by John Ridley
She didn't. Forget about her tensing up at her first recording session, that night Fran was nothing but a songbird.
Set over, the audience went nuts with itself. The CBS guys were all smiles.
After the show Sid borrowed the club manager's office and had a powwow with Fran and the two talent suits. I settled in for a wait while they talked business. The wait turned out to be a short one. Of course it was. How long did it take to tell Fran she was sensational, you loved her, you wanted to pay her big money to put her on television?
Not long at all.
The two CBS guys came out of the office first, backslaps and broad smiles, high on happiness for finding a piece of talent so obvious, the blind could've spotted it. Then came Sid. Then Frances.
Fran crossed to me, wanting to say something. She said nothing, knowing whatever thing she said would be the wrong thing. She kissed me. She left.
The next time I kissed Frances she would be a star. The next time, and the last time.
part III
There was a picture in Life magazine of a cute little girl with cute little curls in mid-skip of a jiggle-belled jump rope as she played on a quiet suburban sidewalk somewhere in Middle Americaville. It was a perfect image of a perfect time to be a kid, too young to know there were ever such things as the Depression or the Second World War. Too young to know about dust bowls and death camps. For the kids of the 1950s, there was only Davy Crockett and Captain Video, Hula Hoops and Flexible Flyers. There was only fun to be had. As it should be. Kids should be having a good time, playing, laughing, and all that Kids should be kids. What they shouldn't be is martyrs and heroes, frontline soldiers of a civil war.
Nine were.
Nine kids who just wanted to go to school and get some education. Problem: They wanted to go to Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. The government said they could. The law said they could. The good white people of Little Rock said different.
Said?
How about they screamed. How about they called the kids niggers. Goddamn niggers. Lousy coon niggers. Frenzied, faces red and twisted with blind hatred, foaming from their shrieking mouths, they called the kids animals.
They called the kids animals?
The kids, armed with just books and pride, tried to do some learning.
The mob of whites chased them off.
But the children tried again.
The National Guard chased them off.
But the children said they would try again.
The governor said, go on. Try again. Try all you want. He would keep chasing them off. That, or let the mob have at them.
Ike didn't care for that, the laws he was supposed to be upholding getting ignored by the troops of redneck governors. Ike sent in the big boys: one-thousand troopers from the 101st Airborne.
The mob quieted up.
The National Guard stepped aside.
The governor backed down.
The children integrated Central High School.
Nine kids. Nine kids who just wanted to learn. They weren't trying to start anything.
For all their non-effort, what they helped start was the civil rights movement.
August of 1957 to February of 1958
Sid and I were having a sit-down. The topic: the future of Jackie Mann. A future I felt I was rushing toward at a slower and slower crawl. Getting turned down for a look-see by the network, having my best friend walk away from an audition with a holding deal; that sock popped the wind from me.
Sid did what he could to set me right, never trying to cheer me up by overselling my prospects or promising me the impossible. With Sid it was strictly what he could get for me, why he thought I should take it, how it would help me down the line. Plain, simple, and regular. Sometimes too plain, too regular, and I'd find myself wanting more. A lot of times I'd want more. More, or bigger, or better: this club over that one. A theater over a club. A radio spot over both. And over all that I wanted Sullivan.
And when I got that way, my wanting in full bloom, Sid started up with his cautionary jazz: Don't get ahead of yourself. Don't rush. You've got one shot at things while you're climbing the ladder, one chance to impress the bookers and talent guys at each rung. If you slipped, down was the only destination. So don't do something to do something, do it when you're ready.
I listened to Sid.
Tried to.
But his counsel was no match for the rat of stagnancy that was making a meal of me and the sense that failure was creeping close, ready to mug me from behind. The pair were becoming a constant of my life that were wearing me out, wearing me down. Twin abuses filling me with a fear of my future: at best a life sentence of coffeehouses and Village clubs. At worst—at the very worst—back to carting furniture by day, back to carting home the high of choice for my father at night.
“We need to get you on the road.” Sid talking. “Get you in some clubs in big markets. You're getting strong. I think you can handle it, opening for a few names. These aren't one-nighters I'm talking. You go out, you're going to be out for a while. I got ins in Chicago, Philly. Hell, we haven't even had you in Jersey yet. I can put you in the Five Hundred easy. They're all class houses, pay top dollar. Three hundred a week for starters. Most'll throw in a meal.”
Three a week. Three and food. By far the most I'd ever made to that point. But Money was starting to seem lonely without sister Fame.
Sid could tell the talk of the road work was doing nothing to prop me up. He started to do a hard sell for what would end up being the last leg of the tour, a stand at the Fontainebleau in Miami Beach. It was class, it was good pay, it was a hot house, it wasuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuzuz …
Sid talked. I drifted, let my gaze travel out the window. Hazy. Ugly. Raining. Below, an intersection. Water had puddled around a clogged sewer drain. A guy—gray suited, anonymous like the man in the Sloan Wilson book—tried to leap over it. Didn't make it. He landed right in the puddle, much deeper than it looked, and ended up splashing water all over himself. He stood where he was, sour, wet, and getting wetter. All around, people pushed by him, past him. They couldn't care less he'd messed hisself, that maybe he had some important meeting or maybe a first date he was going to miss for looking like a rag. All the people cared about was that the soaked, gray-suited man was in their way.
