When Tom Winrow disappeared, Dora had to think of the practical things—how to make ends meet, how to position the family in society, regain dignity. Since Elma had decided to settle in New York, Dora moved with Mah Bette and Lizzie into the old flat on Rose Tree Lane, which she was now buying over time from her cousin Roswell Diggs. Married down and brought down further, right back where I started. Dora consumed herself with industry. She took on extra work from Yum Lee, added a sideline millinery business around the holiday season, clandestinely sold piece-work to the mail-order catalogue mills, and hoarded her savings against every imagined calamity. Another earthquake, or a hurricane! Readymade clothes just ruinin’ my trade!
In those years, she had little time to attend to her second daughter. She was too busy puttin’ a roof over their heads and food on the table to realize that her child lived outdoors. It didn’t help that Lizzie, with her muscular build, her broad flat face and wide smile, was an impish facsimile of the man who had abandoned them. By the time Dora looked up from her Singer sewing machine, her daughter had grown up—wild.
Lizzie Winrow had an energy that could not be contained by bows, straps, buckles, or belts. Dresses cut the stride of her run. Buttons resisted wrestling bouts. Seams were meant to be split. Fifteen minutes after Mah Bette pulled her hair straight, she looked as if she had just arisen, the edges at her temples in gossamer spikes and her crown the crest of a cockatoo. She could run faster, throw further, spit longer, and hollah louder than any boy she knew. “Evuh!” Only difference she could see was that she couldn’t pee in an arc. She tried a couple of times to invent a technique for girls, only to decide that such a contest was a waste of her time. “What a peein’ contest got to do with progress?”
Lizzie never did like to do things she was supposed to, never liked to be caught in the ranks of what the respected expected. Since her pa was gone, she felt disobliged to obey anyone. She was full of anger with no place to put it but into trouble. She could win most any fight, but she rarely had to. She’d made an early discovery—get loud and improvise a barrage of epithets to make your assailant shrink from blows of pure sound. Expert at the dozens, she turned her hostility into pearls of wit, salting the pain of her victim with the complicit mockery of the crowd, her jocular slander, the parry, thrust, and contact. With military precision, she had an instinct for detecting the path straight to the heart. Audience was her armor, laughter reinforcement. An audience insured she would never feel abandoned again. She would never risk trusting her feelings to any one person again. But a crowd? That was a different story. With a wild shock of red and blond hair, a splash of freckles across her nose, her broad juicy mouth always had somethin’ to say. Talking trash, she tried to claim her place in the world by announcing, “I am here!”
Most often Lizzie could be found rambling with her two friends, Osceola and Flip. “I forbid you to associate with either of them,” her mother had said. As a consequence, Lizzie made the two boys her best buddies. While Lizzie knew Ossie from Pilar’s, his official home was the Orange Street Orphanage Asylum, or what folks fondly used to call Crook School. By the turn of the century, the shelter was no more than four damp walls and rows of tattered cots shared with rats and waterbugs. Like most, Ossie, when he could, scrambled out the shutterless windows onto the street, down to the harbor and market district where the ambitious could make money. At twelve he left the home altogether and, following his older brother Deke, made his living on the streets. He had learned some music fundamentals from Mr. Mikell, the music teacher at the home. The rest of his musical education he picked up from the veterans who frequented Pilar’s Palace of Pleasure—Professor Jocelyn on stride, Tom Winrow on cornet before he left, the Pullman porter Doc Sullivan, sittin’ in sometimes on drums, and the regulars like Mingo and Black Tad, with Deke’s girl Tillie on vocals when she wasn’t juiced. Osceola Turner grew up sitting on the piano bench next to Mr. Jocelyn, watching the Professor’s webbed fingers hitting a thousand notes. Being “forbidden to set foot in that place,” Lizzie would watch the band and pick up what she could out the side window. Deke stood at the door as manager and bouncer, his wide chest sporting custom-made suits. She had seen Deke threaten her pa the day he disappeared and she vowed he would one day answer for that. Deke Turner was the last one to see her father. He knows something. But Deke’s malevolence intimidated her. She had seen him drag a patron from Pilar’s and beat his face to a pulp, gut-punch the girl who had caused the trouble, then straighten his suit and walk back in as if nothing had happened. She steered clear, with one exception, her friendship with Ossie, Deke’s little brother, but the thought of revenge always resided in the back of her mind. One day she would steal away something he loved. Show you how it feels.
If Osceola was her best friend, Flip was their white man. Standing on the corner, arms akimbo in a striped tee-shirt and corduroys worn at the knees, the young Flip had introduced himself, saying, “Let me be your white man. Every colored act need a white man to get along. I’m offerin’ to be yorn.” Flip was the eventual son of Tildie Bonneau and Coleridge McKinley. After Tildie was stood up at the altar by “that Northern scoundrel,” her first cousin Cole, “tragically infirmed by a hooligan who was never apprehended,” married her as a token of honor and affection and mutual necessity. A month later they produced a daughter and some years later a son, Coleridge IV, whom everyone called Flip. Some years after that the elder Cole bought an old theater and converted it to a movie palace, just in time for the 1915 Charleston premiere of The Birth of a Nation. Flip grew up spending half of his time at the family home on Everett Street and half in the alleys behind the Bijoux on King. True to family history, Flip liked runnin’ wild with Negroes.
By the summer of 1917 the trio had created rituals of behavior. Hitching a ride on the back of the Red Line trolley, Ossie and Lizzie could easily get from the Neckbone down to the market district and the Bijoux. With Flip as the “Interlocutor,” the rag-tag trio regularly entertained patrons leaving the movie house. “Ladies and Gentlemen! Lizzie Winrow and Osceola Turner’s Colored Troubadours! The Girl made of Rubberbands and the Rubberband Band!”
In the alley behind the Bijoux, Osceola imitated the stride with a comb and a piece of tissue paper while slapping his feet for the rhythm, punctuating it with a bass boom grunt from the back of his throat. Lizzie invented dances and made up lyrics or scat a tight-harmony counterpoint to his instrumental. In exchange for Lizzie showing Flip how to shimmy and walk on his hands and Ossie teaching him to play a little drums, Flip let them sneak into the Bijoux to see the weekly picture show. Since colored weren’t allowed except on “Colored Day,” they hid in the last row in the balcony, where Lizzie demonstrated how to squeeze under the seat until the lights went down.
On other occasions, in the waning days of summer, they would go swimming not far from Lizzie’s old homestead. Dora had rented out a small plot from the Hendersons, the itinerant white family that had bid on and settled on Tom Winrow’s land. There Mah Bette still kept her garden, where the herbs mingled with vegetables and wildflowers.
