Are You Experienced?
BY DANZY SENNA
Way back in 1969, there was this girl named Josephine, a Negro by race, but pale as butter, with straight black hair that fell to her waist. Everybody called her Jo.
She was married to a pretty boy named Charles, a failed musician, whom once upon a time she had loved something awful. Now she only needed him.
One cold week in December he decided Jo wasn't pretty enough, white enough, woman enough for him. He blew her week's earnings on the horses, and disappeared. Rumor had it that he had run off with a white chick named Barbara, which was certainly possible. White girls were always falling for him.
He left Jo without even a dollar for food or diapers for their three year old son, Diego.
She trembled with rage as she called the person she always called in moments like this: her best childhood friend, Carol Anne, who lived in the city.
“Girl,” Carol Anne sighed when she'd finished her story, “You gone and married a bullshit artist. You need to leave his ass. You need to get your behind to the city, today.”
“But what about the kid?” Jo said, sniffling, eyeing the boy where he sat banging blocks across the room.
“Leave him with Charlie's mother,” Carol Anne said, without pause. “That's what grandma's are for. She'll spoil the child senseless and he won't notice anything's wrong. Give yourself a few days, Jo. I'll show you what you're missing. I'll show you a good time.”
So Jo, whispering curses under her breath at her missing husband, did as her friend had told her. She packed a bag of clothes and diapers for Diego and brought him to his Grandma Louise on the other side of town. The old woman did not ask questions. She knew her son was no good. Jo told her she'd be gone a few days. Would the kid be okay with her? The old woman was happy to take him in. And he seemed content to sit in front of her black-and-white television, shoving cookies in his mouth. He did not pull his eyes away from the cartoon to say goodbye.
Jo left for New York that afternoon without man or child and, when the bus pulled away from the depot, she felt her rage transform into a giddy, girlish excitement, something she had not felt in a long, long time. She glimpsed her face in the window beside her and remembered that she was not bad looking. She said to her own reflection, “Two can play at this game.”
Jo's girlfriend, Carol Anne, lived the life she had not chosen. Carol Anne was happily unmarried, childless, and worked designing costumes for rock musicians and Broadway musicals. She was a caramel colored girl with a light brown afro and the long muscular legs of a track star. The two women had grown up together in the nation's capital. They'd spent their teenage years plotting their escape from what they called “Boojie-dom.” They considered themselves sisters—fellow conspirators in their escape from that high yellow prison.
They were both considered good looking, in a similar hinkety way. Lucky for them they had never had the same taste in men. No cause for conflict.
Carol Anne had loved white boys from the beginning. In their arms she could be anybody, a mystery girl with no past and no discernable future. While brothers could see right through her, with white boys she could affect accents, don costumes, rewrite history for herself—and never be called out on her lies. With this one she was the daughter of a Brazilian sailor. With that one she was the half-caste child of an Indian aristocrat and a Nigerian princess. With white boys, her life could be theatre. They encouraged her antics. Brothers, on the other hand, were always trying to make her behave.
Jo stuck closer to home. She had never much liked white boys. They had always seemed to her an alien species—their bodies could stand out in the dark. She had always had a preference for brothers. Not the uptight, Boojie boys she had grown up with, but men two shades darker than she, revolutionaries, who could teach her a thing or two about the world, the streets.
And so it had seemed strange that in the end she'd married a brother who wasn't dark at all. The moody and mysterious Charles Moore was paler than a brown paper bag. But what he lacked in melanin, he made up for with attitude. He was a jazz musician when she met him, with high ideas about how he was gonna conquer the world without ever trying. He was a first generation mulatto, the son of a brown-skinned housecleaner mother, and an anonymous white father. Jo had seen romance in his tragedy, splendor in his split roots.
Jo's family saw none of the allure. They had worked so hard to raise Jo up right, to send her to college, and at the end of the day, she had come home with this ragamuffin, bohemian, misfit bastard. Everything about him rubbed them wrong: the way he smoked those small brown cigarettes incessantly, cupped his mouth when he inhaled, the way he talked in a soft vague murmur about “the trouble with whitey.” Jo's mother told her after dinner the night they met him: “Josephine, you can't trust them mixed bloods. They have too much anger, too much conflict running through their blood. Find yourself a good colored boy.”
