Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

  I park my car now in front of the house, grab my bag, and head for the boneyard. Afternoon services are just beginning at the church. Voices rise to the sky. Hallelujahs and praised-bes. I settle by a tomb so ancient and worn, the only legible date is “18—.” Baby’s breath blooms, early, in the grass nearby: a soft, white smell. Through tree shade I see what remains, across the road, of some of the first homes built by ex-slaves here after the Civil War. Two-by-fours weak as cardboard, pressed by years of wind and rain into the ground; shingles like marked cards, forgotten by a tarred-and-feathered gambler. Sunlight warms my shoulders. A bit of a tan wouldn’t hurt, I think and laugh a quiet, rueful laugh.

  Three weeks ago I found in Mama’s things, along with C’s letter to Sarah Morgan, a yellowed copy of the Crisis, the official publication of the NAACP, dated July 25, 1917—about a month before the Houston riot. I pull it from my bag now. What better place than a field of ghosts to read the words of the dead?

  On the journal’s second page, circled in pencil, a letter appears from Private Cletus Hayes, Twenty-fourth Infantry, Third Battalion, praising the Crisis editor, W. E. B. Du Bois, for his “noble fight for manhood rights for our people.” He closes with a promise that the “entire enlisted command of the Twenty-fourth Infantry is ready to aid you in any way.”

  The phrase “manhood rights” also occurs in the personal letter: “We troops are asked to defend the United States’ interests abroad, when very often we are denied our manhood rights here at home. But oh my dear Sarah, when I think of your vitality, your loveliness, and your understanding, I know what I am fighting for.”

  Standard wartime sentiments. But the near-certainty that C was the Cletus Hayes praising Du Bois in the Crisis, the same man later hanged for mutiny, rioting, and rape, makes his gesture toward Sarah Morgan anything but common.

  Why did Mama keep these things if she wasn’t going to talk to me about them? And she wouldn’t orate, ever, on anything significant. Once, when I asked her why we’d left Houston, she looked at me, said, “Sometimes you come to a crossroads,” and refused to say any more.

  Am I obsessed with Cletus Hayes because she was so mum about him? Sometimes, I see my search for him as defiance, but also, since her death, as a way of snuggling closer to her. Wearing her perspective as if it were a hand-me-down.

  I fold the Crisis back into my bag. It’s not an Alex Haley thing, this scrabbling after roots, though I am hoping Bitter can fill me in on Daddy as well as Cletus Hayes.

  It’s more like this story I read in college. A man fasts to astonish paying crowds. Abstinence is not a skill so much as the curse of his life. As he’s dying, he admits, “If I could have found food I liked, I would gladly have eaten.” Somehow, I felt the truth of that line in my skin. Nothing I was supposed to like was giving me any nourishment. And so—what? I find myself back in Houston, looking for palatable old recipes? Well, but it’s not that simple.

  In Dante’s Hell—another outlook I ran across in college—damnation is a constant lapsing backward, repeating one’s sins. Swimming against the current, never getting things right: I understood that too. But my family’s original sin, the start of the cycle: Cletus, Daddy, Mama. It had to do with them.

  Else, why would Mama have fled?

  I need to know it, nail it—whatever it is—so I can shut the fucker down. “Everybody has a buried story,” my teacher told me, the one who assigned Dante and Kafka. The one who told me, You must know everything. “And everyone’s purpose in life, no matter how foolhardy their attempts may be, is to be heard.”

  Down the street, the church is humming now with the preacher’s calls to witness. I been sanctified, Lord, and offer up a joyful noise in Your name, amen! Sometime I get to ‘membering the slothful sinner I surely usta could be, and FALL on my knees, Lord, humble before Thee, handing up my soul, amen! Touch me with your flame, amen! Take my tongue and teach your grace through me. Enlist me in your mighty army, Lord, amen!

  In the testimonies, I hear blues rhythms, the pacing of Uncle Bitter’s hoo-raws, the gumbo-okra lilt of the Deep South, Louisiana, Africa, and the Caribbean, our misty ancestral sources. I’m a rampaging, devil-dousing soldier for Christ, amen! I hear the music of my childhood—music that, like the blues, Mama worked to drum from my head. I was sixteen the last time I set foot in a church—the day Mama married a Dallas lawyer. By then, we were living in a perfect, all-white world, and I was, on the surface, a perfect, all-white girl. My skin was twice as pale as Mama’s. I could waltz into any public place, in any part of town. My mop had thickened by then—I no longer had that “pretty hair”—and so, for both of us, to maintain the mask, Mama kept the bathroom stocked with Frizz-Away: “Deluxe Hair-Straightener—No Lye, No Muss, No Fuss!”

