If you know jazz, you know about him, and the title of this memoir tells you who he is. If you don’t know the music, his name doesn’t matter. I’ll call him Hat. What does matter is what he meant. I don’t mean what he meant to people who were touched by what he said through his horn. (His horn was an old Selmer Balanced Action tenor saxophone, most of its lacquer worn off.) I’m talking about the whole long curve of his life, and the way that what appeared to be a long slide from joyous mastery to outright exhaustion can be seen in another way altogether.
Hat did slide into alcoholism and depression. The last ten years of his life amounted to suicide by malnutrition, and he was almost transparent by the time he died in the hotel room where I met him. Yet he was able to play until nearly the end. When he was working, he would wake up around seven in the evening, listen to Frank Sinatra or Billie Holiday records while he dressed, get to the club by nine, play three sets, come back to his room sometime after three, drink and listen to more records (he was on a lot of those records), and finally go back to bed around the time day people begin thinking about lunch. When he wasn’t working, he got into bed about an hour earlier, woke up about five or six, and listened to records, and drank through his long upside-down day.
It sounds like a miserable life, but it was just an unhappy one. The unhappiness came from a deep, irreversible sadness. Sadness is different from misery, at least Hat’s was. His sadness seemed impersonal—it did not disfigure him, as misery can do. Hat’s sadness seemed to be for the universe, or to be a larger than usual personal share of a sadness already existing in the universe. Inside it, Hat was unfailingly gentle, kind, even funny. His sadness seemed merely the opposite face of the equally impersonal happiness that shone through his earlier work.
In Hat’s later years, his music thickened, and sorrow spoke through the phrases. In his last years, what he played often sounded like heartbreak itself. He was like someone who had passed through a great mystery, who was passing through a great mystery, and had to speak of what had seen, what he was seeing.
I brought two boxes of records with me when I first came to New York from Evanston, Illinois, where I’d earned a B.A. in English at Northwestern, and the first thing I set up in my shoebox at the top of John Jay Hall in Columbia University was my portable record player. I did everything to music in those days, and I supplied the rest of my unpacking with a soundtrack provided by Hat’s disciples. The kind of music I most liked when I was twenty-one was called “cool” jazz, but my respect for Hat, the progenitor of this movement, was almost entirely abstract. I didn’t know his earliest records, and all I’d heard of his later style was one track on a Verve sampler album. I thought he must almost certainly be dead, and I imagined that if by some miracle he was still alive, he would have been in his early seventies, like Louis Armstrong. In fact, the man who seemed a virtual ancient to me was a few months short of his fiftieth birthday.
In my first weeks at Columbia I almost never left the campus. I was taking five courses, also a seminar that was intended to lead me to a master’s thesis, and when I was not in lecture halls or my room, I was in the library. But by the end of September, feeling less overwhelmed, I began to go downtown to Greenwich Village. The IRT, the only subway line I actually understood, described a straight north-south axis that allowed you to get on at 116th Street and get off at Sheridan Square. From Sheridan Square radiated out an unimaginable wealth (unimaginable if you’d spent the previous four years in Evanston, Illinois) of cafés, bars, restaurants, record shops, bookstores, and jazz clubs. I’d come to New York to get an M.A. in English but I’d also come for this.
I learned that Hat was still alive about seven o’clock in the evening on the first Saturday in October when I saw a poster bearing his name on the window of a storefront jazz club near St. Mark’s Place. My conviction that Hat was dead was so strong that I first saw the poster as an advertisement of past glory. I stopped to gaze longer at this relic of a historical period. Hat had been playing with a quartet including a bassist and drummer of his own era, musicians long associated with him. But the piano player had been John Hawes, one of my musicians—John Hawes was on half a dozen of the records back in John Jay Hall. He must have been about twenty at the time, I thought, convinced that the poster had been preserved as memorabilia. Maybe Hawes’s first job had been with Hat—anyhow, Hat’s quartet must have been one of Hawes’s first stops on the way to fame. John Hawes was a great figure to me, and the thought of him playing with a back number like Hat was a disturbance in the texture of reality. I looked down at the date on the poster, and my snobbish and rule-bound version of reality shuddered under another assault of the unthinkable. Hat’s engagement had begun on the Tuesday of this week—the first Tuesday in October, and its last night took place on the Sunday after next—the Sunday before Halloween. Hat was still alive, and John Hawes was playing with him. I couldn’t have told you which half of this proposition was the more surprising.
To make sure, I went inside and asked the short, impassive man behind the bar if John Hawes was really playing there tonight. “He’d better be, if he wants to get paid,” the man said.
“So Hat is still alive,” I said.
“Put it this way,” he said. “If it was you, you probably wouldn’t be.”
Two hours and twenty minutes later, Hat came through the front door, and I saw what he meant. Maybe a third of the tables between the door and the bandstand were filled with people listening to the piano trio. This was what I’d come for, and I thought that the evening was perfect. I hoped that Hat would stay away. All he could accomplish by showing up would be to steal soloing time from Hawes, who, apart from seeming a bit disengaged, was playing wonderfully. Maybe Hawes always seemed a bit disengaged. That was fine with me. Hawes was supposed to be cool. Then the bass player looked toward the door and smiled, and the drummer grinned and knocked one stick against the side of his snare drum in a rhythmic figure that managed both to suit what the trio was playing and serve as a half-comic, half-respectful greeting. I turned away from the trio and looked back toward the door. The bent figure of a light-skinned black man in a long, drooping, dark coat was carrying a tenor saxophone case into the club. Layers of airline stickers covered the case, and a black pork pie hat concealed most of the man’s face. As soon as he got past the door, he fell into a chair next to an empty table—really fell, as if he would need a wheelchair to get any farther.
Most of the people who had watched him enter turned back to John Hawes and the trio, who were beginning the last few choruses of “Love Walked In.” The old man laboriously unbuttoned his coat and let it fall off his shoulders and onto the back of the chair. Then, with the same painful slowness, he lifted the hat off his head and lowered it to the table beside him. A brimming shotglass had appeared between himself and the hat, though I hadn’t noticed any of the waiters or waitresses put it there. Hat picked up the glass and poured its entire contents into his mouth. Before he swallowed, he let himself take in the room, moving his eyes without changing the position of his head. He was wearing a dark gray suit, a blue shirt with a tight tab collar, and a black knit tie. His face looked soft and worn with drink, and his eyes were of no real color at all, as if not merely washed out but washed clean. He bent over, unlocked the case, and began assembling his horn. As soon as “Love Walked In” ended, he was on his feet, clipping the horn to his strap and walking toward the bandstand. There was some quiet applause.
Hat stepped neatly up onto the bandstand, acknowledged us with a nod, and whispered something to John Hawes, who raised his hands to the keyboard. The drummer was still grinning, and the bassist had closed his eyes. Hat tilted his horn to one side, examined the mouthpiece, and slid it a tiny distance down the cork. He licked the reed, tapped his foot twice, and put his lips around the mouthpiece.
What happened next changed my life—changed me, anyhow. It was like discovering that some vital, even necessary substance had all along been missing from my life. Anyone who hears a great musician for the first time knows the feeling that the universe has just expanded. In fact, all that happened was that Hat had started playing “Too Marvelous for Words,” one of the twenty-odd songs that were his entire repertoire at the time. Actually, he was playing some oblique, one-time-only melody of his own that floated above “Too Marvelous for Words,” and this spontaneous melody seemed to me to comment affectionately on the song while utterly transcending it—to turn a nice little song into something profound. I forgot to breathe for a little while, and goosebumps came up on my arms. Halfway through Hat’s solo, I saw John Hawes watching him and realized that Hawes, whom I all but revered, revered him. But by that time, I did, too.
I stayed for all three sets, and after my seminar the next day, I went down to Sam Goody and bought five of Hat’s records, all I could afford. That night, I went back to the club and took a table right in front of the bandstand. For the next two weeks, I occupied the same table every night I could persuade myself that I did not have to study—eight or nine out of the twelve nights Hat worked. Every night was like the first: The same things, in the same order, happened. Halfway through the first set, Hat turned up and collapsed into the nearest chair. Unobtrusively, a waiter put a drink beside him. Off went the pork pie and the long coat, and out from its case came the horn. The waiter carried the case, pork pie, and coat into a back room while Hat drifted toward the bandstand, often still fitting the pieces of his saxophone together. He stood straighter, seemed almost to grow taller, as he got on the stand. A nod to his audience, an inaudible word to John Hawes. And then that sense of passing over the border between very good, even excellent, music and majestic, mysterious art. Between songs, Hat sipped from a glass placed beside his left foot. Three forty-five-minute sets. Two half-hour breaks, during which Hat disappeared through a door behind the bandstand. The same twenty or so songs, recycled again and again. Ecstasy, as if I were hearing Mozart play Mozart.
One afternoon toward the end of the second week, I stood up from a library book I was trying to stuff whole into my brain—Modern Approaches to Milton—and walked out of my carrel to find whatever I could that had been written about Hat. I’d been hearing the sound of Hat’s tenor in my head ever since I’d gotten out of bed. And in those days, I was a sort of apprentice scholar: I thought that real answers in the form of interpretations could be found in the pages of scholarly journals. If there were at least a thousand, maybe two thousand, articles concerning John Milton in Low Memorial Library, shouldn’t there be at least a hundred about Hat? And out of the hundred shouldn’t a dozen or so at least begin to explain what happened to me when I heard him play? I was looking for close readings of his solos, for analyses that would explain Hat’s effects in terms of subdivided rhythms, alternate chords, and note choices, in the way that poetry critics parsed diction levels, inversions of meter, and permutations of imagery.
Of course, I did not find a dozen articles that applied a musicological version of the New Criticism to Hat’s recorded solos. I found six old concert write-ups in The New York Times, maybe as many record reviews in jazz magazines, and a couple of chapters in jazz histories. Hat had been born in Mississippi, played in his family band, left after a mysterious disagreement at the time they were becoming a successful “territory” band, then joined a famous jazz band in its infancy and quit, again mysteriously, just after its breakthrough into nationwide success. After that, he went out on his own. It seemed that if you wanted to know about him, you had to go straight to the music: there was virtually nowhere else to go.
I wandered back from the catalogues to my carrel, closed the door on the outer world, and went back to stuffing Modern Approaches to Milton into my brain. At about six o’clock, I opened the carrel door and realized that I could write about Hat. Given the paucity of criticism of his work—given the virtual absence of information about the man himself—I virtually had to write something. The only drawback to this inspiration was that I knew nothing about music. I could not write the sort of article I had wished to read. What I could do, however, would be to interview the man. Potentially, an interview would be more valuable than analysis. I could fill in the dark places, answer the unanswered questions—why had he left both bands just as they began to do well? I wondered if he’d had problems with his father, and then transferred these problems to his next bandleader. There had to be some kind of story. Any band within smelling distance of its first success would be more than reluctant to lose its star soloist—wouldn’t they beg him, bribe him, to stay? I could think of other questions no one had ever asked: Who had influenced him? What did he think of all those tenor players whom he had influenced? Was he friendly with any of his artistic children? Did they come to his house and talk about music?
Above all, I was curious about the texture of his life—I wondered what his life, the life of a genius, tasted like. If I could have put my half-formed fantasies into words, I would have described my naïve, uninformed conceptions of Leonard Bernstein’s surroundings. Mentally, I equipped Hat with a big apartment, handsome furniture, advanced stereo equipment, a good but not flashy car, paintings…the surroundings of a famous American artist, at least by the standards of John Jay Hall and Evanston, Illinois. The difference between Bernstein and Hat was that the conductor probably lived on Fifth Avenue, and the tenor player in the Village.
I walked out of the library humming “Love Walked in.”
The dictionary-sized Manhattan telephone directory chained to the shelf beneath the pay telephone on the ground floor of John Jay Hall failed to provide Hat’s number. Moments later, I met similar failure back in the library after having consulted the equally impressive directories for Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx, as well as the much smaller volume for Staten Island. But, of course, Hat lived in New York: Where else would he live? Like other celebrities, he avoided the unwelcome intrusions of strangers by going unlisted. I could not explain his absence from the city’s five telephone books in any other way. Of course, Hat lived in the Village—that was what the Village was for.
Yet even then, remembering the unhealthy-looking man who each night entered the club to drop into the nearest chair, I experienced a wobble of doubt. Maybe the great man’s life was nothing like my imaginings. Hat wore decent clothes but did not seem rich—he seemed to exist at the same oblique angle to worldly success that his nightly variations on “Too Marvelous for Words” bore to the original melody. For a moment, I pictured my genius in a slum apartment where roaches scuttled across a bare floor and water dripped from a rip in the ceiling. I had no idea of how jazz musicians actually lived. Hollywood, unafraid of cliché, surrounded them with squalor. On the rare moments when literature stooped to consider jazz people, it, too, served up an ambiance of broken bedsprings and peeling walls. And literature’s bohemians—Rimbaud, Jack London, Kerouac, Hart Crane, William Burroughs—had often inhabited mean, unhappy rooms. It was possible that the great man was not listed in the city’s directories because he could not afford a telephone.
This notion was unacceptable. There was another explanation—Hat could not live in a tenement room without a telephone. The man still possessed the elegance of his generation of jazz musicians, the generation that wore good suits and highly polished shoes, played in big bands, and lived on buses and in hotel rooms.
And there, I thought, was my answer. It was a comedown from the apartment in the Village with which I had supplied him, but a room in some “artistic” hotel like the Chelsea would suit him just as well, and probably cost a lot less in rent. Feeling inspired, I looked up the Chelsea’s number on the spot, dialed, and asked for Hat’s room. The clerk told me that he wasn’t registered in the hotel. “But you know who he is,” I said. “Sure,” said the clerk. “Guitar, right? I know he was in one of those San Francisco bands, but I can’t remember which one.”
I hung up without replying, realizing that the only way I was going to discover Hat’s telephone number, short of calling every hotel in New York, was by asking him for it.
This was on a Monday, and jazz clubs were closed. On Tuesday, Professor Marcus told us to read all of Vanity Fair by Friday; on Wednesday, after I’d spent a nearly sleepless night with Thackeray, my seminar leader asked me to prepare a paper on James Joyce’s “Two Gallants” for the Friday class. Wednesday and Thursday nights I spent in the library. On Friday I listened to Professor Marcus being brilliant about Vanity Fair and read my laborious and dimwitted Joyce paper, on each of the five pages of which the word epiphany appeared at least twice, to my fellow scholars. The seminar leader smiled and nodded throughout my performance, and when I sat down metaphorically picked up my little paper between thumb and forefinger and slit its throat. “Some of you students are so certain about things,” he said. The rest of his remarks disappeared into a vast, horrifying sense of shame. I returned to my room, intending to lie down for an hour or two, and woke up ravenous ten hours later, when even the West End Bar, even the local Chock full o’Nuts, were shut for the night.
