Mattie kept straightening things that weren’t even crooked. Her hat. Her collar. No need for it, though, because she looked as beautiful as ever, as if not a day had passed during the war, as if we hadn’t fought a war at all. Maybe beauty was a private little miracle given to those who had been forced to love across the ocean. Time had been set backward, so that when we all got home, the world was waiting in the same place we had left it.
“I hope he doesn’t mind a picture,” Mattie said. “He must get tired of people asking him all the time.”
“I’m sure he’s used to it by now. He won’t mind at all.”
She ran a finger around the camera’s lens, and flicked the dust from her glove. Of course there was no dust to speak of, because she had been running her fingers across that lens the whole time we sat in the back of my brother’s taxi, riding across town to the Empire Theater. Her camera was a simple, elegant thing, a red leather box that looked something like a gift.
She had taken a picture of the marquee as we made the turn from Dexter Avenue. NAT COLE TRIO. He was the most famous man, black or white, ever to be born in my hometown, but that sign was a first for us back then. A Negro name with that much light behind it. In Montgomery that was rare.
“You’re sure he won’t mind?”
Mattie smoothed her collar again and breathed her nerves away.
“Absolutely. He won’t mind one bit,” I told her.
Nat Cole was a friend of mine. He was born in Montgomery a few months before me. When Miss McCarthy called the roll on the first day of kindergarten, I answered when I heard my name.
“Nathaniel—”
“Present.”
“Not yet, Master Weary.”
As it turned out, two Nathaniels sat in that classroom at Montgomery County Training School. The first on the roll was Nathaniel Adams Cole. It seemed we were both a little surprised that our names weren’t ours alone. At the same time, I was glad to know I had at least one thing in common with somebody. By third grade, I was the only Nathaniel left. Like many of the families in Bel-Air, Nat and his people had gone to Chicago.
He went up there and got himself famous. “Montgomery’s Very Own Nat Cole Battles the Legendary Earl Hines in Chicago.” The papers added “Montgomery’s Very Own” like it was his given name. For a while Eddie Cole’s name was bigger than his younger brother’s. “Sepia Records Presents Montgomery’s Very Own Eddie Cole and His Solid Swingers.” And months later the stories read “The Cole Brothers and Their Solid Swingers.” Finally, the name was Nat’s alone.
Before the war I worked with my family, driving a taxi from our stand on Jackson Street. Nat Cole was good cab conversation whenever his songs came on the radio. You know, he was born right here. He played the kind of music that made people feel generous enough to kick in an extra penny or two in tip money, as though Nat’s crooning could get somebody from here to there a little bit faster, make the ride that much smoother.
Nat was good barbershop conversation next door to the cabstand at Malden Brothers.
You know, he’s from right here.
Samuel Malden would say it every time a song came on, sometimes pointing his razor to the floor, as though Nat had sprung up through the clay and the earth, straight through the concrete and the black-and-white floor.
Martha Gray said it, too. You know, he’s from right here, when anyone brought his records to the counter of her shop around the corner on High Street. Though the top-forty slots reserved for the hit makers changed every Tuesday, Nat always had a place reserved. Nat Cole never really left, though he had been gone from Montgomery for all those years.
George Worthy said it, too, on his radio show, Hometown Serenade. You know, friends, he’s from right here. George put a little bit more space between the words and talked in a whisper, his voice turned down and softened, a little brush on a snare drum. Right here. The station’s signal came through strong on Centennial Hill. They played Nat’s songs that evening, but in the back of that cab on the way to the show, his voice got weaker as we crossed from the Hill to downtown. Soon after, the voice was gone altogether.
The theater district was foreign to us and governed by different rules, going through side doors and sitting in balconies. Every so often, though, the closed doors were minded by a Negro janitor or doorman who I knew from the neighborhood. Mr. Cartwright had cleaned up at the Empire for as long as I’d known him, and he was just then sitting by the back door. The coin I pressed into his hand was newly minted, a half-dollar with Booker T. Washington’s face looking sideways from Mr. Cartwright’s fingertips.
“Son, you don’t have to do that.”
“I want to, Mr. Cartwright. Besides, it ain’t about have to.”
He held the money for a while, flipped it over a couple of times, head and tail of Booker T. spinning.
“Appreciate you,” he said, and the door opened to us as long as no one found out.
I wanted to take a picture with Nat before the show and also have a word. I had a ring in my pocket. I had been waiting for that night to give it to Mattie, and who better for a serenade than Nat King Cole, born across town and a friend for all those years.
