Axeman's Jazz Read online

  “Damn!” he says, stuffing the five in his jeans. “You have a good night, now.” Grateful. Hostile. The white princess in her fine new carriage, treating everyone like property. The good Samaritan who becomes, the instant money changes hands, just another black man begging on the street. Damn is right.

  I pull away, past the Flower Man’s house. Under sodium streetlights, its roses glow like coral. The bottle tree shivers, releasing a low, bluesy moan in the breeze.

  I wake in the dark, in the mud-dauber shack, sweating and sore-boned. The mattress is sodden. Spiders dabble in the corner. I’d dreamed of the gallows again. Standing on the meadow’s fringes, tugging nervously on my gloves, I believed I heard my name from the shackled huddle. “Sarah! Sarah!” I strained to see past the armed guards blocking the folding chairs. A hawk called in the sky. Sun broke through the clouds.

  The next thing I knew, the men were shivering on the scaffolding; creaking, the nooses were lowered. A black minister strolled among the prisoners, gently touching their shoulders, asking them if they had any final wishes. No one spoke. Then, at the clergyman’s urging, the men said, in unison, “Father, into Thy hands I commend my spirit. Lord Jesus receive my soul.”

  The dream shifted then. Ariyeh and I were little girls in peppermint nightgowns, sharing a bed. Cletus Hayes stood at the window with a broken, bloody neck. “Niece?” he gurgled. I clutched Ariyeh’s hand, whispered, “If I die before I wake / I pray the Lord my soul will take …”

  3

  AT THREE, I’m awakened again by the heat. I sit up, still a little swirly from the beer. Flitting and buzzing, near the ceiling. I reach for the flashlight: a hoedown of roaches and moths. Groaning, I stand, then nearly trip on my bag. The Crisis pokes from its mouth—bold letters heading a lengthy article: “Prize Babies.” I pull it out. In the piece, W. E. B. Du Bois urges black families to breed and train a “new, pedigreed Negro”: “If we strive earnestly to make our children Puritan in morals …” The flashlight flickers; I give it a shake. “… there will be no baffling Negro problem a generation hence.”

  I laugh loudly, sending bugs scurrying toward the corners. Well now, W. E. B., if you’d come with me to the gut bucket tonight, you’d have seen that “breeding” has a lot more to do with lubricant and a good blues groove than love of the race. Look at me. I’m no “Prize Baby.” A mix of God knows what, who sure as hell didn’t show up with any pedigree.

  I need to pee. Uncle Bitter said he’d leave the back door open, but I picture myself stumbling over newspapers, records, and chairs, frightening him awake like a visit from the Axeman. So I pull on my clothes, then go squat in the yard behind the mud-dauber shack. Willow limbs whisper above me. Sleek, dark creatures slice the air. Bats? It must be past their bedtime. I wipe myself with a Kleenex, then zip my jeans. Behind Bitter’s yard, the alley smells of wet cardboard. I toss the Kleenex over the fence: a ragged line of rotting pine boards. I step through one of the gaps, into the alley, then out to the street. Childhood terror swarms my chest, freezing me. I remember the fascination of the street when I was small. Mama said it was a hazardous place. The passing cars startled me, of course, but thrilled me too with their sharp, metallic colors, their glorious speed. Terror had such power to arouse, and it was so available: look how easily alleys, sidewalks, grassy yards gave way to dangerous lanes. Did this mean that safe and not-safe were really just the same?

  My legs tingled, as they do now, whenever Mama took my hand and walked me across hot asphalt on our way to the store. I remember her scolding Ariyeh and me not to “show out” in public whenever we acted up in the market. Other black moms were also strict, tsk-ing at Chicano and white kids who “ran wild.” This, too, was a pleasurable terror: the core of anger in our usually quiet mothers. Later, in Dallas, Mama remained unshakably strict, a holdover of our “down low” days before she remade us both.

  When I went to work for the mayor, I was surprised to learn that remaking wasn’t just a black thing—it was as All-American as baseball and flag waving, two activities the mayor wore out during his reelection campaign, my first year on his staff. First pitches. Hitches on star-spangled parade floats. Mama loved these PR displays and appreciated my small part in them. But behind the scenes, the patriotic fanfare gave way to cynical maneuvering, just as smoothly as an alley slopes into a street.