The Hendersons had proved right decent white folk. They allowed Dora to board the mule and keep some chickens and a fattening hog. They built their own shotgun shack, though, for they didn’t want to live in a house after colored. Except for an old stove, a broken cot, and a wobbly table and chair, the farmhouse where Lizzie was born stood empty, taking on years, the paint chipped away, the shutters fallen to the side and the door disappeared. Lizzie tromped around as if she still lived there. Put out by some low-count, red clay rednecks! Sold off the property and he just gone! That day so long ago.
Reclining on her treetop branch, Lizzie could still see the rooftop in the distance. One leg dangling, she twirled a sprig of lavender against her cheek, breathing in the scent. In these woods, she and her pa had played Union Jack and Johnny Reb. In these woods, he had told her about her grandpa’s pickin’ up a bugle from a dead boy’s hand. “In this land our people are buried. Strangers they were, came and found me, found each other.” Running away, leavin’ behind what you love, Pa, what made you? She could not believe her pa would do that. Every day she expected to see him, every posting she expected to hear. Every time Mr. Sullivan came through the railroad yard, she pried and plied, asking Win’s old friend where he’d been, what he’d seen, was there news, but it was as if Tom Winrow had died. Not even that. Disappeared, vanished like smoke from a chimney, fog off the lake. She couldn’t grieve, daren’t hope, never believed he would leave like that with no word, no reason, nothing, how with no explanation he would just walk away.
“Hey Lizzie, you spozed to be the lookout. What you doin’ up there, daydreamin?” Flip protested, his neck craned toward the perch where she lay.
“Smellin’ up one of her famous pomades,” Ossie laughed. His dimples blossomed when he smiled. “Always experimentin’, lookin’ for the cure-all invention to tackle her hair.” He trilled the air with one finger and with his voice mimicked a trumpet with the mute tight on the bell, signaling delight with a slight jab of his neck. After gorging themselves on wild peaches, the threesome had set up shop on King’s Highway, where it was still a one-lane road. They watched for automobiles cruising down to Florida or the Carolina coast or rumrunner convoys piping their weekend medicine to the city.
Flip and Osceola would disguise a mud slick with palmetto leaves and sand, then watch the city-slickers get their front or back wheels stuck up to the spokes. Flip would then negotiate a tow for a fee. Mr. Lee, the ancient gray-haired mule Lizzie had inherited, had given up being a dancin’ mule in the mature years of his ornery life, but he was pliant only in Ossie’s gentle hands. The single reminder of her life as a child was Mr. Lee. While Ossie harnessed him up, Flip brokered the deal. Lizzie lingered in the treetops as the lookout. She became expert at the makes of cars and the potential for loot. She could easily spot a “Ford, Stutz White, leather seats, tight two-seater!” or a “Buick Touring, B-25! No, a Cadillac Landaulette!” Watching Ossie labor away with Mr. Lee and Flip wrangle the payment, she would idle in her branch and bat the breeze with the wayfarers, getting all the latest news from Savannah or Philly or New York.
These days the road was just as likely to bear military vehicles and work crews as lost vacationers and local moonshiners. The war raging in Europe for three years had finally spilled over to the U.S. Passersby had less time for small talk and adolescent pranks. “Trucks, flatbeds, red spokes,” she called out. “These here don’t look too friendly.”
“Let me do the talkin’,” Flip admonished. “And you!” he rasped, pointing his skinny finger at her, “stay outta sight.”
Flip had his mother’s big forehead and fine, thin hair the color of dirty dishwater. He compensated for his nondescript face and short stature with a twangy bluster and a presumption of privilege. Lizzie didn’t pay him no mind and was about to let him know as much before Ossie interceded. A lanky, tall youth with a rich sienna complexion, he was uncomfortably thin with a straight narrow frame, his baritone voice a shock to hear. “Flip’s right, you don’t wanna be messin’ with fellahs got war on they minds. Let us men handle dis.”
As the boys walked toward the approaching caravan, warding them off from the slick, Lizzie crossed her eyes and chided them, “Men? Hah!”
From the movie house to the farm to the wharf to the depot past the two-flat on Rose Tree Lane that her mother called home to the workroom behind Yum Lee’s Laundry, her feet were a whir. “Hey, Mah Bette!” Rivulets of sweat cascading down her flushed tawny cheeks, Lizzie placed a big kiss on her great-grandmother’s cheek and gave her a rough tight hug, startling the old woman awake. “Mr. Sullivan sent you this snuff and a little taste just like you asked, and the colored newspaper to boot.” She untucked her blouse from her skirt and removed the prize tobacco, a pint of Irish whiskey, and a wilted folded newspaper. “Chicago Defender! Tellin’ people to go north. Got good jobs with the war comin’,” she added.
“Plenty of work right here. The North ain’t all of that someplace,” her mother scowled without looking up from her worktable. Lizzie saw that another letter had arrived in the post from New York. From Elma. It was no secret that Elma was her mother’s favorite. Elma with her long silky hair and swanlike grace. Always the pretty one, always the praise. Swan uh mean old nasty bird. Pretty on the outside, ugly in. Even in her absence, it seemed Elma sucked up all the glory. Lizzie was a good singer with a strong, husky, belting voice, but Elma’s high soprano with the quivering birdsong vibrato was the one that still garnered all the compliments. “My what a voice yoah sistuh has! So sweet!” church members would marvel, as if Lizzie, the loudest in the choir, had none at all. She shrugged off the slights. Since the church congregation saw no favor in her singing, she saw no reason to favor them with her presence.
“Gone to the Devil!” she laughed to herself. At all cost, she avoided direct comparison with her older sister’s talent, deciding that she preferred instead to dance and dabble with various musical instruments—Mah Bette’s old banjo, spoons, harmonica, and piano, when she could get her hands on one. Once she even had tried playing the old bugle her father had left behind. She wound up killing that ambition with enthusiasm. Trying to get good at it overnight, she played it too long. Whole mouth swole up like a paw-paw. “Nebber pwayin’ dot dang no mo’, look mah lips!”
Poking them out now nearly as far, she stealthily watched Yum Lee toggling back and forth, never sayin’ nothin’, while her cousin Roswell waited at the counter for his order of linens. Now that he had taken over the family funeral business, the younger Roswell was even more intolerable. Some cousin. He shoulda gived that house to us a hundred years ago. She hated the way Roswell leered at her, as if her father’s not bein’ there gave him license. Claimin’ he fam’ly, always tryin’ to kiss me. She gave him a short closed-lip smile.
The steam and sweat and noise, her mother hunched over that machine like a demon at work—it all made her fidget, stuffing her shirt back in, rolling her ankles to the sides. She hated the way her people tiptoed around their lives, hated how her mother kowtowed to whites and even with Roswell changed her demeanor and tone, hated how her mother preached disdain for white folk, then turned around and valued everything that was most like them. She hated her sister for pretending she had found happiness when the sorrow washed right through the words in her letters, hated how her once proud and mysterious Mah Bette would now occasionally lose her way, wandering around with goober dust and crab claws until Lizzie found her or the police brought her home. She hated the side glances of grown men lusting after the woman she was becoming and sometimes the child that she still was.
