The Wilful Daughter

by Georgia Daniels

  “I wasn’t hired to play anything. I was just visiting the area and thought I’d come in and enjoy the atmosphere. When I saw no one was playing I asked if it would be appropriate for a stranger to these parts to play a few tunes. I, young man, am not a hired hand.”

  The boy looked at him. “Goddamn, where the hell did you learn to talk like that? I can’t understand a word you’re saying.”

  “I’m not surprised.” Piano Man said and the girl giggled.

  The boy turned to her. “What are you laughing at? Just cause he thinks he’s better than most folks and can play the piano like a white man?”

  Piano Man banged his fist on the table, careful not to hurt his fingers. The girl winced and the boy jumped. “I do not play the piano like a white man. I play the piano period. I play better than most people in the world. Black or white. Make no mistake I am not a white man nor do I want to be one. I know things because I’ve been places. I learned to assimilate, that means I learned to belong. I belong wherever I want because I am the music. And it never belongs to any color of people. It belongs to those who appreciate it. As I do. It belongs to me.”

  He pulled out a cigarette and lit it. Then, his heart and face full of anger, he left the shocked silent shack and walked into the night.

  He stood by a tree to calm down. Wasn’t this the very reason he found it hard to stay in New York? Ignorant up north Negroes there had the nerve to tell him the blues were out of place. White people wanted him to play “their” music, as they called it. Not just classical pieces but silly little ditties that they sang when they sipped their illegal booze. There were so many reasons to leave New York and Europe. But when people had started telling the Piano Man what to play, and they weren’t even paying him to play, it had been time for him to go.

  The girl came out into the night. The shack was now filled with the music of the local piano man as those inside danced the night away. The girl spoke softly, barely audible above the clinking keys. “He doesn’t have any class.”

  “Class is not the question here Miss. . . , I’m sorry, I don’t know your name.” But he was dying to.

  “Brown. Miss June Brown.” She extended her hand and he kissed it instead of shaking it. She seemed unimpressed.

  “Miss Brown, music is my life. I refuse to be insulted by someone who doesn’t understand it.”

  “I agree,” she said and moved so close to him that he could smell the scent that engulfed her. A fragrance from Paris, yes. Something they were no longer wearing but it fit her perfectly. “He is jealous of your talent because he has none of his own. He will get up tomorrow and go to work with his father in the mortuary. In a few years he will marry some high yeller girl, much like myself. But it won’t be me.”

  “Why not you?” The Piano man was intrigued.

  “We are old friends. We’ve known each other since we were children. And in a few weeks he will start Morris Brown and I will start at Spelman, just to please our fathers. But we will never marry each other. It isn’t like that.”

  The Piano Man laughed. She stepped back a little. “Miss Brown, I’m not laughing at you. But I must tell you that though you feel it may not be like that with you, it is that way with him.”

  “Why would you say that? He’s never tried to court me. My father . . .”

  “I am a man. And I know when another man is smitten. Especially with a woman as beautiful as yourself.” She blushed and he was surprised. “Surely you know that you are beautiful! Hasn’t anyone ever told you that?”

  “Only my father and my mother. But parents always love their children that way. And there’s my brother, but we’re best friends and he’s a cripple. I just assume people stare at me and think I’m pretty because I have long hair and I look white.”

  She was frowning and he understood. He suddenly wanted to touch her. “Yes, you have fair skin and long hair like a white girl. But your nose is different from any persons black or white I’ve ever known. Maybe Indian? The straightness and blackness of your hair, maybe that’s Indian too. When I look at you and say you are beautiful I am saying that all the things that you are that are so unique, so different together, on your face and body that make you beautiful. Trust me, my dear, I am not your brother.”

  He dared to touch her face, his fingers recording the softness of her skin.

  Her date exploded from the shack and grabbed her. “What you doing out here with him?”

  She looked up into the Piano Man’s eyes. “I just wondered if he could come by and talk to my father about giving me piano lessons.”

  Hostility was in the boy’s face as he said: “You ain’t never wanted to take no kind of lessons in your life. You don’t need to play, you sing in the choir. That’s enough. Besides, you got sisters that play. They could teach you.”

  “Not as well as he could.” She smiled and the Piano Man smiled back. “Mr. . .?”

  “Jenkins, ma’am.”

  “Mr. Jenkins. I live at 127 Beckwith Street. If you would be so kind as to stop in after dinner tonight and speak with my father.”

  “Come on, Junie.” The boy dragged her off to a big shiny car by her elbow.

  The Piano Man nodded. He remembered music and he remembered addresses.127 Beckwith Street.

  Peter Jenkins shaved, dressed and thought of her. Downstairs he could hear Mrs. Maple humming. Once he would have taken that as a sign that all doors were open to him. Once he would have walked down to the table and waltzed Mrs. Maple about the room as she blushed and laughed like a giddy school girl. Once, once, when had that been?

  He had come back for a reason. And it was not the Blacksmith’s youngest daughter. Oh yes, now he knew who she was. Even more reason to pursue her.

