Some Sing, Some Cry

by Ntozake Shange

  She thought it ironic that, but for the technology and perfect pitch of her computer, she couldn’t sing a note. The turntables were her instrument and voice. “Supposed to get thirty-two bars, Dee,” she said wryly. “The blues only got twelve.”

  “Still rocks, just work off the moment.” He smiled. “When you’re ready,” and with an expert combination of control and surrender, he glided into Tina Turner’s sultry “I can’t stand the rain . . . against my win-dow-oh-ohhh . . . Bringin’ back sweet memories . . .” She chuckled at this inside joke. They both used the Rane Serato program. With her combination of turntables, CD players, and laptop, she was fully digitalized. Still she understood the purists saying “If you’ve never touched vinyl, you’re not a real deejay.” But she had to be able to move, to adapt. Versus taking an hour to load twenty milk crates in a truck, with the new technology she could stuff her overnight bag in fifteen minutes and hop a plane with ten thousand songs.

  Sweet memories . . . Each generation had its collector. For her Great-Nana Dora it was swatches of fabric and buttons, photos and shoes. For Lizzie it was costumes and posters, a kaleidoscope of stuff from her ragged, rollicking life. Rare LPs from Uncle Ray and her grandmère Memphis. Always the music. Aunt Cinn’s precious librettos. The last time she had visited her beloved Cinn, the woman was just a grip of shaking bones, the skin soft, holding fast to her hand. Memories dissolving, even her beloved arias. Aida, Carmen, Butterfly, the heroine always dying. Cinn . . . clinging to her with desperate fingers, one last grasp at life. Liberty had gone to confide in her, seeking that quiet solace she had always found. I can’t do this alone.

  She reminded herself that she wasn’t alone. You got De Spain. When she finally had allowed him to see her and to touch her, he had cupped the palm of his hand over the scar on her breast with such tenderness, like a lover. Though her blood family was scattered all over the globe, she had family. People who loved her for all of her eccentricity.

  “No reason why you can’t live to be a hundred and four,” her doctor had said, “just like your great-aunt Lizzie.” Liberty had found it hard to believe that the birdlike creature she knew as Aunty Liz had been such a powerhouse. Still insisted on driving her car when she could barely see over the dashboard. And walked really slow, Dee. “Wheelchair?” she’d say. “Oh, please, honey, 1921, I walked from Baltimore to Philly, with you on my hip. No, no, wait . . . that was, that was Cinn . . . What’s your name again?” A hundred and four and twenty-four, both staring death in the face.

  “Liberty, comin’ fierce and fabulous with a House/World/trip-hop mix of her own styling, a hybrid form of Electro, Goth, Punk, round the world to round the way.” She pumped herself up, talking in a soft drone over the mix. You can do this. She grabbed De Spain’s checkered scarf and slung it around her neck. “I need some color.” Though it wasn’t her thing, she braced herself for ’90s and ’80s remix requests that she knew would be coming, especially after Michael’s death. Same year the King of Pop dies, his body blanched, cloaked in as much mystery as Robert Johnson, the same week Emmett Till’s grave is desecrated and more kids died in Chicago than Baghdad, the President watched his daughters walk through the Door of No Return. She had to get her mind around the contradictions. Life, Liberty . . . or death. All of this rich history, this past I’m supposed to be able to stand on and draw from. Instead I’m already part of the past even before I’ve begun. The Seventh Generation. The what?

  The club was cavernous, reminding her of a tomb. Catacombs. Underground caves where the faithful secreted their dead. The brick walls were still damp, the stone floor uneven, warped by the metric tons of water that once coursed through. She started up a Tibetan chant with her left hand, looped in a JB holla, layered a piece of her uncle Jesse’s sermon and a plosive Berber’s call, haunting Islamic harmonies into a Badu lick, thence to that twelve-bar blues she was carryin’, pullin’ heavy with the bass, that Zulu club that shakes the bones.

