Axeman's Jazz

by Tracy Daugherty

  “Reggie,” Ariyeh sighs, her face behind her hands.

  “Whoa, boy, watch it now, watch it, you ‘bout to mess up with a capital F!”

  “Sho that’s right. Bet a fat man going through a doughnut hole!”

  “—some of us worry that the informal executions of the sixties—Fred Hampton, Martin—have become, in the nineties, formal executions. Legal lynchings, dig? You know how many black kids are sitting on death row right now?”

  “Ooh, he an E-Light, Bitter. Best back off him, man!”

  “He got da butta from the duck!”

  “Man say, ‘Gimme some dap!’”

  You get them when you lick the sweet honey and you know you shouldn’t have even opened the jar.

  Bitter smiles patiently. “Let me drop some science on you, Reggie,” he says. “You an earnest, sincere fella—I’ve never doubted that—but this Black Nationalism shit is strictly po-ass. Generation just ahead of you learned that during the civil rights years. You only cut yourself off, you make it us-against-them, see, start believing the gov’ment out to crush us all. Gov’ment don’t have that much imagination.”

  “Government is about power, pure and simple. And you’re an ignorant old fool if you think it’s not out to absolutely annihilate the black man.”

  “Geek sho got a hellified way of’splaining thangs,” Grady says.

  “Look at the Crime Bill Congress passed, hm?”

  The men just stare.

  “Makes joining a gang an ‘aggravated circumstance,’” Reggie says. “Who you think that’s aimed at? White folks? And who are the Congress and the army? Gangs! Rich ofays who felt free to steal a whole continent from its original inhabitants—”

  “Shit, boy—”

  “—to rape girls and sell poppy all over Southeast Asia, or to bomb kids in Philly—”

  You get them in rain and fog, in sunshine and snow. Wherever you go, the blues’ll surely know.

  “Imagination tops power, ever’ time,” Bitter insists. “Fellas my age, we know this, ‘cause it’s how we’ve got by. And you know imagination’s secret? It integrates, man. Mixes memories, songs, poetry, ideas—little bit here, little bit there. From the white man’s world, from the black man’s world, making us all a little richer. You cut yourself off, pretty soon you use up all your own air. See, me, in my time … I may have been barred from certain places physically, but I saw black style making its way into white dress, white talk, white music. Slow but sure, our imagination chipping holes in that wall. And wherever I worked, I was sneaking access to white spaces, man, seeing more of them than they could ever see of me, studying up on them, learning, gaining power to go long with my dreaming, don’t you know? You give away your best advantage, boy, you prance and shout, ‘Black is beautiful!’ Keep it on the down-low, is all I’m saying.”

  “Old man, you can talk from appetite to asshole, and I still won’t buy it. You’re not on the street the way I am, sifting through the wreckage. Nine-year-olds hooked on crack. Last week, Ariyeh’s school? Pair of fifth-graders caught freebasing in the boy’s room.” He swings his head; his dreads look enameled in the room’s streaky light. “Better recognize the structure of the fix.”

  “What you talk’m ‘bout?”

  “All right, one example? Just one, ‘cause I know that’s all you can hump.”

  Bitter snorts.

  “Listen up. Used to be, powder coke went for two hundred bucks a gram—it’s a rich man’s drug—till the government and the drug cartels figured they could score a hefty profit and kill our kids, flooding the ghettos with that same shit in rock form. Now a rock sells for ten bucks. Dig—most coke users are still fat-cat ofays, all right, lee people, but most the jail time’s done by our brothers doing crack. Follow me here.”

  Oh, he’s got the spirit now. Cooking with propane. I can’t keep my eyes off him.

  “Feds allow probation for first-time possession of five grams of coke. For the same amount of crack—the street version, the black version—it’s five years, automatic. That’s power, my man. A cold, deliberate attempt to crush our families, our youth, our future, and our hope.”

  Bitter runs a hand across his chest, wrinkling his shirt. “Young’uns with ‘tude, tight as Jimmy’s hatband, think they invented it all. Injustice, righteous anger. Don’t know they own history. You think like lit, boy. Don’t come into my house trying to Martin-and-Malcolm me.”

  “Well, don’t you mammy-and-uncle me, old man.”

  Ariyeh is anguished, listening to her lover and her father go at it, but me … despite my fears of Reggie’s temper and my worries about Bitter’s health, I find myself exhilarated by their exchange. I know what Reggie’s talking about: I’ve seen stone-cold power-plays in the mayor’s office. And I’ve survived on Bitter’s “down-low.”

