Night Song

by John A. Williams

  Here sat a few Keels and Dellas. Keel wondered if they had ever been afflicted the way he and Della had. Probably not. Couldn’t generalize that way. Dangerous and foolish. What stage might they be in? The feeling one another out stage? The comfortable stage where each knew what the other was thinking and when, almost? The you’re using me stage? Or the one human to another stage, the one lover to another stage?

  To hell with them.

  Wait. What about the I hate you stage—when you meant it?

  Keel ordered another beer. He could not help looking at the mixed couples, not with that belligerence that some of them seemed to sense, when looked at, but out of curiosity. Did they look intelligent? Did they have a kind of impervious strength about them which gave them a detached beauty? This is what Keel looked for. He wondered, when he had completed his survey, if he and Della looked as cool, as unconcerned as these people did. He guessed so.

  But now Eagle, even half-zonked, knew something was wrong. Keel knew he could never use as an excuse the fact that Della was the only woman this had happened with. Eagle and the others would laugh him right into the river, though they would expect him to take it with a smile. Their world, his too now, was a tough one. Even mercy and kindness were camouflaged in sarcasm, irony, or a bellicose pessimism. But what Eagle and the others thought or said worried him only slightly. Most of his being was concentrated on finding the solution to the almost nightly humiliation he suffered with Della.

  Why? Think!

  It had never happened before and until last year hadn’t happened at all. The same pride that had carried Keel through Harvard Divinity and then caused him to pass his neatly folded clerical robes to his parents—his thin, austere father and equally severe mother, both of whom had tried to run all their lives from what they were—made him want to solve this problem too by himself. His father, a bishop, had not been half as much interested in religion as in the position it brought him. His mother had enhanced it through clubs, socials, and charities; all these allowed her to be a bigger person than she was. His parents had wanted this for Keel, and he had once assumed he had a right to it. But somewhere in his studies the very hollowness of the religion practiced by his father and his parishioners—by too many people—became nauseous and superficial; when belief became institutionalized, the seeking ended. Keel solved that problem by leaving the ministry.

  He finished a second beer and started out, passing a rather popular novelist and his entourage coming in. He walked east along Christopher Street to Greenwich, then over to 8th, where he spotted Stanley Crane. Keel tried to ease by the jazz critic but failed.

  “Keel, how are you?” Crane was tall and thin and wore tortoiseshell glasses. His smile was friendly, even bashful; but he was abhorred by the musicians he wrote about, though the uninitiated in jazz adored him for his dynamic descriptions, his intimate knowledge of the greats. Keel knew him as an unabashed leech who was forever prying into the lives of the musicians. Crane had enough sense to know when he was being put on, but this putting-on, a truth somewhat wide of its mark, was what he had to pass along to his readers. He wanted the truth—if he could get it. He had developed a bitterness to match that of the musicians. Why couldn’t he get a break on stories? Because he was white? It wasn’t his fault there weren’t any Negro jazz critics. What, were they going to take it all out on him?—Black nationalism. For the past three years Crane had been working on a biography of Lester Young, but hadn’t gotten too much information from the people who had worked with him. He still tried.

  Sometimes he was ignored, sometimes rebuffed and even, sometimes, treated as a human being. This always surprised Crane. He was more apt to be prepared for an attack. Like Rod Tolen, he had taken his share of punches from disgruntled musicians but like Rod too had been forced to admit that they had had reasons for being disgruntled. At least this is what he had told them.

  Keel told Crane he was fine.

  “How’s Della?”

  Keel told Crane she was fine.

  “Going to the shop?” Crane asked pleasantly.

  Keel told Crane he was.

  Crane fell in beside him and they walked a few paces without speaking until Crane asked, “What’s this I hear about Eagle?”

  Keel looked at him. Vulture, he thought. “What do you mean?”

  “I hear he was strung out last night—but good.”

  “No.”

  “At Candy’s?”

  “No.”

  Their hardened rubber heels knocked against the walks of the almost deserted street. A powdery snow had begun to fall, which, caught up by light gusts of wind, rose from the streets and rushed and twirled in the air.

  “Where’s he now?”

  “I don’t know,” Keel lied. He knew Crane knew he was lying, which was what he wanted. This was the putting-on.

  Crane changed the subject. “He hasn’t been sounding good lately, know what I mean?” His look sought confirmation.

  “Sounds all right to me,” Keel answered. He could picture Della rising to meet him when he entered the shop.

  “No, no,” Crane insisted.

  Keel stopped and without comment stared into the window of a furniture store. Crane was right. Eagle, the last year, had been sounding plaintive, almost whiny on his ax. Sometimes the old fire came and he soared, blew everyone off the stand, but that seldom happened anymore. The tone was still there, the shape, the echo of it, but it was hollow. Only Crane didn’t need his confirmation to know that Eagle too was being beaten.

  Keel turned from the window and they continued walking, half-bent before the wind.

  “You don’t agree?” Crane persisted.

  “To what?”

  “That Eagle doesn’t sound good these days.”

