Some Sing, Some Cry

by Ntozake Shange

  Lizzie placed her foot on the pedal and her hands on the keys and called down Osceola’s spirit. With the rhythmic, rising line and furious energy that would become her trademark, two hands turned into four. Lizzie Mayfield Turner blew them out of the room. The pure power of her sound surged with primary colors, a full orchestra jammed into eighty-eight keys. A wild left hand held down the bass line, while the right hooted, hollered, gurgled, and screamed. A trombone arabesqued and growled, the sax streamed diagonally across the keys. A muted trumpet whined over a clarinet’s hypnotic trilling, while her left-hand traps kept the rhythm’s frenetic pulse. When she kicked up her foot, her shoe flew off. The frosted door opened and its frame filled with astonished faces crowding in to see if they could believe what they heard. Lizzie Mayfield Turner coming into her stride, tickling the top notes with her toes.

  When she finished, Meeks snapped his finger with impatience. “Shut the door, shut the door.” The listeners scattered before his associates could oblige. The quartet of men now encircled her as Meeks stepped forward. “How many you got there? I’ll give you fifty bucks for the catalogue. Fifty bucks.” His voice dipped as if she should be impressed.

  Lizzie folded her arms around her stack of songs and held them to her chest.

  “Fifty bucks for this song, dahlin’, plus royalties and a spot in your new revue at the Cane Break. As you can see, I can sing. I dance and I do comedy, too.” She laughed, slipping her foot back into her shoe.

  Leslie, still implacable, finally flicked his cigarette in her direction, indicating she had a deal. “Bring your stuff down to the Ninety-One. Four o’clock.”

  “Four o’clock . . . Say.” She stopped. “How do I know you just won’t walk off with my song and take it for yourself?”

  “I’m a published songwriter, sweetheart. Sold over five hundred thousand copies. You want the job or not?”

  “Four o’clock. The Ninety-One . . .”

  “Forty-second and Ninth. So go on, get outta here before I forget how generous I can be.”

  She walked out quickly, got around the corner, and swung around the lamppost. “Whewwww! Thank you, Jesus! I’m sorry ’bout everything I said!” She could barely comprehend her dramatic change of fortune. Walking up and down the avenue, waiting for four o’clock, practicing what to say, Don’t bother—every time you practice, you get it wrong—just improvise, she remained unnerved. What to tell Sparrow? What other songs to pitch? The afternoon sky darkened, and the anemic concrete-enclosed trees turned their leaves upward. The fine rain turned to pellets. Shielding her head with her suitcase, she ducked into the Times Square library.

  She liked the floors—the banister’s glide, the sound of her cleats on the marble, sand spins without the sand. “Shh!” The librarian made an eye gesture to the security guard. To calm her nerves and think, Lizzie found a seat and grabbed a thick oversized book on reserve about the recent headline excavations in ancient Egypt.

  Facing the clock, she randomly looked at the pictures, pausing at one rendering of the perfect combo—two fluted horns, a guitar with a triangle base, drums, cymbals, rattles, flutes, and shake dancers—all of them women. She studied the features of the headdress, the elongation of the eyes, the hunched shoulders and elevated hips. Oo, I could put charcoal around my eyes like Valentino. A new tune began forming in her mind, her body instinctively moving to the swing tempo in her head. Let’s see Queen Cleopaterah/ Could do a shake or shimmy or tap or uh/ Brand-new dance to make old Pharoah prance/ And rise up from his tomb . . . Marc Antony of ancient Rome/ Never had such things as this at home/ Just one look in his girl Cleo’s eyes/ And my oh my oh my oh my/ He knew that he was doomed/ Just one look at that Egyptian goyl/ Lathered and slathered in snake oil . . .

  Laughing aloud to herself, she borrowed a slip of paper and a squat yellow pencil from the book request box and jotted down the beginnings of what she thought a promising new lyric. Talk, Camel walk . . . Sphinx, thinks? Oh, high jinks! Her freestyle rhymes filled up sheet after sheet of the tiny slips of paper until the pencil was worn to a nub. The librarian looked over sternly. Was the girl going to order a book or not? A rumble of spring thunder underscored Lizzie’s excitement. She wiggled in her seat and jostled her neck from side to side. A whole new routine. I’ll get my own spot, then my own revue! The universe responded with a bright burst of sunlight streaming through the library’s transom window. “The Devil was beatin’ his wife and she run off leavin’ a rainbow,” Mah Bette would say. The storm had passed. It was a brand-new bright day!