  But more than this, I realize I really was cut off—airless, alone—in my stepdaddy’s home. Dale Licht couldn’t imagine two black men disagreeing. Or a black generation gap. To him, all dark-skinned folk were a monolith, thinking alike, acting alike, a fearful enemy when freed from their proper place (serving well-done rib eye in the country club). I remember one day, during O.J. Simpson’s trial, I stopped by the house to lunch with Mama. Dale was home from the law office that afternoon, studying briefs at the kitchen table. Next to the microwave, sound low, a portable TV showed Johnnie Cochran talking about the bloody glove found on Simpson’s property. “If it doesn’t fit, you must acquit,” he said, electrifying me, echoing the slightly mocking, singsong signifying language I remembered from Houston street corners. Dale’s neck turned red (Cochran wasn’t speaking to him). “How can all the blacks think this man is innocent?” he said. I wanted to tell him, “All blacks don’t think that,” but it’s a measure of how much I’d sponged up his world that the same question had plagued me. Eventually, Dale’s fury dwindled into sadness. He looked old and defeated, his gray hair rumpled into quills. In moments like this, when I saw his vulnerabilities or when he was kind to Mama or me, which was most of the time—he was, is, a nice man—I could concede he was a more complicated package than I gave him credit for being. He’d call the country club waiters—men his own age—“boys” and think nothing of it, but he’d also married my mama, whose dusky past he knew all about. He put up with my sullenness, even when, half the time, I didn’t know why I felt sulky. Since I’ve been on my own I’ve avoided him, and surely he feels the bitterness of my rejection. Still, if I were to call him, he’d do anything I asked. Like it or not, I understand his world is also mine. I don’t know how to square this with the fact that, if he were sitting with me here, he’d be trembling with fear and disgust. At the moment, I’m shaking with pleasure.

  But Ariyeh has had enough. “Stop it, both of you,” she tells Bitter and Reggie. Her eyes shine. “I’m trying to hear the music.”

  “Fine,” Reggie says, throwing up his hands. “Wasn’t my idea to come.”

  Bitter settles in his chair, stroking his chest. I squeeze his arm.

  Sweat’s flying off Earl: a busted fire hydrant. “We styling and profiling!” he shouts. He leans over the brandy ladies’ table. “Yo’ mama do the lawdy lawd!” he croons, rasping, breathy. We’re jazzing on a Sunday night. If the Axeman is out there—I glance at the door—he’s pacing in frustration. I sip some more Hen Dog, close my eyes, and tilt my head, whirling with its rusty warmth. It tastes like an old door hinge.

  “Have you heard? The bird, bird, bird—bird’s the word.” I open my eyes on the strutting man who’d spooned over Ariyeh earlier. Reggie stiffens, but she isn’t even aware of the guy. She’s watching Etta stuff bottles and wet paper towels into a Hefty bag. “What’s the matter, sweetie?” I ask. She looks horrified.

  “It’s like … a child’s body,” she says, one hand to her mouth, the other pointing at the bag. “I keep picturing them, you know. The missing boys from our school.”

  “See? It wasn’t a good idea to come here tonight,” Reggie says, smoothing her shoulder. “Le
t’s book, how ‘bout?”

  “No, no. I like the music. I like sitting here with my cousin.” I lock my fingers in hers.

  In the open doorway, now, the Axeman looms, raising his blade … but it’s only Bayou Slim, squinting through the smoke, bumping his old guitar case into the room. Earl and the boys step back. The crowd quietens. “Looks like death eating a sodey cracker,” Grady whispers, trembling, bony—he’s licked a few crumbs himself.

  Slim doesn’t bother to tune. He thumbs his strings as if skimming stiff pages. “Heads or tails, you lose,” he croaks—not so much singing as thrusting his voice into the booze-fumed air. Only the old scarecrow is dancing now. Everyone else concentrates on the floor or the drinks in their hands. Even Etta turns away. “I am that I am!” Slim screams, holding his final chord. He whips off his frayed straw hat and collects a few dollars. When he slips out the door, the room resumes its buzz.

  “Etta, doll, can we get a letter from home over here, please ma’am?” Grady calls.

