Axeman's Jazz Read online

  “So where is he, then?”

  “Wherever the music take him.”

  Instead of filling in the holes after that, he distracted me with more of his spells. Mama wouldn’t ever talk about it (I remember asking her one night what a juke joint was. She frowned and turned away).

  Even now, I think, how can I ever know anything—much less everything—with so many layers to peel, starting with Bitter himself. Uncle Bitter. Uncle Remus. Uncle Tom. My God. Ever since I can remember, he’s accepted the ready-made role—did the family force it on him?—bouncing Ariyeh and me on his knees, erecting wild stories for us full of magic, acting the clown. How much of all this was part of a mask at first—now frozen in place—fashioned to protect himself? The happy-go-lucky nigger. I may never know.

  Listening to him and his buddies—

  “Mistah Bogue! What up?”

  “Shih. Cain’t kill nothing and won’t nothing die.”

  “Sho you right.”

  “Shut the noise.”

  “Yeah, it’s like that, I got it like that.”

  —I’m stunned at how neatly these duffers fit my image of old black men. But where is that image born? My actual memories of elders? Television? Movies? All of it. These fellows have embraced the stereotypes. Accepted their assignment from the world. As I’ve learned, acceptance is the easiest way to negotiate things. But it’s a complex transaction. Those radicals from the sixties who blew up buildings, then spent the next thirty years hiding in the open, changing their names, working respectable jobs, marrying, raising kids … were they disguised as pleasant middle-class people, masking their true violent natures, their repugnance for the systems around them, or were they, after all, what they appeared to be? Was their “radical” side the aberration? Or were they an honest, paradoxical mix? Bank robber-wealthy mom: will the real Patty Hearst step up?

  Looking around now—

  “Ace kool! What up, Doe?”

  “Just trying to make a dollar outta fifteen cent.”

  —it’s clear to me the choices have narrowed here. Back in the early seventies, I swear the neighborhood didn’t look this poor, didn’t resemble the image of a black enclave. The middle-class families hadn’t yet caught the gravy train; those “bettered” by the Movement hadn’t fled their brothers and sisters, the way Mama did. In those days, it was still possible to see black prosperity here. I remember handsome young men in African fabrics, collarless suits like Julius Nyerere wore. Tanzania’s president. He was a model of dignity and success pulling us up, out of ourselves. Or toward ourselves. Black nationalism. Pride. Afros and musk oil.

  Now, the whole place reeks of defeat: not so much alcohol and hash, but a smell of familiarity, predictability, of settling for what the world tells you to be.

  Something I know a thing or two about.

  Bitter winks at me across the table. “You like the music, Seam?”

  I nod, swallow some beer.

  “Axeman’s Jazz.”

  “Axeman?”

  “You don’t recall me spinning this when you’s a kid?”

  “No sir.”

  In his voice is a pinched reproach, a cricket’s rasp. He’s scolding me: ‘Course, I ain’t seen you since you’s a kid, have I now, Seamstress? You and your mama too fine for us folk?

  “Several year ago, here in Freedmen’s Quarter, there’s a series of axe murders,” he says in his smooth story-tone, and I do remember, some. “Always on Sunday nights. No one knew why. Someone mad at God? A grocer and his wife was found sliced into patties, like meat you’d feed a dog. A bartender. A streetwalker. Couple of the Axeman’s intendeds survived, all whittled-on, but they couldn’t agree what he looked like. One said he’s a midget. Another, a monster. Cops was kerflooied.

  “Finally one day a letter come to the Informer, our neighborhood rag. From the very sharp dude hisself. ‘Reason y’all fools cain’t catch me,’ he says, ‘is ‘cause I’s Puredee Spirit, a running-buddy of the Angel of Death Hisself. What y’all wastrels wallow in every day, your so-called worldly pleasures, they make me want to spit, ‘cept’—he hastens to unveil this, out of the blue—’very fond I am of jazz music’ (The preachers, of course, always used to tell us jazz was Lucifer’s tunes.) ‘So I swear by all the devils in the netherworld, them that’s swinging in their rooms Sunday nights’ll be spared. But them that ain’t jazzing, beware!’”

