by Paula Guran
The Blade gave the death of Mary Randolph a single paragraph on its back page, the Biloxi papers nothing.
In Hatchville, the raid on The Backs was described as an heroic assault on a dangerous criminal encampment which had somehow come to flourish in a little-noticed section of the countryside. At great risk to themselves, anonymous citizens of Hatchville had descended like the army of the righteous and driven forth the hidden sinners from their dens. Troublemakers, beware! The Biloxi papers, while seeming to endorse the action in Hatchville, actually took another tone altogether. Can it be, they asked, that the Hatchville police had never before noticed the existence of a Sodom and Gomorrah so close to the town line? Did it take the savage murder of a helpless woman to bring it to their attention? Of course Biloxi celebrated the destruction of The Backs—such vileness must be eradicated—but it wondered what else had been destroyed along with the stills and the mean buildings where loose women had plied their trade. Men ever are men, and those who have succumbed to temptation may wish to remove from the face of the earth any evidence of their lapses. Had not the police of Hatchville ever heard the rumor, vague and doubtless baseless, that operations of an illegal nature had been performed in the selfsame Backs? That in an atmosphere of drugs, intoxication, and gambling, the races had mingled there, and that “fast” young women had risked life and honor in search of illicit thrills? Hatchville may have rid itself of a few buildings, but Biloxi was willing to suggest that the problems of its smaller neighbor might not have disappeared with them.
As this campaign of innuendo went on in Biloxi, the Blade blandly reported the ongoing events of any smaller American city. Miss Abigail Montgomery sailed with her aunt, Miss Lucinda Bright, from New Orleans to France for an eight-week tour of the continent. The Reverend Jasper Sparks of the Miller’s Hill Presbyterian Church delivered a sermon on the subject “Christian Forgiveness.” (Just after Thanksgiving, the Reverend Sparks’s son, Rodney, was sent off with the blessings and congratulations of all Hatchville to a private academy in Charleston, South Carolina.) There were bake sales, church socials, and costume parties. A saxophone virtuoso named Albert Woodland demonstrated his astonishing wizardy at a well-attended recital presented in Temperance Hall.
Well, I knew the name of at least one person who had attended the recital. If Hat had chosen to disguise the name of his hometown, he had done so by substituting for it a name that represented another sort of home.
But, although I had more ideas about this than before, I still did not know exactly what Hat had seen or done on Halloween night in The Backs. It seemed possible that he had gone there with a white boy of his age, a preacher’s son like himself, and had the wits scared out of him by whatever had happened to Abbey Montgomery—and after that night, Abbey herself had been sent out of town, as had Dee Sparks. I couldn’t think that a man had murdered the young woman, leaving Mary Randolph to bring her back to life. Surely whatever had happened to Abbey Montgomery had brought Dr. Garland out to The Backs, and what he had witnessed or done there had sent him away screaming. And this event—what had befallen a rich young white woman in the shadiest, most criminal section of a Mississippi county—had led to the slaying of Eddie Grimes and the murder of Mary Randolph. Because they knew what had happened, they had to die.
I understood all this, and Hat had understood it, too. Yet he had introduced needless puzzles, as if embedded in the midst of this unresolved story were something he either wished to conceal or not to know. And concealed it would remain; if Hat did not know it, I never would. He had deliberately obscured even basic but meaningless facts: first Mary Randolph was a witch-woman from The Backs, then she was a respectable church-goer who lived down the street from his family. Whatever had really happened in The Backs on Halloween night was lost for good.
