Some Sing, Some Cry

by Ntozake Shange

  Thirty seconds. The episodes only lasted thirty seconds. To a singer that was a lifetime. If she pressed on, attempting to force the note, she became a cipher of herself, her voice a whisper or vapor, escaping or stolen. The prospect of never singing again—she didn’t know how to cope with that. What am I to do? What am I supposed to do? Panic made the condition worse. Sometimes she dared not speak for fear of the sound, a grating rasping hoary thing that she could not recognize as her own voice.

  Medication—she had a paper bag full. Muscle relaxers, pain relievers, throat coaters, antidepressants, stimulants, and the “experimental” injections, to which Madame Olivetsky had strongly objected. “That stuff could go all through your body, you don’t know where. You must heal organically.” Needles in her ears. Crystals to her throat. “You have time. You have time,” her aged mentor advised. “You are only in your twenties. Thirty-eight is young for an opera singer.”

  She was young, but no fool. Opportunities for Negro opera singers were beyond rare. Anne Brown took the revival of Porgy and Bess in ’42. Then the Muriels, Smith and Rahn, stole the role she was meant to play, Carmen in Billy Rose’s Broadway-bound production of Carmen Jones. Her blood boiled. Dim light mezzos, think you can out-sing me? I’ll meet you again in the next world! It took two Carmens to withstand the passion she was born to play. On any good day, the timbre and color of her voice would have reduced all three of them to ash. But she had no good days. Just when the door opens, can’t speak to say I’m standin’ here. Singing had been her life. Now she had to sit by and watch others live it.

  Frustrated with the pointless prodding and the questions that always seemed to come when a tongue depressor was halfway down her throat, she was driven to search on her own. She found her diagnosis at the 42nd Street library. Dystonia. Dystonia, what makes your big head so hard?! Laryngeal dystonia. No known origin. No known cure. Neurological disorder generally affected people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Well, we can rule that out. “Disease of the mind . . . a form of psychological hysteria.” She resisted believing that this affliction was only in her mind. If that were so, why could she not will it away? Last stop, psychiatrist. How bad can it be? I’m already sticking needles in my ears. She hated reliving the trauma to her body and spirit, the ritual humiliation of recounting her disorder to yet another stranger. Remembering the first notice of shortness of breath, the creeping strangulation, withdrawing from competition, standing before judges she had impressed enough to make her the exception, a gaggle of pink-faced girls in pink ribbons, pressing their noses against the door pane to get a peek at the so-called colored prodigy. “From the Bronx, not even Harlem!” She sat perfectly poised, feeling still too proud. God said, This is my beloved in whom I am most pleased. Not proud.

  Lawrence came to see her as soon as he got back. “I can’t imagine losing something as precious as that, something that fills you with so much passion—except when I think of not having you in my life. I can’t offer you a New York stage, and I might not have a job once the college gets my letter of protest about the housing situation, but I would very much like to marry you, Cinnamon Turner. I have a firm teaching offer in Chicago. They have some of the finest hospitals in the world. We can get them to see about your voice there, see if they can fix it, however long it takes. Will you marry me?”

  She didn’t want to answer him. She didn’t want to hear herself. However long. “How long is that?”

  Oh Lord . . . I wanna sing like the angels sing, Lord I must go, Oh Lord, give me eagle’s wings, Lord I must go/ I wanna pray like the angels pray, Lord I must go/ Carry my soul to Judgment Day, Lord I must go/ I wanna shout like angels shout, Lord I must go/ Carry me off to your Great House, Lord I must go . . . “Look at that, Cinn, look at that! That’s what I’m missin’ . . . Charleston, Durham, Kittyhawk!/ Norfolk, Richmond, New Yawk!” That melody. Just a rush and it was gone. Runnin’ to catch the steamer, jumpin’ the rail cars in Philly, hidin’ backstage at the Cane Break, flyin’ over Harlem rooftops, then finally collapsing exhausted, dippin’ ankles in a cool blue creek ’longside the long day, Lizzie massaging her fat toes. “You ever hear the Winrow howl, call a sow clean over to another state? I’ma show you how it goes. My pappy taught it to me. He played the trumpet. But he dint play trumpet good as he could hollah. I’ma now teach it to you just like he taught it to me and his pap taught it to him. If ever you need me or if ever you get lost, you just call it like this.”

