When the playing was over, when it was almost dawn, when Cora had finally stopped looking for Michael, knowing he’d come home when he was good and hungry, and had gone to sleep with the knowledge that June had gotten on a train for Atlanta, while Michael slept in a tree in a strange woods far away-the farthest he had ever been from his home, and while Peter and Minnelsa lay in each other’s arms for the baby was finally asleep again, Madman Jeffries yawned as he went to his car and opened the door finding sweet baby June curled up in the front seat.
He touched her face before he awakened her making sure she was really there. She smiled at him as she covered a dainty yawn and he smiled back. “What’s our first stop, Mister Madman?”
“We do Montgomery tomorrow night,” he said slipping into the driver’s seat next to her, the shocked boys climbing in the back.
“Will we ever do Savannah or someplace by the sea?” she asked looking out at the stars.
“Might,” was all he could say and then he and his band, and his new singer drove away.
Part Three
CHAPTER NINETEEN
“Get the hell up,” the half drunk man ordered as he slapped the bottom of the woman in the bed next to him. She turned towards him, eyes closed, black hair dripping in them. She reached for him but he pulled away. It was noon and he wanted the bitch up and out, no matter how fine she was.
Last night had been nice. She was good, as good as Roger said she was. No, she was better than Roger said she was, but even that left a bad taste in his mouth ’cause he usually didn’t listen to Roger. But he had heard her sing and saw her dance and looked at that body. He had wanted that body so badly that he had gone out and spent his last money to get her in the mood.
They had played and loved and played and loved. When he could hardly play anymore, she had taken the last of the liquor to get her to sleep.
Bitch didn’t even leave him one drop and this was his last bottle, his last dime.
“Get out,” he told her as he stumbled down the hall to the bathroom.
June sat up in a tizzy.
She tried to focus on the man slamming the door but to see straight always took a while in the mornings. She tried to remember him, someone Roger had introduced her to after the last set, a fan Roger had said. She didn’t remember his name, didn’t remember what happened. She didn’t remember where she was.
Except she knew she wasn’t at home.
She had been saying that every morning she woke up for four and one half years. She was waking up where she wanted to and doing what she wanted to.
June knew she couldn’t go home.
She looked around for her stockings, one on a chair the other on a table. As she slid them onto her naked legs she looked for the bottle: it was lying at her feet and empty. Damn, she thought. She didn’t say it. Home training she remembered had gotten her this far.
“I may be a lush, but I am a lady.” She longed for a drink but there was nothing, so she dressed and got her purse. Had to find a mirror, couldn’t leave here looking like this.
She had no comb in her tiny pocketbook, never carried one. Resourcefully she took her fingers through her hair from scalp to end, the way Bira had done it when she was a child and leaves were tangled in it when she was playing the yard. She gazed in the mirror for her mother’s approval of her warm coat for the New York winter and the height of fashion, of her ladylike gloves straight from Paris. Would her mother be angry that she had cut her hair to fit the latest style? Would her mother even know her, as old as she had gotten, after more than four years?
Four years ago it was all so simple.
The man, whoever the man was, did not come back before she left. She found everything she needed to go out into the streets of Harlem. Some baking soda for her teeth, and a cloth. She refused to think about where it had been last or how clean it was as she used it on her face. She washed the night off, knowing that once she was back at her hotel she could bathe and properly clean herself.
And not do this again. She always told herself not to do this again.
She checked her small purse for money. There was a little. She would have to talk to Roger about the funds he was holding for her. Then she coughed.
Must be getting a cold for it seemed she coughed a lot nowadays. She tried to think of what her mother would have told her to take for it but only hot tea came to mind.
Was it the drink causing her to feel this way? Was it the lifestyle, singing until all hours of the night, dancing and drinking and sleeping with so many men?
She had been lucky there were no more babies.
She had been lucky there were no more Piano Men.
The cough gone, she left with her head held high as she always held it when she walked the streets of any city. New York no longer fascinated her.
She wanted to go to Europe, to the places the Piano Man had been and lived. Men, white men who had been there and came to Harlem to hear the classical music of their country, looked at her and told her: “In Paris, you would not be treated like a colored woman, a potential maid or nanny or servant.” They touched her skin and looked into her sparkling eyes. “You would be treated like a goddess a queen, a dark Venus with delicate brown arms.”
Some of the white men volunteered to take her across the ocean, of course, as their mistress and not as their wife. Many of them had wives, not that they told her but she was not blind. They were old enough to be her father or as old as Minnelsa and the Piano Man, and they were in the company of young blondes who giggled through the evening as they tried to tolerate the heavy drinks. On their fingers would be the expensive gold band that showed they were married to some woman of well known background who was, as he played with the thigh of the young thing next to him, meeting with other wives of other lax husbands whose money maintained the relationship and whose progeny kept them sane.
