“Sound check, one, two, one, two.” Liberty Johnson stepped to the turntables beside her spin partner De Spain, his wild locks tied in a chignon atop his head. Work boots and stilettos. She laughed at the juxtaposition—she in a black turtleneck more suitable for a SWAT team, he in loose raw silk pants and imported square-toed snakeskins with two-inch heels. She felt privileged that he had asked her to join him. Honored. Nearly five months down. He didn’t have to do this. De Spain already had street cred. Five years ago when she started at fifty dollars a gig, he was pullin’ five hundred, and his last set overseas drew ten grand. She was anxious about the blend, her readiness. She had started out subbing for him. This was the first time he had asked her to partner.
“No favors, Dee.”
“None offered. You the one with the pedigree, professor.”
He still teased her about graduate school. She had originally started deejaying to help pay the tuition, then quickly realized that, more than cataloguing artifacts, she enjoyed curating sounds. But De Spain, being among only a handful of people who knew her lineage, was speaking the truth. She had the pedigree all right. Billed as “Lia and Raoul,” her parents had been on the counterculture circuit for two generations, folk-singing to world music. Her grandfather Baker Johnson was an elder statesmen of be-bop in Europe. Her R&B diva aunt Tokyo, counted down and out more times than anyone could remember, was on yet another comeback tour. And Mayfield Turner, her great-great-aunt, was a show business legend. “At a hundred and four, she was still showin’ her legs! Aunty Liz wasn’t just famous, she was downright infamous!” she joked with De Spain. “Grandma, grandpa, cousins, aunts, uncles, greats and great-greats. Wherever they be, the Mayfields and music go way back. ‘To the seventh generation!’ ” Music was always there, mixing geography and melody.
She felt a twang in her left breast. Memory of her Aunt Cinn playing the piano game. Charleston, New York, Chicago . . . the place above her heart, now a snarled spiderweb of scars. To the seventh generation, then what?
She kept telling herself that she was deserving of life, deserving of happiness. “Take it slow,” De Spain had said. She couldn’t move her arms after the surgery, had to teach the muscles to reconnect. “Just feel the crowd,” De Spain coaxed her, coached her. “Same as your grandpop takin’ a solo. Same as your aunt finding her blues in a slow jam. Find your music, Lib, find your groove.”
She thought it ironic that, but for the technology and perfect pitch of her computer, she couldn’t sing a note. The turntables were her instrument and voice. “Supposed to get thirty-two bars, Dee,” she said wryly. “The blues only got twelve.”
“Still rocks, just work off the moment.” He smiled. “When you’re ready,” and with an expert combination of control and surrender, he glided into Tina Turner’s sultry “I can’t stand the rain . . . against my win-dow-oh-ohhh . . . Bringin’ back sweet memories . . .” She chuckled at this inside joke. They both used the Rane Serato program. With her combination of turntables, CD players, and laptop, she was fully digitalized. Still she understood the purists saying “If you’ve never touched vinyl, you’re not a real deejay.” But she had to be able to move, to adapt. Versus taking an hour to load twenty milk crates in a truck, with the new technology she could stuff her overnight bag in fifteen minutes and hop a plane with ten thousand songs.
Sweet memories . . . Each generation had its collector. For her Great-Nana Dora it was swatches of fabric and buttons, photos and shoes. For Lizzie it was costumes and posters, a kaleidoscope of stuff from her ragged, rollicking life. Rare LPs from Uncle Ray and her grandmère Memphis. Always the music. Aunt Cinn’s precious librettos. The last time she had visited her beloved Cinn, the woman was just a grip of shaking bones, the skin soft, holding fast to her hand. Memories dissolving, even her beloved arias. Aida, Carmen, Butterfly, the heroine always dying. Cinn . . . clinging to her with desperate fingers, one last grasp at life. Liberty had gone to confide in her, seeking that quiet solace she had always found. I can’t do this alone.
