Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

“No.”

  “Save me the trouble of shooting myself. Please.”

  I stand, unsteadily, start to walk away. Owls bellow in the trees. “Good luck to you, Cletus,” Henry says. “You’re going to need it.”

  I stumble through blackberry brambles, bayou water sloshing in my boots. A loud click, then a lid slamming shut. The rifle report freezes my spine, but I force myself to move. Nothing can salvage this night or redeem my shameful behavior, but crossing rails past empty, uncoupled boxcars, I think of Sarah Morgan. One last time, I think of planting seeds.

  Can’t we all just get along? A planner I worked with, a liberal white man who grew up in L.A. and who was profoundly disturbed by the Rodney King riots, once proposed a multifamily public housing project built around courtyards, with lush landscaping and bright ceramic tiles. His idea was that each family would sacrifice ten percent of its interior square footage to create a shared neighborhood center: mailboxes, washers and dryers, a community kitchen, a child-care room. “The shared public space will enforce a sense of collective responsibility,” he reasoned. “It’ll be perfect, especially for single-parent families, who need all the help they can get. I mean, let’s face it, right now, our public housing sucks. We have inner cities that aren’t worth caring about. That leads to a nation not worth defending. At the very least, a nation vulnerable to black rage.”

  I liked him. He used to quote Walt Whitman in the office. “You know what Walt used to say? He asked America to become a vast ‘city of friends’ basking in ‘robust love.’ Now that’s a vision of city planning!”

  Like all Utopians I’ve known, he was crushed when others ruled his dreams unfeasible. He quit his job and became a VISTA volunteer. Later, I heard he was killed one night in a drive-by, serving food outside a homeless shelter in a dying neighborhood, still trying to breathe life into his vision.

  I went through a phase of promoting getting along. I’d hear an ofay make a racist joke, then spring the news on him I was black. Inevitably, instead of apologizing, he’d make an excuse, usually a long-winded list of his hardships. Failed athletic careers. Lost rock-and-roll dreams. School rejections. “The whole damn world’s elitist, all right?” a fellow told me once.” You people don’t have a patent on suffering.” I learned to keep my mouth shut. To expect misunderstandings and fear. To approach planning with skepticism and diminished expectations. To relinquish Eden, a city of friends.

  6

  AT ARIYEH’S suggestion, I meet her and Reggie at a place called the Ragin’ Cajun. Last night at Bitter’s, when she came to arrange the lunch, she told me Reggie and Bitter didn’t get along. Reggie was a tireless community activist. He’d raised funds to salvage collapsing row houses, fix them up, and convert them into a public art project.

  When I arrive at the restaurant, he and Ariyeh are already seated. He’s small, the color of peanut brittle, with shoulder-length dreads. He’s leaning over the table, gesturing with strong, slender hands. “Even if all they do is play games, the cost is justified.”

  “How?” Ariyeh says.

  “Baby, I gotta go through this again?”

  “How is it justified?”

  “See, even before the American Revolution, this country locked a power structure into place—”

  “Reggie, seriously, what do your damn conspiracies have to do with computer games?”

  “Hi,” I say.

  Ariyeh smiles, stands, introduces us. “Good to meet you,” Reggie says. “I’d just like to finish this point, okay?”

  I nod. We all sit down. A plastic cover overlays the table, red and white checks.

  “South Carolina, 1739, all right?”

  “Oh Christ, Reggie, don’t history me again—”

  “It’s the facts, baby. Listen to me, now. What did the legislators do?”

  “Let me guess.”

  “Banned reading and writing for coloreds, that’s what, and even outlawed talking drums.”

  “Okay, Preacher-Man.”

  “The point I’m making is, the Internet is the new talking drum. In the twenty-first century, guaranteed, baby, every important social connection is going to be on-line—”

  “But one computer—”

  “It’s a start, sugar. I showed you those stats, right? Thirty-three percent middle-income whites own PCs, compared with nineteen percent blacks. Nineteen percent.”

  “All right, but—”

  “We’re two separate nations: white and wired, black and unplugged. Seventeen thirty-nine all over again.”

  Ariyeh tells me, “Reggie wants to buy a computer for the Row House Project, get the neighborhood kids comfortable with technology. I think what he and the boys really want to do is sit around and play Doom Master or Master Doom or whatever the hell it’s called.”

