Axeman's Jazz Read online

  Now Uncle uses this bedroom for storage. Boxes clutter the floor and the bed, some of them mildewed and webby. I rise slowly, hearing the box springs’ catlike creak. Ariyeh and I used to giggle about it in the mornings.

  I freshen up now, brush my teeth. The bathroom mirror is old, coppery, and streaked; it dusts my face darker than it really is, makes me feel squirmier here than I already did. An imposter. A mistake.

  So: I have the day to myself, to see how well I recall the old neighborhood, to see what I can find of Cletus Hayes, to see how much trouble I can get into asking questions about secrets Mama told me never to unearth.

  My Taurus still smells of tacos, bought in Huntsville yesterday on my way down from Dallas. I kick the empty food bag under the seat and roll down my window. The streets here are narrow, old, faded bricks knuckling through cracks in the asphalt. More weed lots than I’d remembered: houses gone, rotted, bulldozed, scraped away for progress. I imagine the land here has doubled or tripled its value over the years—like a bully, downtown Houston has crept a few miles closer, gobbling up space, since I scoured these alleys as a girl looking for horned toads. Tall, glassy, air-conditioned bank buildings, mortgage firms, investment companies cast fat shadows over dilapidated row houses worth nothing compared with the rich red dirt they’re cluttering up, over heaps of wheezing washers, busted plumbing, sundered families worth even less on paper than the materials their rickety homes are rigged with.

  I glimpsed Tomorrow in the news this morning, the Business section, open by chance, stained with egg yolk and orange juice, on Bitter’s kitchen table: If we could clear out two dozen houses on lots along West Gray Street, within a year we could open a strip mall that, guaranteed, would turn a healthy profit by its second biennium.

  I’m amazed, then, it’s not already snowing eviction notices here, onto all the broken-glass-and-gravel lawns.

  A Chicano boy bangs a stick against a mossy fire hydrant. A dog in a dirt yard licks a little girl and she licks him right back. Five or six teenage boys, like a cluster of heat-addled flies, lounge around a rusty, wheelless Cadillac, propped on cinder blocks, sharing joints and big blue cans of malt liquor. Now I am nostalgic for my childhood.

  Shit man you got that you fucking got that, they say. They say, That’s all-reet ‘bout that ol’ shit man. Slapping hands. Yeah you got that slick I reckon you got that shit stone cold.

  They stop and watch me in my new purple car, and I imagine them thinking: White bitch. What her fucking business here?

  Look again, I want to shout.

  Instead, I give it the gas.

  Of course, it wasn’t in Freedmen’s Town—“Niggertown,” even we used to call it—where Cletus Hayes sealed his fate. I check a city map. Reinerman Street, Washington Road. Lillian. Rose. San Felipe. The heart of the riot. All west of here.

  In the summer of 1917, Reinerman Street was in a nice white part of town by Camp Logan, a U.S. Army base. The camp had just made room for the Twenty-fourth Infantry, Third Battalion, an all-black unit exhausted from chasing, in vain, Pancho Villa through northern Mexico. The black soldiers were posted on a woody lot, surrounded by a barbed wire fence, about three miles from Logan and the white soldiers there. They were charged with protecting army property. A drainage ditch separated the regiment from Reinerman Street; a Southern Pacific Railroad track isolated it from even more expensive neighborhoods.

  Few history books dwell on the movements of black military units, most of which were formed just after the Civil War; from monographs I first studied in school, I’ve learned that the army preferred to station black troops away from heavy population centers, stateside—far from white folks in the cities. But the Twenty-fourth, despite its failure with Villa, had shown uncommon valor and courage in the field. Prior to their Mexican engagement, the troops had fought bravely in the Philippines. Posted to San Francisco in 1915, the forces’ provost guards so impressed the police chief, he tried to hire several of them. These were “good boys,” so no one expected trouble when they arrived in Houston, an unusually courteous place as Southern communities went.

  That summer in the Bayou City, as elsewhere, scores of white families were anguished at seeing their sons conscripted into the service and shipped to the widening war in Europe. The sight of any soldier must have rattled them. Local politics were rawer than usual then—patriotic fervor stirred the soup on every level—while the days lengthened, grew steamier, more humid, lifting indolence and anger closer to the surface of everyone’s life.