On the Blade’s entertainment page for a Saturday in the middle of November I had come across a photograph of Hat’s family’s band, and when I had reached this hopeless point in my thinking, I spooled back across the pages to look at it again. Hat, his two brothers, his sister, and his parents stood in a straight line, tallest to smallest, in front of what must have been the family car. Hat held a C-melody saxophone, his brothers a trumpet and drumsticks, his sister a clarinet. As the piano player, the Reverend carried nothing at all—nothing except for what came through even a grainy, sixty-year old photograph as a powerful sense of self. Hat’s father had been a tall, impressive man, and in the photograph he looked as white as I did. But what was impressive was not the lightness of his skin, or even his striking handsomeness: what impressed was the sense of authority implicit in his posture, his straightforward gaze, even the dictatorial set of his chin. In retrospect, I was not surprised by what John Hawes had told me, for this man could easily be frightening. You would not wish to oppose him, you would not elect to get in his way. Beside him, Hat’s mother seemed vague and distracted, as if her husband had robbed her of all certainty. Then I noticed the car, and for the first time realized why it had been included in the photograph. It was a sign of their prosperity, the respectable status they had achieved—the car was as much an advertisement as the photograph. It was, I thought, an old Model T Ford, but I didn’t waste any time speculating that it might have been the Model T Hat had seen in The Backs.
And that would be that—the hint of an absurd supposition—except for something I read a few days ago in a book called Cool Breeze: The Life of Grant Kilbert.
There are few biographies of any jazz musicians apart from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington (though one does now exist of Hat, the title of which was drawn from my interview with him), and I was surprised to see Cool Breeze at the B. Dalton in our local mall. Biographies have not yet been written of Art Blakey, Clifford Brown, Ben Webster, Art Tatum, and many others of more musical and historical importance than Kilbert. Yet I should not have been surprised. Kilbert was one of those musicians who attract and maintain a large personal following, and twenty years after his death, almost all of his records have been released on CD, many of them in multi-disc boxed sets. He had been a great, great player, the closest to Hat of all his disciples. Because Kilbert had been one of my early heroes, I bought the book (for thirty-five dollars!) and brought it home.
Like the lives of many jazz musicians, I suppose of artists in general, Kilbert’s had been an odd mixture of public fame and private misery. He had committed burglaries, even armed robberies, to feed his persistent heroin addiction; he had spent years in jail; his two marriages had ended in outright hatred; he had managed to betray most of his friends. That this weak, narcissistic louse had found it in himself to create music of real tenderness and beauty was one of art’s enigmas, but not actually a surprise. I’d heard and read enough stories about Grant Kilbert to know what kind of man he’d been.
But what I had not known was that Kilbert, to all appearances an American of conventional northern European, perhaps Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon, stock, had occasionally claimed to be black. (This claim had always been dismissed, apparently, as another indication of Kilbert’s mental aberrancy.) At other times, being Kilbert, he had denied ever making this claim.
Neither had I known that the received versions of his birth and upbringing were in question. Unlike Hat, Kilbert had been interviewed dozens of times both in Downbeat and in mass market weekly news magazines, invariably to offer the same story of having been born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to an unmusical, working-class family (a plumber’s family), of knowing virtually from infancy that he was born to make music, of begging for and finally being given a saxophone, of early mastery and the dazzled admiration of his teachers, then of dropping out of school at sixteen and joining the Woody Herman band. After that, almost immediate fame.
Most of this, the Grant Kilbert myth, was undisputed. He had been raised in Hattiesburg by a plumber named Kilbert, he had been a prodigy and high-school dropout, he’d become famous with Woody Herman before he was twenty. Yet he told a few friends, not necessarily those to whom he said he was
black, that he’d been adopted by the Kilberts, and that once or twice, in great anger, either the plumber or his wife had told him that he had been born into poverty and disgrace and that he’d better by God be grateful for the opportunities he’d been given. The source of this story was John Hawes, who’d met Kilbert on another long JATP tour, the last he made before leaving the road for film scoring.
