Little Tommy Teller, who is supposed to be practicing his fiddle in the good parlor, is eavesdropping on his sister and his grandma. Like on every Saturday night, the tug of the comb wrenches Bessie’s head back into Grandma Ady’s knees, which are like the old knobby stories that keep children from squirming too much. There’s as much cartilage in her knees, says the doctor, as there’s branches on a loblolly pine. He’s from the Carolinas so he talks funny. One of Bertha’s folk.
She slaps Bessie’s ears and says, “If you stop moving, it won’t hurt.” This is a lie, by the way. But it’s the lie her mother told her and she told Bessie’s mother and Bessie’ll tell her daughter. All Black girls will hear this lie at some point.
Next to Bessie, Miss Matilda is snapping beans—bending the springy greens and snapping them with the pressure of a heated quarrel between lover and lover or father and son. Bending them the way Bessie imagines God spoke the universe from the void to the snap of Creation that exploded across the sky from His own mouth. Next to her, Mother is darning socks, worn through by her baby brothers. Grandma Ady tugs through the tangled mass on Bessie’s head with the comb. “You tender-headed as anything,” Grandma Ady reminds her as Bessie pulls against the grip. Grandma Ady’s eyes hold visions, reflected in her cataracts, as she begins to twist the strands at the scalp.
The canter of foot-foot-stick, foot-foot-stick, foot-foot-stick comes up the wooden sidewalk as Bessie wiggles into the porch. Her behind is numb; her feet are tapping out a different rhythm in her shoes, the ones she’s already outgrown but must wear for another year. There at the porch steps stands Mrs. Harris, whom the old folks call M’Dear, but Bessie calls Mrs. Harris. She is trailed lovingly by Nell. Grandma Ady picks apart the husks of hair fiber by fiber. She doesn’t look up.
“Afternoon, Ady. Girls,” M’Dear begins.
“How’s Silas and ’em? And August, Nell?”
“Fine, just fine. Ady, what you bringing to the church picnic?”
“Not going.”
“Now, Ady, come on!”
“With this rain? My rheumatism? Almanac said it’s a cold, wet autumn.”
Bessie recalls when she ate from the prairie crabapple, thinking sour was a type of painful sweetness yet to be discovered. And when she vomited the acidic bile in floods and floods until Grandma Ady gave her horse chestnut, which she used for everything. The horse chestnut is good for the following ailments: Varicose veins. Fever. Menstrual pain. Swelling. Eating sourness and calling it sweet.
“I’ll give you the recipe for my cream puff so you can make it, Nell.”
“You got it writ down?”
“Not this one.”
Bessie pulls away from the hands weaving and plucking at her wiry hair; some rips from its roots, and she hears that over the sound of:
“Quart of flour, then smattering of butter. I like to use a wooden spoonful, but it don’t even need that much.”
The wind weaving through the trees.
“Now you wanna beat them pretty good or the bread’ll all be too eggy.”
Tobacco leaves drying in their bushel baskets.
“A gill of cream and then the yeast. I usually let it rise overnight when I make a batch that big. Then a teacup of water.”
Grandma Ady’s knuckles cracking as she braids.
“Half an hour in a hot oven should do the trick. Depends on how much you making.”
But she doesn’t hear anything over the edge of weariness in Grandma Ady’s voice, which hovers in the air after she speaks, a slight apparition. Like hammered tin or shattering glass. Like the Aunt Nancy stories Mother told at ten-thirty by the grandpa clock in the hall. Like milkweed rustling with dormouse intercourse, like silky blue stockings hanging from the line, or like the way the sun peeked out from the clouds but way too close to nighttime to matter.
“Bessie, grown folk’s talking to you. Answer ’em,” Mother’s voice snapped.
Bessie had heard; Miss Matilda was talking about her history report.
It had been about when white people first came. She and her brother had put “In the Land of the Pilgrim Fathers” to music. Miss Matilda hums the tune, and Grandma Ady weaves another taut line down Bessie’s scalp and tells her to sing it. Not without Tommy, she thinks and almost musters the courage to say so.
“Lazarus Lyons played the piana for it, too,” says Miss Matilda.
“Huh,” says Mrs. Harris.
“He’s good at piana.”