  I’m a salesman for my Lord, stepping door to door with a surefire sin-cleaner. Its name ain’t Hoover. Its name ain’t General ‘Lectric. No sir. It’s Jesus Christ, amen! He’ll leave you sparkle-plenty!

  Last month, when the breast cancer finally carried Mama home, I refused her Methodist church, her lawyer-husband (“You’re her daughter, you should be here!”), everything but the parched north Dallas graveyard once she’d been laid to rest. I visited late one evening, alone, carrying a sorry, paper-wrapped rose from a nearby Safeway. Her stone was simple, just her name, fitting a taciturn woman. But her last words to me rapped like a faulty pipe in my mind: “I’ve tried to be a good woman, Telisha. God spare me! God spare me from Hell!”

  What was it she was afraid to repeat? And why? And how did her trap become my own? For surely that’s part of my story, too.

  She left for me her perfect world, darkened only by the whispered admission, years ago, that my great-grandmother, Sarah Morgan, was once attacked by a black man and never recovered. All the rest I’ve stumbled over, as through neighborhood debris, on my own.

  Still no witness to my daddy. Nothing to tell me, directly, who I am. So I keep spinning from one perspective to the next.

  One day I’ll be coming on home, Lord, coming on home—

  I left the rose on Mama’s grave and determined to return to Freedmen’s Town. Or at least, her passing is one of my reasons—my most conscious excuse—for coming back. Now, I zip my bag up tight. No matter what I find here, probably my life won’t change. Even if I alter my thinking, I won’t be any more, or less, welcomed anywhere I go.

  So why the hell am I here?

  My legs tingle, nearly asleep. I shake them out, stroll the alley behind my uncle’s house, where Ariyeh and I used to prowl with empty shoe boxes, hoping to catch lizards and horned toads for Bitter to use in his spells. He’d slip the boxes from us, bend to hear the creatures’ scratchings, mumble some gris-gris, then tell us to set our prisoners free. He didn’t need their bodies, he said. “I drawed their spirits clean out of their skins, see. Now I hold the power in my fingers!”

  The alley smells of gin, spaghetti sauce, and urine, the way it always did, and I long to see Ariyeh again, to laugh with her, run with her through drippy bayou heat, past vacant lots where the first freedmen here sharecropped and sang. I wonder if she’ll be at Etta’s tonight with Bitter and his pals? What will Etta’s look like? I’ve never been inside an ice house.

  Someone in the church takes up a mouth harp, wheezes a plea to God. I remember my confusion, as a child, listening to the spirituals—Lawd, Lawd, oh yes my Lawd—then walking home from Sunday school with Ariyeh, past the railroad tracks, hearing the winos whistle and yell at us, “Oh Lawd! Oh yeah! Gonna be fine someday!” What was the difference between the sacred and the old men’s wolf calls? Is this what Bitter meant when he said, “The world sure does love a nigger joke. Always playing tricks on us.”

  The church melody evokes for me lonely soldiers in a field, squatting around a campfire, stuffing their backpacks with gris-gris—frog legs, dried scorpion claws—to give them luck in battle. For a moment, as I stand dazed in a mosquito swarm in the alley, I can almost walk up to Cletus Hayes, in my mind. I can almost see h
is face. Then: the mad red welt around his neck.

  The church thunders with voices, mouth harp, tambourine, sharp guitar. Laughing and clapping. I wipe the sweat from my face. My very pink palm. There’s a train acoming, Lord, and I’m gointer be on it! I know these people. Yet I don’t. I’m hoboing my way to Heb’n! They are making a joyful noise, and keeping Death at bay.

  2

  THE FAINT-HEARTED wont find Etta’s Place. No signs, no lights, no outside paint—just weathered wood and an illegible address on the door in orange Marks-A-Lot. I spun my tires for half an hour, up and down Scott Street, trying to ferret out the club. Now my car is the only one in the lot. The neighborhood, nearly treeless, exposed, looks as scoured and salty as a coastal town. Everything’s the dingy gray-white of seagulls.