  Reggie grins. “Part of the education. You hungry?”

  We stand in a long line at the counter. The walls are covered with beer signs, football posters, cartoon armadillos, Louisiana license plates. A sign above the men’s room door says CRAWFISH GIVE GOOD HEAD. We order cornbread, corn on the cob, and a large bucket of crawfish. The room is pungent and hot, buzzing with talk and the sizzle of frying foods. At a table next to us, two white men the size of Frigidaires, in white shirts and blue ties, paw through a basket of hush puppies. On our other side, three black men wearing oily gas station uniforms bite the heads off their crawfish. They suck the meat.

  Ariyeh is tense. Another child has disappeared from her school. “That makes four boys in two months,” she says. She tucks her napkin into her light blue blouse. “Cops are getting nowhere, and the kids are scared to death. I mean, what if there’s some wacko on the loose? I don’t know how to protect—”

  “You conk your hair?” Reggie asks me, pointing at my head with his chewed-up corncob.

  “Reggie!”

  “Not anymore,” I say, flushing. “But I used to.” I’m holding a crawfish in my hand; it feels alive to me, its stiff legs wedged between my fingers. The food is spicy. It’s like swallowing straight pins.

  “What about the kitchen?” He fingers the nape of his neck. “You know, this real kinky part here. Must be tough to keep straight.”

  “Not so much nowadays.”

  “Ever Jheri-Curl it?”

  Ariyeh says, “Reggie, that’s enough.”

  “You can pass, can’t you?” he says.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s how you get by.”

  “Sometimes. Most of the time.”

  He nods thoughtfully. Encouraged by his bluntness, I ask him, “How come you don’t like Bitter?”

  Ariyeh squirms.

  “Shit, that shuffle-and-jive he does, that ‘uncle’ business, it’s the kind of self-hating crap let whites dog brothers from the start. I can’t fucking stand it.” He touches Ariyeh’s arm. “I’m sorry, baby. I know he’s your daddy. But she asked.”

  “It bothers me too,” I admit. Ariyeh turns to me, surprised. “I mean, I didn’t know any better as a kid, but since I’ve come back this time … still, it’s who he is now, isn’t it? For men his age—”

  “Don’t tell me he didn’t have a choice. He did. Just like you do. You’re not the ‘anguished mixed-blood child,’ are you? Tell me you haven’t accepted a stereotype as the way to carry yourself?”

  Again, I feel my face go hot. “And you? The ‘angry black militant’?”

  He smiles. “You’re right. I like your pluck, girl. And you’re right on target. It’s damn hard to escape the boxes hammered out for us.” He leans forward. “Who are the biggest consumers of television in this country? Black folks. And what kind of pictures of themselves do they see there? But I tell the neighborhood kids: self-awareness—especially awareness of your own clichés or the ideas the culture wants you to swallow—is the answer to kicking all the shit. The way to shoot past whatever the Man expects of you. You, I don’t know,” he says to me. “You seem smart about yourself. But your uncle Bitter’s faith in mother-wit and soft-shoeing it … I think
that old man lost his soul a long time ago.”

  “I don’t agree,” Ariyeh says. “Let’s change the subject.”

  “I can’t imagine you two growing up together.”

  Ariyeh and I look at each other and laugh—because we can’t believe it now, either. The big men beside us rate the Houston Rockets. “Ola-juwon’s lost a step.” “Barkley’s been slacking for three seasons now.” “Drexler’s legs was good for one more run.”

  “What about you?” I ask Reggie. “Where did you grow up?”

  “In the Fifth Ward here. Me and my walkies, my cornerboys, you know, we were groomed to do bids. Ass out. Convicted before we were born. It’s just luck I’m not serving time. Went to a school that should have been condemned for safety violations in the fifties. Scrubbed each night with Pencor Soap. Funny how I still remember its name. My mama told me, ‘This here soap is made by guys in the penitentiary, which is where you’re going to end up.’ Destiny. So I learned to live for props—”

  “What’s that?”

