ain't long for this road. Long Playing records play the hits, what's popular spinning on records for less than any five-piece group driving state to state. They not gonna like you out West because you Sonny Rollins, son, they gonna like you cause they heard your record was on the tops of the Billboard and Downbeat lists. Or maybe you got an angle: Dave Brubeck and Chet Baker blowin blues like the Brothers but their blues ain't about paying the bills. Only a few will rise off the highways and land on wax.

  Make that no never mind. This car is headed for a gig. There are highways full of these long, black cars, carrying the best jazz nobody's ever heard. To hear it live: another breakdown chorus, Basie swinging “April in Paris”—“one more time . . .” a third reprise, volta, groove, call it what you want, it swings just the same—“jus' one more, once . . .”

  Music from the marrow. At clubs a rung above juke joint; velvet-draped lounge or speakeasy; intimate auditorium, backlit in blue. No need for a name, just a love for Blues, a four-four swing tapping your toe, hit that jive, jack, put it your pocket 'til I get back. The show: standards spill like laughter, one into the next; the piano man is running through “Twinkletoes”; the tenor is just sitting down; the trumpet man sips on his sour mash and picks lint from his sleeve; the drum player's got a new suit: Ivy League cut, iridescent green rust shimmers when his brushes ease across the snare, left stick teasing the cymbal like a pastor's blessing. Late night makes early morning, the glow of early morning shows through the skylight, stars like embers through the wireglass. A third set beginning, lights low, dim footers set brown skin glowing. Folks look younger than they ever have or ever will.

  Play on, Brother, play on, it don't matter that tomorrow is a workday, or a Sunday, or another sack o' woe day, play on, because right now, everything is right.

  No record or radio catches that. But it's hits that are selling now, not that better-get-it-in-your-soul music, all its mothers and fathers sold off to new owners. It's the sixties. Just forty years gone since they lynched 617 in three months. Red Summer's strange fruit rots slowly in our gut. We get silent. We learn the ulcers we bear. Or we forget. But you know the Emmitt Till Blues. Where's your singing now? Just a whistle get you dead.

  This is a voice stowed in the Middle Passage. Call looking for Response. After the chain and yoke, there were weeks of dark quiet, the wash of sea water against the ship's bow. Inside, a song of rot breathing head to foot, row over row. This was a voice that sang Benin, Ibo, Fang, Hausa. This is a voice that learned Georgia, Louisiana, Tennessee, South Carolina, all the Dixon below Mason. This is a voice that learned cotton, tobacco, and sugarcane. This is a voice that almost unlearned itself.

  No more drums, no elders' words. They beat you if you speak out or refuse the labor. They hunt you when you run. They listen for the bell welded around your neck, smell you out with hounds when y
ou run from the noose. Not much music in hose-spray or last snap of rope, jolt of cord and spine; that razor quick like fire and fierce between the legs. No voice in that night.

  But Coltrane preaches “Alabama,” so listen: People been hanging from trees; elders gone North and West and back again; Harlem, Detroit, Chicago, burned, Northern lights when they told you only Mississippi was burning. And who sang the Oklahoma Blues? Tulsa, 1921: that fire fierce but silenced. No news carried that. That's our Death, people: no story, no wire, no radio, no voice, no ear, no report, no Call and Response to know that people out here are living and dying. Nobody to sing their Blues. Nobody to hear it wail.

  Listen. You got to listen: Trane's Blues. Four girls, baptized with bombs. Bessie Smith a story we forgot. The ghost-whistle of Emmitt Till cups the street corner of every young black man's dreams. People going broke on Northern city Blues, and their voice, only thing they ever owned for sure, sold for the price of a record.

  Soon enough, they don't want to hear no “Strange Fruit.” Sing us “Body and Soul,” Billie, they cheer. Smile and sweat through “Body and Soul” for the money thing. Soon enough, change chimes in Brothers' pants pockets as they easy-step the sunny side of Lenox Avenue; Billie Holiday all but gone, another echo in the alley.

