Jam on the Vine (9780802191571)

by Barnett, Lashonda

  Ona rolled her eyes. Earlier that year when she turned fifty her name was lost and replaced by Ivoe with any epithet marking age: “Granny-O,” “Biddy-O,” “Dame Durden,” “Blue-Hair”—pleasant reminders. What discouraged other women who had crossed the fifty threshold had brought Ona unexpected peace. It seemed to her that the appearance of an aging woman either opened the onlooker’s eye or shut it. In the absence of ambivalence she took great comfort. On the street she appreciated people who changed their tempo for her—stepped aside on a bustling sidewalk, relinquished a trolley seat, or held a door open—so she understood how being ignored by masses of people might be upsetting. But how much time had been taken from her during her youth? How often had she been put out by casual nothingness? She liked that the swing of her hips no longer invited stares, or, worse yet, uninvited conversation. At fifty, her understanding of life was flowering in a secret garden no one, other than Ivoe, dared enter. How she had looked forward to this special peace that came with being disappeared by age.

  Ivoe devised that Ona visit the catacombs without her and that they rendezvous in the afternoon for sightseeing. Until then, she had a difficult task: how to put on paper the spell Paris had them under.

  LE TUMULTE NOIR, MY TRIP ABROAD

  PARIS, France—To try to set down what two race women can do in Paris in three days, or even the main threads of the pleasures of Paris, would be like trying to catch the sun’s rays in a bottle. The attractions are too numerous and too varied. Everyone who has visited Paris nurses a secret desire to return again soon. The city cannot be abandoned, for nowhere else in the world can one find a semblance of her charming and intoxicating atmosphere. All temperaments, tastes and aspirations find their satisfaction here. The words “Liberté, Égalité and Fraternité” carved on many of her public buildings proclaim to the world that she is free.

  A day in Paris unfolds magically: A walk by the admirable Champs-Élysées to the avenue du Bois de Boulogne. There in that noble scenery of trees, flower beds and sumptuous residences one could watch passing by from 11 o’clock until 1 the smartest of the Parisiennes. Some walking, others in luxurious cars, not to mention elegant horsemen and horsewomen in the special “allée” reserved for them. Deciding on a restaurant is an impossible task. They are all so splendid, each with a celebrated cuisine and welcoming of blacks. Lunch over, you would linger for a while then take a taxi to the Louvre, eventually ambling about the Place de la Concorde. Finally, around 6 o’clock in rue de la Paix, you take note of shop windows sparkling with riches. All those who have breathed this rare atmosphere of elegance and civilization will understand what is called up throughout the world by the words “rue de la Paix.”

  Paris is full of strangers the year around, with Americans in full force. The sidewalks in front of various banks and tourist offices are piled high with American newspapers. Boys imported with the papers display the usual American hustle and are busy selling them to Kentucky colonels and others from down south, out west and New England.

  What looks like indignation meetings on the pavement are simply crowds waiting for seats in the multicolored cars that make the “sightseeing around Paris” excursions. If your bus is going into the vicinity of the Louvre and the Palais Royal, you will see two remarkable churches: the Oratoire and the ancient Saint-Germain l’Auxerrois. The former was the chapel royal of the Louvre from Louis XIII to Louis XV. A bell from one of its towers pealed out the signal for the massacre on the night of St. Bartholomew in August 1572.

  To get a full sense of the poetry and mystery of Paris after dark you would do well to take a trip on the river Seine around the city and let your imagination roam. As the vessel glides under the white lights of the bridges you can see a hundred thousand bulbs outline the World’s Fair’s pavilion and many buildings on either bank of the Seine, turning night into day again. In this setting you are likely to find Paris in its true self, shorn of confusion and trappings. Likewise, you might board an autocar at Place de l’Opéra about 9 P.M., take a whizz by the Bastille, Notre Dame and Étoile and land yourself anywhere in the neighborhood of Montmartre.

  Montmartre is the center of Parisian nightlife, attracting tourists from the four corners of the world. Here you find on Place Pigalle the famous Café du Rat Mort (or the Café of the Dead Rat), which a famous artist has described as the lighthouse of Montmartre. All assemble here: musicians, artists, stars of the literary and theatrical world, including our very own sable queen from down-the-road St. Louis, who opened La Revue Nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées to rave reviews. (Nothing my companion and I have experienced has met with equal rapture.) There is nothing slow about a cabaret in Montmartre. Everything is up-to-date. The songs are full of allusions to the most recent political events, scandals and risqué catchwords. Finally, around midnight, after the actors “take off” on a politician and imitate a jockey who has just won the grand prix, our very own homegrown bands start to jam. Any homesickness would be feigned when such sweet black noise ends the day.

