Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

  Ariyeh looks at the field, boredom in her eyes: a child disappointed at the fair. At least she’s forgotten her own troubles for now. “This? What makes you think so?”

  “Those trees. That little hill. It’s got to be.”

  “There’s nothing here.”

  “Exactly. The army erased all traces of what it did.”

  “Why?”

  “Well, naturally the officers knew it was incendiary, lynching thirteen black men. They wanted to make an example for other Negro soldiers, but they didn’t want to incite more rioting in Houston. So they carried out the execution in secret away from the city and only announced it afterwards. Even then, they said it had taken place at a nearby fort in accordance with strict military procedure.”

  “What do you hope to find here today?”

  I shake my head, step from the car. Grass scratches my ankles. I make sure the Taurus is okay in the high weeds, not too hot underneath, no danger of flame. Ariyeh follows me, a few tentative steps, then stops to swat mosquitoes. Her boredom has turned into annoyance. The field is soft in places, then hard, like leftover food not fully frozen. It smells leftover, too: smoky, green, slightly spoiled. The pines are dry in the late summer heat, green-going-to-yellow. Red and purple dabs of flowers. Shadows move across the limp stalks as a warm breeze blows the trees, silhouettes huddled in soil clumps, praying men, bones bent by grief.

  I survey the field the way I imagine the commander did that day, sweeping my eyes across its borders against the bronze and azure light, and I feel myself slip—out of my skin, out of time. Green bugs pop from the dirt. A khaki-clad guard, gripping his rifle, turns his collar up against a sudden early-morning chill. The folding chairs creak. A whiff of sweat and shit. Coming home, Lord, coming home. I can even smell the ropes, several yards away, resinous, dusty, redolent of earth and passing time. They sound violent, like disease must sound inside the body, eating it away. The hangman adjusts the knots. A train whistle echoes to the north, clacking wheels, roaring wind, goods speeding through the woods, sustenance for communities of fortunate men, far away. Sweat rivers my ribs. I call, “Attention!” and ask my god to forgive me. As the prisoners shuffle up the scaffolding, I turn my head away, and there, shivering in the shadows at the fringe, a pathetic white figure in a rumpled blue dress, hands clasped, her gaze darting, ratchety, quick as a hummingbird. Her presence unsettles, even angers, me. She has no business here. The army does not conduct charity work. Best to send her home with various physics, herbs, broths, with sympathetic sighs and the narcotic advice of talk-cure men. A thump. A shout. One of the doomed has tripped on the gallows steps. I flick my eyes to glimpse him …

  … to see if he is safe. Is it he who is down? Shaken, tugged, kicked by a guard. My eyes sting. I pull a kerchief from my dress pocket. What does it matter if Cletus twists an ankle? Within minutes his soul will be lost. He stands stiffly now at the platform’s edge, his long arms, capable of such tenderness and warmth, neatly by his side as if he were about to be decorated for valor. I have felt the soldier in him, a slight formality as though his commander were judging him, even in our intimacies: his kisses little forays into unsecured territory, cautious, efficient. For all he has risked to spend a few unbuttoned moments with me, he is still a deeply proper man, his bravery dutiful, expected. I am the rebel, careless in my prim trappings (perhaps a tad ungrateful, unappreciative of how easy life has been till now), aching to secede …

  Until last night, when the city fragmented. Sudden spasms like a Roman candle. The noise awakened me over my parents’ murky snoring. Gunshots. Guttural voices. Immediately I knew there was trouble at the camp, perhaps because Cletus had been nervous for days, sensing unease among his comrades, simmering anger. I rose quietly, buttoned my dress. Cletus and I … did we have a regular meeting time? Each night? Three nights a week? In my mama’s garden? Why not in a safer spot? How was he able to escape from his bunk? Did he tell his commanding officer he wanted to rise before dawn to lend us a hand, before his own chores began at the camp? Was he granted permission to be charitable to this stumbling white family for whom his father once worked?