Grandma Ady stops braiding. “He work at that place for Bertha’s kin, don’t he? Out in the marsh?”
“Mama, you know King and Dove ain’t proud of it,” Mother says.
“But they too proud to stop it.”
Bessie calls for Tommy to bring his fiddle to the porch before the tsking and teeth sucking starts.
Bessie imagines Tommy having to hide his fiddle so he can go play at the juke joint tonight. But right now, he brings the fiddle to the porch and they begin the duet. With Grandma Ady’s weaving fingers keep the beat. They smile all. They smile too large for their faces. And in her barely cobbled shoes, in her black stockings and cotton drawers, in her starchy chemise, in her pink dress that’s shrinking as she grows, under her pinafore that pins her to childhood, next to Matilda, snapping beans next to Mother, on Grandma Ady’s porch, Bessie recognizes the exhaustion in every word.
Napoleonville Ladies’ Luncheon Club Newsletter
December 5, 1918
Hometown Hero Spotlight
Dear all,
Thank you for your kind letters. It was nice to know that I am in your thoughts and prayers. Being away from my wife and our little girl has been so hard, but fighting the Hun was my patriotic duty and now fighting shellshock is my other one. This flu is knocking men flat on their backs to the grave, and the ones that do survive the sick… they have a lot to worry about otherwise back here in the hospitals in Washington. You all give me hope.
Regards,
Peter Ailey
PHOTO OF MISS EMILY BOOT’S SCHOOL
1918 Christmas Charity
For this year’s Christmas charity, we will be donating to the Negro Waif’s Home in Tallulah Acres. Our Christmas charity coordinators this year are Mabel Hastings, Dorothée Keith, Winnie Dougherty, and Eugenia Kincaid.
This year’s charity takes care of Negro boys from around the county who are either delinquent, neglected, or orphaned and puts them to useful trades such as animal husbandry, musicianship, gardening, carpentry, and trades for their future endeavors.
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HOUSE HELP needed for Mrs. Peter Ailey and her forthcoming baby. Looking for Negress with references and experiences with babies and the infirm. Please contact Eugenia Kincaid with recommendations.
FOR SALE: One used Singer sewing machine. The Singer is good for clothing and drapery. Contact Harriet Duncan if interested.
Flowers of Spring in Dead of Winter
A Poem by Penelope Kincaid
Flowers of Spring, leap skyward!
Though the sky be dark with gloom
Do not tarry towards sunlight
For the sunlight lives in you
Dead of winter may scold you
And rebuke you towards the dirt
Flowers of Spring, go forth
Away from your mother earth
Flowers of Spring in Winter
Are bound to show their faces
And bring with them God’s glory
Even in the darkest places
My sisters you are the flowers
That cover the earth with green
So grow in the dead of winter
You wond’rous flowers of spring
From Heartland Melodies:
Inspirations for Blues Standards from Middle America
Abstract
The common cultural narrative of blues stan
dards is that they originated in communities of color in larger American cities, especially with the contributions of artists from the Northeast corridor. The history of this music is strewn with “anonymous brute[s] ’n boo’ful buck[s],” to borrow from Ralph Ellison. This narrative, however, erases the role Middle American artists played in the early formation of the genre. The lack of Midwestern exploration in existing historical surveys means that many active sites of inspiration for the melodies remain unaccounted for. Just as Marion, Indiana, cannot be divorced from the legacy of the jazz standard “Strange Fruit,” many works by noted blues artists drew inspiration from Midwestern environs.
Aubade
May 1, 1920
Tata Duende, former circus curiosity and father to a girl nicknamed Snow-baby, was pushing Snow-baby’s pram with stuttered gait into Marion Chapman’s store. He was followed by some of his wife’s folk: Tempess and the mixed child, called Moon-child, at her skirt. Tempess had her grandma’s eyes, like his wife and his baby; those eyes were the words that told the “begat” story all the way back to Adam, Auntie Rhea said. Tata Duende could not see his baby’s face in the carriage, but he knew that she had a star-kissed face. He used her freckles to make constellations. Tempess laughed behind him as he cooed at the girl. She laughed because she thought he was foolish to think that child was his. She wasn’t small like him, and she was a tint above snow. Tempess laughed until she noticed two dull eyes peering out from Marion Chapman’s store down to Mercer Street. And she glanced into the eyes of the Barghest, half-cataracted and humbled a little now that jazz was floating from her juke joint in the swamp down into Bramble Patch. That made her laugh harder and harder. Her piano boy was young and had good hands.