On Saturday night, I took my usual table in front of the bandstand and sat expectantly through the piano trio’s usual three numbers. In the middle of “Love Walked In” I looked around with an insider’s foreknowledge to enjoy Hat’s dramatic entrance, but he did not appear, and the number ended without him. John Hawes and the other two musicians seemed untroubled by this break in the routine, and went on to play “Too Marvelous for Words” without their leader. During the next three songs, I kept turning around to look for Hat, but the set ended without him. Hawes announced a short break, and the musicians stood up and moved toward the bar. I fidgeted at my table, nursing my second beer of the night and anxiously checking the door. The minutes trudged by. I feared he would never show up. He had passed out in his room. He’d been hit by a cab, he’d had a stroke, he was already lying dead in a hospital room—and just when I was going to write the article that would finally do him justice!
Half an hour later, still without their leader, John Hawes and the other sidemen went back on the stand. No one but me seemed to have noticed that Hat was not present. The other customers talked and smoked—this was in the days when people still smoked—and gave the music the intermittent and sometimes ostentatious attention they allowed it even when Hat was on the stand. By now, Hat was an hour and a half late, and I could see the gangsterish man behind the bar, the owner of the club, scowling as he checked his wristwatch. Hawes played two originals I particularly liked, favorites of mine from his contemporary records, but in my mingled anxiety and irritation I scarcely heard them.
Toward the end of the second of these songs, Hat entered the club and fell into his customary seat a little more heavily than usual. The owner motioned away the waiter, who had begun moving toward him with the customary shot glass. Hat dropped the pork pie on the table and struggled with his coat buttons. When he heard what Hawes was playing, he sat listening with his hands still on a coat button, and I listened, too—the music had a tighter, harder, more modern feel, like Hawes’s records. Hat nodded to himself, got his coat off, and struggled with the snaps on his saxophone case. The audience gave Hawes unusually appreciative applause. It took Hat longer than usual to fit the horn together, and by the time he was up on his feet, Hawes and the other two musicians had turned around to watch his progress as if they feared he would not make it all the way to the bandstand. Hat wound through the tables with his head tilted back, smiling to himself. When he got close to the stand, I saw that he was walking on his toes like a small child. The owner crossed his arms over his chest and glared. Hat seemed almost to float onto the stand. He licked his reed. Then he lowered his horn and, with his mouth open, stared out at us for a moment. “Ladies, ladies,” he said in a soft, high voice. These were the first words I had ever heard him speak. “Thank you for your appreciation of our pianist, Mr. Hawes. And now I must explain my absence during the first set. My son passed away this afternoon, and I have been…busy…with details. Thank you.”
With that, he spoke a single word to Hawes, put his horn back in his mouth, and began to play a blues called “Hat Jumped Up,” one of his twenty songs. The audience sat motionless with shock. Hawes, the bassist, and the drummer played on as if nothing unusual had happened—they must have known about his son, I thought. Or maybe they knew that he had no son and had invented a grotesque excuse for turning up ninety minutes late. The club owner bit his lower lip and looked unusually introspective. Hat played one familiar, uncomplicated figure after another, his tone rough, almost coarse. At the end of his solo, he repeated one note for an entire chorus, fingering the key while staring out toward the back of the club. Maybe he was watching the customers leave—three couples and a couple single people walked out while he was playing. But I don’t think he saw anything at all. When the song was over, Hat leaned over to whisper to Hawes, and the piano player announced a short break. The second set was over.
Hat put his tenor on top of the piano and stepped down off the bandstand, pursing his mouth with concentration. The owner had come out from behind the bar and moved up in front of him as Hat tiptoed around the stand. The owner spoke a few quiet words. Hat answered. From behind, he looked slumped and tired, and his hair curled far over the back of his collar. Whatever he had said only partially satisfied the owner, who spoke again before leaving him. Hat stood in place for a moment, perhaps not noticing that the owner had gone, and resumed his tiptoe glide toward the door. Looking at his back, I think I took in for the first time how genuinely strange he was. Floating through the door in his gray flannel suit, hair dangling in ringletlike strands past his collar, leaving in the air behind him the announcement about a dead son, he seemed absolutely separate from the rest of humankind, a species of one.
I turned as if for guidance to the musicians at the bar. Talking, smiling, greeting a few fans and friends, they behaved just as they did on every other night. Could Hat really have lost a son earlier today? Maybe this was the jazz way of facing grief—to come back to work, to carry on. Still it seemed the worst of all times to approach Hat with my offer. His playing was a drunken parody of itself. He would forget anything he said to me; I was wasting my time.
On that thought, I stood up and walked past the bandstand and opened the door—if I were wasting my time, it didn’t matter what I did.
He was leaning against a brick wall about ten feet up the alleyway from the club’s back door. The door clicked shut behind me, but Hat did not open his eyes. His face tilted up, and a sweetness that might have been sleep lay over his features. He looked exhausted and insubstantial, too frail to move. I would have gone back inside the club if he had not produced a cigarette from a pack in his shirt pocket, lit it with a match, and then flicked the match away, all without opening his eyes. At least he was awake. I stepped toward him, and his eyes opened. He glanced at me and blew out white smoke. “Taste?” he said.
I had no idea what he meant. “Can I talk to you for a minute, sir?” I asked.
He put his hand into one of his jacket pockets and pulled out a half-pint bottle. “Have a taste.” Hat broke the seal on the cap, tilted it into his mouth, and drank. Then he held the bottle out toward me.
I took it. “I’ve been coming here as often as I can.”
“Me, too,” he said. “Go on, do it.”
I took a sip from the bottle—gin. “I’m sorry about your son.”
“Son?” He looked upward, as if trying to work out my meaning. “I got a son—out on Long Island. With his momma.” He drank again and checked the level of the bottle.
“He’s not dead then.”
He spoke the next words slowly, almost wonderingly. “Nobody—told—me—if—he—is.” He shook his head and drank another mouthful of gin. “Damn. Wouldn’t that be something, boy dies and nobody tells me? I’d have to think about that, you know, have to really think about that one.”
“I’m just talking about what you said onstage.”
He cocked his head and seemed to examine an empty place in the dark air about three feet from his face. “Uh-huh. That’s right. I did say that. Son of mine passed.”
It was like dealing with a sphinx. All I could do was plunge in. “Well, sir, actually there’s a reason I came out here,” I said. “I’d like to interview you. Do you think that might be possible? You’re a great artist, and there’s very little about you in print. Do you think we could set up a time when I could talk to you?”
He looked at me with his bleary, colorless eyes, and I wondered if he could see me at all. And then I felt that, despite his drunkenness, he saw everything—that he saw things about me that I couldn’t see.
“You a jazz writer?” he asked.
“No, I’m a graduate student. I’d just like to do it. I think it would be important.”
“Important.” He took another swallow from the half-pint and slid the bottle back into his pocket. “Be nice, doing an important interview.”
He stood leaning against the wall, moving farther into outer space with every word. Only because I had started, I pressed on: I was already losing faith in this project. The reason Hat had never been interviewed was that ordinary American English was a foreign language to him. “Could we do the interview after you finish up at this club? I could meet you anywhere you like.” Even as I said these words, I despaired. Hat was in no shape to know what he had to do after this engagement finished. I was surprised he could make it back to Long Island every night.
Hat rubbed his face, sighed, and restored my faith in him. “It’ll have to wait a little while. Night after I finish here, I go to Toronto for two nights. Then I got something in Hartford on the thirtieth. You come see me after that.”
“On the thirty-first?” I asked.
“Around nine, ten, something like that. Be nice if you brought some refreshments.”
“Fine, great,” I said, wondering if I would be able to take a late train back from wherever he lived. “But where on Long Island should I go?”
His eyes widened in mock-horror. “Don’t go nowhere on Long Island. You come see me. In the Albert Hotel, Forty-ninth and Eighth. Room 821.”
I smiled at him—I had guessed right about one thing, anyhow. Hat did not live in the Village, but he did live in a Manhattan hotel. I asked him for his phone number and wrote it down, along with the other information, on a napkin from the club. After I folded the napkin into my jacket pocket, I thanked him and turned toward the door.
“Important as a motherfucker,” he said in his high, soft, slurry voice.
I turned around in alarm, but he had tilted his head toward the sky again, and his eyes were closed.
“Indiana,” he said. His voice made the word seem sung. “Moonlight in Vermont. I Thought About You. Flamingo.”
He was deciding what to play during his next set. I went back inside, where twenty or thirty new arrivals, more people than I had ever seen in the club, waited for the music to start. Hat soon reappeared through the door, the other musicians left the bar, and the third set began. Hat played all four of the songs he had named, interspersing them through his standard repertoire during the course of an unusually long set. He was playing as well as I’d ever heard him, maybe better than I’d heard on all the other nights I had come to the club. The Saturday-night crowd applauded explosively after every solo. I didn’t know if what I was seeing was genius or desperation.
An obituary in the Sunday New York Times, which I read over breakfast the next morning in the John Jay cafeteria, explained some of what had happened. Early Saturday morning, a thirty-eight-year-old tenor saxophone player named Grant Kilbert had been killed in an automobile accident. One of the most successful jazz musicians in the world, one of the few jazz musicians known outside of the immediate circle of fans, Kilbert had probably been Hat’s most prominent disciple. He had certainly been one of my favorite musicians. More important, from his first record, Cool Breeze, Kilbert had excited respect and admiration. I looked at the photograph of the handsome young man beaming out over the neck of his saxophone and realized that the first four songs on Cool Breeze were “Indiana, “Moonlight in Vermont,” “I Thought About You,” and “Flamingo.” Sometime late Saturday afternoon, someone had called up Hat to tell him about Kilbert. What I had seen had not merely been alcoholic eccentricity, it had been grief for a lost son. And when I thought about it, I was sure that the lost son, not himself, had been the important motherfucker he’d apotheosized. What I had taken for spaciness and disconnection had all along been irony.
On the thirty-first of October, after calling first to make sure he remembered our appointment, I did go the Albert Hotel, room 821, and interview Hat. That is, I asked him questions and listened to the long, rambling, often obscene responses he gave them. During the long night I spent in his room, he drank the fifth of Gordon’s gin, the “refreshments” I brought with me—all of it, an entire bottle of gin, without tonic, ice, or other dilutants. He just poured it into a tumbler and drank, as if it were water. (I refused his single offer of a “taste.”) I made frequent checks to make sure that the tape recorder I’d borrowed from a business student down the hall from me was still working, I changed tapes until they ran out, I made detailed backup notes with a ballpoint pen in a stenographic notebook. A couple times, he played me sections of records that he wanted me to hear, and now and then he sang a couple bars to make sure that I understood what he was telling me. He sat me in his only chair, and during the entire night stationed himself, dressed in his pork pie hat, a dark blue chalk-stripe suit, and white button-down shirt with a black knit tie, on the edge of his bed. This was a formal occasion. When I arrived at nine o’clock, he addressed me as Mr. Leonard Feather (the name of a well-known jazz critic), and when he opened his door at six-thirty the next morning, he called me “Miss Rosemary.” By then, I knew that this was an allusion to Rosemary Clooney, whose singing I had learned that he liked, and that the nickname meant he liked me, too. It was not at all certain, however, that he remembered my actual name.
I had three sixty-minute tapes and a notebook filled with handwriting that gradually degenerated from my usual scrawl into loops and wiggles that resembled Arabic more than English. Over the next month, I spent whatever spare time I had transcribing the tapes and trying to decipher my own handwriting. I wasn’t sure that what I had was an interview. My carefully prepared questions had been met either with evasions or blank, silent refusals to answer—he had simply started talking about something else. After about an hour, I realized that this was his interview, not mine, and let him roll.
After my notes had been typed up and the tapes transcribed, I put everything in a drawer and went back to work on my M.A. What I had was even more puzzling than I’d thought, and straightening it out would have taken more time than I could afford. So the rest of that academic year was a long grind of studying for the comprehensive exam and getting a thesis ready. Until I picked up an old Time magazine in the John Jay lounge and saw his name in the “Milestones” columns, I didn’t even know that Hat had died.
Two months after I’d interviewed him, he had begun to hemorrhage on a flight back from France; an ambulance had taken him directly from the airport to a hospital. Five days after his release from the hospital, he had died in his bed at the Albert.
After I earned my degree, I was determined to wrestle something useable from my long night with Hat—I owed it to him. During the first seven weeks of that summer, I wrote out a version of what Hat had said to me and sent it to the only publication I thought would be interested in it. Down Beat accepted the interview, and it appeared there about six months later. Eventually, it acquired some fame as the last of his rare public statements. I still see lines from the interview quoted in the sort of pieces about Hat never printed during his life. Sometimes they are lines he really did say to me; sometimes they are stitched together from remarks he made at different times; sometimes they are quotations I invented in order to be able to use other things he did say.
But one section of that interview has never been quoted, because it was never printed. I never figured out what to make of it. Certainly, I could not believe all he had said. He had been putting me on, silently laughing at my credulity, for he could not possibly believe that what he was telling me was literal truth. I was a white boy with a tape recorder, it was Halloween, and Hat was having fun with me. He was jiving me.
Now I feel different about his story, and about him, too. He was a great man, and I was an unworldly kid. He was drunk, and I was priggishly sober, but in every important way, he was functioning far above my level. Hat had lived forty-nine years as a black man in America, and I’d spent all of my twenty-one years in white suburbs. He was an immensely talented musician, a man who virtually thought in music, and I can’t even hum in tune. That I expected to understand anything at all about him staggers me now. Back then, I didn’t know anything about grief, and Hat wore grief about him daily, like a cloak. Now that I am the age he was then, I see that most of what is called information is interpretation, and interpretation is always partial.
Probably Hat was putting me on, jiving me, though not maliciously. He certainly was not telling me the literal truth, though I have never been able to learn what was the literal truth of this case. It’s possible that even Hat never knew what was the literal truth behind the story he told me—possible, I mean, that he was still trying to work out what the truth was, forty years after the fact.
