“Lawrence! I thought you were against the war. The protests.”
“Protests to make the country more American, not less. Democract small d, remember? This war can change the whole policy toward Negroes, Cinn, change the whole world. I leave for training next week. It’s only a matter of time before the country’s at war. It occurred to me, I might not come back. I didn’t want to risk the chance that I’d never see you again.”
She had just met the man, yet just as fast as he had entered her life, he too was leaving.
Picture Roy, Waxby, Reno, and Inglewood, in their swing through East St. Louis, sittin’ round a fire extinguisher on a curb outside the pawnshop waiting to get their instruments out of hock before the ten o’clock train pulled in. Maybe the music was hot, but the Baker Johnson Quintet was still ridin’ rough and ready. The manager stiffed ’em on the gate and the band had to pawn their instruments to get a place to sleep and something to eat that night. Now they were just waitin’ on the pawnbroker and on Preach, who was pulling an all-night poker game to get them square again. Just as Inglewood started up a scat Memphis Minor appeared from around the corner, switchin’ barefoot in the street, her high heels slung over her shoulder. She eased her made-up lyrics onto Inglewood’s improvised tune. “Sneakin’ out the window for the very last time/ She was finished with a life that was nickel and dime/ She was lookin’ for a high life that was pretty and fine/ She was lookin’ for the high life, but she couldn’t read the signs . . .” In her opinion, the Baker Johnson Quintet could use a singer. “Even if it is music you can’t dance to.” She saw Baker look up at her warily. “I’m just here to sing, brothuh. I come all this way, the least you can do is hear me out. I’ve been practicin’.”
The band toured the Midwest to Cali, small club circuit. Sleeping in the back seat of a sedan or upright on the bus, cokin’ through the long hauls, heroin to mellow out, drinkin’ to balance and disinfect. With Baker Johnson on trumpet and Memphis Minor as his featured jazz singer, the combo blew city after city away, and swept their competitors into debris. A way never heard he played, a sound never heard, her melody following the chord changes, Waxby skating on cymbals and snare, Preach’s piano polyrhythms strattling lead and percussion, Inglewood grounding the sound with an amplified bass, they spoke a new urbane language, stirring the guts and brain faster than the most complex jitterbug. Fingers snapped, heads bopped, feet pulsed, knees bounced, keeping time with the high hat, curls of smoke and clinks of highball glasses. People came to listen and danced in their minds.
The music had been great that night. They wanted it to go on forever. St. Paul, they were shooting up in the boiler room when the feds blew through. Everybody thought it was for the dope! Flushed it, tossed it, good stuff straight into the snow. While her bandmates scooted out the window, Memphis stuck hers in her bra and threw her hands in the air. “They went that way!” she shouted. Still looking the naïf, she pointed the police in the wrong direction.
Memphis had to run through a cornfield to catch em. “Draft notice? You’ve got to be kidding.”
Memphis was good to him, but driving through the late-night fog, Baker still found himself thinking about Cinn and those broad Asiatic eyes, so fierce and unforgiving. He hated himself for bowing to Deacon’s pressure. Maybe a military stint would do him good, toughen him up, give him a chance to get himself straight. He begged off in Kankakee and hopped a train. Joined an air force pick-up unit in Michigan and began training as a mechanic in the fall of ’42.
Lawrence waited at the platform, uniform buffed, white gloves and aftershave. “I didn’t know you were going to bring your whole battalion.” Behind Cinnamon stood her grandma Dora, humming to herself, and beside her, Yum Lee with a basket of fried chicken, biscuits, homemade jam, and her grandson Jesse’s favorite—stewed cherries. Dora poked out her ruffled chest and arched her back, steadying herself with both hands on her cane. Elma flanked her other side, as Papa Ray collected their bags. Cinn laughed and turned to Lawrence playfully, her hands clasped behind her. “My uncle insists I have a proper chaperone.” Priscilla popped between them. “Cinnamon says you’re a pilot. Can I go on an airplane?”
Dora poked her cane in the direction of a new uniform striding across campus, soldiers saluting him. “An officer! Praise Jesus!” she exclaimed and threw her arms open as her grandson Jesse approached.
“Nana, staying with you sho’ paid off,” Jesse beamed. “After seeing me leading a prayer meeting, the captain made me a chaplain. Imagine that.” He leaned over, giving her a peck on the cheek.