She reminded herself that she wasn’t alone. You got De Spain. When she finally had allowed him to see her and to touch her, he had cupped the palm of his hand over the scar on her breast with such tenderness, like a lover. Though her blood family was scattered all over the globe, she had family. People who loved her for all of her eccentricity.
“No reason why you can’t live to be a hundred and four,” her doctor had said, “just like your great-aunt Lizzie.” Liberty had found it hard to believe that the birdlike creature she knew as Aunty Liz had been such a powerhouse. Still insisted on driving her car when she could barely see over the dashboard. And walked really slow, Dee. “Wheelchair?” she’d say. “Oh, please, honey, 1921, I walked from Baltimore to Philly, with you on my hip. No, no, wait . . . that was, that was Cinn . . . What’s your name again?” A hundred and four and twenty-four, both staring death in the face.
“Liberty, comin’ fierce and fabulous with a House/World/trip-hop mix of her own styling, a hybrid form of Electro, Goth, Punk, round the world to round the way.” She pumped herself up, talking in a soft drone over the mix. You can do this. She grabbed De Spain’s checkered scarf and slung it around her neck. “I need some color.” Though it wasn’t her thing, she braced herself for ’90s and ’80s remix requests that she knew would be coming, especially after Michael’s death. Same year the King of Pop dies, his body blanched, cloaked in as much mystery as Robert Johnson, the same week Emmett Till’s grave is desecrated and more kids died in Chicago than Baghdad, the President watched his daughters walk through the Door of No Return. She had to get her mind around the contradictions. Life, Liberty . . . or death. All of this rich history, this past I’m supposed to be able to stand on and draw from. Instead I’m already part of the past even before I’ve begun. The Seventh Generation. The what?
The club was cavernous, reminding her of a tomb. Catacombs. Underground caves where the faithful secreted their dead. The brick walls were still damp, the stone floor uneven, warped by the metric tons of water that once coursed through. She started up a Tibetan chant with her left hand, looped in a JB holla, layered a piece of her uncle Jesse’s sermon and a plosive Berber’s call, haunting Islamic harmonies into a Badu lick, thence to that twelve-bar blues she was carryin’, pullin’ heavy with the bass, that Zulu club that shakes the bones.
“What’s your name again?” Liberty . . . what a name to live with. Congress just now apologizin’ for slavery. Wasn’t an apology she sought, but recognition, a celebration even, for the music. For the weave of Spirituals and Blues to Rock ’n’ Roll that let freedom ring from one generation to the next. For the Jazz that defined modern. For the root music from Be-bop to R&B to Hip-Hop, pushing the boundaries, giving the world permission to syncopate, improvise, and integrate styles, to synthesize and sample, make somethin’ fresh. The music always the music, as soon as it’s born fading away, giving birth to somethin’ else and somethin’ new. Shedding skin like Damballah. New life. To the seventh generation. What then? What now?
De Spain looked over, one earphone off his ear, listening to the room and the track at the same time, between their two sets of hands and the six instruments between them, every sound in the world, his beat in sync with hers, eyes locked, looking for the hand-off. Liberty had chosen life, but what then? How much time to bend it, stop it, speed it up, slow it down, slide or let it rumble? Startled by its syncopation, the shift in accent, holdin’ back on the strong beat, leanin’ heavy on the weak, producing the unexpected—surprise—this night, this dance, this song into the next into the next, she laid down a groove that surged into a wall of sound, that gospel effect irresistible, the crowd catching the spirit, erupting with an Ahhh . . . responding to her spin, the whole club her partner, conjuring souls with stomps and slides of their feet, the collective naturalized Soul. Everyone is there, in call and response, callin’ up the ancestors and wakin’ the yet to be born, the notes dancing in the air, a world without bounds at the tip of her fingers, the music, always the music.
The Transvaal’s vast Drakenberg Mountains on the horizon, the two-wheeled cart toggled up the road. On the scenic Sani Pass, the car had broken down and rolled backwards on the winding road. After two hours in the blistering sun, they had been rescued by a donkey cart driver. Tokyo Walker just shook her head. I could just as well be in the eighteenth century as the twenty-first.