I heard the trio of voices on the other side of the dressing room door. In the mix of them, one was unmistakably Nat. Mattie turned her head and brought her ear a little bit closer to the door. She held her camera as if every picture she’d ever taken was still inside. Surely, the picture we would take with Nat would end up in a frame somewhere in the little house for sale on Tuscaloosa Street that I’d seen that morning. It’d be perfect for us. I had peeked through the gap in the blue-striped curtains. Maybe the picture would sit above the mantel, along with pictures of the wedding, the children, and all the rest to come.
After the show, we would go back across town to the Centennial Hotel and do some drinking in the Majestic Lounge. We would go up on the rooftop garden and stand in the middle of the cabbage palms in the night light. I had told Mattie, right there, years before, what she surely knew already, that I loved her. I’d tell her again with a ring, and once she said yes, we would go back down to the Majestic, where Nat, Oscar, and Johnny would surely play like the bands always did after their downtown shows.
I had a newfound taste for big-money liquor, and I had my GI money and a bankroll fat enough to buy one for everybody in the narrow little bar. I’d order some of that top-shelf bourbon that had gotten dusty, waiting for somebody to have a night worth reaching up that high to bring the bottle down for.
But before all of that I would have to ask Nat. Before I could ask him, I had to knock.
Mattie beat me to it, though. She knocked, glove against the steel, and the hollow door echoed loud enough to fill the empty hallway. Mattie smiled and nodded once more, calm then, as if the last of her nerves had flowed through her knuckles and bounced back and forth between the metal sides of the door.
We waited, listening for the footsteps of someone coming to let us in. I turned the knob, unlocked, and pushed the door to find a dark, empty room. Nothing moved but me, and I could see myself more shadow than reflection in the many mirrors, each framed in darkened bulbs that carried no light of their own, only the little bit that came from the hallway.
The voices we had heard were a little louder inside, and I saw why that was. The ducts overhead carried the sound, and we had been fooled by the echoes. The voices came from an unmarked door we had passed walking in.
When I pushed it open, I didn’t see anybody at first. It was a storage room stacked with marquee letters as tall as we were. They were the same set used to spell the names of the trio of men—Nat, Oscar, Johnny—sitting in the corner on worn-out theater seats.
“Is that who I think it is?” Nat said when he saw me, his seat snapping closed behind him when he rose to his feet.
“Guess that depends on who’s thinking,” I said. “And who’s being thought of.”
“Good old Nat Weary.”
“Ol’ Nat Cole.”
When the boys saw Mattie, they all stood.
“Mattie. It’s been a long time, but the years have been more than kind,” Nat told her.
“And you as well.”
“It feels like a long time ago, but I guess everything before the war does now.”
It felt good to be remembered. They had come to Montgomery in the fall of 1941, playing for the college’s Autumn Ball. Mattie had wondered if he would remember. Four years was not a long time, but Nat was right about the wartime years. They made even the best memories seem that much further away.
The marks of their work covered their palms. Oscar’s and Johnny’s fingers were more calloused than mine had become after years of holding a rifle like it was my last friend in the world. Oscar had those long nails like the guitar players who worked every Saturday night on the Hill and down Jackson Street, and the shoulder of his jacket had creases from the leather strap. Johnny had the same marks in a different place, rubs along his lapel where the bass rested. Their suits were work clothes a shade lighter than my army green, but made from shiny thread that caught the same light the pomade on their heads did.
“Would it be too much to ask you gentlemen for a photograph?” Mattie lifted that camera when she asked them. The way she said “gentlemen,” with that lilt in her voice, made the word sound like the flick of her fingernail on crystal.
They were more than willing, but the light wasn’t doing us any favors. Three fixtures dangled from the ceiling, barely fixtures at all, just sockets on the end of dusty cloth wires. We arranged ourselves, the five of us, in that little bit of dingy light. We would be halfway in the shadows no matter where we stood in that storeroom, as far away from starlight as we could ever be.
“This won’t do,” she told them, her chin up and her eyes on the slim little fixtures. “All that light across the hall going to waste.”
“I do say, ma’am. I believe you have a point,” Oscar said. Then he motioned to me. I was, after all, the one closest to the door. Mattie shrugged and lifted the camera again.
“They won’t miss that little bit of light we borrow,” she said.
And with a look to see that no one was coming, we made our march a few steps across the hall to the dressing room that on most nights was home to the star of the show. I felt along the wall until I found the switch. When all that light pushed through the dressing room mirrors, we went with it. We didn’t have to share that space with anyone other than our smiling reflections.
