An hour later Rosetta arrived at the Alley Cat, where Andre let her in. Empty of its patronage, the club had an empty, lonesome quality to it. Marty waved at her from the only table that didn’t have its chairs stacked on top of it. Next to him another white man was twisting a red handkerchief in his large hands. Andre left her and headed into the dark, silent recesses behind the stage.
Rosetta sat down. “What’s going on?”
Marty made a face. “It’s Minnie. The SPC picked her up last night over in Bridgeport.”
“Bridgeport! What was she doing over there?” Actually, it would be just like Minnie to run off and do something stupid like that.
“We’ve been patrolling the place, my friends and I,” the man said, not looking at her. “We found her at this patch of stumps. She . . . we . . . aw, hell. We were threatening her. Just wanted to scare her, really. We weren’t gonna do anything serious. But she got scared, so she sang.”
“She what? In front of the stumps?” She glared at the man. “You’re lucky you’re not dead!”
“Yeah . . . that’s the thing. We didn’t die. No convulsions, no coughing up blood. Even your friend was fine, and she wasn’t even wearing a face mask. But the stump that burst . . . we saw . . . we saw.”
Haltingly he told the story of Rose Haskell, how he saw everything in her life, right up to how she and her children died at the hands of a mob.
Rosetta listened, her hands pressed to her mouth. “And all of you saw this? Even Minnie?”
“Yeah. She was pretty sure it was her singing that did it. Otherwise we would’ve been dead.”
“But the SPC told us to sing only enough to make the stumps burst. They said anything more and it would be too dangerous!” She turned to Marty. “Did you know about this?”
He dropped his gaze, started playing with the brim of his hat.
“You . . . did . . . know,” she said in slow disbelief.
“What you and Minnie saw is called ‘residual memory.’” Marty spoke in a low voice, not looking up from his hat. “It’s the last form stump dust takes after it’s been rendered inert by an exterminator’s voice. Once the memory gets played, it just becomes useless dust. Our job as handlers was to gather the stump dust before it became residual memory.”
“H-how long have you’ve known?”
“Since my first day. At the time I thought nothing of it. I wasn’t paid to think. All I had to do was keep quiet and do my job.” He glanced at the other man. “Then I heard about your exterminator. Seems he also found out the stumps’ secret by accident. The SPC took him in and he was never seen since.”
“And now they got Minnie,” Rosetta said, her voice hard. “But you still haven’t said why the SPC would do this. Why all the secrecy? Why are they doing this?”
Marty dropped his eyes again. “I don’t know.”
The man cleared his throat, twisting the handkerchief so tight it was close to tearing. “’Scuse me, but your friend? She gave me a message for you. She said . . . to tell you to sing to the stumps.”
She stared at him. “What?”
“She said to sing to the stumps. It’s somethin’ you’re supposed to do. Like your momma told you to.”
It was as if a ghostly finger plucked her insides.
The man rose. “Look, I need to get home.” He hesitated, then said in a rush, “If you ever find your friend, tell her . . . tell her I owe her a drink.” With that, he left. Minnie would see it as an apology. It did, after all, involve alcohol.
Assuming they could find Minnie.
“Where are they holding her now?” Rosetta asked Marty. “And don’t you dare say, ‘I don’t know.’”
He said, resigned, “They would have taken her to the lower levels. It’s . . . it’s where I’m also supposed to take you. In fact, my orders were to bring you in last night.”
“But you didn’t.”
He squirmed, which made him look younger. Rosetta stood up and hollered toward the stage. “Hey, Andre!”
He emerged, rubbing his hands with a rag. “Yeah. What’s up?”
“We’re going to the SPC and I need your help.” She gave Marty a hard look. “Both of you. We’re gonna do some warfare of our own.”
Rosetta kept her eyes fixed on the road as Marty raced his Ford toward the SPC. She clenched the door handle tight, as if she could add every ounce of her strength to make the car go faster. Every so often Marty glanced over toward her.
“You all right?”
“I’m fine.”