  The road and the soundless miles are for the singers and players, heard and unheard. They all want the voice, they travel. Once they've heard the voice it will never leave them alone. They travel. Most will never hear it, but they travel. This is the road jazzfolk play. Have played. Been playing. Been played by. Will play for.

  I let a song go out of my heart

  it was the sweetest melody

  I know I lost heaven,

  'cause you were the song.

  Before King's English. Before the Word, there was story, in song and wail, drumbeat, hambone, and sand shoe, the hot breath of mothers birthing field-to-factory-generations. Thick and light, the sound moved as the people did, on to East St. Louis, on to South Detroit and Cleveland, to Chi-town, where brothers blew that hard, Midway-city, get-ol-man-Hawk-out-my-draws bop.

  On North and East, to Philly, and, of course, The City, The Village, 52nd Street, and 125th street, Harlem, Mecca at Lenox Ave, nothing small in Small's Paradise, where anybody on the move was moving. On out westward: Austin, Lincoln, Denver, K.C.—all the gigs before, in between, and after—all the way out to the Pacific, that high-tone, low-key, California-here-we-come land of give up the gravy.

  Just one night, one good jam in Denver—tear up the Rossonian—and the skate to the West Coast was smooth.

  After that, return to the South slow and easy, like nobody's ancestors ever left it. A stroll on Beale. Cakewalk down Rampart.

  After that, leave it, freer than any freedom train headed North.

  After that, to The City. The road will lead to The City.

  After that, only Ancestors and Elders know . . .

  Some kind of way, this trip will be made. There are so many cities, all too far from Kansas City, but the trip will be made. Phone rings, the gig is on. Denver. The Rossonian, Down in Five Points. The Rossonian: two sets, one night, a hundred heads, fivespot to get in, two drinks to stay, a quarter take of the door. Fill the place, management is happy, band is happy, and like that, the Rudy Van Gelder is the Call from Englewood Cliffs, just across the Hudson, where the studio is still buzzing from when Miles Davis Quintet was the Word.

  So the trip will be made: Three days, two nights. Head out Route 24 after a half-day's shift, roll past Topeka, already lit in the winter early dusk of the Plains, pass through Kandorado as the blue bowl of late night pours its last stars across the West; make Pueblo for the late set at the Blossom Heath. Two encores milk gas money for the trip— nice work if you can get it. Sleep off late night's drunk until just before new day's dark, then a biscuit, coffee, corn liquor, junk, or smack. Here comes Denver. The Rossonian: oasis in Jazz Nowhere on the way to Jazz Somewhere. Someday soon, stompin' at the Savoy.

  And after the gig is swung, tired or no, never mind hangover, no time for a strung-out morning, the Lincoln will make fast back to Kansas City, the small low-money gigs, the stormy Monday job, the life that always expects the empty-handed return.

  So the phone rings, for the bassist, the drummer, the singer, the piano man; maybe a vibraphone player, but maybe they ain't ready for the vibes out in the Mile High, not yet, and this ain't the time for testing new waters.

  The phone rings for the hornplayers, the sax, trumpet, trombone, whichever horns, any of them are waiting for that phone to ring. Everybody wants that taste like what Canonball and Nat got on the grill out in California. Monk fixing on which suit coat to wear—dark or light—while the car is running and the photographer is waiting. Ain't we all been waiting for that phone to ring? Cannonball Adderley filling seats like it was summer Bible school. Mercy, mercy, mercy. Dizzy blowing that horn easy as waxing the Cadillac: L.A. smooth, beret, goatee, horn rims, and herringbone. Ivy League cut suit, fresh bed, dry martini, salt peanuts, salt peanuts.

  Go get some. Don't bring no soft sound. There are few chances, one or two big moments. Many misses. The young cats, they got good at hitting the target, notes all dressed up and in line, so on top of technique the soul got blowed out. They miss. Those brothers will rattle some walls with a few records but, come five years, those cats are quiet, waiting on that phone. They missed.