  He had gone back into the smoky shack, people begging him for his music. He played songs he could never, would never sing. And they danced and did more then just listen. The room swayed with movement. A man sat on a woman’s lap as she laughed drunkenly. Minutes later they were nowhere to be found. A hand slid up a skirt and no one complained. Outside the night was filled with the silence of sleeping and the noise of love making under the stars. Only it hadn’t been real love. It had been the music. The kind of want you get from the music. The kind of I got to have me a man/got to have me a woman feeling you got when the music got inside of you and had no place to go.

  Some man tweaked Emma’s breast and a sly grin slid onto her face. She had called him with her music. And tonight her bed would be filled with both his music and hers. He couldn’t let them know that even in Europe, even in the most polite society, they felt the music, but they didn't know what to call it. And most of the time they didn’t know what to do with it.

  Roy pulled a chair up next to him. “I saw you looking at Miss June Brown, the Blacksmith’s youngest daughter. Nice ain’t she?”

  He stroked the keys as he said: “Nice doesn’t describe her.”

  Roy pointed a finger. “I knowed it! I just knowed it. She’s trouble man. Girl shouldn’t be out this late. Shouldn’t be out a-tal. She’s gonna be trouble for who ever gets her.” He took a swig of his drink and added: “Somebody ought to tell her father.”

  “Is that somebody gonna be you?” the Piano Man said with a grin. “I saw you smiling at her too.”

  “Hell no. Ain’t a man around here don’t smile at them girls. Or think about them girls when they get a chance, if you know what I mean. But I ain’t going nowhere near that Blacksmith. I stays away from trouble.”

  Her music had called the Piano Man. The way she swayed to him, the red dress shimmying with the slightest movement. The way she left him with just the smile and turn of her head. One moment longer his music, her music would have combined he was sure. Their music was yet to be made.

  Roy whispered as the Piano Man had played the last note: “I bet the right man could make her do anything he wanted.”

  “But that’s not proper, Roy,” he responded. The Piano Man needed proper now more than before.

  “Man,
she is a woman. Maybe think she’s better than most women cause of her daddy. ” Roy went on to talk about rich women and beautiful women.

  Mrs. Lathon Gross had barely been able to stand the day they buried his mother. “You need stability in your life, Peter. You can’t sleep with beautiful and at times not so beautiful women, drink liquor night and day and wake up each morning and feel good about yourself.” “You have a reputation with the ladies. You want neither wife nor children. But they are proper. They are what your mother would want for you.” She hung her head as she said: “She would not want you back with the likes of Herr Bogle.”

  He had slammed the lid of the trunk. “I never was with the likes of Herr Bogle, I thought you understood that.”

  She nodded leaning her huge bulk on the cane. “He had a reputation.”

  “I left his care and you were angry. You confronted me and I wouldn’t say what he was or what he did. The reason was simple. He was not proper.”

  “He told me he had never. . .” She had been unable to say it. “His only interest had been your hands. Yours were truly gifted. The others, the ones that left, had no gift of music. You he truly wanted to teach, Peter. But his friends. . .”

  “They disgusted me too.”

  “You will never make as much money in New York, if you do not finish your training here.”

  “Madame,” he took her thick hands in his slim ones and saw her aging smile. There had been no teas since the visit of the nephew so many years ago. After that he had spent his time with his mother or in the kitchen with the other help. But there had been afternoons when he played and they shared a glass of wine. “I must go out on my own. When the time is right, when the woman is right, I will know it. You and my mother taught me well.”

  She sat down on the chair beneath the window. “Where will you go?”

  “There are places I can play, Madame, where you cannot go and where the money will get me back to America.”

  “If that’s all you want Peter, I can get you a ticket on the next boat.”

  He raised a hand to cut her off and gently went on. “And there will be places where I will be able to learn what is new and compete with others who do not play as well but have a following. I will not return to the states until I have one here.” He smiled at her. “There are no Herr Bogles in my future. Only the right things are in my future.”

  So he went down to breakfast. As he sat with a shirt and a tie and a vest in the midst of overalls and suspendered pants, as he refused bacon, and took small starved bits of toast, he smiled politely at Mrs. Maple. “What a lovely outfit you are wearing. You look quite elegant in this light.” She blushed but she was not June, she was not his dark haired fantasy.

  He would learn more about the Blacksmith’s daughter and what it took to court her. That was proper.

  And Peter Jenkins, the Piano Man from Europe, was going to have proper.

  CHAPTER THREE

  He felt the first rock in the middle of the breeze that blew the chintz curtains across his back, but he thought it was part of the dream. The same dream he had had for the past week.

  In the dream he was dancing, on legs bigger and stronger then his father’s. He was doing a cakewalk and then he was doing something akin to the two-step, but it wasn’t the waltz that he had done on his crutches when he was ten with Minnelsa while Fawn played the piano. The woman he danced with was small and delicate of build, like June, but her breasts were large and full and her gown so low cut that when he looked down at her from his over six foot height he could see between the heaving brown mounds.

  He felt the first rock when he looked down and turned in his dream to find June standing there laughing at him. How did she get there, how did she get into everything he was involved in?

  “She’ll hurt you,” June whispered. “All she wants is papa’s money. Your share and mine.”