  À bientôt,

  Ivoe Leila Williams

  .

  Only in Paris could the wrong train deliver you to the right place. They had traveled too easterly before looking up from the map to see the Bois de Vincennes. Ivoe sighed at the sprawling, romantic park like those she had read about in English novels, replete with gazebos and hilly picnic areas. On their day in Manhattan, plans to visit Central Park’s Ladies Pond and Ladies Pavilion were dashed by segregation. Here she and Ona could rent bicycles or a boat but settled for holding hands as they ambled among the trees. Late in the afternoon at Maison Prunier, their knees touched under a small corner table. Since the moment they arrived, Paris had taken their hearts; now, evidently, she had come back for their minds—a grown pair of women, swirling spoons through a creamy pink-and-yellow foam, giggling. They interrupted each other or sat in silence, beaming. A single crossing had made them different because time was different; a French hour differed from an American one in all the ways they were free to spend it. Hobbled by language and a poor sense of direction, before the congress she and Ona intended to drink in Paris until drunk, starting with the modern industrial and decorative arts exhibit at the World’s Fair. They hammered out more plans; Ona hummed a little under her breath the way she did whenever she felt delighted. The days before them flung wide open to strolling the royal gardens at Tuileries, spraying Babani perfume and feeling fine couture in shops along the discreetly elegant boulevard Haussmann, climbing to the top of that lattice iron tower on Champ de Mars, and more peach clafouti. For all these decadences they needed not bend themselves to accommodate the most inconvenient hours, or wait for the day when the colored ban was lifted. Just as the Associated Press had greeted them with calm affection and in little time sent cables to Jam on the Vine, their plans would run smoothly. Free to go and do as they pleased.

  .

  “Mesdames et messieurs. Nous sommes arrivés à la Porte d’Orsay. S’il vous plaît sortez.” An open-air tram let them off before an intricately designed steel canopy. The path to the L’Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes had the usual concessions: a Ferris wheel, a merry-go-round, boats, and a skating rink. Umbrellas of every color on the banks of the Seine gave swimmers respite in shade while band concerts drew crowds. Music from the left bank’s band pavilion floated across the water, jazzing Ivoe and Ona along the esplanade of Les Invalides, Louis XIV’s playground. A loud pop that sounded like a gunshot made Ona jump. Bursting showers of liquid silver nails and aerial bombshells of red, white, and blue shot high above the Seine. Peace and progress, the exposition’s themes, hardly applied to life back home, Ivoe thought. No matter the game blacks always played to the white man’s hand because of America’s reluctance to turn her gaze away from slavery. In 1925 her government still clung to backward thinking with appalling tenacity. She recalled her family’s first Independence Day in Kansas City. She was twenty-eig
ht years old, Timbo thirty-four, the twins about ten. In 1917, Fairmount Park fairgrounds lifted the ban on blacks for July 4. Roena had fussed about Timbo working at the white fairgrounds instead of Swope Park, where blacks could enter year-round. She hated that in seeing their father work, the twins would also see how much better everything was at a fairground they couldn’t attend any other month. At the Parker Brothers’ invention, the Little Darky Shooting Gallery, where Junebug and Pinky tossed watermelon-shaped discs into the open red mouth of an ebony face, Ivoe had tried to explain to Roena advice she had received from Ona: “Sometimes you have to bend low to follow through.” Timbo was unwilling to scab. The fairground work wasn’t really him. After the Game of Sambo the twins grew anxious for their daddy’s game, pulling their mother and aunt along. A smack landed on Ivoe’s arm. Roena had stopped dead in her tracks. “Well, ain’t that a pretty howdy-do.” At that moment Ivoe recalled the various images of a boo-hag that sprang to her childhood mind during story time. None of the boo-hags she conjured ever looked as frightening as what she and Roena saw: caricatured Negro faces with bulging eyes, large, twisted mouths, and startling hair painted on a large canvas scene of a cotton field. Dressed in silly clothing, contorted limbs frozen in a dance or on the run, the painted Negro bodies made the twins laugh. Ivoe stared at the three faces until Junebug pulled on her skirt, finally shifting her gaze to the hole where a face she knew peeked through. Timbo’s eyes grew big; the red paint around his mouth drew his grin from ear to ear. He ran out barefoot from behind the canvas in torn britches and a dirty shirtwaist with a bright red kerchief tied around his neck. But it was the large yellow bonnet bedizened with broken flowers that made Ivoe bite her lip. In mock fear Timbo ran in circles, just missing the grasp of the white man standing before the canvas with a long whip, speaking in a boisterous voice. “Step right up and teach this darky a lesson about not doing his work.” He lashed the whip. “Teach him well and win a prize.” He waved a small bucket with three balls at the audience. The aim of the African Dodger was clear. Timbo returned to his place behind the canvas as Junebug and Pinky begged for change. Disgusted, Roena grabbed their hands and walked away.