  Cinnamon and Lawrence were to marry in Jesse’s new church in Alabama, not far from the old airbase. Mabel was pregnant. Several of Lawrence’s fellow airmen showed up. Deacon and Iolanthe arrived in a limo from New York. Cinnamon left Lizzie off her list. Elma and Dora had a big fuss about it. “Mama El, I appreciate your concern, but this is my decision. It’s for the best.”

  “And how is that? Not to have your own mama to your wedding.”

  “This is my day, not Mayfield Turner’s.” She turned and brushed down Raymond’s lapel and straightened his tie. “Uncle Deacon’s only walking me to the first row. You’re giving me away.”

  Dora tried one last time. “Your mother should be here.”

  Cinnamon embraced her and held her tight. “My mother is here.”

  Only Sparrow knew. Sparrow asked Deacon if he had told Cinnamon the truth about Lizzie. “Get outta my face,” Deacon replied, knowing Sparrow hadn’t the nerve. How to explain who he was then and who he had become? Her wedding day certainly wasn’t the occasion. He would wait.

  Memphis arrived just in time to help set up the party. She had married a second cornet in Sparrow’s band named Calhoun. “Yeah, baby, I got to Paris. Baker’s sittin’ up in your mama’s club with his arm around some Algerian chick,” she reported. Even if it wasn’t Baker, she damn straight was showing up with a husband. If she showed up with a husband, she figured all would be forgiven. She had followed her dream and she had lived it. She patted her round tight belly and danced up the wooden steps of the modest white-framed chapel. “Talk about, talk about, talk about it!”

  As Cinnamon dressed in Jesse and Mabel’s small cottage, random thoughts danced in her head. Rain was threatening. How to fit a hundred twenty people at a garden party into a house. The wedding cake was decorated with sparklers. Would they work in the rain? Dora had made her dress. It was more baroque than she would have chosen herself, but in the delicacy of design and the care with which her grandmother had sewn each element in its place, she felt comfort. In the rustle of a veil, the song in the trees, the wind . . . she was content. No more intrigue, settle down, she thought. College professor. The backyard was festooned with lanterns.

  Lawrence and his airmen buddies were corralled at the town’s juke joint and café. Flush from the war, they joked easily about their future, primed to take their place in Negro Society. Bolstered by their performance in World War II—providing tactical air support and aerial combat, never lost a man—they were the fulcrum of the new elite. Access to higher education through the GI Bill insured the successful push for desegregation beyond military into everyday life. Not without a fight, but they were ready for it. Civil rights talk was constant among them.

  “Had to sleep over with friends. No accommodations. This has got to stop. I’m sick of this crap.”

  “Passed a GI Bill for me to buy a house, but I can’t get a mortgage and when I do, can’t buy where I want to.”

  “Wiley got his teeth knocked out and nose broke for steppin’ off the train in uniform. He’s gon be late.”

  But they agreed. It was a joyous day. The last of the radicals was going traditional. Lawrence Walker was jumpin’ the broom and gettin’ hitched!

  Preceded by Sissy, the maiden of honor, and escorted by her two fathers, Cinnamon Turner walked down the narrow aisle, past her friends and family, a radiantly pregnant Memphis, and her ever faithful Mama El, toward her husband to be. She squeezed Raymond’s hand and joined Lawrence at the altar. This is what she wanted. This is what she wanted as her own. Her own fa
mily.

  At the garden reception, the rain held back. Memphis was first to toast the newlyweds, “Never seen her happier!” Via Calhoun, she then produced her wedding present, “As advertised, an almost brand-new portable record player!” To the room’s silence, she prompted Calhoun, who held up a little brown tweed box with a red bow hastily taped atop. Memphis glistened. It was her most precious possession. “So that the music may always dance between you.”

  Sissy got hold of the record player almost immediately. Sparrow just happened to have a box full of sample 78s in his car. While a few adults lingered in the living room with the classical pianist Cinn had found through the local college, the party was on the porch. With an extension cord slung through the window, Priscilla and company popping their arms to a new sound, making the very floorboards shake, rattle and roll.

  Sparrow offered Memphis a job in L.A. “A new thing called teevee,” he said. “They want to put me in some colored comedy show.” Jesse, as usual, saved his announcement for last. Mabel’s father’s congregation had asked him to stay on and pastor their church.