He stayed quiet for a couple of minutes. “You sure you want to do this? I mean . . . think about Minnie—”
“Minnie can take care of herself,” Rosetta snapped. “We need to do this first. I need to do this.”
Marty clammed up. Rosetta focused her attention back on the road and her rage.
The SPC had used her. All that talk of being careful with her voice, the throat checks, the admonishments to always be careful not to sing. All this time, it was a lie. No—worse than a lie. It was a cover-up of epic proportions. And she had been complicit in it, using her guilt over her mother’s death, her own faith—her own faith—to justify the SPC’s work.
By nature Rosetta considered herself a joyful soul: quick to smile, slow to anger. But now she was startled to discover that a furious rage had been slowly building inside of her. Rage at the SPC, at herself, at Marty. And she had liked Marty. He always found some way to make her laugh. He had been so considerate of her since her first day on the job.
She hadn’t felt such betrayal since the day Thomas beat her when she told him about the Cotton Club job.
The street leading to the SPC was closed off by police. Marty showed them his SPC badge and indicated he was bringing Rosetta in per their request. The police waved him through but warned him, “Got some folks angry about the quarantine. I suggest you get some of the security guards to help you. It’s not a pleasant sight.”
Indeed, the place was in chaos. A crowd of men—and a few women—stood in the street outside the SPC, shouting at the security guards lining the entrance. Several bodies lay on the ground, eyes fixed in death, frothy blood streaming from their mouths and noses. The guards wore heavy gas masks, similar to the one Rosetta used in extermination.
And everywhere were stumps. The sidewalk and street were littered with misshapen clumps of them growing together, like the strangest game of Freeze Tag. As she watched, a guard lifted what looked like a tube to his shoulder. There was a dull whump as something shot out of the other end to land several yards away in a burst of smoke. The crowd scattered to the other side of the street, but one or two stumbled. They dropped to the ground, their bodies jerking and seizing as they tried to claw at the rags tied around their faces; then they stilled.
From the smoke a shapeless mass began to form. By the time Marty pulled up it had sprouted several arms, a foot, and the head of a small child sightlessly gaping at the sky.
Rosetta’s gut crawled. Now she knew what the quarantine was for. The SPC was turning stumps into weapons and wanted to test them out. She wished she could swear like Minnie.
“Get me as close to the sidewalk as you can,” she told Marty. “Put us between them and the crowd.”
Marty did so, muttering, “I sure hope this works.”
There was an electric feeling in the air, something like Rosetta used to feel before coming onstage to do a concert, but this felt tense, simmering with anger. As she emerged from the car someone shouted, “Sister! Sister Rosetta Tharpe!”
She recognized Lawler’s voice; he had one of Minnie’s face masks strapped on, but it was undoubtedly him. He shouted at her, “They won’t let me in to see Minnie!”
“We’ll see about that,” Rosetta shouted back. She hiked up her dress a bit and hoisted herself onto the hood of the Ford. Every eye instantly riveted on her. Good, she still knew how to play a crowd. Ignoring Marty’s horrified face as the hood groaned and buckled under her boots, she surveyed the scene, hands on her hips
.
One of the guards moved toward her, his voice hissing from his gas mask: “Miss Tharpe . . . Miss Tharpe . . . come down. We’ll have someone escort you inside. It’s too dangerous out here.”
She turned her back on him and addressed the crowd. “What’s this I’m hearing about a quarantine? The stumps are getting outta control? Is that right?” Rosetta was never the sort to need a microphone to make herself heard. She turned so that she could include the guards. “Stumps kill. We all know that. We see their handiwork now. But I just found out something that makes me question all that. Y’all know Memphis Minnie, right?”
A few cheers rose from the crowd. Most, however, exchanged confused looks, including the guards.
“Well, let me tell you, she learned something she shouldn’t have and now the SPC’s went and took her in, and we got this quarantine. Coincidence? I don’t know. But like my momma always said, strange things are happening every day.”
She gave a signal to Marty, who stuck Minnie’s National guitar out the window.
