That was Oliver’s last time in Memphis, and now he’s about to move there with his youngest sister and his niece and her family. He’s been told his niece has a big house right downtown on the river, that she flies around the country in small planes telling people what to do. Black woman in the same town Oliver had run from when they felt the coast was clear forty years before. Times have changed, he supposes, smiling at the photo.
“Leastwise, I hope they have,” he says to that picture. “Good night, Francesca, my love.”
(INTERLUDE NO. 2)
MEMPHIS, 1937
as told to Frank Severs by Oliver Pleasant
The Capasso Hotel, 1:00 a.m.
New York, New York
Memphis was the first place I played professionally, on land anyways. There was New Orleans before, but that wasn’t for pay, that was just for me to get my nut. And since you came up here all the way from Memphis, we’ll talk about that.
The first time I stepped foot in your city it was on them cobblestones at the river. Y’all still got them cobblestones? Yeah? Shit, them stones seen slaves and cotton, freedmen and soldiers comin from and goin off to war. So here I come, down that gangplank all wide-eyed and starin up top them bluffs there where the city rests, lookin for all the world like I belong there. Like I got as much right steppin foot on them stones as any slave or soldier just because I play some music and got some tail five hundred miles downriver.
I was put in my damn place, though, ’cause when I stepped on land with the shakiness in my legs from bein on water since New Orleans, and the slickness there under my feet, I fell backward. And it wasn’t to the sound of no orchestra or cheerin for Mister Nobody Oliver Pleasant, neither. It was to the laughter of the riverboat men, the dockworkers, passengers, and my own boys from the band. That’s how I first entered Memphis, on my ass.
Suppose that’s how I’ll go back to it now, too.
Anyways, it was my first time in the city and the boys took me all around from Beale Street, down Main, lookin in all the windows to them fine department stores. There was movie houses, too, with their marquees shinin and barkers out front callin for folks to come in and watch a picture show. “It’s air-conditioned!” they’d shout.
It was full of people, Memphis was. Like New Orleans, only there seemed to be more purpose, I guess. There was bales of cotton bein sold and shipped right there on Cotton Row and pretty ladies dressed to the nines shoppin or goin for lunch, businessmen everywhere with folded-up newspapers under their arms and sharp-lookin lids to keep the sun off. There was a music to Memphis, the same as New Orleans, but it was different somehow and I’m hard-pressed now to say just how. It was the blues, be sure, shufflin through the town the way I suppose a sharecroppin Negro might have when he come in town for the day to shop or visit kin. Kind of wary, you know? New Orleans was brass and brash and in your face, and our people could be anywhere there, go anyplace we damn well pleased. But there seemed to be a little taste of the unknown in Memphis, like somebody might not like the tunes and have a mind to do somethin about it. Oh, but the sound was there. It was everywhere; you can’t stop the music.
We had a night’s stay over and some of the boys was known to the manager of the Gayoso Hotel, who wanted some new blood on his bandstand and hired ’em to play up on the rooftop. They needed a piano and asked me did I want to sit in. Cash under the table, all the booze you could drink, and white tail from here and gone? Shit, I’d of been a fool not to sit in on that. We had a hell of a time playin up there in the breeze and with a different crowd than we’d been playin to on that boat. Memphis, the river view, it was a good scene up there on that rooftop. Stars even seemed that much closer in the night sky.
After the show, we was scurried off that rooftop to the basement, where the colored staff and waiters was passing around a bottle taken from the hotel’s bar and some smoke I was told was taken from a guest’s room. Some a them staff was goin over to a block party not far away and took us along. It was in the black part of town, of course, past Beale and down to where them row houses get smaller and closer in. Had a scare on the way when a couple of cops, white cops of course, stopped us to ask where it was we thought we was headin. Home. Drinkin? Naw suh. Askin us where we was comin from and what’s in the case there and was we sassin them? I wasn’t but seventeen or so and it scared me a little, put me in mind of old Mr. Sheffield sittin up at my mama’s lunch counter and tellin her to bring him the pepper sauce. Tryin to tell her she burnt his pork chop tough. Motherfuckers. But they let us go. No harm no foul, I guess, just the white man’s idea of a good time.
