Axeman's Jazz Read online

  Axeman’s Jazz

  Tracy Daugherty

  Dzanc Books

  Dzanc Books

  1334 Woodbourne Street

  Westland, MI 48186

  www.dzancbooks.org

  Copyright © 2003 Tracy Daugherty

  All rights reserved, except for brief quotations in critical articles or reviews. No part of this book may be reproduced in any manner without prior written permission from the publisher.

  Published 2013 by Dzanc Books

  A Dzanc Books rEprint Series Selection

  eBooks ISBN-13: 978-1-938604-67-6

  eBook Cover designed by Steven Seighman

  What follows is a work of the imagination. Without exception, every character and event is fictitious. The causes, incidents, and aftermath surrounding the 1917 Houston race riot have been slightly altered. Even when actual place names or geographical locations have been used, no resemblance to real institutions or locales is intended or should be inferred.

  For Margie,

  who went there with me,

  all the way

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  NOVELS GROW from many sources—memories, suggestions, challenges, prohibitions—and with the help of many companions. I am indebted to all my teachers and friends, living and dead, from my Houston days. In particular, I wish to thank Glenn Blake, Michelle Boisseau, Rosellen Brown, Tom Cobb, Carl Lindahl, Martha Low, John McNamara, and Lois Zamora. For their part in helping me shape this work, I thank Ehud Havazelet and Kathryn Lang. For their support during the writing, I thank Marjorie Sandor, Hannah Crum, Gene and JoAnne Daugherty, and my colleagues at Oregon State University, especially Keith Scribner and Jen Richter. Finally, for their long-term encouragement and friendship, thanks to Molly Brown, Jerry and Joyce Bryan, Betty Campbell, Kris and Rich Daniels, Ted Leeson, Debra and Creighton Lindsey, George Manner, Jeff and Pam Mull, Marshall Terry, and the indefatigable souls at SMU Press, Kathie, Keith Gregory, and George Ann Goodwin.

  Either I’m a nation or I’m nothing.

  —DEREK WALCOTT

  1

  EACH TIME I imagined the execution I saw it from a different perspective. First as a simple observer, then as a catalyst in the tragedy. Female then male. Once I was an officer. Next time a common foot soldier.

  The sky was always lime, as just before a storm. Pine trees lined the meadow where the gallows stood. A commander—sometimes he was me—called, “Halt!” The prisoners, thirteen of them, all but two cleanly shaved, stopped in the dewy clearing, the chains around their ankles and wrists murmuring in disturbed unison, like a flock of startled birds. Their military uniforms were well-pressed and pleasing to see. A pair of them had soiled their britches; shit and fear tinged the air, along with the mulch of rotting cotton nearby. Several armed cavalrymen, following the commander’s orders, led the condemned men to two rows of folding chairs in the field’s center. The chairs were set back to back, six on one side, seven on the other.

  From the perspective of a simple observer, a young woman much like myself—someone on the fringes, that is—I see the gallows’ fresh timber, flesh-colored against the green and cloudy predawn sky. (Women, of course, were officially barred from the field that day as the army dispatched its duties.)

  And to be clear, when I say “flesh,” I mean my own light skin, not the boggy darkness of the men about to be hanged. In its coloration, the terrible contraption looked like me, not them.

  A bonfire licked the sky’s first gold streaks. By an earlier fire’s sparks, the night before, the Army Corps of Engineers had erected the death-rig on hasty, top-secret orders. This I know from my perspective as an officer, just as I know the prisoners requested, at their trial, death by firing squad, a more dignified military exit than hanging. As I stand here swatting mosquitoes, I understand the significance of refusing the prisoners’ request, the example of lynching more than a dozen black men.

  Am I uneasy with my knowledge? Is the sweat on my upper lip caused by more than humidity, stifling here in deep East Texas, even in fall, even in the hour before sunrise?

  Might I be a better witness, come to a fuller understanding of these events, as an infantryman? You must know everything, a teacher once told me. So, mentally, I switch identities again, like pouring water from one cup into another. Now, standing among mesquite trees at a rough pace of twenty yards from my comrades, I see, just below a straw-covered hill, two rows of unpainted pine coffins next to thirteen open graves.

