Freedom's Just Another Word

by Caroline Stelllings

  DEDICATION

  For Olga and Sylvia–since 1970, my very best friends

  PROLOGUE

  You know your life must be seriously messed up when the one who straightens it out for you is Janis Joplin. Not that I don’t have the utmost respect for the blues-rock singer—I do. Sure, she drank too much. She was drinking the heart right out of a summer afternoon the day I met her. And when I saw her again in Texas, she was so high on heroin, her eyes looked like two little television screens, reflecting a dead channel.

  But when she sang—oh, when she sang—that tempered-in-a-forge voice of hers was like a flame in this burned-out world. You’d have to be stone-deaf or a cadaver not to be electrified by her; she could sound as smooth as the Southern Comfort that dribbled from the corners of her mouth, or as gritty as walking on spilled sugar. And the way she clutched every stanza like it was her last made me shake with anticipation.

  It was an unwritten rule for musicians to be strung-out back then. The 1960s were, after all, one big love-fest; an endless chain of events where stoned hippies sat in fields and listened to some of the best music that the world has ever produced and couldn’t appreciate it because they didn’t know where the hell they were. Monterey Pop, Woodstock, the Isle of Wight—it’s a pity that these concerts went by in a purple haze because they will never be repeated. Never.

  The year I met Janis Joplin—1970—was a turning point in many ways. It was the year that the Beatles stopped being the Beatles. The year that Jimi Hendrix died of an overdose in London, and Simon and Garfunkel recorded their last album together. It was the year that Janis took her final fix at the Landmark Motor Hotel. Booze, heroin, desperation—that’s what killed her.

  The end of a life is such a definite thing—no wiggle room whatsoever. But I don’t think anyone’s life really begins at birth. Being born is just a technicality. Everyone chooses a certain moment, a particular experience from which they look ahead, and to which they return, time and again, wondering if life would have been different had that one incident never occurred. For me, it was meeting Janis—Pearl, as she chose to be called—outside a liquor store in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Every road in Saskatoon leads sooner or later to the South Saskatchewan River, that grande dame of a waterway that meanders through the center of town. She’s stout, dark blue, and dependable. She glides past the upscale hotels and well-turned-out office buildings the same way she always has, keeping time like a watch and a careful check on the residents: the mothers herding their children, old people talking in low voices about how everything’s changed, husbands waiting patiently in parked cars, and long-legged delivery boys staggering under loads of groceries.

  The farther the citizens get from the river’s vigilant eye, though, the more they are apt to drink and gamble, and if you drive far enough west on 20th Street, where gang graffiti appears on every surface marking territory like cat spray, you can see drug addicts shooting up and fourteen-year-old girls “walking the strolls.” Some are white, some are Aboriginal; all of them are desperate. If they were black, you’d think you were in the south side of Chicago. Or Harlem.

  Growing up in Saskatoon, I’d never seen a black hooker, mostly because there were so few blacks in Saskatoon to begin with. I’m black (well, half-black), but other than one old man at whom everyone pointed because his grandfather had been a slave, and a girl in school who wasn’t allowed to come to my birthday party because we played music and kept Jesus out of the house, there weren’t any black people in my neighborhood at all. Besides us.

  I wasn’t raised in the upscale area, but I didn’t live in the gutter either. I lived with my parents, Clarence and Thelma Merritt, not far from downtown, on a street that had a few trees, and was safe enough that you could go out after dark without being armed. Clarence was a mechanic, and we lived over top of his garage. I didn’t mind it as a child, but by the time 1970 rolled around, and I was eighteen, I’d spent many a night peering into that dark sinkhole known as my future, craftily planning how I’d get the hell out of Saskatoon.