“Perfect.” Mattie placed us just so and then she stood in the middle, facing the mirror and holding the camera before her. She clicked three shots.
“There. Just like that,” she said.
Before I left for the army, Mattie had asked an odd promise of me. She didn’t want letters. Just pictures. Her uncle had died in the First World War, and her grandmother held on to his letters, going over his words so many times that the paper got too old and raggedy to read. The pictures were different. Her grandmother would never see his grave, Mattie told me, but she could see his face as he stood on a bridge near Lorraine, the last of the distant places he would see in his twenty-three years of living.
I kept that promise. All she knew of my time came through the little portraits of faraway countrysides spared from the bombing. She sent to me as much of home as she could get that lens on. I had missed her voice, which just then, with that camera in her hands, made the simplest requests: “Sweetheart, raise your chin for me. Oscar, turn this way a little bit, please. Thank you.”
“Just a few more,” she said.
“Take your time,” Nat told her.
I was tempted to ask her right then. I wondered how the engagement ring would look with all of that dressing room starlight passing through it.
“I got a ring,” I told Nat.
I said this just loud enough for only him to hear, once Mattie had moved back for a few wider pictures. Nat patted me on the shoulder as Mattie told us to look her way.
“We’re headed to the Majestic after the show,” I said. “I was hoping you could sing something for us when you get back across town.”
“You waited long enough, my friend,” he said. “How about we start the show with the two of you? Sing your song first in front of all of Montgomery. Be the envy of this little town.”
“Even better.”
“I’ll stop the show. Then you’ll know what to do next.”
I nodded and felt his words in my chest, where they sank in deep. Nat had transformed my little plan, stoking the fires of a wondrous notion.
I was there on Saint John Street when Nat Cole got his new middle name. Adams was out and in its place, King. We grew up in the little Bel-Air houses, all with green trim and white clapboard siding like they’d grown from the same handful of seed. Nat Cole lived on the end of the block, next to the lot we turned into our playground. Sometimes he played with us and sometimes he stayed home practicing on that front-room piano with the door and windows open.
In the middle of “I’ll Fly Away” and “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” Nat would work in a riff from the school yard hymns. The rope jumping and the marble shooting and the whatnot would stop, and he’d know it was on account of our listening and every so often singing along. The one that everybody knew was “Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he.”
He had a famous man’s name before he was either famous or a man. I could lie and say I knew where he was headed, but it would only be a half lie. His hands were suited for a star turn, but I figured it would come from that work he did on that makeshift diamond we called a ball field. We had no hind-catcher, just a tree stump with cans on top. Instead of hearing “Wade in the Water” and “I’m on My Way to Canaan Land,” anybody who saw Nat Cole on the mound heard the sound of that curveball catching the corner of a tin can. The sound of his strikes rang out like his music did.
At seven years old, Nat Cole threw curveballs with either hand. His left coming at you like Big Walker, and that right like Satchel Paige. And when it wasn’t baseball it was marbles, where Nat Cole could put enough English on a cat’s-eye to send us all home empty-handed and head scratching. We should have known from the sound of the strikes and the clink of marbles in keepsies. It didn’t occur to us that all of his winning ways, a left hand as good as the right, came from that same piano playing he did when he sent “Old King Cole” out of his window, floating down the street and carrying that nickname. Maybe it was a stretch to say we gave it to him, when he gave it to us first.
After Mattie and I exited through the side door, we took our place in the second of the two lines on the Montgomery Street sidewalk. The first line started near the marquee, and the white patrons were damn near close enough to touch the letters, stretched over the walkway as big as war headlines. The value of the marquee, outside of telling who’s playing and when, was that it gave a little shelter if it rained.
It could have been raining on us in the other line, which led to the little box office with that sign in the window, COLORED SEATING, that let us know we were in the right place. Above our heads was nothing but three stories of brick wall, the fire escape, and the sky. We waited beyond a rope that, exposed to the weather, had not been velvet in years.
The black cabbies knew which end of the block to leave their fares, and three of our orange cars were among them. My mother and father both drove their Hudsons, and my brother, Dane, drove the Studebaker. At that time of night, he could make it from the Empire to Centennial Hill in six minutes. Another minute and a half would get him from the Court Square Fountain to the capitol steps and that statue of Jefferson Davis. A few more turns got him over to Union and south on High Street all the way across town to Jackson and the cabstand. There the city became ours again, where the State Theater marquee did for us what the one above the Empire could not, keep the rain off our heads while we waited for a show.
