Some Sing, Some Cry

by Ntozake Shange

  Though it was well into the night when the car arrived at the new farmhouse, everyone was still awake. Eudora worked ten years to buy back the land Tom Winrow lost and another seven to build a beautiful brick house on it. They didn’t know when Eudora had found the time to cook, too. The children kept saying they’d never seen so much food in one day. Elma cautioned them sternly with a whisper, “That’s private family business, not anybody else’s.” But Eudora heard.

  “That’s all right, daughter, I can see through all this. Raymond, don’t you know I just want the two of you to be good to each other and raise these children up right? I know you’re havin’ hard times, but these children don’t have to suffer, too. Let me keep Jessie, the boy, till you get your feet on the ground again. I can help you out some. Really.”

  “We’re not paupers, Eudora,” Raymond responded sharply.

  “I’m not suggesting that, Raymond. I’m just saying there’s nothing wrong with accepting help, either.”

  “Well, Mama, it’s not as simple as that,” Elma said.

  “Why isn’t it? I’m your mother, not some stranger doing a good deed. Francina and even Roswell were quite taken with Jessie. And I think Jessie took to me, as well. I think he’d like to stay with me.”

  Stoking his solitude, Raymond retreated to the corner of the parlor. Elma’s mind turned to her children. What Eudora was saying made some sense, but does Jessie want to stay in Charleston? How would Memphis respond to the absence of her big brother? And what about Cinnamon? Shifted and shunted from household to household, how would she feel? “We’ll have to ask the children what they want to do, Mama.”

  “Oh, no, you don’t. You just tell them what’s good for them.”

  Elma ignored her mother’s admonitions. She walked over to Raymond. “What do you want, my angel?”

  Raymond chose his words very carefully. He didn’t want her to know what a failure he thought himself as a husband and a father. “Well, I . . . ah, I think your mother’s got a good idea. Actually, I think we should give Jessie that one foot up on the world, like your mother said.”

  “What about Cinn? I can’t see separating her from Jesse.”

  “Cinnamon might enjoy the farm.”

  Eudora overheard the name Cinnamon and felt a chill go up her spine. Not Cinnamon. She couldn’t bear that. Her daughter’s pregnancy had caused such a rift between them. I lost my temper and cast my Lizzie into the wild and she has gone to naught. Her daughters, she had failed them both, cut herself off. Even Elma, sometimes when she looked at that sweet girl, the long-buried rage at her unavenged rape passed through her body with a shudder. How could she feel these things toward her own daughters? It wasn’t their fault how they were born. Trying to push these thoughts from her mind, Eudora retired to her bedroom.

  She opened a heavy wooden chest at the foot of her bed. Dress of lace made for a wedding that never was. Old pair of cloth-covered shoes. Gingerly, she drew out an old Sears shoebox, though vintage, still pristine, the casing just frayed on the corners. Sitting by the light, she cradled the box in her arms and opened the lid. She held up a worn curled photograph. Acid had eaten away at parts. She squinted to make out the image, a ghost of itself. Her eyes widened as she remembered Lijah-Lah’s words, “Oh yo mama could sing!” Just to hear it once, just to hear her voice one more time. The door quietly opened. Eudora turned and was looking straight into the eyes of the child she had wanted to avoid.

  “Grandmother? Nana? May I sit with you?” asked Cinnamon, peeking through the entrance.

  “Now there’s a first. A relation who seeks my company.” Dora held out her arms. “I’m teasing, child. Come.” Cinn sat beside Dora, still fingering the edge of the photograph. She straightened her shoulders, laughing, “This here is our Ma Bette, when she was still livin’ on that island, Sweet Tamarind. And this is your great-grandma Juliet, my mother. Only picture I have. You maybe favor her some, I think. People used to say she had a beautiful voice.”

  Cinnamon’s embrace startled her. Dora had grown unaccustomed to warmth, but the child’s gesture was so genuine and unfettered, Dora relaxed into it and drew strength from it.

  Cinnamon gravitated toward Eudora as if Eudora had something just for her. “Why are you staring at me so?” Cinnamon asked. “Do I remind you of someone, Nana? Tell me about my mother. Am I like my mother, Nana?”

  “Oh, goodness no, child,” Eudora exclaimed, “you’re not like your mother at all!” She leaned toward Cinnamon until their foreheads met. “Why, you’re too graceful and well-mannered to be your mother’s child.”

