Some Sing, Some Cry

by Ntozake Shange

  “Baker!” Cinnamon called out.

  Baker turned his head toward her. “No, don’t say a word, I’m not an artist, I’m just some colored man makin’ thangs up as ah goes ’long. Leave me alone, Cinnamon. Just go.”

  Memphis slipped her arm round Baker’s lean body, about to ask what happened, but Baker put his fingers over her mouth gently, saying, “C’mon, baby, let’s go make some music.”

  Cinnamon stood alone on the stairwell, her heart flooded with sorrow. Baker would never come back to her now. All because of what he called music and what to her signaled abandonment by one Lizzie Turner. She had lost not only her mother but the only man she would ever love to jazz. She gathered her thoughts and made for Madame Olivetsky’s, where she sang till she wept. Madame Olivetsky said, “My little black cherub. Your heart is broken. It takes a broken heart to sing the opera for the people. You must make them cry.”

  Signor Grapelli, Madame Olivetsky’s visitor from Milan, showered her with compliments. “We shall see you in Milano, my dear . . . if our countries will behave, yes?”

  Cinnamon left, headed nowhere in particular. She thought of the songs she wasn’t singing, of Baker’s gestures toward Memphis, and called herself a fool for not recognizing what was going on between them earlier. But maybe nothing had been going on. She had thrown Baker into Memphis’s arms. He hadn’t left her, she had disrespected him in a way that he could not tolerate and be a man. Memphis was just there. She had underestimated her cousin, and had not seen the precocious teen as a competitor. As she tried to make sense of it all, Cinnamon made her way through Manhattan to Harlem, where she and Baker had been so happy. She realized she had lied to herself and to him. She couldn’t stand jazz, the jazz life. She had simply wanted that man who made her feel so special. He seemed to accept her for who she was, while she had not accepted Baker for who he was and what he represented. It was her own fault. No more Battle of the Bands, no more lindy-hoppers, only the heroines of the great operas. That’s what she was left with, so she would make that enough. Eventually Cinnamon made it to the Bronx. Her head was clear. Elma wanted to know why she was home so early.

  “I guess you could say I got fired, Mama El. I wasn’t what they were looking for after all.”

  “Well, where is Memphis?” Elma asked. “Didn’t she quit too, since they fired you?”

  “Oh, no, Mama El, that’s not at all what she did, but I’m going to lie down now, all right?”

  “Well, don’t you want something to eat? I’ve got some okra and rice to heat up.”

  “No, Auntie, I just need to rest. I walked a long way today.”

  Months later, Cinnamon grew used to Memphis skipping off to be with Baker and the band. Some of the fellahs even came round to visit with Raymond and Elma. Only Raymond felt the tension between his niece and his daughter over the one they called Baker. Elma was just happy for Cinn. Her niece had found a working calling with some class and talent in it. She prayed the response from Juilliard would be positive. She hoped her Memphis would find an interest of equal value. She took joy in their dreams, when her own dreams had slipped from her fingers.

  Raymond, too, knew the frustration of wanting to practice a fine art and being shunned by one’s own. He tried to spend more time with Cinnamon, listening to her sing arias as if he were the only member of the audience. He thought his attention would help Cinnamon to keep going. Keep going to Madame Olivetsky, keep going to the National Negro Opera, keep going in spite of Memphis and Baker. The Negro Opera Company’s production of Aida was coming up, featuring Cinnamon in her first lead role. Plus there was the final word from Juilliard yet to come.

  Cinnamon sat very patiently in the anteroom of the Office of Admissions at Juilliard waiting to be called before the committee. A tall blond girl came rushing out crying and slammed the door. Cinnamon was intimidated by her hysteria and tried to calm her own nerves. Finally an aristocratic-looking woman stepped through the door and nodded at her. “Cinnamon Turner?” Cinnamon rose and followed the woman through the heavy mahogany door. There was a group of four seated behind a long table with pitchers of water and glasses set beside them.

  “Well, Miss Turner, it’s been a while since we’ve seen you,” said a man with heavy eyeglasses and a mole on his nose.

  “Yes, sir, it has been,” Cinnamon replied.

  “We have come to a unanimous decision concerning your application for admission,” a woman in a herringbone suit injected.

  One of the others added, “Yes, this is very true.”

  Cinnamon was coming out of her skin. Why didn’t they get to the point—was she in or not?