“That’s no way to greet your Nana,” she said and hugged him fiercely. Dora drew back and patted her grandson’s chest, speechless with pride.
Before his grandmother could settle herself, Jesse cupped her delicate wrists. “Nana, I should tell Mama, Memphis is here,” he said. To his grandmother’s look of consternation, he countered, “She seems good, Nana. Lead singer. Working with Mr. Sparrow. You remember him. I think she’s happy, but better tell Mama. Got something else to tell you, too . . .”
The family piled into a taxi, Lawrence and Cinn in the jeep ahead with an enlisted man as their driver. Lawrence threw his arms out, framing the bare dusty fields. “So what do you think of our airstrip?”
“Way too many trees,” Cinnamon teased.
Memphis arrived with a four-car cavalcade, DAKOTA SPARROW’S EBONY TALENT SHOWCASE emblazoned on the sides. The show had been hopscotching military bases in the South with a medley of comedy routines and variety acts for the Negro troops. Finding her stranded and heartbroken in L.A., Sparrow had bailed her out with a gig. She ran into Private Baker backstage. “Hey you.”
“You know this sorry-ass suckuh?” Baker’s drill sergeant barked.
“I see you ain’t heard him play,” Memphis smiled.
“The band is the only outfit where officers and enlisted meet on equal terms,” Baker said wryly. “Tonight they need us mere mechanics.”
“Arrogant roughneck, act like he know something bout music.”
“Yeah, yeah.”
“You got something to say, Private?”
“No sir.” Not yet. I’ll speak through my horn. About some things, Baker was still cool.
“What? Without telling us? Without our meeting this girl?” Elma’s eyes were round as saucers.
“Mama, it was the right thing to do,” Jesse said flatly.
“Lord, don’t tell me you got her pregnant?”
“I hope to, but no! I married her because I wanted this woman to be my wife,” he said with the earnestness that he had always possessed. “Mama, this is Mabel. Mabel . . . this is my mama.”
Mabel, a thin-framed young girl with a round face, dimpled smile, and button nose, pushed a lock of her simple pageboy cut behind her ear. She was clear-eyed, bright, and direct. Her grasp firm with faith, she shook her new mother-in-law’s hand, then, slightly embarrassed, she pulled Jesse away. “You told me that you weren’t going to be able to see your family and that’s why we should marry. Two weeks later, here they all come. Jesse Minor, you wanna tell me about that? What’s it gonna look like?”
“Mabel, May—May—Mabel. Stop, listen to me. I didn’t know Cinnamon’s uncle was going to pay for the trip. My family couldn’t afford to get down here. Honey, I promise, that’s the truth. Mabel Minor. You are my wife, that’s all that matters.”
She laughed as they clasped hands. “Yes, Reverend.”
Cinnamon was the only brown-skinned date at the dinner dance. She spied Baker in the pit, Memphis leaning over the music stand, wigglin’ her behind and singing alongside him. Salt gnashing old wound.
Sparrow checked out the cantina audience from the bandstand wings. “Hi ho, the gang’s all here.” His USO show was the headliner. The warm-up featured the officers’ house band, the Rhythm Kings, vs. the King Pins, comprised of enlisted men. The only place they all could congregate was the bandstand. The friction was natural. For black men battling for equality so long, the inequality
of rank was bound to rile some. Sparrow still had the eye. Brothuh, brothuh, brothuh. Someone itchin’ for a fight.
Tuskegee was to be an experiment, the crown jewel of the military’s efforts to offer black men an opportunity to fight as equals, but the atmosphere was tense. In Houston, Negro soldiers had been court-martialed and executed for a blow-up with local whites from the town. There were incidents in Jackson between Negro soldiers and MPs. Charlotte, Fort Huachuca in Arizona, Fort Dix in Jersey, all had seen trouble. In Chicago, a munitions loading dock blew up, killing seventy-nine colored dock workers. Harlem had exploded in a riot.
A skirmish broke out at the ticket booth and spread inside, tumbling toward the bandstand. An MP swung at Baker. He backed up toward the stage and threw up his arms to avoid the blow. Lawrence saw in a look that Cinnamon loved someone else.
