by Rod Davis
The bartender, probably a UNO student, reached up to a tape deck behind the bar and put in another cassette. It was Miles Davis. Jean-Pierre glanced over. He wondered if the tape was for him, the only customer, or if the bartender, a white guy, was into jazz himself. You never knew. Jean-Pierre had refused to believe Clint Eastwood liked jazz, and when it turned out to be true, it made him rethink his own position on it. But it was African whether Clint Eastwood liked “Bird” or not.
Jean-Pierre considered that an important lesson in the maturation of his own taste, and he used that example of Eastwood many times in his classes at Metairie High to tell students that art is not dependent on the beholder, but on the artist. If it were the other way around, artists could never create, because they would live in terror of encouraging evil, or of comforting it.
Gus waved from across the lounge as he came up. Jean-Pierre glanced at his watch. Houston wasn’t late; he was right on time. That was good. It showed respect. Jean-Pierre made respect a fulcrum of his pedagogy and of his life.
“Have any trouble getting a table?”
Jean-Pierre laughed in spite of himself. “I had to wait for this window, though.”
Houston sat opposite him and signaled to the bartender to bring a beer.
“I appreciate your coming.”
“No problem.”
“Talk to your mother lately?”
“She called me early this morning to ask me to help her with some insurance forms for Paulus.”
Houston looked at him, then up at a satellite soccer game on the TV mounted over the bar. He nodded and shook his head. “He seems to be pretty much healed up, considering.”
“Considering they damn near killed him.”
“Yeah, considering that.”
There was a silence.
“Your mother says it was the Delgados.”
“She says right.”
The bartender came over and put the beer down. Jean-Pierre covered the top of his glass with his hand. The bartender smiled and moved off. Miles was gliding into trumpet sex.
“So what’s this big idea?” Jean-Pierre leaned back in his chair.
Houston took the cue to change the subject. He looked at Jean-Pierre, smirked a little, as if talking to himself, and then spread his palms open before him. “You might think this is crazy, but I want to put a choir from Miss Angelique’s in the Gospel Tent at Jazzfest.”
Jean-Pierre’s face didn’t move, but one of his eyebrows arched.
“Yeah. And I want you to help me set it up.”
Jean-Pierre crossed his arms. Eyebrow still raised.
“Also, I want you to be the choir director. And train them. You’d be paid well.”
Jean-Pierre nodded slowly. “Anything else?”
“That’s a pretty good start.”
Jean-Pierre uncrossed his arms and reached for his beer. He heard himself laugh softly. It was an odd instant. He realized he was simultaneously slightly offended, intrigued, and even excited.
He grasped Houston’s idea thoroughly. It was big. It was crazy. It was also pretty close to brilliant. Where this white man with the vague past was coming from with this idea was open to wildly contradictory interpretations, but if Jean-Pierre’s mother saw something in him other than a blue aura, maybe Jean-Pierre could give him the benefit of the doubt, too.
Jean-Pierre laughed—a full baritone, his church voice laugh. Although he was shorter than his rangy, dark-haired companion, he was stockier and probably stronger. When he laughed, the volume filled up any room he was in, and when he sang, as he had done in almost every major church choir in town in the last decade, he could see the power in his voice in the faces of everyone within his sight. He could see the glow above the audiences as he pushed the melody up the mountain like a giant moving a boulder as though it were a pebble.
Sometimes he thought he could sing like Miles Davis could play, though that was vanity and he was quick to suppress such thoughts. As a choir director to many of the churches in which he had sung, he had learned to push his energies and his ambitions and his ego through the voices of others. In that, he had felt closer to God than in using his own voice. He didn’t know why, but it was true. He was a good and natural teacher, and that also was his soul’s mission. All these were. He was laughing so loud the bartender turned to look.
“You’re right,” he said at last to Houston, who had been watching him with a quizzical expression and pursed lips. “You are crazy.”
“I knew you couldn’t resist,” Houston said, turning suddenly to look over his shoulder, which is where Jean-Pierre’s gaze seemed to be directed. But no one was there.
15
Bonita had seen St. Jude’s Lamb of God from the outside many times on her way to Corina’s church services next door, but today was the first time she’d stepped inside. Although the March norther was bitter, the inside of the little store was so warm it nearly choked her. Gus always said Corina’s thermostat was 180 degrees different from everyone else’s. Bonita unbuttoned her old Navy pea coat at once. Oddly, it made her shiver to feel the warmth.
“My mother say have a seat, she be right out.” Bonita recognized the boy Paulus from church.
“No hurry.” Looking at the boy’s still discolored face, she felt she had to say more. “How you feelin’?”
“I feel pretty good.” He looked down in what she realized was a kind of male shyness. She realized he was looking at the way her breasts swelled in her red sweater. She’d seen the look three or four million times a night at The Hellhole, and rarely thought about it. But Paulus’s look was not rapacious. Lustful, but in a curious, innocent way. She did not mind, and was sorry he felt self-conscious.
“Well, that’s something that takes a long time to get better. One time my brother got his jaw broke in a car wreck and he looked all black and blue from his neck to the top of his head for weeks, but then it all faded out and you’d never have known it ever happened.”