But Jo would hear none of it. She'd had enough of those over-bred puppy dogs her mother trotted out for her inspection—nice boys who were dry as toast at the end of the day.
When she'd told her mother she was marrying Charles, and dropping out of college to become a jazz singer, her mother seemed tired of fighting. She'd simply wrung her hands, looked heavenward, and said with a miserable smile: “Well at least he's got good hair. At least you'll make pretty babies.”
In the early days of their union, Charles and Jo had been a team making music around the outskirts of the capital, and later in Boston at a small crowded jazz club on Tremont Street. But from the beginning it was clear: Jo's voice was better than Charles's playing. It wasn't that Charlie didn't have talent. He did, but it was talent without discipline. And he didn't shine the way Jo did on stage. The moment she took the stage, a hush would fall over the audience and her voice, smoky and androgynous, would fill the space with a remote yearning that could never be filled. Listening to her sing made one long for something indecipherable. Charles's horn, behind her, was just a background tune for her voice, nothing in itself. After a set, the boys and the girls would flock to the stage to compliment her. Charles would sit at the sidelines, rubbing a dirty cloth against his horn, glowering at his wife.
At first Jo had wanted to believe Charlies's failure was due to the alcohol or some inner torment that prevented him from being his best. She wanted to believe the reasons for his failure were complicated, traced back to his absent father and poverty-stricken youth.
But then one day, after a particularly bad show, it struck her: Charles was lazy. That was why he would never be great. He fancied himself a genius, and maybe he was, but he would never be more than mediocre. She had seen it so clearly she stopped breathing for a moment. Some people, she'd realized with a flash of lucidity, fall with a crash. Others, like Charlie, fall slowly, gently and slowly as a feather to their demise, so gradually they barely notice it happening. One day, they wake up, and they've hit the bottom. She thought, staring at her husband across the smoky nightclub air, that she would rather crash and burn any day of the week. There was nothing more horrifying to her than mediocrity. Nothing worse than a slow demise.
But she was loyal. She stuck by his side. Even when she had to stop singing, start working as a music teacher at a local public school to support them both and Charles had gotten a job as a cab driver (he said he wanted to feel he was moving somewhere, though he never got out of the car). Most nights, though, she came home to find him lying on the couch with a bottle of triple sec in one hand, a cigarette in the other. Sometimes, when he was sober and they would take the cab out and drive to the country, pretend they were really going on a trip. They would blast music, pass a joint between them, and giggle about the people they'd known in their club days, the wild things they'd seen.
But most of the time it wasn't like that. Most of the time they were fighting.
It didn't turn violent until after Diego was born.
The first time it happened she thought he'd lost control of his hand. She thought it h
ad convulsed and ended up flying across her face. Holding her cheek she had stared at him silently as he turned away and shuffled back to the living room, muttering, “Shit,” under his breath. The second time it happened was outside a club, where he'd just given his lousiest and last performance. Like before he'd back-handed her, but this time when she fell he gave her a swift kick in the belly for good measure.
It was evening when Jo arrived at Carol Anne's crumbling studio in the Bowery. Carol Anne gave her a big perfumey hug and told Jo to forget about the Failed Musician, to lighten up and smoke a joint. “Girl, we're goin out tonight. A party. New York style baby. I'm gonna show you how the other half live.”
She did Jo's makeup, dressed her up in a rainbow mini dress that showed off her slight figure, and braided her hair so she looked like a Navajo princess. Jo missed her baby boy with a pain that gnawed at her stomach, but she did as Carol Anne told her, and tried to feel her freedom.
The two women shared a joint and reminisced about their girlhood in D.C.—the clothes pins on their noses, the plaits in their hair—how far they'd wandered from all that. Linking arms, they'd leaned in towards one another against the icy wind, as they went out to meet the night.