  Now, I park my car near a bike path winding into a neat, managed oak grove. Nearly eighty years after the events I’ve returned here hoping to plumb, this part of town is still nice and white. Paved. Well-trimmed. The streets have been swept and a sweet smell of late-season honeysuckle zizzles the air. Couples picnic in the grass. A toddler chases a pigeon. I push through brambles, deeper into shade.

  No traces remain of Camp Logan. Following the First World War, the base served as a convalescent center, then it was dismantled. In the twenties, a wealthy, English-born music teacher gave millions to the city to turn the vacant land into a memorial for soldiers who’d paid the ultimate price. She had lived for a time near the base, rented rooms to soldiers’ wives, played golf with them on the camp course, and had come to love the woodlands there (I imagine her as the type of person my mama always wanted to be, refined, respected, dignified, and quietly remote).

  Eventually, bridle trails crossed Memorial Park; a polo club opened; no doughboy or doughboy’s wife could afford to go near it. In my duties for the Dallas mayor’s office, I’ve learned a lot about Houston. The two cities often compare themselves, competing in sports, finance, real estate. Several (white) lawyers jog in Memorial Park. Wealthy singles convene here, plumed in spandex, hoping to find True Love, or at least a love that will support them in the manner to which they’re accustomed.

  The ghosts of the old Twenty-fourth remain, now, only in the wind huffing through all the soft magnolia leaves.

  Across the street, wood-trimmed brick homes murmur with TV baseball. Lawn mowers buzz, barbecue sauce spices the breeze … what didn’t Mama like here?

  I used to wonder why the city would place an army base so near a residential neighborhood. But the military was universally respected in those days (I’m what my stepdaddy calls a “cynical, post-’Nam babe”). Houston looked at World War I and saw a rainbow; it was the country’s largest cotton port and stood to reap a bundle from the feds.

  Texas’s Anti-Saloon League recognized that young recruits might get rowdy from time to time and convinced lawmakers to establish a five-mile zone around all military installations, banning bars and bawdy houses. Citizens referred to these areas as white zones, long before the Twenty-fourth arrived.

  Initially, the battalion settled peacefully into Houston. The city’s “colored population,” as it called itself then, hailed them as heroes. Businessmen welcomed the army’s money. From court records following the riot, I have testimony from a well-to-do widow who lived by the base. “I didn’t want those niggers tromping through my yard on their way into town, scattering all my chickens,” she said, “so I decided to make friends with them right away. Baked bread for some of the boys, let them use my kitchen phone now and then. I didn’t much like them—didn’t like the way they smelled—but I figured cordiality was the best policy.” So, through cordial, gritted teeth—the Southern way—the camp’s immediate neighbors accepted the “dark guard,” at first.

  Most of the soldiers had never served in the South, had never been so intimate with Jim Crow, even on his best behavior. Right away, they resented the city’s streetcar conductors, who expected them to stand at the back of the cars. They resented the stares they got from white workmen at Camp Logan. They resented water coolers in their own camp, roped off and labeled WHITE for construction workers, GUARD for the troops. Cops on the beat, noting the newcomers’ attitude, began to mutter, “I never …,” started to whisper, “Uppity.”

 
By most accounts, on the night of the riot, August 23, fifteen black soldiers, ignoring their white commanders’ pleas, armed with Springfield rifles and ammunition pilfered from the post’s storage lockers, marched down Washington Road toward the streetcar loop. They opened fire on a jitney, killing the driver, severely wounding a passenger.

  Over a hundred other troops, led by a previously exemplary sergeant named Vida Henry, avoided Washington Road’s bright lights, sticking instead to the smaller streets, Lillian and Rose, crossing Buffalo Bayou into the San Felipe district. They shot randomly into the dark in these usually quiet white neighborhoods. Two hours later, when the mutiny petered out, twenty people lay dead or dying in the streets.

  Apparently, the whole thing had flared around the rumor that a pair of Houston cops had killed a Corporal Charles Baltimore of the Third Battalion. Later, he turned up in camp, beaten and bloody, but alive. More to the point, several weeks of “uppity” anger had broken free at last.