  She brings us a watermelon sliced into wide, red grins. I pass—again, I’ve had more to drink than I realized—and step outside to clear my head, though the air, even this late in the evening, is hardly a relief: dense, close, searing. It’s like standing by a barbecue grill, inhaling the heat. Roaches, big as cigar butts, twist across the gravel parking lot. Smaller bugs snick and skitter at my feet. I rub the smoke from my eyes. The Big Dipper tilts above the Flower Man’s house. An old song pulses through my head: “Follow the gourd …”

  The streets are empty. I wonder where Slim could have got to.

  “There you are.” Reggie lounges in the doorway, holding his bag. “I had something I wanted to give you.” He steps near, as warm as an old bed quilt.

  “Oh? By the way,” I say, “I’ll be happy to write in support of Mumia.”

  He squints at me, a tough, guarded look. “Thank you.” He pulls from his bag a fat paperback, gold and gray: The Angela Davis Reader. “Ariyeh told me about your run-in with your colleague.”

  I’m not sure what he’s talking about. Dwayne? Before I can ask him, he nudges my hands with the book. “I’ve dog-eared a piece you should read.”

  All my life, smart black boys have been telling me what to think. I look up at him, questioning, lean toward his body a little. Ariyeh appears behind him in the doorway. “School tomorrow,” she says, followed by a yawn. “I thought I could stay for a couple of sets—I really wanted to—but I guess I’ve got to call it a night. Can’t keep my eyes open.”

  I thank them both for coming. “How often I get to spend time with my cousin?” Ariyeh answers.

  “Are you okay?”

  She nods unconvincingly. “You’ll call me, now, before you leave town?”

  Bitter and his buddies laugh raucously inside. The Flower Man’s bottle tree chimes. “Sure,” I say. She kisses my cheek. So does Reggie. They throw their arms around each other and weave away, through the gravel and glass of the parking lot.

  9

  A WHITE PINE building, three blocks from Bitter’s house, GROCERY/RIBS painted on its side. There’s a pay phone in a weedy lot out front. Across the street this morning, on the porch of a rickety row house, four old men guzzle Forties. In front of the store three b-boys with a boom box smoke blunts and give me a cocky once-over. LL Cool J is rapping about knocking you out. (Yeah, this white chick’s heard Cool J, I could tell the boys. I don’t live entirely on another planet.) Sausage sizzles inside; a wet, earthy smell rolls from the open doorway. Next to the phone, near a stack of rotting boxes, a rat pulls a shank bone into some shade.

  I punch in my phone card code, then my friend Shirley’s number. She’s been feeding my fish and birds. I call her a friend, though I see her socially only at the happy hours after work (she’s just down the hall, in Social Services). It rarely occurs to me to invite my coworkers home for dinner. I’m not sure why. Shirley is high yellow, too, so I feel comfortable with her, though we’ve never schmoozed about skin.

  She answers on the third ring and seems happy to hear my voice. No problem, she says, take a few extra days. I promise to write her a check for the additional food when I get back. Maybe in the next two weeks I can talk Bitter into seeing a doctor. Maybe I can get my name on the prison’s guest list. “How are Crockett and Bowie?” I ask.

  “Such good birds. Crockett’s picked up a couple new words. My fault, I’m afraid. I did like you said, made myself at home, spent a little time with them. The other night, while they ate, I stayed and watched NYPD Blue. Today, Crockett’s going, ‘Scumbag. Skel.’ Sorry.”

  I laugh, though this does bother me. A barrage of insults when I walk in the door?

  “Telisha, I wanted to ask you … you know Dwayne Jefferson, don’t you? He said you were pals.”

  The name stings. “Yes. Why?”

  “He’s been calling me, asking me out. I think it turns him on, I was a finalist for the Cowboys cheerleading thing? I like him well enough, I guess, but there’s something … a kind of arrogance …”

  “Stay away from him.” My own force shocks me.

  “Really? What do you know?”

  “Nothing, just … I agree with you. About the arrogance.” Do I lay it all out for her? What purpose would that serve? Can I trust her, or would the story get out, all over the mayor’s office? I’ve never had a white black woman. “Just be careful, Shirk I don’t think he’s a good guy.”

  “Okay, thanks.” She’s disappointed.

  She says she’s run through the Terra Fin flake food. I tell her to make things easy for herself and get some long-term feeding tablets for the aquarium. My voice wobbles, saying good-bye. It’s not Shirley’s fault—she asked an innocent question—but I’m angry at her for unsettling me.