  “What’s your name again?” Liberty . . . what a name to live with. Congress just now apologizin’ for slavery. Wasn’t an apology she sought, but recognition, a celebration even, for the music. For the weave of Spirituals and Blues to Rock ’n’ Roll that let freedom ring from one generation to the next. For the Jazz that defined modern. For the root music from Be-bop to R&B to Hip-Hop, pushing the boundaries, giving the world permission to syncopate, improvise, and integrate styles, to synthesize and sample, make somethin’ fresh. The music always the music, as soon as it’s born fading away, giving birth to somethin’ else and somethin’ new. Shedding skin like Damballah. New life. To the seventh generation. What then? What now?

  De Spain looked over, one earphone off his ear, listening to the room and the track at the same time, between their two sets of hands and the six instruments between them, every sound in the world, his beat in sync with hers, eyes locked, looking for the hand-off. Liberty had chosen life, but what then? How much time to bend it, stop it, speed it up, slow it down, slide or let it rumble? Startled by its syncopation, the shift in accent, holdin’ back on the strong beat, leanin’ heavy on the weak, producing the unexpected—surprise—this night, this dance, this song into the next into the next, she laid down a groove that surged into a wall of sound, that gospel effect irresistible, the crowd catching the spirit, erupting with an Ahhh . . . responding to her spin, the whole club her partner, conjuring souls with stomps and slides of their feet, the collective naturalized Soul. Everyone is there, in call and response, callin’ up the ancestors and wakin’ the yet to be born, the notes dancing in the air, a world without bounds at the tip of her fingers, the music, always the music.

  The Transvaal’s vast Drakenberg Mountains on the horizon, the two-wheeled cart toggled up the road. On the scenic Sani Pass, the car had broken down and rolled backwards on the winding road. After two hours in the blistering sun, they had been rescued by a donkey cart driver. Tokyo Walker just shook her head. I could just as well be in the eighteenth century as the twenty-first.

  Her career was down and out. Her R&B “classics” covered and sampled to death, but she couldn’t buy a gig. Her big hit, her signature, was a theme song for the presidential campaign. Think they’d let me sing it?! Who was she kidding? Back taxes and a reputation for bad behavior had trailed her all the way to Botswana. This was Jimmy’s cockamamie idea . . . I oughta fire my brother—again! Her comeback needed a new platform, James had said. “Broaden your outlook. We gotta go global.” She still had some presence on the world music market, he argued; blue-collar Liverpool white girls were forever copying her licks. Her backup band was already international, hailing from Morocco, Senegal, South Africa, and Brazil. Only the bass player and keyboardist were American, and they were both white. Her ’70s hit “Jump Up!” was a staple all over the continent.

  “Tokyo Walker’s Africa Tour.” It sounded like a good idea. Right! Twelve cities in three weeks. Rumbling planes, obtuse airport officials, from rain forests to sandstorms the size of Manhattan. Ostensibly she was on tour to raise awareness about Africa’s lost children, orphaned by disease, poverty, and war. While half the money she would make would go to settle the million-dollar debt she owed the federal government and she got to keep ten percent, the rest was to be entrusted to private, not-for-profit organizations her brother had identified. “Get you a couple of celebrity TV shows,” but she needed a charity. All I need right now is a drink. She had been straight for ten years, but still savored the memory. She was tired, broke, and alone. Funny, Alelia, her radical, hippie cousin, had settled with Raoul into a relatively ordinary, stable life. House, husband, daughter, named Liberty, of all things. What you got? Her Grammys, her fans, memories. No man. No children. She had never imagined that. Here she was at fifty, schlepping up a mountain in half a buckboard. She removed her tour logo baseball cap and held her face to the white noonday sun. The music has fed me. No cause to feel sorry for myself.

  Her escort, Dr. Kwetana, a young pediatrician from Umtata, looked like a child hims
elf. One leg braced on the side of the cart, he talked over his shoulder. “This is one of twelve safe houses of the Pathways Organization,” he said in a thick South African accent that bespoke Xhosa origins. “These children, products of the mines. Men far from home, women. The stigma of an orphan is unfortunately still a bad thing. Parents drink, use drugs, abuse the children—or their parents have AIDS. Once they know they’re going to die,” he said matter-of-factly, “they leave the children alone. They think, why spend money? It’s not going to do any good.” He shrugged, clicking his teeth.