“Lizabeth.” Roswell tipped his hat, his laundry package stuffed tightly under his arm.
“It’s Lizzie,” she glowered and stepped back with emphasis, allowing him free room to exit.
“Don’t stand on the sides of your shoes like that,” Dora snapped when the three women were alone. “They cost good money.”
“I’m goin’ out.”
“You stay right there till I say you could move.”
In defiance of her mother and to Mah Bette’s secret delight, Lizzie jabbed her neck back and forth in rapid staccato, perfectly capturing a chicken pecking at grain. Mah Bette laughed aloud. The sewing machine stopped abruptly. Dora flashed a silent glare. Lizzie poked her neck back in place and stood still as a statue.
Each make up she own mind bout tings, Mah Bette mused. Each tink she need nuttin’ from th’other, an expect less. Dora hold she head up high. Folks tink she nose inna air. My Lizzie, stickin’ she nose all de time where it got no place bein’.
Lizzie casually palmed her sister’s letter from the side of the table. Turning away from her mother, she plied it from the envelope and began to read it. Elma’s letters were always cheerful and short. Life with Raymond was getting better. New York, where buildings touched the sky, things were always looking up. Lizzie could read through the lines. She could see within the picture, a photo from Easter—two toddlers by her side, another one on the way, Elma standing on a Manhattan rooftop framed by the New York City skyline. Her sister was gaunt, a smile forced on her thin lips, her large dark eyes wide and frightened, one fist clenched at the end of an arm seemingly bound to her side, her beautiful mane of hair pulled close to her head. Elma, too proud to ask, but always tacitly accepting the few dollars her mother dutifully sent.
Dora had overpowered her shame and shaped her older daughter with a fierce, unbending pride. Perforce, she had overlooked Lizzie, did not have room to see her. “Make yourself useful and fold some of those pieces for packin’.”
Lizzie quickly put the letter back on the table, then flexed her feet and dug her heels into the floor. As she slapped the sleeve parts together sloppily her mother started in on her again. “It wouldn’t hurt to be civil to your cousin. Don’t you roll your eyes at me! The idea!”
Sensing a brewing summer storm, Yum Lee looked to Mah Bette and silently glided from the room. The sewing machine stopped and started as Dora stomped on the pedal with each new thought building to crescendo. “You want people to talk!? I always held my head up high. Made sure if people was gonna talk, I was looking straight at them and now! Waltzin’ in here. Lookin’ like that! My own daughter? Gallavantin’ with that no-count waterfront trash!”
“We ain’t no trash! We got us a good act! We gon be famous!”
“That nigguh ain’t eben thinking ’bout you,” Dora snapped, her shoulders hunched over the sewing machine. “When I was your age, I had my own growing business. I slave like crazy to make a decent life and what do I get? My own daughter! Hangin’ inna trees like a monkey! Smellin’ like a mule! Singin’ on street corners like a common heiffuh!”
“I make good money same as you!”
Dora slammed her hand on the table. “Oh, you are a headstrong, willful, good-for-nuthin’! I swear you take after your father for spite!”
“I take after my daddy cuz he’s my daddy. I should take after him for real and leave this doggone place!”
“Chile, you better not let me get up from here and get my hands on you. You ain’t makin’ nothin’ but a mess outta that. Go on and refill the kerosene for the lamp.”
“Ain’t you never heard of ’lectricity?”
Dora made a gesture as if she would rise up from her chair. Lizzie darted out.
“No-good heiffuh.”
“That’s hoofuh!” Lizzie retorted and stomped an angry rhythm pattern on the landing as Dora’s sewing box hit the screen door. Lizzie hated when her mother worked late for the Chinaman, the room close and hot, stinking of sweat and starch. Her eyes brimming with tears and fury, she stomped round back the building to the storm cellar. “Bending over that machine till she nearly blind! He so cheap won’t even turn on no lights!” All had gone. All she knew as her family. Her father, never to be seen again. Then Elma. Elma used to send letters addressed especially to her. The last was in April and here it was July. She lifted one of the heavy cellar doors. The air within was cool and clammy. The cellar would be damp with soot and cobwebs. “Wouldn’t have to cart no lamp up the steps if you’d git some doggone lights. I’mo get outta this backward doggone beat-up town.”
She left the unfilled lamp on the ledge and in the last hint of twilight ran off to find Ossie at Pilar’s.
Osceola watched her create an improvised dance, her body lithe with no seeming rules of behavior as she scaled the brick wall like a cat. Her feet disappeared through the jimmied window. He hesitated. “Don’t think it’s right, dancin’ up where the dead lay.”
“Ain’t no dead people in here tonight. Besides, is that all you want to do—walk around behind Mr. Jocelyn, carryin’ his hat? Where you gon go with that?” She flashed him the prize possession concealed under her shirt. “Looky hyeah, a Victrola attachment!” Her knees propped on the sill, she extended her hand, “Come on, reach!” she whispered. “We gon make some music of our own tonight.”
They had snuck into the private office of her cousin Roswell’s funeral parlor. Roswell had bought a Victrola to entertain his men friends with the latest Jass recordings when their wives thought they were having a Brown Society Benevolence Committee meeting. Twisting his lanky body to get through the tiny stairwell window, Ossie cautiously lowered himself onto the landing. Lizzie arched her back and pursed her lips. “Cousin Roswell be ovuh to Sundie dinnuh, sayin’, ‘Jass is the Ruination!’ Then he sneak over here, snapping his finguhs and smokin’ cigars.”
Lizzie considered this minor breaking and entry a repayment for the grief Roswell regularly bestowed upon her family. Her first efforts were foiled. Roswell had kept the stylus attachment locked and hidden away in his roller desk. Without it, the mahogany box with its golden rimmed horn was beautiful to behold, but unplayable. Now that Lizzie had procured the exclusive Victrola attachment from Mr. Sullivan, “only for one dollah,” she was ecstatic.
“A dollah?! Lizzie, we need be savin’ our money. I’ll keep it, ’fo you spend it on somethin’ else stupid like them tap shoes.”
“I need these shoes,” she protested as she clicked her new patent leather, black-bowed flats around the sparkling parquet floors of the funeral parlor.
“Put bottle caps on the bottom like everybody else,” Ossie rebutted.
“I ain’t like everybody else. I’m Lizzie Winrow.”
Her kinship with Ossie was genuine. He was a natural. He played multiple instruments, as adept at rhythm as melody as she was, and he laughed at her jokes, admired her dances. She could be herself. “Just the same,” he said, “I’ll keep the money.”
“Whatever. We gon have us our own Victrola Party tonight!” Ossie’s contribution to the evening was a new set of treasured Red Seal records. He had procured them off a sailor who owed his brother Deke some money. The two vandals watched transfixed as the needle rested against the rotating black disc. Miraculously, a cornucopia of sound washed over the room.