I had been raised to believe that if I timed it just right in my taxi, I could outrun Jim Crow. He was not fast or skillful, because he did not have to be. He could always corner us somewhere and make us wait. If I moved quickly and kept to schedule, I could leave him somewhere looking at my taillights. When I drove that cab, the elusiveness was possible. But standing still in the other line, Jim Crow had me where he wanted me. Nat’s plan was enough to elevate me for a while, but then I felt Jim Crow’s ass while he sat upon my shoulder, sweating out the starch of my army uniform, leaving creases where they didn’t belong.
We stood beneath the heroes in the wall posters, matinee specials of soldiers old and new. John Wayne and Anthony Quinn, and, for good measure, they had brought back old Howard Hughes and his Hell’s Angels. Hollywood had sent its armies to sit sentry, keeping watch over Saturday night. Those of us below them—sailors, nurses, a pilot or two—wore the wartime colors that we’d saved Europe in. We had gotten as far as the Empire and its velvet rope, where we waited for somebody to open the door.
When Nat Cole played the 1941 Autumn Ball, he had filled the Centennial Ballroom. We hadn’t seen that kind of commotion since Erskine Hawkins came back from Harlem. Nat was not altogether famous, but famous enough. That was the first time I had heard him play since we were children. One hand was Chicago fast, and the other nice and slow, like some country boy straight out the woods and in no hurry to go back home.
During a break, Mattie and I eased up close to the piano, where I had thought that I might say hello to “my old friend Nat” to impress my date. I thought better of it, because so much time had passed. People changed, as they should. If I had left Montgomery for Chicago, then left Chicago for Los Angeles, my birthplace might feel small and distant. I didn’t expect him to recognize me, but I was sure glad he did.
“Good ol’ Nat Weary!”
“Good ol’ Nat Cole,” I said. Mattie looked at me like I was on a whole different shelf right then.
You could still hear a little bit of Alabama in his voice, secondhand by way of Chicago and California, but it was there just the same.
When I introduced him to Mattie, he greeted her with a smile and nod. They talked about “Honeysuckle Rose,” and she told him she liked what he did with “Song of the Wanderer,” different than what Erskine Hawkins and Count Basie had done. She spoke as calm as could be, the whole time her hands dug into my arm, strong enough to pull the elbow clean off. Once Nat started the second set, I felt the lighter touch of her fingers, practiced on pianos since she was a child. She played notes down my arm, “Dream a Little Dream of Me” and a little of the song that came after, a medley that ended with her fingers in mine.
Mattie whispered the names of the songs I didn’t know, and as the evening went on, she whispered all manner of preludes to the night that was our beginning. We’d met in a lecture hall, and what had started as talk across desk rows had taken on a new form. It had turned into a long-felt touch in those weeks that led autumn into winter, as we enjoyed the wonders of articulated love.
Then came Pearl Harbor. As a part-time student and part-time cab driver, my number had come up among the first. Mattie and I were left with the bits of each other that could fit in the white frame of photographs we sent across the ocean. Every so often, a wartime radio was close enough for us to hear a Nat Cole record and that faint sound of home. Victory brought me back. On either end of my war years were those two shows of Nat Cole’s. That old one at the Centennial and the one I waited for with Mattie’s hand on my arm and her ring in my pocket.
Nine of them would play the show. Nat at the piano. Oscar on guitar. Johnny on bass. The rest were horns, six of them, their positions set on the bandstand at the back of the stage. They were local players who marched with the Bama State band. The New Collegians, they called themselves. The piano was separated from the bandstand by a screen decorated with autumn leaves in red, white, and blue, matching the bunting that lined the stage. During the shows I’d seen at the Empire, the thin fabric of the screen revealed only the shadows and lines of the bandstand. Once the music started, the screen would show them as it rose, lifting the music and applause right along with it.
From the first row of the colored balcony we could see most everything. Too small a consolation. After Mattie set her camera on the floor, she nudged me. The seats in the front row downstairs were filling, including the two that we’d sat in after we left the dressing room. Perhaps the starlight had emboldened us, and with no ushers around and the outside doors still closed, we made ourselves comfortable in the forbidden row, if only for a few seconds, before we eased back outside. A young couple took the same seats, with the man unfolding my A4 for his lady friend and then taking A3, where Mattie had been. I’m sure he found his cushion sunk a little bit lower because of the beautiful crater left by Miss Mattie Green, more lovely and buxom than Jean Harlow, Betty Grable, or the young lady who held his arm. Mattie had run her hand along my collar and my ear, and then down the back of the downstairs seat, collecting army green and red velvet lint on her gloves. She’d rolled it between her fingers and released a bright little tornado that spun to the floor.
