Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

  A limber blonde, who always annoyed me, preening in the back row, drawled, “‘Cause we’re all human beings, okay, when you get right down to it. We’re not all that different. We all, like, fall in love and stuff.”

  “Bullshit,” said Keshawn Jackson, the only obvious black pupil in the class, one of the few minority males on campus not riding an athletic scholarship. “What’s the most you ever suffered, dear? When your mama snatched away your charge card?”

  Both these answers were lazy, too easy, mired in stereotypes, but they had the effect on me of sniper fire. I sank in my seat. Keshawn reminded me of my old crush, Troy, intense, argumentative, rough around the edges. He’d shaved his head—before M.J. had popularized the style—and he looked exotic, sleek, a little dangerous. Was his baldness a slap at the fat afros of the seventies? A logical next step for someone seeking distinction?

  “Anyway, Ellison’s just a house nigger,” Keshawn growled. He enjoyed tweaking the ofays. “He wants to be part of the American tradition, right? Twain, Hawthorne, Melville, James, T. S. Eliot, for Christ’s sake—he’s sucking Jim Crow’s dick. ‘Yessir. Okay, sir. I’ll write it the way you say’ It’s bullshit. A black novelist, if he’s going to tell us anything new about ourselves, has got to tear down the tradition, blow it up and start over from a fresh perspective.”

  “So then … what? You’ll have anarchy? That doesn’t help anybody,” said a usually quiet kid up front.

  “Gotta start somewhere, pal.”

  “Maybe we live closer to anarchy than we think,” the teacher said, trying to focus the talk. “Listen. Ellison also wrote, ‘The Civil War is still in the balance, and only our enchantment by the spell of the possible, our endless optimism, has led us to assume that it ever really ended.’”

  By now, I had learned to read ideologically, as Troy had asked me to do, but I was no longer seeking my heritage. I was after acceptance and success—a quick, easy out, away from Mama toward independence and peace of mind. That meant White Lane, right down the middle. It meant rejecting Maya Angelou and Nikki Giovanni. It meant masking myself, which was simple for me. Keshawn had no idea that, behind my rouged sorority face, I knew exactly what Ellison was up to. I’d caught the blues pacing in his sentences, the serious mockery. Still, I got Bs on the two short papers I wrote on the book; I wasn’t about to give myself away, a peasant here in Paradise. Like my classmates, I tried just hard enough to get through the course.

  At first, the sororities on campus weren’t interested in me, not because they suspected my race, but because I was quiet, shy, not a quick joiner. My short hair and angularity gave me a “bit of a masculine thing”—several dorm-mates told me this, trying to “help” me. Finally, a girl whose ass I’d saved once or twice, aiding her with her calculus homework, invited me to the Tri Delt house. I wound up pledging, declaring myself a business major with a minor in marketing: the Yellow Brick Road to America’s soul.

  I wasn’t the only one compromising for purely pragmatic reasons. One day, in one of my marketing classes, a pretty black girl told us she’d had a rib removed so she could be thinner; she was “going the beauty pageant route” so she could parley her winnings and attention into a career as a TV personality, maybe as a news anchor or a talk show host. “This isn’t vanity,” she insisted. “It’s a business decision. Being beautiful is the only way a woman can make it in television—especially a black woman.” Fiercely, the class debated her strategy, the selling of her beauty, her skin. “What’s the difference between what you’re doing and what a stripper does or a hooker?” a shocked boy asked. The girl just smiled, and I thought, She’s tougher than I am. I was too intimidated to approach her after that, though initially I’d hoped we might be friends.

  Surviving as a Tri Delt took tremendous energy, a cynical edge cloaked as wit about trivial matters (in the house, concern over anything serious was “way not cool”). I hated my sisters’ records—Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd—plodding, dippy music, overly earnest without a whiff of irony or self-awareness, dead water compared with the rush of the blues (though in those days, Mama’s good little girl, I didn’t allow Uncle Bitter to muddy my thoughts).

  By junior year I was exhausted, maintaining the act. One day, after physics class, I found a quiet corner of the Meadows Museum on campus, a dimly lit gallery full of Goya’s Caprichos, wild pen-and-ink drawings of twisted creatures. The sketches were too disturbing to lure many viewers; the room was almost always deserted, and I started going there each afternoon, sitting and reading, hiding out, the way I used to escape to the junior high restroom.