He started telling me the story after we heard what I thought were gunshots from the street. I jumped from the chair and rushed to the windows, which looked out onto Eighth Avenue. “Kids,” Hat said. In the hard yellow light of the streetlamps, four or five teenage boys trotted up the Avenue. Three of them carried paper bags. “Kids shooting?” I asked. My amazement tells you how long ago this was.
“Fireworks,” Hat said. “Every Halloween in New York, fool kids run around with bags full of fireworks, trying to blow their hands off.”
Here and in what follows, I am not going to try to represent the way Hat actually spoke. I cannot represent the way his voice glided over certain words and turned others into mushy growls, though he expressed more than half of his meaning by sound; and I don’t want to reproduce his constant, reflexive obscenity. Hat couldn’t utter four words in a row without throwing in a motherfucker. Mostly, I have replaced his obscenities with other words, and the reader can imagine what was really said. Also, if I tried to imitate his grammar, I’d sound racist and he would sound stupid. Hat left school in the fourth grade, and his language, though precise, was casual. To add to these difficulties, Hat employed a private language of his own, a code to ensure that he would be understood only by the people he wished to understand him. I have replaced most of his code words with their equivalents.
It must have been around one in the morning, which means that I had been in his room about four hours. Until Hat explained the “gunshots,” I had forgotten that it was Halloween night, and I told him this as I turned away from the window.
“I never forget about Halloween,” Hat said. “If I can, I stay home on Halloween. Don’t want to be out on the street that night.”
He had already given me proof that he was superstitious, and as he spoke he glanced almost nervously around the room, as if looking for sinister presences.
“You’d feel in danger?” I asked.
He rolled gin around in his mouth and looked at me as he had in the alley behind the club, taking note of qualities I myself did not yet perceive. This did not feel at all judgmental. The nervousness I thought I had seen had disappeared, and his manner seemed marginally more concentrated than earlier in the evening. He swallowed the gin and looked at me without speaking for a couple seconds.
“No,” he finally said. “Not exactly. But I wouldn’t feel safe, either.”
I sat with my pen half an inch from the page of my notebook, uncertain whether or not to write this down.
“I’m from Mississippi, you know.”
I nodded.
“Funny things happen down there. Whole different world. Back when I was a little kid, it was really a different world. Know what I mean?”
“I can guess,” I said.
He nodded. “Sometimes people just disappeared. They’d be gone. All kinds of stuff used to happen, stuff you wouldn’t even believe in now. I met a witch lady once, a real one, who could put curses on you, make you go blind and crazy. I saw a dead man walk. Another time I saw a mean, murdering son of a bitch named Eddie Grimes die and come back to life—he got shot to death at a dance we were playing, he was dead, and a woman went down and whispered to him, and Eddie Grimes stood right back up on his feet. The man who shot him took off double-quick and he must have kept on going, because we never saw him after that.”
“Did you start playing again?” I asked, taking notes as fast as I could.
“We never stopped,” Hat said. “You let the people deal with what’s going on, but you gotta keep on playing.”
“Did you live in the country?” I asked, thinking that all of this sounded like Dogpatch—witches and walking dead men.
He shook his head. “I was brought up in town, Woodland, Mississippi. On the river. Where we lived was called Darktown, you know, but most of Woodland was white, with nice houses and all. Lots of our people did the cooking and washing in the big houses on Miller’s Hill, that kind of work. In fact, we lived in a pretty nice house, for Darktown—the band always did well, and my father had a couple other jobs on top of that. He was a good piano player, mainly, but he could play any kind of instrument. And he was a big, strong guy, nice-looking, real light-complexioned, so he was called Red, which was what that meant in those days. People respected him.”
Another long, rattling burst of explosions came from Eighth Avenue. I wanted to ask him again about leaving his father’s band, but Hat once more gave his little room a quick inspection, swallowed another mouthful of gin, and went on talking.
“We even went out trick-or-treating on Halloween, you know, just like the white kids. I guess our people didn’t do that everywhere, but we did. Naturally, we stuck to our neighborhood, and probably we got a lot less than the kids from Miller’s Hill, but they didn’t have anything up there that tasted as good as the apples and candy we brought home in our bags. Around us, folks made instead of bought, and that’s the difference.” He smiled at either the memory or the unexpected sentimentality he had just revealed—for a moment, he looked both lost in time and uneasy with himself for having said too much. “Or maybe I just remember it that way, you know? Anyhow, we used to raise some hell, too. You were supposed to raise hell on Halloween.”
“You went out with your brothers?” I asked.
“No, no, they were—” He flipped his hand in the air, dismissing whatever it was that his brothers had been. “I was always apart, you dig? Me, I was always into my own little things. I was that way right from the beginning. I play like that—never play like anyone else, don’t even play like myself. You gotta find new places for yourself, or else nothing’s happening, isn’t that right? Don’t want to be a repeater pencil.” He saluted this declaration with another swallow of gin. “Back in those days, I used to go out with a boy named Rodney Sparks—we called him Dee, short for Demon, ’cause Dee Sparks would do anything that came into his head. That boy was the bravest little bastard I ever knew. He’d wrassle a mad dog. He was just that way. And the reason was, Dee was the preacher’s boy. If you happen to be the preacher’s boy, seems like you gotta prove every way you can that you’re no Buster Brown, you know? So I hung with Dee, because I wasn’t any Buster Brown, either. This is all when we were eleven, around then—the time when you talk about girls, you know, but you still aren’t too sure what that’s about. You don’t know what anything’s about, to tell the truth. You along for the ride, you trying to pack in as much fun as possible. So Dee was my right hand, and when I went out on Halloween in Woodland, I went out with him.”
He rolled his eyes toward the window and said, “Yeah.” An expression I could not read at all took over his face. By the standards of ordinary people, Hat almost always looked detached, even impassive, tuned to some private wavelength, and this sense of detachment had intensified. I thought he was changing mental gears, dismissing his childhood, and opened my mouth to ask him about Grant Kilbert. But he raised his glass to his mouth again and rolled his eyes back to me, and the quality of his gaze told me to keep quiet.
“I didn’t know it,” he said, “but I was getting ready to stop being a little boy. To stop believing in little-boy things and start seeing like a grown-up. I guess that’s part of what I liked about Dee Sparks—he seemed like he was a lot more grown-up than I was, shows you what my head was like. The age we were, this would have been the last time we actually went out on Halloween to get apples and candy. From then on, we would have gone out mainly to raise hell. Smash in a few windows. Bust up somebody’s wagon. Scare the shit out of little kids. But the way it turned out, it was the last time we ever went out on Halloween.”
He finished off the gin in his glass and reached down to pick the bottle off the floor and pour another few inches into the tumbler. “Here I am, sitting in this room. There’s my horn over there. Here’s this bottle. You know what I’m saying?”
I didn’t. I had no idea what he was saying. The hint of fatality clung to his earlier statement, and for a second I thought he was going to say that he was here, but Dee Sparks was nowhere because Dee Sparks had died in Woodland, Mississippi, at the age of eleven on Halloween night. Hat was looking at me with a steady curiosity that compelled a response. “What happened?” I asked.
Now I know that he was saying It has come down to just this, my room, my horn, my bottle. My question was as good as any other response.
“If I was to tell you everything that happened, we’d have to stay in this room for a month.” He smiled and straightened up on the bed. His ankles were crossed, and for the first time I noticed that his feet, shod in dark suede shoes with crepe soles, did not quite touch the floor. “And, you know, I never tell anybody everything, I always have to keep something back for myself. Things turned out all right. Only thing I mind is, I should have earned more money. Grant Kilbert, he earned a lot of money, and some of that was mine, you know.”
“Were you friends?” I asked.
“I knew the man.” He tilted his head and stared at the ceiling for so long that eventually I looked up at it, too. It was not a remarkable ceiling. A circular section near the center had been replastered not long before.
“No matter where you live, there are places you’re not supposed to go,” he said, still gazing up. “And sooner or later, you’re gonna wind up there.” He smiled at me again. “Where we lived, the place you weren’t supposed to go was called The Backs. Out of town, stuck in the woods on one little path. In Darktown, we had all kinds from preachers on down. We had washerwomen and blacksmiths and carpenters, and we had some no-good thieving trash, too, like Eddie Grimes, that man who came back from being dead. In The Backs, they started with trash like Eddie Grimes, and went down from there. Sometimes, some of our people went out there to buy a jug, and sometimes they went there to get a woman, but they never talked about it. The Backs was rough. What they had was rough.” He rolled his eyes at me and said, “That witch lady I told you about, she lived in The Backs.” He snickered. “Man, they were a mean bunch of people. They’d cut you, you looked at ’em bad. But one thing funny about the place, white and colored lived there just the same—it was integrated. Backs people were so evil, color didn’t make no difference to them. They hated everybody anyhow, on principle.” Hat pointed his glass at me, tilted his head, and narrowed his eyes. “At least, that was what everybody said. So this particular Halloween, Dee Sparks says to me after we finish with Darktown, we ought to head out to The Backs and see what the place is really like. Maybe we can have some fun.
“Well, that sounded fine to me. The idea of going out to The Backs kind of scared me, but being scared was part of the fun—Halloween, right? And if anyplace in Woodland was perfect for all that Halloween shit, you know, someplace where you might really see a ghost or a goblin, The Backs was better than the graveyard.” Hat shook his head, holding the glass out at a right angle to his body. A silvery amusement momentarily transformed him, and it struck me that his native elegance, the product of his character and bearing much more than of the handsome suit and the suede shoes, had in effect been paid for by the surviving of a thousand unimaginable difficulties, each painful to a varying degree. Then I realized that what I meant by elegance was really dignity, that for the first time I had recognized actual dignity in another human being, and that dignity was nothing like the self-congratulatory superiority people usually mistook for it.
“We were just little babies, and we wanted some of those good old Halloween scares. Like those dumbbells out on the street, tossing firecrackers at each other.” Hat wiped his free hand down over his face and made sure that I was prepared to write down everything he said. (The tapes had already been used up.) “When I’m done, tell me if we found it, okay?”
“Okay,” I said.
“Dee showed up at my house just after dinner, dressed in an old sheet with two eyeholes cut in it and carrying a paper bag. His big old shoes stuck out underneath the sheet. I had the same costume, but it was the one my brother used the year before, and it dragged along the ground and my feet got caught in it. The eyeholes kept sliding away from my eyes. My mother gave me a bag and told me to behave myself and get home before eight. It didn’t take but half an hour to cover all the likely houses in Darktown, but she knew I’d want to fool around with Dee for an hour or so afterward.
“Then up and down the streets we go, knocking on the doors where they’d give us stuff and making a little mischief where we knew they wouldn’t. Nothing real bad, just banging on the door and running like hell, throwing rocks on the roof, little stuff. A few places, we plain and simple stayed away from—the places where people like Eddie Grimes lived. I always thought that was funny. We knew enough to steer clear of those houses, but we were still crazy to get out to The Backs.
“Only way I can figure it is, The Backs was forbidden. Nobody had to tell us to stay away from Eddie Grimes’s house at night. You wouldn’t even go there in the daylight, ’cause Eddie Grimes would get you and that would be that.
“Anyhow, Dee kept us moving along real quick, and when folks asked us questions or said they wouldn’t give us stuff unless we sang a song, he moaned like a ghost and shook his bag in their faces, so we could get away faster. He was so excited, I think he was almost shaking.
“Me, I was excited, too. Not like Dee—sort of sick-excited, the way people must feel the first time they use a parachute. Scared-excited.
“As soon as we got away from the last house, Dee crossed the street and started running down the side of the little general store we all used. I knew where he was going. Out behind the store was a field, and on the other side of the field was Meridian Road, which took you out into the woods and to the path up to The Backs. When he realized that I wasn’t next to him, he turned around and yelled at me to hurry up. No, I said inside myself, I ain’t gonna jump outta this here airplane, I’m not dumb enough to do that. And then I pulled up my sheet and scrunched up my eye to look through the one hole close enough to see through, and I took off after him.
“It was beginning to get dark when Dee and I left my house, and now it was dark. The Backs was about a mile and a half away, or at least the path was. We didn’t know how far along that path you had to go before you got there. Hell, we didn’t even know what it was—I was still thinking the place was a collection of little houses, like a sort of shadow-Woodland. And then, while we were crossing the field, I stepped on my costume and fell down flat on my face. Enough of this stuff, I said, and yanked the damned thing off. Dee started cussing me out, I wasn’t doing this stuff the right way, we had to keep our costumes on in case anybody saw us, did I forget that this is Halloween, on Halloween a costume protected you. So I told l him I’d put it back on when we got there. If I kept on falling down, it’d take us twice as long. That shut him up.
“As soon as I got that blasted sheet over my head, I discovered that I could see at least a little ways ahead of me. The moon was up, and a lot of stars were out. Under his sheet, Dee Sparks looked a little bit like a real ghost. It kind of glimmered. You couldn’t really make out its edges, so the darn thing like floated. But I could see his legs and those big old shoes sticking out.
“We got out of the field and started up Meridian Road, and pretty soon the trees came up right to the ditches alongside the road, and I couldn’t see too well anymore. The road looked like it went smack into the woods and disappeared. The trees looked taller and thicker than in the daytime, and now and then something right at the edge of the woods shone round and white, like an eye—reflecting the moonlight, I guess. Spooked me. I didn’t think we’d ever be able to find the path up to The Backs, and that was fine with me. I thought we might go along the road another ten-fifteen minutes, and then turn around and go home. Dee was swooping around up in front of me, flapping his sheet and acting bughouse. He sure wasn’t trying too hard to find that path.
“After we walked about a mile down Meridian Road, I saw headlights like yellow dots coming toward us fast—Dee didn’t see anything at all, running around in circles the way he was. I shouted at him to get off the road, and he took off like a rabbit—disappeared into the woods before I did. I jumped the ditch and hunkered down behind a pine about ten feet off the road to see who was coming. There weren’t many cars in Woodland in those days, and I knew every one of them. When the car came by, it was Dr. Garland’s old red Cord—Dr. Garland was a white man, but he had two waiting rooms and took colored patients, so colored patients was mostly what he had. And the man was a heavy drinker, heavy drinker. He zipped by, goin’ at least fifty, which was mighty fast for those days, probably as fast as that old Cord would go. For about a second, I saw Dr. Garland’s face under his white hair, and his mouth was wide open, stretched like he was screaming. After he passed, I waited a long time before I came out of the woods. Turning around and going home would have been fine with me. Dr. Garland changed everything. Normally, he was kind of slow and quiet, you know, and I could still see that black screaming hole opened up in his face—he looked like he was being tortured, like he was in Hell. I sure as hell didn’t want to see whatever he had seen.