The sight of the guitar elicited a response from both sides: the crowd crying out and scrambling back, the guards moving forward, yelling at her to stop. Rosetta settled the guitar around herself and strummed. Andre had set up the amp to run from Marty’s battery in his car, and the effect was powerful. The chord jangled into the air, electric and glassy and just a little bit off-key.
“I don’t know about you,” she boomed, “but I think it’s gonna rain.”
She was no longer at the SPC but back in church, six years old, dressed in her pink pinafore and her hair braided in four pigtails with pink barrettes, standing on an old piano while Momma beamed at her from below as she strummed on her mandolin.
Sing, baby girl, Momma said back then.
And so she did. She launched into the old spiritual “Didn’t It Rain,” gospeled up her style. She made that guitar talk, riffing and jamming, her fingers dancing over the strings. She called out. “Didn’t it rain, children?” and then responded to herself. “Yes!”
“Didn’t it?”
“Yes!”
“Oh, didn’t it? Didn’t it rain? Yes!”
Rosetta could never get a straight answer on what happened next. Marty said one of the guards panicked. Lawler said no, the guard knew exactly what he was doing. All Rosetta knew was that one moment she was so deep in her music, the next something struck her in the center of her chest, knocking her off the hood of the car. As she tumbled, she gasped, and it was like breathing in tiny sparks of hot embers—
Yu Lan Lin lugs her suitcase down Cermak Avenue in Chinatown. Though many of the street signs and buildings are in her familiar Mandarin, she doesn’t know which street would take her to her uncle’s apartment. She squints at the piece of paper which holds his address, then up at the buildings pressed against each other. In a small way, it reminds her of Beijing—
A rough hand wraps around her mouth before she has time to scream. More hands drag her into an alley. Cold, sharp metal presses against her neck . . . and disappears just as quickly. The hands let go of Yu Lan, who drops to her knees, dimly aware of someone fighting off her attackers.
“You wanna mug poor defenseless girls? You gotta go through me first!”
The attackers run off, and the young man turns to help Yu Lan up. “They won’t be bothering you again.”
“Thank you,” Yu Lan starts to say, then stops. The young man in front of her looks half Chinese, wears a well-tailored shirt and trousers, and is clearly not a man.
“They call me Rita,” she says. “My pops run this place. Where do you need to go?”
Yu Lan will die of pneumonia a year later, but her time spent with Rita Moy, daughter of the unofficial mayor of Chinatown, would be considered the best year of her life.
And Rosetta found herself flat on her back, staring up at the sky, her chest heaving . . . but alive. She sat up and the crowd gasped. Rosetta could barely believe it herself. There was no hint of pain or seizures. Her head was clear, albeit filled with joy rides and the warmth of Rita’s arm across her shoulders. Rosetta rose, brushed the powdery remains of stump dust off herself.
“We’ve been doing this all wrong,” she said, scooping up the guitar. “We’re supposed to sing them down. That’s all they want.” She went to a stump. This one was an older-looking black man, crude cap and overalls just beginning to form. She found her fingering, began singing again. This time, when it burst, she was prepared—
Lawrence Jameson has worked almost fifty years in construction. He’s proud of his work, though sometimes he had to fight to get jobs. But he’s a man of integrity. He’s on a building now, hauling a wooden plank on his shoulders, walking a girder forty-one stories up with the ease of a man walking across a fallen log . . . until his foot slips and his stomach flip-flops as he loses his balance, falling through the air—
And was Rosetta back and whirling over to another stump—
And she was a runner for Al Capone drowning in the Chicago River and she was an old woman dying in bed after days of battling a hard cough and she was a young woman pausing from scrubbing a tub to listen to her children’s laughter and she was a homeless man beaten in an alley . . .
For this was what the gospel was supposed to be. It was never about fear. It was about going to those all alone in darkness and bringing them light. Gospel was voices lifted in song, the open-throated cry of joy. It was water bent toward parched lips, the tears and laughter bubbling from reunited friends. It was standing in front of the church and proclaiming, “I don’t care what you’ve done. You are always welcome here.”