  Occasionally the mayor visited the city’s “oldest neighborhoods,” which offered the “most affordable housing.” Everyone on staff understood that when he mentioned old neighborhoods, he meant the black parts of town; “affordable housing” meant project homes. In courting the black vote, he remade himself into a civil rights champion (despite his abysmal record there). His hypocrisy disturbed many of his supporters, but he’d finally come ‘round to broadening his constituency, and we figured that was a good thing—even if he was spurred by polls that showed him trailing his opponent among minority voters.

  I was stunned one morning when one of his aides ordered me to join the motorcade. My first limo! “Why me?” I asked. “The mayor thinks you might be useful at one or two stops he’s scheduled to make.” “My specialty is city planning,” I protested. “I don’t know the first thing about campaigning.” “Well, here’s your chance to learn.”

  I wasn’t useful at all. For hours, I stood with other staffers as the mayor ate barbecued chicken and watermelon for carefully planned photo ops in an especially picturesque “old neighborhood.” He coddled several prize babies. Later, an inner-circle flunky confessed to me the mayor wanted me there after someone had pointed out to him I’d checked “African American” on my job application. “Hell, she doesn’t look like one,” he reportedly said. “But if she knows the lingo, maybe she can bail me out if I step into a load of crap.”

  So the paper trail had caught up with me. The rest of the campaign, I had a seat in a limo, three cars behind the mayor, whenever he made a run into “old” Dallas. I never did a thing—what he thought I could do, I don’t know. He was adroit, deft, and charming, a natural vote-hound. Only once did he speak to me. One afternoon, in a ribs joint on the banks of the Trinity River, he wiped barbecue sauce from his hands so he could dandle a few squealing babies, then leaned close and whispered, “That old cook in the corner, he’s seventy-five years old, you believe that? That’s what he told me.” He nodded at a tall, stooped man smoking a hand-rolled cigarette just inside the kitchen. “He don’t look a day over fifty. I swear, blacks wear their age better than white folks do. Me, I look a full ten years older’n I am—no no, don’t flatter me, darling, I know it’s true.” He pulled a squirming girl to his chest. “Hell, this hustling life grinding me down.”

  I thought of the old adage Black don’t crack. I’d heard it in high school—football jocks sizing up a buddy’s sexy mom—and wondered if I’d inherited a smooth, lingering youth despite my skin color. I also thought of Cletus Hayes, slumped at the end of a rope. He’d be young forever. An eternal “Negro problem.”

  In cuteness and charm, the babies the mayor kissed were all award winners, but you couldn’t say their folks were pedigreed. As with the ribs cook, their youthful faces were offset by harsh surroundings, faded clothes, callused hands. Aimlessness. Hopelessness. The mayor wanted their votes, but it was clear he didn’t have any solutions to “baffling Negro problems”—chronic poverty, drug use in some of the neighborhoods, the way the black middle class had abandoned its brothers and sisters—and he didn’t plan to look for answers. Often, after a day in the projects, he’d attend gala fundraisers and promise his white donors he’d pursue a “Broken Windows” policy in the city’s poorest areas, cracking down on vandalism and petty mischief to deter larger crimes.

  His cynicism and the smugness of his staff, who regarded the public as lazy kids to be “educated,” numbed me. The mayor’s girl, I wasn’t. Every day I thought of walking off my job. But I also liked belonging to a team, even a corrupt team; I’d been a loner so long. Besides, the campaign season was short. My real job was helping
city planners: honest, absorbing work.

  One day, a week before the election, the mayor led us to a wasteland in south Dallas, a shambles of crack houses, meth labs, prostitution fronts. He proposed a sixteen million dollar renovation plan, bringing “new energy and opportunity to this traditionally blighted area.” He announced support of a development firm that planned to build a huge apartment complex here. Several staffers smirked, assuming this was baloney, easy to ditch once the election was over (the polls had now tipped decisively in the mayor’s favor). What they didn’t know, and I did, was that this area bordered a soon-to-be-completed freeway, so the land value was bound to increase. I’d examined the documents in the city planning office. Even if the developers simply maintained low-income housing while waiting for the value to peak, the federal government would guarantee them $400,000 a month in subsidies, plus tax credits of over $1.5 million a year. And the mayor sat on the firm’s board. In this light, some baffling Negro problems didn’t seem so baffling, after all.