“I could hear the Cord’s engine after the taillights disappeared. I turned around and saw that I was all alone on the road. Dee Sparks was nowhere in sight. A couple times, real soft, I called out his name. Then I called his name a little louder. Away off in the woods, I heard Dee giggle. I said he could run around all night if he liked but I was going home, and then I saw that pale silver sheet moving through the trees, and I started back down Meridian Road. After about twenty paces, I looked back, and there he was, standing in the middle of the road in that silly sheet, watching me go. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘let’s get back.’ He paid me no mind. Wasn’t that Dr. Garland? Where was he going, as fast as that? What was happening? When I said the doctor was probably out on some emergency, Dee said the man was going home—he lived in Woodland, didn’t he?
“Then I thought maybe Dr. Garland had been up in The Backs. And Dee thought the same thing, which made him want to go there all the more. Now he was determined. Maybe we’d see some dead guy. We stood there until I understood that he was going to go by himself if I didn’t go with him. That meant that I had to go. Wild as he was, Dee’d get himself into some kind of mess for sure if I wasn’t there to hold him down. So I said okay, I was coming along, and Dee started swooping along like before, saying crazy stuff. There was no way we were going to be able to find some little old path that went up into the woods. It was so dark, you couldn’t see the separate trees, only giant black walls on both sides of the road.
“We went so far along Meridian Road I was sure we must have passed it. Dee was running around in circles about ten feet ahead of me. I told him that we missed the path, and now it was time to get back home. He laughed at me and ran across to the right side of the road and disappeared into the darkness.
“I told him to get back, damn it, and he laughed some more and said I should come to him. Why? I said, and he said, ‘Because this here is the path, dummy.’ I didn’t believe him—came right up to where he disappeared. All I could see was a black wall that could have been trees or just plain night. ‘Moron,’ Dee said, ‘look down.’ And I did. Sure enough, one of those white things like an eye shone up from where the ditch should have been. I bent down and touched cold little stones, and the shining dot of white went off like a light—a pebble that caught the moonlight just right. Bending down like that, I could see the hump of grass growing up between the tire tracks that led out onto Meridian Road. He’d found the path, all right.
“At night, Dee Sparks could see one hell of a lot better than me. He spotted the break in the ditch from across the road. He was already walking up the path in those big old shoes, turning around every other step to look back at me, make sure I was coming along behind him. When I started following him, Dee told me to get my sheet back on, and I pulled the thing over my head even though I’d rather have sucked the water out of a hollow stump. But I knew he was right—on Halloween, especially in a place like where we were, you were safer in a costume.
“From then on in, we were in no-man’s-land. Neither one of us had any idea how far we had to go to get to The Backs, or what it would look like once we got there. Once I set foot on that wagon-track I knew for sure The Backs wasn’t anything like the way I thought. It was a lot more primitive than a bunch of houses in the woods. Maybe they didn’t even have houses! Maybe they lived in caves!
“Naturally, after I got that blamed costume over my head, I couldn’t see for a while. Dee kept hissing at me to hurry up, and I kept cussing him out. Finally, I bunched up a couple handfuls of the sheet right under my chin and held it against my neck, and that way I could see pretty well and walk without tripping all over myself. All I had to do was follow Dee, and that was easy. He was only a couple inches in front of me, and even through one eyehole, I could see that silvery sheet moving along.
“Things moved in the woods, and once in a while an owl hooted. To tell you the truth, I never did like being out in the woods at night. Even back then, give me a nice warm barroom instead, and I’d be happy. Only animal I ever liked was a cat, because a cat is soft to the touch, and it’ll fall asleep on your lap. But this was even worse than usual, because of Halloween, and even before we got to The Backs, I wasn’t sure if what I heard moving around in the woods was just a possum or a fox or something a lot worse, something with funny eyes and long teeth that liked the taste of little boys. Maybe Eddie Grimes was out there, looking for whatever kind of treat Eddie Grimes liked on Halloween night. Once I thought of that, I got so close to Dee Sparks I could smell him right through his sheet.
“You know what Dee Sparks smelled like? Like sweat, and a little bit like the soap the preacher made him use on his hands and face before dinner, but really like a fire in a junction box. A sharp, kind of bitter smell. That’s how excited he was.
“After a while we were going uphill, and then we got to the top of the rise, and a breeze pressed my sheet against my legs. We started going downhill, and over Dee’s electrical fire, I could smell woodsmoke. And something else I couldn’t name. Dee stopped moving so sudden, I bumped into him. I asked him what he could see. Nothing but the woods, he said, but we’re getting there. People are up ahead somewhere. And they got a still. We got to be real quiet from here on out, he told me, as if he had to, and to let him know I understood I pulled him off the path into the woods.
“Well, I thought, at least I know what Dr. Garland was after.
“Dee and I went snaking through the trees—me holding that blamed sheet under my chin so I could see out of one eye, at least, and walk without falling down. I was glad for that big fat pad of pine needles on the ground. An elephant could have walked over that stuff as quiet as a beetle. We went along a little farther, and it got so I could smell all kinds of stuff—burned sugar, crushed juniper berries, tobacco juice, grease. And after Dee and I moved a little bit along, I heard voices, and that was enough for me. Those voices sounded angry.
“I yanked at Dee’s sheet and squatted down—I wasn’t going any farther without taking a good look. He slipped down beside me. I pushed the wad of material under my chin up over my face, grabbed another handful, and yanked that up, too, to look out under the bottom of the sheet. Once I could actually see where we were, I almost passed out. Twenty feet away through the trees, a kerosene lantern lit up the greasepaper window cut into the back of a little wooden shack, and a big raggedy guy carrying another kerosene lantern came stepping out of a door we couldn’t see and stumbled toward a shed. On the other side of the building, I could see the yellow square of a window in another shack, and past that, another one, a sliver of yellow shining out through the trees. Dee was crouched next to me, and when I turned to look at him, I could see another chink of yellow light from some way off in the woods over that way. Whether he knew it not, he’d just about walked us straight into the middle of The Backs.
“He whispered for me to cover my face. I shook my head. Both of us watched the big guy stagger toward the shed. Somewhere in front of us, a woman screeched, and I almost dumped a load in my pants. Dee stuck his hand out from under his sheet and held it out, as if I needed him to tell me to be quiet. The woman screeched again, and the big guy sort of swayed back and forth. The light from the lantern swung around in big circles. I saw that the woods were full of little paths that ran between the shacks. The light hit the shack, and it wasn’t even wood, but tarpaper. The woman laughed or maybe sobbed. Whoever was inside the shack shouted, and the raggedy guy wobbled toward the shed again. He was so drunk he couldn’t even walk straight. When he got to the shed, he set down the lantern and bent to get in.
“Dee put his mouth up to my ear and whispered, ‘Cover up—you don’t want these people to see who you are. Rip the eyeholes, if you can’t see good enough.’
“I didn’t want anyone in The Backs to see my face. I let the costume drop down over me again and stuck my fingers in the nearest eyehole and pulled. Every living thing for about a mile around must have heard that cloth ripping. The big guy came out of the shed like someone pulled him out on a string, yanked the lantern up off the ground, and held it in our direction. Then we could see his face, and it was Eddie Grimes. You wouldn’t want to run into Eddie Grimes anywhere, but The Backs was the last place you’d want to come across him. I was afraid he was going to start looking for us, but that woman started making stuck-pig noises, and the man in the shack yelled something, and Grimes ducked back into the shed and came out with a jug. He lumbered back toward the shack and disappeared around the front of it. Dee and I could hear him arguing with the man inside.
“I jerked my thumb toward Meridian Road, but Dee shook his head. I whispered, ‘Didn’t you already see Eddie Grimes, and isn’t that enough for you?’ He shook his head again. His eyes were gleaming behind that sheet. ‘So what do you want?’ I asked, and he said, ‘I want to see that girl.’ ‘We don’t even know where she is,’ I whispered, and Dee said all we got to do is follow her sound.
“Dee and I sat and listened for a while. Every now and then, she let out a sort of whoop, and then she’d sort of cry, and after that she might say a word or two that sounded almost ordinary before she got going again on crying or laughing, the two all mixed up together. Sometimes we could hear other noises coming from the shacks, and none of them sounded happy. People were grumbling and arguing or just plain talking to themselves, but at least they sounded normal. That lady, she sounded like Halloween—like something that came up out of a grave.
“Probably you’re thinking what I was hearing was sex—that I was too young to know how much noise ladies make when they’re having fun. Well, maybe I was only eleven, but I grew up in Darktown, not Miller’s Hill, and our walls were none too thick. What was going on with this lady didn’t have anything to do with fun. The strange thing is, Dee didn’t know that—he thought just what you were thinking. He wanted to see this lady getting humped. Maybe he even thought he could sneak in and get some for himself, I don’t know. The main thing is, he thought he was listening to some wild sex, and he wanted to get close enough to see it. Well, I thought, his daddy was a preacher, and maybe preachers didn’t do it once they got kids. And Dee didn’t have an older brother like mine, who sneaked girls into the house whenever he thought he wouldn’t get caught.
“He started sliding sideways through the woods, and I had to follow him. I’d seen enough of The Backs to last me the rest of my life, but I couldn’t run off and leave Dee behind. And at least he was going at it the right way, circling around the shacks sideways, instead of trying to sneak straight through them. I started off after him. At least I could see a little better ever since I ripped at my eyehole, but I still had to hold my blasted costume bunched up under my chin, and if I moved my head or my hand the wrong way, the hole moved away from my eye and I couldn’t see anything at all.
“So, naturally, the first thing that happened was that I lost sight of Dee Sparks. My foot came down in a hole and I stumbled ahead for a few steps, completely blind, and then I hit a tree. I just came to a halt, sure that Eddie Grimes and a few other murderers were about to jump on me. For a couple seconds I stood as still as a wooden Indian, too scared to move. When I didn’t hear anything, I hauled at my costume until I could see out of it. No murderers were coming toward me from the shack beside the still. Eddie Grimes was saying ‘You don’t understand’ over and over, like he was so drunk that one phrase got stuck in his head and he couldn’t say or hear anything else. That woman yipped, like an animal noise, not a human one—like a fox barking. I sidled up next to the tree I’d run into and looked around for Dee. All I could see was dark trees and that one yellow window I’d seen before. To hell with Dee Sparks, I said to myself, and pulled the costume off over my head. I could see better, but there wasn’t any glimmer of white over that way. He’d gone so far ahead of me I couldn’t even see him.
“So I had to catch up with him, didn’t I? I knew where he was going—the woman’s noises were coming from the shack way up there in the woods—and I knew he was going to sneak around the outside of the shacks. In a couple seconds, after he noticed I wasn’t there, he was going to stop and wait for me. Makes sense, doesn’t it? All I had to do was keep going toward that shack off to the side until I ran into him. I shoved my costume inside my shirt, and then I did something else—set my bag of candy down next to the tree. I’d clean forgotten about it ever since I saw Eddie Grimes’s face, and if I had to run, I’d go faster without holding onto a lot of apples and chunks of taffy.
“About a minute later, I came out into the open between two big old chinaberry trees. There was a patch of grass between me and the next stand of trees. The woman made a gargling sound that ended in one of those fox yips, and I looked up in that direction and saw that the clearing extended in a straight line up and down, like a path. Stars shone out of the patch of darkness between the two parts of the woods. And when I started to walk across it, I felt a grassy hump between two beaten tracks. The path into The Backs off Meridian Road curved around somewhere up ahead and wound back down through the shacks before it came to a dead end. It had to come to a dead end, because it sure didn’t join back up with Meridian Road.
“And this was how I’d managed to lose sight of Dee Sparks. Instead of avoiding the path and working his way north through the woods, he’d just taken the easiest way toward the woman’s shack. Hell, I’d had to pull him off the path in the first place! By the time I got out of my sheet, he was probably way up there, out in the open for anyone to see and too excited to notice that he was all by himself. What I had to do was what I’d been trying to do all along, save his ass from anybody who might see him.
“As soon as I started going as soft as I could up the path, I saw that saving Dee Sparks’s ass might be a tougher job than I thought—maybe I couldn’t even save my own. When I first took off my costume, I’d seen lights from three or four shacks. I thought that’s what The Backs was—three or four shacks. But after I started up the path, I saw a low square shape standing between two trees at the edge of the woods and realized that it was another shack. Whoever was inside had extinguished his kerosene lamp, or maybe wasn’t home. About twenty–thirty feet on, there was another shack, all dark, and the only reason I noticed that one was, I heard voices coming from it, a man and a woman, both of them sounding drunk and slowed-down. Deeper in the woods past that one, another greasepaper window gleamed through the trees like a firefly. There were shacks all over the woods. As soon as I realized that Dee and I might not be the only people walking through The Backs on Halloween night, I bent down low to the ground and damn near slowed to a standstill. The only thing Dee had going for him, I thought, was good night vision—at least he might spot someone before they spotted him.
“A noise came from one of those shacks, and I stopped cold, with my heart pounding away like a bass drum. Then a big voice yelled out, ‘Who’s that?’ and I just lay down in the track and tried to disappear. ‘Who’s there?’ Here I was calling Dee a fool, and I was making more noise than he did. I heard that man walk outside his door, and my heart pretty near exploded. Then the woman moaned up ahead, and the man who’d heard me swore to himself and went back inside. I just lay there in the dirt for a while. The woman moaned again, and this time it sounded scarier than ever, because it had a kind of a chuckle in it. She was crazy. Or she was a witch, and if she was having sex, it was with the devil. That was enough to make me start crawling along, and I kept on crawling until I was long past the shack where the man had heard me. Finally, I got up on my feet again, thinking that if I didn’t see Dee Sparks real soon, I was going to sneak back to Meridian Road by myself. If Dee Sparks wanted to see a witch in bed with the devil, he could do it without me.
“And then I thought I was a fool not to ditch Dee, because hadn’t he ditched me? After all this time, he must have noticed that I wasn’t with him anymore. Did he come back and look for me? The hell he did.
