by Ed Pavlić
AND
THE
JAZZ
MES
SEN
GERS
BLUE
NOTE
4003
She turned the slip over and found a photo of the same man caught in a state of rapture. She glanced down at the songs on the album:
1 WARM-UP AND DIALOGUE BETWEEN LEE AND RUDY
2 MOANIN’
3 ARE YOU REAL?
4 ALONG CAME BETTY
5 THE DRUM THUNDER SUITE
6 BLUES MARCH
7 COME RAIN OR COME SHINE
8 MOANIN’ (ALTERNATE TAKE)
The names of the players and songs meant nothing to her. She liked the two photos of the man very much. She flipped back and forth between them. The face on the cover was a mask, a portrait: thoughtful, sad. Anger burned behind all that like the paper the photo was printed on. The man’s face on the back was open in a totally private way. “Open, that is,” she thought, “if you were willing to meet him where he is and on his terms.” She wondered why she thought that. Ndiya then inserted the disc. She played song number three. The horns appeared in three notes and she heard Shame laugh over the running water in the kitchen.
–Ah! You’ve got nerve, Ndiya Grayson. And jokes!
More laughter. She listened to the solos. She knew it wasn’t just nerves. She felt a mix of underground trains, distant pendulums, and cautionary mountain streams. Beyond that she wasn’t sure what it was. The song was upbeat but not fast. The cymbals galloped. When the song concluded she popped the button back to song number two. She read that the piano player was Bobby Timmons. She thought it sounded more like he was playing the change in his pocket than a piano. During the first piano solo, Ndiya’s fingers started to move with the sound. The notes pulsed together, fell like rain blown by a strong, slow wind. She looked back at the painting, touched the tip of her tongue to the surface of her drink, and thought: “Can a strong wind be slow? Can it pause and still be strong? Still be wind?” She heard the image of Muna’s fingertips coming off the slope of Ahrrisse’s neck. Touch.
While Shame washed the dishes, Ndiya stood still on the kilim rug. She swayed imperceptibly in time to a rhythm much, much slower than the tempo of the song. Her fingertips tingled and burned a little and she felt like she was a weight swinging at the end of a very long wire. While Mr. Timmons played, she said to herself,
–That son of a mother—
Suddenly it was obvious. The sliced ginger had nothing at all to do with the sauce. The ginger was for her. Or, she thought, eyes narrowed, for him? Ndiya felt the pendulum behind her back, trains underfoot. She moved her spiced fingers and felt like she could taste the sound of a distant bell.
The song ended and Shame appeared from the kitchen, handed Ndiya a white towel.
–You dry, OK? If you can’t find the place for something, just leave it on the stove.
She took the towel from his outstretched hand, walked into the kitchen, and took a plate out of the dish drainer. Wiping it with the towel, she noticed Shame kneeling down at the stereo.
–I guess two can play this game, right?
She kept at the dishes with two fingers wrapped in cloth sweeping inside a wineglass. Shame chanted to himself,
–Six minutes, six minutes … uh, uh on—
He raised up and Ndiya, without turning her head, watched his back as he walked the length of the apartment to the bathroom. The back of his head went from shadow to light, back to shadow, and back to light just before he disappeared. He closed the door but left it ajar. She heard the bathroom fan, the slink of curtain rings, and the shower spurted into action. She recognized his “six minutes” foolishness, of course. Everyone their age knew “The Show.” But that was a decoy. Then she heard synth-bells float in an empty space of cymbals—
Ndiya’s vision immediately began to sweat. Her eyes felt exactly like her gingerized fingertips. And then a voice, Whis-per-ing-ing in his e-e-ear … and that the-ere’s nothing too good for us.