It wasn’t just that the men were white with their cold pale hands and their greedy shiny eyes. It was that they belonged to someone else, two someone else’s as a matter of fact. When they made their offer of Paris in the spring, the Riviera in the summer, June was unenthused. She would take a sip of the gin they had paid for, the best gin in the house of course, and cross her charming legs and nod a “that sounds nice” nod.
But she never took them up on their offers. Many of the men felt she was a cold hearted bitch. Some of them felt she was a tease. The white men felt she really didn’t want them. The colored men felt they couldn’t afford her.
Then there were the women.
Most of the women hated her. Hated her straight hair, for they assumed because of it she thought she was white. They hated her slim body for many of them had more children then they wanted to count or remember and decided that this sweet young thing had not one child to speak of. And they hated the fact that she had talent.
Oh they all loved to listen to her but hated the fact that she could open her ruby red lips and pour out verse after verse of any type of song, of opera, of the blues, of that new music they were playing. One night she even sung an Irish folk song for an off duty cop who was fond of her for his birthday. He sat before her and cried in his whiskey saying he had never heard anything so sweet.
Each time she sang she pretended the Piano Man was playing for her. It was his fingers on her throat that made her sound so sweet, his arms around her that made her feel each note.
It was the child they had, the child they shared, the child that would never be hers that she sang for when she couldn’t feel the Piano Man near her.
Ophelia would be about four now, or a little older. June had gone so far as to try to forget the date. What would she be like at four, this dark skinned baby that she had not seen in as many years?
She found her way back to the hotel she had been staying in for the past two weeks on and off. On when the night didn’t produce a lover who could make her happy with both drink and romance. Off when the lovers produced the cash and the class to be considered a little more than a quick fix behind
the bandstand. The room was little better than one of the shacks she saw back home when she went to aid the poor with her mother.
The poor, she had never really been that. Sometimes, when she didn’t get paid, when she couldn’t afford a room of her own and had shared one with Roger (what he required for the night was a little less than sex) she wished to have back those days of not having to care where her next meal came from.
She took off her coat and hat and placed her dainty leather gloves in the top drawer of the dresser whose ancient mirror reflected how much she had changed since she snuck out of the train station the night she hitched a ride with Madman Jeffries to go away and become a singer.
Only they didn’t go up North immediately. They went to Florida where she got to see the ocean and Tennessee and finally Washington DC where they stayed in a house with Madman’s mother Mona, ate regular meals and acted like normal people instead of five vagabonds who traveled around the country playing their music.
She had liked Mother Jeffries, a big buxom woman who was raising Madman’s three children by two different women, both of whom had been singers with him, both who had left and gone with other bands. Mother Jeffries told her “June, you are childlike and pretty and have manners. But what I like best is the fact that you have never slept with my son or any of the men in the band. That’s what gets these girls in trouble.”
June had earned their respect. She knew if she was going to be an independent woman she was going to have to require that the men around her look at her for who she was and not what she was.
She wasn’t so pretty anymore, and hadn’t been since they left the South.
She could have told anyone who cared they stayed in the South far too long.
June went down the hall to bath. Eleven a.m. on a workday and she was the only one in the hotel, except for Roger and the boys on the floor below. She soaked herself in the soothing warm water and washed off the man from the night before. When she had stopped requiring the respect that she had needed so much at first, she had started learning to wash the men down the drain after they left. It was so simple, especially if you didn’t know their names and their faces were just a blur in the mixture of music and alcohol.
Once she started washing herself, lathering up the soap, rubbing over places where they touched her trying to prove that they were men when she wouldn’t have looked at them if they hadn’t been, she stopped thinking about them.
They were just men, like her father, like her brother, like her brother-in-law.
The band had stayed in the South far too long.
Madman wanted to play as many different places as possible. Of course once they heard June sing-such a big voice from such a little thing-they ended up staying longer in each place. A date that was supposed to be a week turned into a month. They were in Tennessee for almost two months, living out of their cars, sleeping sometimes in barns and in fields, the men eyeing her hungrily as if she was a bed warmer. But somehow she had made it clear she wanted the music, she wanted to sing and not roll around on some dirty floor with a drunken musician pawing her.
They were just men and as men they had to try her.
The first one that touched her was a guitar player named Bo. Nobody knew his last name. He seldom spoke but he hooked up with them in Chattanooga and they were pleased as punch for his presence. He was a genius on the guitar, and even more of a genius when it came to following June’s instrument with his own. One night June got lost in the music and didn’t know that as she sung all the other instruments, the piano, the dorms, the other guitar had dropped out and it was just her and Bo. It brought down the house. She was amazed when Madman, usually jealous of anyone’s success, suggested that they use the routine whenever possible.
Bo said nothing and just smiled a bright grin that made his two gold teeth shine. Everyone slapped him on the back, except June. She gently kissed his cheek, said thanks and walked away.
At that moment Bo was lost. Bo was in love.
