Memphis Noir

by Laureen Cantwell

  “But they both haunt this train, you said. He’s on this train now?”

  “Believe that.”

  “Floating up and down the aisles, between cars?” Mort was agitated now, his voice rising with the train’s whistle. He was on his way out, heading down to New Orleans and then . . . what? He thought he might catch a freighter to a tropical clime, or maybe he’d just sink into the underbelly of that city and disappear from society and himself altogether. Either way, he was out. This one last job, and then he was done. He’d had enough of the life and was starting to see those ghosts, those spirits, everywhere.

  “What? No, mister, he in a coffin, nailed in and resting there in the porters’ car.” The bartender gestured away with his dirty bar towel. “He’s what you call, ah, in state.”

  Mort gulped his drink, his hands shaking now; he squeezed them to make it stop. “Why don’t you tell me about him, huh? We got a long ride, why don’t you tell me who he was?”

  “Musician, like I said. Come from Nova Scotia by way of Winona. This train here’ll pass within a donkey path of where he grew up, though he won’t be getting off there. No sir. His body’ll be off at Elmwood Cemetery in Memphis, Tennessee. Grew up just down the road in Miss’ssippi, though, and came of age on this train right here. Spent his early days ridin’ these rails, raisin’ Cain, playin’ shows, and carryin’ on. Then he met Jael, and he was humbled, tried to go straight, and that’s when they say he got good. Channeled all that love and fire and jealousy into his horn. But I don’t know too much about all that. I’m just a barkeep on a train.”

  The liquor was calming him again, and Mort took pleasure as it burned through his chest. He focused on that. “Can I buy his records?”

  “Nah, you can’t find that brother’s records,” said a new voice. “Couldn’t be slowed down long enough to record.”

  Mort hadn’t heard the man approach due to the rattling of the train and the trumpet from the whiskey. It’s why he knew he needed out—his instincts, his senses, were diminishing. The new arrival, a pianist working his way south, threw a quarter on the bar, and the bartender poured him fifty cents’ worth of gin.

  “You knew him?”

  “Got to know him in Memphis where he’ll be laid to rest.” The man winced as the good gin washed over his teeth.

  “How did he get from Nova Scotia to Memphis?”

  “Wagon,” replied another new voice—a rumpled, graying man, unshaved and with a stoop to his shoulders, had appeared on the other side of Mort. The ends of his fingers were ink-stained. Newspapermen, they could be spotted a mile away. “Came down south when he was just a boy, one of six brothers and sisters. Mama died in childbirth, daddy got tired of the cold. Can’t say I blame him. The old man was French-Canadian, and his mama was the daughter of escaped slaves, God bless ’em. He was dark, but could pass for Mediterranean if needed.”

  Mort was unnerved by these bookends, the way they’d crept up on him like, well, spirits.

  The two new men and the old bartender fell into laughter. The hack continued his story. The LeDucs left Nova Scotia in 1910, piling all of their belongings, including the mother’s upright piano, onto a wagon, and began the slow march south from frozen lakes into the rich, warm soil of the Delta. They followed the very line these travelers were on—the Panama Limited it was called then—as it was being built, feeling the climate change in their very bones.

  Papa LeDuc was a blacksmith and took work along the way in the railroad camps, forging rivets and repairing tools. They’d often stay in the camps for a week at a time. The LeDuc children would play that piano and sing—ten-year-old Jackson blowing his trumpet. The laborers, stinking of sweat and cinder, worn from a day’s work and drunk from a night’s drink, would laugh and howl and throw coins at the feet of the children, grateful for any diversion from the monotony of laying rails in a straight line for miles at a stretch.

  “The railroad bosses noticed LeDuc’s work,” the newspaperman explained. “They offered him a piece of land in Mississippi, right near a new yard they were planning. All he had to give them was five years of service. He had his sights set on New Orleans, but he’d never had his own land before. Another thing Jackson told me: his grandma’s name, his mama’s mama, was Winona.”