  “He sounds all right to me,” Keel insisted again. Keel knew that whatever critics like Crane felt about Eagle they could never be sure until they had amassed a variety of opinion in their favor; and that opinion could only come from the hostile musicians. Eagle had left a lot of them around the country, guys he hadn’t paid or only half-paid, guys he had allowed to join him on the stand only to be blasted off by some number Eagle devised on the spot called, for want of a better name, “Pow!” The number usually began in some ridiculous key at an ass-breaking tempo. And so the guys who thought they could blow with Eagle were wiped out. Publicly. Humiliatingly. There were also the guys whose wives or girl friends had always been on Eagle—those weird ones who thought a contact, an intimate one with him, would enhance them.

  There were a lot of hostile people around who would and could knock Eagle, Keel thought. Crane didn’t need him too.

  Keel entered the shop, Crane behind him. “Hey,” Keel said to Della and Hillary, sitting together drinking coffee.

  “Ho,” Hillary answered.

  “Hi, baby,” Della said. She looked anxiously at him and rose. “Cool it. I’ll bring some hot coffee right out.” Without waiting for his answer—she anticipated a refusal—she went to the kitchen. Crane looked inside the Musicians’ Room. “Nobody here,” he said.

  “Too cold, too early,” Keel said, without looking up. To Hillary he said, “Eagle’s all right?”

  Hillary, taking his cue from Keel’s soft voice, said quietly, “He’s sleeping now.”

  “Good.” Keel lapsed into silence.

  “You look beat,” Hillary said, when Della had brought the coffee and Keel had taken it without comment.

  “Yeah.”

  Hillary got up and went to the kitchen, less to putter around than not to be in their way.

  “You all right?” Della asked.

  Keel nodded. “Tired.”

  “Tired,” Della said with a smile, “again?”

  “Look, Dell—”

  “Darling, don’t be so touchy.”

  “Sorry. It’s a touchy thing.”

  “I thought if we could laugh about it a little you wouldn’t worry so.”

  Keel sat back in his chair, his eyes on the floor. “What mak
es you think I’m worried?”

  Della started to speak but changed her mind; she recognized the tone of his voice. The one thing she feared was his sarcasm; it was like a whip tipped with steel.

  They heard Crane drop a coin in the record player. In the kitchen Hillary dropped a pan. “Baby,” Keel said, reaching for her hand. “I am sorry.”

  She squeezed his hand. “Don’t let it bug you. It’ll be all right.”

  “It does bug me.”

  “If you’d only try to relax.”

  “I try.”

  “Why don’t you let Hillary run the place for a week or so? Go somewhere.”

  “Without you?”

  She looked at him. “Wouldn’t that be best?”

  “You think that’ll do it?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t want you to be away from me.”

  Keel gave her a cold smile and stared past her into the kitchen. “Now there’s a good guy when he gets straightened out. Why don’t you hit on him?”

  Della stopped squeezing his hand. “That won’t solve anything for you.” She shook her head. “Besides,” she said, reaching for a cigarette, “I’m not letting you quit. Not like this anyway.”

  “He could get rid of a lot of headaches for us.”

  “Dammit,” she said. “We went through this a couple of years ago, baby. We’ve made progress—now you want to toss everything up.”

  Keel didn’t answer.

  Della stared at the tablecloth. A year. Three hundred and sixty-five days. Twelve months. An endless succession of empty nights. “This is an anniversary,” she said.

  Keel jerked up. He was startled, not so much by her comment as by the tone of her voice, that carefully phrased, social worker’s diction that she sometimes slipped into. “Of what?” he asked.

  “Finian’s.”

  “Finian’s,” Keel echoed. He frowned, then smiled. “Oh yeah, Finian’s.”

  They both remembered: how could they forget?

  They had met Eagle between sets on the street, and all dashed around the corner to Sixth Avenue for Eagle’s quick drink. The bar was called Finian’s. They stood at one end of the bar, waiting for the bartender to serve them. He glanced at them several times, but did not move. The men along the bar eyed the bartender and them and smirked. Della wanted to leave then, but had known that neither Eagle nor Keel would. She stood trembling, trying not to show it.

  Eagle walked slowly down the bar until he came to the bartender. He spoke softly, so softly that Della and Keel could not hear him, but they did hear the bartender’s reply: he did not serve niggers. It hit Della like a slap—what followed seemed to occur in slow motion. Eagle lunged, putting a knee on the bar, with one arm up to protect his head from the bartender’s bottle, which landed anyway. The barflies scrambled away from their seats, their mouths grim, their eyes bright. Suddenly Keel was no longer beside Della: he was on his way to help Eagle. The ranks of the barflies opened to let him through, then closed about him. Eagle stood on the bar for one second, then flung himself down at the bartender, crashing him against the neat rows of bottles. Methodically his fist drew back, once, twice and a third time, until the bartender slumped out of sight. Then Eagle turned and heaved himself into the mass that had closed about Keel. Once, the grunting bodies parted and Della saw Keel on the floor—dazed, struggling upwards, only to be kicked in the stomach. A crowd gathered in the doorway; a siren sounded; the men inside dashed out. The few who remained gave the police the details of Eagle’s and Keel’s attack. There followed the humiliation of a hearing in police court.