“Grant didn’t have a lot of friends on that tour,” Hawes told the biographer. “Even though he was such a great player, you never knew what he was going to say, and if he was in a bad mood, he was liable to put down some of the older players. He was always respectful around Hat, his whole style was based on Hat’s, but Hat could go days without saying anything, and by those days he certainly wasn’t making any new friends. Still, he’d let Grant sit next to him on the bus, and nod his head while Grant talked to him, so he must have felt some affection for him. Anyhow, eventually I was about the only guy on the tour that was willing to have a conversation with Grant, and we’d sit up in the bar late at night after the concerts. The way he played, I could forgive him a lot of failings. One of those nights, he said that he’d been adopted, and that not knowing who his real parents were was driving him crazy. He didn’t even have a birth certificate. From a hint his mother once gave him, he thought one of his birth parents was black, but when he asked them directly, they always denied it. These were white Mississippians, after all, and if they had wanted a baby so bad that they taken in a child who looked completely white but maybe had a drop or two of black blood in his veins, they weren’t going to admit it, even to themselves.”
In the midst of so much supposition, here is a fact. Grant Kilbert was exactly eleven years younger than Hat. The jazz encyclopedias give his birth date as November first, which instead of his actual birthday may have been the day he was delivered to the couple in Hattiesburg.
I wonder if Hat saw more than he admitted to me of the man leaving the shack where Abbey Montgomery lay on bloody sheets; I wonder if he had reason to fear his father. I don’t know if what I am thinking is correct—I’ll never know that—but now, finally, I think I know why Hat never wanted to go out of his room on Halloween nights. The story he told me never left him, but it must have been most fully present on those nights. I think he heard the screams, saw the bleeding girl, and saw Mary Randolph staring at him with displaced pain and rage. I think that in some small closed corner deep within himself, he knew who had been the real object of these feelings, and therefore had to lock himself inside his hotel room and gulp gin until he obliterated the horror of his own thoughts.
Central Park is magic. This isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s the truth.
GRAND CENTRAL PARK
DELIA SHERMAN
When I was little, I used to wonder why the sidewalk trees had iron fences around them. Even a city kid could see they were pretty weedy looking trees. I wondered what they’d done to be caged up like that, and whether it might be dangerous to get too close to them.
So I was pretty little, okay? Second grade, maybe. It was one of the things my best friend and I used to talk about, like why it’s so hard to find a particular city on a map when you don’t already know where it is, and why the fourth graders thought Mrs. Lustenburger’s name was so hysterically funny.
My best friend’s name was (is) Galadriel, which isn’t even remotely her fault, and only her mother calls her that anyway. Everyone else calls her Elf.
Anyway. Trees. New York. Have I said I live in New York? I do. In Manhattan, on the West Side, a couple blocks from Central Park.
I’ve always loved Central Park. I mean, it’s the closest to nature I’m likely to get, growing up in Manhattan. It’s the closest to nature I want to get, if you must know. There’s wild things in it—squirrels and pigeons and like that, and trees and rocks and plants. But they’re city wild things, used to living around people. I don’t mean they’re tame. I mean they’re streetwise. Look. How many squished squirrels do you see on the park transverses? How many do you see on any suburban road? I rest my case.
Central Park is magic. This isn’t a matter of opinion, it’s the truth. When I was just old enough for Mom to let me out of her sight, I had this place I used to play, down by the boat pond, in a little inlet at the foot of a huge cliff. When I was in there, all I could see was the water all shiny and sparkly like a silk dress with sequins and the great gray hulk of the rock behind me and the willow tree bending down over me to trail its green-gold hair in the water. I could hear people splashing and laughing and talking, but I couldn’t see them, and there was this fairy who used to come and play with me.
Mom said my fairy friend came from me being an only child and reading too many books, but all I can say is that if I’d made her up, she would have been less bratty. She had long Saran-Wrap wings like a dragonfly, she was teensy, and she couldn’t keep still for a second. She’d play princesses or Peter Pan for about two minutes, and then she’d get bored and pull my hair or start teasing me about being a big, galumphy, deaf, blind human being or talking to the willow or the rocks. She couldn’t even finish a conversation with a butterfly.
Anyway, I stopped believing in her when I was about eight, or stopped seeing her, anyway. By that time I didn’t care because I’d gotten friendly with Elf, who didn’t tease me quite as much. She wasn’t into fairies, although she did like to read. As we got older, mostly I was grateful she was willing to be my friend. Like, I wasn’t exactly Ms. Popularity at school. I sucked at gym and liked English and like that, so the cool kids decided I was a super-geek. Also, I wear glasses and I’m no Kate Moss, if you know what I mean. I could stand to lose a few pounds—none of your business how many. It wasn’t safe to be seen having lunch with me, so Elf didn’t. As long as she hung with me after school, I didn’t really care all that much.
