In the spring of 1940, under the weight of a massive German invasion, the nation of France collapsed like a child’s toy box. The French army retreated in disorganized scampering bands and the government fled the capital, leaving two million Parisians in its wake. In less than a month, Nazi troops overran Paris. The newly installed rulers wasted no time in dividing the country into a Gestapo-run northern sector with Paris as its center and a “Free France” southern zone overseen by a puppet regime holed up in the former resort town of Vichy. With some bread and cheese slung over his shoulder, Mitch managed to pedal a broken bicycle to the southern border and slip across the Pyrenees to the Spanish frontier. From there he made his way to Madrid to petition the American consulate to get his family out and to sign up with the Free French army in exile, which galvanized around the tall, implacably patrician General Charles de Gaulle. With every crooked pump of the one pedal he had, Mitch cursed his crazy wife Genya, who had resisted his pleas to leave for a year. “France will never surrender!” she said. At least, they agreed on one thing, to hide their two black Arab Jewish girls in a local Catholic convent.
German street signs replaced the French. For the citizens of Paris who remained, every imaginable commodity became scarce. No butter, no milk, no sugar or petrol. Bicycles converted to taxis, one half a car chassis attached to the back. To feed the German homeland and support their war effort on multiple fronts, the Nazis commandeered French produce, manufactured goods, machinery, and labor and deflected them north. Yet Paris was spared the crushing assault experienced by Warsaw, the relentless bombing of London. Paris, it seemed, the Reich desired not to destroy, but to possess. Paris, the white slave, the comfort woman. Preaching Aryan purity and austerity at home, in Paris, the occupiers daily displayed their excess. Rare cheeses, fine wines, vintage champagne, prostitutes in silk stockings, cigarettes, and chocolate were plentiful for officers. The city was the furlough destination of choice for the troops. Meanwhile, ordinary Parisians were issued ration cards for bread, meat, and milk. Thinking her two girls safely hidden away in convent school, Genya turned her organizing efforts entirely toward the Resistance.
The Banana Club remained open. Lizzie survived through the patronage of an SS official who had admired her when her show played Berlin. Karl Von Arendt, a decorated officer in the omnipresent black-shirted Gestapo, had a secret love of jazz and a secret passion for Mayfield Turner’s bronze flesh. Before the war, Von Arendt was a modernist and a well-connected socialite. During the war, he turned pragmatist and used his pedigree to secure the plum assignment of commandant to Montmartre. While the official Gestapo headquarters were on Avenue Foch off the magisterial Champs d’Elysées, Von Arendt’s undocumented office was just off the scruffy Rue Pigalle, specifically the corner table by the bandstand. The general often used the club to entertain emissaries from the Italian consulate and to vet potential turncoats from Britain and other mangled nations. Most Parisian nightlife performers were banned from working. Mayfield Turner’s little underground spot was just about the only place one could get a taste of the once infamous and now forbidden demimonde. It was the last place anyone would think a hotspot of the underground.
While Lizzie entertained her commandant, her girls, under the tutelage of Farid, gathered bits of information from the soldiers they picked up. In the attic, above Genya’s old flat, the perpetual doctoral student pieced together the strands of idle conversation into intelligible information—troop movements, naval schemes, aerial strategies, supply schedules, prisoner records, travel patterns, odd habits and proclivities. Using her own urine as a cheap and accessible form of invisible ink, Genya would then transcribe the notes onto the back pages of sheet music. A little heat to the tune and the message could be relayed by radio or courier. Lizzie told Von Arendt that she had to keep her show fresh. She changed her musical numbers often, ensuring that as her musicians left for the night, they carried a steady flow of information to the Allied forces.
She suffered the silent watch of women and old men. Mothers gathered their children and crossed the street to avoid her. She met their stares without apology. She did what she had to do. She ventured out less and less. Her caramel complexion began to fade, even her freckles. Her hair had gotten used to the damp, cool climate of France. She wore it short. It curled around her face like young Octavian’s. When she gazed in the mirror, she didn’t look so colored anymore, but downright Mediterranean. Who the hell are you?
The spying arrangement had worked successfully for almost a year when Genya’s daughter Bruria came running to Lizzie. Genya and Rachel had been arrested.
Lizzie sat outside the SS office. She hated enclosed spaces. She didn’t know why Genya had been arrested or if her own position had been compromised. She had been waiting for two hours. Her anxiety was not eased by Von Arendt’s arrival. When he came to her club, he most often appeared in civilian dress. He stood before her in his field gray uniform of the Schutzstaffel. His eyes darted about with concern, his posture the soldier and enemy. “Mayfield, you should go. You cannot get involved. These people are foreign nationals and they are Jews.”
“Their grandfather was Jewish, their mother’s Arab,” she argued. “Their father’s—”
“I can release the girl for now, but you should go south to the free zone. I have a place near Marseilles.”
“But—wh—”
“Lizzie, the woman is dead. Your friend is dead.”
Lizzie sat down, immobilized, unable to process the casualness of his comment. Von Arendt gripped her by the arm and pulled her close to him, his intonation unchanged. “It is not safe for you to remain in Paris. You I can protect. They are foreign nationals and they are Jews.”
That night she took the girls through a basement passageway that Farid had used for years in his black market enterprise to a nearby house, out the skylight into a neighbor’s balcony window, onto a back street, down to the sewers beneath the streets. The trio made their way to the outskirts of west Paris to La Ronde, the ancient ring of gypsy wagons, always poised to flee. “Gypsies . . . loyal to nothing but their freedom,” she said. She found Farid among them. With conditions increasingly precarious for foreign nationals, the Romani were already planning to head south. Farid convinced them that Lizzie’s papers from Von Arendt would help. The caravan became her company of players. Farid was silent on the death of his sister Genya. But for his ashen pallor and black arcs beneath his eyes, he exhibited no grief.
Movement between the occupied zone and the Free France zone to the south was highly restricted. There were three exceptions, German and Vichy officials and the circus. Waving papers from her commandant, with her money stuffed in her undergarments, the soles of her shoes, and the lining of her hat, Lizzie said that she was on her way to the Mediterranean to develop a new review with a circus theme, “Une carnivale pour élever l’esprit des gens!” Ferrying the girls in a false-bottom truck full of circus gear, she told the patrols that Cocteau had promised her a ballet with a circus theme. The gypsy caravan of old cars and covered wagons hopscotched through Vichy-controlled southern France. After a significant conversation, Lizzie convinced Farid that a slow passage would draw less attention. Making their way to the coast, the convoy stayed with miscellaneous friends of Lizzie’s—holdouts, renegades, and leftovers from the Left Bank. Man Ray took her picture, Simone trimmed her hair, Trudy and Miss T. served the entourage cucumber sandwiches, Matisse begged her to don one of her feathered costumes for yet another speed painting. They sweltered in a hothouse, and shivered through the night hidden in a wine cellar. The meandering trip gave her time to reflect. She had lived by magic. By all rights, she should be dead by now, a few times over.