“And right then I would have gone back home but for two things. The first was that I heard that woman make another sound—a sound that was hardly human but wasn’t made by any animal. It wasn’t even loud. And it sure as hell wasn’t any witch in bed with the devil. It made me want to throw up. That woman was being hurt. She wasn’t just getting beat up—I knew what that sounded like—she was being hurt bad enough to drive her crazy, bad enough to kill her. Because you couldn’t live through being hurt bad enough to make that sound. I was in The Backs, sure enough, and the place was even worse than it was supposed to be. Someone was killing a woman, everybody could hear it, and all that happened was that Eddie Grimes fetched another jug back from the still. I froze. When I could move, I pulled my ghost costume out from inside my shirt, because Dee was right, and for certain I didn’t want anybody seeing my face out there on this night. And then the second thing happened. While I was pulling the sheet over my head, I saw something pale lying in the grass a couple feet back toward the woods I’d come out of, and when I looked at it, it turned into Dee Sparks’s Halloween bag.
“I went up to the bag and touched it to make sure about what it was. I’d found Dee’s bag, all right. And it was empty. Flat. He had stuffed the contents into his pockets and left the bag behind. What that meant was, I couldn’t turn around and leave him—because he hadn’t left me after all. He waited for me until he couldn’t stand it anymore, and then he emptied his bag and left it behind as a sign. He was counting on me to see in the dark as well as he could. But I wouldn’t have seen it at all if that woman hadn’t stopped me cold.
“The top of the bag was pointing north, so Dee was still heading toward the woman’s shack. I looked up that way, and all I could see was a solid wall of darkness underneath a lighter darkness filled with stars. For about a second, I realized, I had felt pure relief. Dee had ditched me, so I could ditch him and go home. Now I was stuck with Dee all over again.
“About twenty feet ahead, another surprise jumped up at me out of darkness. Something that looked like a little tiny shack began to take shape, and I got down on my hands and knees to crawl toward the path when I saw a long silver gleam along the top of the thing. That meant it had to be metal—tarpaper might have a lot of uses, but it never yet reflected starlight. Once I realized that the thing in front of me was metal, I remembered its shape and realized it was a car. You wouldn’t think you’d come across a car in a down-and-out rathole like The Backs, would you? People like that, they don’t even own two shirts, so how do they come by cars? Then I remembered Dr. Garland speeding away down Meridian Road, and I thought, You don’t have to live in The Backs to drive there. Someone could turn up onto the path, drive around the loop, pull his car off onto the grass, and no one would ever see it or know that he was there.
“And this made me feel funny. The car probably belonged to someone I knew. Our band played dances and parties all over the county and everywhere in Woodland, and I’d probably seen every single person in town, and they’d seen me, too, and knew me by name. I walked closer to the car to see if I recognized it, but it was just an old black Model T. There must have been twenty cars just like it in Woodland. Whites and coloreds, the few coloreds that owned cars, both had them. And when I got right up beside the Model T, I saw what Dee had left for me on the hood—an apple.
“About twenty feet farther along, there was an apple on top of a big old stone. He was putting those apples where I couldn’t help but see them. The third one was on top of a post at the edge of the woods, and it was so pale it looked almost white. Next to the post one of those paths running all through The Backs led back into the woods. If it hadn’t been for that apple, I would have gone right past it.
“At least I didn’t have to worry so much about making noise once I got back into the woods. Must have been six inches of pine needles and fallen leaves underfoot, and I walked so quiet I could have been floating—tell you the truth, I’ve worn crepe soles ever since then, and for the same reason. You walk soft. But I was still plenty scared—back in the woods there was a lot less light, and I’d have to step on an apple to see it. All I wanted was to find Dee and persuade him to leave with me.
“For a while, all I did was keep moving between the trees and try to make sure I wasn’t coming up on a shack. Every now and then, a faint, slurry voice came from somewhere off in the woods, but I didn’t let it spook me. Then, way up ahead, I saw Dee Sparks. The path didn’t go in a straight line, it kind of angled back and forth, so I didn’t have a good clear look at him, but I got a flash of that silvery-looking sheet way off through the trees. If I sped up I could get to him before he did anything stupid. I pulled my costume up a little farther toward my neck and started to jog.
“The path started dipping downhill. I couldn’t figure it out. Dee was in a straight line ahead of me, and as soon as I followed the path downhill a little bit, I lost sight of him. After a couple more steps, I stopped. The path got a lot steeper. If I kept running, I’d go ass over teakettle. The woman made another terrible sound, and it seemed to come from everywhere at once. Like everything around me had been hurt. I damn near came unglued. Seemed like everything was dying. That Halloween stuff about horrible creatures wasn’t any story, man, it was the way things really were—you couldn’t know anything, you couldn’t trust anything, and you were surrounded by death. I almost fell down and cried like a baby boy. I was lost. I didn’t think I’d ever get back home.
“Then the worst thing of all happened.
“I heard her die. It was just a little noise, more like a sigh than anything, but that sigh came from everywhere and went straight into my ear. A soft sound can be loud, too, you know, be the loudest thing you ever heard. That sigh about lifted me up off the ground, about blew my head apart.
“I stumbled down the path, trying to wipe my eyes with my costume, and all of a sudden I heard men’s voices from off to my left. Someone was saying a word I couldn’t understand over and over, and someone else was telling him to shut up. Then, behind me, I heard running—heavy running, a man. I took off, and right away my feet got tangled up in the sheet and I was rolling downhill, hitting my head on rocks and bouncing off trees and smashing into stuff I didn’t have any idea what it was. Biff bop bang slam smash clang crash ding dong. I hit something big and solid and wound up half covered in water. Took me a long time to get upright, twisted up in the sheet the way I was. My ears buzzed, and I saw stars—yellow and blue and red stars, not real ones. When I tried to sit up, the blasted sheet pulled me back down, so I got a faceful of cold water. I scrambled around like a fox in a trap, and when I finally got so I was at least sitting up, I saw a slash of real sky out the corner of one eye, and I got my hands free and ripped that hole in the sheet wide enough for my whole head to fit through it.
“I was sitting in a little stream next to a fallen tree. The tree was what had stopped me. My whole body hurt like the dickens. No idea where I was. Wasn’t even sure I could stand up. Got my hands on the top of the fallen tree and pushed myself up with my legs—blasted sheet ripped in half, and my knees almost bent back the wrong way, but I got up on my feet. And there was Dee Sparks, coming toward me through the woods on the other side of the stream.
“He looked like he didn’t feel any better than I did, like he couldn’t move in a straight line. His silvery sheet was smearing through the trees. Dee got hurt, too, I thought—he looked like he was in some total panic. The next time I saw the white smear between the trees it was twisting about ten feet off the ground. No, I said to myself, and closed my eyes. Whatever that thing was, it wasn’t Dee. An unbearable feeling, an absolute despair, flowed out from it. I fought against this wave of despair with every weapon I had. I didn’t want to know that feeling. I couldn’t know that feeling—I was eleven years old. If that feeling reached me when I was eleven years old, my entire life would be changed, I’d be in a different universe altogether.
“But it did reach me, didn’t it? I could say no all I liked, but I couldn’t change what had happened. I opened my eyes, and the white smear was gone.
“That was almost worse—I wanted it to be Dee after all, doing something crazy and reckless, climbing trees, running around like a wildman, trying to give me a big whopping scare. But it wasn’t Dee Sparks, and it meant that the worst things I’d ever imagined were true. Everything was dying. You couldn’t know anything, you couldn’t trust anything, we were all lost in the midst of the death that surrounded us.
“Most people will tell you growing up means you stop believing in Halloween things—I’m telling you the reverse. You start to grow up when you understand that the stuff that scares you is part of the air you breathe.
“I stared at the spot where I’d seen that twist of whiteness, I guess trying to go back in time to before I saw Dr. Garland fleeing down Meridian Road. My face looked like his, I thought—because now I knew that you really could see a ghost. The heavy footsteps I’d heard before suddenly cut through the buzzing in my head, and after I turned around and saw who was coming at me down the hill, I thought it was probably my own ghost I’d seen.
“Eddie Grimes looked as big as an oak tree, and he had a long knife in one hand. His feet slipped out from under him, and he skidded the last few yards down to the creek, but I didn’t even try to run away. Drunk as he was, I’d never get away from him. All I did was back up alongside the fallen tree and watch him slide downhill toward the water. I was so scared I couldn’t even talk. Eddie Grimes’s shirt was flapping open, and big long scars ran all across his chest and belly. He’d been raised from the dead at least a couple times since I’d seen him get killed at the dance. He jumped back up on his feet and started coming for me. I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
“Eddie Grimes took another step toward me, and then he stopped and looked straight at my face. He lowered the knife. A sour stink of sweat and alcohol came off him. All he could do was stare at me. Eddie Grimes knew my face all right, he knew my name, he knew my whole family—even at night, he couldn’t mistake me for anyone else. I finally saw that Eddie was actually afraid, like he was the one who’d seen a ghost. The two of just stood there in the shallow water for a couple more seconds, and then Eddie Grimes pointed his knife at the other side of the creek.
“That was all I needed, baby. My legs unfroze, and I forgot all my aches and pains. Eddie watched me roll over the fallen tree and lowered his knife. I splashed through the water and started moving up the hill, grabbing at weeds and branches to pull me along. My feet were frozen, and my clothes were soaked and muddy, and I was trembling all over. About halfway up the hill, I looked back over my shoulder, but Eddie Grimes was gone. It was like he’d never been there at all, like he was nothing but the product of a couple good raps to the noggin.
“Finally, I pulled myself, shaking, up over the top of the rise, and what did I see about ten feet away through a lot of skinny birch trees but a kid in a sheet facing away from me into the woods, and hopping from foot to foot in a pair of big clumsy shoes? And what was in front of him but a path I could make out from even ten feet away? Obviously, this was where I was supposed to turn up, only in the dark and all I must have missed an apple stuck onto a branch or some blasted thing, and I took that little side trip downhill on my head and wound up throwing a spook into Eddie Grimes.
“As soon as I saw him, I realized I hated Dee Sparks. I wouldn’t have tossed him a rope if he was drowning. Without even thinking about it, I bent down and picked up a stone and flung it at him. The stone bounced off a tree, so I bent down and got another one. Dee turned around to find out what made the noise, and the second stone hit him right in the chest, even though it was really his head I was aiming at.
“He pulled his sheet up over his face like an Arab and stared at me with his mouth wide open. Then he looked back over his shoulder at the path, as if the real me might come along at any second. I felt like pegging another rock at his stupid face, but instead I marched up to him. He was shaking his head from side to side. Jim Dawg, he whispered, what happened to you? By way of answer, I hit him a good hard knock on the breastbone. What’s the matter? he wanted to know. After you left me, I say, I fell down a hill and ran into Eddie Grimes.
“That gave him something to think about, all right. Was Grimes coming after me? he wanted to know. Did he see which way I went? Did Grimes see who I was? He was pulling me into the woods while he asked me these dumb-ass questions, and I shoved him away. His sheet flopped back down over his front, and he looked like a little boy. He couldn’t figure out why I was mad at him. From his point of view, he’d been pretty clever, and if I got lost, it was my fault. But I wasn’t mad at him because I got lost. I wasn’t even mad at him because I’d run into Eddie Grimes. It was everything else. Maybe it wasn’t even him I was mad at.
“ ‘I want to get home without getting killed,’ I whispered. ‘Eddie ain’t gonna let me go twice.’ Then I pretended he wasn’t there anymore and tried to figure out how to get back to Meridian Road. It seemed to me that I was still going north when I took that tumble downhill, so when I climbed up the hill on the other side of the creek I was still going north. The wagon track that Dee and I took into The Backs had to be off to my right. I turned away from Dee and started moving through the woods. I didn’t care if he followed me or not. He had nothing to do with me anymore, he was on his own. When I heard him coming along after me, I was sorry. I wanted to get away from Dee Sparks. I wanted to get away from everybody.
“I didn’t want to be around anybody who was supposed to be my friend. I’d rather have had Eddie Grimes following me than Dee Sparks.
“Then I stopped moving, because through the trees I could see one of those greasepaper windows glowing up ahead of me. That yellow light looked evil as the devil’s eye—everything in The Backs was evil, poisoned, even the trees, even the air. The terrible expression on Dr. Garland’s face and the white smudge in the air seemed like the same thing—they were what I didn’t want to know.
“Dee shoved me from behind, and if I hadn’t felt so sick inside I would have turned around and punched him. Instead, I looked over my shoulder and saw him nodding toward where the side of the shack would be. He wanted to get closer! For a second, he seemed as crazy as everything else out there, and then I got it: I was all turned around, and instead of heading back to the main path, I’d been taking us toward the woman’s shack. That was why Dee was following me.
“I shook my head. No, I wasn’t going to sneak up to that place. Whatever was inside there was something I didn’t have to know about. It had too much power—it turned Eddie Grimes around, and that was enough for me. Dee knew I wasn’t fooling. He went around me and started creeping toward the shack.
“And damndest thing, I watched him slipping through the trees for a second and started following him. If he could go up there, so could I. If I didn’t exactly look at whatever was in there myself, I could watch Dee look at it. That would tell me most of what I had to know. And anyways, probably Dee wouldn’t see anything anyhow, unless the front door was hanging open, and that didn’t seem too likely to me. He wouldn’t see anything, and I wouldn’t, either, and we could both go home.
“The door of the shack opened up, and a man walked outside. Dee and I freeze, and I mean freeze. We’re about twenty feet away, on the side of this shack, and if the man looked sideways, he’d see our sheets. There were a lot of trees between us and him, and I couldn’t get a very good look at him, but one thing about him made the whole situation a lot more serious. This man was white, and he was wearing good clothes—I couldn’t see his face, but I could see his rolled-up sleeves, and his suit jacket slung over one arm, and some kind of wrapped-up bundle he was holding in his hands. All this took about a second. The white man started carrying his bundle straight through the woods, and in another two seconds he was out of sight.
“Dee was a little closer than I was, and I think his sight line was a little clearer than mine. On top of that, he saw better at night than I did. Dee didn’t get around like me, but he might have recognized the man we’d seen, and that would be pure trouble. Some rich white man, killing a girl out in The Backs? And us two boys close enough to see him? Do you know what would have happened to us? There wouldn’t be enough left of either one of us to make a decent shadow.
“Dee turned around to face me, and I could see his eyes behind his costume, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. He just stood there, looking at me. In a little bit, just when I was about to explode, we heard a car starting up off to our left. I whispered at Dee if he saw who that was. ‘Nobody,’ Dee said. Now, what the hell did that mean? Nobody? You could say Santa Claus, you could say J. Edgar Hoover, it’d be a better answer than ‘Nobody.’ The Model T’s headlights shone through the trees when the car swung around the top of the path and started going toward Meridian Road. ‘Nobody I ever saw before,’ Dee said. When the headlights cut through the trees, both of us ducked out of sight. Actually, we were so far from the path, we had nothing to worry about. I could barely see the car when it went past, and I couldn’t see the driver at all.