  “But Miss Turner, there’s one major mitigating factor,” the man with the heavy glasses said somberly. “We noticed that there are no Negro spirituals or work songs in your repertoire.”

  “No, sir, there aren’t.”

  The herringbone woman interrupted her. “We’re very interested in admitting young Negroes who are committed to exploring the beauty of the Negro’s music and song.”

  Cinnamon felt her blood rushing to her head. Her fingernails were plunged deep into the flesh of her palms. “I want to sing opera, ma’am,” she said as respectfully as she could. The committee members smiled those sick little smiles that the powerful often have when someone challenges their perceptions.

  “Well, Miss Turner, unless you will concentrate on your own race’s contributions, it would be cruel of us to admit you to our school, as well as a waste of money . . . for wherever in the world do you think you would sing?”

  When she heard that, Cinnamon reached into her purse and pulled out flyers for the Aida featuring Cinnamon Turner. “Here, you might be interested in attending this production by the National Negro Opera Company.” Then she turned and ran out of the door the same way the tall blonde had just before her. Cinnamon fought back tears, sobs actually, but she was angry as well. If Mary Cardwell Dawson was her only option, so be it. Somewhere in the world, she would sing what she wanted. Of all places, it was Harlem!

  “Vedi? Di morte l’angelo

  radiante a noi s’appressa.

  Ne adduce e eterni gaudi sovra i suoi vanni d’or.

  Già veggo il ciel dischiudersi,

  ivi ogni affanno cessa.

  Ivi comincia l’estasi

  d’un immortale amor!”

  Amidst a rousing applause Cinnamon took her bow as roses showered the stage. Elma and Raymond were clapping heartily. Cinnamon noticed that Memphis wasn’t there. She saw Baker wasn’t either. But she held her head high. This was her night. Thank you, thank you, she waved to everyone as she headed toward the dressing room. She looked in the mirror and said to herself, “I am an opera singer no matter where I sing.”

  Elma was the first person backstage. “You were magnificent, sweetheart!”

  Then came Madame Olivetsky and Signor Grapelli with kisses and hugs. “Oh, my little black cherub has made me so proud, non, Grapelli?”

  “Yes, yes,” the petite man replied, smiling. “If she will have you, Senorita Cinnamon will make a fine addition to your graduate opera program. She might even force me to reconsider whether I teach in America.”

  Before Cinnamon could respond, Madame Olivetsky handed her an envelope embossed with the Juilliard logo. Her wizened and faithful teacher patted her on the shoulder. “Full tuition. Congratulations, my dear. The maestro has come to you.”

  Cinnamon had difficulty accepting so much praise, but she did her best. This was going to be her life. Now she knew it was possible, the world opened up for her in a new way. Still Memphis’s absence weighed on her. Finally she relented and asked where her cousin was. Elma quipped with disapproval, “She’s runnin’ after that band. I’m sorry, Cinnamon, I know you miss her.”

  So Baker and Memphis were together somewhere away from her. Cinnamon thought of the implications of their absence, but gathered her roses to her face and took heart. She could make the audience cry. Baker and Memphis had given her that.

&
nbsp; The rush of well-wishers parted as a handsome stately couple approached. The man was tall, round-chested, and dark like her. The woman on his arm, a willowy sylph swathed in silk and the scent of orchids. The woman was a mystery. The man she had seen before . . . the day her mother disappeared.

  “Cinnamon Turner?” he queried. “You aren’t by any chance related to a Lizzie Turner from Charleston?”

  24

  London, Brussels, Moscow, Shanghai. With the restlessness of an oceanic storm, Mayfield Turner had to be on the move. She had traveled by train, by car, small plane, milk wagon, motorcycle, gondola, even an Arabian stallion once. Since abandoning her native U.S. of A. more than a decade ago, she had circled the globe a few times. Place took on an illusory quality. She might awaken to a bronze sunrise over the Alps or to a Flanders merchant peddling fresh, steaming strudel or to a Tehran urchin offering the finest Persian weave—“Qalicheh, Kilim!”—the languages percussive, plodding, pleading, a kaleidoscope of sound. All over the world she had performed her sacred dance, an undulating body without bones, a winding, whirling, rubber-legged dervish of light, the “apricot dipped in honey,” flaunting herself to her nation of birth, anointed by the denizens of the cabaret life “divine!” Barefoot and, but for a few strategically placed feathers and sequins, butt naked, the former Harlem chorine had become an international sensation. Still, she was a gypsy, a migrant worker with sore feet and a wrenched back.