Paris to Lyon to Marseilles was the plan. From Marseilles, they were to cross the Mediterranean to Algiers and Free France. Belying the appearance of a pastoral bucolic countryside, there were signs of war everywhere. Deserted villages, empty farmsteads, crops left unattended. The caravan ran into three nuns, their habits a colorful pink. One of them whispered hysterically that, to protect a Jewish family they had been hiding, she had killed a soldier. Lizzie calmly decided that the group would have to join their party. Just outside Avignon, they came across two children on the side of the road, squatting in a rain puddle, drinking the filthy water. Lost children, abandoned, separated from their families, Lizzie couldn’t resist. A third child, a toddler with dark, sparkling eyes, she scooped up herself. “The boat trip will be cold,” she said, “best get them coats.” Farid hit the roof when he saw this new brood. Lizzie insisted, “When the war is over, we will find their families. For now they come with us. The children can sit on our laps.”
They were stopped again just outside of the town. Lizzie flashed her papers. The regional inspector, bedeviled by the local underground, bore no goodwill toward Von Arendt, whom he considered a decadent son of privilege lounging in Paris while he swatted at peasants in the French hinterlands. When Lizzie presented her papers, he insisted she demonstrate a preview of the show.
Lizzie May Turner had been putting on shows since she was six, but two hours to mount a circus? “Sorry, sistuhs,” she told the nuns, “you got to lose the habit. Prepare to go to confession.” She taught the children some simple acrobatics—cartwheel, backbend into a elephant walk. She stacked them by weight in squatting positions. “Okay, on the count of three, everybody stand up. Un, deux . . .” The toddler on the top began to cry. With no way to get him down, she volunteered Farid to catch him. With a little gypsy music, a side booth for fotune-telling, and three very angelic-looking shake dancers, Le Cirque Mayfield magically appeared. Lizzie topped the show with a comedic, German rendition of her old-time signature. “Say what? Strut, Miss Lizzie, strut! Sagst was? Gehe ab, Fraulein! Gehe ab!”
The inspector and his men were delighted. Kicking up his heels in imitation of her, the hard-nosed SS official begged Lizzie to return when the show was complete. Shortly after the entourage had set out on their way again, Farid threw down his hat. “You marry colored scarecrow, sleep with German SS, fool around with cuckoo photographer, what is wrong with me? You no like Arabs?”
Lizzie stared at her old friend in disbelief. His lips were tight, his brow protruded. His hands were on his hips and his chin jutted out. His tawny, aquiline face was red with rage. “How are we doing with the coats for the kids?” she said slowly.
“Kids are goats,” he replied, turning on his heel. He got a few paces away and pivoted. “You never think why I do this for you? You never think of anyone but yourself.”
Despite massive Nazi sweeps that rounded up thousands of French Jews and hundreds of gypsies, Lizzie’s colorful caravan somehow meandered unmolested. When they reached the sea, the waves were the Aegean blue of her mother’s eyes in summer, the sky tangerine. The old fisherman who agreed to transport them was a Haitian. As he prepared the boat he sang an ancient song to amuse the children.
I had a girl in Puerto Prince,
I loved her so and was convinced,
She was the only girl for me,
Then I first saw you . . .
The sweet merengue reminded Lizzie of Osceola laughing in the harbor breeze, his deep brown skin reflecting tints of ochre like her daughter. Cinnamon. Farid was right. Pah, Dora, Ossie, then El . . . and Cinn. People she wanted to draw near, she only managed to push away. Fresh start. No past. No ties. The skiff set sail. The boat slipped across the smooth Mediterranean waters toward the edge of the world.
They landed safely in Oran. The drone of flyers overhead pierced the morning fog. When the plane formations came into view, they bore the ensigns of the British Union Jack and La Croix de Lorraine of the Free French. Her escapades made the cover of the Harlem Herald, “Mayfield Turner Rescues Lost Children. Stages Concert for Allied Troops.”
In short order, Lizzie rented a spot and opened a club in Algiers. She offered Farid a partnership—“Une petite boîte, just you, me, and piano, my friend.” Imagining the lush fecund shores of Mah Bette’s Sweet Tamarind, she christened the dry dusty sand trap Le Tam-Tam. “The only joint in the quarter with an unlimited supply of ice,” she boasted and joked with the press, “Roosevelt and Churchill come here to chill.” By then, Mitch had secured passage from Spain. She gave him his old job on piano so she was free to circulate. Both Bruria and Rachel volunteered as aides at the Allied field hospital. It is there that Bruria met a young Algerian doctor, who spoke of a further resistance, a North African alliance, forming in the mountains. Rachel hung around the club, often serving as hostess for American GIs on leave. They brought her chewing gum and tales of the U.S.
Mayfield Turner made a new recording of “Le Chanson Pleurante” and was frequently asked to sing it. The tune became a favorite on the mainland, often sung in cafés and dance halls, by peasants and shop girls, and a battle cry for fighters still holed up in the mountains, all yearning for elusive liberty. “Recherchons, n’importe comment longue pour cette chanson . . .” We search, no matter how long, for that song . . .
Cinn had the sanctity of her own apartment, a full scholarship at Juilliard, and her choir jobs. She wanted for nothing material. With Baker’s departure she swore off any more romantic distractions. Memphis had also disappeared—out the fire escape with her suitcase. Cinn figured they were probably touring together. So be it. She awoke in the morning hearing children outside her window, a family going to school, the bustle of people going to work. How solitary she was, betrayed by her own ambition! She resisted the heartache with a near maniacal focus on her voice. For a full year she poured herself into her studies. For her final concert recital at Juilliard she prepared a grueling repertoire. She practiced relentlessly, choosing some of the most challenging selections in the classical canon. After hearing and seeing Miss Anderson, she had set an impossible standard for herself. Madame Olivetsky cautioned that, like a good wine, singers needed their time to mature, but Cinn was impatient to succeed and paralyzed at the thought of failure.
She told her family that the graduate performance recital only allowed a few guests. She wanted no big to-do. She didn’t know how she would be received, and she wanted no witnesses in case the recital went badly. Seated in the back of the small unassuming recital hall, only Dora and Raymond, Madame Olivetsky, and Deacon. Iolanthe, who was invited, was absent. Cinn kept looking toward the door. She caught herself wondering if Baker might surprise her.