  The six Mexican laborers hired by the army last night near the little river in San Antonio stand beside the crude boxes, wringing their hands. They will be asked, shortly, to untie the hangman’s knots and to bury the corpses, each with a soda water bottle in his pocket holding a paper ribbon typed with the prisoners’ names and ranks and the statement “Died September 11, 1917, at Fort Sam Houston.” As a foot soldier, just following orders myself, I suspect the Mexicans cannot read these statements and do not know where Fort Sam Houston is; but if they could decipher the words, I doubt even they would be fooled into thinking this slovenly, hidden field is anything resembling a fort.

  As the prisoners sit, remarkably calm, in the folding chairs, surrounded by Sheriff John Tobin of Bexar County, seven deputies, 125 cavalrymen, two white army chaplains, and a black civilian minister, the hangman adjusts his knots. The men have refused blindfolds. They stare at the two waist-high wooden triggers, manned by twelve soldiers, where the ropes converge on the platform. Softly, one of the bound fellows drones a hymn, “I’m coming home, I’m coming home.” The others take it up with him, one by one, low and even.

  Finally, the commander calls—I call—“Attention!” then I summon them, coldly (distantly, to protect myself, hunched and dyspeptic with my burdensome knowledge), to the scaffolding.

  In my many varied draftings of this scene, I have never once viewed it from the prisoners’ perspective. Which of the doomed would I choose to be? I’ve recovered a name—Cletus, Cletus Hayes—from the bottom of a cardboard box in my mama’s chest of drawers. But which one is he? All accounts of that morning’s events, admittedly highly subjective, possibly wildly inaccurate, agree that only two of the men were unshaven. One of them, then: with distinguishing whiskers. To isolate him one more step, I could say he is one who shat his pants. But do I want this figure, with possible family ties to me, already disgraced by history, to be marred further by cowardly grime?

  He steps forward with the others over a series of trap doors in the scaffolding, and I lose him again. It is too difficult to see, much less be, Cletus Hayes in my mind, so, as the men burst a last time into song—“Coming home, Lord, coming home!”—and the white guards from the Nineteenth Infantry yell to them, with grave sincerity, “Good-bye, Boys of Company C!” I become, again, a young, light-skinned woman—no: a white woman—standing on the fringes, watching in horror.

  I am not supposed to be here, but because I may have suffered a trauma at the hands of one of the prisoners, the army, at my family’s request, has perhaps allowed a special dispensation (no orders exist confirming this), hoping the sight of punishment will restore me to myself. But as I witness the triggers’ swift arcs, the beams’ awful shudders, I want to shout, “Cletus!” both to save him and to cast him into Hell. I will never again know clearly what I want out of life, and therefore, I will never again know clearly who I am. My curse is a variety of perspectives, and I will pass it on.

  The army seems as paralyzed as I am, torn between the desire to comport its duties with dignity and the need to hide its shame. As soon as the bodies are hustled down the straw-covered hill, into the steaming, unmarked graves, the Mexicans are ordered to dismantle the gallows and burn the lumber. By noon, the clearing looks as if no one had ever set foot in it, and the grassy fringe
where the frightened white woman may or may not have trembled now begins to expand—not just by distance, but by years. Years of silence, uncertainty, sorrow, and lies.

  This morning, I awoke from a dream of the lynching and, naked in hot sunlight, twisted in clammy sheets, wondered for a minute where I lay. Not home in my apartment in Dallas, where I would have heard my aquarium bubbling, my parrots chattering, demanding the day’s first affection. Instead, I was aware of close, rough walls, the difficulty of breathing—the scorch of each intake—and remembered: Houston. The leafy, humid sump, the Cajun-Southern-niggery mess of the neighborhood known as Freedmen’s Town.

  Yesterday evening, late, when I showed up with my suitcase on Bitter’s porch, he glanced up at me, indifferently at first, then with recognition. We stood yards apart, both aware of my daylight skin next to his night-color, and said nothing for a while. He looked me over—my short, boyish hair, my slender hips—and slowly shook his head, as if sorry for my confusing physical geometry: a creature who can’t fully settle on what she really is.

  Finally, I set my suitcase down on his cracked plank porch, where old honeysuckle vines, crushed and heavy and rancidly sweet, grew up between the boards, and said, “Hello.”