  Ivoe and Ona moved with the crowd jamming the banks of the Seine to enjoy the spectacle. As if by magic, at eight o’clock six beautiful women emerged from makeshift fountains in the river. The crowd watched, spellbound by the living statuary. When the lights changed color over their graceful tableaux, Ivoe saw that three of the women were colored. Paris had her ear tuned to jazz, the future, while white America still sang Mammy songs and longed for minstrel shows.

  .

  Ivoe ducked out of the rain, pulling Ona beneath a canopied stall in the open-air market in rue Mabillon, Saint-Germain-des-Prés. An old woman beckoned from the rear of her cart. She spoke as Ona tapped Ivoe on the arm. Ivoe translated: “Sour cherries from Montmorency Valley just north of the city . . . cheap.” The woman lifted the tarp covering small baskets of cherries, their scarlet skins split by the rain. Ona’s mouth watered as she dug around for the fifty-centime bronze coin displaying Apollo seated on a throne with his lyre and serpent-entwined staff. At a cheese stall they had their fill of nutty, bland, and too strong. A freckled man with bright green eyes insisted they try the fresh chicken. While waiting for the rotisserie to stop, he entertained them, whisking off Ona’s hat, putting it on, and juggling three pieces of fruit. An honest-to-God Frenchman—playful, silly, charming, all of that. Ona was certain she would remember the scene for the rest of her life. Finally, they descended underground for the metro.

  They had planned to return to Le Grand Duc for dinner but were now too full, so they fell into Ciro’s for deux pastis and dancing. The last notes of a slow drag played; the floor trickled down to a few beguine dancers. A group from Martinique raised a raucous as the bands changed. Black American sound was contagious but they hated those dances—no gyrating; one must roll the hips modestly—and sulked against the wall. Ivoe grabbed Ona’s hand, joining the others eager to claim a spot. On the downbeat, Ona raised her right foot then tapped the floor. Ivoe imitated. Tap, tap the heels of the right foot in front and slide. Here was the part in the music Ivoe loved best. A glorious sight. The merry dancers jamming to the music when all of a sudden, a caesura, a break from the rhythm of hurt, loss, a moment of freedom unchained from someone else’s rhythm—and the music starts again. Fingers snap, hips swivel, moans swell in the chest, the wood of the floor bulges: kick left with your right foot, kick right with your left. They all jumped up and landed, facing the center of the room, continuing the steps from the beginning. Ecstasy is the pitch of undulating hips, eyes rolling to one side then the other.

  Ivoe could dance all night. A big-bottomed woman stomping in place bumped into Ona, who laughed at first, then grimaced, plucking her skirt. She reached for Ivoe and headed for their table.

  “I thought we were gonna hucklebuck until the rising sun,” Ivoe teased as they sat down. They were doing too much in Paris, it couldn’t be helped. After daylong meetings at the Hotel de Malte, the city beckoned. Exiting the metro station, blocks from their flat, Ivoe would run into a journalist. There was some singer to hear, a theater troupe acting original works in a centuries-old church, or some debate on the political climate back home in full swing at a small café. More than a few of those evenings Ona had left her alone with les bohémiens, stating the hills and cobblestones were too much for fifty-year-old Methuselah. The last few evenings full of good entertainment and great conversations kept Ivoe away from their apartment until two in the morning. Ona twisted in her seat a little, yawned, then pulled Ivoe up to join the other patrons jamming to the center and all along the margin. The wooden floor shook beneath them as people danced everything from the black bottom to the beguine. Ona drew Ivoe close, singing along with Isabelle Patricola, a record they had worn out last year:

  You were meant to be my loving baby,

  Somebody loves me

  I wonder who,

  Maybe it’s you.

  Home sweet Paris on rue de Steinkerque, Ivoe leaned across the bed in her slip to reach the unfinished basket of cherries. Alternating between Ona’s mouth and her own, she rolled cherry after cherry, ignoring the juice trickling down their chins. They talked about the club, complained about the work that awaited them in Kansas City, remarked for the eleventh or twelfth time on the splendor of Paris.

  “Everything is perfect. Can’t think of a thing we’re missing,” Ivoe said.

  Ona rose from the bed. She threw open her valise, pulled out a box. She sat down next to Ivoe, giddy as a schoolgirl on graduation, and withdrew a purple velvet drawstring bag. Before opening it, she relayed news of her journey to rue Saint-Denis earlier that day.