Ossie’s hands went up in panic. “Oh Lawd, they gon hear us!”
Lizzie transformed her voice into a ducklike churl, crossed her eyes, and drew her knees together. Enunciating each syllable with exaggeration, she conjured her spinster cousin Francina to a tee. “Osceola! I know for a verifiable fact that cousin Rrrrrossssswell is burying Mr. Portas tonight. I know, also for a fact,” she shifted to her regular slang, “he buryin’ the husband an sleepin’ widda widda.”
Ossie frowned in embarrassment. “You got a dirty mouf, you know.”
“I tell the truth, is all. Can’t help if it hurt to hear it. Come to think of it, Roswell and the widow Portas? Hurt to think about that!”
A selection called the Castle Walk began.
“These folks—the Castles—goin’ all over the world teachin’ folks how to dance our dances,” she continued.
“It say Castle Walk, Lizzie, not Cake Walk.”
Lizzie fanned herself with the box cover. “White folks, dancin’ roun’ the world—got a colored band leader.”
“You lyin’. Lemme see.”
“Why, you cain’t read.”
“Gimme it.”
“You wish.”
“Who told you he was colored? Ain’t no colored people makin’ no records.”
“Uh-huh! Mr. Sullivan say when I brung him Mah Bette’s charm and he give me the Victrola needle I asked him fuh. ‘Same one as usual, Lizzie. Gimme Spell Number Seven,’ he say.” She handed him the weathered, folded newspaper that had been read by people many times over and continued, “These folks here, the Castles, goin’ all over country, national tour, teachin’ folks how to dance. Got a colored band leader on stage with em. Come on!” She held out her arms, expecting Ossie to dance with her.
“Ain’t no sech a thing as a colored band leader for a white act. Colored act need a white man. Ain’t no white act need a colored one.” Osceola had stopped to examine the front page. He looked at the masthead and spelled out, “Chi-ca-go . . . Defender.”
“Say so right there. A symphony of one hundred instruments, including eleven pianos.”
Ossie sucked his teeth. “Sullivan’s a drunk and a liar. Ain’t no nigguh got eleven pianos,” but he flipped the page and saw that it was true. A full picture spread of a colored band graced the center pages of the smuggled Chicago daily. “Vernon and Irene Castle and Conductor James Europe.” Ossie studied the pictures—Jim Europe standing between the Castles, standing with his horn section, standing next to the King of England! James Reese Europe, in fine black tails, a colored man named after a continent!
Osceola immediately saw the possibilities. The Victrola players had been selling for a decade, but still people were suspicious. The old stride player, Mr. Jocelyn, so prideful when Osceola would carry his hat and instrument case, was scared of this new sound. “Who gon come hear us, if they kin take the band home? Who gon wanna hear us play if they done heard the song over and over?” But Ossie could see now that the music could go anywhere, it was going everywhere, and colored musicians were riding first class. It was one thing to hear a coin slot phonograph in a penny arcade, it was another to have a full orchestra sittin’ up in your parlor. White folks dancing with a colored band? That was nothing new. White folks paying a colored band leader, both of em standin’ on stage together? That was something else!
Lizzie tried to match her steps to the foot patterns diagramed in the paper. “Most of the decent bands not even comin’ south no more. Far south as I’m goin is Baltimo they say. St. Louis in a pinch. Only ones come down hyeah is them tired old minstrel shows. Black Patti comin’ to town next week. She a hundred years old. Come on. Let’s walk like rich folk. No mo’ Cake Walk. We doin’ the Castle.”
Osceola squinted in the half-light of the room. Lizzie approached and stood beside him. He could feel her breath on his neck. The article said that both Vernon Castle and Jim Europe had set aside their careers to support the war effort, Castle becoming an airman with the Royal Canadians and Europe becoming an officer with Harlem’s 369th Infantry and leader of its military band.
Ossie studied the band picture in disbelief. In the last row of musicians, he recognized Herbie Wright, standing proud with his drumsticks, his bass drum emblazoned boldly THE PERCUSSION TWINS. Jim Europe had innovated again, amplifying his sound with two trap drummers, who only by coincidence had the same last name. Europe took a cue from Kittyhawk and dubbed them The Wright Brothers. Ossie was more than familiar with one of them. Herbie Wright was from Crook School, just like him! Herbie had taken lessons from Mr. Mikell and withstood his advances just like him. And just like him, Herbie had run off and gotten his start in Deke’s street band. Even now Ossie could hear their marching rhythms and the sound of coins dropping into Deke’s bowler hat. But Herbie had a temper, and when he tried on his own to collect on the band’s popularity, Deke disabused him of that notion, pummeling him every time the boy attempted to stand back up. Dispossessed of all but his hide, Herbie left Charleston for good. Next thing Ossie sees, Herbie is being called one half of the Percussion Twins, sittin’ in with the legendary Clef Club Band of James Reese Europe, drum set flanked by grand pianos.
Europe’s matte ebony visage dominated the page. Suited up in perfectly cut formal black tails, he stood before a massive ensemble of banjos, reeds, fiddles, and brass—trumpets and tubas, trombones and horns curled around themselves with serpentine splendor. In the center of it all a black man, his almond-shaped eyes, piercing through his rimless round glasses, baton in hand, lookin’ like Moses! Herbie Wright had not only resurfaced, he was resurrected, playin’ in what had to be the grandest band in the world!
“Castle Walk. This dance don’t look like nothin’,” Lizzie complained. “Gimme a rag or somethin’ jukin’.”
Osceola barely heard her. He couldn’t believe it. Orange Street, same as me! Callin’ theyselves Percussion Twins. Bet I kin outplay the both of em put together. Me and Lizzie like twins. Got talent and each other, just like them. We would run them off the bandstand. Cain’t b’lieve, Herbie got out, got away, and wound up on the cover of the newspapuh! While he could easily read notes on a piece of sheet music, he struggled silently with the words on the page.
Lizzie intuited his struggle and to distract him improvised a lyric while bumping her hips.
“Told my mama I was sick, that I got the croup,
Snuck out of the back to join a colored Jass troupe,
But Mama put her foot down and this is what she say,
I don’t care if you got pneumonia, you gwine to school today!
I hollahed right back at huh and this is what I say,
You wanna catch up wid me, Mama, let me school you my way!
You wanna lay some learnin’ on me but it ain’t no use,
Less it’s some fast jukin’ Jass or a barrelhouse Blues!”
Tapping out the melody with a buck and time step, Lizzie slid into a skating scotch step to a crossover double tap to a broken leg and her old man’s dance with one leg short and a dip and a wobble.
Their plan was to get in a little olio, the variety sketches that came after the comedy sets in most traveling shows, and, by way of entertainment, earn a ticket out of Charleston and make their way to New York.
In the wee hours of the morning the following week, Lizzie and Ossie approached the private railcar, the traveling troupe ’most packed up after their last set. A bright orange stripe of dawn had just cracked the night sky.