Our idea of a good time was over in our people’s neighborhood. It was raucous and loud over there, boy. It was a fine time and all that party needed was some more musicianers from downriver. The girls liked havin somethin new to look at and touch like we was exotic animals from some far-off place. And we was, too!
There was parties all up and down that narrow street with dice set up in the front room of one of them shotgun houses, a bar set up in the house next door, and then music callin from the third. Amen, brother. But that music could be heard all up and down the street and, I imagine, all the way to the river and back. Them houses were packed so tight together you could pass a bottle from porch to porch, or peel the paint right off a neighbor’s clapboard. That was a good time, Memphis was. Somebody had a old upright pulled out on a porch so it blocked the front door and folks had to climb in and out of the windows to come and go. I played there all night long and my boy Hamlet blew his trombone from the sidewalk. Felt like we was celebratin somethin, but I don’t know what, just that free feelin and bein in the South, I suppose. That was thirty-seven back then. It was friendly, like bein among family, you know?
I’d like to get that feelin back when I move down there, but I reckon it’s done left with the current and the time. Hopefully them cops left, too—that ain’t good for nobody. But it’ll be nice to see my sis and baby niece. Get some more of that southern cookin, too, boy. And the music? It’s good everywhere, but with somethin just a little sweeter tastin down closer to where it was birthed, and in the face of them who weren’t so damn happy about it all bein born in the first place.
NIGHT THREE
1.
The parties of the Garden District are lavish affairs. “Balls,” Agnes had called them, giggling with her roommate, Terron, as she dressed. Galas. There were those during Mardi Gras, of course, that would hardly raise an eyebrow anymore and dozens of others similar in taste and a profound lack of it occurring throughout the District, plus hundreds more less opulent parish-wide. The others, though—parties in midsummer with a beach theme, Halloween with its built-in penchant for costumes and decadence, or Christmas holidays and throwing their bacchanalian ways in the face of the Christ child’s birth—those were the real treats, the pearls among oysters of New Orleans social circles.
Agnes was invited to some of these parties to provide entertainment. She was discovered in a local dive or passed by on a street corner and noticed, as much for her long neck and the sleepy tilt of her head while she played as for her talent or her light touch on the keyboard. Agnes’s thinness, the two barely discernible bumps at the front of a black evening gown cut low in the back and draped along her visible rib cage, added a splash of femininity to the androgynous cocktail of the house staff—the bare-chested boys circulating their wares and the hors d’oeuvres of the dykish caterer in the kitchen. The hosts always preferred a bit of muscle behind the curtain with all the flash and form on the main floor. And on the main stage, they appreciated the lithe, young Agnes Cassady.
One of the more anticipated and attended of these parties was thrown by Landon Throckmorton. Landon is a collector. Spread throughout his home are collections of antique furniture, first editions of classic novels and scientific journals, nickel-plated handguns, Tiffany lamps, and Civil War–era daguerreotypes. These are nice things to walk among and gaze at where th
ey rest on side tables and mantels. But he also collects people. Upon his shelves are gathered senators and chefs, authors and impresarios, models and the moneyed. He is accustomed to the finer things, having grown up among wealth. Despite his ease with wealth, or perhaps because of it, it’s the layer beneath such finery that he seeks. Landon finds predictability dull and likes to mix and mingle prostitutes with the bourgeoisie, the hustlers with high society. He gets a thrill from the friction and spark of recognition where there should be none at all.
The street, as he thinks of those from the underbelly of New Orleans, comes to him in various ways. In general, though, they are attracted to the scent of wealth the way a shark is to chum. Agnes, a busker he’d first encountered in the Quarter, is from the street. But there is something different about her—he’d noticed it the first time she’d entered his home. She hadn’t needed to be scrubbed the way others had; her eyes didn’t dart from side to side, sizing up the room to learn what might be stolen quickly and easily. She’d carried herself with confidence, but there was something else—she was damaged. Landon was drawn to her just as he was to the pair of hand-painted porcelain teacups kept in the dining room hutch, preferring the one with the chip in the rim. How did it get there? he wondered. Who in its provenance chipped such a fragile object? The flaw is where the interest is for him. He looks for the same flaws in his politicians and in his corner boys, though they’re difficult to detect, if not impossible—one so guarded, the other so phony.