  And tonight, what had happened to him? Mud-spattered, soaked, frightened, and wild. “Cletus?” I whispered. “For God’s sakes, what is it?” He trembled as though his ribs were a spinning turbine. He gripped my arms, tearing a sleeve. He was at war. The causes were unclear to me, the reasons for sacrifice ambiguous, but I felt the conviction in his clench. He hadn’t waited to be shipped to France. “Cletus?” “Forgive me,” he said. Then my buttons spilled into the furrows at our feet, bitter seeds among the sproutings of weeds, and I was enemy, hostage, land to be seized … in a lurch, my perspective leaps again; I smell olives, gin, stale automobile upholstery; Dwayne’s face hovers above me; “The dark part of you wants it” … Coming home, Lord, coming home. Another leap. Cletus wears the rope now like a horse’s harness. He holds his dignity. Or he doesn’t. The soldiers pull the triggers. “Cletus! For God’s sakes!”

  Ariyeh folds her arms, scratches an ankle with her foot. An edgy sound, insisting on the moment. “So?” she says, imploring me to be done with this place.

  I bow my head to clear it, walk to the fringe, where the field starts to curve like a toppled bowl. I struggle to focus. “This must be where they had the coffins waiting. And there, where the Mexicans stood. The hired men who’d actually do the burying.”

  “What do you get from this?” Ariyeh asks, not unkindly. She slaps another mosquito. “Looking around? Speculating?”

  A whisper in the trees. Birds. Wind. “More questions,” I admit. “I think the only resolution I can hope for is to accept I’ll know only so much. Maybe I know as much, already, as I ever will. But to be convinced of that, I need to see this. To see it’s nothing. Does that make sense?

  “Of course. Yes.”

  “Too many perspectives …”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I wish I could settle on a single approach to the story …” A train—an actual one—goes speeding through the woods. “I’ve always blamed it on the women. Instability. A weakness of mind, even of soul. Mama and Grandma, neither black nor white, here nor there … and Great-Grandma, I can’t even pin her story down … but that’s not what I’m getting at. Sometimes I lose myself in other people. People from the past. It’s the weirdest thing, Ariyeh. It’s like my whole ego … I don’t know … just spills into others …”

  “It’s a gift. A vision. The ability to see through the cracks.”

  “I fear it means I’ve got no center.”

  “No, really. Think of slaves,” Ariyeh says. “Living in shacks but gaining access to the big house, the masters’ bedrooms and kitchens. They had the whole perspective, in a way even their owners didn’t. Saw it all, top to bottom, inside and out. Maybe that’s the gift you have, T. I mean, I believe that stuff”

  “If so, it’s a bitch to carry.”

  “I know.”

  “Sometimes I think I’m going nuts. Hearing voices, you know, like some crazy bag lady on the street.” I want to linger in the field, to breathe it inside me, but Ariyeh is getting more and more impatient. I smile at her. “Okay, what do you say? Dairy Queen? Time for an ice cream sundae?” I hear the false cheeriness in my voice, and I’m sure she’s aware of it too.

  “Sure. I’ll buy.”

  We move toward the car, listening to the insect buzz in the field. Back on the highway, signs for bail bondsmen, a semipro baseball team, an Arthur Murray dance studio. I’m disoriented; I grip the wheel until my fingers ache.

  Ariyeh laughs, capping our uncomfortable quiet. “You ever take dance lessons?”

  “No.” I feel the pull, still, of another world, another time. “I have enough trouble keeping my balance as it is.”

  “I tried once, at ten or eleven. Talked Daddy into shelling out the cash—he still had his carpentry practice then. Right away I discovered ballet was not for black girls! Those pink tights? Supposed to blend in wit
h the white girls’ skin, but my ass showed right through. Chocolate syrup in a strawberry sundae! And the movements, all shoulders, and tall, stiff postures—not for us low-slung types. Teacher used to scream at me, ‘Pull your hips up,’ and I’d tell her, ‘Lady, these hips ain’t going nowhere!‘ It was the one time Daddy yelled at me when I was a kid, the day I wanted to quit. I’d pestered and pestered him for the lessons, and he’d wasted good money. Told me I had to put up with the embarrassment. That’s the way it is for folks like us. He’d done it all his life. It’s the kind of attitude Reggie can’t stand in him.” She slumps in the seat. The outing is over for her; her world has come pressing back in. “I don’t know. I guess it worked in Daddy’s time—up to a point. Most fellas didn’t get hurt, putting on a silly clown act for the buckras. Reggie had the Movement, you know. It was on TV every night. Malcolm and H. Rap. He learned to clench his fist. And that worked too—up to a point.”