  “Props. You know. Proper respect. You earned it on the street by doing something cool. We all knew who’d earned the most props. Taking something. Ripping someone off. All the way live. We knew we were eighty-sixed from the good life, see, so we figured we were owed whatever we could steal. Let me tell you, BMT—”

  “Black Man Talking,” Ariyeh interprets for me. “Means, ‘Listen up.’”

  “That’s right. We learned to express only one emotion, sister: rage.”

  As he talks, Ariyeh wears the same bored expression Barbara Jones did, listening to Kwako. She, too, has hooked up with a visionary, a man who’s changed his frustrations into creative energy, but who, in his grandiosity (I’m guessing), overlooks daily chores and the immediate needs of others. But maybe I’m judging unfairly.

  “On my ninth birthday, to impress my cornerboys, I swiped a starter pistol from the school gym—one of those guns they fire to begin a race? After classes I caught a guy from another gang—we all marked ourselves with different-colored rags. I knocked him down and shoved the pistol into his mouth. When I pulled the trigger, it flashed and broiled about half his face. Teachers caught me, and that was my ticket to the system. They sent me to YSC, Youth Study Center—first of about half a dozen trips. After that it was BCC, the Bureau for Colored Children. These are prep schools for the pen, you dig? I was learning to be a criminal.”

  The gas station guys are laughing. “No, I ain’t fucking wit’ you,” one says to another in a tone that indicates Of course I’m fucking with you but I’m too cool to admit it. The white men still debate basketball. “Rodman’s a showboat, man, bad for the game, ought to be banned from the league.” The voice says, Crazy nigger, I’d love to see him get what he deserves, but with a thrilled edge that also indicates, I love it when he’s bad, I wish I had the balls to be bad.

  “So what broke the cycle for you?” I ask Reggie. “Your luck. What was it?”

  “Books. In BCC a guy gave me Maya Angelou.”

  I smile.

  “W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. Elijah Muhammad’s Message to the Blackman in America. See, on the street, props had never been handed out for intellectual development. But in the system, where you had lots of time, some guys started using their minds, their imaginations. So the irony was, prison freed these fellows, let them pick in high cotton. Gave them power their white captors never intended them to have. I’m living proof of that.”

  Reading ideologically.

  “I hate to say it, but I’ve got to get back,” Ariyeh says, wiping her hands on a shredded napkin. A busboy swishes by, knocking crawfish shells from our table onto wet paper on the floor. He scoops the paper up and dunks it into a trash can. “Why don’t you go with Reggie to see the Row House Project, T? I think you’ll be impressed.”

  I glance at her, then him. His energy makes me nervous.

  Ariyeh senses my hesitation. “It’s an example of what can be done to salvage old black neighborhoods. It’s what ought to be happening in Freedmen’s Town. I think it’s something a city planner should see.”

  “All right,” I say, falsely bright. “Lead the way.”

  “No no, I disagree,” one of the big men says. “Michael Jordan earned every penny. I mean, the man wasn’t human. I swear he had wings in his butt—”

  Reggie leans their way. “The NBA throws an obscene amount of money at a few hundred brothers to compensate for the collective guilt you ofays feel, but you know what? There’s not enough money between here and Africa to ever atone for the lethal shit dumped on my people.”

  The men tremble; tartar sauce greases their thumbs. The gas station gang hoots, bumping shoulders. Ariyeh tugs Reggie’s arm. He walks away without leaving a tip: we were owed whatever we could steal.

  Outside the restaurant, he chuckles, pleased with himself. Clouds fat with seawater bubble up in the east, turning the afternoon light a pleasant blue-green. The passing traffic smells toasted: hot brakes, broiling metal. “I have to go back to school now and face dozens of frightened children, who wonder why their friends have disappeared. I don’t want to have to worry about you doing a ghost too,” Ariyeh tells Reggie.

  “They’re all talk and blubber,” he says. “Living vicariously through black, athletic bodies. And hating them at the same time. Pathetic.”

  She kisses him curtly on the cheek. “We’ll talk about it later.” She takes my hand. “I’ll drop by Bitter’s again soon. You’re staying a while longer?”

  “A while.”

  “Follow me,” Reggie says and steps into a red Honda. I wave goodbye to the woman I used to think was my cousin, back when I believed I knew my family, my home. My own true colors.