  Holding the money pouch tightly in her lap, Lizzie reviewed the tour earnings in her head. “Band, chorus, manager, porters, whiskey—man!” I shoulda converted the take to francs while I was over there. “Some measure of success, sistuh!” she spat to herself. “Tryin’ to make that little bit of money ’fore they close the border nearly got us all killed.” Her last night in Berlin, a gang of brownshirts had stoned the club she was playing and pelted her sidemen with eggs, cursing the long-haired German youth who had crammed in to see her act, her “Negermusik!”

  All she wanted to do was get across the border back to France and the safety of Paris, but the train had stopped again. She arched her spine against the stiff leather cushion of the cabin seat, then stood up and stuck her head out the train window to see if Haviland was on his way back to report on the holdup. She gripped the moneybag tighter and stuck her hand deep into the pocket of her russet fox jacket and wrapped it around the cold, smooth pearl handle of her derringer just to feel safe. “Haviland! Hav!” she hollered up the platform. He turned casually as if annoyed. She watched him jockeying with the border guards. Dog bite it, he’s givin’ away my cigarettes. Avoiding the black expat village in Montmartre, Haviland had been strictly a Latin Quarter guy until his Harmon Fellowship ran out. Then, like so many others, he came easin’ over to Lizzie’s Banana Club looking for a job. She hired him as a companion, passing him off as an African prince. Haviland had a facility with languages and a seductive grace with which she was all too familiar. Every day she regretted her nostalgia. He sauntered back, his collar up, his hands in his pockets. The train still had not budged.

  She stood up, pacing the cabin, a profusion of epithets, slurs, and curses punctuating the frigid air with percussive clouds of vapor and puffs of tobacco smoke. She wouldn’t tolerate it. Not here. Her laundry was picked up and delivered. She had exclusive vendors just for her show clothes. Her apartment got cleaned, the walk swept, pets pampered, and plants watered in her frequent absences. “People work for me! Goddammit! People wait for me! I don’t wait for them!” She swayed, intoxicated by the remembered scent of green orchids and a thousand roses at her dressing room door, the sound of the crowd wrapped around her like a lover, her fingers bedecked with yellow diamonds and around her neck a priceless choker of pink pearls. “Women burn their skin trying to get my color!” she fumed, “steal my bathwater!” She would not be treated this way! “What’s the holdup now?” Mayfield Turner bristled at the frosty chill of the morning and a train stuck on the tracks in the middle of nowhere. “Happy New Year!” she barked as Haviland entered the cabin.

  “They’re checking everyone’s papers,” he said.

  “Damn Nazis,” she hurled under her breath, offering Haviland her already lit opium-laced cigarette. “Just my luck.” Haviland nervously took the cigarette from her and, darting his head out the window to see how close the patrols were to their cabin, attempted to put it out. She wrested the thing from him and flipped the flame around as if she might burn him, then plopped herself on the seat, taking a long drag. As the nicotine and narcotic took effect, she leaned back in the corner and began improvising a song, “It’s a sorry thing when your luck done gone/ You start worrying and everything goes wrong/ My daddy lost his luck/ Now it’s mine I’m missin’/ Some joker took my luck/ Like it was his commission . . . Just put it in his pocket/ Weren’t no way to stop it/ Now everything’s gone wrong/ Cuz my luck done gone . . .” Haviland’s look of anxiety completely annoyed her. “What are they gonna do? Shoot us?”

  She missed Sparrow. In fact, she blamed the downturn of her fortune on Sparrow’s departure. Sparrow yearned for the rhythms of a Harlem snap apple, bobbing in the breeze. “The unique smell of lard, biscuits, and hair oil. Dixie Peach, Brilliantine, and Miracle Grow Palm-Made!” he said. “I wanna stand in the shade and watch Easter hats float atop round rumps rolled into their clothes. All that Parisian stuff. Act like they doin’ you a favor to stop and listen.” She couldn’t believe he just packed his bags, bopped and dipped around the joint, kissing everybody on both cheeks, dusted off his spats, and stepped. “Say baby, I got to go. I know you like Europe and everything, but I want me some decent grits. And I don’t want to search all over town for ’em.” On a drunken whim, they had married aboard the ship that first brought them to Europe. Ten years later he just up and announced he was leaving. “I hear we can get a divorce in Reno quicker than it took to get hitched. I’ll stop there on the way to Los Angeles. Think I’mo try my hand in Hollywood. See if I still got the eye.”