The roster of judges included her nemesis Marintz, van Giesen, Sachse on stage technique, Vaillant to test her French, the famed conductor Bruno Walter sitting in as a guest. Her graduation and future career depended on this performance. Small consolation they would inform her of their assessment and her status that day. She breathed deeply and steeled herself as if making ready for battle. She would play no colored divas. No Carmen, no Butterfly, no Aida, no Bess. No fickle fortune-teller, no suicidal concubine, no doomed Nubian slave, no stranded whore down on her luck. Today she would dazzle them with surprise or be a disaster. Beethoven’s Fidelio provided the required German selection. In her private protest to Marintz’s dismissive treatment, as Leonore she cursed her prison tyrant in a perfectly intonated venomous German. She chose Massenet’s sacred Rêve Infini for her French melodie, imbuing the Virgin Mary’s grief for her son with the passion of one abandoned. From Mozart’s Idomeneo her Elettra descended into madness with perfectly modulated pitch. Bellini’s impossible Norma was her eleventh-hour offering, convincing everyone that she was a Druid princess standing with her people against ruthless invaders. For her English art song she chose her own arrangement of a classic in the making, Duke Ellington’s “Sophisticated Lady,” her one bow to blackness and modernity, a gauntlet to Baker. I can do this if I want to. I’m not afraid of you.
Marintz came to her in tears. “This Hitler,” he said, “we must stand up to him like your Leonore . . . You think that I was hard on you, Miss Turner. Only to make you your best, your best. We trust you will be entering the Opera School. Consider this an invitation.”
Despite her ardent preparation, Cinnamon couldn’t believe what she was hearing. She had succeeded, and on her own terms. The Opera School was Juilliard’s pinnacle program, equivalent to a musical doctorate. Only ten percent of the graduate vocal class. In Juilliard’s rarified environment, that translated into fourteen students, and she would be the first African American. Her aunt and uncle insisted on taking her out to celebrate. Begging off, Deacon kissed her on the cheek and apologized on behalf of Iolanthe, “Some stuff with the business.”
“Surprise!” The family greeted her as she opened her apartment door. “First in the family to go to college and now graduate school!” Elma beamed. “You didn’t think we were goin’ to let you get by with that little bit of to-do?” she teased and hugged her niece, “We’re so proud of you, baby. A model for Memphis, I pray.” Papa Ray chomping on his glory carried on, “Never let you through, build you up only to dash hopes. Going up to that school,” he said, “we gave them a piece of our minds, we did!” Madame Olivetsky clasped hands of jubilation. “Finally, emotion!” Deacon looked on, curiously silent, yet always there. Iolanthe bustled about. “I’m so sorry I missed the recital, my dear,” she quipped while refilling champagne glasses, “someone had to plan the party.” Among them Sissy and Miss Tavineer, now a fixture with the family, Iolanthe’s colleague, the social columnist from the Amsterdam News, Mrs. Dawson and some members of the Negro Opera Company, and Jesse, who drove up with their grandmother Eudora. “My first trip to New York! My grandbaby, a graduate from graduate school!” Her grandmother’s business partner Yum Lee and her cousin Roswell had come along for the ride. Jesse alone was comforting. “A gift from God the way you sing. No one can take that from you.” Cinn couldn’t take their joy.
Dora didn’t much like the idea of having to share her prize with someone she used to feed with scraps from her table. Deacon Turner or whatever his name is now. Cinn’s father’s people. Even if they were well placed in New York society, he was still wharf trash to her. Dora was dismayed that Cinn seemed more enamored of them than herself. She thought her granddaughter might return with her to Charleston, but clearly Cinn was on her way to new and bigger thrills, leaving Dora to her loneliness. The grandmother consoled herself that she still had Jesse. At least he was loyal.
Elma called Cinnamon to the phone. “Sweetheart, it’s for you.” The line was full of static. “I hear congratulations are in order. How’s my girl doin’?” It was Lizzie. “Got the general to put me through. Callin’ from Casablanca. Just like the movie—Hello?”
“The line went dead,” Cinn said, holding the phone like a sleepwalker.
“Dog bite it,” Elma fussed, taking the receiver back. “It took me two days to set up that call.” She pounded on the drop hook and held the receiver to her ear. The phone rang again. “Thank, God! Hello, Lizzie, that you? . . . Well, who is it then? . . . Lawrence, Lawrence who?” her aunt continued.
“Mama El, let me have it.” Cinnamon took the phone from her distraught aunt and spoke into the mouthpiece. “You have the wrong number.”
“Tell him to get off the phone. Your mama’s callin’ long distance.”
Cinn shooshed Elma off. “I don’t know any Dr. Walker . . . Chicago?” She turned to her aunt, then back to the receiver. “How did you get my number?”
Elma fussed in her ear with that chicken rhythm she acquired when she got nervous, “Well who is that what does he want tell him to get off your mother’s trying to call—long distance!”
Cinn hung up the phone in a daze. “It’s a guy I met in Chicago last year, Mama El. He wants me to meet him.”
“On a date?” Iolanthe peeked in between them. “A doctor?”
“Isn’t he comin’ to the house?”
“No time. I’m to meet him. Curtain’s at seven thirty,” Cinn replied, still perplexed.
“It’s a date, Elma. Don’t quibble,” Iolanthe assured with a quick survey of the room. “If he’s worth anything, we’ll meet him later. Go, get dressed.”
“At least let us know where you’re goin’,” Elma insisted.
“He’s got tickets to . . . the opera.”
Standing beneath the marquee of New York’s Alvin Theater, Cinnamon was wearing a pewter satin sheath that clung to her body, a stardust tiara, taupe gloves, gossamer shawl, and silver slippers. She was ecstatic, then worried, then panicked. He was late. She didn’t know a thing about him, not even his full name. Just as she was about to bolt, he hobbled up on crutches, his left eye swollen like a plum. “Miss Turner!” he said with a huge smile. “The last time we met, I didn’t get a chance to introduce myself. I’m Lawrence, Lawrence Walker.”
“Cinn, call me Cinn. It’s short for Cinnamon.”
“Hmm,” he said, as if tasting something delicious.
“How did you find me?” she asked.
“Social science research, University of Chicago Ph.D. I can find anything.” He had lost nothing of the confidence or fire she remembered.
They had to excuse themselves over a whole row of people. “Got knocked out playing squash, imagine that,” he joked to a snarling patron, bumping knees. He explained as they finally took their seats, “Ran into a little union-bustin’ goon squad back home. They accepted the platform, but not without a little explanation of the fine print,” he babbled. “I would have waited to let it heal a bit, but I couldn’t wait to see you. These were the best seats I could get.” He turned to her as if the rest of the room had simply vanished. “My God, you’re beautiful.” She flipped through the program to hide the blush. A Kurt Weill piece, another side of Gershwin. “Lady in the Dark,” he said, looking at the tickets, “only thing I could get on short notice. It’s opera, right?”