Her career was down and out. Her R&B “classics” covered and sampled to death, but she couldn’t buy a gig. Her big hit, her signature, was a theme song for the presidential campaign. Think they’d let me sing it?! Who was she kidding? Back taxes and a reputation for bad behavior had trailed her all the way to Botswana. This was Jimmy’s cockamamie idea . . . I oughta fire my brother—again! Her comeback needed a new platform, James had said. “Broaden your outlook. We gotta go global.” She still had some presence on the world music market, he argued; blue-collar Liverpool white girls were forever copying her licks. Her backup band was already international, hailing from Morocco, Senegal, South Africa, and Brazil. Only the bass player and keyboardist were American, and they were both white. Her ’70s hit “Jump Up!” was a staple all over the continent.
“Tokyo Walker’s Africa Tour.” It sounded like a good idea. Right! Twelve cities in three weeks. Rumbling planes, obtuse airport officials, from rain forests to sandstorms the size of Manhattan. Ostensibly she was on tour to raise awareness about Africa’s lost children, orphaned by disease, poverty, and war. While half the money she would make would go to settle the million-dollar debt she owed the federal government and she got to keep ten percent, the rest was to be entrusted to private, not-for-profit organizations her brother had identified. “Get you a couple of celebrity TV shows,” but she needed a charity. All I need right now is a drink. She had been straight for ten years, but still savored the memory. She was tired, broke, and alone. Funny, Alelia, her radical, hippie cousin, had settled with Raoul into a relatively ordinary, stable life. House, husband, daughter, named Liberty, of all things. What you got? Her Grammys, her fans, memories. No man. No children. She had never imagined that. Here she was at fifty, schlepping up a mountain in half a buckboard. She removed her tour logo baseball cap and held her face to the white noonday sun. The music has fed me. No cause to feel sorry for myself.
Her escort, Dr. Kwetana, a young pediatrician from Umtata, looked like a child himself. One leg braced on the side of the cart, he talked over his shoulder. “This is one of twelve safe houses of the Pathways Organization,” he said in a thick South African accent that bespoke Xhosa origins. “These children, products of the mines. Men far from home, women. The stigma of an orphan is unfortunately still a bad thing. Parents drink, use drugs, abuse the children—or their parents have AIDS. Once they know they’re going to die,” he said matter-of-factly, “they leave the children alone. They think, why spend money? It’s not going to do any good.” He shrugged, clicking his teeth.
The cart slowed at the top of the hill and pulled up to an enclave of corrugated tin structures, squat, plain prefabricated buildings. The other side of the world. “They touch your hair, play with your ears,” he forewarned her as they disembarked. Despite herself, Tokyo was heartened by his earnestness. Suddenly the seemingly empty settlement came alive. “Bayeté! Bayeté! She coming!” A choir of barefoot children in navy blue and white uniforms, and their teachers, a gaggle of children, gathering around her, pressing in to touch her.
“They just want somebody to love them,” Kwetana said as they entered a small room lined with cribs. “Here we are. Our latest arrival.” Before she knew it, the young doctor had picked up a swaddled infant and placed her in Tokyo’s arms.
The baby was a golden hue, her face a glowing amber, her black eyes a cubist picture of reflected light. “Hello there . . .”
“Her name is Monday,” Kwetana explained. “That is the day she arrived, so that is the day she was born to us.”
Tokyo cradled the infant’s head in her elbow and sat in one of the clinic’s fragile folding chairs. “Monday?” Tokyo cooed, “Where you from, chile? Charleston, L.A., Chicagah?” and tickled the baby’s stomach, playing her piano game, “Abuja, Nairobi, Umtata!” With each changing note, the baby scrunched her tiny belly and gurgled with laughter. She fidgeted madly, her little fists in constant motion, her delicate graceful hands a miracle of architecture. Suddenly she grabbed Tokyo’s finger and held on, the eyes seeming, trying to focus. Tokyo gazed into those eyes, in those eyes all that had ever been and all that would be, and she began to sing.