“Say, we’re here to see Black Patti.”
“Sister Sissieretta ain’t, isn’t seeing anyone.”
“She seein’ us! “Mah daddy and Black Patti was like this.” Lizzie held her two fingers tight together. “Mah daddy come to see Black Patti. Turnt the show out! I’m Tommy Winrow’s daughter.”
“Who?”
“Tom Winrow, the cornet playuh!”
“Never heard of him.”
“Yeah? So who are you?” Lizzie snapped.
“Please, mistuh,” Osceola interjected, “she’s just excited is all. We really got somethin’. I play the piano, she sing and dance.”
The headliner Black Patti stepped out of the shadows and walked toward the couple. She was a giant woman, an earth goddess bedecked with sequined splendor of the sun and moon, one on each breast, a crest of waves atop her head, her chiseled brown face regal if worn. Osceola stepped forward to meet her and bowed. “We have created an act in your honor, Miss Sissieretta, and we would like to show it to you.”
“What is it you do?”
“She sing and I uh . . . I uh, uh . . .”
“It’s a song and dance. Uh olio, brand-new, never been seen,” chirped Lizzie.
Intrigued by the earnestness of the young man’s large languid eyes and the contours of his youthful body, the songstress turned to him, the sun of her left breast blotting out Lizzie’s presence. “New song?”
“Yessum.”
“You wrote it?”
“Yessum. Well I—mostly uh some . . .”
“Lemme hear it.” Osceola moved swiftly and sat down at the upright piano. As Lizzie started shaking her shoulders in preparation, surveying the railcar to determine how much room she had for her moves, Sissieretta followed Ossie to the piano bench and sat beside him. “Lemme hear you sing it.”
“Well, I just play. Lizzie Mae do the sangin’, song part.”
“I like to hear the composer sing the song,” Sissieretta purred. “Tells me if it’s true.”
Lizzie didn’t like the way this was going at all. She was not accustomed to some woman showing that kind of attention to her friend and partner, let alone a legend!
Osceola felt his heart racing. His face was flushed. A room full of people and he was fine, but with a giant goddess looming over him and the band members standing round, the hint of tobacco smoke, alcohol, and reefer clinging to the air, he panicked, couldn’t move. When he played at cuttin’ contests at Pilar’s, he always lasted to the final round, but sitting there so close beside Black Patti he felt his whole body quivering like a puddle in a rain shower. His hands trembled. Dismissing him with a soft grunt, Sissieretta shifted her weight and turned indifferently toward Lizzie. “Lemme see yo’ dance, then.”
“Me and my partner come as a duet,” Lizzie snapped. “Didn’t come for no solo.” With bold long steps, she marched toward Ossie, grabbed him by the elbow, and dragged him down the car and out the train door. Laughter followed them, jabbing at their ribs, Lizzie’s fingernails digging into Ossie’s arm.
Only when they were down the street and out of sight of the railyard did she let go of his elbow. “Osceola Turner, what wrong wid you? Yuh know you play bettern that.”
“Oh leave me alone. I juss froze up.”
“Just froze up?! Shit. North Pole ain’t that cold.”
“Don’t be messin’ with me, Lizzie. Doan be messin’ wid me.”
“I don’t know why I bother messin’ witchu at tall. I sneak out the house and for what? We ain’t neber gon git nowhere talkin’ ’bout ‘just froze up.’ A block of ice could just froze up. Snowstorm just froze up. Eskimo in uh igloo just froze up. Dead body got rigor mortis just froze up. How is a musician what wrote a song talkin’ ’bout just froze up? What the people poze to do, imagine how it sound?”
“Oh shut up and leave me alone.”
“Then there be two of us ‘just froze up.’ ”
“One of these days yo’ mouf gonna get you in a lotta trouble.”
“Least it open when I want it to.”
“She warnt interested in yo’ singin’ no way.”
“Now he got something to say!”
He turned and left without speaking another word.
Through a wall of mirrors, Deke could scan the whole floor from the entrance to the bandstand. They were angled so he could even see the balcony ringing the saloon floor. He tracked all of the business like a musical score, the intricate weaving of human enterprise. Respectable vice. No crimps or dips. No snake juice. Only the devious and perverse. Only in this world could a black man assume some measure of equality—the underground that connected Pilar’s to the wharf. South Carolina being a dry state since 1916 had produced in Charleston a healthy enclave for sin and abundant opportunity for ambition. Be it the white action on Beresford and Clifford Street or Pilar’s Palace of Pleasure, Deke was the man to see.
Pilar’s had three doors—one for the girls, one for white men, and one for colored. Sailors, scuffs, dock boys, clerks, stevedores, ruffians. Gentlemen who preferred the darker pleasures, he escorted to Pilar’s—pillars of society he could break into twigs. He had paid his dues. Occasionally he had to clean up a mess—a slit throat, stabbing, suicide—but usually the whiskey was free and easy flowin’, camphor and cocaine and cunt abundant and a fair fightin’ game good for five bucks a purse. Deke was a large man with a quiet, still demeanor. Music kept him easy, his coolness serene.
He liked to keep things organized. Cards in the back: rotating games of poker, faro, gin, and blackjack, old-timers like Winrow playin’ coon. Bringin’ in his homemade wine like it was an offering from God. “Made up for you just right. Persimmon beer, corn liquor. Scuppernong! Tommy Winrow’s wine divine!” Deke remembered Win’s laugh the most, loud with joy he didn’t deserve havin’. Lookin’ like a Sambo in a pichuh show. Deke wanted to wipe that grin off his face, but he couldn’t put it out his mind. Lost his laugh, went lookin’ for it in a slug of cough syrup. Rapture. Smack, thunder, hell dust, nose drops. Even now, years later, Deke couldn’t get the sound out his ear. The hollow laughter would beckon from a corner, or in the notes of an itinerant horn player’s casual tune. Even after Deke had squelched him, played him, beat him, distilled him down to emptiness, Win was still laughin’. Haunted, even now, in the face of that girl.
Traveling the back roads through Hell Hole Swamp, Deke would store local moonshine and bootleg labeled liquor at Hiram’s Barbershop, but he steered clear of the stuff himself. Anything that altered his attention. The whores had tried to feed him sweet water as a kid, a little whiskey mixed in with sugar water. He had turned his head even then. Prize for the best picker, soldier’s haze, double shot for a good hand. He saw too many people swallowed. Either by the spirits or by the smoke. Snow, juice, death. Even Tommy Winrow. Tricked out by his own hand. “Made up for you, Deke, just right.” How’d that happen?
Deke always liked to keep his mind sharp, calculating. He had a system: pickpocket—broken fingers; card cheat—gouge out an eye. If someone beat up one of the girls, he broke their nose and jaw. Confidence? Busted kneecaps. He carried three guns, one in his pocket, one behind his back, one in his sock garter, a shiv up his sleeve. Blackjack, brass knuckles, didn’t need those. Reputation was enough.
Trade: opium from Chinamen, cocaine in packets from Sully, whiskey up the backwoods routes. Girls always in from somewhere.
Pilar was older now, her bloated hands tippin’ her cough syrup brown-laced with heroin to her sunken lips, toenails curved around, couldn’t fit in her red-topped boots. He stood to inherit, thought to expand, any day now. Then the war came. MPs everywhere, the girls gettin’ surly, cuttin’ deals on their own, up-country crackers struttin’ their arrogance, banning fraternization, crimping his trade.
Ossie’s face was still hot when he got back to Pilar’s. He headed for the backstair pantry where Pilar often let him sack out during the day. The old madame puffed on her cigar. Her weathered hands still graceful, her nails still pink, she cupped her mouth and hollered toward the back, “Deke? Got company.” Ossie pulled back the pantry curtain. His meager belongings were scattered about. Deke’s hulking frame huddled over the loose floorboard under which Ossie had concealed his stash. Ossie charged at his brother and whipped him around only to be confronted with a pearl-handled pistol at his cheek, the trigger pulled back.
“Better sleep with it from now on,” Ossie spat.
“I always do,” Deke chuckled, and slowly let the trigger ease, releasing him. Deke casually tucked the pistol back up his sleeve. “Hold out on me again and see what happen.” In the silence, Ossie felt a trickle of urine run down his leg. The cigar box where he had secreted his and Lizzie’s hard-won earnings was dashed, broken and emptied.
“That money belong to me and Lizzie. You ain’t got no right to it.”
“I got a right to anything you got, little brother. I brought you into this world, I’ll take you out.”
Ossie bolted out the door and ran.
“Come back here! Get back here, you lil nigguh!”
Ossie hid in an empty freight train all that day and night. He grabbed the truss rods of a livestock car and hoisted himself up. Retreating to the corner, he crumbled to the floor. How’m I gonna tell Lizzie? He beat his hat to his knee in fury and curled himself into a fetus, not even noticing when the train started up. The earthen smell and the swaying movement of the car finally lulled him to sleep.
He bolted awake just as the moving shadow of a train patrolman rushed him. The club came crashing down. He crouched and instinctively stuffed his hands in his armpits to protect his fingers. Better his head and back, he thought, than his hands.
He wound up in the Spartanburg County lockup, three hundred miles into the piney woods, cracker country. The cell next to his was occupied by a crew of colored soldiers. Five of ’em. Uniforms pressed, hair slicked, mustaches clipped. One of them was standing leisurely, taking a drag off a hand-rolled cigarette.
“Hey, I told you nigguhs, no smoking in hyeah!” The soldier coolly looked at the red-faced white guard, dropped the cigarette, and stepped on it. “Y’all coons bettuh loyn, this ain’t New Yawk.”
The soldier let out a smooth trail of smoke. “No kiddin’. We don’t want no sparks in Spartanburg.”
As soon as the iron jail door clanked shut and the men were alone, Osceola jumped up and held on to the bars. “Y’all real soljahs? Never seen colored ones befoah. Charleston full of ’em, but no colored to speak of. Just a couple of messengers and sech.”
A chubby dark one seated on a cot replied, “Last time I looked we was colored.”
A reddish-brown soldier with small black eyes paced in a circle and nervously slicked down his hair. He spoke with a staccato accent Osceola could not place. “I dint sign up to be no soljah. I juss play bassoon, okay?” he protested. “I sign up to be inna inna inna band. Five hundred dollah a month, that’s what he say, that’s what Jimmy told me. I sign up to be inna band, not no army. I don’t wanna be no soljah. I play bassoon!”
“You a bassoon-playin’ muthafuckin’ soljah now, Romero,” the fat one teased. “Ain’t you heard? We got a war to fight.”
“With who, a newspaper boy?”
“Shut the fuck up, both of you.” A thin, wide-eyed caramel man grabbed the bars and shouted at the empty hallway. “Hey! We want to speak to the colonel! We have our rights!”
“You know they lynch nigguhs down here for mess like this,” blurted the fat one. He leaned back, his hands folded over his round stomach as if in prayer. He closed his eyes while speaking. “In Houston, the colored troops and the locals got into it, and afterward, sixteen of the nigguhs was hanged.”
“I ain’t no nigguh. I’m Puerto Rican.”
“Well ’scuse me for breathin’, mon señor.”
“That’ll do, guys,” cautioned the one with the cigarette. He stood apart from the rest and moved slowly as if on his own time. The older man met Ossie’s gaze. “Where you from, kid?”
“Charleston, thereabouts. Jumped a freight.” Ossie chuckled wearily, bashfully. “Jumped the wrong train.”
The man smoothly rolled a new blunt. “Didn’t we all, brother. Didn’t we all? Name’s Mitchell, Mitch Jackson.”
“Ossie . . . Osceola Turner.”
“Hoss–SEE–o–lah.” Mitch rolled the word over, shifting the accent, and set the seal of a new cigarette with the moist tip of his tongue. “Great, ancient war chief. Lover of black women, defender to the last.” Hoss–SEE–o–lah . . . Hoss, hoss, hoss.”
With each syllable Mitch emitted a perfect smoke ring. In successive sizes, they floated to the center of the jail cell and hovered. He shifted the conversation back to his comrades. “The lieutenant will be along directly. He’s trying to get us reassigned.”
“Never thought I’d say it, but I would give my right toe to be in Detroit right about now.”
“Aw, gimme a beach in San Juan!”
There had already been a few incidents in town. Mitch wondered how the lieutenant was going to take this new situation: the drum major, lead trumpet, oboist, and the entire imported Puerto Rican reed section sitting in the county jail.
“On the positive side, we have not been arrested, only ‘detained.’ ”
“On the positive side, we have not been lynched!”
“We still in jail.”
The local sheriff was holding them he said for their own protection, but how long that safeguard was going to last was anybody’s guess.
The thin caramel man approached. Noble Sissle, the great songwriter-singer, reduced to a twitter. “You think they’ve even notified the camp? Where’s Jimmy? Where’s Colonel Heyward for that matter?” His face was bruised and swollen on one side, his eyelid drooping and black. “What are we going to tell him?”
“Our drum major has to learn to remove his cap,” Mitch teased.
“Wait till the shit happens to you, Jackson!”
“We’re all here, Noble. We’re all here,” Mitch responded wryly.
At that moment, the bandmaster himself entered with papers for their release. The one called Sissle jumped up. “Jimmy!” He stepped back and saluted. “Lieutenant, I mean. I only went into the hotel to buy a newspaper!”
Jim Europe, his arms folded, head lowered into a straight gaze of disapproval, listened patiently as the guard unlocked the cell door and his men exited single file, saluting their lieutenant as they passed. Mitch, the last, casually explained, “Noble got into it with the local hotelier. Claiming he couldn’t stand to be away from New York, he had to have a newspaper.”