  I spot a DQ sign and exit. “What about now?”

  “Now?” She sags again.

  In the Dairy Queen, Mexican kids clamber over mustard-smeared tables. Their father, tiny, in a straw hat and dirty shirt, stands helplessly by the napkin dispensers. A woman I take to be his wife balances four or five soft drinks in a mushy cardboard container and yells at the kids in Spanish. Ice cream drips like Elmer’s glue from a silver machine just behind the counter. The cashiers are either high school kids in braces or grandma types who can’t hide their contempt for their young partners, who will probably work here only for the summer. “You can supersize that for only sixty more cents,” a girl behind a register tells an overweight woman desperately counting her change. While Ariyeh buys our treats I’m standing back trying not to lose the hanging field. Its soft light, its moldering mulch smell. But even as I tighten my mental grip, it’s slipping away from me. The present is too damned insistent. Cletus shatters again, and Sarah Morgan. As ever, I’m left on my own. It’s now, it’s August, Ariyeh needs thirty-six—no, thirty-eight—more cents. I scrabble in my purse and hand her the coins.

  8

  WE’RE BACK at Etta’s on a Sunday night. Ariyeh has talked Reggie into showing up, and he sits across the table from me, sullen, gripping a leather bag as though it’s his last earthly possession. Earl and his boys are taking their sweet time setting up. Bitter’s buddies trickle in, one by one—overalls, straw hats, ratty cotton shirts (only the women are dressed to the nines)—and make their way to the bar.

  “Hey man, what up?”

  “End of the world.”

  “I can co-sign that.”

  “Mickey Mouse in the house and Donald Duck don’t give a fuck.”

  “Etta darling, how ‘bout a Forty or an Eight Ball?”

  “Hen Dog for me, and some of them hog maws.”

  “Pass the pluck-wine.”

  Like last week, the brandy women settle regally at a table, placing their paper sacks in a delicate row, and as before, Earl, dressed in green and purple silk, courts them lewdly. “Mmm-mmm! Looka the box on that fox! Sugar, you sharing them cakes?”

  The women ignore him, but they’re trying hard not to smile.

  A man at the bar, knocking back cup after yellow cup of what he calls “do-it fluid,” ogles Ariyeh. “You jingling, babe,” he says, swaying. “You ain’t no haincty bitch, is you?”

  Reggie scowls, and another man says to the first, “Parlay, slick. Don’t be beaming on the brother’s girl. He liable to jump salty on you.”

  “You damn skippy,” Reggie growls.

  The first man turns to me. “Fried, dyed, and laid to the side,” he says, pointing at my hair. “Am I right? You muh-rhine-ee, ain’t you?”

  “Dead it, slick. Git ghost,” the man’s friend says, watching Reggie nervously, and both men move away toward the Coors crates stacked against the wall.

  “Charming place,” Reggie tells Ariyeh. “A throwback to the twenties, when the only ambitions allowed the black man were to get drunk and get laid.”

  “Chill, Reggie. Please. And try to be nice to Daddy.”

  The old scarecrow leans against a wall holding a malt liquor can, grinning in private ecstasy. Etta shivers past rows of ripped, cotton-spitting chairs, ferrying a tray of Olde English 800s. I’m struck, again, by everyone’s age. Reggie, Ariyeh, and I, along with the bass player and drummer, are the only under-fifties. Reggie has noticed this too, I suspect—he glares distastefully, sizing up the room. In the malarial light from the bar’s beer signs, Bitter and his posse appear ancient, wrinkled, and discarded. Packed-away paper. They crowd our table now, bearing drinks: OEs and Hennessy’s “Very Special” cognac. The old men smell of aftershave and peanuts. Reggie gestures at the band members, who are talking and laughing with one another while their guitars remain in cases and the drummer’s cymbals lay stacked on the floor like extrathin cake layers. “It’s after ten already,” he mutters harshly.

  “Listen him,” says a short man next to Bitter. “I think he wearing a white man’s watch, eh Bitter? Best sit back and relax, brother. We on CP Time in here.”