  Ivoe listened to the story of Ona’s encounter at the curious shop. What she described could not exist. Such things lived solely in the imagination of European writers—Mr. Shakespeare toyed with the thought in her favorite play, Measure for Measure. The Marquis de Sade’s Justine knew of them in the eighteenth century—but surely a woman could not walk in off the street and simply purchase one. Paris is not a city for nonbelievers. Ivoe’s cheeks grew warm, staring at the maroon leather phallus on display across Ona’s lap. Quickly, she reached out to cover it. Ona pulled the apparatus from beneath Ivoe’s hand and stood with her back turned. She removed her skirt and made the final adjustment before turning around. “Une consoler.” Ivoe fell against the bed laughing. Here was Miss Durden—eclipsed by none in intelligence and grace—with an alarming erection.

  “You’ve been wearing those—those special underpants all evening, Ona?” She could barely catch her breath.

  “Had them fit me in the store. Had to—if I wanted to wear Monsieur Consoler.” Peals of laughter erupted from Ivoe.

  “Hush, girl, before you start the people to thinking we’re drunk and crazy.” Ona crawled across the bed, kissed Ivoe until the waves in her belly stopped. All the play was gone fr
om her voice: “You tried to dance the loving right out of me. But there’s still some left.”

  Ivoe’s legs trembled and buckled against Ona’s shoulders. “Is it all right?” Ona whispered sweet, her hips rocking, the gleam in her eye pleasant lightning. A look from Ona and she was found out, every hope, every doubt. It frightened her, how much Ona knew, could see, and want her still.

  “Um-hmm—you feel anything?”

  Husky breathing was answer enough.

  “You got me tingling all over. Make me melt, baby.” She kissed Ivoe’s forehead, feathered her tongue across the soft plump lips.

  Sometimes their lives were too much. The heavy cost paid left Ivoe light as a leaf. More than anything she wanted not to be tossed about—the way life did them. She searched every crease, every line of Ona’s face for the heart’s memory. Rose to lick and suckle the dangling nipples. Ona rocked into her, left her filled, whispered into her ear: “Baby.” The wet of her eyes, the quiver of her lips, was almost too much to take.

  Sleeping Angelica had stepped off Rubens’s canvas. She loved Ona this way—sprawled out and nude. Fresh as April, warm as May. After telling her what colors she saw this time, Ona had fallen asleep. Ivoe rolled over and grabbed paper and pencil. Questions and ideas flitted about like fireflies, refusing to land for very long. At a quarter to three in the morning, she curled into Ona, grateful for their time in Paris, a moment that would buoy her soul in life’s most turbulent waters.

  Early in the morning of May 25, a phalanx of black journalists strutted along the fashionable rue de Richelieu. Fire for justice had called together citizens of the Americas, Ethiopia, Haiti, Liberia, Martinique; a hundred or more representatives from the newspapers of sixteen nations and colonies converged on the right bank at the Hotel de Malte. The mass meetings for the Pan-African Congress convened in a large room off the hotel lobby in which several telegraphs were furnished for journalists. Ivoe skimmed the program. Now was the Greeting Hour when editors and journalists gave introductions and remarks on their interest in the meeting, what issues their papers grappled with, the collective direction they wished for the black press. Ona and Ivoe took their seats, eager for the opening address by editor Paul Kellogg of Survey Graphic magazine, the national periodical devoted to sociology and social work. Kellogg’s trenchant address implored his audience to protect the rights of people of African descent and to be less concerned with Negro history but fanatical about the future. “If we keep looking back, that bear is going to get us. We must forge ahead in the names of our ancestors who lost their lives so that we might have a stake in freedom. Lest we forget, there are places where we are yet found swinging in the wind.” Delegates, politicians, newspaper people, and representatives from clubs convened in each room of the hotel reporting their findings on the health and welfare of black communities, unemployment, hiring practices and economics, black disfranchisement, and violence. Inflammatory speeches by several editors condemned social conditions in the United States, inveighing against President Coolidge and the government. One editor stood in a frightful rage, calling for a movement against the mendacity of white politicians. His speech erupted like the pent-up fires of a volcano: “Ink for blood! We must write to incite our readers to action. It is the only way the government’s indifference and apathy can be dealt with.” Ivoe recognized the man at once, for his paper was the only one she knew to include a large photograph of the editor on the front page. She had been reading the Boston Guardian since she removed a copy from the wastebasket in Lois Humphrey’s office. The editor’s gaze fell over everyone in the room. “After all, the thrust of the preamble is action . . . ‘We the people’ includes us.” Without identifying anyone by name, the Guardian lambasted editors for not rattling more cages. “For those of you writing for the timid, I can assure you, you do them no favor. America will not give equality just because we behave and wait for it patiently.”