“Shit yes, and Max Low.”
They trade more names of the dead, order more liquor, grow sadder, drunker. Earl has shucked his coat. He’s standing in a puddle of his own perspiration. Regally, the ladies sip their brandy, shun him with intricate head twists — which only entice him closer to their table. He croons to them, “Had me a Volkswagen love, now I’m looking for a Rolls / Roll on over, Mama, let me pop your pretty hood.” Etta vibrates like a tuning fork behind the bar. The skinny old man still dances by himself, grinning as if an invisible angel is tonguing his ear.
I worry the splinter, worry what I know — what I’ve always known, if I’m honest with myself. Why it slips out now, like ice spilled from the ladies’ bucket, I’m not sure, but Uncle Bitter has something to do with it: leaving me on my own all day, asking me here, then pretending my chair is empty. I suspect he’s not punishing me so much as making me see, forcing me to sit here, quietly, uncomfortably, and take it all in. Not just the place, but him. Me. Our history. Our lost years.
But the place. Of course it signifies for me, powerfully. I asked him once where my daddy had got to. We were alone in his yard. I was maybe seven. “Your daddy been down to the crossroads,” he said. “Learned him that hoodoo guitar.”
“So where is he, then?”
“Wherever the music take him.”
Instead of filling in the holes after that, he distracted me with more of his spells. Mama wouldn’t ever talk about it (I remember asking her one night what a juke joint was. She frowned and turned away).
Even now, I think, how can I ever know anything — much less everything — with so many layers to peel, starting with Bitter himself. Uncle Bitter. Uncle Remus. Uncle Tom. My God. Ever since I can remember, he’s accepted the ready-made role — did the family force it on him? — bouncing Ariyeh and me on his knees, erecting wild stories for us full of magic, acting the clown. How much of all this was part of a mask at first — now frozen in place — fashioned to protect himself? The happy-go-lucky nigger. I may never know.
Listening to him and his buddies —
“Mistah Bogue! What up?”
“Shih. Cain’t kill nothing and won’t nothing die.”
“Sho you right.”
“Shut the noise.”
“Yeah, it’s like that, I got it like that.”
— I’m stunned at how neatly these duffers fit my image of old black men. But where is that image born? My actual memories of elders? Television? Movies? All of it. These fellows have embraced the stereotypes. Accepted their assignment from the world. As I’ve learned, acceptance is the easiest way to negotiate things. But it’s a complex transaction. Those radicals from the sixties who blew up buildings, then spent the next thirty years hiding in the open, changing their names, working respectable jobs, marrying, raising kids … were they disguised as pleasant middle-class people, masking their true violent natures, their repugnance for the systems around them, or were they, after all, what they appeared to be? Was their “radical” side the aberration? Or were they an honest, paradoxical mix? Bank robber-wealthy mom: will the real Patty Hearst step up?
Looking around now —
“Ace kool! What up, Doe?”
“Just trying to make a dollar outta fifteen cent.”
— it’s clear to me the choices have narrowed here. Back in the early seventies, I swear the neighborhood didn’t look this poor, didn’t resemble the image of a black enclave. The middle-class families hadn’t yet caught the gravy train; those “bettered” by the Movement hadn’t fled their brothers and sisters, the way Mama did. In those days, it was still possible to see black prosperity here. I remember handsome young men in African fabrics, collarless suits like Julius Nyerere wore. Tanzania’s president. He was a model of dignity and success pulling us up, out of ourselves. Or toward ourselves. Black nationalism. Pride. Afros and musk oil.
Now, the whole place reeks of defeat: not so much alcohol and hash, but a smell of familiarity, predictability, of settling for what the world tells you to be.
Something I know a thing or two about.
Bitter winks at me across the table. “You like the music, Seam?”
I nod, swallow some beer.
“Axeman’s Jazz.”
“Axeman?”
“You don’t recall me spinning this when you’s a kid?”
“No sir.”
In his voice is a pinched reproach, a cricket’s rasp. He’s scolding me: ‘Course, I ain’t seen you since you’s a kid, have I now, Seamstress? You and your mama too fine for us folk?
“Several year ago, here in Freedmen’s Quarter, there’s a series of axe murders,” he says in his smooth story-tone, and I do remember, some. “Always on Sunday nights. No one knew why. Someone mad at God? A grocer and his wife was found sliced into patties, like meat you’d feed a dog. A bartender. A streetwalker. Couple of the Axeman’s intendeds survived, all whittled-on, but they couldn’t agree what he looked like. One said he’s a midget. Another, a monster. Cops was kerflooied.
“Finally one day a letter come to the Informer, our neighborhood rag. From the very sharp dude hisself. ‘Reason y’all fools cain’t catch me,’ he says, ