“You want to go, don’t you?” Ivoe was saying to her now.
Not for money or peace would Berdis have them know their affection toward each other rankled. She growled curses at the ash falling from her cigarette.
“Go where?”
“My sister Irabelle’s at the Ozarks Club tonight. Wait until you hear her, Bird. Sister really can play. Roena might let my brother out. You know Timbo’s married with twin boys. They’re eleven.”
Three years older than Beetleboy.
Ona nudged Ivoe, who sealed the pomade then turned around, pulling herself up so that she was standing on her knees between Ona’s legs. Her voice lowered to a whisper for no reason at all. “Wear the yellow dress. The one with the cerise trimming.” Just below the lace hem of Ona’s slip, Ivoe planted a kiss on both knees, as if to say no deed was too small to go unnoticed. Ona dashed from the room and reappeared in the yellow dress, which fit her perfectly and drew out a pleasing nod from Ivoe.
“Shoes?”
Had they forgotten she was in the room? “Wish I could go tonight. I’m leaving on the late train,” Berdis announced, as surprised as anyone.
“Tonight? I thought you were leaving tomorrow,” Ivoe said.
“Naw, honey. I really do need to get back—to prepare for my students.”
Ona had never wanted so much to shout for joy. Anybody could see Berdis was in a world of hurt, still wallowing in bitterness, indulging insatiable selfishness. Early in the visit Ona had given patience and tolerance; they were the spars saving her and Ivoe from the abyss of unfulfilled potential that Berdis drowned in. She had felt enough quiet, outraged emotion, witnessed enough brooding, to know that a dream without love is the most dangerous weapon in the world. She managed a slight smile now, her voice sober and flat. “It was nice of you to come.” Berdis excused herself to the packing she needed to do, slinking toward Ivoe like a starved cobra for a good-bye embrace. Now their home could return to its pleasant order, rid of cigarette smoke and gloom, Ona thought. She was grateful she had not lost control and ruffled the shady woman’s plumage, as she had longed to do more than a few times that week. At the desk, Ona pulled paper from the typewriter’s carriage and scribbled in haste. “Here’s the exchange for the taxi service. Better to call well in advance to make the train.”
The pianola played Berdis’s favorite Blind Tom composition, a clever piece for the peculiar harmonics of the treble and the bass that rumbled like thunder. Inside a box under the small bed in Baltimore was music for “The Rainstorm,” which she could play from memory. Alone, she surveyed the cheery little room through a haze of smoke, nauseated by its contents. She looked at several small pictures—groups of women. Above them, in a heavy oak frame, was a picture of Ivoe and Ona. A honeymoon look hung about the two. Ona had laid a smile down deep inside of Ivoe while her mouth curved up high on one side in a smirk, as if she had won a secret prize. They were right for each other and right together. Years after Willetson, life still made Ivoe drunk. She was interested in everything, patient, and thoughtful. And Ona repaid all this with her quick wit, humor, and knack for making the light leap from Ivoe’s eyes. They were just that damned happy. For all of her trying to control her feelings, Berdis was nagged by want to share her rage with the hostesses smiling back at her. She sucked her cigarette long and hard to drive back her rising anger, then laid it on the edge of the player piano. She moved closer to the picture and stumbled over her valise. She found her cigarette tin, lit another, and after a long, slow exhale laid it across a stack of papers. She slipped into her coat, struck a third match, and walked to their bedroom, where she placed a cigarette in the middle of the bed as the taxi blew its horn.
.
Vine Street pulsed and writhed with people and music. Ivoe, Ona, and Lemon stood off to the side while patrons bounced out of the Ozarks Club. A man ushered them along a wall of windows covered with burgundy velvet to shut out the public eye. The unassuming space could accommodate thirty comfortably, but on a Saturday night twice that many jammed inside, their heads swaying to melancholy strains, their faces lit by pleasure’s flame. Ivoe pointed to a table at the front of the room with an empty seat and gave her mother a gentle shove through the crowd.
What Lemon understood about city life couldn’t fill a mason jar, but she recognized a dandy when she saw one. She sat down next to a hulk of a man wearing a gray Stetson, a sack suit with a lavender vest piped at the pockets in gray silk and black leather, and gray gabardine spectator shoes. He mopped at his forehead with a lavender handkerchief, nodding at her and the small bucket on the table holding bootleg liquor in bottles branded with fake Haig & Haig labels.
Great anticipation brought hands together in feverish applause. Chore and worry behind, the crowd was eager to go wherever the music carried them. “I knew y’all pickaninnies couldn’t stay away for long.” The MC spoke in a booming voice above roaring laughter. “Had to come get you some more of the Three Deuces. Each one of the players got two stories, one they tell and one they play. Y’all know his story. Uncle Sam dropped by his place talking about did he want to fight in the war? Pease told him to take his khaki suit and shove it where the sun don’t shine. And for that, he ranks high around here. Put your hands together for Major Pease.” The piano clopped then galloped into a stride. “Now the one on the drums, well, his dough ain’t done. Went over yonder with Uncle and listen at how they sent him back.” A fleshy nub crashed the cymbal and the drummer grabbed it still with his only hand. “Stump!” The crowd howled as the MC strutted over to Irabelle and took a bow. “Ladies and rascals, you don’t need no Alamo when you can hold up with a sweet tune like hers. Our very own Texas Bell.”
Irabelle gave a single nod to the audience and raised her clarinet like a wineglass. “We have two names for this tune: ‘Send Me Away with a Smile’ and ‘Chowchow,’ after that good sweet-hot Momma used to make back home.”
Major Pease ragged the melody, his left hand letting up, pausing in out-of-the-way places while the right played a steady duple rhythm. The high hat was hopping, the snare sizzling, then Irabelle made the clarinet moan.
Lemon couldn’t put her finger on it, but something told her the bull-necked dandy sitting next to her was all vines and no tomatoes. “That girl something else, ain’t she?” he said through a wide, toothy grin, nodding at her daughter. Her ears pricked at his cadence. Texas but farther east—’round abouts Polk and Nacogdoches.
It took Irabelle sixteen bars, plus the four she traded with Major Pease, to tell her mother she was wrong. Odell “Plenty” Smalls was not a Texan or Louisianan. He had denied coming from both places. Whenever she had asked him anything about himself, he grabbed her chin with the cup of his hand, kissed her hard, and slapped her ass. He didn’t have a home, didn’t have no people, but he had a woman and she was it. His eyes said it first, as the train crossed the Texas state line. In Oklahoma he’d handed her three colas, and on her first night in the city she had dialed the phone number written on the napkin. All the waiting—between that call and his showing up one week later outside the high school—was to blame for tonight’s tempo. Plenty never raised a hand to her. He didn’t even raise a voice, so everything she had worked to turn hard turned soft again. She was silky smooth riding a mile of steel. “Stop rushing it,” he said in the only motel on Independence Avenue where colored folks could rent a room. “Damn, you a furnace,” he said. “Stop rushing it.” Forward and backward and upside down and, well, if she used a thousand words describing what it was like being with Plenty nobody would understand. She made them feel it in her music while the porter who had served them two years ago aboard the Sunshine Express patted his heavy foot against the floor. She hoped he wasn’t saying nothing too crazy to her momma, first impressions lasting like they do.
“You gonna send me all right.” Plenty slapped his knee and leaned toward Lemon. “That girl sure do make it whimper, don’t she? She make it whimpe
r like a dog.” His tongue did a slow, deliberate sweep over dazzling white teeth. “You squeezing it, Texas Bell. Got a death grip on that thing. Let it go, girl. Let it go!” After that he settled back, his teeth a mean little smile of contentment. Up there getting them to feel like that, Irabelle carried a sad kind of beauty, Plenty thought. Her hair might even be pretty if there was more shine to it. He didn’t care too much for her skin—too dull for a girl of twenty—except for the scar. It reminded him not to handle her so well. Helping himself to her pocketbook, he had only to think of it. What’s a little change? And why should she have it? He couldn’t be bothered with remembering a birthday or taking note of the things she eyed in store windows. All she really wanted was in that damn case. With no encouragement at all, she would open it up and start in to playing that sad shit she should have left in the country, right on the dirty ground where they cut her. He wasn’t moved. But whenever she played for a crowd and the light fell on the scar like it did right now, there was one thing on his mind: Irabelle’s ankles on his shoulders. He grunted. Never mind the dicty woman next to him who probably never had it the way Irabelle got it—a fuck that left her so hoarse that “good-bye” came out broken into tiny pieces when he left out the motel door.
It was a hard feeling to put into music: Plenty rocking above her like he would in just a few hours and, with any luck, for years to come. An impossible emotion was welling up inside Irabelle. To get rid of it meant to pluck at a memory rooted so deep it had become part of her song. Every song. “You too young,” Plenty had said when they pulled into the motel parking lot. She wondered at the surprised tone of his voice, as if he had not picked her up at the high school. She stared at him with grown woman eyes, told him she knew things. Knew things? Like what? Like how to blow a reed until a tune sprang from it. But before she could finish, Plenty had brushed past her thighs and beat through the drum until she sang for him clear and sharp like crystals. He must have liked that sound crashing around his head because he wouldn’t let up till he shaped another tune, louder this time, and ugly. She tried to think pretty thoughts while he made her body a song but they never came. She blamed it on the city. Plenty was his very own industrial revolution, a shiny black piston that knew no end, a locomotive rocking above her. He rode easy, not so much gliding into her as flying down smooth tracks toward some expected destination. She blew the clarinet for as long as the pleasure had lasted the night she came so hard the waves of her pushed him out and laughter raised her cheeks, hiding the scar in a perfect crease. Plenty had looked down on her, stopped pumping, and cussed. An almost perfect memory, a damn perfect note.
The backs of Ivoe’s knees sweat and her toes were pressed too tight inside her shoes, but she was delighted. Sure as she was standing there, her sister was in love. You could hear it in the playing, the end of which was perfection interrupted by some little commotion. A voice was calling her name high above the thundering applause. She looked in every direction, not recognizing anyone. The boy working his arm like an ax to get through the crowd said something but was not close enough to hear. Finally, she reached out to brace the boy, out of breath and horrified.
“Ivoe Williams? Ms. Williams! I come as fast as I could. Your house is on fire!”
For years municipal services had withered on the Vine. Infrequent garbage pickups made the area home to the fattest strays in the city. Nothing smelled worse than leftover meat rotting after a day in the heat, let alone a week. No one knew when the sewers were last drained. Blood from the packing plants, shit, and piss backed up so bad only fire could cut the stench. The nobodies who never picked up the garbage, or plowed the winter streets, and forgot to light the gas lamps at dusk also drove the fire truck. Neighbors gathered quickly, sucking their teeth, cussing, praying the flames wouldn’t get greedy and start to nibble on what little they had. Children from three blocks over clucked their tongues about who had motive. “Miss Ivoe give me licorice.” “Me too.” “Miss Ona give me two pennies for hauling her bags.” Even without a culprit, the midnight blaze was more thrilling than peach ice cream. Nothing that summer would come close to topping it.
From the corner of Eighteenth and Cherry, Ivoe and Ona saw smoke billowing out against the starry sky. They turned into their street winded and afraid, pushing past the small crowd watching the conflagration in awe. The hissing crackle of wood stunned them into silence. The little house and pressroom was now indistinguishable parched timber. “Your friend left,” a neighbor said. “Um-hum. Saw when the taxi carried her away. Fire broke out not too long after.” Each breath Ivoe drew extinguished hope. In a cold season a faulty furnace or stove might take the blame. What she could not unpuzzle was how the house caught fire in the middle of summer. The Underwood typewriter; the pianola; their letters. With all the paper and ink that burned like oil, not even cinders remained when the fire truck finally arrived. As a breeze kicked up a final gust of smoke, Ivoe bit down hard on her lip, trapping words that crisped on the tongue like the smoldering pages of a dictionary.
Waiting on Ona to speak to her was like waiting on the sun after a long, long rain. Ivoe scolded herself for having grown too dependent on Ona’s perspicacity. Nobody’s fault but her own that she couldn’t refrain from drawing out Ona’s perspective. “What do you think about . . . ?” came as easy as hello. Talking to Ona made everything possible; even when plans laid came to nothing, like now, it was all right. Private little joys found along their journey were enough to sustain her.
Somewhere in the ash heap on Cherry Street were notes for the Meditation. The most important stories Ivoe had recalled with little effort and typed up at the YWCA. She was headed for the printing shop when she encountered an old foe, Jim Crow. The printers’ union had direct orders to decline all colored business, including that of churches. She devised to condense the news into a single page and type as many as she could, but the letter in hand now thwarted that idea.
Ivoe laid the money order aside and threw away the envelope.
“Well, no typewriter.”
How to work with less—a smidgen of this, a piece of that—was no great challenge. Fragments and ruined things sometimes came alive with a little imagination. But how could the music of their lives take back up again when she was a writer with no instrument? She had waited weeks for the new Remington, paid for by the church, before today’s disappointing news that production had been halted indefinitely in favor of building arms and ammunition.
“Did you hear me?” Ivoe said curtly, annoyed by Ona’s silence, her tried-and-true manner of curbing and revealing her disappointment all at once. Equally irritating were the one-word responses and the way she moved around the apartment in a concerted, noiseless way.
The first time they’d fought Ona didn’t speak to her from the early winter afternoon until late at night, when Ivoe lay with her back to Ona, crying, and sure Ona would return to Texas in the morning. This fight was worse. A week had passed since they had engaged in real conversation.
“Do you ever intend to talk to me?”
Ona lowered her copy of Sepia magazine, peering over the rims of her spectacles. “No. I’m just going to sit here while you summon doubt and failure like you’ve been doing.” Though her voice did not betray it, Ona was anxious. Past disappointments had been valleys for Ivoe to rest in, to prepare for the journey ahead. Over the years she had learned to detect in Ivoe’s letters whenever she was in a shadowy place, divided against herself, or simply tired. Living with her she had matched the signs with the moods. “I might as well just . . . ” hinted that Ivoe needed another perspective. Chewing the inside of her jaw meant the day had been a little long, a little tough, and a little encouragement was needed. Repeated sighs were another way of saying Do not disturb unless they were accompanied by the rustle of pages, then it meant: If you want to talk to me, this would be a good time. “It’s too cold in here,” or “Nothing’s where I left it,” when the missing whatever was exactly where she ha
d left it, was good news—she was nearly finished, a conclusion away from a very fine article. Perpetual sullenness was a new state.
“I’ve already told you what you should do. You came to the city to write for a newspaper, Ivoe. So write for one. Write for your own.”
“You say start a newspaper like it’s as simple as baking a pie. I can’t even get a typewriter. Did you forget we lost the little press in the fire? With the printers’ union refusing to work on behalf of colored businesses, how do you suppose I publish the damn thing?”
“You’re looking at the question all wrong. It’s not can you but will you.”
This was the kind of woolly-mindedness that brought Ivoe up short, Ona thought, a sob gathering in her throat. “I figured you for a lot of things. A quitter was never one of them.”
“Wish you wouldn’t,” Ivoe said.
“Every colored woman I know has compromised her dreams.” A degree of petulance had crept into her voice. “You just giving yours up. That’s worth a cry at the very least. Don’t you think?”
“When you get a no everywhere you turn, what can you do?”
“Shit, you act like a press can’t be bought. All it takes is money. Money ain’t no big thing. We can both work. Now, the big things—the will and the courage—that’s got to come from you. If you don’t have it there’s no need in me carrying on about it.”
“A newspaper’s got to extend beyond my writing. And I can’t pay anybody.”
“People won’t work unless you pay them? You’re the only one who cares about the race, huh?”
“It’s not right to have people working and not pay them.”
“You do it. I’m willing to bet you aren’t the only one who would. And you know why?”
They were interrupted by a knock at the door. Three little girls, each with outstretched arms holding covered dishes, and a finely dressed dark-skinned woman offered boisterous greetings. The floorboards of the hallway creaked as the woman parted the children to step forward and removed her sun hat. It was then Ivoe recognized the minister’s wife from Stranger’s Rest.
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