  Jackson grew up in his father’s forge, his back and shoulders broadening, his nights spent working on his trumpet. On trips to Memphis, he would hear W.C. Handy play and watch the people who flocked to see him. In New Orleans, where his father would take his children to be near the water again and to talk to men on the docks in his native French, Jackson heard stories of Buddy Bolden. His head became filled with the smoke and voodoo, the vibe and music.

  He saw the train speeding past his home in Winona as a lifeline to music and went to work as a porter when he was barely seventeen. He spent his days and nights slinging luggage, spending his off-hours on the train smoking dope and playing along with other would-be musicians in the porters’ car, sitting among the bags and trunks of the travelers.

  “That’s where he coupled up with the music for work,” said the younger man on the other side of Mort.

  “You were there?”

  “Mhm, yes sir.” He drummed his fingers on the bar top, a piano man in an eternal state of play. “I was there, and it’s the first time I heard that sweet horn. He jumped down on the tracks that day at some stop or other between here and there. Played as though his goddamn life depended on it. Told me later he heard one of the porters’ brothers needed a trumpet to round out his ’tet, and old Jackson had it in his mind to audition wherever that boy might be. I was a boy myself, waiting at the depot with my mama’s hem in hand. Never heard nothing like it. Mama and me, we got on that train that day, followed him to Memphis, and I’m following him there now, I suppose. I’d’ve followed his horn anyplace.”

  “Did he find the porter’s brother and round out that ’tet?”

  The pianist shrugged and nodded at the white-gold liquor set in front of him. “They found him. They all found him in time.”

  “And the girl?”

  “I was there that day.” A porter had now slipped into the car and sidled up next to the bartender, pouring his own finger of fun. “I was working that train. Still working that train by the looks of it. I was in the luggage car that day knockin’ a few back, listening to a band—what they call impromptu—keep time with the clicking and clacking of the wheels, when this vision walked in. How she made her way back to the porters’ shitty car, I don’t know, but she brightened it as soon as she entered. A face like suede, she had, with emerald-green eyes and tight ringlets of hair. She was an angel, or looked like one. And then, if the wings and glow wasn’t enough, she started to sing with them boys. LeDuc’s horn was something else, but you ain’t never heard an instrument like hers. The clicking and clacking stopped right there. I think, and you can’t tell me different, that we floated there above them tracks.”

  “LeDuc heard her?”

  “He was outside, between cars lighting a cigarette. Waited until she was finished, scared it was a vision that might evaporate before he had the chance to lay eyes. It was the first time I’d seen him in his silky suit and watch fob. All that material, though, them shoes and pinky ring, couldn’t make up for the fact that the boy was ugly. Small and square, he had one eyebrow to speak of, and skin didn’t know if it wanted to be French or swamp black. Goddamn ugly. Nose set off-center on that head of his, looked like it’d been broken a couple or dozen times, maybe once that very morning.”

  The porter said he’d never seen anything like what happened then between Jackson and Jael. Said that instant was like lightning striking.

  He played his trumpet for her, blew it soft so it rolled around her curves, pushed all that suede the wrong way and then smoothed it over again. And she sang for him, hummed at first before it became words so he could get a foothold and climb aboard.

  She had nowhere to be, no particular destination, so he brought her to Memphis where they to
ok a room above Pantaze Drug Store, just across from Central Station on South Main.

  “Where’d she come from, though?” Mort asked. “What’d she want? Who the hell was she?”

  Mort lived his life in the shadows on Chicago’s South Side, willing to live and let death do the rest. Maybe the slivers of light from the lives he’d touched and snuffed had finally broken through to open his eyes and show him what life might be. Yet all he’d seen there through the bleariness and haze were the ghosts that run amuck.

  There were five in the car by then, a proper quintet, looking into their glasses for an answer to the newest age-old question: who was Jael Jean-Baptiste Toussaint? That’s when a woman’s voice said, “She was trouble.”

  Heads turned to see the middle-aged beauty who’d just entered the car. She wore a cocktail dress, and her hair was in curls that fell to her cheeks. She stood with one hand on the Pullman’s door and the other on her hip, and as she walked to the bar, it seemed that the car’s swaying subsided in deference to hers. “Sextet” always did have a nice ring to it.

