Dorsey flicks lather off the blade, rinses it clean in the pan. “Oh, I been studyin it, Mr. Turpin. Got a gal picked out.”
“That’s good to hear.” The pharmacist winks. Dorsey always hates it when they wink, especially if there’s a nasty story coming after. “Before we know it you’ll have a whole tribe of pickaninnies to support.”
Dorsey turns away, strops the blade hard on the leather. “Whatever you say, Mr. Turpin.”
“The tyranny of numbers,” grumbles the Judge. “If we bred like damned jackrabbits we might stand a chance.”
Mr. Turpin leaves two nickels on the counter and turns at the door. “Don’t you worry, Judge,” he calls. “Plans are being formulated. Prominent citizens are involved.” With that he steps out onto the street, setting his hat over his haircut before the breeze can muss it.
Colonel Waddell settles into the next chair as Hoke flaps the cloth out and drapes it around his neck. “If a move to remedy the situation is afoot,” he says, frowning, “I have not yet been informed of it.”
The Judge seems lost in thought, and the lather has been sitting on his face long enough. Dorsey reaches two fingers under but doesn’t quite touch him. “Chin?”
The white man grunts and tilts his head back for the razor.
Miss Loretta envies the colored girl her fingers. Her own were never long enough, never nimble enough to do justice to Chopin, her left hand adequate at tempo but her right fumbling to arpeggiate his harmonies. She had to think too far in advance, worrying about what pitfall lay ahead, and would lose the emotional thread of the music. But this one, Jessie, glides over the keys, rocking back and forth slightly as she plays the nocturne, closing her eyes for the darker passages and talking softly to her teacher, not so much distracted from the music as allowing it to take on the color of her mood.
“I love him so much.”
She does not mean Chopin.
Miss Loretta does not allow herself to smile. She can recall making much the same statement, in much the same desperate tone, to old Aunt Kizzy while the servant combed her hair out at night. “Chile,” Kizzy would say, shaking her head, “you got yo life all in a knot.”
“Being in love is a state to be envied,” Miss Loretta responds, flipping through the sheet music in her lap as Jessie lets the final tone decay. “Let’s go back to the études — try the Number Three.”
The colored girl picks out a single E, hums it, then rocks forward into the Tristesse.
She has worked so diligently, this one, advancing between lessons much more than she does during them, working at the purely technical exercises without complaint, listening to criticism and acting upon it gracefully. But there is something more, beyond what application and hours at the bench can achieve. She has the gift.
“This is a stroll through a beautiful wooded glade,” Professor Einhorn said once when Miss Loretta, in her own student days, was struggling through one of the lovelier preludes. “You, young lady, are pulling up stumps.”
She had been the favorite target of his epigrams, and after each she would press on all the more doggedly with her inadequate digits, clenching her jaw, humiliation roiling within her but never allowing it to color her performance. Not like this one—
“My father will never accept him,” says Jessie, shaking her head as if it is a new realization, something the music has just informed her of, and not the recurring opera seria that has accompanied every lesson this year.
“That is what fathers are for, I’m afraid.”
“If he had any idea of how I feel, he’d lock me in the attic.”
Jessie plays the agitato departure in the middle of the étude, frowning at the keys. Miss Loretta has never thought of colored living in homes with attics before, but the Luncefords are quality people, Episcopalians, Jessie’s father a graduate of a northern medical college and her mother one of the doyennes of what Daddy calls “sepia society.” They have a lovely house on Nun Street, keep a carriage and a servant girl.
“You have a well-developed sense of drama, Jessie.”
“But I’m serious!”
“I do not doubt that for a moment.”
Miss Loretta’s father scolded and harangued but never took her seriously. Nor did Professor Einhorn, constantly bemoaning of her lack of Empfindsamkeit. Men. Self-important men, towering edifices of consequence. At least now when Daddy interrupts her playing with one of his perambulating tirades she is allowed to continue throughout his aria. Her piece must be slow and unobtrusive, of course — once she accompanied his outburst with the Heroic Polonaise and was cursed for mocking him. I am forty years of age, she thinks, and my father treats me like a dim schoolgirl.
Jessie leans back as she begins the return, softening her touch, the notes achingly beautiful, the first pale rays of sunshine after a storm, and looks to Miss Loretta with tears in her eyes. Sometimes it is the composition, sometimes her own sixteen-year-old’s romantic anguish — it does not much matter. She is not the singer that little Carrie was and has none of her ambition, but she is a channel for the music the way the truly gifted ones are. A prodigy, yes, though any of the colored girls who can make their way through a classical piece is labeled thus, and the term devalued. With this one Miss Loretta has to concentrate to be of any help, to resist the urge to stop judging and surrender to mere listening. The music is always of a piece when Jessie plays.
“I know you’re using them all, Miss Butler,” Professor Einhorn said to her once, “but I’m only hearing the white keys.”
It is, at times, difficult not to be jealous. The girl coming in at twelve and playing, flawlessly, the Minute Waltz, and when her teacher professed amazement saying, innocently, “But Miss Loretta, it’s a song.” And now—
“Idiocy!” thunders Daddy from the next room.
He stalks in waving the Messenger. Jessie leaps immediately into the Number Four, attacca il presto as Chopin himself suggested, the piece she likes to call “Off to the Races.”
“ ‘There is no gain,’ ” Daddy reads in the voice he uses to quote men he thinks to be fools, “ ‘that may be won through the peaceful machinations of diplomacy and commerce equal to that which is ripped from the enemy in the grisly pursuit of war!’ Have you ever heard such rot in your life?”
“I know, Daddy, it’s terrible.”
The sixteenth notes scurry after each other, Jessie seemingly unaware of the old man’s estimable presence in the room. Miss Loretta has heard this piece plagiarized in a particularly vulgar melodrama, underscoring the action as hero and villain chased each other around the stage and heroine wriggled helplessly tied across a railroad track.
“Imbeciles!” he cries, God’s angry man. “A pack of yellow dogs! Jingo-istic, profiteering, mealy-mouthed—”
The veins are standing out in his neck in the manner that worries her so, Daddy thwacking the rolled newspaper against his thigh to emphasize each new deprecation, and Jessie plays through it all, now politely twisting her head to acknowledge his presence, accustomed to his reports from the editorial page. Roaring Jack Butler, his few living friends call him, and his enemies too, though with an implication that he is not of right mind. That the Union prevailed in the great conflict did nothing to mitigate their opinion of him as a scalawag and heretic, and there are few of Wilmington’s great men who will meet his eye in passing.