  “Can I tell you something, Nana?”

  “Yes, child, you can tell me anything.”

  “My mother hates me.”

  Eudora’s heart seized up like she was being stabbed. Softly she whispered, “Oh no, she doesn’t,” grabbing up the child like she wished she’d held Lizzie.

  “Mayfields are just very mysterious folks. Your mama’s just a mysterious woman, like our Ma Bette was, and you will be too. Ma Bette could talk to the birds, run with the horses, and read the moon. Oh, you’re a Mayfield all right! And if you stay with me for a while I’ll fill you up with gumbo and peach cobbler. Plus, all the magic you’ll ever need to know.”

  Before long the family had gathered round. “Is this our grandpa?”

  “Hmph. Tom Winrow, yes.”

  “Where’d he go?”

  “To hell I most likely suspect. All I have to say on that matter.”

  “What’s this?” Memphis chirped, holding up a small preserves jar.

  “All that’s left of Julius Mayfield, who your Ma Bette called her husband, while everyone else called her his slave woman, his fancy gal.” She took the jar from Memphis and, squinting to make out the contents, held it to the light. “Ma Bette always said this was his big toe. Pickled like a pig foot.”

  “Eww!” The children already thought their mother odd for saving pieces of hair, and here their grandmother had a big toe!

  Eudora laughed wickedly, then sobered. “Mayfield, that horrible man. Why my daughter has chosen to use it as a stage name is totally beyond me. Hmph, Ma Bette used to call it her proof!” Dora laughed and laughed, then started sobbing. “I made her to leave everything she held dear . . . She used to get on my nerves so. Now I can’t stop missin’ her. This house is so empty. Your father’s people bought this place. Hoping their people would come back. Not a one ever did. No one ever come back. I bought it, built a new house, thinkin’ it would give Ma Bette some peace, thinkin’ my own children would come back. Not like this, not like this.”

  Intuiting her mother’s needs, Elma approached Dora. “Mama, Cinnamon says she would like to sing something in honor of Ma Bette.” Dora looked across the room at the tall pudgy brown-skinned girl. “Oh Mama,” Elma crooned, “she has a better voice than I ever could claim.”

  “Come, Nana, sit with me at the piano.”

  “You know I will, darlin’, you know I will.” Perhaps, my redemption. Eudora took her seat by her grandchild as the rest of the family gathered round. “Your great-great-grandmamma, well, she held a lot of respect in this town. In the middle of this here Depression, people come from all over the country to honor her. Your Ma Bette’s crossin’ ovuh and she waitin’ on your song. Sing so she can hear you, Cinn. Sing that song right on up to heaven.”

  “My name is Cinnamon Mayfield Turner. In honor of my great-great-grandmother Bette Mayfield . . .” As Cinnamon began to sing, a strength, a source infused her soul with both sweetness and power that swept all present into its orb. Eudora nodded to herself. Hear that, Mah Bette? Lijah-Lah would say, like Ma Bette’s mama and she mama before that. And Bette’s daughter, my mama Juliet. Lijah-Lah could tell. A voice to make the birds take notice.

  Eudora turned to Elma and Raymond. “Let me keep Jessie and Cinnamon for a while. If they don’t get on well here, I’ll send them right back to New York for you to care for.”

  So Jessie and Cinnamon stayed with Eudora for
a while, and Elma and Raymond returned with Memphis to New York to start their lives over. Both Jessie and Cinnamon flourished in the South. Jessie seemed to draw strength from the land and the slower pace of life there, while Cinnamon blossomed at Eudora’s church, singing in the choir and, on many occasions, playing piano and singing classics and hymns for the Negro Society.