By the time the song’s intro ended, tears streamed her face. Ndiya thought, “Like hell two can play.” Echoed in how the singer’s voice broke the word “there” over different dimensions, Ndiya found herself in three places at once. She was drying dishes with slow-burning, ginger fingers, in tears, standing in Shame’s kitchen staring at the steam in the stripe of light next to the bathroom door he left ajar. Her mind blew back to her sublet table with the oatmeal and the meditation on the Bic Lighter phrase. Standing in these two places, she thought to herself, “Shame couldn’t play a game to save his damned life.” He clearly didn’t know how to play. She thought, wrongly, that passing up all kind of preliminaries and going straight in for the kill must just come naturally to the man. It wasn’t even the kill part. It was the “straight for” of the thing. But straight for what, and for who? And from where? The ways Shame arrived at where he came at her from weren’t, what? Regular? Predicable? It was beyond that. None of it was natural. His arrivals arose, she thought, from another dimension—
Then all that vanished behind Ndiya, age ten, in bed beneath her eight-hundred-foot-deep blanket, listening to her favorite song. The soft beat and synth chimes leading her into sleep. The voice, wan, slight, was heavier than the blanket pinning her legs to the sheet. The song sang, I’ll only be here for while, and she wondered what that meant. The singer sang I just got to be me and I just got to be free until she couldn’t tell the two words apart. The song rained portraits of women on her floor: her mother and her mother’s sisters, all her aunties, to which of whom she had no idea how or if she was actually related. “Why ‘actually’?” suddenly occurred to her. The song rained women listening to the song. Singing along with the rain raining themselves, listening to each other sing, listening to each other rain. That soft rhythm sledgehammer, the light voice that blew out the wall.
By the time she was ten, she’d learned what “free” meant. They’d talked about freedom in her school. She’d heard about it on TV. Freedom was loud men with fists. They died by getting killed. She’d learned about that just like all the other square-box-type stuff in school that no one ever heard of. But this song swung open a secret door, an unknown room in her arms and legs.
It came to her just then, standing on that thin rug in Shame’s jeans: “What happened if a woman couldn’t tell the difference between the words ‘free’ and ‘me’?”
She remembered lying beneath the immovable weight of her blanket. Freedom was invisible fluid. It vanished into the space of sleep. It rained women who knew what fantasies were and what they were good for. And she knew how the world fell apart on people, in people, women, who were forced to play the near side of the border they’d all been born beyond.
Music like this went where they lived but couldn’t never go. Somehow, in a bottomless, electric way that would swallow her if she let it, all that led to where she’d been taken and how everything …
Ndiya felt the pendulum swing behind her and wondered all over again how such a light wisp of a song could rain that lead-weighted invisible fluid she’d heard, partially hid from, partially hiding in, as a child. She could see it now, standing in Shame’s kitchen wearing his clothes. Whoever he was. She glanced at the bathroom door ajar. The swinging weight wasn’t in the song at all. It was in the world the song didn’t sing about. A world of hard sense and fanatical control the song refused, a room with no room for common mistakes, a room no one owned, a room each person built around herself with no windows and no door. Refusal was the song that this song didn’t sing. Refusal was her mother’s song, which is why her mother loved this song. Then the song fell out of that place and swung around like a flashlight dropped deep in Ndiya’s underwater life.
The circle of light in the floating song flashed around Shame’s place. Ndiya felt surrounded by overlapping waves of frailty and strength, fullness and vacancy, in the voice. She saw four black numerals above a white, battered door: 2337.
And she knew it was a house address on Monroe Street. She didn’t know how she knew that. The flashlight voice swung and lit up other voices. Her daddy and his brother arguing with her mother. Her daddy didn’t come around much. He used to say Ms. Alexander, the building president, had barred him from the premises unless he was willing to work security for her. He wasn’t. When he came around anyway, there were always words. And he always dropped off money. She remembered thick knots of worn, green bills. And she remembered the way her mother took the money from her daddy while staring over his shoulder at whatever was back there. The song just then sounded exactly like how Ndiya always knew how to stay out the way of her mother’s eyes whenever her daddy was there. The words between her parents were always about any little thing. It was obvious to her even then, even more now, that there was always something else going on. She had no idea what.
–Now, Vee, look here—
–Naw, nigga, you look ’cause I already seen what you saying.