Tempess’s glance shifted away from the shuffling coon up the road to the little boy down the road. He was Tommy. Tommy nodded to Tempess and Tata Duende but skirted on by to his friend, Lazarus. Talked to him about Lazarus’s girl, Bessie. Bessie was smart and good in school, like her beau. She was with his child, too, growing bigger. She had a beautiful voice and wanted to sing with her man later that night but wasn’t allowed to. Lazarus wanted to go to the Negro college in the fall, but Bessie hoped he would stay for the baby. Tommy said all of this to Lazarus, because Tommy was Bessie’s brother. Lazarus just nodded slowly and left Tommy on the road. The curtain of heat rose and Tommy trotted back into his mind and played the chords he had heard Lazarus play so often.
Lazarus was walking down Freedom Road, the path he had traced in his veins from childhood onward. At the crest of the hill, Freedom Road would turn into Main Street and the whiteness above it. This road had scarred him across his legs, which had switchbacks of tissue raised from a caning. He never liked it here. The ground was hallowed. The earth was still burnt out from the train that passed through but never left. This was sacred, holy earth, between the black and the white, between the Bramble Patch and Napoleonville.
His neck was bulgy and ringed in sweat. Sweat drenched his spectacles so he couldn’t see the spot where Jessup’s body was found split open. Daddy King and Ma Lyons couldn’t afford the glasses, but he had a white benefactor up the hill who was interested in Negro education. And now Lazarus could wear the spectacles he had needed for so long and could play real piano music away from hully-gully drunks and maybe could go to a Negro college. His benefactor said white folks were willing to invest in an industrious Negro.
In Lazarus’s hand was the sheet music for the concert that night. The crows kept screaming at him in the trees. His sister Esther was a witch, the folks all said. The crows followed her, and her kin. Still, she’d gotten him the white benefactor. And how it went was that Daddy King sent him to go get her from the white Reverend’s house where she worked. He had just started working in Tempess’s place and Ma Lyons didn’t like it because of the sexing and marsh fever. Ma Lyons said to him, “Not all poisons come in vials and snakes. Not every poison is made of things. I named you for someone who come back alive. Lazarus, son, don’t ever go anywhere you can’t come back from. Don’t get down a path that don’t lead back to alive.”
But he had nimble slender fingers that could memorize tunes on the piano against all odds: son of a peach picker, son of a seamstress, son of the Bramble Patch. He liked books and carried them with him everywhere. He went to the Negro school, even though all Them worked and Dinah and the witchy one, too. He liked words. He liked music.
He met the white benefactor because he went to get Esther from the Reverend’s house, and he took a book with him. That amused the Reverend’s wife, because she thought she’d never met a Negro that liked words. She thought the whole lot of them were curiosities.
And she asked, “Are you looking for a job?” And he said, “No ma’am.” And she said, “That’s odd, I’ve never met a Negro boy not looking for a job.” And he said, “I got a job, ma’am.” And she said, “What’s that then?”
He looked at his sister, but she would not look at him. “I play piano.”
“What sort of things you play?” asked the Reverend’s wife. She placed her hand on the head of her child.
Esther’s face contorted in disgust. Lazarus said, “They’re hymns of a sort.”
“It’s just as well, then. I know you don’t know any of our hymns. We took your sister to the church to watch Croswell. She didn’t know a single word of them. We’re Baptists.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
It was then she decided a Negro boy who liked piano and liked reading needed a benefactor. To save him from the Bramble Patch. Everyone thought him to be the best of them all.
Now he rang the bell of his benefactor, Mr. Richard Keith, and heard a voice say, “Well don’t just stand there like a dumb cow.” It was the benefactor’s daughter. He winced. His hair was combed and parted but his lips were swollen from a bee sting. Dinah collected honey and had asked him over to watch her kids. The benefactor’s daughter had disdain dripping from her own lips. The sheet music shook in his hands. He walked inside.
