The Black folk here resist our attempts to get to know them. The greengrocer has never asked me my name, and the fishermen avert their eyes and vary their paths when they see August frolicking in the sand. Only one person breaks our day: Sanders. He comes calling to share what he calls brunch: vodka with a finger of cranberry juice. He walks through Janet’s house—around her parlor, into her bedroom, into ours. We hear him stop, turn back her star quilt, rummage through her chest of medallions. He brings his glass back drained, and has me pour him another from his own bottle. “That’s my fruit for today,” he’ll say, guffawing, but he is well preserved, given his diet. Skin smooth as an apple’s. A thick mustache without even one gray hair in it.
He and August sit at the kitchen table, looking through the pages of Janet’s Life. A surprise: Janet doesn’t seem jolly enough to enjoy Life, but she keeps a subscription.
“Where’d they take that picture?” Sanders asks, full of excitement.
“Caption says Hiawassee. Georgia.”
“I’ve been there!” Sanders says. “I’ve done that!”
“Where haven’t you been, man?” rejoins August, but it’s charity—when Sanders brags of his travels, he makes going downstate sound like sailing the Spice Islands.
“One place I ain’t been,” Sanders says. “That’s up in Janet Silvers.”
Sanders laughs hard at his own joke, then leaves. Women to chase, tin cans to collect, tales to sell to other stoops. “Y’all need to get out of here and live a little,” he says on his way down the front steps, but when he leaves, we lunch; we screw. August finishes the middle pages of the paper. Night falls, and Janet comes home early from the restaurant and makes a point of sniffing the air. “You’ve had a guest?” she asks me. “A smoker?”
“No, ma’am.”
She hands me a letter, addressed from Miss Caroline Wallace, 832 Queen Street, Mt. Sterling, Kentucky. “Don’t you lie to me, Missy,” she says.
“I wouldn’t dare.”
Before she can object, August does. “My guest,” he says.
“Oh,” Janet says softly, and giggles.
It’s the third letter Caroline’s sent to North Carolina. Mother said she came out to the county one day, dressed in a man’s jeans with a long look on her face, asking for my address. I’ll throw this one in the trash, where I’ve thrown the others, and August will ask why I don’t want to hear from someone I spend mornings crying over. I’ll tell myself I don’t believe she could be saying anything that would be productive for either of us. I’ll tell him nothing.
The next morning, after Janet leaves, I sit naked and play until my fingers are sweaty. I play through an imitation of Janet, move on to Rachmaninoff, then Joplin. Then, some miracle—I improvise the end to a song August started writing before we were married—but still he doesn’t stir. A storm is beating in the Banks, and the piano’s bass competes with thunder. When I stop, wind blows down the sand, scattering its noise into the millions of grains. “Dumpling,” I say, when at last I stop and go in to him. “Are you sick?” He’s buried his face in Janet’s good goose pillow, sandwiching his head. “Dumpling,” I ask again. “You okay?”
“Lightning,” he says, in a voice melted with crying. “Out here, it’s so loud.”
I sit on the bed and rub his trembling shoulders, then lean over to push my breasts into his naked back. I warm his body with mine, and this, this minute empty of music or talking or contracts or sex or envy or pity, this minute is a birth, two souls’ definition. This minute, I know, will leave the Outer Banks and live with us forever. I kiss the back of his neck, move his hands from his ears. A grown man afraid of thunder. The most incredible thing I’ve seen yet.
We cry together until the rain tapers to drizzle, until we fall asleep. We push into opposing arms and legs, breathe sour air into each other’s faces. We have only so many hours to be ourselves before Thursday night begins that weekend, before we turn into August and Audrey Barnes, one half of whatever-T.O.B.A.-has-named-our-band-this-week; before we have to deliver happiness we haven’t quite found for ourselves. We tangle hard in the sheets, and we don’t wake again until we hear Janet’s key in the front door.
“Yoo hoo!” she calls, a child forever puzzled. “Y’all home?”
To be awakened by her voice is to be mauled by savage animals: August’s heart beats wildly against mine.