This argument was about the cold. It was December. She knew because her mother kept asking him, “You do know it’s December?” She must have been three, almost four. The flash of sound curved out of the song on Shame’s stereo and blew out of focus like sleet through her body. Her body felt like those warm winter nights when it snows and grass is white and the streets are wet black. The clean, cold black smell in the street. Steam from the manholes. Black and white grains fell together like how an image became itself in a photo or like the way an old-time TV warmed up, the image beginning at the edges of the screen and filling in toward the center. She recognized this scene as one of her two blurry, earliest memories. But it had surfaced this time with a strobe of irregular details she’d never known. It was a feeling behind her eyes. It felt like when her hands went numb in the cold, a blur, imprecise, studded with vivid flashes of feeling.
–You’re not going to have my child standing out there in this cold, I don’t care if Jesus Christ is handing out keys to the Kingdom over there.
–She’s going to see this, Vera.
–She’s seen enough. Gonna see more.
–Which is why she’s going to see this.
The ceiling was as close as the floor. She wondered what was so special about seeing this cold or not. Ndiya’s daddy held her around her thighs so her face was just beneath his. She could smell sweet wine on his breath, the smoke in the woolen arms of his dark blue coat. The smell of distant cigarettes would always make her feel her daddy’s arms. That close-up scent of her daddy’s distance. He carried her away and stood at the window of their apartment. The freeway and, beyond that, endless rectangles of black-streaked gray out the window. She heard her uncle Lucky’s soft voice.
–Look here, Vee. I know there’s noise and all. But this—they—we got to—we can’t just—why don’t you come along? We’ll bring blankets.
–Oh, now you asking?
–No, you answering.
Lucky could always approach the wall of her mother’s face when her daddy was there. They paused, eyes broadcasting invisibly to each other. Ndiya saw her daddy was the white grass and watched her mother turn into the warm, black street, her uncle the steam between them. For a minute she sensed a pause in the cold.
Ndiya and her mother sat in the back of Lucky’s car. Lucky always had a car. The puffy green, quilted seats warmed up under them, the back windows were fogged. She remembered Lucky had wiped the windshield with his coat sleeve while he drove. The rhythm of the wipers, the rhythm of streetlight bulbs, black against the gray sky, stared straight down at her. She lay on her back, her head in her mother’s lap. She fell asleep.
She remembered standing on the sidewalk surrounded by coats. Fur coats. Wool coats. The smell of leather from long, quilted coats. The fringe-ends of scarves tingling her head like the heavy-dancing flop-things she’d seen at the car wash. Black. Brown. Crème. Coats. The sound of gloved hands slapping each other, the deep thick sound of gloves hitting the backs of men’s coats. Clouds of breath. And smoke. And gloves. It was a waist-high world of leather breath and fur touch. A man stood in front of them, his right glove at exactly her eye level. It had a small V cut at the back where a tuft of fur came out.
The crowd stood close to each other. No one spoke. At one point, Ndiya leaned forward and the fur from inside the man’s glove touched her nose. She thought it was as soft as nothing-at-all must be soft. The glove was brown; it had three tracks, like the tread on a car tire, on the outside. Each track pointed toward a knuckle on the back of the man’s hand. No one talked. She remembered the sound of people’s shoes and boots on the cold sidewalk. What she remembered most is the strange sound, a sound she’d never heard before. She stood there wondering what it was. Cars passed. A jet plane flew overhead in the clouds. Sirens, a city bus. Nothing strange about them. Then she knew what it was: it was the sound of all those people at once, the sound of no one talking.
Her daddy must have picked her up on his shoulders, because she remembers looking back behind them and seeing the long line of people they were in. This from above. Then she looked up ahead. And nobody talking. She knew it was cold but she couldn’t feel it. She woke up inside a house with everything tumbled down. Her daddy held her in one arm, held her mother’s shoulder with his other arm. The house was all thrown down. Chairs broken, flipped. Posters torn and hanging off the walls and papers all across the floor. No one talked except now one loud, loud man who pointed to holes in the front door. Each hole had a thin, straight stick coming out of it. They pointed into the house. She remembered the man’s voice. Loud.
–Don’t touch nothing, don’t move nothing. Don’t touch nothing. Don’t move nothing.
She remembered:
–Brother … Chairman … Sister … Pigs …
Her daddy said,
–It’s murder, Vera. Stone-cold murder.