Hired to play parties, she was drawn to the warmth of the room, the timbre of his instrument. She never really gave Landon a thought then; he was simply the means to an end. In fact, she may have been the first guest in his house not to give him a thought. Agnes came to him through her music and her playing was beautiful. Yet, when he watched her from across the room, it was the hand she would clench into a fist over and over again, as though trying to regain feeling there, that held his attention.
Because of this tiny flaw, this damaged piece of porcelain, he was protective of her from the start, keeping the leeches in tuxedos and ball gowns from her. He wanted to lock her away like that teacup, and suggested as much to her, offering her a bedroom, comfort, and all the luxuries she might imagine. She wouldn’t hear of it. Agnes Cassady is not anyone’s to keep, not for the short amount of time she has left. So she comes and goes as she pleases, welcome to sit at his piano anytime the mood strikes her, and her music has become the favorite part of these gatherings for her host.
This party was to celebrate the autumnal equinox with its equal part day and night. Guests were expected to wear white and then, halfway through the party when Agnes was told to strike up Cole Porter’s “Night and Day,” they would change to evening black. The melody would send the more modest scurrying for bedrooms and bathrooms, linen closets and pantries; the less modest would find a shadowy recess or seventeenth-century Oriental screen behind which to disrobe; and the immodest would simply undress where they stood and sometimes, though not always, go in search of their change of clothes. Still playing, Agnes would stand up from the bench, and as a note held in the smoky, humid air, she would step out of a glittering silver dress and into the black gown she’d kept draped across the Baldwin piano, her alabaster skin barely having time to register the air, the furtive glances, or the appreciation in Landon’s smile.
It was at such a party, as Agnes was concluding a rendition of “Six and Four,” that she saw Terron coming through the crowd toward her as though pulled to the sound of the piano. The look on her face, drawn and pale, told Agnes something wasn’t right.
These parties were meant to be private, with formal invitations inscribed with the blackest calligraphy on the thinnest of parchment hand-delivered to only a select circle of acquaintances and hopefuls. Agnes had told Terron where she’d be, because in New Orleans you didn’t go to an unknown location without a safety system in place. In the butler’s pantry just off the kitchen, Agnes struggled to catch her breath and shook her head as though she couldn’t hear what Terron was saying.
Terron repeated herself: “It’s your father. A heart attack, Agnes. You should call your mother.”
Heart attack. The words left a bad taste in Agnes’s mouth as she repeated them back to her friend, words as bitter as whatever it was those waiters carried as they flitted back and forth past young women.
“What happened to the music? Who’s this?” It was Landon. Ever the host, he worried for his guests’ lack of entertainment.
“This is my friend Terron. She just came to tell me my father had a heart attack.” The words sounded foreign and had an unnatural feel on her tongue. She realized then that Terron hadn’t said whether he was still alive, and Agnes hadn’t thought to ask. “Is he dead, Terron?”
Terron had been sneaking glances at the bare-chested waiters but now looked back to her friend, her eyes brimming with tears, and nodded.
“Oh dear,” Landon said. “You must go, Agnes. We’ll find another pianist.”
Agnes held Terron, sadness filling her every pore, before disengaging herself and wiping her face with the palms of her hands. “No. No, I’ll play.”
“Agnes,” Terron said.
“Darling . . . ,” Landon started.
“I’ll play,” she assured them. “For Daddy. He taught me how, and I’ll think of him there on the bench beside me like when I was little. I’ll play for him tonight and go home tomorrow.” She took a black mask with white highlights and feathers from the china hutch and placed it over her eyes.