  She had blessed him out then. She missed him now, his wiry clickety-clack manner. “Listen, come back with me,” he had said, but she declined. Never that, never back. Europe was supposed to be a fresh start. “No stoppin’ us!” Ossie had said. Europe, Asia, the Greek Isles, Egypt. No past. No claims. No ties. No shit. On the road half the year, the permanent exile found no world to her liking. Paris at least was a life of her own design. Paris was where she was staked and where she was going to stay. My worthless friends, my sorry club, my lousy bookings, but mine. She was tired of runnin’.

  When she arrived at the Banana Club, the shutters were down. She found Mitch padlocking the club door. More often than not, he ran the club when Lizzie went on the road. Twenty years of knowing each other, a nod of her chin sufficed as a greeting. He was agitated, blowing her tenuous high.

  “Damn Nazi goons pelted my band with eggs,” she said. “Train held us up for six hours. I ain’t seen shit like this since Charleston! I swore I’d never let it happen to me again!”

  “We gotta talk,” he said.

  Her voice ricocheted in the empty street as she waved him off. “I’m a French citizen, goddammit!” She squinted at the gray overcast morning and she walked wearily around the corner through the alley to the back of the club. She was tired, bluesed up, and mad, her sorrow rising with each step. Her platform heels that buckled at the ankle tracked up the steep winding lane with its crooked streetlights and broken cobblestones, the dog shit and bouquets of garbage.

  In its day, the Banana Club would still be going strong, a center of action right along with the Duc’s and Bricktop’s. Free thought, free love, free imagination. Everything free. No wonder I didn’t make no money. The shipping heiress and the black pianist, the flying champ and the countess, the dashing young writer and the sheik—she had danced and sung for them all. Fitzgerald, Hemingway, even posed for Man Ray. The toast royale of the modernists. Wrapped in aluminum foil for a Dadaist! Dalí, Duke, Louie, Calloway—the rich radical high-life fringe had been her Par
is. Now near abandoned, her club was still the hotspot of sorts—for Communists, anarchists, down-and-outs, hookers, and spies. Prostitutes, pimps, gigolos, and gypsies. Would-be fortune-tellers, speculating on where the world was headed.

  In its day, her little patch of Paris was a French-speaking capsule of Harlem’s 135th and Seventh, a bustling, hustling intersection of music, cultures, and classes, but her beloved neighborhood was no more. Paris was no longer a city of light but a city haunted by shadows, the Lost Generation replaced by a constant traffic of lost souls. The Americans began disappearing first. Their casual newspaper gigs evaporating and patrons jumpin’ off buildings, they had come, like Haviland, asking Lizzie for loans, looking for a way back home. Then came Russians—poets, painters, musicians—fleeing theirs.

  And constantly Jews, spilling in spurts and gushes from Austria and Germany, crowding into the already teeming, labyrinthine Montmartre, staying in flats, ten, twelve to a room. While everyone who could leave already had, Lizzie remained among a small and diminishing group of colored musicians, who had collected among themselves, still making their home in the gritty winding streets of the hill district beneath the white-domed Sacre Coeur. Lizzie was barely hanging on, and that was in 1938. The year ahead looked even grimmer. Sparrow would have at least seen me to my door.

  The narrow wooden staircase’s uneven steps and rancid smells gave way to a temple of tapestries awash in candlelight. The inviting smell of Mediterranean spices and the warmth of the communal dining room and oversized kitchen of Mitch and Genya’s attic flat softened Lizzie’s mood. A gash of purple ink on her cheekbone, fingernails blue-black on the cuticles and rim, Genya greeted Lizzie gruffly, “Algerians are the niggers of France, you know that?” Genya crunched her body over a rustic mimeograph as her thick muscular arms unwound another stencil sheet of her weekly neighborhood newsletter. “Worthless piece of shit! The roller is stuck again!” she said over her shoulder to Lizzie as she dodged the zigzag clothesline strung across the kitchen and motioned to her two daughters to come collect the inked sheets. “Quick, quick before I have to type the copy all again! Lee-zee, I ask you, why I’m still a student? Thirty-eight with two grown daughters! I tell you why,” she fussed, “I fall for that American musician! That is why!”