  “You knew her?”

  “Mmm, I knew her. I played piano behind her several times. How you, Harold?”

  The two pianists greeted each other, and the bartender said hello by way of a pour of vodka. The newspaperman sipped his drink while the porter tried his best not to stare at the woman’s décolletage.

  “I’m good, Miss Lil. You?”

  “Getting by. What y’all talking about Jael Toussaint for?”

  “Weren’t,” the newspaperman said. “Talking about LeDuc. Toussaint’s just a by-product.”

  “Shit,” the woman tapped out with her lithe espresso fingers on the bar. “Ain’t no Jael, ain’t no Jackson.”

  “Tell about her,” Mort said, mesmerized by this new arrival.

  Lil slipped a cigarette from a studded case and put it to her lips where it was greeted by four lighters. She took the flame from Mort’s dented Zippo. He felt some satisfaction as it snapped shut. “She was seventeen,” Lil breathed out with a stream of smoke.

  “Daughter of a whore born outside Baton Rouge and raised in Storyville. Passed around from auntie to neighbor to stranger alike. She told me once she and her cousins would play hide-and-seek among the raised gravesites of the city’s cemeteries. Her daddy? He was absent . . . ain’t so many? A fireman on trains, she’d been told. Not on any as well-appointed as this—” The woman looked around and seemed to wrinkle her nose at the men in front of her. “But freight trains on the long haul north and west.”

  Jael Jean-Baptiste Toussaint would learn to hustle early, making her own way among the whorehouses as she had the cemeteries of her childhood, learning when to hide and when to appear for the taking. The first man left her with a handful of coins. She stood naked that morning, staring down at her palm as though it held manna from heaven. She was thirteen. She’d decided right there that she loved the money more than the man, and set her own course. The money she made after that was mostly taken by pimps and her mother on those rare occasions she was sober.

  At fifteen Jael was spirited away by a mulatto who’d told her to sing while she sat astride him. He’d been so surprised by what he heard that he’d gone limp, made the sign of the cross, and took her back to East St. Louis to sing in his saloon.

  “She stayed a month,” Lil said. “Nearly drank that old fool out of business and scared off customers with her fits and squalls. I was there for a weekend’s worth of shows, first time I come to know her, and I thought this was a voodoo priestess brought up from the bayou. Louis thought she was great, reminded him of home. He even gave her money for the train and showed her to the depot. That little girl told that swooning husband of mine that she was gone to look for her daddy. Word has it she never found a man fit to be called such and has been riding the rails ever since.”

  “She here now?”

  Lil shrugged and held her empty glass out to the bartender without looking in his direction.

  “Day Jackson found her, she looked worn down,” the porter offered, his elbows on the bar and chin resting in his hands as though his big head held all the thoughts of the world. “Looked older than her years, but when she sang . . .” He rubbed his hands over his face. “Ooh-wee, there was that spark. Something was touched off like your Zippo, and it lit up that whole dank luggage car. Jackson must’ve seen it from under the door as well as heard it.”

  Jackson LeDuc would take her, not only into his arms, but into his life. He put together a band just to back her, a quintet of the highest order; the voice that would make them all rich.

  Jackson and Jael grew close, played some gigs, and tried to make a home in Memphis. But Jael still hustled. She hustled, because it was in her blood. She hustled the way a shark has to keep swimming, never stopping for fear of death. Jackson had professed his love right there on the Panama Limited that first day, and he professed it every night to the city below as he sat in the open window above Pantaze and blew his horn for her. Jael might be right there in the room with him, or she might have been at the Beetle down the street drinking and carrying on. Some nights, as the train rumbled by on the trestle so close Jackson might have reached out to touch it, he knew she was in one of those luggage cars again, smoking dope among the porters and wandering sidemen.

  “There was tender moments too, now, don’t you take everything a newsman says to be gospel, young man.” Lil produced another cigarette, but the slick piano man beat Mort this time. “Even the hardest woman goes soft from time to time and needs to be held.”