Cinnamon rolled her eyes. My, he’s nervous. “Well, it’s musical.”
“I have to confess, the only other one I’ve seen is Porgy and Bess,” he said. “I thought it was pretty good.”
Porgy and Bess has as much to do with Charleston as I do. I know Cabbage Row, I’ve seen Goat Man. Why do we always have to be low-down, old-time, lowlife, no-count? We have nobility, we have class. Where’s that story?
The lights went down. The overture began. Despite her reservations, Cinnamon found herself pulled in different directions, intrigued by this man, intrigued by the music’s modern composition and characters, the concepts in the dream sequences. Danny Kaye’s recitation of Russian composers, rattling off fifty in one minute, reminded her so much of herself cramming for exams she laughed out loud.
During intermission, Lawrence escorted her to the lobby, hobbling on the one crutch. “Excuse us, sorry about that, pardon us, please,” he said with a smile to the irritated white patrons as they made their way back to their seats. The audience was not used to seeing Negroes among them, especially in the choice orchestra section. Lawrence spoke with a smile, disarming the frowning faces, “Good evening. Magnificent performance, don’t you think?” Reading her dismay, he chuckled. “Have to use every opportunity to educate these white folk. We have as much right to be here as anybody. And you! You need to be up there—center stage!”
When the show concluded, they exited the theater. Lawrence balanced precariously on his crutches, bouncing on his foot. “May I offer you some dinner? A drink, perhaps?”
She shook her head. “The music was meal enough. Fills you up.”
He leaned toward her with an impish whisper. “All right, I confess, I don’t know a thing about opera, except you.”
Walking down Broadway with no particular destination, they got quiet. Memories for her—52nd Street, where Baker used to play, the Cane Break, Mr. Jocelyn’s, an apartment above a saloon and stairwell where she used to sit waiting.
He stopped and turned to Cinn again. “I went off and did this crazy thing,” he said, laughing. “I enlisted . . . in the air force, can you believe that? I know it doesn’t look it, but I’m supposed to report for duty in a week.”
“Lawrence! I thought you were against the war. The protests.”
“Protests to make the country more American, not less. Democract small d, remember? This war can change the whole policy toward Negroes, Cinn, change the whole world. I leave for training next week. It’s only a matter of time before the country’s at war. It occurred to me, I might not come back. I didn’t want to risk the chance that I’d never see you again.”
She had just met the man, yet just as fast as he had entered her life, he too was leaving.
Picture Roy, Waxby, Reno, and Inglewood, in their swing through East St. Louis, sittin’ round a fire extinguisher on a curb outside the pawnshop waiting to get their instruments out of hock before the ten o’clock train pulled in. Maybe the music was hot, but the Baker Johnson Quintet was still ridin’ rough and ready. The manager stiffed ’em on the gate and the band had to pawn their instruments to get a place to sleep and something to eat that night. Now they were just waitin’ on the pawnbroker and on Preach, who was pulling an all-night poker game to get them square again. Just as Inglewood started up a scat Memphis Minor appeared from around the corner, switchin’ barefoot in the street, her high heels slung over her shoulder. She eased her made-up lyrics onto Inglewood’s improvised tune. “Sneakin’ out the window for the very last time/ She was finished with a life that was nickel and dime/ She was lookin’ for a high life that was pretty and fine/ She was lookin’ for the high life, but she couldn’t read the signs . . .” In her opinion, the Baker Johnson Quintet could use a singer. “Even if it is music you can’t dance to.” She saw Baker look up at her warily. “I’m just here to sing, brothuh. I come all this way, the least you can do is hear me out. I’ve been practicin’.”
The band toured the Midwest to Cali, small club circuit. Sleeping in the back seat of a sedan or upright on the bus, cokin’ through the long hauls, heroin to mellow out, drinkin’ to balance and disinfect. With Baker Johnson on trumpet and Memphis Minor as his featured jazz singer, the combo blew city after city away, and swept their competitors into debris. A way never heard he played, a sound never heard, her melody following the chord changes, Waxby skating on cymbals and snare, Preach’s piano polyrhythms strattling lead and percussion, Inglewood grounding the sound with an amplified bass, they spoke a new urbane language, stirring the guts and brain faster than the most complex jitterbug. Fingers snapped, heads bopped, feet pulsed, knees bounced, keeping time with the high hat, curls of smoke and clinks of highball glasses. People came to listen and danced in their minds.
The music had been great that night. They wanted it to go on forever. St. Paul, they were shooting up in the boiler room when the feds blew through. Everybody thought it was for the dope! Flushed it, tossed it, good stuff straight into the snow. While her bandmates scooted out the window, Memphis stuck hers in her bra and threw her hands in the air. “They went that way!” she shouted. Still looking the naïf, she pointed the police in the wrong direction.
Memphis had to run through a cornfield to catch em. “Draft notice? You’ve got to be kidding.”
Memphis was good to him, but driving through the late-night fog, Baker still found himself thinking about Cinn and those broad Asiatic eyes, so fierce and unforgiving. He hated himself for bowing to Deacon’s pressure. Maybe a military stint would do him good, toughen him up, give him a chance to get himself straight. He begged off in Kankakee and hopped a train. Joined an air force pick-up unit in Michigan and began training as a mechanic in the fall of ’42.
Lawrence waited at the platform, uniform buffed, white gloves and aftershave. “I didn’t know you were going to bring your whole battalion.” Behind Cinnamon stood her grandma Dora, humming to herself, and beside her, Yum Lee with a basket of fried chicken, biscuits, homemade jam, and her grandson Jesse’s favorite—stewed cherries. Dora poked out her ruffled chest and arched her back, steadying herself with both hands on her cane. Elma flanked her other side, as Papa Ray collected their bags. Cinn laughed and turned to Lawrence playfully, her hands clasped behind her. “My uncle insists I have a proper chaperone.” Priscilla popped between them. “Cinnamon says you’re a pilot. Can I go on an airplane?”
Dora poked her cane in the direction of a new uniform striding across campus, soldiers saluting him. “An officer! Praise Jesus!” she exclaimed and threw her arms open as her grandson Jesse approached.
“Nana, staying with you sho’ paid off,” Jesse beamed. “After seeing me leading a prayer meeting, the captain made me a chaplain. Imagine that.” He leaned over, giving her a peck on the cheek.