  Court records show that Cletus Hayes, a young private, was captured neither on Washington Road nor the other rioters’ paths. He wound up near dawn, by himself, on Reinerman Street.

  I walk there now. This block is not so well-appointed as its neighbors. A failed flower shop, dry and cracked, drops light orange paint flakes onto the grass next to Brock’s Combo Burger #2 and a row of modest homes. As a former history major, I can’t help but imagine the births and deaths, the tilled soil, the spilled blood on this spot, all so Brock can make a profit, now, off his fatty foods. The march of progress. Onions in the air.

  Slack wire frames a vegetable garden by a sagging wooden home. The house is painted yellow. Corn wilts in the hard soil. I recall the court transcripts, following the riot: “Defendant accosted the young lady, Sarah Morgan, in her mother’s garden.” But over five hundred pages detailing this single incident fail to explain the woman’s presence among the cabbage at four o’clock in the morning.

  That particular garden is gone; this yellow house, like those around it, dates from the thirties, no earlier. An accurate picture of the neighborhood as it appeared in the summer of’17 is impossible now.

  But this might as well be the place. The Morgan home had to be near here. If Private Hayes had been hiding that night near the bayou, as MPs later claimed, then he would have approached this block from the southeast, up Oak Street or Pine, past the spot where a pimpled high school kid flips burgers now in Brock’s cockroachy kitchen.

  Sergeant Vida Henry, the riot’s leader, shot himself by the bayou at around 2:05 A.M., several hours after the uprising ended. Private Hayes never denied accompanying him, though he claimed at the trial he’d never raised his weapon. Realistically speaking—if nothing else, peer pressure would have been irresistible—he’d probably shot out a window or two, shattered some white woman’s crystal lamp as she crocheted in her den.

  If only I could see wholly from his perspective, slip past the surface details I’ve gathered and melt into the man … his strategies, hopes, rages—at whites? Women? White women?

  Standing at the garden’s edge, I concentrate so hard my head hurts in the swirling afternoon heat. I try to lose myself, pour my ego from one container into another …

  If I were Cletus Hayes that night, what would I do? I’d chuck my rifle, my cap, even my coat, so in the dark, in the swift sweep of headlights, I might not be recognized as a gunner. I’d stick to alleys and narrow paths between homes. I’d want to return to camp as soon as possible—to claim, perhaps, I’d never left my bunk. I wouldn’t dawdle—why would I dawdle?—in a wide-open vegetable garden in an all-white neighborhood.

  Am I dumb? Impulsive? Arrogant? Who the hell am I?

  Car horns blare by the burger joint. I open my eyes. Why do I care? Why go to all this trouble to snatch a ghost? Because, for some time now, I’ve suspected my origins are linked with his … but that’s an abstraction, no realer than believing the Founding Fathers had me in mind when they formed this nation. No realer than the Needle Men.

  But maybe Cletus is my hoo-raw: a spirit dragging life and death behind him, like a wedding car’s clattery tin cans; a breath from the past who could fill my present if only I can inspirit him, inhabit him … so I shut my eyes … take up his uniform …

  … and slink like a scarecrow down Reinerman Street, shivering, rank with dirty bayou water. I hear sirens south of here where several white-owned businesses—the Ruby Café, Claude’s Coffee Shop, Jack’s Fine Shoes—flatten in flames. Gunshots echo in the dark. No lights illuminate the homes. I pick my way past small magnolia trees, Fords big as buffaloes parked in narrow drives, wooden porches large as gallows, until I come to a neat, clear patch staked out in Bermuda grass. There—waiting for me?—among cabbages, tomato vines, and yellow-tipped cucumbers, a young lady in a blue cotton dress.

  Then I lose him again. My perspective shifts to this other family ghost. Sarah Morgan, whose father has fallen on hard times. He’s lost his cotton farm—hard to manage in this glorious war boom—and moved with his wife and child to the city. Sarah stands there among the scorched, growing things, watching the young colored man, wary, exhausted, approach.