The inlet was our safe place, where we could talk about whether the French teacher hated me personally or was just incredibly mean in general and whether Patty Gregg was really cool, or just thought she was. In the summer, we’d take our shoes off and swing our feet in the water that sighed around the roots of the golden willow.
So one day we were down there, gabbing as usual. This was last year, the fall of eleventh grade, and we were talking about boyfriends. Or at least Elf was talking about her boyfriend and I was nodding sympathetically. I guess my attention wandered, and for some reason I started wondering about my fairy friend. What was her name again? Bubble? Burble? Something like that.
Something tugged really hard on about two hairs at the top of my head, where it really hurts, and I yelped and scrubbed at the sore place. “Mosquito,” I explained. “So what did he say?”
Oddly enough, Elf had lost interest in what her boyfriend had said. She had this look of intense concentration on her face, like she was listening for her little brother’s breathing on the other side of the bedroom door. “Did you hear that?” she whispered.
“What? Hear what?”
“Ssh.”
I sshed and listened. Water lapping; the distant creak of oarlocks and New Yorkers laughing and talking and splashing. The wind in the willow leaves whispering, ssh, ssh. “I don’t hear anything,” I said.
“Shut up,” Elf snapped. “You missed it. A snapping sound. Over there.” Her blue eyes were very big and round.
“You’re trying to scare me,” I accused her. “You read about that woman getting mugged in the park, and now you’re trying to jerk my chain. Thanks, friend.”
Elf looked indignant. “As if!” She froze like a dog sighting a pigeon. “There.”
I strained my ears. It seemed awfully quiet all of a sudden.
There wasn’t even a breeze to stir the willow. Elf breathed, “Omigod. Don’t look now, but I think there’s a guy over there, watching us.”
My face got all prickly and cold, like my body believed her even though my brain didn’t. “I swear to God, Elf, if you’re lying, I’ll totally kill you.” I turned around to follow her gaze. “Where? I don’t see any
thing.”
“I said, don’t look,” Elf hissed. “He’ll know.”
“He already knows, unless he’s a moron. If he’s even there. Omigod!”
Suddenly I saw, or thought I saw, a guy with a stocking cap on and a dirty, unshaven face peering around a big rock.
It was strange. One second, it looked like a guy, the next, it was more like someone’s windbreaker draped over a bush. But my heart started to beat really fast anyway. There weren’t that many ways to get out of that particular little cove if you didn’t have a boat.
“See him?” she hissed triumphantly.
“I guess.”
“What are we going to do?”
Thinking about it later, I couldn’t quite decide whether Elf was really afraid, or whether she was pretending because it was exciting to be afraid, but she sure convinced me. If the guy was on the path, the only way out was up the cliff. I’m not in the best shape and I’m scared of heights, but I was even more scared of the man, so up we went.
I remember that climb, but I don’t want to talk about it. I thought I was going to die, okay? And I was really, really mad at Elf for putting me though this, like if she hadn’t noticed the guy, he wouldn’t have been there. I was sweating, and my glasses kept slipping down my nose and …
No. I won’t talk about it. All you need to know is that Elf got to the top first and squirmed around on her belly to reach down and help me up.
“Hurry up,” she panted. “He’s behind you. No, don’t look”—as if I could even bear to look all that way down—“just hurry.”
I was totally winded by the time I got to the top and scrambled to my feet, but Elf didn’t give me time to catch my breath. She grabbed my wrist and pulled me to the path, both of us stumbling as much as we were running.
It was about this time I realized that something really weird was going on. Like, the path was empty, and it was two o’clock in the afternoon of a beautiful fall Saturday, when Central Park is so full of people it’s like Times Square with trees. And I couldn’t run just like you can’t run in dreams.