  The men—three of them, and Uncle—all laugh.

  “When you live by your hands, the way we done, you learn to ‘ppreciate a slower pace, know’m saying?” the man continues. I’ve heard Bitter call him Grady. The two of them worked together in Texas City, roughnecking and unloading bananas from Peruvian freighters. “Last job I had, canning shrimp down in Galveston, ever’ three day or so, the factory upped its niggamation—you know, speeding up the ‘ssembly line so we’d work harder and faster for the same amount of pay. Now, that timepiece you wearing and that impatient scowl on your face, brother, they based on niggamation. White man’s tricknology. You feel a whole lot better, you let it go.”

  Reggie’s fists tremble on the bag in his lap. “I’ve spent the last three years renovating twenty-three row houses on Alabama Street, using only hammers, screwdrivers, and saws,” he says, low and precise. “Don’t assume I haven’t worked with my hands.”

  A tall man whistles and laughs. “Ooh-ee, Grady, better watch yo’ ass. He be thinking he the Head Nigger in Charge!”

  “Mack Daddy!”

  “Word to the mother!”

  Ariyeh’s hand moves like a blown leaf up Reggie’s arm. He frowns, squirms in his chair, but doesn’t say anything. Finally, the band rolls into its first tune. Earl is already sweating. The drummer flick-flicks the hi hat—a sassy skirt-switch—and the bass fills in with betcha bottom dollar, betcha bottom dollar. The lead riffs lonesome me, and Earl scats and grunts like a catfight. You get them every morning when that train whistle blows and the factory doors burst open; you get them at lunch when the bugs are so bad you can’t sit still and eat your bread; you get them in the evening when the pint bottles empty and that greased steel blows once-a-more, once-a-more, once-a-more, ah, I’m talking about the blues …

  The scarecrow closes his eyes and goes into his solo dance; politely, folks shove back their chairs to make room. The brandy ladies order setups and ice, squeeze their plastic limes. You get them every night when the bedbugs start to bite. The room smells sweet and sour: gin and cologne, perfume, food, and sweat. Black faces, brown faces, yellow, gold, and tan. I’m glad for Bitter’s lanky old frame, hunched just a few feet away; glad for Ariyeh’s beauty and Reggie’s indulgence on her behalf; glad for Earl’s graceful bulk. In only my second time here, the place feels deeply familiar, like a rag doll from childhood rediscovered in an attic, stained with years-old dog slobber, spit-up, and dirt, smelling faintly of all those nights you clutched it in bed as a girl, tucked between your legs or tight beneath your arm. I sip some of Uncle’s cognac. It warms my mouth and throat.

  Reggie rises, unlatching his leather bag. Ariyeh glances at him, anxious. From the bag he pulls a handful of orange fliers—melty and pale in the bar’s yellow light—and begins to pace the room, leaving them on tables or beer crates within people’s reach. Folks stare at them, then him, lips twisted, angry, as though they’ve just been ordered to
leave.

  You get them at midnight all alone in your bed when the body goes cold and the no-noise of your house wakes you like a smoke alarm, alarm, alarm, ah, you know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the blues.

  I pluck one of the fliers from a beer puddle:

  Free Mumia Abu-Jamal

  The Voice of the Voiceless

  Free All Political Prisoners

  and Prisoners of War

  Bitter also peruses one of the sheets. “Hey!” he shouts at Reggie, grimacing, squinting. “What’s all this Mumia-Jumbo?” Ariyeh shakes her head.

  “Read it,” Reggie tells him.

  “Don’t make no sense.”

  “Mumia’s on death row in Pennsylvania, wrongly accused of killing a cop. The government wants to silence him.”

  “Oh, the gov’ment, huh?” Bitter tugs his bottom lip. “And why’s that?”

  “He was a founding member and minister of information of the Black Panther Party of Philadelphia. He had a radio show, and he exposed the cops’ racism in bombing the MOVE house, burning all those children—”

  “Brother ‘bout the people’s business,” Grady says, grinning. He slurps his malt liquor.

  “That’s right, brother” Reggie hisses. “While you old poot-butts sit here getting wasted night after night, listening to this retro shit”—he nods at Earl—“some of us worry about the fact that the government is about to murder a prominent black revolutionary—”