  I was happy when the votes were counted, the black babies left alone—when my presence was no longer “useful,” and I could resume dreaming of better cities.

  The flashlight wavers again, a weak battery. I shut it off and stand at the alley’s edge. Frogs chirp in humid fields nearby. I remember Mama telling Ariyeh and me good-night as frog chrrs drifted through open windows, then grew louder, softer, louder, a lulling night cycle. As she stood in our bedroom doorway, did Mama think of me as a “prize”? Mostly, I remember her correcting me as I grew older: “Get that mush out of your mouth. Speak clearly.” Or: “Don’t slouch like some grumbly ghetto kid. You’re better than that.”

  Speak clearly. Lord. Another alley memory nudges me now. When I was eight or nine, and we’d returned to Houston for a visit, Mama sometimes walked me across here to a falling-down house at the edge of a culvert. There, I’d read to an elderly shut-in. I don’t recall her name, just her appallingly large head, her concave temples as though she were a slowly leaking balloon, and her thatch of hair, as fervid as Frederick Douglass’s ‘fro in those famous sepia pictures of him. As I read aloud—articles from Time, Ebony, Jet—Mama sat in a corner of the bedroom (a lemony soap and talcum odor in the doilies, the rug) correcting me when I slipped up, urging me to speak more clearly, enunciate, louder, louder. Who were these sessions really for, the old woman who needed distraction, or me, who apparently needed lessons in English usage? We were back in the old neighborhood, but this wasn’t my old Mama. This was the Dallas matron, the “Northerner,” training me to better myself, to shake off musty smells from dingy old rooms, to learn the rules of language and proper bearing. In the green-gold afternoon light, streaming through dirty windows past water-damaged curtains, Mama’s face was as delicately stern as a piece of hand-painted china, beautiful but precise in a predictably strict way that diminished its loveliness. Even when she smiled she seemed on the verge of terror, as I did, facing the street. What did she fear? That I’d never learn to enunciate clearly? Or was she reliving her own girlhood, gazing at me, the lessons that took, the ones she ignored? What traps was she still trying to flee, through me?

  We weren’t alone with the grand old dame. By an old chifforobe, in a spoke-backed chair covered with a simple cotton quilt, a boy sat day after day, maybe fourteen or fifteen. I don’t know who he was or what he was called. The old woman’s nephew? Grandson? I must have been told these things, but they’re lost to me now. He’d pull the quilt around his shoulders—though the room was a sweatbox—and watch my lips as I read. His stare was like the looking-at Ariyeh and I got from the old men when we walked home from church, a gaze that said I want to do things to you, and it made me feel both powerful and afraid. Look how I can make a boy set his jaw, I thought, fix his eyes on me, feverish, raw, but what else might he do if Mama weren’t here? She saw this silent exchange, and it gave her even more to dread, I’m sure—reminded her, perhaps, of her own buzzy stirrings, her first longings, in the bayou heat. Is that why we finally stopped calling on the old woman? Did Mama not want me to connect Houston’s swelter with the curious warmth just starting to prickle between my legs? Did she hope the old neighborhood would hold for me no romance?

  If she caught me sloe-eyed on my bed, my hand drifting lazily down my belly, she’d tell me to sit up, get busy, do something useful. At night, I’d often dream of being smothered in one of her quilts, and I’d wake, gasping, then slip out of bed, careful not to stir Ariyeh. At least twice that I recall, I walked out to the alley, right to the edge of the chancy street, and sat in the dark, imagining the shut-in boy, as I thought of him, finding me here. I got goosebumps wondering what would happen if he did. I sat in the dirt, in my slippers and peppermint gown, rocking, rocking, my forearm stiff between my legs.

  Now, I slide down the hot, dry culvert and cross a brambly lot. The old woman’s house is gone. I never saw the boy again. Soon after the summer-of-reading-aloud, Mama stopped bringing me back to Houston.

  Frog clicks. Crickets. Grackles, not bats. I sit in a damp patch of grass. The flashlight is dead so I set it aside, breathe deep. I’m sorry I wasn’t a prize baby, Mama. I’m sorry I felt what I did in the old lady’s room. But see? I’ve done all right. I’ve bettered myself. These days, I can read most anything, even boring statistical reports composed for the mayor, transportation plans, and land development codes. I can wear any mask and wear it well. Black don’t crack.