  The record player clicked on a new 78. Lawrence swept his new wife into a mean boogie-woogie, her veil flying around as she spun, the guests all laughing. Who knew they were such good dancers? Everyone was jamming as the stack of records dropped a new cut on the turntable. As soon as the needle hit the groove, the whole party was on its feet, jookin’ to a hot blues stompin’ electric guitar from Chicago, a new R&B label called Row House Records. “That’s my song, that’s my song!” Sissy squealed as the whole party erupted in a sing-along. “Tell yah what I’m gonna, what I’m gonna do/ It’s somethin’ my Papa taught me, and now I’m teachin’ it to you/ When you’re feelin lost, when you’re down and blue/ Ain’t nuthin’ left at all/ Nuthin’ you can do/But howl, howl the whole night long/ When you howl like that/ Baby I’ll come runnin’, Say I’ll come runnin’ along!”

  Elma looked on the party with some dismay. I don’t trust our Memphis, shakin’ her hips that way, belly all out. Calhoun seems a nice man, but still.

  Mabel offered, “Stay here and have the baby, then go on out there to L.A. Our little Joshua would love some company. A baby’s no good for the road, Miss Memphis.”

  There they were, crowding her again, telling Memphis how to live her life, but, four hours later, her baby was born at the county hospital not five miles from her brother Jesse’s place, so last-minute, the kid almost made her debut in the back seat of Calhoun’s car. Memphis with her little Alelia, upstaged her cousin Cinn again—at her own wedding!

  She and Calhoun didn’t last long. Split up by the time they reached Los Angeles. After Sparrow’s television show tanked, Memphis wound up running a boardinghouse for broke musicians. “Anyone with a hard luck story, a sad song, and cash.”

  Christened Alelia, the daughter answered also to Lia and Leelee, depending on whose house she was in. Rotating from Nana’s to Grandma El to Uncle Jesse and Aunt Mabel, and then to Aunt Cinn and Lawrence, she became another migrant child, a visitor even at her mother’s.

  Cinnamon moved with Lawrence to Chicago, where he began his teaching position at his alma mater the University of Chicago, one of the few elite universities in the country allowing Negro faculty. She got pregnant almost immediately and had three children in rapid succession, much to Dora’s dismay. “Can’t you two do anything but make babies?” Cinn’s second was hangin’ low in the belly. Dora pronounced it a girl.

  Deacon came to see her that spring. “Doctors say I got cancer in the blood,” he said.

  Cinn reached out to him and held his hand. “There are doctors at the university hospital, the finest doctors in the country.”

  “Too late for that. Didn’t come here for that.” He was impatient. The rackets had moved on. Younger men in the game. Harlem real estate had plummeted. Tax troubles. Iolanthe had bought a house in New Jersey. “I’m settin’ my affairs in order,” he said, “I’m leavin’ what I have to you and the boys . . . I’m dyin’, Cinn. But before I do, I must tell you somethin’. I have wronged your family. Run off the father, deceived and betrayed my brother, but the greatest wrong was to Lizzie. Broke her body, her heart, warped her spirit. I cannot undo that. I cannot give these things back to her, but maybe I could give her back her daughter.

  “When I was a young man, I was a wild one, a roustabout—got so the police arrested me before the crime, sayin’ ‘I know you gonna do it.’ ” He chuckled softly and coughed, holding his hat in his hands. He lowered his head to shield the grimace of pain. “I was wild then. Didn’t know.” He waited for the words to sink in. Cinn did not stir. “We both loved Osceola. Competed. I came outta prison, took your mother by force. Your mother. Hurt her, hurt her bad. Most likely, you my daughter.”

  “Most likely?” She shrank from him.

  “Please, please. Hear me out. I cannot rest while there is distance between you and Lizzie, distance that was caused by me. When she left, she wasn’t runnin’ from you, she was runnin’ from me.”

  The words cleaved through her torso. “You tell me this now? Why now?”

  “I cannot undo that night. Would not want to. You are my pride, Cinn Turner. I have done my best to do right by you.”

  Cinnamon never regained the full power of her voice. After Tokyo’s birth, she stopped seeking treatments, stopped trying to discover the root of the dysfunction and techniques to overcome it. Standing at the cash register with a shopping cart filled with groceries, she would sometimes absentmindedly begin singing, a soft voice, concealing the cracks.