As soon as they arrived at the party, in a tall doorman building overlooking Central Park, Jo felt out of place. The people there were in another league—dazzling and decadent, famous or at least pretending to be. She felt small and brown and dingy. As she stared at a blonde woman spinning circles in a sequined mini dress, she thought that she belonged at home, with her Failed Musician, and her little boy, Diego, who smelled of strawberry's behind his ears. But when she looked for Carol Anne, she was gone, swallowed up in the throngs, so Jo stood in a corner and anxiously sipped her champagne.
Later, somewhat tipsy, Jo wandered down the hall in search of a bathroom. Peeking in a door she saw a gaggle of white people surrounding one black man who sat like a king on a throne, his head tilted back and an expression that teetered between amusement and boredom. Jimi Hendrix. She recognized him immediately. She had listened to “Foxy Lady” fourteen times in a row one night. She had wanted to go to Woodstock, but the Failed Musician had said he didn't want to hang around with a bunch of filthy, greasy haired honkies who smelled like wet dogs.
The people who surrounded him looked like industry types, sycophants and handlers. They were talking to him excitedly, but he looked bored, smoking at tiny stub of his joint and tapping his foot impatiently. His heavy eyes caught hers at the door. He smiled, a strange, familiar smile, as if he had known her already, for years. The gaggle of white folks turned around and smiled at her as well, waved her toward them, as if they were offering her up to this sullen prince. She stepped inside the room and stood before him speechless. Everyone else was silent too, as if they were waiting for his verdict. His eyes roved up and down her slim yellow body, until, finally, he winked and said, “Hey sister. You lost?”
They slept together three times. Once that night, in the king sized water bed of the stranger who owned the apartment, and twice the next night, in his hotel suite at the Ritz. He said she reminded him of a world he had nearly forgotten. He traced his finger over her wide brown nipples and said she was a lovely little slip of a thing. She told him she was married to a Failed Musician who drank too much and sometimes slapped her upside her head. Naked beside him in the big sloshing bed, she showed him pictures of her little boy, Diego, and he admired the child, and said, giggling, he looked like a wet back. Before falling to sleep each night, she sang to Jimi with that smoky boy's voice of hers, and he told her, sleepily, that she had a voice that could make a grown man cry. On the third night, he asked her to come with him on the road. He told her he could make her a star. She only laughed, sadly, and told him it was too late for all that. She had a boy to go back to.
Then he was gone, and Jo was on a bus back home, where her husband had returned, tail between his legs, white girl discarded, ready to make peace. That first night back, she picked Diego up at his grandmother's house & the boy crawled all over her, kissing her face and pulling her hair, as if he were a hungry bird, and for a moment she was glad to be home.
The Failed Musician, strangely, did not suspect anything had gone on in his absence. He thought she had been pining for him at Carol Anne's apartment. Only later, much later, after her face had been smashed and put back together, would she utter the name of Jimi Hendrix.
Nine months passed, and Jo grew. When the Failed Musician slapped her, she didn't even think of her own face, but only of her belly, shielding this child. On a wet September night in 1970, the baby was born at Brigham and Women's Hospital. Jo had been to that hospital two other times during her pregnancy—once at four months, for spot bleeding, and once, at six months, for a broken nose. Now, on her third trip in nine months, she gave birth to a red faced, howling, slippery, squinty eyed little thing who she wanted to name Cheyenne, but whom her husband insisted on calling Mabel, after his great aunt.
The child was nothing like her brother. She did not like to be touched, for one thing. While Diego clung to his mother, begged to sleep beside her at night, the little girl wiggled and squirmed from both her mother's and father's touch, as if she had her eyes on some other destiny from the start. While Diego hid under the table, sobbing and begging, “Stop, stop,” whenever the Failed Musician went after Jo with his fist, the little girl would just watch them, study them, solemnly, unblinking, in such a way that seemed to shame even the Failed Musician himself.
Jo noticed that this was how the girl watched everybody: her friends, her teachers, the whole world—from a distance, wide-eyed, unblinking, as if committing an image that would soon be gone.