Cooped up in the jailhouse, Baker Johnson had a holy conversion. Out there something was happening, a new music takin’ off, threatening to leave him behind, standin’ on the ground. Bird, Dizzy, and Prez—pressin’ past the boundaries of sound—squeezing notes outta nowhere. Mad scientists, huddled in their secret laboratories, surviving on a diet of salt peanuts. In their pork pie hats, long waistcoats, tapered trousers and berets, horn-rimmed glasses and snakeskin shoes, they seemed an alien species, speaking in a language all their own, generating an afrocentrifugal force reducing sound to smaller and smaller components, generating unstable, unheard-of radioactive elements till the notes were like pieces of string, powerful enough to pierce through black holes and emerge on the other side. Another Manhattan Project, cookin’ up the recipe with a fusion of traditions and a fission of the rules, splitting apart the known sonar universe.
And there he was—in lockdown! For what? Tryin’ to prove some damn thing to some gal you ain’t seen in a year! Baker let loose a howl, wailin’ to the record down the hall, he pursed his lips and conjured up his horn. The notes traveled on a trade wind. He imagined they could hear him in Tunisia and blew into the night.
monk crunched over the piano keys,
always with his hat on,
diz workin’ up to light speed,
splittin’ notes like they was atoms and electrons,
bird blastin’ so fast and precise
he could flyyyyyyyyyy . . .
for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles . . .
from five a.m. at minton’s to a carnegie hall convention,
in uh five—six—seven dimensions,
these black argonauts of sound,
discovered that space had elastic bounds,
long on talent, short on shellac,
these black magic radical cats,
disgorging their galactic scat
just couldn’t be stopped,
once the formula unfurled,
they rattled the world,
with be-bop, be-bop be-bop!
“Shut up that noise!”
“That’s the sound of the future, my man, Straight, No Chaser!”
“This isn’t a bandstand break, buddy.” They gave him thirty more days for insubordination.
Lawrence came to see him just before his unit shipped out. Baker was right about one thing. They needed their mechanics. “You gonna have trouble fixin’ my plane?” Lawrence asked, sizing up his adversary.
“Having trouble flyin’ it? . . . Sir?”
“Private.”
“Yes sir.”
“Get ready to ship out and get yourself shined up.”
Memphis told Jesse that she was going overseas with the USO. “It’s a bad idea, sis,” he said. “Niggas ain’t seen a woman in five month and a shower in six. They don’t treat those girls with any respect.”
She didn’t want to hear it. “I can take care of myself.”
“Startin’ when?”
“It’s my patriotic duty.”
“You just followin’ that nigguh.”
“You would say that. None of you ever supported me and what I wanted to do. I got talent.”
“Here we go again.”
“Cinn’s not the only one can sing, you know. I might not have a voice like hers,” she argued, “but I can take a colored song to your bones, and that’s something she’ll never do.”
Elma didn’t approach until they were all standing at the train platform. She was conflicted. Her son had become a man. Married. A preacher. Her daughter was troubled. Both my daughters.
“Hey Mah, what’s cookin’?” Memphis smiled that devilish grin, still dimpled. “It’s regular work, Mah. A job.”
Elma couldn’t stay mad at Memphis. That child was a mess of trouble from the very beginning, but so full of life, so full of yearnin’. Elma hugged her daughter, not wanting to let go. Memphis, so skittish, relished the moment before plunging back into the whirl. “You a mite skinny, Memphis Minor.”
“Better for the camera, Mah. When I come back from the tour, I’m goin’ to be in the movies.”
Quiet Mabel, a preacher’s daughter, surmised that the best and quickest way to become a true member of her husband’s family was not through its very formidable women. She and Papa Ray made great friends, especially when she mentioned that her father had hoped to build a new brick church. The revelation gave her new father-in-law the entrée to speak of his great architectural achievement, the landmark Harlem church which did not bear his name on its cornerstone. Everyone else’s eyes discreetly rolled up at the all too often recited lamentation. Mabel’s fascination allowed Raymond a touch of that ambition he once had for himself.