  Because the only things I could do with any degree of success were motor mechanics and singing the blues, I knew that if I didn’t find a nightclub to take me on, I’d be changing oil and rotating tires for the rest of my life. There was only one genuine club in the city, Saskatoon Blues, but it was reserved for big names. They didn’t hold auditions for amateurs. There was also a trashy kind of place near our garage called The Beehive; it was an octagonal building, with huge ceramic bees on the roof and hardly any customers below it, but the owner wouldn’t let me sing there, anyway. He said I wasn’t ready, but I knew the real reason was because I was the product of an affair that my father had with a white woman.

  Her name was Wendy Wood and I’m sure she was a prostitute. Thelma never said so, but that’s what I think. It was a cold night in February when she scaled the fence. My father found her sleeping in one of the cars on his lot, so he brought her inside. Gave her a bed. Gave her a meal. Gave her a home. She became pregnant with me the following summer, and after I was born, she turned me over to Clarence and Thelma. They never saw her again. They got one letter at Christmas, postmarked in Alberta. (She didn’t ask about me.)

  Then, when I was sixteen, a customer pulled up in a Studebaker Starlight coupe that needed a new muffler. He told us that a drunken woman outside a homeless shelter in downtown Calgary had grunted something to him about Clarence and his work with classic cars after he’d tossed her some change. We figured it was Wendy Wood.

  Thelma never blamed Clarence for the affair, never took it out on me, never made me feel like a bastard child. She loved me as if I was her own. Clarence said it was because she’d always wanted to have a baby but never could. The rest of the neighborhood was shocked when it happened, and the older folks never got over it—a married black man impregnating a young white woman. It was worse than being born in the backseat of a bus. Eighteen years later, some people were still talking about it. Mrs. Hill—a dusty little woman who ran a boarding house next door and who (without knowing it) hollered ah-screwyou every time she sneezed—made sure nobody forgot. Like the river, she kept careful check on the entire community. She knew who drank, who smoked, and who slept with whom. And she disseminated the information through an espionage system that involved the local beauty parlor, the grocer, the shoe repair shop, and a tearoom that advertised palm reading in its foggy, limp-curtained window. She even coerced the mailman into letting her look at postcards; she said she liked to see the pretty pictures, but always managed to sneak a peek at the messages.

  That was how she kept the Wendy Wood story going, and that was why so many people drove to the other side of town to have their cars fixed, and why I never got to sing at The Beehive, and why I hated Wendy Wood, and why I hated Saskatoon. I figured I’d go to Toronto, or better yet, back to Louisiana where my parents came from.

  That’s my name, Louisiana.

  Easy for short.

  And that’s where I’d hoped to go one day, once I had enough money saved. I figured I might buy a real nice, classic car—the kind Clarence specialized in. Something really fine that would suit a blues singer. I wanted to make something of myself. I wasn’t going to settle into marriage and kids, not me. That would have been like death. Once I’d gotten through the hell of high school, I noticed that my friends were starting to throw their lives away. I’m not talking about the ones I drank lemon gin with under the bridge—their lives were over by the ninth grade. I’m talking about the ones who were trying to get ahead by studying accounting through correspondence courses or enrolling in hairdressing school or learning s
horthand. The path to nowhere. That’s how I saw it. The bottom rung on the ladder to happiness.

  So I stuck it out in the garage and saved every dime I earned. At least there I could listen to my parents’ old blues records while I worked—Bessie Smith’s “Lou’siana Low Down Blues” got me through many dull, rainy mornings replacing fan belts and scraping the corrosion off battery terminals.

  Got a loaded feelin’

  A loaded feelin’ I can’t lose my heavy load

  Got a loaded feelin’ I can’t lose my heavy load

  My home ain’t up north, it’s further down the road.

  I’d always had a strong voice. Clarence and Thelma recognized it right away and encouraged me to sing even before I could talk. And Clarence taught me the frottoir. That’s an instrument used in zydeco—the Cajun blues they play in Louisiana. The frottoir looks like a washboard, and you hang it around your neck, but it makes a great scratchety-scratchety-

  scratchety sound and keeps better time than a snare drum. Clarence played it every Saturday night. Thelma would make a big pot of gumbo, and we’d put on records by Clifton Chenier, King of the Bayou, and Thelma would get out her accordion and I would sing. It was loud and crazy and the most fun I’d ever had in my life. Sometimes we’d be real quiet and somber and listen to Billie Holiday sing “God Bless the Child.” Thelma cried every time she heard that one. Even at five or six years of age, I did my best to sound as good as that. By the time I was ten, I could make Thelma cry too.