  The phone didn't have to ring for Satchmo, who never missed. Not Charlie, who was blessed with more jam than he could jive. Not Bessie, who was hit enough to bring it back black and blue—beautiful like that until she couldn't bring no more. Not Prez or Johnnie, who didn't know what slow was. Not Billie, who didn't know what “no” was, and gave her soul to encores and needles. Not Ella, who never knew an off note. Not Milt, who gave Bag's Groove to the grooveless. Not Chet, who gave to music and no one else. Not Nina, who got more sugar in her bowl, her well-deep voice the middle of whatever best and worst day anybody ever lived through. Not even Clifford, who lived through one car wreck only to be taken in another before he was twenty-seven. Not even thirty yet, and he needed no phone to ring. He already swung with strings, just like Charlie Parker.

  The phone rings for the rooftop and boiler room players. The Brother scales on his lunch hour. Down by the riverside. With mute when it's late. A bus ride hum. Not yet twenty, but a lifetime waiting on that phone. Sometimes, it rings. They pick it up. They say yes. They travel.

  The bag is packed, shirt's been pressed for weeks, instrument oiled, shoes shined—chamois across alligator pumps, matchstick to clean each wingtip hole. The savings is cracked—quarters and singles from days of pinching for days of playing. The landlord is dodged. Never mind the bills. The bossman is conned: . . . you see, I just gotta see my Auntie Berthene, up over in Denver, else she likely to up and die fore this time next week.

  And somebody will always be left behind. A woman, a man, maybe large-eyed children, but somebody's left on the porch in the day's first light. They wonder what makes this time the time when it's the Big Time? What makes it different from the last big time? St. Louis: gone for three days. Or Memphis: gone for a week, and come back with half the world dragged out in between. Somebody will be left. Somebody is always left. But nobody will remember after the record deal is signed, and the reel-to-reel is playing back “If I Were a Bell,” take two. Gin gimlets all around. Someone will tell the story about Ben Webster trying out the tenor when the piano had no luck in it for him. “In a Mellow Tone,” from that day on. It will feel like that, your story will be told down the ages. When that new sound comes everyone will know the name on the album, bookings sticking at Birdland, Leonard Feather calling for a Downbeat feature, and nobody will never, ever, be left alone again. Whoever it is that's left behind, that's the promise left on their lips as night air makes their embrace stiff.

  Inside the Lincoln it's quiet-cool. Nobody looks at anyone else. Snow's still coming. The sax player drives the car quietly now, changes and progressions silent
secrets to an inner hum of his head. The drum player is almost asleep, slumped against the passenger window as he syncopates fingertaps between the hushed beats of passing fenceposts. The trumpet player works a soft-scat to the high C he's never hit. The piano man has blank paper at the ready. The singer low-moans spirituals that got her through the ten-hour days of working somebody else's clothes against a washboard. Joshua fit the battle of Jericho . . .

  The bassist rubs a match stick, pushing it to spark, pulling back before the rasp springs to fire. The car is full with the quiet of knowing. Some kind of way, they know some sound is going to roll up the highway and reclaim the song-breath of blackfolk.

  This voice something like some thing drifting in the summer air of childhood days, caught and lost in sun-glare. It's wind lingering in the branches of the boabab just before rain covers the savannah. An Elder whispering. A mother's sigh carried on the wind, the rasp of callused hands across burlap bags when the cotton is high. It's Biloxi crickets, never seen but heard, in want of wet and hot, loud for days even in winter, through the cold, hard bright of day, out here, on the winter-bare spine of the Rockies—miles of dry and nothing—where crickets echo only in imagining.

  The tight air waits for any sound, and when the bass player strikes his match, everyone is startled. Wait for it: brass stopper and snare skin, bass string strained, sevenths and discordant ninths sustained on the high registers of the ivories. I let a song go out of my heart. Nothing is captured: not time, rushing past the Lincoln, come and gone, down the road fast, like it's the car—not the passing of seconds or minutes—pushing the hours; not this vast rust-out bowl of land spilling from the Rockies; not the wail of prairie birdsong, ringing like something forgotten, impossible in March, not here, not now, not this road.