She hadn’t paid attention to it at first, what with trying to learn the ways of the road, trying not to be so picky about where they stayed. The other guys hadn’t paid attention either. They were so busy trying to get as close to as many women as possible that they didn’t notice how many evenings Bo shied away from the prettiest girls and from the strongest booze. They didn’t notice how he ate the way Miss June did, chewing with his mouth closed, putting down his utensils between bites, not talking with food in his mouth. And they didn’t realize that whenever they got into the cars, he ended up in the same one as Miss June, most of the time sitting next to her.
They didn’t notice because they thought he was too quiet and too shy. They thought that while they talked he listened to them.
One evening June made casual conversation with the man who smiled seldom and just looked at her with big eyes.
“You got a girl, Bo?” she asked as the men talked about the music and the night before.
When no one looked at him, when no one paid attention, when they kept on letting their lips flaps he told softly: “Had a girl but she wanted to get married. I wanna play my music. She didn’t understand. So she left me and married somebody else.”
“Did you love her?”
“I guess so, Miss June, ’cause they say loves hurts and it hurt when I discovered she was going to marry somebody else. Yeah, I guess I did.”
She touched his hand and smiled, trying to share something with him - the loss of love or somebody you loved. She squeezed his hand hoping that he understood that he was now her friend.
However Bo didn’t understand.
On many of the nights when they couldn’t travel in the darkness, or try to get out of town before the law or, as Madman called them, the “White Hands of God” found them and strung them up, they slept in the places they played. Sometimes in the room itself still smelling of grain alcohol and cheap gin, sometimes in an adjoining barn, sometimes outside.
If there was a nice sofa or anything that looked like a bed, the boys gave it to June, unless she was being noble and was saying it was someone else’s turn. But on this particular night the place they played had a big dressing room with a cot and a smaller room with another cot. The floors were well swept and the cots looked new, even though June didn’t want to think what they were really used for.
June had the little room to herself and took off as many of her clothes as she felt the door that separated her from the boys would allow. They had never interrupted her sleep when she was in the same room or the same car with them, so June felt safe to strip all the way down to her slip and pretend that she was sleeping in a real bed, the one thing she missed about having a home.
Red spied Bo in the wee hours before dawn getting up. Since Red had always known that Bo was a little crazy he asked the man where he was going.
“To my girl,” Bo replied softly, taking off his smelly socks so as to tip toe away even quieter.
“What girl you talking about?” Red asked. He told Madman later that it was the first good night’s sleep he had had in months without that woman looking so good and smelling so sweet and being always underfoot. He wasn’t about to let some fool disrupt it.
“My girl. June.”
“June?” Red almost shouted and grabbed Bo by his arms. He felt for his shoulders and discovered the man was shirtless. “Bo, what you talking about?”
“Don’t you know about us, man? That’s my girl in there.”
Red wanted to get up and stop him, but then he thought, maybe he’s right. Maybe June’s come down off her pedestal and started acting like a woman what travels with a band. A woman that likes men looking at her and thinking about her and touching her. Red decided that he didn’t care.
Until June shouted something they had never heard from her before: “Negro, get out of here. Are you crazy?”
Bo laughed and said a smooth: “Ah, baby.” Then Red heard the little woman’s big piercing voice again.
“Get out of here and get your han
ds off of me, you fool.” Red laughed as the noise woke the rest of the band. The men went to see what was wrong because if June screamed with those lungs of hers she might wake the wrong element, that being the White Hands of God.
“What’s wrong?” Madman said rubbing his eyes. Clay had his pistol drawn and Red just stood there, softly giggling
June was on the floor, how she got there wasn’t clear yet, but Bo was on top of her, and the cot and its contents strewn about the tiny room.
“Nothing,” he said. “Just me and my woman having a little argument. Go on back, she’ll be fine.”
“Your woman?” Madman observed June’s chemise pulled up almost to her hips revealing pale thigh.
“June?” Clay said, noticing Bo’s hand on her breast and her hand on his trying to move it away.
“Get this crazy man off of me,” June shouted as she tried to kick and move.
Clay shook his head. He knew it was bound to happen.
They got Bo off of her but he was full of fire by then. About her loving him, about her leading him on, about her asking if he had another woman to make sure he was available.
“I knew this was going to happen, Madman,” Red said angrily, and Clay nodded in agreement. “We ain’t never had no female singer that wasn’t either with one of the guys or. . .”
June was in his face, her chemise strap falling off her shoulder, her hair tousled and falling in her eyes. Her scent not as fresh as earlier in the day when she had bathed and washed but yet fresh, like that of a good, clean smelling woman who had just waken up. “Are you trying to say this is my fault?”
“Yes,” Red snapped back at the petite woman. “If you had a man to attend to you. . .”
“Attend to me? What am I, some farm animal?” Nobody moved. Nobody spoke. Red just grinned.
“You need a man to protect you,” Clay said trying not to notice the tiny waist that he had himself thought about holding many a night.
She looked into each of their faces. “They’re supposed to be four men protecting me. What’s wrong with that?”
The Wilful Daughter Page 30