Some Sing, Some Cry

by Ntozake Shange

  Lizzie chuckled to herself. She had always collected the strays. Crook School kids in Charleston, leftist intellectuals and gangsters in New York. In Paris, it was the colored musicians, of course, and Corsicans, gypsies, Left Bank leftovers like Haviland and Genya’s bunch, French colonial students, colored of another variety. Genya was Algerian. She and Mitch had met through her brother Farid, who supplied Lizzie’s club with contraband drugs and caviar. Farid also ran a brothel on the nearby Rue Pigalle, which he stocked with country colonial girls from the shanty zones on the outskirts of the city. When Genya arrived, on a scholarship to the Sorbonne, her days off from studying, she spent organizing the Algerian factory workers. She and her brother were having words about her activities the night she met Mitch. Fifteen years later, Genya had lost none of her fire. Lizzie rolled herself a cigarette as Mitch sat down beside her.

  “We need a plan to get to Lisbon, Genya,” Mitch said. “Tell her, Lizzie, what happened to you on the train. It’s not safe.”

  “You want to go, go! I am not leaving Paris,” Genya insisted. “Took me ten years to get here to study, fifteen to get to the point of dissertation. Now you want me to go?”

  “At least let’s get the girls out of here,” Mitch pleaded.

  “Where are they going to go? With you? You’re on the road, sometimes gig, sometimes not. Strung out, sometimes yes, sometimes, no. No!”

  Bruria whined, “I want to go with Papa.”

  “You hush and get ready for school,” snapped Genya.

  Rachel said nothing, but swept a few spilt sugar crystals with the corner of her napkin. Mitch got up from the table. “I don’t understand you. I’ll be downstairs.”

  “Try not to miss the vein,” Genya hollered over her shoulder without turning around.

  “I got no time for your shit today,” he said and left.

  “Walk away! Always your answer? Hey, and put the records in the jackets. What do you think, I’m American slave?” Genya turned from the mimeograph and threw the shuttle onto the floor, her hand to her head in frustration. “He never bothers to put the records back in their jackets.”

  Lizzie found in Genya a rhythm that was sisterly without any of the hurtful ties. It struck her as amusing how a strung-out musician and a radical Marxist could somehow have an otherwise ordinary, contentious marriage, when she had never found anyone with whom she could bond more than a few months at best and that was with effort. She expressed this opinion to Genya, who laughed, “I tested out a theory. The idea of going to bed with a black man is no more extraordinary than with a white man. Now I know. But I guess I keep him. But I will not run away from German bluster.” A perpetual student and ardent Communist, Genya was also a fierce patriot, loyal to the principles of equality, liberty, and fraternity. “Do you think they will stop with Austria? Spain and Ethiopia were dress rehearsal, how you say, an out-of-town tryout. I will not allow the same to happen to France.” Genya placed a bowl of steaming lentil soup on the table. “That’s the last of the lamb.” Lizzie sniffed at the slices of curled meat and the intricate blend of spice. She would never get used to Genya’s notion of breakfast. Bruria sat in the corner, silently sheathing a stack of 78s in their brown jackets, then randomly in album covers. Rachel sipped from her glass and nervously kicked her leg under the table, rattling the place setting beside Lizzie’s untouched bowl.

  “They rounded up the patrons at the club I was playin’ and took em away . . . just kids,” Lizzie said off-handedly. “They say they’re rounding up Jews. I’ve seen that look before. It’s more than bluster.”

  “The hell with it,” Genya spat. “Mitch should go ahead to Spain then. But I stay to finish this course work. If war does come, God only knows when I will get done. I will send the girls to him when I know he is safe.” Lizzie looked at Genya and her two silent girls, then slipped off the kitchen stool and shimmied out the creases in her skirt. “I better get downstairs. We gotta talk over this new ordinance. Musicians’ union demanding we only hire Frenchmen! It’s hard enough keepin’ my band together as it is. Gotta see what it means.”

  “I’ll tell you what it means. More lentils. Stale bread.”

  Lizzie took off her pearl choker. She now wore all of the expensive jewelry she had. “See what Farid can fetch for this.”