  The museum catalog said that Goya, when he made the Caprichos, was fascinated by a Swiss theorist named Johann Kaspar Lavater, who insisted that an individual’s moral nature is shaped by his physical features. A “degenerate” lower jaw was a sign of “brutal corruption”; a “slavish devotion to pure reason” could lead to a “warped and bony forehead.” In this, I heard echoes of Bitter’s bayou superstitions, as well as more sinister strains of genetic engineering and racial typing. Still, for all their horror, Goya’s sketches were madly funny. My favorite was a drawing of two stumbling sleepwalkers hoisting braying asses—I get it! I thought. Mans donkeylike behavior! I know this stuff!

  In a history class that year, I learned that Spain, where Goya lived, was a blend of both European and African influences, a bastard mix, a slumgullion. Maybe that’s where Goya’s turmoil came from—why I was so attracted to his work. I liked history classes so much, I switched majors. This didn’t please Mama or my stepdad, who disdained the “impractical” liberal arts. By this time, tired of the Tri Delt house, bored with three-chord rock and roll—bored with myself—I began, at last, to think once more of the past, to smell, in memory, the bayou’s sweet, compelling rot. I pressed Mama again about our flight from Houston, her aversion to blacks, the blackness in herself. I wanted to know about Sarah Morgan. One day her husband Dale yelled at me to “leave your poor mother alone, can’t you? Christ, you’d think you’d want to live in Queen City”—a poor, inner-city neighborhood—“instead of enjoying the good things here. Your daddy couldn’t have given you a life like this. You know that, don’t you?”

  Aggravated by Mama’s silence, I sought my answers at school. Sarah Morgan. Insubordinate soldiers. Eventually, these threads led me to the Houston race riot. I became obsessed with it and would have remained a history major if the professors hadn’t discouraged me. Women weren’t really welcome in the profession. I saw this in subtle games of intellectual one-upsmanship at socials. Men competed for the big prizes—the American Revolution, the Civil War, the New Deal—animals fighting over meat. African American history barely surfaced on campus—the field’s few black scholars had earned their degrees at obscure institutions and were forced to spend most of their careers overworked in the classroom, woefully underpaid.

  When I proposed writing on Houston history for my favorite teacher, he looked at me skeptically. “There’s no collective memory in that city,” he said finally. “It’s been in such a hurry to grow, ever since its founding, it hasn’t bothered to retain its past. It only cares about Tomorrow. I’m afraid ‘Houston history’ is an oxymoron.”

  He was right. Records from Houston’s past had often been sloppily kept, misplaced, eaten by bugs, burned up, thrown out. The city’s heat and humidity were natural enemies of paper, where much of history resides. In researching the place, I kept running into silence. It was eerily like talking to Mama.

  In the end, I stuck with business and marketing, reading history on my own in the Goya room, surrounded not by short-ribbed TV beauties, but by humpbacks, birdmen, cannibals eating angels, children with hoary, feathered bodies. Slumgullions, all. I felt at ease with them. Happy. Since my freshman English class, Ralph Ellison’s blues-prose had spun, flashing, in my head, and I returned to him now, this time studying his essays, his concern that “practically missing from America …since Huckleberry Finn” was a “search for images of black and white frat
ernity.”

  One day I ran across this phrase: “The American Negro [has an] impulse toward self-annihilation and ‘going-under-ground.’” The words brought tears to my eyes, unexpectedly. I looked up at one of Goya’s grotesques, a tortured creature writhing on the earth, and this time, instead of seeing myself, I recognized poor Mama, running, frightened, stumbling from her past.

  On our visits back to Freedmen’s Town, she walked with me down magnolia-shaded roads or past pecan trees on the far side of the cemetery. She didn’t talk much but seemed content to be with me. Web-worms spun silk, patterned like musical staves, among the leaves. On the hottest days, worms dropped, shriveled, from the limbs: old lady fingers. People crushed them underfoot, accidentally, until the walks were slick with chili-like paste. I didn’t mind. I loved being with Mama.