“Rain!” she sang, spinning in the street.
“RAIN!” she shouted, her voice echoing off the buildings.
“RAIN!” she thundered, and the crowd swarmed past her, past Marty’s car, past the guards—who had removed their masks and had the shell-shocked look of survivors who didn’t expect to live through a fire.
In plucks and chords and harmonies, she brought those stumps to church, spun their memories into riffs and chords, and sang them out for everyone to hear.
“Rosetta!”
It took her a moment to recognize Marty shaking her arm. “You can stop now. Look! The stumps are all gone.”
She coughed with a dry throat—it had been too long since she had sung. “Where’s Lawler?”
“He booked it into the SPC a while ago.” As he spoke, Rosetta could hear shouting and the shattering of glass coming from inside the building.
“Well, then.” Rosetta pulled her Gibson out of the car and gave it a strum. Somewhere her momma was smiling. “Now we can go get Minnie.”
In her later years, an older, thinner Memphis Minnie would sit and cackle over what she called “the Storming of the SPC.”
“Oh, it was a riot,” she would say in interviews. “All the SPC people running around like chickens with their heads cut off. They put me in a room and then get all panicky and put me in another room. I had no idea what was going on. Whoooo-ee! I didn’t know if it was a jailbreak or Mardi Gras.”
What she never told the interviewers, or anyone else for that matter, was when Minnie was finally found by Lawler and Rosetta—Lawler punching out lab coats right and left and Rosetta singing “When the Saints Come Marchin’ In” at the top of her lungs—she had to press her face into the wall so no one could see her cry.
The FBI was called in to investigate the illegal activities of the SPC: spreading stump spores in poor neighborhoods and analyzing the results, kidnappings, extortion, experimentation on homeless people. Eventually Minnie and Rosetta were asked to help the government put together a new stump elimination program, one that focused more on allowing the stumps to release their memories safely. They agreed, but with one condition.
“So that’s how we got Andre his club back,” Rosetta told a group of partygoers.
She and Minnie were at the newly reopened Alley Cat. Andre had begged both Rosetta and Minnie to sing. He had even presented Rosetta with her own
electric guitar: a National Triolian, similar to Minnie’s.
So for the first time Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Memphis Minnie jammed onstage together, Rosetta with her high chants, Minnie with her low growls. They sang until one in the morning, when they both came down to take a break and let others take the stage.
“Damn straight,” Minnie said. “Way I see it, if the SPC is gonna pay me to sing, and I mean really sing, I’m gonna jump on that shit.”
“I thought you didn’t like following their rules.”
“I can too. When they make sense.”
“Mind if I join?” Marty came to their table, his tie loose, carrying a couple of glasses. Rosetta rose to her feet.
“Actually, I’m going to do some more singing. You two can talk without me.” Rosetta avoided Marty’s eyes as she headed toward the stage.
Marty sighed as he sat down. “She’s not going to forgive me, is she?”
“Can’t blame her. Your testimony may have done some good, but you gotta long way to get her trust back.” Minnie gave him a wide grin. “And we loooove holdin’ on to our grudges.”
Onstage, Rosetta strapped on her Triolian. “I’m gonna need someone to help me. Anyone know ‘Up Above My Head’?”
“I do,” another woman called out. She was ushered onto the stage. She had sweet eyes and a sweet smile.
“Well, then, let’s see if you can keep up!”
Rosetta launched into song. The woman at first was hesitant, but then as she became more comfortable grew more animated, trading lyrics with Rosetta with all the confidence of a well-seasoned singer. Their two voices fit each other like two peas in a pod, the woman’s strong contralto wrapping itself effortlessly around Rosetta’s high soprano. Minnie sat up straighter, noticing that other people were watching, spellbound.
Well, damn me if they don’t got something there . . .
If the room hadn’t been loud before, it certainly erupted when they finished. Rosetta whooped and grabbed the woman’s hands.
The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2019 Page 24