“I’ve been able to eat again. That’s the main thing.”
“Well, your face won’t be that way much longer.” She caught herself. “I mean it’s already gotten a lot better since the last time I saw you.”
He shrugged and looked over his shoulder. The door in the small hallway in the rear was open. Wisps of incense floated out. Paulus left the counter and went back to the room. After looking in, he came forward again. “She say she ready now.”
Bonita picked up her jacket and walked around the counter, following Paulus. He stopped short of the door and bade her continue. He smiled again, shyly, as she passed.
When she reached the open door, she stopped for far too long. It was very plain, very white, except for pictures on the wall and plates full of dead things along the baseboards. The woman she knew as the Reverend Youngblood was sitting behind a small desk, watching her closely. Bonita knew she had to go on inside. Then she heard a quiet laugh.
“You in the right place, darlin’. Come here and sit.”
Bonita felt her feet move forward. The incense filled her lungs. It did not make her cough. It made her feel like she was in space. She sat in a chair to one side of the desk. Reverend Youngblood was explaining something about the “spirits” and “feeding” them and why crabs were on one of the plates and the heads of some kind of bird on another.
Bonita was glad the incense was so strong. A Bible was open on the table, next to a clear goblet of water. The reverend wore a simple blue dress—nothing weird or strange, except maybe the white lace shawl around her head and neck.
“You nervous, child. Relax. You never been in a reading before, and you from Louisiana?”
Bonita looked into the eyes of the woman across the desk. Those eyes were very dark. But to Bonita’s surprise, they were not the eyes of evil. She felt herself breathe for the first time. “You have to excuse me, Reverend,” she said. “I’ve be
en to palm readers and like that but I don’t believe I’ve ever seen anything like this.”
“This is the room of the Spirits, and of the Lord,” the reverend said. “I use all the help I can get to help people. These are the santos,” she said, indicating some iron pots and other statues Bonita had never seen before. “That one there the one belong to me—Ogun. A very powerful spirit.”
Bonita nodded. “It’s just that I was raised a Catholic—”
“I know that, child. You don’t got nothing to fear. Half the people come in here good Catholics, too, and Baptists, Pentecostals. I get everyone.”
“But we were told not to be around hoodoo.”
The reverend’s face seemed to tighten slightly. “I don’t be doing no hoodoo in this place.”
“Well, I guess I thought that’s what this was.”
“It ain’t no hoodoo. This is the santos. They the one and only Spirits from Africa, come to America with the slaves. And now the children of the slaves finding the Spirits again. That’s what this is. Those old ladies in the church and most white people all they see is hoodoo but the santos is different. Santos the power of the Lord. Don’t you see this Bible in front of me?”
Bonita nodded.
“You think I be letting anything in my church or my body don’t work with the Lord Jesus Christ? Santos all work together. Jesus is above all of them but they all part of the Lord.” She looked at Bonita. “You understand that?”
Bonita glanced around the room, then at the Bible, then at the Reverend Corina Youngblood. She was breathing quite normally again, and though her face was still flushed, it was from the excessive heating and not from the fear that had inflamed it before. She hated herself for being such a priss. She had seen things in her life she’d bet even this preacher would have trouble digesting. It had caught her off-balance, is all.
“I didn’t mean to be that way.”
“Spirit brought you here, no point fighting with it.”
“I guess I know that.”
“Good. Now we get started. You got your money?”
Almost eagerly, Bonita pulled thirty-five dollars from the pocket of her black jeans. Gus had told her about the fee. She had wanted to be prepared and not look like a fool about money, same as in a dope deal.
“No,” said Corina, pushing her extended hand back. “Hold the money in your right hand and make a fist.” Bonita did. Corina closed her red Bible. “Now open it to anywhere you want.” Bonita did. It fell on Ruth in the Old Testament. “Now run your finger down the page and let it move till you ready for it to stop.”
Bonita extended her finger, and stopped as requested.
“‘C,’” said Corina, looking at a boldfaced letter at the beginning of a paragraph. She wrote the letter on a small white pad. Then she closed her eyes for a moment. Her expression seemed slightly troubled. When she opened her eyes, she gently took Bonita’s hand and removed the money. She put the money on the table next to the Bible. “The money lay there for success,” she explained.
Then Corina recited a Biblical passage which Bonita did not recognize. She thought she heard her say something like “Trough of God” but she wasn’t sure.
For the next half hour, Corina, no longer “the Reverend” in Bonita’s mind, not in this room, dropped in and out of focus. Sometimes she appeared to be talking to Bonita, and sometimes to voices she called by strange African names. In her own voice, or sometimes in a low growling voice, she told Bonita Rae Doucet all about herself. Most of it she got right. When she was done, she asked if Bonita wanted to know anything.
Bonita hesitated.
Corina smiled. “Spirit say try again.”
“I just wondered . . . if I’m able to.”
Corina closed her eyes for two minutes or more. Bonita felt uncomfortable. Eyes still closed, she said, “Spirit say something keeping you in your period. Spirit say you don’t want your period but you have it. Spirit say you not ready. Spirit say—” she stopped, head dropped back on her shoulders. “Spirit say you need to know if that man love you before you have his baby.”