  Silk waves in the oaks today in front of Ariyeh’s school. The neighborhood has been bulldozed and burned to near-extinction. An old man in a hooded jacket—he must be broiling!—pushes an empty shopping cart past the campus. On the playground, three girls stop to whisper about him, staring and laughing, then resume their game. Closer, I see they’re using TV cable as a jump rope. Garbage bags flap in broken windows on the building’s second floor. An inspection sheet taped to the wall near a boarded-up basement door says, “NO ACCESS TO BUILDING HERE,” and the remaining safety form is blank. A third- or fourth-grade boy saunters past me, puffing on a plastic inhaler, wrestling a backpack almost as big as he is. As they skip rope, the girls chant, “SSI, SSI / Give it to Granny / So Granny won’t die!” I’m astonished. SSI is a federal program for the sick and disabled, and just about everybody—including these laughing girls, it seems—knows it’s worthless. Last month, a woman who mistook my office for one of the social service outlets burst in, yelling, “How sick you gotta be to get on SSI? I’ve had AIDS for six months now, and the bastards still won’t cut me a check!”

  The school’s main door gives me trouble. It’s metal, painted green, and sticks near the uppermost hinge. I tug hard, imagining how difficult it must be for a child to budge this thing. What would happen in a fire? Fungus, old paper in the halls. Kids shuffle through them, quieter than I would have anticipated, gloomy even. This morning, before I left the shed, Uncle Bitter told me, “Three kids disappeared there lately, over a span of six weeks. Ain’t been found. Folks worried the Needle Men is back.”

  In the sweltering front office I ask for Ariyeh. A big woman fanning her face with a Newsweek (“George W.’s Run for the White House”) points out a cracked, dirty window to a concrete courtyard about the size of a doctor’s waiting room. “There she is, eating her sandwich.” The woman she means is slender, long-armed, in a red dress. Dark as bookprint. I don’t recognize my cousin until … yes, yes. Oval mouth. Small nose, like a thread spool. Talk about a remake!

  At the courtyard entrance, a sign on the wall says NO SKATEBOARDING. Below it, someone has scribbled No Guns.

  Ariyeh’s surprising appearance, along with Bitter’s information about my family, has made me shy. We’re strangers now, really. Not even real cousins. I’m slow to approach. “Excuse me,” I say. “Ariyeh?”

  She looks up, startled, and knows me immediately. A pleasure-twitch crosses her lips, tamped down instantly by anger, hurt, resentment? Who has she become in the last fifteen years? What burdens does she carry? “T,” she says softly, looking away, setting her cheese sandwich on a square of wax paper in her lap.

  “Look at you. You’re beautiful,” I say.

  Wry smile. “Not fat, you mean. I hit a growth spurt around fourteen, sprouted like a dandelion. No more Ugly Duckling.”

  “You were never an Ugly Duckling.”

  “You haven’t changed.” A sting. A Needle Man prick. Maybe some brown shoe polish on your cheekbones, little bit there, would help.

  “Uncle Bitter told me I could find you here. Can I sit for a minute?” She moves over, making room on the wobbly concrete bench. Her sweat smells like sage. “I’m sorry to interrupt your lunch.”

  “What brings you back after all this time?” She’s playing it cool, the way Uncle did two nights ago when I showed up on his porch.

  “My mama died.”

  “Yeah, Daddy told me. I guess he got a funeral notice.”

  “I had them send him one. She left me, you know, with a lot of questions. I needed to be here to study up on them. So …” A quiet minute. She nibbles her sandwich. “How long have you been teaching?” I ask.

  “Six years.”

  “You like it?”

  “Pays the rent.”

  “I figured you’d be married with a passel of kids by the time you were twenty. Playing house was always your favorite.”

  “I’m not married.” Another minute. “Got a boyfriend. You?”

  “No.”

  She stamps a cockroach at her feet. Crushed, it keeps crawling away, trailing what looks like sticky coconut. “Your hair’s still naturally straight like that?” she says, a little shyly.

  “Mostly. In my teens, it thickened up some. Now, it seems to be relaxing again.”

  “Lucky. ‘Round the time I lost my fat, I started going to the hairdresser to get pressed—two, two-and-a-half hours—forty dollars a pop. Daddy wasn’t happy about that, let me tell you. I tried the snatch-back look for a while, but finally the chemicals turned everything into, like, these gnarly old plaits, so I gave up.”

  “It looks lovely.”

  She pats her short curls. “You’re one of those women who, late at night in the clubs, makes the rest of us crazy,” she says. “In the heat, when all our ‘dos have wilted and fallen flat, you’re still just perfect.”