  He rattled the ice in a Smucker’s jar of weak red tea, swatted a horsefly, and watched me wipe the sweat from my face. My very pink palm. I half expected him to pitch a story, some silly yarn out of nowhere. I’m nothing but a old mose, he used to tell me, spinning hot air and hoo-raws. The old-school patter, the uncle-jive: who he’d always been, or pretended to be. Instead, he only grinned and, with a twist of his pear-shaped head, led me around back to what he called his mud-dauber shack, an old wooden tool shed, empty now except for a mattress and sheets. The shed was clustered around, he said, with “couronnes de chene,” and I remembered, like a lantern flaring on in the middle of the night, this lovely Creole name from my childhood visits here. “Mistletoe,” I said.

  He tossed melting ice from his jar into the high yellow grass. “That’s right, Seamstress. So. Some of the Bayou City did rub off on you.”

  “More than you think.”

  “This here’s my guest-house now, since I got need no more of my tools,” he said. “May smell like gin. Mostly buddies of mine sleeping off weekday drunks in here. You welcome to it for now. Back door of the house’ll be open when you need a john.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Pretty low-rent for a mayor’s girl.”

  “It’s just fine. It’s more than I expected on such little notice.”

  “Well. It’s late now. I’ll let you get settled. Back door’s open, too, when you ready to chat. That letter you sent, girl. It was short.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I knew you didn’t have a phone—”

  “Don’t turn this around on me.”

  “I’m not. Thank you. Tomorrow? Tomorrow we’ll talk?”

  “Sure, we’ll tow out the cotton whenever you ready. Don’t see nothing, don’t say nothing.” That was the way he used to tell me good-night when I was little, and I smiled.

  He left me then in the dusty mud-dauber shack with only a flashlight to steer by. In the corners, sprawling, elaborate spiderwebs. Dirty-towel curtains. He wanted me to breathe “low-rent” again, to take old sharecropper dirt into my lungs. Punishment. Nostalgia. He wasn’t about to give me any of that poor-mulatta-bullshit you saw in the corny old stories or fall back praising my credentials.

  As I unlatched my suitcase I remembered the word gris-gris and an afternoon when I was eight or nine, here in the yard, and Uncle Bitter instructed me in bayou lore. “Never pull down curtains from windows and doors to wash in the month of August. Sure as you hang a clean curtain back up in August, you gonna be hanging a shroud on your door ‘fore the month is done. Never kill no spiders, neither, girl. Never. That’s bad luck for a longtime.”

  So, since we’re only midway through August, the spiders and towels will stay, I thought, turning back the sheets.

  And that’s how I woke this morning, fresh from a hanging, surrounded by the pure good luck of crawlies and filth.

  I folded yesterday’s clothes and buttoned on a new cotton blouse. A piece of red flannel was nailed to the wall above the mattress, and I wondered if this was another bit of gris-gris: some happy charm for helpless drunks, or a spell to chastise long-lost kin. I remembered more of Uncle Bitter’s magic from years ago. Dried frogs on a doorstep bring tragedy to a home. If an alligator crawls beneath your porch, it’s a sure sign of death. If a gal cheats on her man just before baking, her bread won’t rise. Bitter swore an innocent neighbor of his was beaten to death by her husband when her muffins kept failing.

  “Gumbo ya-ya,” my mama used to snap whenever she’d pass through a room to find my cousin Ariyeh and me sitting in Bitter’s lap, listening to his tales. It meant, she told me once, someone who blabbed all the time.

  “What you Yankee niggers know ‘bout the bayou?” he’d toss back at her.

  Her light cheeks turned the color of raspberries.

  It’s a measure of how place-bound my family has been that my Houston kin have always regarded Dallas, both suspiciously and with awe, as “the North.” Mama, tight-lipped, snatched me up and took me north one day, in 1974, when I was three years old. We made four or five visits back to Freedmen’s Town, all before I was ten, then never returned.

  As a teenager I missed my uncle’s stories, his sweet affection for my cousin and me. He called me Seamstress—Small Woman, in his parlance—and Ariyeh, Junebug, because she was chubby and round as a child. When I slipped into my twenties, went to college, then got a job with the Dallas mayor’s office, I lost sight of “Down South,” like my childhood had all been a fever dream. A heat rash in steamy swamp-grass. I got one scribble from Uncle Bitter, on my twenty-second birthday, telling me how much it pained him that I hadn’t been to see him in so many years. It didn’t open “Dear Seamstress.” “To the mayor’s girl,” it began, and ended, “You and your mama too fine for us folk?” By then, I believed that was true; I threw the letter away. Three years passed before I finally answered him, earlier this week, saying, “I need to come down. If you can make room for me somewhere, I promise not to be a bother.”