  She ambled down the steps and entered the club through the back door off the kitchen. She could hear a faint improvised solo emanating from the bandstand. Just as he sat now was how she first spied Mitch, tinkering on the piano. She had just arrived from the States with La Danse Negre. During the break, he sought her out hoping to sift through memories. He had seen how much Osceola loved her, how he had risked his life and lost it to save her. Initially, she wasn’t having any of it. Mitch had made presumptions about her and, by claiming Osceola’s music as his own, betrayed him and stole from both of them. Mitch insisted she listen. He took her to a nearby café to explain.

  “I didn’t know about any song. I don’t know how they got it. Damn scam artists, the lot of them.”

  It had never occurred to her that Mitch was unaware that his name was on Osceola’s sheet music. He sure hadn’t made any profit from it. She could see even then, when Negroes were the thing in Paris, his pant knees were shiny, his figure gaunt, but he looked content, at home. Mitch had immersed himself in the ethos of France. As if he had opened the pores of his skin and breathed out color, a musician learning a new key, he had picked up the language, its musicality, the movements of the body, the rhythms of the day. In the Great War, the French army had embraced him, awarded him the Croix de Guerre, and when the band played, the people threw garlands at their feet. He had no desire ever to go back. “Back to where? The place that killed my boss? The place where my best friend was stomped to death? Steal a song off a dead man. America? You can have it. Put me in the army of a foreign land rather than accept me as a fightin’ man? To hell with ’em for real! Vive la France!”

  She watched him, these many years later as he hunched his shoulders over the piano, anticipating his solo. He had long ago lost the edge. He didn’t play loudly anymore and barely went to late-night jam sessions. His one method of holding on was his religious purchase of any American albums he could get his hands on to keep up with the flow from the States. Lizzie joined him on the bandstand.

  “Really thin house for the New Year,” he noted, barely moving his lips. “Mostly Farid’s girls at the bar. What we gonna do bout the fellahs, they sayin’ we gotta hire half French?”

  “Shit, I don’t know about you. I am French. Got papers to prove it,” she chortled as she rolled her eyes. She took a long drag, then put her cigarette to his lips. “We’ll add that accordion player and that guitar, the gypsies, they must be French. Cut the combo down to five.”

  Like Haviland, Mitch, and Genya, Lizzie had found Paris a comfort to her rootlessness. New start. No past, no ties. Except now she had made them.

  For days, months, even years after, Cinn’s ears would be keyed to the sound of arrival. She would look toward a door opening, the rhythms of footsteps, the crescendo of an approaching car motor. Often she would stare out the window with an involuntary expectation and predictable disappointment. She and her mother had been on the run it seemed most of her young life. That had been Lizzie’s way. “Wait for me, wait for me here, you hear?” her mother Lizzie, her pal, had said, spending longer and longer times missing until finally, she just never showed up.

  “That is done,” Cinnamon told herself. She was a young woman now, the same age as Lizzie when she had given birth. Cinnamon Turner was her own person. The daughter had chosen her own path with her own song, one totally distinct. Lizzie Turner, Mayfield Turner, Aunty, whatever she wants to call herself, we’re done with that. Cinnamon vowed her voice would never be used for loose, lowlife entertainment, but as a beacon of dignity and class and a champion for the voiceless. She saw that her voice had power, that standing up for what she believed produced results. Just as she had pursued the job at the five a
nd dime, just as she had defined her own repertoire of songs for admission to Juilliard, the picture of poise and rectitude, when she sang Aida, she embodied the role and became an ancient African princess, battling injustice on and off stage. Incensed to learn that Harlem’s National Negro Opera Company as a “Negro unit” of the New Deal’s Federal Theatre Project would only get half the resources provided the white theater companies downtown, she wrote letters to the press demanding that the Negro ensemble get equal support. She stood with the protesters against the city unions to demand that Negro construction workers be hired to refurbish the cavernous Harlem dance hall that was to be the opera company’s home. She had even gotten her Papa Ray some much needed work, helping to bring the old dance hall back to life, transforming the decrepit freezing ballroom into a respectable amphitheater.