Dora, in the interim, took the opportunity to pull Jesse aside. “May I borrow my grandson for a minute, m’am?” She had gone out to Sweet Tamarind and talked to Mah Bette. Her grave might have been in Charleston, but her spirit had never left the island. She asked Mah Bette to put the light round her grandson and protect him overseas. She scooped up some dust from the grounds of the old slave cemetery and put it in a pouch. She handed it to him now and patted his chest. “Now, you’ll always come back. You carryin’ a piece of your home with you.” He promised not to open the cherries until he got overseas. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he wasn’t really fond of cherries. He shared the jar with his bunkmates on the ship and was surprised at how fast the compote was devoured. Too late he discovered his Nana’s secret ingredient, homemade brandy.
Cinn realized that she had not been listening. Lost in thought, she had wasted fifteen minutes of a very expensive hour. “Think of a time when you were singing,” the doctor counseled. “Go to that place when the music first captured you.” A flurry of memories spun in her mind, the good and the bad colliding. Watching that turntable go round, she heard Mahalia, Dinah, Ella, Ethel. Singing everything. Her big voice. Summers at Nana’s, solo in the children’s choir. Elder Miss Mary, saying, Have you thought bout getting her some training? Shaking her head to the offer, wanting to so bad, but hearing the laughter, the gawkers. Papa Ray bringing home the radio. Mimicking everything from her grandfather’s famous sow call to high C. Cousins, boarders, neighbors beggin’, Shut up! Papa Ray shoutin’ back, Let that girl sing. Leave her alone! Her first talent show, Jesse’s delight, We won five dollars. Here’s your cut, twenty-five cents. Big money for the big voice! The hawkers of Delancey Street, two subway stops to the other end of Manhattan. Good stuff, great stuff, cheap! The air smellin’ of harbor and garlic and chestnuts and fish and sweat, old clothes and ambition. Elma sayin’, You got a good eye for quality. The sound of fabric, sifting through a bin of odds and ends. “Sissieretta.” Her aunt spoke reverently as she stared over Cinnamon’s shoulder. “Your mother and I went to one of her concerts. You shoulda heard her voice, Cinn.” Elma sighed. “Like Marian Anderson, beautiful, brown skinned, like you. Black Patti. The night Ray proposed. The last day we saw our pah.” Everything—Everything . . . How to remember a moment when it was everything?
Disto—what? Dystonia. She noticed something was wrong. A scratch in her throat didn’t heal, a tightness in her larynx felt li
ke, sounded like . . . her voice was dying. What did I do? Who do I tell! The street was a flurry of people. Jumping up and down, shouting, yelling. But her world was completely silent. What?
“Victory! The war’s over. We won!”
“Oh, Mama . . .” Broken. Ambition and hurt, love and disgust, longing and rage fracturing her song into a million discordant pieces, her dreams swept away in a pan of dust. Her voice was gone.
El took her by the hand and pulled her close, rocking her slowly. “We gon pray on this one. Pray with me, Cinn. The body may fail us, but the Holy Spirit never will.”
Cinnamon sat straight-backed, defying the soft contours of the chair, fingers of her left hand laced round the right, trying to hold them both still, squeezing until she could feel the tendons bulging and sliding from the bones.
“Ridicullous!” Dora’s voice popped into her head, followed by a typically pragmatic pronouncement. “So you can’t sing. Do sumpin else.” Simple as altering a pattern or letting out a seam. But it wasn’t.
Private coaches in singing, acting, and languages, university and conservatory, first to crack the junior circuit. Better than the white girls. Invited into Opera Studies. She had trained hard, she had powered through with intensity, but now everything, everything, was gone. Perfect pitch? Now she couldn’t even approximate. Over a period of a few weeks, her sonorous Verdian power began to diminish, then simply vanished. Approaching even the smallest crescendo, her larynx went into horrible spasms and she thought she might die, gasping for breath.
Iolanthe sent her to specialists in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, but the small fortune in train fare and doctor fees left her without a diagnosis. Nowhere. They could find nothing physically wrong with her vocal folds. Following her aunt Elma’s ardent faith, she then sought counsel at her church. The Reverend’s warm hands were not consoling. “Those whom I love, I chastise. You should thank Him for the hardship, for it is a blessing. If things hadn’t gotten worse, they wouldn’t have brought you back to the Lord. Trust that He will deliver you.” She had prayed, repented, and endured a year, a whole terrifying year as if she were preparing to be hanged.
Some Sing, Some Cry Page 59