Our actual seats were worn, but sturdy enough. Besides, once the music stopped, everyone in that theater would want to be in my place, AA17. That ring had been with me for the seven hours since I’d bought it, but I had lived with the notion for years. People had rushed to altars all over Montgomery before the war, but I didn’t want to. In case I might die wasn’t the way I wanted to start things. I needed it to feel like forever instead of maybe.
“I wonder what song he’ll play first?” Mattie said. “I guess it doesn’t matter, because I want to hear them all.”
I just squeezed her arm. I didn’t want to say much until I said the most important thing. The nerves had started working, and I needed the last few minutes to get collected. No fumbling with the pocket button or dropping the ring.
On my way out, I’d told Mr. Cartwright about the plan me and Nat had made, and then I’d given him three more half-dollar coins, one more for him and two for the stagehands above our heads, moving on the catwalk that ran down the center of the theater, their own little alley high above us. One turned right and the other left as they took their places on the twin spotlights that flanked the stage. One looked across and nodded my way.
The blinking of the house lights came and went, and the place got showtime dark. The New Collegians came on, and the applause started, polite from downstairs and heavier in the balcony, where some of the folks probably knew the band members. As the horn players took their seats on the bandstand, Johnny, Oscar, and Nat came on to roars and clapping from the top and bottom of the theater. As soon as Nat took his place at the piano, the band started with a little of the local flavor with “Tuxedo Junction.” Then Nat leaned into the microphone and told us what we already knew.
“Good evening, Montgomery. We are the Nat Cole Trio and we’re pleased to be here tonight with the wonderful New Collegians ensemble. It’s good to be back home.”
Hearing him say “home” brought more cheers. When he lifted his hands from the piano, the band stopped as well. One of the two spotlights left the stage and swung around to me.
“Montgomery,” he sang. “Let me tell you ’bout a friend of mine . . .”
And then it was my turn.
Mattie watched me drop to a knee. My back foot stepped onto the folks beside us, but they seemed to understand. I took Mattie by both hands, and everything about her said yes. People downstairs were on their feet. A few from the rows beneath the balcony had walked into the aisle to see. Sweet murmurs came from the seats all around us. I was never one who liked being the center of things, never craved the attention of anyone beyond my loved ones and friends, but that feeling was something else, the whole world knowing the good news I’d held in my pocket for too long.
I froze before I could reach for the ring. My heart beat faster than it had since the war. It was not because of love, marriage, or the fear of either. Through the brass railings along the balcony, I saw the trouble coming. The usher moved down the far-side aisle, walking faster than any usher needed to. He was already five rows from the stage. He didn’t search out seats, and he had no patrons behind him. He looked at Nat, who didn’t see him because he was looking at me like everyone else in the Empire.
“Nathaniel,” Mattie said, more a question than my name.
By then she was looking over the rail, seeing what I did down below, just as that usher jumped the stage. His flashlight hit the floorboards as he pushed himself up. The spotlight showed that it wasn’t a flashlight at all. It was a foot and a half of lead pipe.
Nat and the band played softly, “Somebody Loves Me,” but it was loud enough to mask the footsteps of the man crossing the stage.
Mattie saw it, too. “Somebody—”
That’s when I shouted and jumped over the railing. I was again at the foot of the stage, pain running up both legs from the jolt of that fall. I stumbled up the stairs, trying to get to the piano before the man with the pipe did. But I didn’t. Nat by then had turned and stood, moving just enough so that the pipe meant for his head hit his shoulder instead. The thud, more flesh than bone, sent both men to the ground.
The band shouted in the middle of the ruckus going on behind the screen. The attack stopped the show before the screen lifted, and a half-dozen men, some with pipes and some throwing punches, had rushed the bandstand from the back. Nat was alone in front of the piano, grabbing at the man’s shirt, the cotton so thin that it ripped, freeing the attacker to rear back with the pipe again.
I got in front of him before he could hit Nat, but he was quick enough to catch me in the side of the knee. Not a good shot, but good enough for me to stumble. Before he could square up, I grabbed the microphone that had fallen to the floor against my foot. I swung, and the first blow sent him back against the piano. I kept swinging, and the sound of the steel against his skull went through the Empire, and the screaming from the place got quiet. I swung some more, beating him until the microphone broke to pieces and went dead.