Down the street a house or two from the Kincaids, the blonde woman was perched up on her porch, half-mad but beautiful still. She was Verity Ailey and she wore her hair in ringlets. Beside her, a little Black girl held a cup of milk from which Verity drank. Long ago but not so long, Verity had boarded a night train, and now her right hand was gone. She kept the stump wrapped up in a crocheted shawl. She had lost a brother too, and she kept a piece of him wrapped up in the shawl as well. Her husband passed by and grazed her cheeks with his lips. She didn’t look up to his eyes, but the little Black girl did. Her name was Wanhope, and she was reading Dickens to Verity on the porch. Verity half heard the book, half remembered language and how the tongue connects to the mind. Her nerves were half severed and half forgotten. Her eyes remained fixed on the spot where a draft horse had grazed seven years prior. “Girl! Take my wife inside when you can. I’m going to work,” Peter said. Wanhope nodded; she never spoke to him. Wanhope squeezed Verity’s hand.
Peter left them on the porch. Away from the porch, he was called Doctor Ailey. Away from the porch, he had some dignity. Away from the porch, the air was not always thick with history. His wife. Her caretaker. Both stank of the smashed iron of that damn train. Of the river on fire. Of the blood and scars raised high like mountains over the whole body. Of the swollen red stump where once a delicate hand had skirted his skin to goosebumps. He was lucky she had remained mostly beautiful to the eyes; he had seen the rudimentary horrors of war, doughboys with faces sewn back together with other faces. She only had a missing hand, which he had advised her to keep hidden for the sake of the children, and a shiny, purple scar that ran from her hip socket to the outer edge of her knee. It crawled up her leg, hideous, and threatened to bite and poison him. It was venomous; so was the woman up the road from him. Who had been growing, summer by summer, from little Sistie to a woman, before he could recognize it. Penelope eyed him from her spot on the sidewalk.
He would greet her in
a friendly manner on the road and head to Miller Duncan’s place for a ride into the city. He would go to the white part of the mental hospital first, spending the day as an alienist examining and prescribing and keeping them calm and trying to tell the hospital director that malaria therapy would work on the syphilitic old man. Then he would go to the Black ward. Despite the controversy about cross-contamination and giving whites the Negroes’ diseases, he would go to them, too. He believed in equality. He might say hello to a man from the Bramble Patch named Danuel, who’d moved to the city so that he could visit his son in the ward. He liked Danuel’s kind manner. Peter would consider sterilization for a few patients, but only the really bad ones. He might suggest one to his surgeon. All the while, though, he would be thinking of Penelope’s venomous body against his, knowing that the time would come that he would get bit. He walked past the house of Lazarus’s benefactor.
What Laz liked most about the Hungarian Rhapsody was the way it held sorrow and transitioned effortlessly to caprice, as though sadness was a jacket you could shed when it got too warm. Ma Lyons had said: “You never shed your jacket in a white man’s house. You cannot take off that jacket or else they’ll think you were born without any sort of bringing up.” Laz pressed his fingers into the minor key. The benefactor’s second daughter, the brunette one with bright eyes, placed her head against the floorboards and felt the vibrations against her ears. He paused, feeling a swell in his knuckles, and she perked up and frowned. “Aimee, I can’t no more,” he said, and she nodded.
From the other parlor, her Pentecostal mother Mrs. Dorothée Keith looked on with her trembling hand gripping a cup of coffee. The cup shook violently as she watched Aimee run over to the Negro and sit next to him on the piano bench. Between her husband’s delight in the boy and her daughter’s growing affection, she feared the beast would snap and eat the whole household. Her husband had said: “Dolly, he’s college-bound. We’re helping to take him out of the brambles and mud and make him a real man. I doubt Reverend Kincaid’s wife would have approached us if she thought he could be dangerous.” This was not how he had said it, but she was too irritated to remember the exact words now as she sipped her coffee. She hated how he petted her head and called her Dolly, as if Dorothée was too difficult for his boorish mouth. She hated the Negro boy who played piano at that swamp place her preacher had warned her about. She hated that all their friends and family were being tricked into seeing the boy play music tonight and would be tricked into giving him money for “college.” Mostly she hated that her husband was raising their kids Baptist instead of Pentecostal. She watched Lazarus and waited for his wild sensibilities to pounce on her little girl. He cracked his knuckles and began working on the Moonlight Sonata.
These Bones Page 6