Jo loved the little girl, but feared her gaze. Whenever the girl stared at her, Jo would see herself—painfully clear—the way she walked perpetually tilted to the side, as if warding off an invisible blow. Watching herself through that child's eyes she saw that she was doing what she had swore never to do: she was falling slowly, in an endless gentle descent toward a place where she could not recognize herself.
Over the years, she studied her daughter closely for signs of the dead musical genius, looked for the features that would prove her royal lineage. And sometimes, when Jo was drunk and bruised and angry, she would drag the girl down into the darkened living room and make her dance with her, sleepy, confused, to “Purple Haze,” until the sun came up and the high wore down and the truth shone through the curtains-revealing the Failed Musician in her daughter's pale face.
Group Solo
BY SCOTT POULSON BRYANT
Dad?” asked my son James. “How should you tell someone you don't love them anymore?”
James is an actor. He's on an afternoon soap opera that airs after the game show which, ironically, just fired me from my job as host. His character, named Radcliffe, is a spy who speaks seven languages (none of which, I like to tease him, is Ebonics) and Ebony magazine says he is rumored to be one of the highest paid blacks on TV. This explains the luxurious expanse of his lower–Fifth Avenue apartment overlooking the entire southern tip of Manhattan on one end and the entire northern tip of Manhattan (and some of New Jersey) on the other end. His mother and I worked the Chitlin' Circuit for years before prime-time TV ever thought to call us; James went right from our house to Vassar to daytime drama and this elaborate spread. During his four years at Vassar, as a black boy in thrall to “art” and “acting” and “the classics,” he was, I thought, completely, adolescently loathsome. But I loved him, as I love him now. Besides, I believe the long hours and aesthetic vulgarity of daytime television have humbled him. Which was clear to me when he said, “Dad, how should you tell someone you don't love them anymore?”
This was the first time James had ever brought up his love life to me. Other than the day he told us he was gay when he was eighteen years old, he's never talked about his romantic involvements. I said, “Your mother is the only woman I've ever loved and I never had to tell her that.”
“But
Mom—”
“What?”
“I just thought you and Mom had, uh, done things.”
“We have,” I told him, offering a smile. “With each other.”
“Oh.”
James is a good actor, but he is not a good liar. He is not good at hiding things; he is not good at keeping secrets. I've spent a lot of time at James' apartment since I was fired from the show, my way of still spending time in Manhattan instead of brooding in Long Island. I like the track lighting, glaring like spotlights, and the silk curtains draped over the windows like they're hiding a stage; the dazzling stereo set-up where I play my Motown hits at full blast, the wall of fame hung with magazine covers featuring James' handsome face. I love it here. But I haven't spent a lot of time with James, considering his long hours on the set. Now here we were talking, spending quality time together and he wanted to talk about how to end a relationship. My handsome son, who is not a good liar, was trying to tell me something.
“This isn't about you, is it?” I said to him. “You trying to tell me something?”
“Like what?”
“I don't know.”
He flipped a page in the script he'd been studying. Finally he said, “You need to find a job, Dad.” He shifted on the couch, pulling his bare feet up underneath his behind. “Everything flows from work. You used to tell me that, remember?”
James had been speaking to his mother. “You been talking to your mother?”
“You need to get a job, Dad.”
That was two weeks ago. My name is Dennis Manning, but the woman who cuts my hair calls me Nissy, “short for Dennis, you know, like a nickname,” she says, smacking orange-scented gum in my ear. “You know what I like, Nissy? You're kind of famous and you're the only guy who comes in here and asks specifically”—pronounced “pacifically”—“for me. I really like that.” She talks the whole time she cuts my hair, offering long-winded tales of domestic life, about her pit bulls Kinky and Joe, and the constant loss of the remote control at the hands of Cyril, the three-year-old second cousin she baby-sits three nights a week. I don't know her age, but I assume she must be older than twenty-one, yet younger than twenty-five: She goes to a bar named The Misty Blue every weekend for dancing and drinking, and she refers to her boss Lyle (the quarterback to my tackle senior year of high school, Class of '64) as the Old Guy.
Gumbo Page 70