“I went to buy a newspaper, damn it!”
“Watch your language, Sergeant Sissle.”
“Damned cracker told me to take my hat off . . . sir.” The reedlike man enunciated every syllable in a crisp high tenor. “I had the paper in one hand and the change in the other. He knocked my hat off!”
“Knocked his hat off,” echoed Mitch.
“I went to pick it up, and he kicked me. Kicked me, Jimmy! Almost took out my eye. Chipped my tooth! Like he wanted to take my head off. If the fellahs hadn’t come in, he might have killed me!”
“Came in to see what was taking you so long, Sis.”
“Go on, keep laughing. I broke a tooth!”
The lieutenant responded like a weary father with a houseful of children, the men clustered around him. “Pull yourselves together, soldiers. We have a gig in two hours. We’re playing the local country club tonight.”
No, uh-uh, the universal cry went up. “I no playin’ in no goddam country club inna inna inna goddam country like these!”
“You have a problem understanding the command, Romero?”
“No sir, Lieutenant Europe, sir.”
Osceola suddenly realized that he was standing before James Reese Europe in the flesh. A Negro, an officer, and leader of the finest band in the world! “Sergeant Sissle can sit out until he gets that tooth fixed,” the lieutenant continued. “If it’s any consolation, the boys back at the barracks stand ready to tear up the town on your behalf, but I have to have your word. No retaliation.”
“No newspaper neither,” mumbled the drum major as he exited the jail.
Mitch idled and gestured with a slant of his head. “Chief, can you spring the kid, too? Don’t think you wanna leave him here.”
The sheriff was only too happy to let Osceola go. Should the good citizens of Spartanburg decide to pay him a visit, he wanted his jail emptied of any colored. Wanted his town that way, too. He spat after them a thick sludge of well-chewed tobacco.
Their hands tucked into their pockets, the band members spilled into the sunlit street. Mitch mimicked a slide trombone wail of George M.’s “Over There!” shifted into a minor key. His fellow band members picked up the variation.
That night before an all-white crowd of Spartanburg’s finest and the country club’s all-colored waitstaff, James Reese Europe took the bandstand. Dressed in their military finest, pressed and polished, the band members, forty-eight strong, sat forward at attention. Europe crisply called out the number, then leaned into the hotspot and whispered, smiling, “You know, gentlemen, a funny thing about war you’ll discover—it condenses and compresses a whole lotta manhood into a very short period of time. A lotta people wanna know what kind of men are we?” Jim Europe, chest round and tall, his cap cocked low to the head so the men could see his bespectacled eyes without glare, raised his baton and spoke in a barely audible nonchalant baritone. “They tell me they got a medal over there of a naked white woman chained to a big black dick. They wear it round their necks like the iron cross, two, three, four.”
The ensemble struck up a hot tempo that increased in speed and volume and complexity with each riff. James Reese Europe’s 369th. They were soon to be known as Hellfighters. Already Osceola could hear it in their sound. Already the music said they were a tough breed of city cat, out from the shackles of Jim Crow, feeling their own power, feedin’ on it, “Harlem!” the horns howled, a part of town that black people owned or felt like it—livin’ it, smellin’ it, soundin’ it, lovin’ it, tastin’ it, movin’ breathin’ bein’ free! Had they own taverns, tailors, shoe parlors, barbers, broad avenues, newspapers, societies, wage jobs, even unions! By steamer, by wagon, by foot they came, from country to small town to the black metropolis, the field hollahs and the moanin’ blues travelin’ up the New England Constitution, blending with the fast, loud urban rhythms of the factories. Jacksonville to Durham to D.C. to Philly to New York, the Tenderloin, baby, Hell’s Kitchen, and from there to Harlem!! And Music! Bending the notes, spitting them out, diesel fuel gushed forth in great arcs of golden sound with so much power it got everybody movin’! Urban wildcatters, prospectin’ for their future, their tools trumpets, cornets, sax and tuba, violins, clarinets, bass, flute, and drums. Hellfighters—shoot, even before the war, they was raisin’ Cain and the roof! Their leader called himself a continent and built a band to suit the size. When the standard was twenty-eight, Jimmy had forty-eight. He insisted on forty-eight, with Noble Sissle as drum major. Went to Puerto Rico and Cuba to recruit the reed section. While the armies of the world were at stalemate, this big band from Harlem would conquer everywhere it went, killin’ em with the music. While the great world seemed to crumble and fall, they offered the possibility of a wholly unimagined new one, sayin’, “This is what freedom feel like—this, how it sound!”
The country club’s Negro waiters bustled about, unsure of what to make of this bold new music. Ossie was quiet. He stepped out of the truck and stood at the fence listening. A sound so full it could not be contained, a power so rich it could not be resisted. He was a changed man. He had a whole new way of hearing.
When the band struck for the evening, Osceola was surprised that neither Herbie nor Stevie seemed to recognize him. Their drums were drivin’! He intended to tell them as much. Stoking himself, he patted a nervous tempo on his thighs. Herbie stopped packing his gear and cut him a look. When they had left, he was a kid. Now he was almost eyeballin’ them. Maybe that was it. Maybe they remembered him as Deke’s kin and thus no friend to them. Ossie smiled back. Yeah, my friend, I’m coming after you. Osceola Turner’s cuttin’ in.
The next morning, he joined the army, signed up right there in Spartanburg. Though he was not yet seventeen, he told the recruiter he was a home birth and gave his age as twenty. They told him he had a week to set his affairs in order. He thought he had signed up for the band.
At first the war had been good to Deke Turner. He provided protection for Pilar’s girls and kept the musicians happy with whatever made them so. The pink-faced new recruits who crowded into the city, the doughboys, flush with innocence and fat with cash, kept the gambling tables busy. For a short while, he was king of the joint, Little Mexico’s chief bandito. But as soon as the country actually entered the fight, things changed. Though the sailors roamed the streets three abreast and twelve deep, there was no action. Little Mexico was near shut down. “They say it because my gals hab VD,” Pilar moaned. “My gals is clean. Got VD? Dem dam sailors brought it widdem. What we gon do, Deke?”
“Goddam white folks messin’ up everythin’. Half the girls locked up.” Deke had needed that money that Ossie had hidden away. A few months back, he had gotten himself detained in Georgia. Just travelin’ through as he always did with hard cash and half pints to bribe the deputies at the state border, he ran into a roadblock manned by military police with rifles drawn. They commandeered his automobile, put him in cuffs, and threw him in the back of his own car. Before they could discover the seat’s false bottom, he escaped—punched out the driver from behind, jumped out, and rolled into the thick country foliage just in time to see his car, along with five crates of good bourbon, crash into the sentries. He convinced a neighborly sharecropper’s wife to bust the manacles with an ax, then, following the moonlit backroads to Savannah, he hitched a shrimp hauler up the coast to Charleston. He stayed in the Neckbone now, away from the harbor. Now that the U.S. had entered the war, the city was thick with military police. With an out-of-state warrant, he had double cause for concern. He had to make himself scarce, invisible, sittin’ up in Pilar’s like some washed-up pimp. Lost his car, his money, workin’ on his reputation.