  He felt the second rock and turned to find his partner gone. “Damn it, June.” He must have been near waking for the next voice he heard was his sister’s from the back yard far below his bedroom going: “Psst, Willie, get me in.”

  Swiftly he rose in his bed. June was outside again. The fairy tale princess had slipped into the night and danced till almost dawn. Willie wished he could do it too. Then he looked down at his legs that had never really grown, withered and thin, and was glad that he had the power in his arms to be a little part of his sister’s secret life.

  Leaning on one crutch he made his way to the window. The curtains blew past his face. Fall was coming fast, but even closer was the storm that was brewing to the west. The clouds that covered the night sky were moving rapidly. Faster than he could ever walk. He loved to lie on the grass and watch the big fat white ones waddle along slowly on spring days.

  Barely visible beneath the pear tree where the Blacksmith’s property sloped downhill was a tiny figure dressed in red. June. She waved at him, making sure that their father and mother had not been disturbed on the other side of the house. Without a word he waved back and went to his bed to get the rope hidden beneath his mattress. At the window he threw it out and June ran to it. They both checked about to see if any of their back-yard neighbors had awakened or had been prowling about. Without any hesitation he planted himself on the window ledge and, with arms more powerful than his father’s, he pulled his sister up to the house. Willie had been able to do feats like this for years but the Blacksmith did not know. Ever since the summer day when he was 9 and his sister had almost fallen out the window and he had grabbed her pulling her back in with two powerful arms they had shared his secret. June had told him to show his father how strong he was. But Willie said the Blacksmith would never believe it. Each day his arms grew more powerful and now he was able to pull his sister up from the yard below with little or no sweat.

  Once at the edge of the window he supported her with one hand, while she pulled herself in.

  “Thanks, Willie.” She threw herself in his powerful arms. Once standing she helped him back to his bed.

  The room was small, a little bigger than the monks’ cells that he had read about in his father’s library. But it had its advantages. It was at the back of the house not far from the indoor bathroom and the kitchen. June’s room, just like it was right next door.

  “How was it tonight?” he asked taking pleasure in his sister’s beautiful pale brown face. Her hair hung tangled at her shoulders, leaves and grass in it just like when they had played in their father’s fields when they were younger. Willie had always had a companion in June and June had always had an audience in Willie.

  “Let me put on my nightgown and come right back. God forbid papa or mama catch me in this.” Willie smiled as she left the room in the bright red dress shimmying as she went. He opened the pocket watch he had received for his sixteenth birthday. Three Thirty in the morning. She must have left the house as soon as everyone was sleep, probably around ten, right after papa turned out the light from reading the last of his book.

  She came back in the room in the white gown, bare foot and with her hairbrush. “Help me get this mess out of my hair.”

  As they sat close together, Willie removing leaves, clovers and bits of flowers and grass and June brushing the long thick locks, she started talking.

  “Oh Willie tonight was wonderful. Just wonderful! I snuck down to the highway right after ten, bout a quarter past and Ross was down there with his car. We had to drive forever before we found the place. Little backwoods joint. A new one Ross found just yesterday. Ross’ buddies were already there drinking and with the Plato sisters.”

  Willie laughed softly. “Two of the most ignorant women in Atlanta named after the brilliant Plato. Sister, there is no justice.”

  “Anyway,” June continued with her story but stopped working with her hair and handed the brush to him. Dutifully Willie continued the chore. A fair exchange he thought: her story about the outside world in exchange for a few strokes to her hair. “I told Ross if he got drunk he wouldn’t ever get anywhere w
ith me or my father. That made him think and spend most of his time drinking plain old water. But it was too late. What I really was afraid of was that Ross would get drunk and not figure out how to get back home. It was so complicated getting there. I have no idea where it was.” She turned to her brother.

  His eyes met hers and he thought how beautiful she was. Small and delicate, tiny hands almost like a child’s, the twinkling eyes that would belong to a fairy. Of all his sisters she was the most beautiful, the most delicate creature in the world.

  But as if she were reading his thoughts she said: “God you are handsome, William Brown Jr. No man in that place looked as good as you do, with your slick hair and your whiter than white teeth. And your big barreled chest. Just like papa’s. Almost as big.”

  “I got no legs, June. Remember?” He made her turn her head so he could continue to brush. But as he did the tears welled up in his eyes. “Go on, Junie. Tell me what happened to keep you wherever you were till almost dawn.”

  “The Piano Man.” It was almost in a whisper. Willie’s strong strokes slowed and softened. He heard it in her voice, something he had never heard before.

  “Who’s the Piano Man?”

  “The most handsome colored man I’ve ever seen. Except of course for you. But he’s different from you. And he was playing the piano like nobody I’ve ever seen. Ross said he played like the devil himself. He has these long brown fingers. Really long and he could reach keys in places. . . Oh Willie, you should have been there.”

  She jumped up and turned to her brother. “Legs or no legs, he can’t make you stay in this house forever. If the man who runs that art colony in Florida wants to pay good money for you to paint and for your paintings then you can get your own car and I can drive for you. And we can go out whenever you want.” She hugged him. “You’ll be my brother the famous artist. And I can dress as I please and do as I please and. . .”