  The cart slowed at the top of the hill and pulled up to an enclave of corrugated tin structures, squat, plain prefabricated buildings. The other side of the world. “They touch your hair, play with your ears,” he forewarned her as they disembarked. Despite herself, Tokyo was heartened by his earnestness. Suddenly the seemingly empty settlement came alive. “Bayeté! Bayeté! She coming!” A choir of barefoot children in navy blue and white uniforms, and their teachers, a gaggle of children, gathering around her, pressing in to touch her.

  “They just want somebody to love them,” Kwetana said as they entered a small room lined with cribs. “Here we are. Our latest arrival.” Before she knew it, the young doctor had picked up a swaddled infant and placed her in Tokyo’s arms.

  The baby was a golden hue, her face a glowing amber, her black eyes a cubist picture of reflected light. “Hello there . . .”

  “Her name is Monday,” Kwetana explained. “That is the day she arrived, so that is the day she was born to us.”

  Tokyo cradled the infant’s head in her elbow and sat in one of the clinic’s fragile folding chairs. “Monday?” Tokyo cooed, “Where you from, chile? Charleston, L.A., Chicagah?” and tickled the baby’s stomach, playing her piano game, “Abuja, Nairobi, Umtata!” With each changing note, the baby scrunched her tiny belly and gurgled with laughter. She fidgeted madly, her little fists in constant motion, her delicate graceful hands a miracle of architecture. Suddenly she grabbed Tokyo’s finger and held on, the eyes seeming, trying to focus. Tokyo gazed into those eyes, in those eyes all that had ever been and all that would be, and she began to sing.

  A Note on the Vernacular

  Capturing the nuances of African-American speech is always a challenge, and the particular voice patterns of the Carolina Sea Islands’ Gullah people—Geechee in our family—especially so. The patois on the outer, isolated islands off the coasts of South Carolina and Georgia derived from the blending of various African tongues with West Indian influences and the overarching lingua franca of Southern English. In earlier segments of the story we have tried to create a vernacular reflecting some of these influences without being too severe. Linguistic studies suggested using “em” for all third-person pronouns; however, since the Mayfields straddled house and field, giving them some exposure to standard English, we deferred to the use of the third-person pronoun without the possessive and the occasional dropping of the h from th. The choices could be maddening. In our matrilineal family tradition, we were always told that we were Geechee descendants. In contemporary studies, scholars of Gullah culture have decried the term “Geechee” as a derogatory expression. Thus we were faced with a dilemma at the outset of the tale. Do we honor the respected academic research or the testament of our grandmother and the truth of the story she told? In this fictive landscape of ours, how do we get to the truth of the language, the truth of the story?

  Since music is a theme, we thought it important to approach spoken passages with sound in mind and let the spelling follow. Hence, readers will encounter changes in language through time and in different situations. Characters modify speech patterns depending upon whom they are addressing and the emotions of the moment. Many early characters are emerging from pre-literate and semi-literate enslavement and Jim Crow constriction. We have allowed ourselves to hear what they say and let that guide the spelling; thus the dialect/dialongue is not standardized. For instance, “something” may appear as somethin’ and sumpin; “everybody” as ever’body, ev’body, eb’body; “brother” as spoken by the Reverend may appear as brothuh in the barbershop and brothah to signal a labor recruiter’s New England Yankee twang.

  We debated both going without dialect and standardizing it. We decided instead to allow for variation in hopes that the many voices we encountered would suggest the fluidity of language these people lived in as they made their way from enslavement to liberty and from the countryside to the city—as they struggled to find voice and to carve out and discover their identity. This fluidity is reflected in character names as well. A character’s family name, nickname, and outside name may change as individuals literally try on new selves with nomenclature. Betty is Miz Bette, Mah Bette, Ma Bette, Mother Betty, Bette, and Mauma. Eudora is Dora and Dora May. Alelia is also Leelee and Lia. And since two sisters wrote this book, our voices closely related yet distinct, we saw no reason to force a linguistic uniformity onto this family story. The small discrepancies in names and style may be read as tell-tale signs of individuality within the family, both the Mayfields and ours.

