by Joyce Meyer
I found another one in my seat before I sat down on the streetcar and remembered that Jesus said I didn’t have to be ashamed. I found one on the street when I took Mama’s knives out to be sharpened by the scissor-grinder, and I remembered that God had planted a seed of greatness in me. I found one at the A&P while I waited in line with Jean to buy Lustre-Creme shampoo because Lustre-Creme was the kind Grace Kelly liked, and I thought how the preacher’d said if I put myself in the arms of Jesus, the stains inside me would go away.
One lady even dropped a penny right in front of us on the sidewalk. Aurelia was with me—and I promise you, she saw it. I left the penny on the ground and chased after the lady until she stopped in front of the Laundromat and set her clothes basket down.
“Excuse me, don’t know if you noticed, but you dropped that penny down there.”
“What?”
“You dropped that penny down there, ma’am. Don’t you want to pick it up?”
She smiled halfway, as if she couldn’t quite figure me out. And the story had gotten way too long to explain to her now. “No, child. You keep it. Being as you’re honest and all. It’s just a penny. You want it, it’s yours.”
“God is giving you a message,” Miss Shaw had said. “He’s watching over you all the time.”
“Find a penny, pick it up,” Aurelia chanted as I ran back to get it. “All the day you’ll have good luck.”
“No.” I kicked a bottle cap full of dirt and it ricocheted off the curb. “Aurelia, I think it’s more than good luck. It’s a message.”
Lots of those pennies I picked up, I spent. But I kept the first one—the one that started it all outside the Fox Theater—safe and hidden in its box. Every so often, when the house grew quiet and I knew Jean wouldn’t come in to tease me, I’d open the lid and take a look. I’d hold it until it grew warm inside my palm, then turn it over and check its date of issue.
Those summer days passed to the tone and brilliance of Eddie Crockett’s trumpet crying. It didn’t take much for even somebody like me to hear that Eddie Crockett’s sound was just as good as anything Miles Davis could do. When Aurelia told him I’d said that, Mr. Crockett picked me up off the floor with his broad-beamed arms. For a minute, I went stiff as a cork, not knowing what he meant by laying hands on me. But he hugged me so tight I thought he might squeeze the air out of me, and I realized he did it out of fondness.
Aurelia danced around us, “I tell you, when it comes to blowing the horn, Daddy can really play it down.”
And I felt nothing but wonder when Eddie Crockett treated me fine, the same way he treated his daughter.
He showed off, dancing with Aurelia, tilting his head back and playing to the sky. For the first time, I felt like I’d found a world where I belonged.
The S.S. Admiral had a brochure out that called it “a ship of luxury, of gaiety, of glamour.” It promised a six-deck steamer with “clean, clear river breezes that make eyes sparkle and cheeks rosy-hued.” The level rooftop guaranteed passengers “a taste of the South of France or Biarritz.” Jean had been on it for her graduation dinner and she’d come home talking about the Three Ring Circus tea room with waiters dressed up like clowns and chairs made to look like lions, leopards, camels, and giraffes. Aurelia had told me plenty of times how playing on the Admiral meant something to her daddy. Not because he hadn’t been featured on the bandstand at plenty of music clubs before. He had even played on the radio station. But Aurelia said that the Admiral was the first place they’d wanted him to read notes to get his job.
“When they’ve got an old piece of horn, most musicians learn to work that horn from morning until night,” Mr. Crockett said one day while the heat bore down on us so hard, all of us wanted to sit in the shade and do nothing. “What folks got to understand is, St. Louis got genius all over the place. They say the blues and the rhythm come up the river from New Orleans, but the genius comes from right here.” He pointed at the whitewashed step, right where he sat. “That’s the ones that make it, the ones that spend crazy hours playing their instruments.”
Aurelia was scraping the stoop with a piece of broken plaster, leaving scratches between her feet. “Daddy—don’t know why you won’t let us hear you play over on the boat.”
“I told you, girl. You hear us practice any time you want over at Mr. Lamoretti’s.”
“If you’re a genius”—I swatted at a mosquito buzzing in my ear— “how come you can’t read music?”