“That’s no way to greet your Nana,” she said and hugged him fiercely. Dora drew back and patted her grandson’s chest, speechless with pride.
Before his grandmother could settle herself, Jesse cupped her delicate wrists. “Nana, I should tell Mama, Memphis is here,” he said. To his grandmother’s look of consternation, he countered, “She seems good, Nana. Lead singer. Working with Mr. Sparrow. You remember him. I think she’s happy, but better tell Mama. Got something else to tell you, too . . .”
The family piled into a taxi, Lawrence and Cinn in the jeep ahead with an enlisted man as their driver. Lawrence threw his arms out, framing the bare dusty fields. “So what do you think of our airstrip?”
“Way too many trees,” Cinnamon teased.
Memphis arrived with a four-car cavalcade, DAKOTA SPARROW’S EBONY TALENT SHOWCASE emblazoned on the sides. The show had been hopscotching military bases in the South with a medley of comedy routines and variety acts for the Negro troops. Finding her stranded and heartbroken in L.A., Sparrow had bailed her out with a gig. She ran into Private Baker backstage. “Hey you.”
“You know this sorry-ass suckuh?” Baker’s drill sergeant barked.
“I see you ain’t heard him play,” Memphis smiled.
“The band is the only outfit where officers and enlisted meet on equal terms,” Baker said wryly. “Tonight they need us mere mechanics.”
“Arrogant roughneck, act like he know something bout music.”
“You got something to say, Private?”
“No sir.” Not yet. I’ll speak through my horn. About some things, Baker was still cool.
“What? Without telling us? Without our meeting this girl?” Elma’s eyes were round as saucers.
“Mama, it was the right thing to do,” Jesse said flatly.
“Lord, don’t tell me you got her pregnant?”
“I hope to, but no! I married her because I wanted this woman to be my wife,” he said with the earnestness that he had always possessed. “Mama, this is Mabel. Mabel . . . this is my mama.”
Mabel, a thin-framed young girl with a round face, dimpled smile, and button nose, pushed a lock of her simple pageboy cut behind her ear. She was clear-eyed, bright, and direct. Her grasp firm with faith, she shook her new mother-in-law’s hand, then, slightly embarrassed, she pulled Jesse away. “You told me that you weren’t going to be able to see your family and that’s why we should marry. Two weeks later, here they all come. Jesse Minor, you wanna tell me about that? What’s it gonna look like?”
“Mabel, May—May—Mabel. Stop, listen to me. I didn’t know Cinnamon’s uncle was going to pay for the trip. My family couldn’t afford to get down here. Honey, I promise, that’s the truth. Mabel Minor. You are my wife, that’s all that matters.”
She laughed as they clasped hands. “Yes, Reverend.”
Cinnamon was the only brown-skinned date at the dinner dance. She spied Baker in the pit, Memphis leaning over the music stand, wigglin’ her behind and singing alongside him. Salt gnashing old wound.
Sparrow checked out the cantina audience from the bandstand wings. “Hi ho, the gang’s all here.” His USO show was the headliner. The warm-up featured the officers’ house band, the Rhythm Kings, vs. the King Pins, comprised of enlisted men. The only place they all could congregate was the bandstand. The friction was natural. For black men battling for equality so long, the inequality of rank was bound to rile some. Sparrow still had the eye. Brothuh, brothuh, brothuh. Someone itchin’ for a fight.
Tuskegee was to be an experiment, the crown jewel of the military’s efforts to offer black men an opportunity to fight as equals, but the atmosphere was tense. In Houston, Negro soldiers had been court-martialed and executed for a blow-up with local whites from the town. There were incidents in Jackson between Negro soldiers and MPs. Charlotte, Fort Huachuca in Arizona, Fort Dix in Jersey, all had seen trouble. In Chicago, a munitions loading dock blew up, killing seventy-nine colored dock workers. Harlem had exploded in a riot.
A skirmish broke out at the ticket booth and spread inside, tumbling toward the bandstand. An MP swung at Baker. He backed up toward the stage and threw up his arms to avoid the blow. Lawrence saw in a look that Cinnamon loved someone else.
Cooped up in the jailhouse, Baker Johnson had a holy conversion. Out there something was happening, a new music takin’ off, threatening to leave him behind, standin’ on the ground. Bird, Dizzy, and Prez—pressin’ past the boundaries of sound—squeezing notes outta nowhere. Mad scientists, huddled in their secret laboratories, surviving on a diet of salt peanuts. In their pork pie hats, long waistcoats, tapered trousers and berets, horn-rimmed glasses and snakeskin shoes, they seemed an alien species, speaking in a language all their own, generating an afrocentrifugal force reducing sound to smaller and smaller components, generating unstable, unheard-of radioactive elements till the notes were like pieces of string, powerful enough to pierce through black holes and emerge on the other side. Another Manhattan Project, cookin’ up the recipe with a fusion of traditions and a fission of the rules, splitting apart the known sonar universe.
And there he was—in lockdown! For what? Tryin’ to prove some damn thing to some gal you ain’t seen in a year! Baker let loose a howl, wailin’ to the record down the hall, he pursed his lips and conjured up his horn. The notes traveled on a trade wind. He imagined they could hear him in Tunisia and blew into the night.
monk crunched over the piano keys,
always with his hat on,
diz workin’ up to light speed,
splittin’ notes like they was atoms and electrons,
bird blastin’ so fast and precise
he could flyyyyyyyyyy . . .
for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles . . .
from five a.m. at minton’s to a carnegie hall convention,
in uh five—six—seven dimensions,
these black argonauts of sound,
discovered that space had elastic bounds,
long on talent, short on shellac,
these black magic radical cats,
disgorging their galactic scat
just couldn’t be stopped,
once the formula unfurled,
they rattled the world,
with be-bop, be-bop be-bop!
“Shut up that noise!”
“That’s the sound of the future, my man, Straight, No Chaser!”
“This isn’t a bandstand break, buddy.” They gave him thirty more days for insubordination.
Lawrence came to see him just before his unit shipped out. Baker was right about one thing. They needed their mechanics. “You gonna have trouble fixin’ my plane?” Lawrence asked, sizing up his adversary.
“Having trouble flyin’ it? . . . Sir?”
“Private.”
“Yes sir.”
“Get ready to ship out and get yourself shined up.”
Memphis told Jesse that she was going overseas with the USO. “It’s a bad idea, sis,” he said. “Niggas ain’t seen a woman in five month and a shower in six. They don’t treat those girls with any respect.”
She didn’t want to hear it. “I can take care of myself.”
“Startin’ when?”
“You just followin’ that nigguh.”
“You would say that. None of you ever supported me and what I wanted to do. I got talent.”