  Unbeknownst to the young singer, the National Negro Opera Company had not gotten its supplementary money for the full orchestra at rehearsals, the glorious lush costumes, and the moving scenery for the production of Aida from the U.S. government, but through a private contribution from the Holstein Realty and Trade Company run by the late founder’s adopted son and heir, Deacon T. Holstein. It was he who had persuaded the whites-only construction and theater unions to back off of their hiring demands. She would often see the production’s anonymous benefactor looking over the workmanship on the building repairs or lingering during rehearsals. He was a striking, square-shouldered man, always impeccably dressed from hat to shoes, his dark face broad and implacable. She thought him an odd stage-door Johnny and found his staring inappropriate. The cast would often whisper, “That’s Mr. Holstein,” as if she should be impressed.

  Opening night, she discovered that same Deacon Holstein was her relative—an uncle, her father’s brother. “My name used to be Turner,” he said haltingly. “When I married into Mr. Holstein’s family, I took the name on—for the sake of the business.”

  “My father is old-fashioned,” the woman beside him said. “He so wanted a son, I had to marry one for him.” She was beautiful, willowy, moving ever so slightly as if stirred by a breeze. She put her arms through his, their fingers intertwined. “I’m Iolanthe,” she said. “Deacon, what a gifted young woman your niece is!”

  “We lost track of you when your mother went to Europe,” he added with a single chuckle.

  Cinnamon suddenly remembered. That voice . . . the man on the steps.

  “We presumed Lizzie took you with her,” the man continued, speaking slowly, searching for the proper words. “Didn’t realize till this day, till I saw your aunty sittin’ in the audience,” he smiled. “Then I knew for sure who you was.”

  I have family. Other family. I had a father. That was in February. The revelation stunned her still.

  The week after the final performance of Aida, the Holsteins invited Cinnamon and her aunt Elma to tea. The Holsteins. Refined, with delicacy of movement, the strict staccato speech denoting their British-influenced West Indian origin, the Sugar Hill brownstone four-story home, uniformed servants, everything in its place. Deacon T. Holstein had come up mightily in the world from bootblack and pickpocket to Harlem kingpin. Rackets into respectability. Marrying into the Holstein family, he now controlled grocery stores, clubs, hairdressers, barbershops, and real estate up and down the Northeast, not to mention the Policy Wheel in three-quarters of Harlem. Yet, he looked awkward in his own house. His body seemed oversized for the imported ornate furniture, his color too bold against the muted pastel walls.

  “This is your father with the Great Jim Europe, third from the end, his helmet tipped to the side,” Deacon said proudly with a heavy baritone laugh, pointing out the pictures in an album Iolanthe had made for him. Sitting beside him on the divan, Cinn slowly flipped through the pages. “Orange Street Gang,” “Verdun, beside a cannon,” “Welcome Parade on Sullivan Island,” the captions read.

  Deacon occasionally looked over to Elma. He asked after her mother Miss Dora and was sorry to learn Mah Bette had passed a few years back. He laughed, reminiscing, “I usedta pester Mah Bette and your grandmamma somethin’ awful. They set food out for me just the same. Miss Elma remembers. She could set the plate down for me, but was forbidden to play. Had a little marchin’ band back then. Your father was the star. Could play everythin’.”

  Cinn slipped one photo out of the jacket and held it up. Standing beside a fellow soldier, a smiling Osceola in uniform. He has such a young and open face, my . . . father. Lizzie had never spoken of him. “Mitch—the most terrific guy I ever knew,” she read aloud the writing on the back of the photo. She did not see Deacon’s face wince at the words. Her fingers graced over the script. My father’s words in his very own hand. “How did he die?” she asked. He paused before putting the picture back in the album jacket. “Got caught up in a riot just after the war, two days home . . . A gang of white sailors kicked him to death. He died protecting your mother. A hero twice over in my book.”

  Cinnamon blanched, suddenly unable to breathe, her throat constricted. She excused herself from the room, her mind dizzy, her heart pulsing shocks of grief. Elma and Iolanthe followed her to the powder room. The two women held her between them, Iolanthe apologizing for her husband’s matter-of-fact delivery, Elma telling her it would be all right, but the news was too much to comprehend. She had found her father and lost him that same day.

  “Your father was a great guy all around,” Deacon told her when she returned to the parlor. “He woulda been a great musician. You got music on both sides.”

  “Perhaps, you could honor his memory with a song,” Iolanthe suggested.