  The Row House Restoration Project, twenty-two shotgun houses built in the twenties and thirties, braced, refurbished, repainted, occupies two city blocks on Alabama Street, ten minutes south of Freedmen’s Town. With local arts grants and a smattering of corporate support, Reggie has turned the abandoned homes into a series of galleries displaying the work of black, Chicano, Asian, and other minority artists. In one house, lining the floor, I find a collection of snapshots in canning jars. The artist’s statement explains that she distributed 150 disposable cameras at schools and churches in Houston’s blighted neighborhoods and asked kids to take pictures of whatever they wanted. She placed the results in over three thousand jars, beneath a banner that reads, “What will we choose to preserve?” The pictures show broken fire escapes, drug needles glinting in gravel parking lots, old people sleeping, undernourished babies.

  In another house, life-sized cardboard figures stand, faceless, in the center of the room. Huddled against the walls, in shadow, cutouts of children. The artist hoped to dramatize the trauma of child abuse, she writes, by showing “something is horribly wrong in this house.”

  A third artist has used her space to “celebrate pattern making, a tradition passed down through generations of African American families—using a variety of surfaces and materials to record events and thus claim our place in the universal order.” On the walls, torn newspaper strips covered with crayon drawings, elaborate maps made on napkins and cardboard boxes, photographs pinned to tapestries sewn out of bed-sheets. They remind me of my mama’s old quilts.

  I’m delighted to see one of Kwako’s car-bumper birds perched on a porch. “I just met this guy,” I tell Reggie. Lunch still burns my mouth. “Yesterday. I drove to his museum.”

  “Good man. One of Houston’s finest folk artists.” Sunlight and shade sculpt his face: crystalline brown panes. I understand what Ariyeh sees in him: dignity, pride, an impressive commitment to his community. But the arrogance! It doesn’t help that he reminds me of another beautiful young man in dreads, Dwayne Jefferson, a former coworker who fucked me over last year. These damned self-made men! Dont look back, Mama warned me when we abandoned our old life. But ever since—haven’t I longed for whatever’s off-limits? I vow to myself, for Ariyeh’s sake as well as my own, to keep a cool d
istance from Reggie.

  The last house on the block is still being renovated. Its stripped walls smell of piney woods. Reggie warns me to be careful of the flooring—“Some of those planks are just splinters.” I stand in the little room, breathing in dust, the tinge of rusty nails, the imagined odors of muddy clothes, shoes, boiling potatoes, spit-up, and milk—the sweet and bitter smells of a cramped sharecropper life. And I wonder if my daddy, whoever he was, once lived in a room like this, huddled in candlelight on cold nights, running a pocketknife over rain-tightened strings, coaxing sad sounds out of the worn old wood.

  “I’m amazed at what you’ve done here,” I tell Reggie. “Ariyeh was right. This is a model of good city planning.”

  “I wanted to preserve history and our heritage and at the same time make it an active, living place, a resource for the people here—”

  “The neighborhood’s soul?”

  He smiles at me, and I recall Dwayne’s roguish charm, remember the shut-in boy, all those years ago, staring at me from across a quiet room. “It’s been a political and financial nightmare, as you can imagine. But we’re holding our own for now. Come on. Let me walk you down to the office, show you what I’m proudest of.”

  A rap song grunts from a passing car. The sun has turned the ground into a hard, baked crust. Reggie’s sweating lightly beside me. Yeasty, warm. As we walk, I move away from him, slightly. “So, Ariyeh was telling me. You’re here to find your daddy?”

  “Not find him, exactly. He’s long gone, from what I can gather. But I wanted to hear from Bitter who he was. Who they all were. My family.”

  “And once you know?”

  “I thought it might bring me some kind of peace.” I laugh. “I see now I was wrong about that. Besides which, I’ll never know it all. Too much time has passed. Too much lost.”

  “Like this neighborhood,” he says. “It doesn’t matter so much what you recover from the past as what you do with yourself now.”

  “Spoken like a true renovator.”

  He grins. We come to a house with the word OFFICE painted in red on its side. Two boys, about ten, in do-rags and basketball shirts, shoot hoops at a goal on the corner. They quit their trash-talking long enough to stare at me. “Reg-gee,” one calls. “‘S up, man?” His sneakers glow in the sunlight. His loose drawers look like grocery bags slipped down over his knees.