  The Flower Man’s house sits on a corner down the street. I remember sneaking around it when Ariyeh and I were kids. We never knew what the Flower Man did, never even saw him. But he’d covered his house with giant plastic roses, TV trays, Barbie dolls, seashells, clay birds—all nailed or glued to the walls so you couldn’t see the wood anymore. A bottle tree hides his front porch: bare cedar limbs holding empty colored bottles, which, according to bayou lore, will trap evil haints. The bottles ting like out-of-tune piano keys. Aspirin containers, vitamin jars, sodas. Green, purple, blue. The house is like a gulf-side beach, a flotsam-catcher whenever the tide comes in. Like everything else I remember here, the place looks worn now but still glorious in its trashy get-up.

  I lock the car. Opening Etta’s door, I get a splinter in my thumb. I’m the only one here. Ten-thirty. Coors crates block the back wall. Microphones huddle near a Pearl drum set in a dusty corner. Termites appear to have colonized the bottom third of the bar. A gray-haired woman stands there, thin as a diving board, quivering like someone’s just jumped off her. She croaks, “Take a load off, dear. Make yourself at home.”

  “I was supposed to meet somebody here—”

  “They’ll be along d’rectly. Music’ll be starting up.”

  No sign of a band. I set my purse on a gimpy wooden chair.

  The woman—Etta?—says, “Beer?”

  “Yes, please. Just a—” Something ratlike skitters among the crates. “—Coors.”

  She attacks a bottle with difficulty, using a small hand-opener. I wonder if I should go over and help her, but she seems determined. I don’t want to embarrass her in her own place. Her hands shake like water sprinklers. Finally the cap spins off, and she heads my way. “Enjoy, dear.”

  “I appreciate it.” A sulfurous, ruined-eggs smell wafts from the kitchen, behind an open curtain near the bar. It’s not really a curtain but a Star Wars bedsheet. Princess Whatcha-macallit, faded. I settle at a wobbly, ash-browned table.

  Fifteen minutes or so later, two men with guitars show up, one thin and stiff as a two-by-four, the other in a James Brown outfit, purple suit, black leather shoes. His hair is oily and straight. He must weigh three hundred pounds. “Etta, you gorgeous, chicken-legged mama, you! How you been, girl?” He gives the old woman a hug. She shivers, her face buried in the wedge between his breasts.

  A bass player and a drummer, both sullen, arrive, start tuning, tightening, adjusting. Still no crowd. I order a second beer, watch in agony as Etta struggles with the opener. I pick at the splinter in my thumb.

  Finally, just as the band seems ready to start—as if a secret signal has sounded somewhere—Uncle Bitter walks in the door, followed by dozens of other men and women, all in their fifties and sixties, I’d guess. It’s 11:20. “Bitter!” Etta croaks. “Hanging good, my man?”

  “Feel like a million dollars that’s done been spent. How you coming, mon ‘te chou?”

  “Poly, thank God.”

  While Uncle greets the band and orders beers for his friends (pointedly ignoring me, so far), three big women sit at a table next to mine. They’re dressed in Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes, black crinoline and lace, red stockings. With great solemnity, they set heavy paper bags on the tabletop, then settle back in their chairs, surveying the room like teachers on the first day of class not entirely happy with their prospects. The monster in the purple suit—his name is Earl, I overhear—bows to them, saying, “Ladies.” They ignore him, but not really; their turning-away is practiced, almost choreographed, for Earl’s benefit. He knows this and smiles. I have the feeling I’m watching a long-familiar ritual, and I’m glad I got here first. I’d hate to walk in on this scene, interrupting it, drawing direct stares instead of the furtive ones I’m getting now.

  White bitch: there it is again, in the ladies’ cutting eyes. They’re as disdainful of me as the sorority girls in college were when I finally told them I wasn’t really one of them and not to be fooled by my skin. I sit up in my chair, sip my beer, try not to look as discomfited as I feel. After years of this, you’d think I’d have perfected a smooth disdain of my own, but I don’t seem able to just let things ride. I’ll bet I know what kind of straightener you slap in your sorry-ass hair, I’m thinking, but I keep it to myself.

  Earl palms a mike and the band eases into some blues. Leadbelly. I know it right away. All about the National Dee-fense and a woman who don’t have no sense.

  At the bar, Bitter mimics Earl’s hippy movements and calls to him, “Un wawaron!”—another Creole lilt I recall from long ago: Bullfrog. Its sound warms my ears. We used to sit outside and listen to the critters late at night, Bitter, Ariyeh, and me. Earl laughs, wags a playful finger at my uncle.