  “Say, fly lady, I’m amp over here,” one of the b-boys calls. “I ain’t gaffling you, babe, come on over now and check out my hard, honey bozack. It’s fiending for you. No shit, sugar.”

  His posse cracks up. “Aw, get off the woman’s bra strap, G. She come backed up.”

  “I just want her to lamp wit’ me.”

  “Look to me like a Mickey T.”

  I step through the weeds, watching for rats, annoyed at my thready jeans, which attract sticker burrs left and right, but grateful I didn’t put on shorts this morning, which might have amped the boys even more. Hide as much flesh as you can—a habit with me. Cool J’s rapping now about a “playette” with toe rings whose sexual prowess can turn a prince into a king. I cross the street, pause on a dirt path where a sidewalk should be, and pluck the thorns from my pants. At the happy hours with Shirley and others from work, in Fuddruckers or Fridays or Chilis, rock-and-roll muzak usually plays, but occasionally a rap tune will jump through the speakers. “You ever really listen to this shit, the hardcore stuff?” a mayor’s aide asked the table one evening. “It’s ‘mothafucka mothafucka mothafucka.’ That’s it.”

  “Maybe they’ll all kill themselves and save us the trouble,” said a buddy of his.

  The men on the porch are doing a pretty good job, right now, of erasing themselves. The yard is littered with drained malt liquor cans, blue as diamonds in the sunlight. The old scarecrow from the gut bucket is with them, swaying on the balls of his feet, eyes closed, grinning at the secrets in his head.

  I cut through several more overgrown fields, back to Bitter’s. Compared with Dallas, Houston is magnificently lush. Willows, pines, magnolias. Big D is mostly parking lots now, especially downtown, where all-day parking can cost as little as seventy-five cents, so many lots are competing—a consequence of the development addiction that kicked in during the eighties and hasn’t let up since. I recall shopping one day, about six years ago, and realizing how much Dallas felt like Disneyland now, standardized and gaudy, not a place where real people lived and worked (though amazingly we did work there, stuffed into our power-lunch costumes—like so many smiling mice).

  Bitter’s not home—just a note saying, “Errands.” I gather my laundry, pass through
the kitchen to the back porch pantry and Bitter’s old washer. Maybe I should buy a couple new T-shirts to tide me over, the next ten days or so. I check Bitter’s room, to see if he’s left any dirty clothes. A pair of boxers, socks, and a shirt. I snatch them up, glimpse by his bed, in a squatty bookshelf, half a dozen paperbacks: titles and authors I’ve never seen. Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim. Trick Baby. Pimp: The Story of My Life. Bookplates stiffen the back covers: “Property of Buck Jackson,” the barber who Bitter said used to run a lending library out of his shop. The books look silly, but I stand for a minute absorbing their fusty smell, the scent of all the years I lost when I should have been here, reading the same trash Uncle read, listening to his music, eating his bad fried food.

  On the top shelf of his open closet, a familiar white shape: one of Mama’s quilts. My heartbeat quickens. I pull it down. It’s fusty, too, a cloud of mothballs and lint. I never learned the patterns, though I remember Mama talking about Log Cabins, Bow Ties, Shooflies. On this one, uneven lines dodge through rough squares, triangles tipple over rows of heavy brown knots. The cotton backing is soft and cool.

  “Follow the gourd …” She used to sing to me as she stuffed thick batting between fabric layers. I’d be sitting at her feet in Bitter’s kitchen, watching. How did it go? “The river’s bank” something something. “Dead trees …” I’ve lost it. I hummed the tune as she sang, rocking on the hardwood floor, delighting in the winglike movements of her hands, fluttering across jagged strips of brown, green, gold. “‘Nother river on the other side …”

  Later, in my teens, I felt ashamed of her work, its ripply lines and apparently random designs; embarrassed when company came and saw the quilts curled across the couch. I felt her amateurishness would reflect badly on me. In Dale Licht’s house she sewed in a tiny room just off the kitchen overlooking her backyard flower garden, azaleas and purple irises. When I’d get home from school and rummage through the fridge for string cheese, pickles, or strawberries, she’d call to me from that sunny little room, ask me to come sit with her as she snipped thread or appliquéd beads to raffia cloth. Usually I refused, mumbling, “Homework.” When I did linger, I was struck by how much her hands had slowed over the years, how tough it was for her to tie a simple knot. Still, she worked with patience, humming peacefully, and occasionally I’d feel pleasure in watching her bring something out of nothing, a magic as great as the spells Bitter extolled.