“We’re here,” I yell, “but we won’t take dinner tonight. We’ve got twenty minutes to make the ferry.”
“August,” she yells, though she’s come close enough to the door that I can hear her stockings rub together as she walks. “Would you like dinner? I’ve got sweet potato pie . . . hot rolls . . .”
“No, but thank you just the same.”
The storm has left the air colder, and we have to link arms and huddle together to feel at all human. “I don’t think Miss Janet likes you,” August says, laughing.
“Now you’re married,” I tell him, “you’d better get used to women not liking your wife.”
HATTERAS
A gruesome Thursday. Cold. Rain breaking up the ground out in Janet’s backyard, coming down like weights. I’ve been down so deep that it’s like waking from two separate sleeps. One an unmooring of the mind: dreams of music from the night before, of White girls’ dresses fanning out over hooped slips and the Black waiter taking the cut-crystal bowl to the kitchen to mix more punch; what I’d have said, in a different world, to the White ferryman who spat at my feet on my way down his plank. The other sleep a drugged cocoon of lost functioning, from which I have to rehinge my slack jaw upon waking, and wonder if the clouds in my eyes aren’t permanent. We’ve played fifty shows in a month, and I’ve never seen a crowd so hungry as the one I saw last night. Julius, our drummer, was as wet at the end of the night as if he’d gone swimming, and I sweated so much that I think the stink will never come out of Mother’s dress. Mark’s solo still echoes, his sax at the tail end of it so like a human scream that I’m still hunched over in panic. And in the real distance of the morning: the telephone.
It’s rung five or six times by now—it has to have, to wake me up—and I run to the living room, where the little black machine sits in its anointed place atop a doily on Janet’s end table.
“Hello?” I ask.
“Hello,” the woman says. Then comes her silence, her deep breathing. “Are you Audrey Martin, then?”
“Audrey Barnes. Yes, ma’am.”
“Well, I’m August’s mother.”
“The other Mrs. Barnes, then,” I say. I’m smiling, but when she says yes, I can hear that she’s not.
I’ve daydreamed her call a hundred times, her welcoming me to her family (abridged as it is), her sharing stories of August’s youth and instructions on how to feed him. I’ve rehearsed my end of things, my thanking her for the wonderful man she’s raised, my wishes for Sunday tea in her parlor, my general graciousness. I can’t let her have any doubts, can’t give her mind one centimeter of space that registers as regret. But when she says, “Made me chase you down, did you?” I know it’s already too late for us.
“It’s not what we intended. When we got down here, things happened so fast—”
“Well, such a short time as you’ve been married, it’ll be just as easy to have it annulled.”
“Annulled?”
“Revoked. As though it never happened.”
“I know what it means, but—”
“Yes, that’s it—you can have it annulled. Then, if my son still wants to, you come back to New York and do it properly. I keep telling him. And he needs to come back home anyway. I don’t know how you were raised. But I raised my son to be a musician, not a migrant laborer.”
If her son still wants to. She keeps telling him. Things he’s never told me. I didn’t know he even spoke to her.
“And your people are from where?” she asks.
“Mt. Sterling. Kentucky.”
“Whosy wheresit?”
“Kentucky.”
“No, ma’am. Eastern Kentucky.”
“Well, I’ve never heard of any Colored people from Kentucky,” she says, as though I’m either lying or White. “I guess he thinks that makes you exotic.”
When August gets home, cloaked like a Spanish bandit in his gray poncho, I don’t have the courage to tell him his mother called. “You went out in this weather?” is all I can think to say.
“Things wash up on the beach in a rain. There wasn’t any thunder this morning, so I wanted to see for myself.”
“And what did you find?”
Jelly Roll’s been gone three days. August has spoken of it in only the most oblique of terms. This morning, his pant legs are soaked. His feet are bare. His thick eyelashes are still beaded with rain. “Nothing,” he says. “Didn’t find a thing.”
And why look for the truth? The crowds come to us as happy as they know how to be, and Sam Reevin, the T.O.B.A. manager, always smiles as he counts the take. We’re making enough of a cut, August promises, that we’ll be able to go to New York and start our own quartet by Thanksgiving.