  When it became time to think about college, Cinnamon returned north with plans to attend school in New York. She returned with the clipped proper drawl of Charleston’s colored elite falling from her lips in the dead of winter, like the start of spring when the air was fresh, the trees bearing a small bit of green. She had grown three inches and her body had slimmed into a tall Rubenesque bronze. With the Minors as her guardians, she could go to Hunter College. The premier institution for young women in the city college system offered a first-rate education for five dollars a semester. Even then the cost was a challenge. Cinn still had to find work in her off-hours and during the summer. She coached the choir and the children’s choir at the church and played piano at the Wednesday evening service. She performed at weddings, funerals, and teas, in the basements of churches, the lobbies of libraries and cafeterias, and at summer gazebos. Bringing high culture to the Bronx and Harlem also included supervising piano lessons and gym class at the colored YMCA. “Roll call!” How to arrange the junior choir. Three tan, three crimson robes, two men one woman and two women, one man. Forty-five students, three groups of fifteen for basics. Or four groups of ten? Evenings and weekends she took tickets at the Lafayette Theater. The job gave her an opportunity to sometimes stand in the wings and watch the shows—The Hot Mikado, Voodoo Macbeth, Mamba’s Daughter. She didn’t know how she felt about George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess when the radical all-Negro opera finally made its way uptown. The Catfish Row portrayed in the musical wasn’t anything like the Charleston she had come to know while living with her grandmother. And she didn’t even see how a decent man like Porgy would ever fall for a triflin’ heifer like Bess. I loves you, Porgy. Who talks like that?

  The Manhattan campus of Hunter College, in its new buildings, sat a few blocks from Central Park. Cinnamon realized how much she enjoyed being at Hunter every time she walked past it. She had applied herself so diligently that she expected to finish in three years, graduating in June of 1939; yet as her senior year began, she missed being with the friends she had made as a freshman and regretted that she wouldn’t get to march with them. Already her visits to the campus were sparse. Having secured a part-time job as assistant choir instructor at Hunter High School, which was adjacent to the college, she was also still taking private voice lessons from her undergraduate singing instructor, Professor Olivetsky. She missed the camaraderie of her old college life more than she let herself know.

  As she neared the campus, Cinnamon saw her friend Esther Mason coming from voice class, where they’d met. Esther was a charmer of a young woman with a fury of brown curls that enveloped her face.

  “Cinnamon, what a serendipitous happenstance.”

  “Esther, don’t put on so,” Cinnamon laughed. “Where you goin’?”

  “Just finished social studies. What are you doing here, Miss I-Can’t-Wait-to-Graduate?”

  “I was on my way to see Dr. Olivetsky. She left me a message that she had some good news for me,” Cinnamon replied.

  “Oh well, if Dr. Olivetsky says jump . . . we jump, huh?”

  “Stop it, Esther!” Cinnamon started to blush. Everyone in the vocal department knew that Cinnamon thought the world of Dr. Olivetsky, who taught voice as vigorously as a Russian ballet teacher. “The Bolshoi of the Voice” she was nicknamed, with some reverence.

  “Yes, I’m going to see Dr. Olivetsky. Why don’t you wait for me? I’m sure my appointment won’t be long. I’m supposed to meet Memphis here.”

  “Say, me too. What’s your cousin cookin’ up now?”

  Cinnamon just shook her head and shrugged. “She’ll be along any minute. I’m sure we’ll find out. You know Memphis. Always somethin’.” With that, she jumped on the elevator for the fifth-floor faculty offices. Cinn was a little nervous. Dr. Olivetsky wasn’t the kind of teacher who called students at home. She had something to discuss that she could only talk about in person. Cinn prepared to be chastised. She was graduating early, but she was embarrassed that she had not yet found a permanent position. Cinn supposed she would teach music upon getting her degree. How long did she expect Olivetsky to be her private vocal tutor at no charge? She knocked on the door.

  A gruff “Yes, come in.”

  Cinnamon brightened as soon as she saw Dr. Olivetsky, small and a little bent over, but the sparkle in her eyes was the same, and her arms opened for a big hug.

  “Here’s my girl, with a voice from the angels,” her mentor said, her soft voice heavily accented. “Why must there be something as foolish as money keeping you from training your voice? Cinnamon, I have talked with a colleague at Juilliard who has agreed to audition you for a full scholarship, but you must be ready by tomorrow. Can you do that?”

  Olivetsky’s words were just sinking in. The Juilliard School of Music was world renowned, and the graduate school only for students of unusual talent with aspirations toward professional performance careers. “Well, I looked at Madame Butterfly and Carmen just the other day.”

  “Oh my darling, you must do more than ‘look’ at them. And you will also need an Italian aria from the eighteenth century or before, an art song in English, and a German lied. You must sing with all the control and passion at your command. Now here’s the address. The appointment is at ten A.M. sharp. Plan to be there all day. There are practice rooms available. Get there at eight and we will go over your material. All right?”