  Bitter swirls his malt liquor can. “Wellsir, that Sunday eve, everybody made damn sure they had ‘em some hot stuff on the phonograph. Those that didn’t have no stacks of wax stole ‘em. And no one croaked that night. After a few more shaky Sabbaths like this, the Axeman, he up and vanished. Shuffled on back to Hell where he belonged, folks said, toting his blade and a fiery clarinet, which you can still hear sometimes late at night, like a faraway train: a warning you been spared for now, but next time and tomorrow, who knows?

  “Ever’ since, it’s kind of a saying ‘round here. You know: you looking for peace of mind, we say you chasing the Axeman’s Jazz.”

  “Yes sir, that’s what I’m here for,” I say. “You got it.” He laughs. “You got it.” After a minute I venture, “Mama asked for you at the end.”

  He looks at his hands. “Shoulda ask for me long time ago. So you ain’t got a job now, or what? How come you can abandon the mayor and just hang here awhile?”

  “I’m on sabbatical.”

  “That like church?”

  “No. It’s earned leave. A friend of mine is watching my fish and my birds—”

  “Oh, so you a zookeeper now, too? Lot I don’t know ‘bout you, Seam. Like I say, your letter was short.”

  “There’s a lot I don’t know, too, Uncle Bitter.”

  “Might be you ready to ask?”

  “Might be.”

  “I don’t know all the answers.”

  “But you know some of them?”

  He shrugs, rises stiffly, and orders another round of drinks at the bar. His buddies watch me closely, nodding and smiling. One says, “Telisha. That like dee-lish?” I excuse myself.

  The ladies’ room smells of vomit and lilac perfume. The Tampax machine lies broken on the floor. I open a stall door. Just then one of the brandy women barrels in, heading for the stall next to mine. She gives me a hooded look—something she does with her brows—like, What your snowflake ass doing in here?

  She grunts and groans, and I hold back a little so as not to make much noise. So many ways to nearly disappear. I’ve tried them all, over the years. Dressing like everyone else. Hugging corners. Staying home. I remember sitting for an hour at a time in a bathroom stall in junior high school, because that was the only place I could escape the teasing. I’d made the mistake once, in seventh grade, of bringing home a friend; the next day, it was all over school: “You won’t believe it! Her mama’s black! She looks white, sort of, but she’s a Negro, all right, you can tell up close. Fat lips, flat nose.” In ninth grade, Troy Jones, my first crush, somehow hadn’t heard the talk. We hung out together at lunch, eating sandwiches and apples under an oak tree just outside the cafeteria. He was a merit scholar and an athlete, tall and muscular, a honeyed, varnished color. His father was the first black banker I’d met. Troy told me up front he didn’t want to date me because I looked too much like a boy—thin, no hips, no breasts to speak of (that hasn’t changed). But he liked me “as a friend.”

  One day I told him what I knew about my family, hoping he might date me if he thought I was more like him. He stood, bread crumbs spilling from his pants, pulled me up beside him, and walked around me slowly, rubbing his chin, saying, “Mmm-hmmm. Mmm-hmmm.” He ran a finger down my arm, my back, across the flat cotton bra beneath my blouse. Finally, he stepped back. “Girl, you telling me you’re a nigger?”

  When I didn’t answer and began to cry, he dropped the jive act. He hugged me. “You must really be confused.” No one had said this to me before—no one had understood it—and I cried even harder. Later that day, after classes, he caught me in the
hallway. “Here,” he said. “I have something for you.” He handed me a paperback copy of Claude Brown’s Manchild in the Promised Land, with a picture of Harlem on the cover. “This will tell you who you are.”

  “What is it?”

  “Brother tells it straight, growing up black in white America. This is your heritage, girl.”

  For the next week I tried to read the book, but I didn’t see myself in it anywhere. Claude Brown was writing about the North. The East. Most of all, he was writing about being a man. In one passage, he talked about going away to college and partying for the first time with white women. “I never would have thought that white girls could be so nice,” he said. “Cats could look all up under their dresses and everything, and all they did was laugh.”

  One day I told Troy I didn’t understand this bit about the kitties. He laughed so hard he nearly choked on his sandwich. “Cats. You know, guys. Fellas. Dudes.”

  “They go to college so they can look up white girls’ dresses?”