For the rest of the evening she played the melancholy songs that were her father’s favorites. She played rousing rags when the room was blurred through tears. She kept the mask on, wishing she could be someone else, wishing her father could truly be there beside her. Landon would stop his tour through the rooms periodically to watch her and raise his eyebrows in question. “You okay?” And Agnes would nod along with the music. The music that night, guests would recall for months afterward, had sounded sweeter and sadder than any they’d ever heard.
A car arrived for her at six the next morning to take her to the train station for her departure on the City of New Orleans line to Memphis. She hadn’t slept, the party ending around 4:00 a.m. when the last of the guests had either left or retired in twos and threes to bedrooms and basement. Agnes had played for six straight hours, sipping scotch supplied by boys and, for much of the time, with a single stream of tears falling from behind the mask. Terron had refused to leave her friend and was found on Landon’s sleeping porch curled up asleep on a cruel iron settee.
“What time is it?” Terron asked, rubbing her eyes.
“Morning,” Agnes answered, and the two walked home arm in arm with their grief.
Landon told Agnes he’d arranged for a train ticket and for his driver to escort her to the station. When? He never appeared to stop circulating; Landon is society’s Gulf Stream, constantly moving to carry his warmth from room to room. When and how had he made a reservation? A computer? A phone call? Not Landon. Now that Agnes thinks about it, she doesn’t even remember ever seeing a telephone in his house.
Regardless of how it came to be—Landon has a way with making things come to be—Agnes found herself being let out of a white Lincoln Town Car and led by an enormous black man in an equally black suit who called her Miss Agnes and carried her suitcase as though it were a child’s lunch box. He guided her into the Amtrak station with its brassy Dixieland jazz and iconic murals on the steel-gray walls. The man presented a ticket to the clerk, handed off her bag, and turned and bowed slightly to Agnes before leaving more briskly than she would have thought such a thunderhead could move.
She was handed off to a porter, a withered black man in a red cap who walked her to the train and took her hand as she stepped into the car as though it were 1904 instead of 2004. A conductor escorted her from the door, up a narrow staircase, and down a dark passageway. She was a relay baton, a fire b
rigade bucket, though drained of any lifesaving liquid. This man opened a door to a sleeper compartment, a boxy room with a bunk, a closet, a sink, and a sitting chair that held, unexpectedly, Landon Throckmorton.
Landon closed the book he’d been reading and stood to accept Agnes’s luggage from the conductor. “Thank you, Roland,” he said. Roland, just like Landon’s driver, bowed and left.
Agnes wanted to ask him what he was doing there, whether he intended to travel to Memphis, how he had reserved the accommodations on such short notice, and why. But she was exhausted. She was just too tired, too heartbroken, and too empty to form the sentences or put a coherent thought together. Instead, she lay down on the bunk with only the vaguest sense of her shoes being removed and a coarse, Amtrak-issued blanket being pulled over her shoulders.
“Thank you.” It was all she could muster and, at such a whisper, Landon missed it altogether.
He’d accompanied her more as a comfort to himself. He felt he needed to make sure his prize wouldn’t become chipped any more than she already was, and he stood watching her drift into sleep as they left the station and cleared the city’s limits.
Agnes dreamed, not of her father but of his piano, and it made her heart swell even in her sleep. The slow, rhythmic rocking of the train car gave her the sense of her father sitting at his bench, the way the music would touch him and take him with it. She dreamed that his soul was carried up on the music of his piano and her sleep was full of the tones that had sounded so good bouncing off of wood floors and plaster ceilings in the rambling farmhouse built by her grandfather, sinking into randomly laid rugs, worn sofas, and chairs. The age of the home helped to round the edges of the music.
Her daddy had spent money they didn’t have to have the piano tuned once a year. An elderly man with long gray hair and narrow glasses whom her daddy called “Professor” would come out to the house each fall like clockwork to crouch behind the console with felt hammers, delicate pliers, and calipers. He’d practically climbed into the open top with tuning forks and his own ears, the most precise instruments of all, turning his head this way and that to listen. Agnes would sit on the floor, handing him tools out of his canvas bag, so she could see inside the piano, learn something of its heart and brain and spleen.
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