  “Oh, Madame Olivetsky, thank you! Thank you so much!” Cinnamon just about flew down the stairs. She ran past Esther and Memphis as if she didn’t even know them.

  “Hey, hey! Where you goin’ so fast, girl?” Memphis shouted. Her high school classes just finished, she was still in her plaid skirt and bobby socks.

  “Yeah, you sposed to meet us, not run us over,” Esther said.

  “Oh, oh, you won’t believe this, but I’ve got an audition at Juilliard tomorrow.”

  “Great, we’ve got one tonight, my sister, in Harlem. Good luck all around, I say,” Memphis beamed.

  “I can’t sing with you tonight.”

  “Hey, you promised. Friday night, remember? The Ebony Club? The Friday Night Talent Show? Helloooo?” The girls babbled on as they walked down the broad Manhattan avenue.

  When they emerged from the subway station in the Bronx, the conversation had gone nowhere. “I have an audition tomorrow at Juilliard. I have a chance to get a scholarship.”

  “What better way to get prepared than to sing tonight?”

  “But I can’t sing that stuff you sing, Memphis,” Cinnamon said.

  “No, you mean that stuff I swing? Doo-ta-do-lil-da ta-do oh-yaaae.”

  “Yeah, that stuff. Can’t do it.”

  “Hey, look,” Esther said, hoping to deflect the argument as the trio came around the corner. A HELP WANTED sign was posted on the window of Walbaum’s, the local variety dime store. “ ‘Pianist Needed—Sheet Music Department,’ ” Esther read aloud. “You said you needed a job. Sounds right up your alley to me.”

  The Bronx apartment complex six-flats where the Minors lived was one of the few enclaves open to Negroes. The main thoroughfare and much of the surrounding neighborhood were still predominantly German and Jewish like Esther. Walbaum’s dime store, still selling merchandise for the old neighborhood, had an abundant selection of classical, popular, and klezmer tunes.

  “You’re right, I should try and get that job,” Cinn concurred. “Even with a scholarship, Juilliard’s gonna cost. Train fare, books.”

  “Then you could help us and yourself out tonight. The contest at the Ebony Club. C’mon, Cinnamon, do it, just this one time,” Memphis begged.

  “Not singing what you sing. I sing
lieder and arias.”

  “I know you, Cinnamon Turner. You can swing when you want to. You’re still a Mayfield, sistuh,” Memphis chided. “Hey, that should be our name, the Mayfield Sisters.”

  “We don’t exactly look like sisters,” Esther cautioned.

  “Mayfield Trio, then. Nah, Sistuhs sounds better. So you’re in, right.”

  Cinnamon paused. She could never resist her cousin’s cajoling. “What’s in it for me?”

  “One third of the prize money, that’s what. If we win! When we win. Cinn’s been winnin’ contests since she was five,” Memphis boasted to Esther. “One third of a hundred dollars’ll go a long way even at your Juilliard.”

  “A hundred?! . . . Okay, you two sing it to me. I’ll learn it and then coach you and learn it as well.”

  Esther and Cinnamon began a song Memphis had written, a clear musical take-off of one of her Aunty Lizzie’s big hits, “Egyptian Girl.”

  “Come with us to Harlem,

  Where you’ll surely meet a darlin’,

  Feisty gals’ll make some brand-new pals,

  Some dancin’ and kissin’ honeys, wow!”

  “This is where we go into the scat,” Memphis explained, launching into a spate of random syllables, “Ba da wowow uh huh so/ La-la-ta da dada papi,” gliding into the refrain,

  “Come with us to Harlem,

  Come on along with me!

  Come with us to Harlem,

  Come on along and see!”

  Memphis scatted through the bridge, and Esther joined in for the close. “How you like it? Tell the truth, Cinnamon.”

  “Well, I don’t know if I can keep up, but you’re both tending to flat on ‘dancin’ kissin’ honeys.’ Try that again.”

  “Well, you join in this time,” Esther added.

  “But I don’t know the scat part.”

  Esther and Memphis laughed. “Nobody does, silly,” Memphis chided her cousin. “That’s the point. It’s spontaneous.”

  “I don’t know how you talked me into this, but I’ll try.”