“We stood up. Over Dee’s shoulder I could see the side of the shack where the white man had been. Lamplight flickered on the ground in front of the open door. The last thing in the world I wanted to do was to go inside that place—I didn’t even want to walk around to the front and look in the door. Dee stepped back from me and jerked his head toward the shack. I knew it was going to be just like before. I’d say no, he’d say yes, and then I’d follow him wherever he thought he had to go. I felt the same way I did when I saw that white smear in the woods—hopeless, lost in the midst of death. ‘You go, if you have to,’ I whispered to him. ‘It’s what you wanted to do all along.’ He didn’t move, and I saw that he wasn’t too sure about what he wanted anymore.
“Everything was different now, because the white man made it different. Once a white man walked out that door, it was like raising the stakes in a poker game. But Dee had been working toward that one shack ever since we got into The Backs, and he was still curious as a cat about it. He turned away from me and started moving sideways in a straight line, so he’d be able to peek inside the door from a safe distance.
“After he got about halfway to the front, he looked back and waved me on, like this was still some great adventure he wanted me to share. He was afraid to be on his own, that was all. When he realized I was going to stay put, he bent down and moved real slow past the side. He still couldn’t see more than a sliver of the inside of the shack, and he moved ahead another little ways. By then, I figured, he should have been able to see about half of the inside of the shack. He hunkered down inside his sheet, staring in the direction of the open door. And there he stayed.
“I took it for about half a minute, and then I couldn’t anymore. I was sick enough to die and angry enough to explode, both at the same time. How long could Dee Sparks look at a dead whore? Wouldn’t a couple seconds be enough? Dee was acting like he was watching a goddamn Hopalong Cassidy movie. An owl screeched, and some man in another shack said, ‘Now that’s over,’ and someone else shushed him. If Dee heard, he paid it no mind. I started along toward him, and I don’t think he noticed me, either. He didn’t look up until I was past the front of the shack and had already seen the door hanging open, and the lamplight spilling over the plank floor and onto the grass outside.
“I took another step, and Dee’s head snapped around. He tried to stop me by holding out his hand. All that did was make me mad. Who was Dee Sparks to tell me what I couldn’t see? All he did was leave me alone in the woods with a trail of apples, and he didn’t even do that right. When I kept on coming, Dee started waving both hands at me, looking back and forth between me and the inside of the shack. Like something was happening in there that I couldn’t be allowed to see. I didn’t stop, and Dee got up on his feet and skittered toward me.
“ ‘We gotta get out of here,’ he whispered. He was close enough so I could smell that electrical-fire stink. I stepped to his side, and he grabbed my arm. I yanked my arm out of his grip and went forward a little ways and looked through the door of the shack.
“A bed was shoved up against the far wall, and a woman lay naked on the bed. There was blood all over her legs, and blood all over the sheets, and big puddles of blood on the floor. A woman in a raggedy robe, hair stuck out all over her head, squatted beside the bed, holding the other woman’s hand. She was a colored woman—a Backs woman—but the other one, the one on the bed, was white. Probably she was pretty when she was alive. All I could see was white skin and blood, and I near fainted.
“This wasn’t some white-trash woman who lived out in The Backs, she was brought there, and the man who brought her had killed her. More trouble was coming down than I could imagine, trouble enough to kill lots of our people. And if Dee and I said a word about the white man we’d seen, the trouble would come right straight down on us.
“I must have made some kind of noise, because the woman next to the bed turned halfways around and looked at me. There wasn’t any doubt about it—she saw me. All she saw of Dee was a dirty white sheet, but she saw my face, and she knew who I was. I knew her, too, and she wasn’t any Backs woman. She lived down the street from us. Her name was Mary Randolph, and she was the one who came up to Eddie Grimes after he got shot to death and brought him back to life. Mary Randolph followed my dad’s band, and when we played roadhouses or colored dance halls, she’d be likely to turn up. A couple times she told me I played good drums—I was a drummer back then, you know, switched to saxophone when I turned twelve. Mary Randolph just looked at me, her hair stuck out straight all over her head like she was already inside a whirlwind of trouble. No expression on her face except that look you get when your mind is going a mile a minute and your body can’t move at all. She didn’t even look surprised. She almost looked like she wasn’t surprised, like she was expecting to see me. As bad as I’d felt that night, this was the worst of all. I liked to have died. I’d have disappeared down an anthill, if I could. I didn’t know what I had done—just be there, I guess—but I’d never be able to undo it.
“I pulled at Dee’s sheet, and he tore off down the side of the shack like he’d been waiting for a signal. Mary Randolph stared into my eyes, and it felt like I had to pull myself away—I couldn’t just turn my head, I had to disconnect. And when I did, I could still feel her staring at me. Somehow I made myself go down past the side of the shack, but I could still see Mary Randolph inside there, looking out at the place where I’d been.
“If Dee said anything at all when I caught up with him, I’d have knocked his teeth down his throat, but he just moved fast and quiet through the trees, seeing the best way to go, and I followed after. I felt like I’d been kicked by a horse. When we got on the path, we didn’t bother trying to sneak down through the woods on the other side, we lit out and ran as hard as we could—like wild dogs were after us. And after we got onto Meridian Road, we ran toward town until we couldn’t run anymore.
“Dee clamped his hand over his side and staggered forward a little bit. Then he stopped and ripped off his costume and lay down by the side of the road, breathing hard. I was leaning forward with my hands on my knees, as winded as he was. When I could breathe again, I started walking down the road. Dee picked himself up and got next to me and walked along, looking at my face and then looking away, and then looking back at my face again.
“ ‘So?’ I said.
“ ‘I know that lady,’ Dee said.
“Hell, that was no news. Of course, he knew Mary Randolph—she was his neighbor, too. I didn’t bother to answer, I just grunted at him. Then I reminded him that Mary hadn’t seen his face, only mine.
“ ‘Not Mary,’ he said. ‘The other one.’
“He knew the dead white woman’s name? That made everything worse. A lady like that shouldn’t be in Dee Sparks’s world, especially if she’s going to wind up dead in The Backs. I wondered who was going to get lynched, and how many.
“Then Dee said that I knew her, too. I stopped walking and looked him straight in the face.
“ ‘Miss Abbey Montgomery,’ he said. ‘She brings clothes and food down to our church, Thanksgiving and Christmas.’
“He was right—I wasn’t sure if I’d ever heard her name, but I’d seen her once or twice, bringing baskets of ham and chicken and boxes of clothes to Dee’s father’s church. She was about twenty years old, I guess, so pretty she made you smile just to look at. From a rich family in a big house right at the top of Miller’s Hill. Some man didn’t think a girl like that should have any associations with colored people, I guess, and decided to express his opinion about as strong as possible. Which meant that we were going to take the blame for what happened to her, and the next time we saw white sheets, they wouldn’t be Halloween costumes.
“ ‘He sure took a long time to kill her,’ I said.
“And Dee said, ‘She ain’t dead.’
“So I asked him, What the hell did he mean by that? I saw the girl. I saw the blood. Did he think she was going to get up and walk around? Or maybe Mary Randolph was going to tell her that magic word and bring her back to life?
“ ‘You can think that if you want to,’ Dee said. ‘But Abbey Montgomery ain’t dead.’
“I almost told him I’d seen her ghost, but he didn’t deserve to hear about it. The fool couldn’t even see what was right in front of his eyes. I couldn’t expect him to understand what happened to me when I saw that miserable…that thing. He was rushing on ahead of me anyhow, like I’d suddenly embarrassed him or something. That was fine with me. I felt the exact same way. I said, ‘I guess you know neither one of us can ever talk about this,’ and he said, ‘I guess you know it, too,’ and that was the last thing we said to each other that night. All the way down Meridian Road Dee Sparks kept his eyes straight ahead and his mouth shut. When we got to the field, he turned toward me like he had something to say, and I waited for it, but he faced forward again and ran away. Just ran. I watched him disappear past the general store, and then I walked home by myself.
“My mom gave me hell for getting my clothes all wet and dirty, and my brothers laughed at me and wanted to know who beat me up and stole my candy. As soon as I could, l went to bed, pulled the covers up over my head, and closed my eyes. A little while later, my mom came in and asked if I was all right. Did I get into a fight with that Dee Sparks? Dee Sparks was born to hang, that was what she thought, and I ought to have a better class of friends. ‘I’m tired of playing those drums, Momma,’ I said, ‘I want to play the saxophone instead.’ She looked at me surprised, but said she’d talk about it with Daddy, and that it might work out.
“For the next couple days, I waited for the bomb to go off. On the Friday, I went to school but couldn’t concentrate for beans. Dee Sparks and I didn’t even nod at each other in the hallways—just walked by like the other guy was invisible. On the weekend I said I felt sick and stayed in bed, wondering when that whirlwind of trouble would come down. I wondered if Eddie Grimes would talk about seeing me—once they found the body, they’d get around to Eddie Grimes real quick.
“But nothing happened that weekend, and nothing happened all the next week. I thought Mary Randolph must have hid the white girl in a grave out in The Backs. But how long could a girl from one of those rich families go missing without investigations and search parties? And, on top of that, what was Mary Randolph doing there in the first place? She liked to have a good time, but she wasn’t one of those wild girls with a razor under her skirt—she went to church every Sunday, was good to people, nice to kids. Maybe she went out to comfort that poor girl, but how did she know she’d be there in the first place? Misses Abbey Montgomerys from the hill didn’t share their plans with Mary Randolphs from Darktown. I couldn’t forget the way she looked at me, but I couldn’t understand it, either. The more I thought about that look, the more it was like Mary Randolph was saying something to me, but what? Are you ready for this? Do you understand this? Do you know how careful you must be?
“My father said I could start learning the C-melody sax, and when I was ready to play it in public, my little brother wanted to take over the drums. Seems he always wanted to play drums, and in fact, he’s been a drummer ever since, a good one. So I worked out how to play my little sax, I went to school and came straight home after, and everything went on like normal, except Dee Sparks and I weren’t friends anymore. If the police were searching for a missing rich girl, I didn’t hear anything about it.
“Then one Saturday I was walking down our street to go the general store, and Mary Randolph came through her front door just as I got to her house. When she saw me, she stopped moving real sudden, with one hand still on the side of the door. I was so surprised to see her that I was in a kind of slow motion, and I must have stared at her. She gave me a look like an X-ray, a look that searched around down inside me. I don’t know what she saw, but her face relaxed, and she took her hand off the door and let it close behind her, and she wasn’t looking inside me anymore. ‘Miss Randolph,’ I said, and she told me she was looking forward to hearing our band play at a Beergarden dance in a couple weeks. I told her I was going to be playing the saxophone at that dance, and she said something about that, and all the time it was like we were having two conversations, the top one about me and the band, and the one underneath about her and the murdered white girl in The Backs. It made me so nervous, my words got all mixed up. Finally, she said, ‘You make sure you say hello to your daddy from me, now,’ and I got away.
“After I passed her house, Mary Randolph started walking down the street behind me. I could feel her watching me, and I started to sweat. Mary Randolph was a total mystery to me. She was a nice lady, but probably she buried that girl’s body. I didn’t know but that she was going to come and kill me one day. And then I remembered her kneeling down beside Eddie Grimes at the roadhouse. She had been dancing with Eddie Grimes, who was in jail more often than he was out. I wondered if you could be a respectable lady and still know Eddie Grimes well enough to dance with him. And how did she bring him back to life? Or was that what happened at all? Hearing that lady walk along behind me made me so uptight, I crossed to the other side of the street.
“A couple days after that, when I was beginning to think that the trouble was never going to happen after all, it came down. We heard police cars coming down the street right when we were finishing dinner. I thought they were coming for me, and I almost lost my chicken and rice. The sirens went right past our house, and then more sirens came toward us from other directions—the old klaxons they had in those days. It sounded like every cop in the state was rushing into Darktown. This was bad, bad news. Someone was going to wind up dead, that was certain. No way all those police were going to come into our part of town, make all that commotion, and leave without killing at least one man. That’s the truth. You just had to pray that the man they killed wasn’t you or anyone in your family. My daddy turned off the lamps, and we went to the window to watch the cars go by. Two of them were state police. When it was safe, Daddy went outside to see where all the trouble was headed. After he came back in, he said it looked like the police were going toward Eddie Grimes’s place. We wanted to go out and look, but they wouldn’t let us, so we went to the back windows that faced toward Grimes’s house. Couldn’t see anything but a lot of cars and police standing all over the road back there. Sounded like they were knocking down Grimes’s house with sledgehammers. Then a whole bunch of cops took off running, and all I could see was the cars spread out across the road. About ten minutes later, we heard lots of gunfire coming from a couple streets farther back. It seemed to have lasted forever. Like hearing the Battle of the Bulge. My momma started to cry, and so did my little brother. The shooting stopped. The police shouted to one another, and then they came back and got in their cars and went away.
“On the radio the next morning, they said that a known criminal, a Negro man named Edward Grimes, had been killed while trying to escape arrest for the murder of a white woman. The body of Eleanore Monday, missing for three days, had been found in a shallow grave by Woodland police searching near an illegal distillery in the region called The Backs. Miss Monday, the daughter of grocer Albert Monday, had been in poor mental and physical health, and Grimes had apparently taken advantage of her weakness either to abduct or lure her to The Backs, where she had been savagely murdered. That’s what it said on the radio—I still remember the words. In poor mental and physical health. Savagely murdered.
“When the paper finally came, there on the front page was a picture of Eleanore Monday, girl with dark hair and a big nose. She didn’t look anything like the dead woman in the shack. She hadn’t even disappeared on the right day. Eddie Grimes was never going to be able to explain things, because the police had finally cornered him in the old jute warehouse just off Meridian Road next to the general store. I don’t suppose they even bothered trying to arrest him—they weren’t interested in arresting him. He killed a white girl. They wanted revenge, and they got it.
“After I looked at the paper, I got out of the house and ran between the houses to get a look at the jute warehouse. Turned out a lot of folks had the same idea. A big crowd strung out in a long line in front of the warehouse, and cars were parked all along Meridian Road. Right up in front of the warehouse door was a police car, and a big cop stood in the middle of the big doorway, watching people file by. They were walking past the doorway one by one, acting like they were at some kind of exhibit. Nobody was talking. It was a sight I never saw before in that town, whites and colored all lined up together. On the other side of the warehouse, two groups of men stood alongside the road, one colored and one white, talking so quietly you couldn’t hear a word.