  Lizzie gathered her things to leave, but she wanted that picture for inspiration. Who’d believe an all-girl jazz band in ancient Egypt! “Reserved.” Hmmm. She scanned the hall to see if anyone was watching and considered tearing out the page. Just ask old Emperor Caesar/ Who did whatever he knew to please her/ But soon as he professed his love/ His bubble bath became a bath of blood/ But nothing seemed to harm her/ Indeed she was a charmer/ Who could resist that Egyptian goyl/ Lathered and slathered in snake oil?

  “Please, continue what you were doing.” An ominous baritone voice bored into her from behind a towering stack of books. “I’ve been watching you for quite some time.”

  She froze, considering should she make up a story or bolt. The source of the voice emerged from behind the row of shelves. He was a short, dark-skinned, delicate man with huge, almost brooding eyes. He was dressed in a sleeveless cardigan with an open-collar cream shirt. Instead of a tie, a silk scarf loosely looped around his neck. A fitted tweed jacket, shoes that looked like slippers, and no socks completed the look. His hair was thick and pressed back in a series of tiny, rebellious waves. He surveyed the cover of the book she held. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch? You read German?”

  She closed the book and crossed her legs. “Yeah, sauerkraut,” she laughed. “A girl can’t look at the pictures?”

  “Please do.” He placed another book on the table, pushed it in her direction, and gestured for her to open it. “I should introduce myself. But I think the proper thing is to wait for the lady to do so.” He was oddly shy and self-assured.

  “. . . Lizzie May . . . Mayfield Turner,” she extended her hand.

  “Haviland Remick.” He cupped both of his hands around hers.

  High-toned to be so black. She liked that about him.

  The book contained scores of charcoal and ink drawings, pastel sketches, and quick pencil studies. Faces, hands, shadows. Muscles moving swiftly. Head, house, light. A face in a window frame, a still-life bottle on a curb, a dancing couple, an estranged couple, the body proportions exaggerated. The work was not realistic, but sharp, with clean angles and curves, essential lines and emphasis where unexpected. As much as Lizzie wanted to talk to him, she didn’t want to lose the strains of melody floating in her head. “These are really good.”

  He stepped backward, almost tripping as she complimented him. He was a contradiction, arrogant and insecure just like her. Lizzie liked that about him, too.

  She turned the page. The last sketch was a half-finished, three-quarter charcoal profile of a young woman twisting a lock of her bangs and peering into a heavy tome, the open page of the book visible over her shoulder. The smudgings, line corrections, and scratching showed a tension between calculated labor and turbulence, a polish that erupted into a deliberate imprecision. Within the frame he had captured her movement, her thought, her essence. “You did all this in the little time I was sitting here?”

  “One must commit like the flash of lightning on a darkening sky.” His whisper traveled across the room. The librarian looked up again.

  Lizzie examined the drawing more closely. No one had ever made a portrait of her. “You didn’t have to make my lips so big.”

  “One distinguishing feature among your many. The unusual is the beautiful.” He sat beside her, his shoulder probing her space. She shook her paper slips into a neat stack.

  “I noticed you were writing,” he continued. “Are you a poet?”

  She laughe
d one short staccato note through her nose. “Hell no.” The plosive startled him, but the thought had never occurred to her. “Uh, well I write songs. Show tunes, blues, rags and jazz n stuff.”

  “The triumph of this century—Negro music!”

  “Excuse me.” The librarian poked her pointy face between them. “If you two cannot be quiet, I’m afraid I will have to ask you both to leave.”

  He didn’t blanch. “This is the public library, isn’t it?”

  “Impertinence!”

  “Every day, if I can help it. We’re New Negroes.” Lizzie pursed her lips to smother another chortle. The flustered woman turned on her heel and marched back to her desk, a fortress of wood with its parapets of returned volumes. “I’m used to standing out,” Haviland confessed. “It’s rather an addictive habit.” His voice tickled her ear. “I just got to New York yesterday. From Minneapolis. Friends are still putting me up on a couch.”

  “Shoot. That’s an official New Yawk apartment. I’m sleepin’ on a couch, too. And I been here goin’ on two years. Where’s that at, Minneapolis?”