  A tall girl in overalls comes running up to us. In her hair, a plump yellow scrunchie. She eyes me suspiciously, then whispers to Ariyeh, but not so softly I can’t hear, “I be having my periot now, and the koteck thingy in the bat’room is broke.”

  Ariyeh reaches into her big leather bag, produces a tampon with an applicator. The girl grabs it, greedily, then hurries off. “Fourth grader,” Ariyeh says.

  “You’re kidding. How old is she?”

  “Thirteen. We stopped social promotions here a few years ago, so some of these kids stay stuck.”

  A grackle lands in the courtyard, plucks at the gooey bug. In its throat, the bird makes a leaky air hose sound.

  “Uncle told me you’ve lost some kids lately.”

  “Three. All boys. Ten-year-olds.” She bites into an apple, talks as she chews. “Police checked all the unguarded construction sites in the area, the crack houses, vacant lots. Nothing.”

  “Needle Men?” I smile, though as soon as I’ve said it, I know it’s in bad taste.

  Of course she won’t share the humor. Or memories of our childhood on Bitter’s lap. “If Reggie—my boyfriend—ever heard Bitter spinning that tale, he’d hit the roof. He doesn’t have any patience for superstition or folklore. I guess I don’t either, anymore.”

  I decide not to tell her I passed the Flower Man’s house last night and thought of us. A man in a gray custodian’s uniform fast-walks through the courtyard, scolding a boy for apparently setting fire to paper in a trash can. “Send you to boot camp, boy, how you like that?”

  Ariyeh balls up her lunch bag. “I need to get back.”

  “Ariyeh.”

  She stands, then turns to me, waits.

  “Ariyeh, I’m sorry I didn’t stay in better touch. I know Bitter thinks I was being a snob. Maybe you do, too. I was just … my mama didn’t want me to … anyway, anyway, I missed you. I thought about you a lot.”

  She taps the bag against her thigh. It sounds like a torn tambourine. “I didn’t think you were being a snob,” she says softly. “I just thought you were being white.”

  I look at my hands. My very pink palms. Then Ariyeh starts to laugh. I stand, smile nervously. I laugh with her, slowly at first, finally in great, sobbing waves of relief. I want to hug her, but she doesn’t look ready for that. She is beautiful. And dignified
. “How long are you going to be here?” she asks.

  “A few days, at least. Right now I’m staying with Uncle, but I may give him a break and move to a motel.”

  “I’ll stop by. Maybe you can meet Reggie.”

  “I’d like that.” She squeezes my arm. “Ariyeh,” I say, grasping her hand. “How well do you remember my mama? If you don’t mind me asking?”

  She chews her lower lip. “Pretty well. I remember she always seemed sad to me.”

  “She never talked to you about my daddy, did she?”

  “No.”

  “What do you remember about your own mother?”

  “Cass? I remember her yelling all the time. That’s all.”

  “What about?”

  “Anything. Everything.”

  I nod and let her go. She disappears behind a big metal door, catty-corner to the one I came through, in a wall scored by scorch marks. Green fungus mottles a window frame next to the door; with nail polish, someone has painted on the glass “Uh-Huh.” Two boys, about ten, with sneakers as big as banana floats, pass through the courtyard, glancing at me, snickering.

  In the Safeway parking lot, as I’m loading my trunk with grocery bags, a car passes palpitating to a rap beat. I turn, expecting black teenagers. Instead, two white boys in a brand-new BMW cruise with the windows down, thrashed by the tune in their speakers.

  Bitter isn’t home, so I unload our supper supplies, snatch a beer, and walk across the street to the cemetery. Sunflowers, snapdragons, and hollyhocks curl around headstones of mothers, fathers, children, baseball players, street singers, salesmen. The snapdragons smell like ashtrays. I remember picking flowers for Mama as a girl. She never thanked me for them; she’d take them from my hands with a seriousness that indicated she deserved this lovely tribute. Maybe some brown shoe polish on your cheekbones, little bit there… the day Ariyeh suggested this to me (some boys, passing Bitter’s yard, had laughed at me), I bawled fiercely. Mama, stirring chicken soup on the stove, said, “Go pick me some flowers. Hurry up now.” When I came back, she arranged the roses, lilies, and violets in a jar, poured me a glass of milk, and sat with me at the kitchen table. “Aren’t they pretty?” she said, turning the jar around and around. “And they’re all different, each attractive in its own unique way.”