“Now, I was never one who liked standing in lines, so I figured I’d just dart up there, peek in, and save myself some time. I came around the end of the line and ambled toward the two bunches of men, like I’d already had my look and was just hanging around to enjoy the scene. After I got a little past the warehouse door, I sort of drifted up alongside it. I looked down the row of people, and there was Dee Sparks, just a few yards away from being able to see in. Dee was leaning forward, and when he saw me he almost jumped out of his skin. He looked away as fast as he could. His eyes turned as dead as stones. The cop at the door yelled at me to go to the end of the line. He never would have noticed me at all if Dee hadn’t jumped like someone just shot off a firecracker behind him.
“About halfway down the line, Mary Randolph was standing behind some of the ladies from the neighborhood. She looked terrible. Her hair stuck out in raggedy clumps, and her skin was all ashy, like she hadn’t slept in a long time. I sped up a little, hoping she wouldn’t notice me, but after I took one more step, Mary Randolph looked down and her eyes hooked into mine. I swear, what was in her eyes almost knocked me down. I couldn’t even tell what it was, unless it was just pure hate. Hate and pain. With her eyes hooked into mine like that, I couldn’t look away. It was like I was seeing that miserable, terrible white smear twisting up between the trees on that night in The Backs. Mary let me go, and I almost fell down all over again.
“I got to the end of the line and started moving along regular and slow with everybody else. Mary Randolph stayed in my mind and blanked out everything else. When I got up to the door, I barely took in what was inside the warehouse—a wall full of bulletholes and bloodstains all over the place, big slick ones and little drizzly ones. All I could think of was the shack and Mary Randolph sitting next to the dead girl, and I was back there all over again.
“Mary Randolph didn’t show up the Beergarden dance, so she didn’t hear me play saxophone in public for the first time. I didn’t expect her, either, not after the way she looked out at the warehouse. There’d been a lot of news about Eddie Grimes, who they made out to be less civilized than a gorilla, a crazyman who’d murder anyone as long as he could kill all the white women first. The paper had a picture of what they called Grimes’s ‘lair,’ with busted furniture all over the place and holes in the walls, but they never explained that it was the police who tore it up and made it look that way.
“The other thing people got suddenly all hot about was The Backs. Seems the place was even worse than everybody thought. Seems white girls besides Eleanore Monday had been taken out there—according to some, there was even white girls living out there, along with a lot of bad coloreds. The place was a nest of vice, Sodom and Gomorrah. Two days before the town council was supposed to discuss the problem, a gang of white men went out there with guns and clubs and torches and burned every shack in The Backs clear down to the ground. While they were there, they didn’t see a single soul, white, colored, male, female, damned, or saved. Everybody who lived in The Backs had skedaddled. And the funny thing was, long as The Backs had existed right outside of Woodland, no one in Woodland could recollect the name of anyone who had ever lived there. They couldn’t even recall the name of anyone who had ever gone there, except for Eddie Grimes. In fact, after the place got burned down, it appeared that it must have been a sin just to say its name, because no one ever mentioned it. You’d think men so fine and moral as to burn down The Backs would be willing to take the credit, but none ever did.
“You could think they must have wanted to get rid of some things out there. Or wanted real bad to forget about things out there. One thing I thought, Dr. Garland and the man I saw leaving that shack had been out there with torches.
“But maybe I didn’t know anything at all. Two weeks later, a couple things happened that shook me good.
“The first one happened three nights before Thanksgiving. I was hurrying home, a little bit late. Nobody else on the street, everybody inside either sitting down to dinner or getting ready for it. When I got to Mary Randolph’s house, some kind of noise coming from inside stopped me. What I thought was it sounded exactly like somebody trying to scream while someone else was holding a hand over their mouth. Well, that was plain foolish, wasn’t it? How did I know what that would sound like? I moved along a step or two, and then I heard it again. Could be anything, I told myself. Mary Randolph didn’t like me too much, anyway. She wouldn’t be partial to my knocking on her door. Best thing I could do was get out. Which was what I did. Just went home to supper and forgot about it.
“Until the next day, anyhow, when a friend of Mary’s walked in her front door and found her lying dead with her throat cut and a knife in her hand. A cut of fatback, we heard, had boiled away to cinders on her stove. I didn’t tell anybody about what I heard the night before. Too scared. I couldn’t do anything but wait to see what the police did.
“To the police, it was all real clear. Mary killed herself, plain and simple.
“When our minister went across town to ask why a lady who intended to commit suicide had bothered to start cooking her supper, the chief told him that a female bent on killing herself probably didn’t care what happened to the food on her stove. ‘Then I suppose Mary Randolph nearly managed to cut her own head off,’ said the minister. ‘A female in despair possesses a godawful strength,’ said the chief. And asked, ‘Wouldn’t she have screamed if she’d been attacked?’ And added, ‘Couldn’t it be that maybe this female here had secrets in her life connected to the late savage murderer named Eddie Grimes?’ ‘We might all be better off if these secrets get buried with your Mary Randolph,’ said the chief. ‘I’m sure you understand me, Reverend.’ And yes, the Reverend did understand, he surely did. So Mary Randolph got laid away in the cemetery, and nobody ever said her name again. She was put away out of mind, like The Backs.
“The second thing that shook me up and proved to me that I didn’t know anything, that I was no better than a blind dog, happened on Thanksgiving Day. My daddy played piano in church, and on special days we played our instruments along with the gospel songs. I got to church early with the rest of my family, and we practiced with the choir. Afterward, I went to fooling around outside until the people came, and saw a big car come up into the church parking lot. Must have been the biggest, fanciest car I’d ever seen. Miller’s Hill was written all over that vehicle. I couldn’t have told you why, but the sight of it made my heart stop. The front door opened, and out stepped a colored man in a fancy gray uniform with a smart cap. He didn’t so much as dirty his eyes by looking at me, or at the church, or at anything around him. He stepped around the front of the car and opened the rear door on my side. A young woman was in the passenger seat, and when she got out of the car, the sun fell on her blond hair and the little fur jacket she was wearing. I couldn’t see more than the top of her head, her shoulders under the jacket, and her legs. Then she straightened up, and her eyes lighted right on me. She smiled, but I couldn’t smile back. I couldn’t even begin to move.
“It was Abbey Montgomery, delivering baskets of food to our church, the way she did every Thanksgiving and Christmas. She looked older and thinner than the last time I’d seen her alive—older and thinner, but more than that, like there was no fun at all in her life anymore. She walked to the trunk of the car, and the driver opened it up, leaned in, and brought out a great big basket of food. He took it into the church by the back way and came back for another one. Abbey Montgomery just stood still and watched him carry the baskets. She looked—she looked like she was just going through the motions, like going through the motions was all she was ever going to do from now on, and she knew it. Once she smiled at the driver, but the smile was so sad that the driver didn’t even try to smile back. When he was done, he closed the trunk and let her into the passenger seat, got behind the wheel, and drove away.
“I was thinking, Dee Sparks was right, she was alive all the time. Then I thought, No, Mary Randolph brought her back, too, like she did Eddie Grimes. But it didn’t work right, and only part of her came back.
“And that’s the whole thing, except that Abbey Montgomery didn’t deliver food to our church, that Christmas—she was traveling out of the country with her aunt. And she didn’t bring food the next Thanksgiving, either, just sent her driver with the baskets. By that time, we didn’t expect her, because we’d already heard that, soon as she got back to town, Abbey Montgomery stopped leaving her house. That girl shut herself up and never came out. I heard from somebody who probably didn’t know any more than I did that she eventually got so she wouldn’t even leave her room. Five years later, she passed away. Twenty-six years old, and they said she looked to be at least fifty.”
Hat fell silent, and I sat with my pen ready over the notebook, waiting for more. When I realized that he had finished, I asked, “What did she die of?”
“Nobody ever told me.”
“And nobody ever found who had killed Mary Randolph.”
The limpid, colorless eyes momentarily rested on me. “Was she killed?”
“Did you ever become friends with Dee Sparks again? Did you at least talk about it with him?”
“Surely did not. Nothing to talk about.”
This was a remarkable statement, considering that for an hour he had done nothing but talk about what had happened to the two of them, but I let it go. Hat was still looking at me with his unreadable eyes. His face had become particularly bland, almost immobile. It was not possible to imagine this man as an active eleven-year-old boy. “Now you heard me out, answer my question,” he said.
I couldn’t remember the question.
“Did we find what we were looking for?”
Scares—that was what they had been looking for. “I think you found a lot more than that,” I said.
He nodded slowly. “That’s right. It was more.”
Then I asked him some question about his family’s band, he lubricated himself with another swallow of gin, and the interview returned to more typical matters. But the experience of listening to him had changed. After I had heard the long, unresolved tale of his Halloween night, everything Hat said seemed to have two separate meanings, the daylight meaning created by sequences of ordinary English words, and another, nighttime meaning, far less determined and knowable. He was like a man discoursing with eerie rationality in the midst of a particularly surreal dream: like a man carrying on an ordinary conversation with one foot placed on solid ground and the other suspended above a bottomless abyss. I focused on the rationality, on the foot placed in the context I understood; the rest was unsettling to the point of being frightening. By six-thirty, when he kindly called me “Miss Rosemary” and opened his door, I felt as if I’d spent several weeks, if not whole months, in his room.
Although I did get my M.A. at Columbia, I didn’t have enough money to stay on for a Ph.D., so I never became a college professor. I never became a jazz critic, either, or anything else very interesting. For a couple years after Columbia, I taught English in a high school until I quit to take the job I have now, which involves a lot of traveling and pays a little bit better than teaching. Maybe even quite a bit better, but that’s not saying much, especially when you consider my expenses. I own a nice little house in the Chicago suburbs, my marriage held up against everything life did to it, and my twenty-two-year-old son, a young man who never once in his life for the purpose of pleasure read a novel, looked at a painting, visited a museum, or listened to anything but the most readily available music, recently announced to his mother and myself that he has decided to become an artist, actual type of art to be determined later, but probably to include aspects of photography, videotape, and the creation of “installations.” I take this as proof that he was raised in a manner that left his self-esteem intact.
I no longer provide my life with a perpetual soundtrack (though my son, who has moved back in with us, does), in part because my income does not permit the purchase of a great many compact discs. (A friend presented me with a CD player on my forty-fifth birthday.) And these days, I’m as interested in classical music as in jazz. Of course, I never go to jazz clubs when I am home. Are there still people, apart from New Yorkers, who patronize jazz nightclubs in their own hometowns? The concept seems faintly retrograde, even somehow illicit. But when I am out on the road, living in airplanes and hotel rooms, I often check the jazz listings in the local papers to see if I can find some way to fill my evenings. Many of the legends of my youth are still out there, in most cases playing at least as well as before. Some months ago, while I was San Francisco, I came across John Hawes’s name in this fashion. He was working in a club so close to my hotel that I could walk to it.
His appearance in any club at all was surprising. Hawes had ceased performing jazz in public years before. He had earned a great deal of fame (and undoubtedly, a great deal of money) writing film scores, and in the past decade, he had begun to appear in swallow-tail coat and white tie as a conductor of the standard classical repertoire. I believe he had a permanent post in some city like Seattle, or perhaps Salt Lake City. If he was spending a week playing jazz with a trio in San Francisco, it must have been for the sheer pleasure of it.
I turned up just before the beginning of the first set and got a table toward the back of the club. Most of the tables were filled—Hawes’s celebrity had guaranteed him a good house. Only a few minutes after the announced time of the first set, Hawes emerged through a door at the front of the club and moved toward the piano, followed by his bassist and drummer. He looked like a more successful version of the younger man I had seen in New York, and the only indication of the extra years were his silver-gray hair, still abundant, and a little paunch. His playing, too, seemed essentially unchanged, but I could not hear it in the way I once had. He was still a good pianist—no doubt about that—but he seemed to be skating over the surface of the songs he played, using his wonderful technique and good time merely to decorate their melodies. It was the sort of playing that becomes less impressive the more attention you give it—if you were listening with half an ear, it probably sounded like Art Tatum. I wondered if John Hawes had always had this superficial streak in him, or if he had lost a certain necessary passion during his years away from jazz. Certainly, he had not sounded superficial when I had heard him play with Hat.
Hawes, too, might have been thinking about his old employer, because in the first set he played “Love Walked In,” “Too Marvelous for Words,” and “Up Jumped Hat.” In the last of these, inner gears seemed to mesh, the rhythm simultaneously relaxed and intensified, and the music turned into real, not imitation, jazz. Hawes looked pleased with himself when he stood up from the piano bench, and half a dozen fans moved to greet him as he stepped off the bandstand. Most of them were carrying old records they wished him to sign.
A few minutes later, I saw Hawes standing by himself at the end of the bar, drinking what appeared to be club soda, in proximity to his musicians but not actually speaking with them. Wondering if his allusions to Hat had been deliberate, I left my table and walked toward the bar. Hawes watched me approach out of the side of his eye, neither encouraging nor discouraging me to approach him. When I introduced myself, he smiled nicely and shook my hand and waited for whatever I wanted to say to him.
At first, I made some inane comment about the difference between playing in clubs and conducting in concert halls, and he replied with the noncommittal and equally banal agreement that yes, the two experiences were very different.
Then I told him that I had seen him play with Hat all those years ago in New York, and he turned to me with genuine pleasure in his face. “Did you? At that little club on Saint Mark’s Place? That was the only time I ever worked with him, but it sure was fun. What an experience. I guess I must have been thinking about it, because I played some of those songs we used to do.”
“That was why I came over,” I said. “I guess that was one of the best musical experiences I ever had.”
“You and me both.” Hawes smiled to himself. “Sometimes, I just couldn’t believe what he was doing.”
“It showed,” I said.
“Well.” His eyes slid away from mine. “Great character. Completely other-worldly.”
“I saw some of that,” I said. “I did that interview with him that turns up now and then, the one in Down Beat.”
“Oh!” Hawes gave me his first genuinely interested look so far. “Well, that was him, all right.”
“Most of it was, anyhow.”
“You cheated?” Now he was looking even more interested.
“I had to make it understandable.”