“Here we go again.”
“Cinn’s not the only one can sing, you know. I might not have a voice like hers,” she argued, “but I can take a colored song to your bones, and that’s something she’ll never do.”
Elma didn’t approach until they were all standing at the train platform. She was conflicted. Her son had become a man. Married. A preacher. Her daughter was troubled. Both my daughters.
“Hey Mah, what’s cookin’?” Memphis smiled that devilish grin, still dimpled. “It’s regular work, Mah. A job.”
Elma couldn’t stay mad at Memphis. That child was a mess of trouble from the very beginning, but so full of life, so full of yearnin’. Elma hugged her daughter, not wanting to let go. Memphis, so skittish, relished the moment before plunging back into the whirl. “You a mite skinny, Memphis Minor.”
“Better for the camera, Mah. When I come back from the tour, I’m goin’ to be in the movies.”
Quiet Mabel, a preacher’s daughter, surmised that the best and quickest way to become a true member of her husband’s family was not through its very formidable women. She and Papa Ray made great friends, especially when she mentioned that her father had hoped to build a new brick church. The revelation gave her new father-in-law the entrée to speak of his great architectural achievement, the landmark Harlem church which did not bear his name on its cornerstone. Everyone else’s eyes discreetly rolled up at the all too often recited lamentation. Mabel’s fascination allowed Raymond a touch of that ambition he once had for himself.
Dora, in the interim, took the opportunity to pull Jesse aside. “May I borrow my grandson for a minute, m’am?” She had gone out to Sweet Tamarind and talked to Mah Bette. Her grave might have been in Charleston, but her spirit had never left the island. She asked Mah Bette to put the light round her grandson and protect him overseas. She scooped up some dust from the grounds of the old slave cemetery and put it in a pouch. She handed it to him now and patted his chest. “Now, you’ll always come back. You carryin’ a piece of your home with you.” He promised not to open the cherries until he got overseas. He didn’t have the heart to tell her that he wasn’t really fond of cherries. He shared the jar with his bunkmates on the ship and was surprised at how fast the compote was devoured. Too late he discovered his Nana’s secret ingredient, homemade brandy.
Cinn realized that she had not been listening. Lost in thought, she had wasted fifteen minutes of a very expensive hour. “Think of a time when you were singing,” the doctor counseled. “Go to that place when the music first captured you.” A flurry of memories spun in her mind, the good and the bad colliding. Watching that turntable go round, she heard Mahalia, Dinah, Ella, Ethel. Singing everything. Her big voice. Summers at Nana’s, solo in the children’s choir. Elder Miss Mary, saying, Have you thought bout getting her some training? Shaking her head to the offer, wanting to so bad, but hearing the laughter, the gawkers. Papa Ray bringing home the radio. Mimicking everything from her grandfather’s famous sow call to high C. Cousins, boarders, neighbors beggin’, Shut up! Papa Ray shoutin’ back, Let that girl sing. Leave her alone! Her first talent show, Jesse’s delight, We won five dollars. Here’s your cut, twenty-five cents. Big money for the big voice! The hawkers of Delancey Street, two subway stops to the other end of Manhattan. Good stuff, great stuff, cheap! The air smellin’ of harbor and garlic and chestnuts and fish and sweat, old clothes and ambition. Elma sayin’, You got a good eye for quality. The sound of fabric, sifting through a bin of odds and ends. “Sissieretta.” Her aunt spoke reverently as she stared over Cinnamon’s shoulder. “Your mother and I went to one of her concerts. You shoulda heard her voice, Cinn.” Elma sighed. “Like Marian Anderson, beautiful, brown skinned, like you. Black Patti. The night Ray proposed. The last day we saw our pah.” Everything—Everything . . . How to remember a moment when it was everything?
Disto—what? Dystonia. She noticed something was wrong. A scratch in her throat didn’t heal, a tightness in her larynx felt like, sounded like . . . her voice was dying. What did I do? Who do I tell! The street was a flurry of people. Jumping up and down, shouting, yelling. But her world was completely silent. What?
“Victory! The war’s over. We won!”
“Oh, Mama . . .” Broken. Ambition and hurt, love and disgust, longing and rage fracturing her song into a million discordant pieces, her dreams swept away in a pan of dust. Her voice was gone.
El took her by the hand and pulled her close, rocking her slowly. “We gon pray on this one. Pray with me, Cinn. The body may fail us, but the Holy Spirit never will.”
Cinnamon sat straight-backed, defying the soft contours of the chair, fingers of her left hand laced round the right, trying to hold them both still, squeezing until she could feel the tendons bulging and sliding from the bones.
“Ridicullous!” Dora’s voice popped into her head, followed by a typically pragmatic pronouncement. “So you can’t sing. Do sumpin else.” Simple as altering a pattern or letting out a seam. But it wasn’t.
Private coaches in singing, acting, and languages, university and conservatory, first to crack the junior circuit. Better than the white girls. Invited into Opera Studies. She had trained hard, she had powered through with intensity, but now everything, everything, was gone. Perfect pitch? Now she couldn’t even approximate. Over a period of a few weeks, her sonorous Verdian power began to diminish, then simply vanished. Approaching even the smallest crescendo, her larynx went into horrible spasms and she thought she might die, gasping for breath.
Iolanthe sent her to specialists in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, but the small fortune in train fare and doctor fees left her without a diagnosis. Nowhere. They could find nothing physically wrong with her vocal folds. Following her aunt Elma’s ardent faith, she then sought counsel at her church. The Reverend’s warm hands were not consoling. “Those whom I love, I chastise. You should thank Him for the hardship, for it is a blessing. If things hadn’t gotten worse, they wouldn’t have brought you back to the Lord. Trust that He will deliver you.” She had prayed, repented, and endured a year, a whole terrifying year as if she were preparing to be hanged.
Thirty seconds. The episodes only lasted thirty seconds. To a singer that was a lifetime. If she pressed on, attempting to force the note, she became a cipher of herself, her voice a whisper or vapor, escaping or stolen. The prospect of never singing again—she didn’t know how to cope with that. What am I to do? What am I supposed to do? Panic made the condition worse. Sometimes she dared not speak for fear of the sound, a grating rasping hoary thing that she could not recognize as her own voice.
Medication—she had a paper bag full. Muscle relaxers, pain relievers, throat coaters, antidepressants, stimulants, and the “experimental” injections, to which Madame Olivetsky had strongly objected. “That stuff could go all through your body, you don’t know where. You must heal organically.” Needles in her ears. Crystals to her throat. “You have time. You have time,” her aged mentor advised. “You are only in your twenties. Thirty-eight is young for an opera singer.”