  Thinking back to last night, I count it as a good sign that he greeted me, finally, as “Seamstress.” I suspect, too, he knows why I’m really here … maybe better than I do. I’m traveling on impulse, the way Mama used to do, and—no. No. Mama never acted impulsively in her life, and neither have I. If I could believe she left here impulsively I might be more at peace with her ghost, more at ease with myself. Truth is, I think, she fled deliberately because she was determined I’d become someone else, not the girl who’d grow up here.

  I pluck a toothbrush and a comb from my case, walk across the yard, tap on the back door, painted blue but peeling. No answer. “Hello?” The door creaks like a rope pulled taut as I push it open, gently. I recognize nothing in the house. The furniture I’ve always remembered as gaudy, big, but these old chairs are faded, green, and small. Rugs cross the floor, fraying, the color of exhausted dirt. The place smells of onions. On a cutting board next to the kitchen sink I find a handwritten note: “Seam—Gone to do my Sunday business. You on your own til tonite. Some of us gather round ten at Etta’s Place over on Scott Street,” and he gives me an address. “See you there if you so incline.”

  His Sunday business, I recall Mama saying sadly long ago, was dominoes and bust-head in some raggedy-ass ice house somewhere. She used to fret about his drinking; he had what he called “high bloods.”

  This kitchen. I remember afternoons here, the bready smell of catfish frying on the stove, a saxophone signifying from the phonograph in the living room, and Mama running a hot-comb through Ariyeh’s abundant hair. A dry, singed, old-cloth odor. I wailed, wanting the hot comb too. “Honey, you don’t need it,” Mama said. “You got that pretty hair, thin and wavy.”

  “But I want to look like Ariyeh!”

  Even then
, I was tugging against her conception of me.

  On my way to the bathroom, I pass the old Crosley and stop to inspect the records. Louis Armstrong. Leadbelly’s “Pigmeat.” I laugh, remembering how fine the blues made me feel as a girl—all tingly, and happy/sad—despite Mama’s disapproval of the music. My uncle’s real name is Ledbetter, tagged after Huddie Ledbetter, Leadbelly’s given name. I couldn’t say the word as a child. It came out “Bitter” and stuck to him.

  Down the hall, in the corner bedroom I shared with Ariyeh, Uncle’s Needle Men stories whisper in my memory. The Needle Men were medical students from the Charity Hospital who roamed the streets in summer looking for bodies to practice on, “since stiffs get scarce that time of year.” Uncle explained, “All they got to do is brush by you, and bingo, you been pricked. Some kinda sleeping poison. They whisk you away to a room ‘neath the earth where they can cut on you.”

  I sit on the old bed, now, recalling hot breezes through the window screens filling drapes while Ariyeh and I tried to sleep. Each sound outside—boys hurling stones at streetlamps, dogs pawing through wet newspapers, winos stumbling through weeds—became an abduction or a murder in our minds. We imagined crouched figures in green medical smocks, needles gleaming in moonlight, approaching our house. West of us, about a mile, the Southern Pacific made its midnight run; its metallic clanging was a lonely man curling his sour-egg breath through a clarinet. All over the neighborhood, children were vanishing, pricked with poison or sliced by the soft precision of a blade: in alleys and behind the markets, beside the barbershop and fireworks stands, which only opened on New Year’s, Juneteenth, and July Fourth, and so were more sacred than church. Ariyeh’s damp palm clung to mine; my nose, next to her popcorn-curly hair, opened wide with the pleasure of her sage and peppermint smell.

  Nights, I remember, Mama quilted in her room down the hall: just a pencil line of lamplight beneath her bedroom door, a scrap of tune, a hiss of thread. Since she was so distant, I depended on Ariyeh to protect me, though I knew she was just as scared as I was. We stared at our open window. Later, when the air had gotten cold in the room, she sometimes jarred me awake, tussling with dreams. If her hand had slipped out of mine, I’d find it again and squeeze until she calmed, sighing back into the mattress.