  She is my great-grandmother, and I know as little about her as I do about him. I know her family was reckless with money (“Foreclosed, First City National Bank, 8/21/16”). I know her father, like his old man, mourned the loss of slavery (“The darkies were happier then—just ask them”: signed editorial, Houston Post, 5/8/15). But Sarah? I know, from the transcripts, she wore a blue dress in the early morning hours of August 24, 1917, shivering in her mother’s garden. She was twenty-five years old, living at home with her parents. Unmarried. Plain? Ugly? I have no photographs, no detailed description. I do have a handwritten letter, signed C, addressed to Sarah, found among my mama’s things the week she died. C thought Sarah “exquisite, like mist in a cornfield early in the morning.”

  Private Hayes denied accosting the young lady. There were no witnesses, only the emotional testimonies of Sarah Morgan’s folks, with references to a ripped dress and the rhetorical question, “What else could have happened?” In over five hundred pages, the young lady herself remains mysteriously silent: a special dispensation from the court, perhaps. (Repeatedly, others describe her as nervous.)

  So I am left with the moment itself. The early-morning garden, trembling with the breath of innocence and the possibility of a fall. The nervous young woman, dressed as if for church. And the army private, dark as the neighborhood soil, grimed with Houston’s muck. They meet to the distant sound of gunfire, a city coming apart.

  The court finds him guilty and sentences him to be hanged by the neck until he is dead, along with twelve other mutinous souls. But more and more in my mind—since Mama’s death and my discoveries in her lint-filled chest of drawers—he merely reaches out to touch her sleeve, to stroke the wrist he has stroked so many times before.

  Does she pull back? Does she welcome his gesture? Does she know, even now, this meeting will lead to an unhappy dawn, a hidden grassy fringe, her confused shout as the gallows’ triggers roar back and ropes tighten like cramping muscles?

  An old woman shoves her screen door open, now, and stands, wearing a floured apron, on the yellow house’s porch. She squints at me, crouching in her garden. “Hello? Can I help you, young lady?”

  I rise, brushing my pants. Brock’s Combo Burger burps harsh, sizzling sounds through its window screens. Jukebox guitars: lost love, country-style. Pickles and mustard. Something sour.

  “No, thank you,” I call across the yard. “I was just admiring your peppers.”

  She frowns.

  I leave, knowing what Cletus Hayes must have felt many times. Harried. Undesired. But wearing my privileged skin, I can pass through town in ways he never could. I return to my car, moving with the confidence of someone secure behind a mask. I pull into the nice wide streets and vanish into the anonymous safety of white drivers going shopping or hauling their kids out to play in the parks.

  On Allen P
arkway, heading back to Freedmen’s Town, I pass row after charred row of neglected public housing. Neglect is the easiest form of eviction. Eventually, folks will move out on their own, worried for their children’s health (here, it appears to be mostly single black mothers and Vietnamese refugees). Then the land can be developed. It’s a little trick I’ve seen often since going to work for the mayor.

  Kids’ bikes rust in glass-toothed parking lots, dogs nose through mounds of shoes, abandoned baby clothes, Burger King bags. Empty gas cans, stuffed with rags, rust among sticker burrs, as if arson were as natural as shooting hoops. A way to pass the day.

  Around the block, a SWAT team, stealthy as an army, busts up a confab on a pitted volleyball court. Right out in the open, eight or nine teens, cuffed and forced to their knees. Down the street, nine- or ten-year-olds, signifying, mill around a liquor store. Shit man your nappy haid done been hit by a hurrican’. Like a ol’ rubber in the gutter, man, like your mama’s funky ol’ Milk Dud drawers. Facts is facts, they hard as rocks, your mama’s got a pussy like a Cracker Jacks box. I speed on by, then exit the parkway.

  The part of Freedmen’s Town I knew best as a girl curls around a cemetery dating back to slavery times, the Magnolia Blossom, on South Ruthven Street. Uncle Bitter’s house sits across the alley from it, with the AME Church just down the block. Bitter used to tell me his grave was already waiting for him, roomy and fresh, but I didn’t believe him. Visiting, I’d sit against the warm old stones on summer days, reading, coloring, or playing with my dolls.