“He loves me.”
“Spirit say he don’t know that.”
“Does the Spirit say it’s not true?”
“Spirit say it might be true, or not, but he don’t know. Spirit say that why you keep your period. Because it not the time.”
Corina’s eyes closed again. Her hands tightened on the edges of the Bible. “Then ‘C’ is for child, Lord? Not for that other? Why you try to trick me like this, Jesus, when I still don’t know what you mean the first time?”
Her eyelids opened. Bonita had never seen such a powerful and beautiful brown. But they were not focused on anything or anyone in the room. In a moment, Corina’s hands loosened and she let them rest flat on the table. She was speaking to Bonita again, as though she had been all along.
“You know, that Houston man have some Spirit after him, I think. I see him strong around you and I been having him strong around me, too. But I know this, child, you not gonna have no baby with that man right away. Spirits looking after you—Huh!” Her head lurched again. “Spirit say you have good soul in you and nobody put a baby in you until they cleared.”
She opened her eyes and shook her head. “I never have seen that before, like that, child. That clear.” She moved one hand across the Bible and took Bonita’s slender fingers. “You be well blessed today.”
As soon as Bonita walked out the door, the cold, damp wind reminded her she had been perspiring. She tugged her pea coat tight against the shivers, but on the way to work she kept her window rolled down. It was as if she couldn’t take the air in fast enough.
Picking the girls was the easiest part. Miss Angelique’s had included voice training and chorale as a part of its curriculum for years. It was a popular choice, perhaps because so many of the girls were musically inclined and perhaps because being in choir was a solid way of getting out of sixth period study hall and a good way to take trips to Atlanta, Chicago, and Dallas, the cities in which Miss Angelique’s choir had annual competitive appearances. Nor were they a rowdy bunch, judging by the standards set by their peers within the Academy. If anything, the choir members were considered more or less among the school normals, and, since the music often veered into the seasonally religious, often as not they were reasonably pious, too.
The hard part was convincing them they should get on stage in the Gospel Tent at Jazzfest. Not just get on stage, but crowd around the rear of the tent and generally mingle with the ensembles from black churches throughout the city and even the South.
“We’ll be the only white girls there,” Cissy Otterton said. “Mr. Houston, I don’t mean that racially, I just mean we’ll stand out and look like a bunch of freaks.”
“Some of those black girls are mean,” said Betsy Druford. “Look, I grew up five blocks from here and you just don’t go and do something like this and pretend it’s not a problem.”
“They don’t like us because we’re white and also they think we’re a bunch of snobs. Mr. Houston, they hate us.” That was Cissy again.
All fifteen were talking, but Cissy and Betsy more than the others. Maybe because they were the seniors. Gus was letting them talk. He figured the main thing was to let people who were being forced to do something against their better judgment get all the hard feelings out of their system first. He had observed in the Army, and also in the World, that people were willing to do all sorts of things if they felt like they had put in their two cents. It was saying what they wanted that seemed to matter more than the doing. Gus knew people just naturally liked to bitch. But he wasn’t sure if that was going to cut it this time.
“I just don’t think you can make us do this, and I haven’t even talked to my mother yet,” said Cindy Duchamps, of the Garden District Duchamps.
“Oh, come on,” said a new voice—Charlotte Percy, a brunette
junior who also played on the school basketball team. “Y’all act like you’ve never been to Jazzfest or for that matter never been outside this school. I’ve been to basketball games over in the east that were scary. This isn’t anything. It’s just going and singing. And anyway, it’s like church or something. Plus Jazzfest is fun and after we can go around to everything else for free. So what’s the fucking deal?”
Silence.
“You don’t have to curse.”
“I wasn’t cursing.”
“You said ‘fucking’.”
“‘Fucking’ isn’t cursing.”
“Yeah, right.”
“‘Fucking’ is what you do with Jimmy.”
Cindy Duchamps didn’t move, or throw her books, or anything, which is what Gus had expected. She simply glared at Charlotte Percy. It was a glare Gus had learned to recognize in New Orleans social circles. It meant that the person being glared at was henceforth a nonperson. Response to the causative insult was no longer necessary because the person making the insult was no longer in existence. New Yorkers only knew of the “drop dead” look. Gus had received that one a couple of times during his brief adventures in the advertising trade. In the South the sequence jumped far past mere cessation of life. The death had occurred, the funeral been attended, the earth folded over the coffin, and the headstone moldy with years—all this was implied in the look Cindy flicked toward Charlotte. And even though they were only sixteen and seventeen, it would be generations before anyone in their respective families would have much to do with one another except in required business and financial affairs.
So Gus figured Cindy was off his list. He only needed eight girls anyway, according to Jean-Pierre. He could see natural attrition taking care of the roster all by itself.
The discussion went on for an hour. To his surprise, Cissy wanted to stay, which was good, because she had a beautiful alto that could hold a hymn right in its place. Charlotte agreed, also, and Betsy and Tina Smythe and Marie Graham. In the end, ten of the fifteen agreed to work up a medley in time for Jazzfest. Gus told them only eight could be on the final squad, but that two could be alternates.
