Chapter 64

“I’ve apologized, what more can I do?”

Red-eyed and sniffling, Lizard’s mother stomped from the living room into the kitchen. She returned holding a white dinner plate. “Take it and throw it down to the ground.”

Groaning, Lizard took the plate and hurled it to the floor, shattering it into a dozen pieces.

“Now apologize to it,” his mother demanded.

“What? Ma!”

“Do it!” Moise ordered.

Lizard looked at the shards and mumbled, “Sorry.”

“Tell me, Leo,” Rachel said, “did it go back to the way it was?”

“N-no, of course not.”

“Exactly. I am the plate, Leo. Your father, sisters—we are all the plate. Do you see now?”

* * *

Home no longer felt like home to Lizard.

Everything seemed bland—the walls, the food his mother poured all of her love into preparing, the air he breathed. All of it.

Lizard couldn’t blame his family; he knew it was he who was different, and they knew it too. He had a new walk and a new way of speaking. Sometimes he would look up from his meal, from his textbook, and catch one or all of them staring at him as if he was an uninvited dinner guest at their Passover table.

And the music, the way he played now, improvising the masters, denigrating them, ghettoizing Bach, Strauss, and Beethoven—effectively coloring the classics Negro.

“What did they do to you?” his mother wailed, wringing her hands.

“I won’t have that type of music played in my house,” Moise declared.

So Lizard left. With a satchel filled with clothing, his trumpet, his violin, and a few dollars, he set off for Kansas City. He chose Kansas City because Frank Brown was fond of saying—when Mrs. Brown was out of earshot—“Jazz may have been born in New Orleans, but it got its dick wet in Kansas City!”