All this time we’re playing on the islands, our minds are boiling over with it—Harlem. We walk down Main Street in Hatteras and can’t help but hallucinate 125th, and we wonder where are the gassed crowds, the street preachers calling the end times, the septuagenarian Modelles and Hatties hobbling to remnant sales. We miss the happy ribboned schoolgirls entering the Colored library, the packed trolley about to jump its groove. When we play corny little veterans’ halls, when we watch bowlegged old men two-step with women a foot taller than themselves, we wonder where is The Sweeper when you need him. All the smiles are forced down here. All the debutantes wear polyester. Someone has cut the electricity of hip somewhere in Philadelphia; down here, we get no juice.
In any Southern town, Thursday nights are the Negroes’. Thursday crowds come with gas; Thursday crowds almost save us. Women—flour white, cornmeal yellow, red-boned, pitch-ochre—in dresses of dandelion, pineapple, goldenrod, and grape; at eight o’clock they swirl and dip together in clusters. They toss their freshly pressed hair and isolate their hips into celestially fleshed arcs, all for the men lined along the wall, wearing their own different tensions of curly hair, standing in their own many shades of brown skin so striking against the white shirts they wear like a dancing uniform. By eight thirty, the wall has moved to the center, pulled into orbit by the magnetic force of the women’s bodies. Here is the thin-lipped, long-nosed woman who takes in White people’s wash over in Buxton, dancing with her eyes to the chin of the round-shouldered hog farmer from Avon. There, the miner who hauls his three littlest children to the Hatteras Colored School in a little red wagon, dancing shyly with his sick wife’s sister, who is a spinster at twenty-eight. Women with connecting eyebrows or men with sinus-ridden breath pair off with second cousins once removed.
And always, on Thursdays, there’s a fight. Nine times out of ten it’s the usual permutation of one man pecking down another, quiet fighting with clean punches and wrestling that would make Gorgeous George jealous. Then comes that tenth fight, two girls making a firecracker, one lilac blouse closing her eyes before she winds up to slap her boyfriend’s other girlfriend, another Butterick pattern grabbing her classmate’s hair and winding it meter by meter around her hand. The girls scream. They spit. They scratch. They shout bitch slut whore. They pretend to fight over men rather than admit their anger over another girl’s lighter skin, or the store-bought cut of her dress. But even against the ragged dance of violence stands this power: the beauty of those segregated into assembly by the rules of the world’s common ugliness. Sometimes, when I watch the Thursday dancers, I can almost understand whitefolk: these people are so beautiful, it wouldn’t do not to oppress them.
Fridays and Saturdays are sloppy seconds. The White people, always, need a fair amount of liquor before they’ll dance, so the first hour, we play a set repertoire. We fool around in our heads, devising mnemonics for our grocery lists and ordering the elements of the periodic table. We don’t reach very far into our souls, because the White people won’t even hear us until around nine, when a couple might move to the center of the dance floor and brush a quiet circle around each other. Eventually more will come, and they’ll fan out into a chimera of misplaced legs and jerking shoulders, but they’ll never quite seem to hear us; they’ll never stop talking to one another over the punch bowl, never get over their individual bodies to move to something as large as an entire Motherland. Julius plays the difference, marking Fridays and Saturdays by barely using his left hand. He looks to one particular burl in the floor and loses himself in thoughts of his only child back in Louisiana, a baby born dying, with wrinkled skin for eyelids and a six-year-old head already bald in patches. Julius has shown us his son’s photograph: the child, despite the hat hiding his baldness, could be his own grandfather. We had to smile to keep from sucking in our breath. Thursdays, when Julius extends his reach and the beat carries his body and he’s dripping sweat by eight thirty, I do believe Julius is able to forget. But Fridays, he sits and stews, waiting for the liquor to mottle the White people’s skin into different colors. Waiting for one of the men to get drunk and jump upon a table to twist like a stuck screw. Waiting for liquor to give one of the women, her hair stuck to her face, the inspiration to sass a barkeep.