They were New Yorkers.
They had places to be.
I jerked around, breath held. Something Sid'd said snagged me, spun me. Exhilarated me. Almost. The blisters from the last time I'd been burned by premature enthusiasm were fresh enough I was shy of letting myself get jazzed on the quick again.
I asked him: “What did you say?”
“I'm not making any promises. But if things go right—”
“What did you say, Sid?”
“The guys at the Fontainebleau, they have an in. You do well there, they told me they'll talk to Jules.”
Jules. That's all the more he had to say, and I dug his meaning exactly. Jules. Jules Podell. Jules ran the hottest nightspot in town. What Sid was saying, just by saying his name, was that if I went over in Miami, if I did right, I had an in at the Copacabana.
WHAT'S THE OPPOSITE OF INDIAN SUMMER? Did it have a fancy name, or was it just early fall? No leaves turning yet, many weeks from an icy chill, not even October but the air was going crisp. The climate being cool, the sun being bright, made for a special kind of weather that juiced you with some Mother Nature–made menthol. Taking a deep breath was taking in a lungful of tingly vitality. Days like that, the city begged to be walked around in, leisurely enjoyed at a stroll's pace: Get out there, boy. Don't let life pass you by. Days like that, New York City seemed just about perfect.
Still, beautiful as the day was, it held a creeping frost.
“All you care about is money.”
We were having the conversation. We were having the conversation again—the one about which was more important, art or commerce. Show or business. Whether it was better to be good or make it big.
&n
bsp; If I wasn't hip to it before, Tommy made her thinking real clear to me. “You think money's everything. You think it's everything, but it's not.”
We were starting to have the conversation with near regularity. Over meals, before lovemaking, after watching other acts—Tommy would want to know if I thought they were talented, or just popular. One night after she'd finished a set, the audience sending her offstage with extra-strong claps and whistles, she beelined for me, faking lament, worrying that if people were digging her, she must not have any depth anymore: “I don't know, Jackie. I don't know. I think I'm selling out.”
The comments were sharp, never subtle. Tommy's remarks never needled, they hacked at you razor-style. But even at that, it wasn't as if she was trying to be smart-aleck about things. To her, for me, it was a kind of therapy, especially in the months since those boys from CBS treated me as if I were a one-eyed albino. Day by day I wanted nothing more than to increase my stature, elevate myself to a place where slicks in suits had no say over me. They could hate me, they could despise me on their own time, but I wanted only to be so big that to my face they could do nothing but love me. Notions that didn't sit at all well with Tommy.
“Why are you always on this trip: If I were a star, everything would be great. If I were rich, life would be fine.”
Arguing wasn't how I wanted to spend my last days with my girl before going off on the road. We were walking on Sixth, bundled mostly in each other and kept warm by our steamed words, after a matinee showing at the Ziegfeld. As if I didn't already have Tommy hot enough at me, same as every other Charlie in America I'd guaranteed myself a standing reservation in the doghouse by insisting we take in a film staring European sexpot Lilian Davi.
“You're telling me,” I told Tommy, “folding money's not better than trying to get by on fews and twos? You get some green, you get some juice, there's nobody who doesn't respect you.”
“Why would you want their respect? Why would you want to minstrel your way into having a bunch of ofays who hate you pretend they don't?”
Yeah, okay, on a level, maybe, Tommy had a point. Maybe. But it was the point of a girl who grew up in the pretty, pleasant Germantown section of Philly. The point I was trying to make came hot off the streets of Harlem. I was arriving at a truth, one I'd been putting the dodge on for the sake of our relationship. Like myself, Tommy was born different. She had something inside her that made her unlike other people. The problem was, the thing that made Tommy different from others also made her different from me.
“You don't get it,” I told her. “You come from money.”
“I come from parents who worked hard and gave me and my sister what they could.”
“They gave you a good life, that's all I'm saying. I want to be able to do the same. Get a house somewhere nice, a quiet, tree-lined neighborhood. We could do the whole scene: picket fence, swing on the por—”
If she'd taken a bullet, Tommy couldn't have stopped any deader. If I'd smacked her, she couldn't have looked at me any more shocked, her pretty little eyes never so wide.
She asked: “We?”
“What?”
“You said we. We could do the whole scene.”
A hundred times I'd mind-riffed on a thousand different combos of the future of me and Thomasina Montgomery. Me and her shacking up, married up. Married and living in the city, or upstate. Kids got blended into this fantasy or that. But the one thing every variation had in common was us. The two of us together. Me saying “we”—to her, surprising—was just talking out loud about what I'd already worked over again and again and again and again.
Still, letting your main know you sit around pipe-dreaming on domestication is strictly a no-no.
