Chapter 29

Harlan, all of sixteen, having only really been in Macon and Harlem, hit the road green, brimming with delight.

In a rickety bus that had seen better days, the veteran musicians and their entourage rolled out of New York on a spring morning thick with the scent of flowering things.

They traveled for days, covering mile upon mile of open road and ever-changing countryside. Harlan watched with amazement as emerald pastures gave way to fields choked with cotton stalks, plantation estates, and ramshackle shotguns.

Their first stop was Wilson, North Carolina, and even though the country was crawling through the muck and grime of financial ruin and despair, you wouldn’t have known it by the number of people who came out to see them.

“Man, you look as green as a frog!” the squat, flat-faced drummer named Cecil laughed. “You scared?”

They were about to perform on a makeshift stage in a dilapidated barn that reeked of livestock. Lucille was on the bus, donning her dress for the evening.

Harlan looked down at his sweaty, trembling hands. “No,” he gulped nervously.

The drummer shoved a half-empty jar of corn liquor at him. “Drink this, it’ll calm you down.”

The swig Harlan took would have been too much for a drinking man, much less a young boy who’d only stolen sips of beer. He gagged.

The drummer laughed again, slapped Harlan hard on the back, and told him to take another. “You’ll get used to it,” he said.

Harlan’s hands stopped shaking, but now his head was spinning.

“Come on.” Cecil grabbed him by the elbow.

On the stage, the guitar strings felt like spaghetti against his fingers. Sweat as biting as lime juice streamed into his eyes as he clumsily strummed chords that might have belonged to some other singer’s song, but not Lucille’s.

After the show, an angry Lucille pressed her lips together and stomped past Harlan without a word.

Bill was the one who took him aside. “If you can’t handle your liquor, you shouldn’t drink,” he warned angrily.

Shamed, Harlan dropped his head and stammered an inaudible apology.

* * *

By the time they reached South Carolina, Harlan hadn’t had a swig of anything harder than Coca-Cola and he was beginning to perform like a pro.

After a show in Charleston, Cecil loudly proclaimed, “You did great out there!”

“Thanks.”

He pulled a cigarette from behind his ear and held it out to Harlan. “For you.”

Harlan scrutinized it for a second. “Naw, I don’t smoke.”

Cecil’s eyes narrowed. “Aw, you think this is the tobacco type of cigarette?”

Harlan shrugged his shoulders.

“This here,” Cecil announced grandly, “is a reefer cigarette. One puff of this and you’ll know Jesus.” He slipped the cigarette between his lips, pulled a silver lighter from his suit jacket, and fired the tip.

Harlan watched the flame swell and collapse as the drummer puffed.

“You gotta hold it in,” Cecil instructed in a strangled voice. After a few seconds, he blew a stream of smoke into Harlan’s face. “Just try it. One toke, that’s all. That’s all you’ll need.”

Harlan smirked. “Naw, that’s okay.”

“Don’t you wanna know Jesus, boy?”

Craig, the piano player, swaggered by, nodding in their direction. When his nose caught the pungent scent, he turned back. “May I?” he asked, grinning.

Cecil passed him the joint.

Craig inhaled deeply and then exhaled. “Damn, that’s some good shit,” he coughed.

“The best,” Cecil said, thrusting the joint at Harlan for the second time. “You’ll play better than you ever thought you could.”

“Sure ’nuff,” Craig agreed.

Three tokes later, Harlan couldn’t stop laughing at his shoelaces. An hour after that, he was stumbling up and down the dark aisle of the bus, begging for food to quell his ravenous appetite.

Their arrival in Augusta, Georgia coincided with the National Baptist Convention, so all of the colored guesthouses were full. Bill informed them that they would have to spend the night on the bus.

Harlan watched the musicians remove their shoes and fold their jackets into makeshift pillows. “But we passed a hotel not a mile down the road that had a vacancy sign in the front yard,” he said sleepily.

“You talking ’bout the Partridge Inn?” Bill questioned.

“Yeah, I think so.”

Bill laughed.

Lucille pulled a purple scarf over her curls and knotted it behind her neck. “Boy, this ain’t Harlem,” she said. “Down south, you can’t walk through the front door of any establishment you please, sit down, eat and drink your gut full. Down here, if your bladder begs, you got to search high and low for a bathroom marked Colored. This here is Jim Crow territory—the rules down here are different. That vacancy sign you saw was for white folks, not us.”