She was young, but no fool. Opportunities for Negro opera singers were beyond rare. Anne Brown took the revival of Porgy and Bess in ’42. Then the Muriels, Smith and Rahn, stole the role she was meant to play, Carmen in Billy Rose’s Broadway-bound production of Carmen Jones. Her blood boiled. Dim light mezzos, think you can out-sing me? I’ll meet you again in the next world! It took two Carmens to withstand the passion she was born to play. On any good day, the timbre and color of her voice would have reduced all three of them to ash. But she had no good days. Just when the door opens, can’t speak to say I’m standin’ here. Singing had been her life. Now she had to sit by and watch others live it.
Frustrated with the pointless prodding and the questions that always seemed to come when a tongue depressor was halfway down her throat, she was driven to search on her own. She found her diagnosis at the 42nd Street library. Dystonia. Dystonia, what makes your big head so hard?! Laryngeal dystonia. No known origin. No known cure. Neurological disorder generally affected people of Ashkenazi Jewish descent. Well, we can rule that out. “Disease of the mind . . . a form of psychological hysteria.” She resisted believing that this affliction was only in her mind. If that were so, why could she not will it away? Last stop, psychiatrist. How bad can it be? I’m already sticking needles in my ears. She hated reliving the trauma to her body and spirit, the ritual humiliation of recounting her disorder to yet another stranger. Remembering the first notice of shortness of breath, the creeping strangulation, withdrawing from competition, standing before judges she had impressed enough to make her the exception, a gaggle of pink-faced girls in pink ribbons, pressing their noses against the door pane to get a peek at the so-called colored prodigy. “From the Bronx, not even Harlem!” She sat perfectly poised, feeling still too proud. God said, This is my beloved in whom I am most pleased. Not proud.
Lawrence came to see her as soon as he got back. “I can’t imagine losing something as precious as that, something that fills you with so much passion—except when I think of not having you in my life. I can’t offer you a New York stage, and I might not have a job once the college gets my letter of protest about the housing situation, but I would very much like to marry you, Cinnamon Turner. I have a firm teaching offer in Chicago. They have some of the finest hospitals in the world. We can get them to see about your voice there, see if they can fix it, however long it takes. Will you marry me?”
She didn’t want to answer him. She didn’t want to hear herself. However long. “How long is that?”
Oh Lord . . . I wanna sing like the angels sing, Lord I must go, Oh Lord, give me eagle’s wings, Lord I must go/ I wanna pray like the angels pray, Lord I must go/ Carry my soul to Judgment Day, Lord I must go/ I wanna shout like angels shout, Lord I must go/ Carry me off to your Great House, Lord I must go . . . “Look at that, Cinn, look at that! That’s what I’m missin’ . . . Charleston, Durham, Kittyhawk!/ Norfolk, Richmond, New Yawk!” That melody. Just a rush and it was gone. Runnin’ to catch the steamer, jumpin’ the rail cars in Philly, hidin’ backstage at the Cane Break, flyin’ over Harlem rooftops, then finally collapsing exhausted, dippin’ ankles in a cool blue creek ’longside the long day, Lizzie massaging her fat toes. “You ever hear the Winrow howl, call a sow clean over to another state? I’ma show you how it goes. My pappy taught it to me. He played the trumpet. But he dint play trumpet good as he could hollah. I’ma now teach it to you just like he taught it to me and his pap taught it to him. If ever you need me or if ever you get lost, you just call it like this.”
Cinnamon and Lawrence were to marry in Jesse’s new church in Alabama, not far from the old airbase. Mabel was pregnant. Several of Lawrence’s fellow airmen showed up. Deacon and Iolanthe arrived in a limo from New York. Cinnamon left Lizzie off her list. Elma and Dora had a big fuss about it. “Mama El, I appreciate your concern, but this is my decision. It’s for the best.”
“And how is that? Not to have your own mama to your wedding.”
“This is my day, not Mayfield Turner’s.” She turned and brushed down Raymond’s lapel and straightened his tie. “Uncle Deacon’s only walking me to the first row. You’re giving me away.”
Dora tried one last time. “Your mother should be here.”
Cinnamon embraced her and held her tight. “My mother is here.”
Only Sparrow knew. Sparrow asked Deacon if he had told Cinnamon the truth about Lizzie. “Get outta my face,” Deacon replied, knowing Sparrow hadn’t the nerve. How to explain who he was then and who he had become? Her wedding day certainly wasn’t the occasion. He would wait.
Memphis arrived just in time to help set up the party. She had married a second cornet in Sparrow’s band named Calhoun. “Yeah, baby, I got to Paris. Baker’s sittin’ up in your mama’s club with his arm around some Algerian chick,” she reported. Even if it wasn’t Baker, she damn straight was showing up with a husband. If she showed up with a husband, she figured all would be forgiven. She had followed her dream and she had lived it. She patted her round tight belly and danced up the wooden steps of the modest white-framed chapel. “Talk about, talk about, talk about it!”
As Cinnamon dressed in Jesse and Mabel’s small cottage, random thoughts danced in her head. Rain was threatening. How to fit a hundred twenty people at a garden party into a house. The wedding cake was decorated with sparklers. Would they work in the rain? Dora had made her dress. It was more baroque than she would have chosen herself, but in the delicacy of design and the care with which her grandmother had sewn each element in its place, she felt comfort. In the rustle of a veil, the song in the trees, the wind . . . she was content. No more intrigue, settle down, she thought. College professor. The backyard was festooned with lanterns.
Lawrence and his airmen buddies were corralled at the town’s juke joint and café. Flush from the war, they joked easily about their future, primed to take their place in Negro Society. Bolstered by their performance in World War II—providing tactical air support and aerial combat, never lost a man—they were the fulcrum of the new elite. Access to higher education through the GI Bill insured the successful push for desegregation beyond military into everyday life. Not without a fight, but they were ready for it. Civil rights talk was constant among them.
“Had to sleep over with friends. No accommodations. This has got to stop. I’m sick of this crap.”
“Passed a GI Bill for me to buy a house, but I can’t get a mortgage and when I do, can’t buy where I want to.”
“Wiley got his teeth knocked out and nose broke for steppin’ off the train in uniform. He’s gon be late.”
But they agreed. It was a joyous day. The last of the radicals was going traditional. Lawrence Walker was jumpin’ the broom and gettin’ hitched!
Preceded by Sissy, the maiden of honor, and escorted by her two fathers, Cinnamon Turner walked down the narrow aisle, past her friends and family, a radiantly pregnant Memphis, and her ever faithful Mama El, toward her husband to be. She squeezed Raymond’s hand and joined Lawrence at the altar. This is what she wanted. This is what she wanted as her own. Her own family.