“Ha.” Mr. Crockett lifted his knee up and crooked his elbow over it. “She tell you about that? That’s why we call ourselves the Six Blue Notes. Six of us went to show Mr. Streckfus what we could play, and I took one look at all those notes on pages he showed us, and I started feeling blue.”
But that was Eddie Crockett for you. He’d gotten the job anyway. He went and figured out something to do to get around the rules.
Aurelia told me that, without telling Aunt Maureen what he’d done, he took his trumpet, invited his band members, paid Darnell fifty cents to go to a basketball game, and the rest of them showed up in Darnell’s stead at his piano lesson.
“Take lessons in your nephew’s place? I never heard of such.” Mr. Lamoretti began to flip wildly through the pages of the music primer above his keyboard. “Mrs. Crockett has already paid the monthly fee, as you well know. Are you sure this isn’t just Darnell trying to get out of practicing?”
“Look.” Eddie Crockett placed the score in front of Mr. Lamoretti’s face. “We just need you to teach us how to play the book, so we can go on the boat on weekends and play parts.”
Mr. Lamoretti, not one to waste a minute if it was paid for, laughed, creasing the book down its middle seam with skepticism. “Well, since you’re here, can you play that? Let’s see what you can do.”
So the Blue Notes took out their horns and ran a few scales for him, and the next thing they knew, he started ragging it up with them on the piano. By the end of the lesson, he was playing Tchaikovsky while they followed his finger on the page. And Mr. Crockett kept stopping him and saying, “Play that again, Lamoretti. Hear the harmony? You could get that on a horn and a sax; I know you could.”
The Admiral advertised a four-and-a-half-hour Saturday cruise, and that’s the one Aurelia wanted to get onto. It left in the afternoon and made a trek along the waters while tourists strolled the decks in their crisp, summer cottons and visited the modern fluorescent-lighted, chromium-trimmed popcorn and newsstand, and a snack bar selling hot dogs. For those who could afford it, the band played for dancing in the ballroom.
“We could do it,” Aurelia whispered. “I could tell Aunt Maureen we’re going to a movie. We could tell her what we’re going to see.”
“No movie lasts four hours.” It scared me, how much like Daddy I sounded. “Your aunt knows that. She’ll knock you up the side of the head when you get home.”
Aurelia looked sideways at me. “No, she won’t. She’d give me a talking to all right, but that’s all. It’d be so different, seeing him play there, not in some dark, smoky place like the Windermere, or one of those bucket-of-blood clubs.” They called them bucket-of-blood clubs because so many fights started up there, she told me. “And Daddy says on the Admiral he gets to wear butcher-boy shoes and suits from Brooks Brothers, with collars so stiff with starch he can’t hardly move his neck.”
“He can show you a suit any time.”
“No, he can’t. The whole setup belongs to the Admiral. He can’t ever bring any part of it home.”
I let Aurelia convince me. I’d do it for her because, for the summer of 1955, we were playing the part of sisters. I’d never seen her want anything this bad before.
The gangplank of the Admiral rose from Laclede’s Landing like a metal serpent. Above it hung a green-and-white striped awning, so in case those present had to wait outside to show a ticket, they could take cover under the shade.
It took a whole week’s pay to buy our entrance before we could board. Ever since that lady at the Laund
romat had insisted the penny was mine, “being as you’re honest and all,” I’d started feeling like I was being tested for something. I’d started wishing I could be honest, although it felt like everything around me fought to keep me from it. I kept thinking, If God has something big planned for my life, then I’d better start acting like it!
When Aurelia tugged my arm and pointed to the short, steep plank at the rear with the sign that read SERVICE ENTRANCE, I looked a bellyache at her. Helping her sneak away from Aunt Maureen was one thing. Sneaking onto the boat was another.
“You don’t understand.” She turned away with her arms limp and her shoulders square, like she thought I’d lost my mind. “This is part of it.”
“Is not.”
“It is.”
I snapped open the black velvet purse Jean had passed down to me. “Look, I’ve got the money right here.” But when it came my turn to step inside the booth and say, “Two tickets, please,” Aurelia had disappeared from sight.