The police had poured in, and two of them pulled me off him. I stood in the middle of the stage with cops on each arm. By then, the attacker was on his feet, squared up with me. I had broken his nose, and his right eye was already swelling. In spite of all that, he smiled and puckered his lips to spit a long bloody shot that caught my ear. The rest hit one of the police. And as the officer raised his hand to his face, he let go of my right arm, so I swung again. I leaned into that punch enough to free the last of his teeth and send him off the stage headfirst.
As the police led me to the side door, the applause started, because Nat was walking to the front of the stage. Though he favored his right side, he was upright. He looked toward me, not a nod or a smile, but just a look that said as much. He took a long breath, or at least tried to. An army corporal set the piano bench right and moved it toward Nat, but he said thank you and no. Seemed he had something to say, and everybody got quiet to hear. But he didn’t talk. He waved his good arm and began to sing. “Got the world on a string . . .”
Behind the screen, the band picked up the instruments and started playing. As raggedy as the whole affair had been through the free-for-all, the music was clean again and moving straight ahead. The New Collegians were outnumbered by the audience, drowned by the murmuring of folks still stunned. Once the band started playing, it was like a new kind of wind rolled in and the ruckus that had clouded the place cleared out. Nat had no microphone so his hands carried the song instead.
I looked for Mattie in the balcony, but the upstairs audience had crowded the railings. And the police moved me out the door and toward one of the squad cars parked every which way in the alley. People in the Whitfield Hotel had the windows wide open, looking down. I thought maybe the police wouldn’t beat me just yet. They’d at least wait until we got to the station. My stomach got tight, my jaw, too, waiting for the first of them to swing. But then they left me in the car and went back to the door. I heard the piano, too. And I was thankful that his fingers had not been smashed.
Mr. Cartwright ran up to the side of the car. “That cracker would have sure enough killed him, son. You did right.”
He looked back at the door, but the police had their backs to us. They were listening. “I’ve Got the World on a String” sounded so sweet. In spite of everything, that was the honest truth. I won’t lie and say the music made me forget that I was in a car, handcuffs and all. The band made the most of it, doing what they could.
“I wish I could have helped you, son. In my heart, I was up there swinging.”
“You can help me now.”
“I’m too old to bust anybody out.”
“No, sir. The ring in my shirt pocket,” I told him. “You need to take it and the money.”
“You want me to give it to your lady friend?” he asked.
“No, sir. Not like this. To my people at the cabstand. If it’s in my pocket when they take my clothes at the jail, that’ll be the last I see of it.”
He reached in and took hold of the ring.
“She down there looking for you,” he said, motioning down the block to Montgomery Street, where Mattie was looking into the backs of police cars. Mr. Cartwright waved to her, and she came running.
“Are you hurt?” she said, breathless.
“No. I just wanted to make sure you made it out all right.”
“Me? I didn’t know if they were out here—Lord, I just didn’t want you to be someplace with nobody knowing where.”
“Don’t worry.”
“Where in the hell did they come from?”
“Crawled out the gutter somewhere.”
Her hands shook, and the gloves showed it that much more.
“They’ll make me spend the night in jail,” I told her. “I’ll pay my fine and be out before noon Monday. I’ll meet you for lunch.”
“It’s not funny.”
“It will be once it’s over,” I said.
The music had stopped by then. I could barely see the cops for all the people that had crowded in behind them to get a glimpse of Nat Cole finishing the only song he would play that evening.
I need to see a doctor, and I’m afraid I cannot continue. Good night, Montgomery.
And the applause then was as loud as the hollering, begging him to stay, but they knew he could not. Nat King Cole had been attacked in the city where he was born. He had left once before, and he was forced to leave again. If he never returned nobody could blame him. I damn sure couldn’t.
“Tell my people,” I told Mattie. “I’m sorry. I just wanted us to have a night.”
I just wanted it to be done with. Take me to jail, let the judge talk to me any kind of way on Monday as long as I could pay my fine and do thirty days.
“It’ll be fine, sweetheart. I’ll see you soon.” That was all I could say to her.
Mr. Cartwright walked Mattie away before the cops returned. When my brother’s cab came to the end of the block, he hollered for Mattie to come and get in. They waited so that they could follow us and make sure I was taken to the jail and not back in the woods somewhere. Dane followed as close as he could, but he couldn’t make the red light the officers sped through, with those sirens so loud they never left my ears. We made it to the jailhouse faster than I could have imagined.