“Oh, sure. You couldn’t put in all those ding-dings and bells and Bob Crosbys.” These had been elements of Hat’s private code. Hawes laughed at the memory. “When he wanted to play a blues in G, he’d lean over and say, ‘G’s, please.’ ”
“Did you get to know him at all well, personally?” I asked, thinking that the answer must be that he had not—I didn’t think that anyone had ever really known Hat very well.
“Pretty well,” Hawes said. “A couple times, around ’54 and ’55, he invited me home with him, to his parents’ house, I mean. We got to be friends on a Jazz at the Phil tour, and twice when we were in the South, he asked me if I wanted to eat some good home cooking.”
“You went to his hometown?”
He nodded. “His parents put me up. They were interesting people. Hat’s father, Red, was about the lightest black man I ever saw, and he could have passed for white anywhere, but I don’t suppose the thought ever occurred to him.”
“Was the family band still going?”
“No, to tell you the truth, I don’t think they were getting much work up toward the end of the forties. At the end, they were using a tenor player and a drummer from the high school band. And the church work got more and more demanding for Hat’s father.”
“His father was a deacon, or something like that?”
He raised his eyebrows. “No, Red was the Baptist minister. The reverend. He ran that church. I think he even started it.”
“Hat told me his father played piano in church, but…”
“The reverend would have made a hell of a blues piano player if he’d ever left his day job.”
“There must have been another Baptist church in the neighborhood,” I said, thinking this the only explanation for the presence of two Baptist ministers. But why had Hat not mentioned that his own father, like Dee Sparks’s, had been a clergyman?
“Are you kidding? There was barely enough money in that place to keep one of them going.” He looked at his watch, nodded at me, and began to move closer to his sidemen.
“Could I ask you one more question?”
“I suppose so,” he said, almost impatiently.
“Did Hat strike you as superstitious?”
Hawes grinned. “Oh, he was superstitious, all right. He told me he never worked on Halloween—he didn’t even want to go out of his room on Halloween. That’s why he left the big band, you know. They were starting a tour on Halloween, and Hat refused to do it. He just quit.” He leaned toward me. “I’ll tell you another funny thing. I always had the feeling that Hat was terrified of his father—I thought he invited me to Hatchville with him so I could be some kind of buffer between him and his father. Never made any sense to me. Red was a big strong old guy, and I’m pretty sure a long time ago he used to mess around with the ladies, reverend or not, but I couldn’t ever figure out why Hat should be afraid of him. But whenever Red came into the room, Hat shut up. Funny, isn’t it?”
I must have looked very perplexed. “Hatchville?”
“Where they lived. Hatchville, Mississippi—not too far from Biloxi.”
“But he told me—”
“Hat never gave too many straight answers,” Hawes said. “And he didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. When you come to think of it, why should he? He was Hat.”
After the next set, I walked back uphill to my hotel, wondering again about the long story Hat had told me. Had there been any truth in it at all?
Three weeks later I found myself released from a meeting at our midwestern headquarters in downtown Chicago earlier than I had expected, and instead of going to a bar with the other wandering corporate ghosts like myself, made up a story about a relative I had promised to visit. I didn’t want to admit to my fellow employees, committed like all male businesspeople to aggressive endeavors such as racquetball, drinking, and the pursuit of women, that I intended to visit the library. Short of a trip to Mississippi, a good periodical room offered the most likely means of finding out once and for all how much truth had been in what Hat had told me.
I hadn’t forgotten everything I had learned at Columbia—I still knew how to look things up.
In the main library, a boy set me up with a monitor and spools of microfilm representing the complete contents of the daily newspapers from Biloxi and Hatchville, Mississippi, for Hat’s tenth and eleventh years. That made three papers, two for Biloxi and one for Hatchville, but all I had to examine were the issues dating from the end of October through the middle of November—I was looking for references to Eddie Grimes, Eleanore Monday, Mary Randolph, Abbey Montgomery, Hat’s family, The Backs, and anyone named Sparks.
The Hatchville Blade, a gossipy daily printed on peach-colored paper, offered plenty of references to each of these names and places, and the papers from Biloxi contained nearly as many—Biloxi could not conceal the delight, disguised as horror, aroused in its collective soul by the unimaginable events taking place in the smaller, supposedly respectable town ten miles west. Biloxi was riveted, Biloxi was superior, Biloxi was virtually intoxicated with dread and outrage. In Hatchville, the press maintained a persistent optimistic dignity: When wickedness had appeared, justice official and unofficial had dealt with it. Hatchville was shocked but proud (or at least pretended to be proud), and Biloxi all but preened. The Blade printed detailed news stories, but the Biloxi papers suggested implications not allowed by Hatchville’s version of events. I needed Hatchville to confirm or question Hat’s story, but Biloxi gave me at least the beginning of a way to understand it.
A black ex-convict named Edward Grimes had in some fashion persuaded or coerced Eleanore Monday, a retarded young white woman, to accompany him to an area variously described as “a longstanding local disgrace” (the Blade) and “a haunt of deepest vice” (Biloxi) and after “the perpetration of the most offensive and brutal deeds upon her person” (the Blade) or “acts which the judicious commentator must decline to imagine, much less describe” (Biloxi) murdered her, presumably to ensure her silence, and then buried the body near the “squalid dwelling” where he made and sold illegal liquor. State and local police departments acting in concert had located the body, identified Grimes as the fiend, and, after a search of his house, had tracked him to a warehouse where the murderer was killed in a gun battle. The Blade covered half its front page with a photograph of a gaping double door and a bloodstained wall. All Mississippi, both Hatchville and Biloxi declared, now could breathe more easily.
The Blade gave the death of Mary Randolph a single paragraph on its back page, the Biloxi papers nothing.
In Hatchville, the raid on The Backs was described as an heroic assault on a dangerous criminal encampment which had somehow come to flourish in a little-noticed section of the countryside. At great risk to themselves, anonymous citizens of Hatchville had descended like the army of the righteous and driven forth the hidden sinners from their dens. Troublemakers, beware! The Biloxi papers, while seeming to endorse the action in Hatchville, actually took another tone altogether. Can it be, they asked, that the Hatchville police had never before noticed the existence of a Sodom and Gomorrah so close to the town line? Did it take the savage murder of a helpless woman to bring it to their attention? Of course Biloxi celebrated the destruction of The Backs, such vileness must be eradicated, but it wondered what else had been destroyed along with the stills and the mean buildings where loose women had plied their trade. Men ever are men, and those who have succumbed to temptation may wish to remove from the face of the earth any evidence of their lapses. Had not the police of Hatchville ever heard the rumor, vague and doubtless baseless, that operations of an illegal nature had been performed in the selfsame Backs? That in an atmosphere of drugs, intoxication, and gambling, the races had mingled there, and that “fast” young women had risked life and honor in search of illicit thrills? Hatchville may have rid itself of a few buildings, but Biloxi was willing to suggest that the problems of its smaller neighbor might not have disappeared with them.
As this campaign of innuendo went on in Biloxi, the Blade blandly reported the ongoing events of any smaller American city. Miss Abigail Montgomery sailed with her aunt, Miss Lucinda Bright, from New Orleans to France for an eight-week tour of the continent. The Reverend Jasper Sparks of the Miller’s Hill Presbyterian Church delivered a sermon on the subject “Christian Forgiveness.” (Just after Thanksgiving, the Reverend Sparks’s son, Rodney, was sent off with the blessings and congratulations of all Hatchville to a private academy in Charleston, South Carolina.) There were bake sales, church socials, and costume parties. A saxophone virtuoso named Albert Woodland demonstrated his astonishing wizardry at a well-attended recital presented in Temperance Hall.
Well, I knew the name of at least one person who had attended the recital. If Hat had chosen to disguise the name of his hometown, he had done so by substituting for it a name that represented another sort of home.
But although I had more ideas about this than before, I still did not know exactly what Hat had seen or done on Halloween night in The Backs. It seemed possible that he had gone there with a white boy of his age, a preacher’s son like himself, and had the wits scared out of him by whatever had happened to Abbey Montgomery—and after that night, Abbey herself had been sent out of town, as had Dee Sparks. I couldn’t think that a man had murdered the young woman, leaving Mary Randolph to bring her back to life. Surely whatever had happened to Abbey Montgomery had brought Dr. Garland out to The Backs, and what he had witnessed or done there had sent him away screaming. And this event—what had befallen a rich young white woman in the shadiest, most criminal section of a Mississippi county—had led to the slaying of Eddie Grimes and the murder of Mary Randolph. Because they knew what had happened, they had to die.
I understood all this, and Hat had understood it, too. Yet he had introduced needless puzzles, as if embedded in the midst of this unresolved story were something he either wished to conceal or not to know. And concealed it would remain; if Hat did not know it, I never would. Whatever had really happened in The Backs on Halloween night was lost for good.
On the Blade’s entertainment page for a Saturday in the middle of November I had come across a photograph of Hat’s family’s band, and when I had reached this hopeless point in my thinking, I spooled back across the pages to look at it again. Hat, his two brothers, his sister, and his parents stood in a straight line, tallest to smallest, in front of what must have been the family car. Hat held a C-melody saxophone, his brothers a trumpet and drumsticks, his sister a clarinet. As the piano player, the reverend carried nothing at all—nothing except for what came through even a grainy, sixty-year-old photograph as a powerful sense of self. Hat’s father had been a tall, impressive man, and in the photograph he looked as white as I did. But what was impressive was not the lightness of his skin, or even his striking handsomeness: What impressed was the sense of authority implicit in his posture, his straightforward gaze, even the dictatorial set of his chin. In retrospect, I was not surprised by what John Hawes had told me, for this man could easily be frightening. You would not wish to oppose him, you would not elect to get in his way. Beside him, Hat’s mother seemed vague and distracted, as if her husband had robbed her of all certainty. Then I noticed the car, and for the first time realized why it had been included in the photograph. It was a sign of their prosperity, the respectable status they had achieved—the car was as much an advertisement as the photograph. It was, I thought, an old Model T Ford, but I didn’t waste any time speculating that it might have been the Model T Hat had seen in The Backs.
And that would be that—the hint of an absurd supposition—except for something I read a few days ago in a book called Cool Breeze: The Life of Grant Kilbert.
There are few biographies of any jazz musicians apart from Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington (though one does now exist of Hat, the title of which was drawn from my interview with him), and I was surprised to see Cool Breeze at the B. Dalton in our local mall. Biographies have not yet been written of Art Blakey, Clifford Brown, Ben Webster, Art Tatum, and many others of more musical and historical importance than Kilbert. Yet I should not have been surprised. Kilbert was one of those musicians who attracts and maintains a large personal following, and twenty years after his death, almost all of his records have been released on CD, many of them in multidisc boxed sets. He had been a great, great player, the closest to Hat of all his disciples. Because Kilbert had been one of my early heroes, I bought the book (for $35!) and brought it home.
Like the lives of many jazz musicians, I suppose of artists in general, Kilbert’s had been an odd mixture of public fame and private misery. He had committed burglaries, even armed robberies, to feed his persistent heroin addiction; he had spent years in jail; his two marriages had ended in outright hatred; he had managed to betray most of his friends. That this weak, narcissistic louse had found it in himself to create music of real tenderness and beauty was one of art’s enigmas but not actually a surprise. I’d heard and read enough stories about Grant Kilbert to know what kind of man he’d been.
But what I had not known was that Kilbert, to all appearances an American of conventional northern European, perhaps Scandinavian or Anglo-Saxon, stock, had occasionally claimed to be black. (This claim had always been dismissed, apparently, as another indication of Kilbert’s mental aberrancy.) At other times, being Kilbert, he had denied ever making this claim.
Neither had I known that the received versions of his birth and upbringing were in question. Unlike Hat, Kilbert had been interviewed dozens of times both in Down Beat and in mass-market weekly newsmagazines, invariably to offer the same story of having been born in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, to an unmusical, working-class family (a plumber’s family), of knowing virtually from infancy that he was born to make music, of begging for and finally being given a saxophone, of early mastery and the dazzled admiration of his teachers, then of dropping out of school at sixteen and joining the Woody Herman Band. After that, almost immediate fame.
Most of this, the Grant Kilbert myth, was undisputed. He had been raised in Hattiesburg by a plumber named Kilbert, he had been a prodigy and high school dropout, he’d become famous with Woody Herman before he was twenty. Yet he told a few friends, not necessarily those to whom he said he was black, that he’d been adopted by the Kilberts, and that once or twice, in great anger, either the plumber or his wife had told him that he had been born into poverty and disgrace and that he’d better by God be grateful for the opportunities he’d been given. The source of this story was John Hawes, who’d met Kilbert on another long JATP tour, the last he made before leaving the road for film scoring.
“Grant didn’t have a lot of friends on that tour,” Hawes told the biographer. “Even though he was such a great player, you never knew what he was going to say, and if he was in a bad mood, he was liable to put down some of the older players. He was always respectful around Hat, his whole style was based on Hat’s, but Hat could go days without saying anything, and by those days he certainly wasn’t making any new friends. Still, he’d let Grant sit next to him on the bus, and nod his head while Grant talked to him, so he must have felt some affection for him. Anyhow, eventually I was about the only guy on the tour who was willing to have a conversation with Grant, and we’d sit up in the bar late at night after the concerts. The way he played, I could forgive him a lot of failings. One of those nights, he said that he’d been adopted, and that not knowing who his real parents were was driving him crazy. He didn’t even have a birth certificate. From a hint his mother once gave him, he thought one of his birth parents was black, but when he asked them directly, they always denied it. These were white Mississippians, after all, and if they had wanted a baby so bad that they taken in a child who looked completely white but maybe had a drop or two of black blood in his veins, they weren’t going to admit it, even to themselves.”
In the midst of so much supposition, here is a fact. Grant Kilbert was exactly eleven years younger than Hat. The jazz encyclopedias give his birth date as November first, which instead of his actual birthday may have been the day he was delivered to the couple in Hattiesburg.
I wonder if Hat saw more than he admitted to me of the man leaving the shack where Abbey Montgomery lay on bloody sheets; I wonder if he had reason to fear his father. I don’t know if what I am thinking is correct—I’ll never know that—but now, finally, I think I know why Hat never wanted to go out of his room on Halloween nights. The story he told me never left him, but it must have been most fully present on those nights. I think he heard the screams, saw the bleeding girl, and saw Mary Randolph staring at him with displaced pain and rage. I think that in some small closed corner deep within himself, he knew who had been the real object of these feelings, and therefore had to lock himself inside his hotel room and gulp gin until he obliterated the horror of his own thoughts.