  Very slowly, now, the women next to me remove from their paper bags elegant glass decanters of E & J brandy, along with lime juice in plastic squeeze bottles. They order Sprites, glasses with straws, and a bucket of ice. Etta brings all this on a tray, avoiding a disaster despite her shakes. The women mix their drinks with great dignity—priests preparing Communion—their long red nails keeping time on the table to the tune.

  An old man who looks to be eighty, a former professional scarecrow, dances by himself next to the beer crates, sipping from a flask of MD 20/20. Uncle Bitter finally turns my way, bearing a big, sweating can of Colt 45 malt liquor. Three fellows follow him.

  “This here Seam,” he says to his friends, waving at me. They grab chairs. Old Spice and gin, tobacco, and sweat. “Telisha,” I say. “Telisha Washington. Hello.”

  “This your niece?” one asks.

  Uncle Bitter just smiles; the drummer raps a rim-shot, like signaling a punch line; and I realize what I should have known, of course, a long time ago. No. I’m not his niece. Not really.

  My skin goes clammy and my mouth dries up. I sit unmoving, hot with shame (or exposed pride, refusing to admit to myself what was obvious all these years). Bitter ignores me again. He and his cronies toast each other, chatter, snicker when the band screws up a bar.

  “Hear they shutting down the Astrodome.”

  “Who?”

  “City.”

  “Shit. Where the Astros gon’ play?”

  “Some fancy-ass new fa-cili-tee they building downtown, call Enron Field.”

  “Enron? Kinda name is that?”

  “Name of the gas company what shuts off your heat every winter. They be owning half the town now.”

  “Own the hot and the winter’s cold.”

  “Bought the balls, the bats, the protective cups.”

  Bitter leans back in his chair, arms stretched on the table: a fatcat senator making deals. “I saw the first game ever played at the Dome, back in ‘65. Exhibition with the Yankees. They let colored folks in cheap that night ‘counta we passed the last bond referee-endum they needed to build the thing. It was gonna fail ‘cause they running way over budget, see, but Judge Hofheinz—he owned the city back then—he lobbied us, hard, in Freedmen’s Town, said we’d be welcome at all the events, and we could even work there and shit. We’s the ones closed the deal, finally.” He grins. “That first night, LBJ was in the crowd, and Mickey Mantle, he slammed him a homer. Real beauty, almost smacked the roof.”

  “‘Mem
ber, Bitter, the Dome’s groundsmen in them days, decked out in spacesuits, raking the infield like they’s sweeping the moon?”

  “Shoot, Houston booming then. Thought the moon just one of its ‘burbs.”

  “Moon in better shape than Freedmen’s Town. I’d move there tomorrow, could I afford it.”

  Their laughter evaporates when the talk turns to Texas City, and they reminisce about working oil rigs or cargo boats down in the gulf, the day half the coast blew up. 1947. I remember overhearing Bitter once, when I was a child, mention “terrible flames,” and I questioned Mama about it. She told me he was there that day and barely survived the explosion. “What caused it?” one of his buddies asks him now. “Oil leak? I cain’t recall.”

  “Fertilizer,” Bitter says. “Ammonium nitrate, stored on a Liberty boat. Some asshole tossed a butt in the hold, and that was all she wrote. Fire spread to the refineries and Welcome to Hell.”

  “‘Member Bill Southey?”

  “Shit yes, and Max Low.”

  They trade more names of the dead, order more liquor, grow sadder, drunker. Earl has shucked his coat. He’s standing in a puddle of his own perspiration. Regally, the ladies sip their brandy, shun him with intricate head twists—which only entice him closer to their table. He croons to them, “Had me a Volkswagen love, now I’m looking for a Rolls / Roll on over, Mama, let me pop your pretty hood.” Etta vibrates like a tuning fork behind the bar. The skinny old man still dances by himself, grinning as if an invisible angel is tonguing his ear.

  I worry the splinter, worry what I know—what I’ve always known, if I’m honest with myself. Why it slips out now, like ice spilled from the ladies’ bucket, I’m not sure, but Uncle Bitter has something to do with it: leaving me on my own all day, asking me here, then pretending my chair is empty. I suspect he’s not punishing me so much as making me see, forcing me to sit here, quietly, uncomfortably, and take it all in. Not just the place, but him. Me. Our history. Our lost years.

  But the place. Of course it signifies for me, powerfully. I asked him once where my daddy had got to. We were alone in his yard. I was maybe seven. “Your daddy been down to the crossroads,” he said. “Learned him that hoodoo guitar.”