  He winced at her sentence construction, but recovered. “North, far north. Half the state’s from Sweden,” he imitated the Scandinavian lilt, two trochees and a spondee. He handed her a printed flyer. “You must come to my show next week.”

  “Show? Oh no!” She grabbed her things and flew.

  Lizzie got to the audition three minutes late, winded and wide-eyed. The band was sittin’ around. Cappy had told the leader, “I got a new song for Queen.”

  “But Cap, the show’s already set.”

  “Well, un-set it,” he said, drawing his pistol. “I said, new song for Queen.”

  To the band leader’s plaintive look, Leslie shrugged. His new silent partner was not so silent. “Give the kid a shot,” he said diffidently, “she’s got somethin’.”

  Lizzie, meanwhile, was in the bathroom, trying to fix her rained-on hair, which had ballooned into a mushroom. “Oh, forget about it. Lipstick. Stockings straight—Go!”

  Queen sat, jawin’ with her combo, the hot five. When Lizzie emerged, the seasoned players already had her music out, distributed and cleanly dissected. Queen looked up with her huge doe eyes. “I like that ‘Crazy Day Blues,’ and this Egyptian thing.” She sifted through the slips of library paper. “It’s different. Put a melody to that, I could do that,” she laughed sexily, the combo concurring. “Got another one?”

  And so it was, her sheet music had auditioned for her while she was frettin’ and fussin’ in the bathroom. Leslie agreed to take Lizzie on, giving her a little feature part in the second act. She was to start in two weeks. “I’ll send my agent down to negotiate the details,” she said as she shook Mr. Leslie’s hand, barely able to contain herself. A little upset at the prospect of giving away her Cleopaterah, she was glad that Queen at least didn’t take her Strut. With that new gut the Queen’s got to her middle, the tempo’s too fast, anyway. Her speed-dancin’ days is ovuh! Lizzie was determined somehow to insinuate the Strut into her Cane Break debut. And from there, in no time, my own revue. When the ritzy places all closed down/ The dukes and duchesses comin’ uptown/ To see and hear the world-renowned—Mayfield Turner! She nearly skipped out of the hall delirious.

  After she left, Queen Opal strolled over to Lew and Cappy. “I know about that gal,” the songstress cooed. “I tell yuh, if she act up just one time . . .” Miss Opal threw up her diamond-crusted fingers, then balled them into a fist. “Pow! I’ll knock that redheaded heiffuh clear into Sundie!”

  19

  Lizzie didn’t understand why Sparrow seemed to be backing away from her. Here she was, in two weeks opening at the first Midtown supper club to offer a black revue, ten blocks from Broadway, and he was testier than ever. “A tarbaby’s jump away from the old minstrel shows—employing strictly black talent for a strictly white audience, a fantasy of slavery right down to the log cabin lobby motif,” he blathered, “statuesque, near naked Creole chorines, and Queen Opal, the big, black Mama, beltin’ the blues!”

  “So what is it, Sparrow? You don’t want me to take the gig just cuz I got it on my own?”

  “I ain’t sayin nothin’. You can go on the white time if you wanna.”

  “I ain’t goin’ on no white time.” She jiggled in her thin coat and drew her collar tighter about her neck. The brisk March air nipped at her thin costume underneath. Trying out her new King Tut motif, Lizzie had wrapped a sequin halter top around her head, using the breast cups as ear flaps, the bodice tied tight to her skull. A halter strap smacked her in the face each time she turned to talk to him. She had employed twelve matchsticks to line her eyes with charcoal. “Here’s the deal. I get what every other girl gets. Twenty-five dollars a week, seven a week for rehearsal. No muss, no fuss.”

  “No johns, no husbands, no babies, and no agents. I go up to negotiate your contract, Cappy Meeks stuck a pistol to my face with uh add-on, write-in clause—‘I never wanna see your particular black ass again.’ I neglected to tell you the finer details of the conversation.”

  “It’s a job, Sparrow, and pays good. It’s money, baby, and that ain’t but one color. Greeeeen. Movie stars, dukes, and marquises come up in there. Give me a chance to be seen.”

  “Yeah, well, just lay low of the bootlegguhs, okay, Slim? Do me that favor.” Sparrow blew on his hands and stuffed them into the pockets of his sports jacket. It was the first day of spring in name only. “I know a cat in the club’s new band. He’ll keep his eye on you.”