  But those old feelings … that lazy, dizzying heat … the breathlessness, the buzz …

  I grip myself, rock in the dark, cover my mouth so all I hear are cricket songs, croaks.

  4

  UNCLE BITTER wakes me, midmorning, tapping the door with his foot. “Got breakfast, Seam. You dress?”

  “Hold on.” I scramble from under the sheets, pull on a fresh pair of underwear, some jeans, and a Dallas Cowboys T-shirt. “Come in.”

  With crusty old oven mitts he’s carrying a steaming bowl. He sets it on the floor, returns to the house, and comes back with a teapot and a cookie sheet brimming with soft brown rolls. “Made us some molasses bread and some oatmeal. You girls used to love this stuff, remember?”

  I do: slow summer mornings, Ariyeh and I would beg to eat breakfast in the backyard—it was usually cooler outside, early in the day, than it was in the house. Uncle Bitter served us on the lawn.

  “You ain’t gonna win no popularity contests wearing that,” he says, pointing with one hand at my shirt, stirring the oatmeal with the other.

  “I don’t figure I’m going to be very popular around here, anyway,” I say, smiling. “A coworker of mine was a finalist for the Cowboys cheerleading squad. She got a handful of promotional clothing and passed it out at work.”

  “Pretty blonde?”

  “No. She was black, as a matter of fact.” Black like me. Day-black.

  “Hm. I only seen pretty blondes when I watch the games on the tee-vee.” As he stirs, he watches me comb my hair with my hands. It’s shoulder length, straight, and seems to intrigue and appall him, equally.

  “I used to get up early in the morning, ‘fore you girls was awake, chop the walnuts and the apricots, flake a little coconut, sift the good brown sugar into the oats …”

  “Where was Mama?”

  “Your mama slept in a lot, them days.” He pours us some weak red tea. “That where you want to start wit’ your questions?”

  The oatmeal’s earthy smell joins grass and oak bark in the air, mint from Bitter’s garden, and the sweet scent of apples from a neighbor’s tree. Sunlight pokes through an open knothole in the shed’s east wall, lands, parchment colored, on the red flannel nailed above the pillow.

  “No. I do have lots of questions about Mama—and my dad,” I say. “But let’s start at the start.”

  He hands me a roll along with a bowl of oats. We sit cross-legged on the mattress, facing each other. Sparrows are wild in the trees. I notice an empty cicada shell in a corner, brittle as spun sugar.

  “All the w
ay back? What you know?”

  “Mama never told me a thing. Beyond the rape story, I mean.”

  “I’da told you, when you’s of an age to truly take it in. But you never come back.”

  “Mama didn’t want—”

  “When you reach a certain point, it ain’t your mama no more. It was you. You decided we wasn’t no part of your life.”

  “You’re right. I’m sorry.”

  He rubs his chest.

  “I missed you so much, and Ariyeh, in junior high and high school. When Mama married Mr. Licht, I knew she intended for me to become a good suburban kid. White bread. Well-to-do. I rebelled for a while, claiming my heritage. Reading Maya Angelou.” I laugh. “But by the time I got to college—I don’t know, maybe it took, finally. Mama’s pressure. Or maybe I got tired of fighting. Not fitting in. Maybe I opted for the easy way out. I figured, ‘I look white. Why not take advantage of that? It’s the way to get ahead.’ So that’s what I did.”

  “I always worried for you. At war with yourself. It showed in your body, your play. You and Ariyeh be drawing, she churning out one finished picture after another, you rubbing everything out, starting over all the time.”

  “Start me again, Uncle Bitter. With the gallows. Please.”

  He sets his bowl on the ground, wipes his mouth with his wide, callused palm. “All right. You know the name Cletus Hayes?”

  “Yes sir.” I tell him I learned the official story from the trial transcripts. I tell him about C’s letter and the Crisis.

  He grins. “So she kept that stuff, did she?”

  “Piecing it together, then … I figure it wasn’t rape. Right? Or not exactly. Maybe he forced himself on her that night, flushed from the riot, but … I figure Cletus Hayes and Sarah Morgan had a relationship—”

  “Fancy talk. They’s in love.”

  I brush bread crumbs from my fingers. “How do you know this?”