Through the curtain of Pilar’s second-floor window, Deke saw his little brother disembark from the trolley and start walking through the square. He watched that gal run and hug up on him. Then she put her hands on her hips and fussed, flirting, he could tell. “Where you been at five whole days?” Osceola grabbed her by the shoulders and spun her around as if he had something to tell her. Deke was glad to see the kid was all right, but furious with Osceola for running off. He watched Lizzie put her arms around him. Still grasping hands, they walked toward Pilar’s together.
Deke flew down the steps and met Ossie at the door. He went to crack Ossie in the jaw with the back of his hand, but Osceola blocked the blow and pushed him back.
“Git yo’ hands offa me. I ain’t got to take that from you.” Stunned, Deke started toward Ossie again, but his opponent stood firm. “You lay a hand to a soljah, you goin’ to jail today. I don’t answer to you no mo’. I am property of the United States Army. I enlisted!”
Lizzie grabbed Ossie’s arm and spun him around, “You what?!”
Deke laughed, “You cain’t enlist in nothin’, you dumbass. You underage.”
“Go tell somebody, why don’t you? I signed up in Spartanburg. Gonna serve my country. Gonna join Jim Europe’s band.” Ossie smiled triumphantly.
Deke responded without emotion, “Your girlfriend don’t seem to be too happy ’bout it.” Ossie glanced behind him. Lizzie, a swirl of color, had already disappeared.
Deke sprang. He grabbed the front of Ossie’s shirt and threw him against the wall. “I’ll show you who you serve awright.” He pressed a steel forearm against Ossie’s throat.
Ossie clinched his teeth and spat back, “I’m goin’ inna mornin’. Ain’t nothin’ you can do.”
“Givin’ me lip, boy, huh?” Deke released his hold. Ossie bent over, coughing, massaging his windpipe. “You goin’ down to that office right now and clear this mess up,” Deke continued as he shoved Ossie toward the saloon’s swinging doors. Osceola landed hard on the sawdust floor and scurried to his feet. He skipped off in pain, running after Lizzie. Deke bellowed after him, “Come back here, you little shit! Goddam nigguh, I said come back!”
Ossie didn’t find her at Yum Lee’s. He peeked in the barbershop, but didn’t ask. Didn’t need any more folks all up in his business. He checked at the Bijoux. Flip had not seen her. He searched under the wharf where they first examined each other’s changing anatomies, but he couldn’t find her. He had outgrown Lizzie by five inches, but he still couldn’t catch her, especially if she had a head start, especially if she was mad.
He hitched a ride out King’s Highway, past Lizzie’s scoutin’ tree, the last artifact of their childhood. He found her, sitting on the front stoop of her family’s run-down homestead. Hands in his pockets, he walked up the path flanked by Mah Bette’s garden of herbs, vegetables, and wildflowers. Lizzie was combing her hair, having just washed it. The cans of cotton seed oil, beeswax, and petroleum jelly scented with sandalwood were lined up next to her, denying him a seat. She sectioned off a quadrant of the coppery mesh atop her head and began the process of braiding it. She layered on the oil and the scent and dried the section with a dishtowel, then pulling it taut divided it into three prongs that she laced through the fingers of her two hands. Picking through each dense, resilient lock in silence, she braided nine tight fat plaits that looked like half-smoked cigars. Her movements were slow and deliberate. When she finished, she twisted one braid on top of another till they ringed her skull in a crown.
Ossie stood there the whole time. He scuffed at the dusty soil. “I didn’t mean fuh yuh to find out like that, Lizzie. Meant to tell you myself. I had to do somethin’, somethin’ to get away from Deke.”
“From me too, look like.”
“I just know this is the right thing to do. Yo’ Mah Bette always talkin’ ’bout signs. I seen Jim Europe and I signed up. I’ma git inna band. You watch!”
“I ain’t watchin nothin’. Leave my great-gran’mama outta this! We coulda had a job with Black Patti if not for yo’ sorry behind. Shiverin’ like a yellah dawg. I don’t need you, Osceola Turner. You was holdin’ me back.”
“I just come to say good-bye, then.”
“Why? I got nothin’ to say to you. Nobody give a shit about you.”
“. . . Ain’t like I’mo be gone forever.”
“Just give me my half of our money.”
“Deke took it.”
“What?”
“That’s why I run off in the first place. I—”
She jumped up. “You let that nigguh take our money!”
“Don’t do nothin’ stupid!”
“Stupid? You got that pretty much covered on your own. You told me you was the best one to be keepin’ it. What kinda moron leave a stash so easy to find?! You just gonna let him do that?”
He stood beside her and grabbed her arms. She squirmed and tried to pull away. He held her fast, his eyes piercing and earnest. “Listen, Lizzie, I can do this. We won’t have to stash no money. In New York, Jim Europe got a musicians’ union. Colored run every band in the city. That’s a better connection than waitin’ for any ol’ touring show comin’ through town. Black Patti’s the past, Jim Europe’s the future. We could make it to New York on our own! New York, Lizzie. You dancin’ and me leadin’ the band? Our band. Be just like the Castles and James Reese Europe. Lizzie Winrow and Osceola Turner’s Colored Troubadours!”
“What about our money? You just gon run?”
“I ain’t runnin’ no more. I’m just goin’ cross the water for a minute. I’ll be back. I’ll send you my earnings.”
“Keep it.” She pulled away, collected her things, and marched off toward the woods. “You’re goin’ to chase your dream, Osceola Turner, didn’t ask nothin’ ’bout mine.”
That night he couldn’t sleep. He wanted to keep his anger at her fresh, but it plagued him through the night and into the morning. His drumsticks in his back pocket, he beat out his anxiety with a hambone, quick-paced paradiddles and syncopated wordless speech, till his thighs and ribs were bruised. He stayed out of Deke’s sight until the birds announced a new day.
Waiting on the depot platform for the local train to take him to camp, he saw her approaching. She stood beside him without looking at him, the air dancing between them.
“I got a letter from muh sister yesterday,” she began, “from New York. She got two girls and a baby boy now. I thought to myself, Mama kin send me up there to help out. I’ll be in New York and see my sister, too. But then I thought, naw, I’mo stay here with Ossie. We gon have us a show. We gon work on it. I was willing to give up what I wanted for you. You didn’t think so much of me, I spose.”
She was carrying the regular charm to deliver to Sullivan when he arrived on the 5:15 Daybreaker from Richmond. She reached inside her blouse and gave the charm to Osceola instead. “Mah Bette sent this for to keep you safe.”