  “I don’t need nobody keepin’ his eye on me. I’m from Charleston!” Her black-rimmed eyes glowed like shields.

  “What the fuck is this?”

  “Villa Jualero,” Lizzie slurped with delight. The total vamp, she teased, twirling Haviland’s flyer in Sparrow’s face.

  “Welcome to the Black Palace!” announced the doorman wearing pantaloons and a powdered wig. They had been so busy talking they had not realized the line had reached the entrance. “Welcome to Mademoiselle Walker’s Harlem Soiree!” The herald carefully scrutinized them. “The evening is strictly black tie, sir.”

  Sparrow glared back. “Is that before or after you jumped Red Riding Hood’s grandma?”

  “I knew I shouldn’t of brought you.”

  “Admission is fifty cents.”

  Before Sparrow could retort, she shoved the flyer at the attendant. “We’re guests of the artist. Mr. Haviland.”

  “You mean, Mr. Remick,” the doorman said haughtily without actually looking at them. “Haviland is his first name . . . And yours?”

  “Mayfield Turner.”

  “Starring, in two weeks, at the new Cane Break Revue,” Sparrow pecked behind her. “That’s her name right there, Minute Man.” He poked at the ledger of invited guests in the doorman’s hand. “In two weeks it’ll be in lights.”

  “And . . . ?” the herald inquired with complete disdain.

  “And guest, that’s me. First name’s Mystery.”

  “You’ll find the gallery upstairs, Miss Turner. The buffet is on the first floor.”

  “I been to a buffet,” Sparrow jabbed at the doorman as he passed. “Buffet flat right up on Hundred Thirty-third give any kinda food you want, and sex,” he added, “cafeteria style.”

  Lizzie grabbed him by the arm and pulled him inside. “You act like you ain’t been nowhere classy before.” She had invited Sparrow so as not to appear too available, but now she regretted his companionship. Surveying the room, she felt a tingling in her body at the sight of so many successful show people mingling among Harlem’s literati. Aside from a few exceptions like Rosamond Johnson and Paul Robeson, their worlds didn’t mix. Most refined households still didn’t play the blues.

  Sparrow prattled on, “Millionaire heiress charging twenty-five cent for ice tea oughta be arrested.” Mumbling fast in Lizzie’s ear, “I’mo exercise my totin’ privileges, that’s what I’mo do,” he scooped the petite salt and pepper shakers into his pocket. Lizzie slapped his hand
. “Jumpy, jumpy.”

  He was right. She was nervous. Lizzie had not felt attraction for anyone. Big Ed’s no-touch policy was fine with her. She could flaunt her body and taunt as she wished and still be in total control. Off the bandstand, she left quickly for the dressing room, avoiding the mashers with seductive dodges and darts. When push came to shove, she used humor. She was a cut-up, a show-off. That’s how she made her living, but in this crowd, she didn’t like the way she stood out. Despite her amazing skills with a scissors and safety pins, her outfit was clearly too flamboyant for the intellectual Renaissance crowd. Her outlined eye treatment was a whole fashion season ahead of its time. Everyone was staring at her. She knew not a soul.

  Sparrow assessed the soiree set as they ambled. “Oooo-wee, sid and siddity’s up in here. Defender of the race as long as it keep him among white people. He looks even whiter in person. Social activist especially fond of plump behinds. Post office runaway on the chickenbone express. Professional doll, her job to siddown and look good. That one built a sanatorium and was its first customer.”

  “Do you even know any of these people?” Lizzie asked distractedly.

  “Read the paper sometime. You might learn something. I see why they call these things finger food,” he quipped, holding a circle of shortbread topped with salmon and a whip of caviar-dotted sour cream. “Meal for your pinky.”

  “Look, if you wanna be mad at me, Sparrow, be mad at me. If you want me to turn loose the gig, say so.”

  “Shoot, baby. I cain’t hold you back just to get my little piece. Go on. Take it.”

  Haviland entered on the arm of a gaunt white woman with a cape of wild foxes around her neck. Lizzie felt a tinge of irritation that he was not alone, but then neither was she. He had seen her. How could he not?

  Like magic, Haviland appeared by her side, his arm cupping her waist. “Don’t go anywhere.” Voices faded, the air around her moving to his melody. “I want you to meet somebody.” He squeezed her waist again. “Quelle ensemble,” he purred, admiring her outfit. “Exotic and erotic, I love it!” And he was off again.