  In most sub-Saharan African languages, sound is paramount. As another character of mine once said, “L’epellation n’est pas importante. C’est le son qui est la verité.” Spelling is not important. The sound holds the truth. When in doubt, read aloud. It is a story meant to be spoken and sung as well as read.

  —IFA BAYEZA

  A Note on the Composition

  My sister Ifa and I have heard and felt and tasted and saw many of the same things for a long time. As children, we went to different schools yet always returned to the same colored household. We were the product of the South as well as of Northern education and worldly experience. Our ears are open to all kinds of dialects and manners. With Some Sing, Some Cry we traded off sections as if trading verses of a song or trading eights in blues or jazz. It was as natural as changing partners for turns during a mambo. The story is told in a voice that is the voice of the Mayfields as heard by two sisters listening carefully to their tune.

  —NTOZAKE SHANGE

  A Bibliographical Note

  For a fictional work spanning nearly two centuries, we consulted numerous sources. To set the timbre of various decades, we relied heavily on contemporaneous newspapers, journals, and letters. We also gleaned much from studying photographs and images, and from listening to the music when recordings were available. While the core of our story is based on the lore of family and friends, colorful and mysterious oral histories, our efforts got context and grounding from many excellent scholarly sources. A few tomes stand out in their invaluable specificity: James D. Anderson, The Education of Blacks in the South, 1860–1935; Leon F. Litwack, Trouble in Mind: Black Southerners in the Age of Jim Crow; Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household: Black and White Women of the Old South; Dorothy Sterling, editor, We Are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century; Bernard E. Powers, Jr., Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822–1885; Reid Badger, A Life in Ragtime: A Biography of James Reese Europe; David A. Jasen and Gene Jones, Spreadin’ Rhythm Around: Black Popular Songwriters, 1880–1930; Jeffrey Melnick, A Right to Sing the Blues: African Americans, Jews, and American Popular Song; Rosalyn M. Story, And So I Sing: African-American Divas of Opera and Concert; Tyler Stovall, Paris Noir: African Americans in the City of Light; Gregory A. Freeman, Lay This Body Down: The 1921 Murders of Eleven Plantation Slaves; Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York; and W. E. B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 and David Levering Lewis’s When Harlem Was in Vogue, which remain the definitive texts on these two vital eras.

  Acknowledgments

  First and foremost I want to thank my parents, Eloise and Paul Williams, who passed before this book reached publication. Without their stories and sense of history, I would not have been able to create the many characters in Some Sing, Some Cry. I hope they are as happy as Ifa and I are with the project’s completion. I especially want to thank Ifa Bayeza, my s
ister, for her remarkable creativity and diligence while working on this project. My sister Bisa Williams and my brother, Paul Williams, were patient and full of suggestions that Ifa and I took to heart and that enhanced our journey in bringing this story to life. I want to thank Cora Ledet for her wonderful work on the manuscript; I would like to give considerable attention to Claude E. Sloan’s meticulous care of the manuscript long before we went to print. As in all his work, Michael Denneny has assiduously applied his craft as an editor to every word in this novel. Thank you, Michael. And then there’s Lindsay Sagnette, editor at St. Martin’s Press, who pulled together all the various genres that make up the whole of Some Sing, Some Cry. I want to thank my agents Tim Seldes, Joy Azmitia, and Jesseca Salky for seeing me through the many years of this novel’s evolution. They hung in there with me. I’d like to graciously thank Mr. Witte for having kept the faith in us. And lastly, I want to thank my dear Savannah for her sense of humor and her deep appreciation of our rich and complex cultural history.

  —NTOZAKE SHANGE

  Individuals to thank, especially our editors: Michael Denneny, who took us on the maiden voyage, believed in the project, and fought hard to bring it to life over many years, never losing patience or the grander vision. My gratitude also to everyone at St. Martin’s Press, especially George Witte, editor in chief, and our editor, Lindsay Sagnette, for their palpable excitement about the work, as well as managing editor Amelie Littell and copy editor India Cooper for their tender treatment of the manuscript. To literary agent extraordinaire Tim Seldes, and the entire staff of Russell & Volkening, Inc., especially Jesseca Salky and Joy Azmitia.