  That was when she decided I should have proper voice lessons, and that was when Miss Poultice—the first racist I’d ever met—came into my life. There would be more to follow, but you know what they say about the first cut being the deepest.

  A tall, skeletal woman, she always wore the same tan suit and mauve blouse when she taught piano, singing, and dancing in the parlor of her home on Clover Street. She told Thelma she had so many people trying to get a place with her that she could only squeeze me in on Thursday afternoons, but other than one piano student, a red-headed boy who lifted his hands about three feet off the keys and came down on the wrong notes, I never saw anyone else there on Thursdays.

  Miss Poultice would walk the boy out the door, smiling all the while. She’d chat with his mother and tell her how well the kid was coming along. And then, with a tortured expression, she would sigh heavily as she put away his sheet music and got out mine. Not because I wasn’t a good student, not because I couldn’t sing, and not because I didn’t want to learn.

  She started each session with breathing exercises. “In through the nose, out through the mouth,” she’d say, while poking the end of her pen into my rib cage. (She touched the boy with her bare hand, but not me.) Next she’d demand that I watch her diaphragm while she sang “Now is the Month of Maying,” the song she was teaching me for a soon-to-be-held recital.

  Now is the month of Maying,

  when merry lads are playing,

  fa la la la la la la la la

  fa la la,

  la la la,

  la la la.

  Miss Poultice didn’t like me; I think that’s why she gave me that song. I asked her please, couldn’t I sing the blues; she was aghast and declared that Negro music had no place in her school. (Nor, I gathered, did Negroes themselves if she could find enough white students.) Then, during our last lesson, just a day before the recital, I had to use her bathroom and left the room. When the phone rang, I heard her tell the person on the other end that she’d call her back in a minute, once she was done with the Negro girl. The other person said something, then Miss Poultice replied, “Oh, don’t you worry, I’ll use Lysol.”

  I thought about telling Thelma and Clarence, but didn’t want them to be upset, or feel guilty for taking me to Miss Poultice. Then I tried to dream up ways to get out of the stupid recital in her stupid stuffy parlor. Finally, I decided that the best way to stick it to Miss Poultice was to go ahead and sing at her recital.

  Yeah, I told myself. I’ll make her wish she hadn’t said that.

  The next evening, six sets of parents jammed themselves into chairs, all side by side in a semi-circle. Clarence and Thelma were the first to arrive, and could have sat right next to the piano, but living so many years in Louisiana, they’d trained themselves to leave the best seats for the white people. They found a place against the back wall.

  First, a sweaty-fingered girl with thick glasses pulled herself in close to the piano, then, with lowered wrists and high knuckles, leaning forward and pressing heavily on the keys, she banged out “The Dance of the Forest Animals” with great big long waits between notes. Following her, an uninspired rendition of a barely recognizable tune by the red-headed boy led to the bored rattle of programs, nervous scraping of chairs, and, finally, polite soft applause with just the tips of the fingers.

  The voice students were worse than the pianists. The first one, a chubby girl with wet spots under her arms, sang “How Much is that Doggie in the Window.” She stuck out her lips and wrinkled her forehead and sang in a baby voice that would make you gag. The next, singing “Pixie in the Glen,” had a voice so loud and so jarring it sounded like she was spilling marbles. At least it woke everyone up. Their wakeful state didn’t last, however. The dancer who followed leapt around the tiny space between the piano and the parents in a pink tutu, and the leg that was supposed to be pointed at the ceiling hung down like a broken wing.