Backpedaling: “… I was just supposing. I wasn't saying anything.” Trying not to backpedal too far: “Not that I wasn't saying anything at all, I was just …”
I quit there. No point going on. I didn't own Tommy's attention anymore. It belonged to something that had caught her eye. Up the avenue, an appliance store. A crowd, mixed black and white, pressed up to the front window, hypnotized by the chorus of images projected from a display of televisions.
Me and Tommy walked for the crowd, bobbed around trying to watch what they were watching. No good.
I asked a brother: “What's going on?”
“News film. Little Rock.”
All the more backstory he needed to give. Looking between shoulders, I caught some of the monochrome horror show. Black children trying to go to school. Blocking their way were bayonet-flashing National Guardsmen—protecting the lilified school from the young invaders—and a gang of whites lynch-mob crazy. Yelling. Screaming. Some rocks got thrown. And through all that, through the wailing voices and hurled slurs and the stench of violence, past the Guardsmen who would just as soon let the mob loose on the “niggers” as muss their uniforms trying to stop them, the children quietly walked up the stairs and into the school to do some learning.
I said to myself, but out loud: “Why in the hell would anybody let their children go through that?”
The brother I'd questioned didn't care for my comment and let me know with a “Negro, please” twist of his lip. “I expect so your children won't have to.”
Done with me, the brother moved off.
Tommy, her stare zigzagging past bodies to the TV, said: “It's terrible.”
“Yeah.” On the TV: Some crazed whites chased down a black who just happened to be out walking. They beat him bloody. From what I could see, they beat him until he was just about dead. “It is.”
Tommy kept standing where she was, kept juking her head around, trying to grab a look at one of the sets. Maybe that was her way of showing support.
So I let her. For a while.
Pretty soon I gave a tug to Tommy's sleeve and I headed off and she followed. Since I couldn't do much concerning America's race issue standing around in front of an appliance store, I figured I should bust my conk on problems I could solve. Like coming up with some new bits for my set.
MY FATHER WAS MOSTLY SOBER, or as close as he got anymore. He was sitting at the kitchen table. Eating. You could call it eating. You could call it shoveling food in the general vicinity of the hole in his face.
His level of communication, the sum of hospitality he could extend to his son as I entered the room, amounted to: “Want some?”
I went to the table. I ladled out a bunch of whatever it was Pop was having—maybe rice and chili—onto a plate, sat. We had a meal together. No eye contact. No words. Our only conversation the dueling of his spoon and my fork against our plates. Anyway, it was our version of having a meal together.
I said: “I'm going away for a while.”
“When you come back, bring me a—”
“Not coming back. Said: not for a while.”
That paused him for a tick. “Whadaya mean, a while?”
“Might be a couple of months. Might be more.”
“You ain't goin' nowheres.” He said that like it was a simple fact he knew to be true: The sky is blue. Water is wet. I wasn't going any where. He said it, then shoveled more of the slop toward his mouth.
I ate some more, too, then I corrected my pop. “I am going away. It's going to be a few months. Might be more.”
“Where? Where do you think you goin'”
“To do some clubs on the road.”
“Nightclubs … ?”
“Philadelphia, Milwaukee, Chicago. A few other places. Going to end things up in Miami.”
Pop didn't care for me explaining things to him. Heating himself up: “Work a few times in the city, you think you somethin' big. Think you somethin' special. Ain't nothing, Jackie.” He just about snarled. “Jackie … Know why I name you Jackie? 'Cause tha's a girl's name, and tha's all you are.” He just about laughed. “You nothin' but a sissy little—”
“I'm a good comic.”
“Ain't nobody gonna pay to see yo nigger ass! ” Pop's anger flushed his black skin. His chest pumped short,
hot breaths.
I stayed quiet, the quiet only making Pop all the madder.
A few more scoops of food. After that I stood from the table, took my plate to the sink, and put it with the others Pop had left there for me to wash.
To him I said, even in tone: “People will pay to see me. They'll pay this time, and they'll pay more next time. And I'm going to take their money and get me some nice things, a nice apartment. And when I get that nice apartment, I'm going to leave you here.”
“You ain't gonna—”
“I'm going to move so far away, all you'll be is some black man I'm going to have to think hard about to remember.”
“Ain't goin' nowheres! Not gonna let you go nowheres! ” Pop clutched at his spoon, ready to use it for something besides eating.
“It's already happening. Sid's booked me into—”
“That Jew? That Jew done this?”
“Don't you talk about him that way.”
“That Jew got all up in yo head an' poison you against me.”
“You don't talk about him like that! ” For the first time since I'd walked through the door, hard as I'd tried to keep cool, Pop had finally managed to edge me up. I didn't care what he had to say about me. There was nothing else he could add to the volume he'd written. But I wasn't going to let him talk on Sid. “He's more a man than you are. He's a man, a decent man, and that right there is one whole hell of a lot more than you'll—”
“Learn yo nigger ass!” Pop came at me; the spoon, having completed its transformation from utensil to weapon, led the way. But for all his anger, Pop's move was powerless, the lumbering and incoherent charge of a perpetual addict, his actions as exaggerated as they were slow. It took little effort to sidestep him, grip him by the shoulder. It took even less to push him away. So little that the conservative energy I put into my defense sent Pop to the floor.