  “The girls don’t mind, see. That’s the point.”

  “I don’t believe it.”

  “No no no. See, since slavery times, the black man has been lynched and shit for even looking at white girls funny. Claude’s saying this is the white man’s insecurity, ‘cause the girls themselves, they get a kick from it.

  “I’m sorry, I don’t believe that.”

  “You’re not reading ideologically, Telisha. Smartly. Maybe I should have started you with Frantz Fanon. He’s all about the mind-set, see, how the mind-set of the perennially oppressed—”

  “I don’t like it when somebody looks up my dress.”

  “Telisha—”

  “Well, I don’t!”

  Exasperated, he grabbed his lunch sack. “That’s ‘cause you’ve been raised a proper white bitch. Grow up.”

  I wanted to tell him he’d just proven the falsity of Claude Brown’s passage, but he’d already stalked away.

  In high school, I tried consciously to embrace my blackness. This was difficult in Dale Licht’s house (“You married him for his home and his money!’ I used to scream at Mama, and we’d both collapse in tears). Each Wednesday night he’d take us to his country club for steaks and baked potatoes. He’d chat with his weekend golfing buddies, Mama would make several trips to the bathroom—to see if she could still pass for white, I accused her—and I watched the black waiters bring us our food, yes sir-ing, yes ma’am-ing to and from the kitchen.

  Among the lawyer set in Dallas, the moneyed folks, mixed-race marriages were less rare than I would have thought, and I could almost believe that color was less and less a problem all the time. But then, on any given day in the hallways at school, I’d hear light-skinned blacks taunt their darker friends until the friendships blew apart in rage and recrimination, and I realized it was a mistake to relax too much.

  On some Wednesdays I’d bring a book of poetry with me to the country club, Maya Angelou, Nikki Giovanni, Ntozake Shange, but Dale would always say, “Put that away, Tish. Sit up, now, and eat your dinner.”

  “My name is Telisha. Don’t whiten it.”

  “Hush now. Put your napkin in your lap. Use your fork on those peas, not your knife.”

  So I’d read the books at school, hiding in a bathroom stall. I loved the poems but still didn’t find myself in any words I saw. My blood may have been black, but my skin didn’t let on, and Mama had whisked me, early, from the only black community I’d ever known. I was living now in an all-white Dallas suburb. Shange didn’t have nothing to say ‘bout that. I ached for Ariyeh, then. She had been dark as the back of a closet, as a kid. She could teach me something about myself, I thought. But Mama had made it clear we were to have nothing more to do with our Houston kin.

  Maybe if I learn black women’s history, I reasoned, I’ll discover a tradition I can respond to. But even the driest books in our school library crumbled into stereotypes: “Mammy reflected two traditions perceived as positive by Southerners—that of the idealized slave and that of the idealized woman.”

  And this, from an essay entitled “The Life Cycle of the Female Slave,” sillier than Claude Brown—the lines so astonished me, I committed them to memory, word for word: “Most slave girls grew up believing that boys and girls were equal. Had they been white and free, they would have learned that women were the maidservants of men.”

  Thank God we didn’t grow up white and free, or we’d have thought men were better than we were? After reading the lines a dozen times, I tore the essay up and flushed it, piece by piece, down the john.

  Water gurgles through pipes. Wet, wheezing sighs. The brandy woman paws a roll of toilet paper, pulls up her stockings, flushes. I can feel her chill through the metal stall partition. Water splashes in the sink, a compact clicks, lips smack; the door eases shut. For several minutes, I linger until I’m sure she’s gone.

  Earl and his mates have given the floor to a new guitarist, “Bayou Slim,” who has just walked in the door “hauling a scuttery-looking old Gibson and a tiny Fender amp,” Bitter says. The man is ravaged, wraithlike, wearing a straw cowboy hat and sharecropper clothes: blue denim shirt and faded overalls. Drunk or doped, he prances about in small, spasmodic jerks, a Stepin Fetchit caricature. He assaults his guitar, making it snap and clatter. Voice like a wall falling down. The chords pierce my ears, as painful as the splinter in my thumb.