At the garden reception, the rain held back. Memphis was first to toast the newlyweds, “Never seen her happier!” Via Calhoun, she then produced her wedding present, “As advertised, an almost brand-new portable record player!” To the room’s silence, she prompted Calhoun, who held up a little brown tweed box with a red bow hastily taped atop. Memphis glistened. It was her most precious possession. “So that the music may always dance between you.”
Sissy got hold of the record player almost immediately. Sparrow just happened to have a box full of sample 78s in his car. While a few adults lingered in the living room with the classical pianist Cinn had found through the local college, the party was on the porch. With an extension cord slung through the window, Priscilla and company popping their arms to a new sound, making the very floorboards shake, rattle and roll.
Sparrow offered Memphis a job in L.A. “A new thing called teevee,” he said. “They want to put me in some colored comedy show.” Jesse, as usual, saved his announcement for last. Mabel’s father’s congregation had asked him to stay on and pastor their church.
The record player clicked on a new 78. Lawrence swept his new wife into a mean boogie-woogie, her veil flying around as she spun, the guests all laughing. Who knew they were such good dancers? Everyone was jamming as the stack of records dropped a new cut on the turntable. As soon as the needle hit the groove, the whole party was on its feet, jookin’ to a hot blues stompin’ electric guitar from Chicago, a new R&B label called Row House Records. “That’s my song, that’s my song!” Sissy squealed as the whole party erupted in a sing-along. “Tell yah what I’m gonna, what I’m gonna do/ It’s somethin’ my Papa taught me, and now I’m teachin’ it to you/ When you’re feelin lost, when you’re down and blue/ Ain’t nuthin’ left at all/ Nuthin’ you can do/But howl, howl the whole night long/ When you howl like that/ Baby I’ll come runnin’, Say I’ll come runnin’ along!”
Elma looked on the party with some dismay. I don’t trust our Memphis, shakin’ her hips that way, belly all out. Calhoun seems a nice man, but still.
Mabel offered, “Stay here and have the baby, then go on out there to L.A. Our little Joshua would love some company. A baby’s no good for the road, Miss Memphis.”
There they were, crowding her again, telling Memphis how to live her life, but, four hours later, her baby was born at the county hospital not five miles from her brother Jesse’s place, so last-minute, the kid almost made her debut in the back seat of Calhoun’s car. Memphis with her little Alelia, upstaged her cousin Cinn again—at her own wedding!
She and Calhoun didn’t last long. Split up by the time they reached Los Angeles. After Sparrow’s television show tanked, Memphis wound up running a boardinghouse for broke musicians. “Anyone with a hard luck story, a sad song, and cash.”
Christened Alelia, the daughter answered also to Lia and Leelee, depending on whose house she was in. Rotating from Nana’s to Grandma El to Uncle Jesse and Aunt Mabel, and then to Aunt Cinn and Lawrence, she became another migrant child, a visitor even at her mother’s.
Cinnamon moved with Lawrence to Chicago, where he began his teaching position at his alma mater the University of Chicago, one of the few elite universities in the country allowing Negro faculty. She got pregnant almost immediately and had three children in rapid succession, much to Dora’s dismay. “Can’t you two do anything but make babies?” Cinn’s second was hangin’ low in the belly. Dora pronounced it a girl.
Deacon came to see her that spring. “Doctors say I got cancer in the blood,” he said.
Cinn reached out to him and held his hand. “There are doctors at the university hospital, the finest doctors in the country.”
“Too late for that. Didn’t come here for that.” He was impatient. The rackets had moved on. Younger men in the game. Harlem real estate had plummeted. Tax troubles. Iolanthe had bought a house in New Jersey. “I’m settin’ my affairs in order,” he said, “I’m leavin’ what I have to you and the boys . . . I’m dyin’, Cinn. But before I do, I must tell you somethin’. I have wronged your family. Run off the father, deceived and betrayed my brother, but the greatest wrong was to Lizzie. Broke her body, her heart, warped her spirit. I cannot undo that. I cannot give these things back to her, but maybe I could give her back her daughter.
“When I was a young man, I was a wild one, a roustabout—got so the police arrested me before the crime, sayin’ ‘I know you gonna do it.’ ” He chuckled softly and coughed, holding his hat in his hands. He lowered his head to shield the grimace of pain. “I was wild then. Didn’t know.” He waited for the words to sink in. Cinn did not stir. “We both loved Osceola. Competed. I came outta prison, took your mother by force. Your mother. Hurt her, hurt her bad. Most likely, you my daughter.”
“Most likely?” She shrank from him.
“Please, please. Hear me out. I cannot rest while there is distance between you and Lizzie, distance that was caused by me. When she left, she wasn’t runnin’ from you, she was runnin’ from me.”
The words cleaved through her torso. “You tell me this now? Why now?”
“I cannot undo that night. Would not want to. You are my pride, Cinn Turner. I have done my best to do right by you.”
Cinnamon never regained the full power of her voice. After Tokyo’s birth, she stopped seeking treatments, stopped trying to discover the root of the dysfunction and techniques to overcome it. Standing at the cash register with a shopping cart filled with groceries, she would sometimes absentmindedly begin singing, a soft voice, concealing the cracks.
“What’s that tune?” a customer would say.
“Excuse me?”
“The song you were singing just then. It was beautiful.”
Her laugh was disparaging. “I didn’t even realize.”
“You have such a lovely voice!”
Cinnamon blushed. “Used to be.”
She turned to teaching, encouraging singers to pace their growth. Her daughter Tokyo later credited this early training for her heralded vocal power and range, for the maturity of voice in one so young.
Cinnamon masked her memory of ambition with pride in her daughter. The interviewer’s question caught her off guard. “Why Tokyo? . . . Why did I name my daughter Tokyo? Oh, I don’t know,” she said, gently tapping her fingertips on the table to some internal melody. “It was shortly before she was born. I don’t know, I just had a whim. I used to play this game with my oldest son, all my children, really.” Tokyo crossed her eyes and sighed with embarrassment that her mother was telling the story on national television. Cinn continued, “Teaching them the scale and geography with a tickling game. What’s your favorite tickling spot, I would ask. For my oldest brother, it was Tokyo. ‘St. Louis, Denver, San Francisco/ Hawaii, Manila, Tokyo,’ ” she crooned softly and giggled. “A spot right here on the left side made him laugh with such joy.” She smiled, remembering. Snatches of memory, snapshots, a nibble of dialogue, pretty pictures, distant harmonies, and sunlight so warm . . . singing . . . somewhere she could hear someone singing.