“Students?” he asked.
“Yes,” I said. “Both of us.”
“Don’t get seasick. Don’t eat too many hot dogs. Have fun!” He pressed two tickets forward and gestured with his head. “He’ll tear those for you up the gangplank, just outside the door.”
“Thank you.”
When I stepped into the sun, Aurelia said, “Just give me my ticket.” She tried to wave me away.
“You’ve got to get it torn.”
“You paid for it—that’s what matters. Meet me in there.” Then in desperation she whispered, “Somewhere.”
I didn’t know what had gotten into her, but I had to let her go. There wasn’t any reasoning, as far as I could tell. I waited to get my ticket torn, mixed in with a jumble of ladies and gentlemen, the ladies wearing gloves like Miss Shaw’s and two-strand pearl chokers and skirts with petticoats so stiff they crackled.
The ladies wore corsages, too and, oh, how good the flowers smelled as they wilted in the heat! I saw Aurelia clamp her ticket in her teeth and, after she’d hidden beside the ticket booth for longer than I could have stood it, she took off. A number of what looked to be waiters had started up the back ramp, and I watched her skip toward them, drum up a conversation, and duck inside that entrance as easy as she’d been born.
She’d left me alone.
Suddenly without Aurelia, I placed my feet together side-by-side. I clutched my velvet bag in both hands, my fingers as straight and pointed as clothespins. Raising my chin, I stood like a fine lady going to a dance. I could have been Miss Shaw, or I could have even been Grace Kelly, standing among so many admirers, her eyes lit with stars.
Jean would’ve been jealous as a snake if she could’ve seen me at that moment.
At the thought of Jean, an ache flickered and began to grow, burst open to all that hollowness I hadn’t known was inside me. Sure, my sister and I did our fair share of quarreling. We might have been rough as nails to each other on the surface, but deep down, we knew how much we needed each other. Jean had been slowly disappearing from me for a while, though. She hadn’t even packed for secretarial school yet, and she was already gone.
When my turn came to climb aboard the Admiral and enter through the gilded doors, I searched for Aurelia, pressing past draped cardigans and dozens of arms and hankies erupting from breast pockets. The Admiral’s foghorn warning blast reverberated clear to my toes. And just when people took up talking again, the horn deafened us all once more.
We’d cast off. I could feel the boat keeling to the west, the current moving beneath my feet, persuading me to move, too. Along with the one tide moving me, I’d been caught by another, set adrift in a sea of white faces. I couldn’t breathe without them pushing against me. How different this was from the days I’d spent with Aurelia in the loud streets of the Ville, swirling with color in every shade—the vanilla bean of Aunt Maureen’s face, the burnt caramel of Garland’s, the soft velvet shine of Eddie Crockett’s.
As if thinking conjured it up, I spied a face the beautiful color of maplewood in the throng, her hand poised on the chrome beside the snack bar, searching in every direction, just as I was. She shoved her way toward me, looking breathlessly relieved.
“I just didn’t know what they’d say about me being colored. And look how it worked. Wasn’t no problem.”
“Well, it was a stupid thing to do. We might never have found each other in here.”
“But we did.”
I started off in the direction of the sign marked BALLROOM with an arrow that pointed to DECK B. I wasn’t going to forgive Aurelia for at least fifteen minutes. She’d twisted my arm to come with her almost as hard as Darnell had twisted it trying to beat me arm-wrestling. And then she’d gone off and left me alone in a plan of her own devising.
“Wait! Don’t you want a hot dog?” Aurelia asked.
“I’d like to get where we’re going. It’s taken us long enough, don’t you think?”
Aurelia peeled herself away from the line faithfully. With no small twinge of guilt, I saw she already had money in her hand. “Never mind, Aurelia. If you’re hungry, you go ahead.”
“Lost my place in line anyhow.”
I can’t tell you how I knew something strange was about to happen. I just sensed it, the way I used to get goosebumps when Jean ran a duck feather along the underside of my knee. The purser trotted toward us, the one who’d nodded his black-patent leather cap brim at me like I was Grace Kelly as I’d stepped aboard. His arms swung with angry purpose, and his gaze pinned us.