  “Poor old soul,” Bitter says. Earl and the others sit, patiently, while Slim gyrates and wails. The crowd ignores him, mostly, though quietly and politely. I wiggle the splinter and finally pull it out just as Slim reaches a shrieking climax. He drops to his knees, shaking and sweating, then tugs off his hat, offers it like an alms bowl around the room, dragging his guitar behind him. People fill the hat with coins.

  “Every Sunday,” Bitter tells me, “Etta lets him into the gut bucket here to do one tune. Act of mercy. Man used to be great. Claimed his old axe was made of wood from the last slave ship ever docked in America. Man, he knew them field-holler blues.” He offers Slim a dollar; I follow suit. A solemn dignity attends the crowd’s charity, and for the first time tonight, I sense a warm, admirable community, a fellowship whose embrace I’d happily welcome.

  Slim transfers his earnings to his pockets, gathers his equipment, and shambles out the door, letting in a gust of heat and several gray moths. Earl screams into his mike, “Come on over, baby!” and the band lurches into a stumbling rockabilly gallop.

  It’s past one now. Bitter looks tired. He rubs his chest and breathes like a running man. The ladies sip their brandy, sneaking glances my way. People are dancing now, all over the room. Watching them, I realize there are no young men here. Besides me, a few other women, the drummer and the bass player (who look like they’d rather be elsewhere), everyone is well past fifty. Where are the boys? The next generation? The future? I remember the SWAT team this afternoon, rounding up kids on the volleyball court.

  Someone mad at God?

  The old man dancing solo careens against the crates. A fellow helps him to a chair, gently takes his flask, then orders him coffee. A woman who’s been smoking in a corner hacks and gasps. Bitter’s buddies are nodding off, catching themselves, shaking their heads. Bitter smiles at me. “Welcome home, Seam.” It sounds like a challenge.

  I push aside my empty beer bottles, lean across the table, ask him, “How’s Ariyeh? When can I see her?”

  “She a schoolteacher now. You knew that, right?”

  I didn’t.

  “Have to give her a call. Or you can drop by her school tomorrow. They in summer session. She usually take lunch ‘round twelve-thirty or so. How the mud-dauber shack working out?”

  “It’s fine.”

  “Not too hot?”

  “Not too hot.” I want him to know I’m up to his challenge. “Thanks for bringing me here. To this place.”

  He glances away: the same I-don’t-give-a-shit the women have affected all night to flirt with Earl. Bitter yells loudly, “Hey man! Give us som
e of that ‘Gallis Pole’!” His breath comes hard and he winces.

  Earl turns to his mates, whispers instructions, then the band eases into another old Leadbelly tune. I remember it from Uncle’s records, back when I was a girl. When I was someone else entirely. Earl chants breathlessly about needing some silver, needing some gold, anything to keep him from the gallows pole.

  A chill slants down my spine. Bitter won’t look at me, his way of telling me I know what you’re here for. This is for you. Earl’s voice lunges from beat to beat like the shuffling of shackled feet, and I hear in his mournful rasp all the low-down, dirty fears of a Southern-cursed man. Dead frogs on a doorstep, ‘gators under the house … hup, two, three, four … Private, that’s a white woman there … look away, look away, look away.

  Keep me from the gallows pole.

  I leave several bills on the table for my beer. Bitter half turns when I rise. “Maybe tomorrow we tackle some of them questions you might be ready to ask?”

  “Yes,” I say, swaying, tipsier than I’d realized.

  “Find your way home all right?”

  “I think so.”

  “Don’t see nothing, don’t say nothing.”

  His buddies wish me good-night; I push by the old scarecrow, who’s sipping oily coffee now. Etta carries a new crate of Coors behind the bar, her back a bent scythe. In the parking lot, my car is hemmed in by two big vans. I try to maneuver between them. A man smoking in the dim-bulbed doorway calls, “You ain’t gonna make it, sugar.”

  I stick my head out the window. “Do you know who owns these?”

  “Sure. I go find ‘em for you.” He slips inside the bar, returns with two drunks. They grumble but move their vans for me. The smoker approaches my door. “You wouldn’t have seventy-five cents, would you, so I can get me a new pack of weeds?”

  I search my purse. “This is the smallest I have,” I say, and hand him a five-dollar bill. “Thanks for your help.”