  “What’s that tune?” a customer would say.

  “Excuse me?”

  “The song you were singing just then. It was beautiful.”

  Her laugh was disparaging. “I didn’t even realize.”

  “You have such a lovely voice!”

  Cinnamon blushed. “Used to be.”

  She turned to teaching, encouraging singers to pace their growth. Her daughter Tokyo later credited this early training for her heralded vocal power and range, for the maturity of voice in one so young.

  Cinnamon masked her memory of ambition with pride in her daughter. The interviewer’s question caught her off guard. “Why Tokyo? . . . Why did I name my daughter Tokyo? Oh, I don’t know,” she said, gently tapping her fingertips on the table to some internal melody. “It was shortly before she was born. I don’t know, I just had a whim. I used to play this game with my oldest son, all my children, really.” Tokyo crossed her eyes and sighed with embarrassment that her mother was telling the story on national television. Cinn continued, “Teaching them the scale and geography with a tickling game. What’s your favorite tickling spot, I would ask. For my oldest brother, it was Tokyo. ‘St. Louis, Denver, San Francisco/ Hawaii, Manila, Tokyo,’ ” she crooned softly and giggled. “A spot right here on the left side made him laugh with such joy.” She smiled, remembering. Snatches of memory, snapshots, a nibble of dialogue, pretty pictures, distant harmonies, and sunlight so warm . . . singing . . . somewhere she could hear someone singing.

  27

  In 1959 autumn came early to Chicago. There was a nipping chill in the air as the Walker children waited for the special bus picking up the Negro students assigned to a pilot program integrating a new public school on the city’s southwest side. The children were wearing the thick wool sweaters Cinnamon had knit for them all summer long. Abbott, Tokyo, and James felt the air on their faces and knew it was summer no longer, but thanks to their mother, they were warm as kittens by the fireplace. Three nervous little brown bodies lifted themselves onto the bus, jostling with other colored children playing hand games and shouting greetings or riddles. They were riding with some enthusiasm and some trepidation. They’d seen other cities in violent crisis because “the niggahs” were coming.

  As the meandering vehicle approached the school building, looming very large, loud, and treacherous to their right, the three Walker siblings crouched on the floor and covered their heads with their hands, try
ing to block the sights before them. Bottles broke the windows, followed by eggs, tomatoes, vile curses, and screams of “Niggahs, go back! Get back, niggahs. No spooks round here! This is for white people. Go, get away from here!” Irish, Italians, some Jews, and plain poor white trash were furious that some eight- to thirteen-year-old colored children were where their children were going to be. This was driving them crazy, making them rabid and terrifying the Walker children along with the other students, and even the newspaper, radio, and TV men.

  It was an ominous fall morning, like a heroin haze kind of day, like a lazy Charlie Parker day, taut, delicate, and spiraling to God knows where. Trash dropped into the gutters was thrown at the lil mess of colored children. But the Walker family was prideful, and Abbott, the oldest, was tending to the safety of his siblings. He saw a darkened doorway and drew the weeping Tokyo and a pale James to him. Eventually the police came to carry the colored children back to their various neighborhoods. The Walker kids wandered through Hyde Park, the cloistered neighborhood near the University of Chicago where the father worked, with frozen eyes, walking as if Charlie Mingus held them all on his back with a strong unyielding spine that could straighten up and face any man. They’d seen burning crosses and KKK parades before, but this was different. It was their backs that carried the weight of the race and nobody had said a word. Abbott’s eyes were steady and piercing. He would never again be spat upon by no white trash, ever again. He’d either die first or take down everybody around him. That he knew for sure. And he kept on walking toward home with his near-hysterical baby sister and the befuddled James, now running to the doorman of their building, the Sutherland.

  They loaded onto the elevator, whispering among themselves. “What are we gonna tell Mommy and Daddy?” Tokyo whined. They had been so proud just this morning and here they were now, disheveled and soiled. How could they explain that the white grown-ups just didn’t want them there? That any Negro youth found west of Halsted was imperiled? The first day of school—turned away at the door. They hadn’t done anything. Just being colored and trying to learn. What could they possibly say? They were now the ones to be ashamed or beat with a cat-o’-nine-tails, that’s how fearful they were of messing up their parents’ dream.