“Come on.” I touched Aurelia’s shoulder. For the life of me, I couldn’t figure how he’d picked out the one girl who hadn’t followed the rules in this crush of people.
“What do you think you’re doing in here?” He grabbed her by the scruff of the neck, the same way I’d seen Marianne Thompson’s dog carry off its puppies.
“Aurelia, show him your ticket,” I commanded, bristling with self-righteousness. “It’s paid for, even though it never got torn in half.”
“My daddy’s in the Blue Notes,” she insisted, pulling against him.
He didn’t glance at me even once. He stayed focused on the side of Aurelia’s face, which she’d averted from him in shame.
“Is that so?”
I wanted her to look him straight in the eyes. I wanted her to shout at him, but she didn’t. “Yes.” I could barely hear her whisper.
“Really?” he asked, like he didn’t believe a word she said. Like he’d never believe a word Aurelia had to say, ever.
“Aurelia, show him your ticket.” To him, “Mister, I paid for it.”
He shot a fleeting glance at me. “It’s okay, young lady. You’re fine, ma’am. You go on ahead and enjoy the show.”
The difference in his voice chilled me. When he spoke to me, he crooned with respect. When he spoke to Aurelia, it sounded like he was speaking to a stupid, dull person. “We’re mid-river. I put you out now and you end up swimming. Current will take you clear down to Festus.”
She said nothing.
“You’ll have to stick with your daddy, then, out of sight. Can’t have you running around on the boat like this. Only Mondays are for the coloreds.”
“My daddy doesn’t play on Mondays.”
For a minute, after she spoke up to him like that, he looked like he wanted to throw her over the side of the Admiral after all. He looked like he had a good mind to set her to work washing dishes in the galley.
“Excuse me, sir,” I said when he started to haul her off. Thinking back on it now, I should have talked with the same sarcastic respect that would have made Daddy belt me into the next county. But I was too bewildered. I knew what Daddy said about Negroes, but I thought that was because Daddy was mean as the devil to everybody. I had seen how the colored people didn’t come to the Fox, but I’d thought it was because they had their own theater much closer by. I hadn’t known coloreds didn’t come because white people wouldn’t let them. For the first time, hearing the purser’s words,
I started to figure out what those portable buildings meant, set up outside our school. I hadn’t known that anyone other than Daddy thought folks from the Ville belonged in a separate place, beneath other people.
Gone was the impertinent way I’d stood at the gate with my chin uplifted and my pocketbook gripped in firm, certain hands. I guess the purser saw me in a different way now, too.
“You want to come with her?” He looked down his nose with disdain. “You follow me.”
He led us into the stairwell, in the opposite direction from where I’d been headed. Our feet, in our dressy patent leather shoes, tapped like raindrops on the aluminum steps.
Chapter Ten
When we were first ushered into their dressing room downstairs, it took seconds for our eyes to adjust to the cigarette smoke curling in our faces. But not so long that I missed Chick’s sharp glance at Aurelia’s daddy when we stepped into the room. Mr. Crockett stood up, looking at his daughter with such immense concern in his eyes that I couldn’t bear it.
“This is no family gathering.” A cigarette dangled precariously from T. Bone’s lower lip. “Don’t know what you two think you’re doing here.”
“Jenny brought me,” Aurelia told her father.
“I can see that,” he said. “Does Maureen know where you are?”
Aurelia didn’t answer; I guess that told him what he needed to know. By the way Eddie Crockett frowned at us when we turned up in that dressing room, I thought for sure he’d send us packing for home.
“Daddy,” Aurelia said, “you can’t blame us for wanting to hear you take the house down with your horn. You’re the one always going on about it.” And by the time he lifted his fancy hat and scratched the top of his head, even though he gave Aurelia a good reaming, I knew he had changed his mind. He let us help carry music stands (which they didn’t need, but they had to pretend they used them) to the shadowy center of the stage, behind the curtain.