Her mother nodded. She said nothing. That was odd. Ndiya wondered if the nothing her mother said just then was the same nothing everybody else was saying. Her daddy’s eyes were underwater. But he didn’t cry. And he didn’t say it loud but somehow she could feel that word in her chest when he said it. Murder. It felt like a breath so deep it hurt her lungs and when she tried to breathe out it wouldn’t go out. In a low voice, her daddy said it again and again. “It’s murder. Murder.” And that deep, too-full, can’t-breathe feeling stayed in her chest. They walked through the first room and into the hallway. Records and a mattress up against the wall and something spilled all over the floor, papers stuck together in the spill. Everyone stepped over the spill. From across the room it looked black, when they stepped across she could tell it was deep red.
There was another room but her daddy, Lucky, and her mother each held her in the hall when one of them went in that room. Ndiya has a major key, melody-clear memory of asking,
–Is there more-dear in there too, Daddy?
–Yes. It’s murder in there too, Ndiya. A beautiful young brother was murdered there.
Ndiya had begun to ask why but she saw the red water in her daddy’s eyes deepen. She hugged his neck and he carried her out the back of the house, back into the cold, and down around the back to the street. Ndiya looked back over her daddy’s shoulder has he carried her. Then she knew that more-dear meant red water. She still couldn’t feel the cold.
They passed a tiny old woman who had three little boys in front of her. She had on a long coat with a fur collar and a matching fur hat. Each boy wore one of those Sherlock Holmes–type hats with earflaps. Ndiya heard the old woman. She told those boys hard questions:
–He always said he wasn’t going to die slipping on no piece of ice, didn’t he?
She took one of the boys under his chin with her hand and bent his face up to hers. Ndiya thought she was treating those boys rough. The old woman told the boy, loud,
–Now, I say, didn’t he?
–Yes, Mum Mum. He dee-id.
Then she looked at the other two. Ndiya wondered if they were twins.
–Now, you te
ll me. What he’d say?
And the little boys answered back one at a time and then in unison. The first:
–Said he wasn’t gonna die off a trippin’ off a no piece a ice.
And the next:
–Said he wasn’t gonna catch no heart attack.
And the woman:
–What did he say?
Then all three:
–Said he was gonna die high on the people, Mum Mum.
And the old woman:
–That’s right. Now, come on.
■
In the cold, early December mist, on the night before the day conjured by Deniece Williams in Ndiya’s memory, a sixteen-year-old singer and student at Kenwood High School in Hyde Park, Chicago, still stunned by the hammer of the news of the murder, walked alone into Washington Park. There she took out a snub-nosed .38 from the sleeve of her mock-fur coat and took a long look at the dead glint of the metal in the ambient light, the city reflected off the snow. Fender Rhodes light. The light looked as if it had emerged out of the ground. Still light. The gun had been given to her the night she’d been renamed in the way of the Revolution. Since she’d carried it, by exactly what luck she now numbly wondered, it hadn’t been fired.
Watched over by a lake-blown, slate sky and a pantheon of newly anonymous gods, she threw the pistol as far out as she could over the dragon-shaped Washington Park lagoon. A sudden wind rose, then, as she turned. It covered the sound of the splash in her ears. She promised the gods that, if they’d reveal their real names to her, she’d go about the Revolution in her own way, in a different way. And she walked out of the park over the trampled snow. Reaching the west edge of the park, she left the path and stood at Fifty-Eighth Street and Martin Luther King Drive, a street that had been renamed just over a year or so earlier to project Chicago’s forward-looking image.
She thought how she and the street now both had new names. She thought that the street had certainly been renamed too late; just then, she wondered if she’d been renamed too soon.
The sixteen-year-old Ms. Khan crossed the one-year-old King Drive and walked west, as if following the sun that, that night, seemed to have left her behind and gone down for good, taking the names of the black gods she’d learned with it. The diviner-priest who’d named her had repeated a phrase: he said it proved that black gods went home by going into the ground. Said black gods never flew away up into the sky. She didn’t know where to go. Back off inside her, in an unswept corner beyond words, in a place no one gets decisions about, she decided to lead with her voice and follow that.