  Keel told the judge: “The man was attacked because he was colored. Only five minutes before he had been playing in a club around the corner, idolized by hundreds. Then to walk around the block and be insulted—”

  The judge had told Keel to shut up and had fined both Eagle and Keel fifty dollars. He had also advised Della to seek more respectable companions.

  An hour after it happened, Eagle was laughing about it, telling how he had “decked that cat.” That Keel didn’t drink at all made him laugh even harder. Della had wanted Keel to laugh too. He was frozen with hate and it was so visible that Della was reluctant to touch him. Something in his manner had made her understand that she must not get too close.

  It had begun that night and continued until now. Finian’s.

  “Why did you just think of that?” Keel asked.

  Della shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Okay,” Keel said. “But the anniversary wasn’t tonight. It was last week.”

  Della bit her lip; he had remembered then. She couldn’t forget how the hate and confusion had leaped and burned in his eyes; confusion because she was one of the “whities,” as the musicians called them with smirking bitterness, but also because Keel was in love with her. She could not, the way some white women would have, try to buy escape from the hatred and confusion by denouncing whites for what they did to Negroes. That was cheap and childish and only the women themselves were deluded.

  Few such women felt the kind of love for their men that Della possessed. Their individual sicknesses had catapulted them into this world. The momentum was in nearly every case self-supplied and required little effort on the part of the musicians who had become, with time and repeated experience, wise and as patient as foxes. They were sharp, these women with their fine bodies and clothes and, very often, brains—although there were some dogs who were obviously making it on color alone—and they could turn as many hip phrases as the men, even if they did sound hollow; they could also talk endlessly about the senselessness of prejudice and discrimination—without once understanding their role in its maintainance. Very often their men laughed at them, just as the women must have, sometimes, chuckled among themselves.

  Keel’s confusion, Della knew, lay in his painful perception of how and what things were; everything merged somehow like a billowing mist upon a darkened landscape, and made everything seem unreal. But Della, like someone who has seen the way before the mists descended, intended to go on. For her it was too late to turn back.

  “Don’t wait for me tonight,” Keel was saying.

  It had to come but Della felt the panic anyway. There had been so many nights when he lay beside her waiting for sleep, after complaining earlier that he was tired, waiting for the weight upon his mind and body (that brown, brown body with the flawless skin, smooth yet hard enough, resilient with its miniature pores) to release him. Della knew it. Some nights she had cried for him, perhaps for herself too, while he lay deep on his side, sleepless with trying too often and too consciously to relax, motionless as any corpse after a time, or else smoking too much. But she did not want the night to come when he would quit and not even pretend to hope: hope was inherent in their being together.

  “I’ll ask Prof to take you home.” Keel hoped she wouldn’t take a deep breath and then ask if she could expect him the next evening. He was relieved when she didn’t.

  “I can get home all right, if that’s what you want.”

  “I don’t want it, but I don’t know what else to do.”

  “Can I make that suggestion again?”

  Keel looked at her. “If I thought seeing one would help, I’d do it.”

  He was still adamant: no analyst. A white one could only approach the problem from his own experience, and from bits and pieces of other people’s. Ultimately his advice, since analysts deal with the reality with which they believe everyone should be in contact, would have to be to accept the fact of blackness. But once accepted, as it had been for a few years now, what then? Do you bare your breast for the bullet so that your shirt won’t scratch the lead as it goes in? Do you stretch your neck for the guillotine? A Negro analyst might do better, if he were a Jungian though, not if he were a Freudian. In any case, what else could he tell you but the truth, and Keel wasn’t sure he was ready to accept it.

  Della was certain Keel would never see a Negro analyst, that he would not want to appear so weak: it would be like decla
ring a weakness to Eagle. The admission of weakness was not as important with a white analyst: somehow they expected it.

  “You might be right—again,” Della said.

  “I’m not sure anymore. I’m moving by instinct more than mind—”

  Della leaned toward him and clutched his hands with hers. “Take me home, baby. I just want to hold you and have you hold me. I—”

  “Dell—”

  The intensity in her voice vanished. “You don’t have to stay.” She turned away from him. “It destroys me. You think you feel badly—”

  Grimly, Keel said, “There’s Prof.”

  “Goddamn ‘Prof’!”

  “Shhhh!” Keel said.

  “I don’t mean it that way.” She ignored him.

  “What way then?”

  “You suffer so.”

  “It’s not so bad.”

  “Don’t lie, baby. You remember how it used to be, and I do too.”

  “Yeah. I’m always remembering how it used to be.”

  “You haven’t said a single word this year about getting married.”

  Keel said, “How can I now?”

  “I still want to. Don’t you?”

  “Not until I’m whole again.”

  “Please, Keel, I want you to come home tonight. Don’t make me feel that by insisting I’m intruding. Lately I haven’t. Please.”

  “All right, baby. In a little while.”

  Occasionally Della Madison could forget that the man she hoped to marry was Negro. They had talked months ago, when they were still able to talk holding hands, of what might happen to them or to their children. It was some time since they had discussed it. Now Della wavered between thinking she should end it as Keel wished and face a life of emptiness without him, or go on waiting.