  There were those late nights when he’d wrap her up in his arms after making love, and she’d sing him to sleep with the nearby train and street musicians keeping time. Those nights she’d sing only for him, lullabies her mother had sung to her. He’d run his fingers the length of her back, raising chills on her skin, the color of cream coffee, as she twirled his thick chest hair around her fingers. They would watch the moon through the filmy windows, confess to dreams and fears. It was those moments that kept Jackson going, along with the nights onstage when he would watch Jael from behind, all swaying silhouette in the spotlight and smoke-filled room. He would wish into his horn, hoping that it would find her ear, that their affair would never end.

  “When it did end, it was on this very train,” the bartender said, working his towel on a wineglass like it was the slide on a trombone.

  “Why did it end?” Mort asked. “Sounds like they could’ve made a go. They had music and love.”

  “They had no money, and that’s what she wanted more than anything. Loved money more than man, remember?”

  “They used to play up and down Beale,” Lil went on. “That was the place to be, baby. It started with Jackson walking the cobbled street, weaving in and out of those revelers, glad to be out of the cotton fields, happily marinating in whiskey juice, and into the saloons and pubs to ask if they were in need of a band. Back then, though, when it was the place to be, you couldn’t hardly swing a cotton sack without hitting a bandleader, and Jackson LeDuc was sent on his way more often than not.

  “The club owners took little notice when that ugly-ass man stopped to play his horn right there at Beale and Main. But when Jael joined him, baby, those club owners raced to host this beauty and her beast.

  “Regular work would come fast and easy. It wasn’t long before more than the club owners and music lovers took notice. By then, Aldo Venotucci, from his de facto office in the Hotel Men’s Improvement Club at Beale and Hernando, had taken notice. His purview was Beale, from the mansion to the water, and not much happened without his say-so.

  “Told Jael Jean-Baptiste Toussaint later that her voice made it up to his office window and that he practically floated down to Sunbeam’s place just to meet her. More than likely he had his boys meet her at the stage door and drag her fine ass up to him, but there’s no poetry in that, no rhythm, and Beale was all about rhythm in them days.

  “Venotucci put her under contract. It was more money than eithe
r Jackson or Jael had ever seen, and they couldn’t help but say yes. Had no choice in the matter anyway. The Italian took a healthy 60 percent, and the quintet was guaranteed fifty-one weeks of work from Memphis to New Orleans and back up to Chicago.

  “But something else happened, and the old Italian fell in love with the young chanteuse. He’d go to one of the clubs he backed, something he rarely did, and sit to the side of the stage just to watch her sway and hear her sing. That was the effect she had on people, on both men and women—they couldn’t turn their eyes or ears from her.

  “He’d have her up to his office where she’d sit in an uncomfortable chair sipping a cocktail by the window, watching the action on Beale below with the sun on her face while he tended to his work. She heard people come in and plead their cases, asking for money or time. Sometimes he’d grant it, mostly not. She grew to fear him despite the tough life she’d led so far, and he grew to love her more despite the life he’d led.

  “Venotucci didn’t interfere with LeDuc and Toussaint; he wasn’t going to stop that money pipeline. She still went home to the room above Pantaze at night, though sometimes straight from another room Venotucci kept in the hotel, and she still traveled extensively along the Panama Limited line. Sometimes he’d show up in New Orleans or St. Louis. The quintet would take the stage, and there would be old man Venotucci sitting to one side, a thimble of grappa at his knuckles. On those nights, Jackson knew he might not see Jael back at the hotel until late, maybe not until the train ride home, and it made his heart ache.

  “There were other nights, dark nights on the road when she might disappear on her own, without Jackson or Venotucci. Those nights Jackson would stay up, wailing on his horn until the hotel manager beat down the door to appease the other guests. Those were drunken nights, frenzied and awash in jealousy and uncertainty. Nights when Jael’s past peeked from behind the thin curtain of lace that separated it from her present. It was a night like that that would end it all.”