  “Of course,” Cinn replied. She chose the German lied that she had prepared for her Juilliard audition, the melancholy Die Winterreise by Schubert. Cinnamon accompanied herself on the piano while she sang, her black hair coils catching glimpses of indigo and purple in the shafts of window light through the stained glass. At the selection’s end, she extended the last note and slowly introduced a timorous vibrato that trailed off, leaving the pitch still ringing in the soundless room.

  Iolanthe watched her husband’s new charge closely. The girl certainly favored her husband more than she did the pictures of his brother. This might be Deacon’s child. She was tempted to come right out and ask, but since he had never spoken about it, she did not. Iolanthe had no offspring of her own and was not intent upon any. Her marriage with Deacon was designed for convenience, not conception. She had no inclination toward intimacy with a man. Birthing was not a notion she had considered. But a beautiful young ward, related by blood? This could work. Iolanthe told Deacon, “Because she is part of you, she is part of me. I will do for her as I would my own daughter.”

  Cinn could tell her aunt Elma was none too pleased. Elma fidgeted with her finger sandwiches and adjusted her body position on the couch far too many times. The ruffle of her dress fluttered about her face. For the occasion, Elma had altered an old dress, alas, with none of her mother Dora’s artistry. Her hair, which had never regained its fullness, was haphazardly pulled back and laced with gray. Compared to Iolanthe’s refined stillness, Elma seemed provincial, old-fashioned, and old. Cinnamon felt closer to her new aunt, who was so stylishly attired and closer in age.

  For her part, Elma went along silently. Clearly this haughty Harlem couple had taken a shine to Cinnamon. Elma determined not to tell Dora or Lizzie about the liaison until she saw better where it was going. Intending to reciprocate the lovely afternoon tea and to investigate this relation further, she inquired, “What are you all planning for Easter?”

  “We’re going to see Marian Anderson at the Lincoln Memorial,” Iolanthe replied. “We’re sponsoring a delegation from New York. I was about to ask you if you would care to motor down with us? It would be a perfect way to celebrate Cinnamon’s admission to Juilliard.”

  Elma immediately saw the look of delight in her niece’s eyes and how easily they came under the sway of these strangers.

  Easter Sunday was already a momentous holiday
in most Negro households. This particular Easter, April 9, 1939, was for Cinnamon Turner triple-fold excitement. Saving every penny she could for her graduate study at Juilliard, she had only hoped to hear the great Marian Anderson’s performance on the radio. The thought of seeing the famous contralto in person made her dizzy with anticipation. The weekend was already jammed with activity. Not only was she overseeing two church choir rehearsals and a Sunday school pageant play, she was also studying for her last set of exams before graduation from Hunter. Having scheduled an extra-long Saturday rehearsal to make up for her absence from the actual Sunday performance, she got home to the Minors’ Bronx flat well past midnight and fell into bed. Iolanthe had promised to pick the family up at seven o’clock Sunday morning, allowing plenty of time for the drive to the nation’s capital.

  The six A.M. elevated train squealing round the corner awoke her. “Dog bite it!” She sat up in a panic, unfolded her body, and flew toward the bathroom, the scrape and flap of shrunken feet in oversized slippers just behind her. The door opened without a knock, a wisp of white hairs poking in. Miss Tavineer in her disheveled robe, one withered breast hanging out and a towel draped over her shoulder, looked wounded with irritation. “Who in there?” Then just as quickly, she shuffled off with a “Jesus, have mercy!”

  “Hey, skyscraper.” Jesse knocked with a trill and poked in his nose. “Some people got to go. Shake a leg, sistuh, ’fore the old lady guh-gets back.” Their Nana had allowed Jesse an Easter week vacation to visit his parents. Ever since he got back, he was a pest, bossier than she remembered. Distance had changed their relation little. He had become a young man. Slow of speech, he was no longer bashful. He had an easy manner, ribbing her with disarming wit. Tall and gangly, he would forever be her brother and buddy, tagging along at her heels. “Hurry it, huhn. People got things to do.” Cinnamon held the warped door shut with her foot. WHEN is Poppa Ray gon fix that! Clearly, she was just going to have to live with the stomach. The knots would have to work their way out. Relax. The choir will be fine. They’ve rehearsed enough. They know the material. You won’t be missed.