  I was left until the end. Thelma and Clarence sat up in their chairs, and everyone looked at them, since it was obvious whose daughter I was. I cleared my throat and raised my chin, and as Miss Poultice moved the sheet music for “Now is the Month of Maying” to the piano, I held up my hand.

  “Miss Poultice?” I asked earnestly.

  “Yes?”

  “If it’s all right with you and with everyone here, I’d prefer to sing without the piano tonight.”

  Looking from side to side, and not knowing what to say when she saw the parents nodding their heads, Miss Poultice had no choice but to let me sing unaccompanied.

  Figuring that “The Month of Maying” was too tame for a Negro girl, I opted instead for Bessie Smith’s “Send Me to the ’Lectric Chair.” I belted out the song, and when I got to the last verse, gave it everything I had:

  I wanna take a journey,

  To the devil down below,

  I done killed my man,

  I wanna reap just what I sowed.

  That was the end of my lessons with Miss Poultice, but I learned something about being a blues singer. You have to be pissed off at somebody or something. That’s what gives you the edge.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Thelma died when I was seventeen.

  She’d been looking forward to my high-school graduation for as long as I could remember. We’d picked out my dress pattern several months in advance. She cut out the pieces on our big wood table that was made from a kind of knotty pine that grows down in the bayou, and was thick and chunky and sturdy, so you could stick pins in it and it wouldn’t feel a thing. Clarence and Thelma brought it with them in their truck, all the way from Louisiana.

  They brought an old Singer sewing machine as well. It was Thelma’s mama’s, and it still ran like new; Thelma made all her clothes with it. Clarence’s overalls too. I wasn’t one for dresses, but Thelma chose a style that was elegant, then found a beautiful dark green fabric that cost more than five dollars a yard at Woolworth’s. And she bought me shoes and gloves to match. When I tried it all on, she sighed and said I looked like Diana Ross.

  “Diana Ross?” I said. “C’mon, Thelma. She’s not a blues singer.”

  “No, but she’s attractive.”

  “I guess. But I don’t like her music.”

  “I thought you liked Motown, Easy,” she said, marking the hem length while I stood on a chair. “You told me you liked all types of music,” she added through the pins in her mouth. �
��Anyway, in a dress, you look like her. So there.”

  I don’t know why Thelma thought I was attractive. How could I be? I was a product of Wendy Wood, and she certainly wasn’t. Thelma and Clarence had a couple of photos of her. I thought she was ugly. She even had teeth missing in the front.

  Thelma was an optimist, I guess. And she was the kind of woman who, if you put her inside any four walls, however dismal, she could turn them into a home. According to real estate standards, ours was a modest dwelling, but when I came home every day from school to the smell of bread baking and soup boiling and spray starch and scorch from Thelma’s iron, our little place over the garage was the warmest place on earth.

  While Thelma pinned up the hem, I asked her about life in the bayou.

  “Who needed money?” was her response when I asked about being poor. “We had music, and we had food. That’s all anybody needs.” It was a good thing she felt that way, because after her daddy died at a young age, her mama got hitched to a real crook of a man. He was a gambler with yellow eyes who rode up and down the river on a paddle-wheel boat and lost every dime they had.

  “Mama was glad I found a good man like Clarence,” Thelma told me. “She died happy, knowing I was looked after.”

  Why does she always tell me that Clarence is a good man? Is she trying to convince herself? Or me?

  The dress turned out great, but I never made it to my graduation after all. I wouldn’t go without Thelma. I put it away in a box in my closet and didn’t dare look at it, because I knew that the sight of those stitches would mean I’d be hit with a wave of unbearable pain.

  Clarence didn’t cry when Thelma died, but after that day, he never smiled once. He just went about his work, answered any questions his customers had with a nod of the head or as simple an explanation as he could muster. Even with me, he used as few words as possible. He let me listen to blues records, but never joined in. Not without Thelma. I still played the frottoir and the accordion, but not at home; I used them to busk outside the liquor store for extra cash.