Mark, our sax, is the hottest thing I’ve heard come Thursday. He sands down his reed and keeps his horn an octave higher than it wants to go, so that it sounds like a menopausal woman calling cows. “Where’d you get that sound?” August asked him, the first night we played.
Mark grinned. He’s fifteen, with rabbit teeth too big yet for his mouth, and a huge roof of hair. “I’m thinking,” he said, “about that girl’s ass over there. See how round? Every time she moves, I play that ass. It’s like a—” he said, tapping his foot to start a rhythm, and he picked up his horn and blew us some free gold. August says I don’t even know how amazed I should be. I’m just nineteen, he says, and haven’t seen it enough times to know, but Mark Parker is going to be a star. Maybe, I say, because Friday and Saturday, he stares into the bell of his sax and plays anybody’s idea of a tea party. A sad aphoniac he is on Fridays and Saturdays. Only half of himself.
There comes, though, one crazy Saturday that leaves us thinking we’ve been wrong about the whole scheme, because the most willowy of polka dot dresses, with the shiniest blond bouffant hairdo, throws a beer bottle and kills a man. The dancers become the show, and we play two more measures before we even catch ourselves, before Mark throws up a hand and we stop to fall into the moment’s inertia. “Penny!” yells the girl standing next to her, and I think I shall never forget that name. “My God, Penny!” the girl yells again, though Bouffant has already begun to shudder. She has, at such close range, broken open the side of his face. She bunches up the big red polka dots in her hand while the dead boy lies at her feet, bleeding into the gloss of the hardwood floor.
A boy wrestles Bouffant to the ground, pins her arms to her sides with his legs, and starts punching her as she turns her head left and right trying to protect her face. She’s able to wriggle under his crotch just enough that he misses her mouth. Her hair comes undone and long blond snakes of it slide all through the dead boy’s blood, and you’d think Bouffant would scream but she doesn’t. She just keeps dodging punches, grunting as she moves, and hers is the only sound besides the five quick footsteps in the hall.
Instinctively, Mark begins packing his horn and August his bass, even before the police swing through the heavy doors of the dance hall: we know the official record will not tolerate the accusing words of any Black person. The only one-set night of our season, then, and though we won’t easily forget what we’ve seen—the paper-thin skin of the boy’s temple, puckering out into blood, the other boy’s knuckles, going white as he finally made contact with Bouffant’s face and then punched her and punched her again.
“I bet that kid deserved it anyway,�
�� Mark says, on the ferry back to Hatteras. He’s feverish. Unable to stand still. He’s staying with some of his daddy’s people over in Ocracoke, but this night, out early from working, he’ll be able to go find the long-legged girl he’s been with all winter, throw a rock at her window, and sneak her out of her mama and daddy’s house and down to the beach.
August shakes his head. “The sorrows of gin,” he says.
Julius is at the rail of the ferry, looking as lost as I’ve ever seen him. Instead of beating his drums he’s back home to his rear room in the little yellow boardinghouse Mr. Glaser found for him over on Fourth Street, back to his dent on the cheap, hard mattress, where he’ll sit with his legs under his chin and wonder whether his sick child is hurting, this clear night of stars. Julius sends all his money beyond expenses back to Louisiana for the child’s medicine. He can never afford to telephone, so he’ll have to imagine the waves he hears out his window are the child’s deep and easy breaths. When I go stand beside him, he offers a nod to the sea. The ferryman drives fast, kicking spray against our hands; the engine drowns the mighty noise of the Atlantic. The ferry crowd, at nine thirty, is so different from the drunken lots of partiers we ride home with at midnight. These are men come home from fishing, women and children returning from visits to relatives.
When we get home, Janet is killing her piano. At nine thirty she’s already in her white nightgown, absurd in its formality, with a lace drawstring that she’s tied in a bow at the bosom. An expensive choking of lace around its collar, as if it’s wishing to have tea with the Queen. She’s wrapped one front section of hair around a foam roller: she’ll wear her bangs tomorrow in one uncombed blister. Her cold cream is a film of grease on her cheeks. “Good night,” she tells August as we walk through the door, and she scampers away so that he can’t examine her bedtime incarnation.
Saint Monkey Page 30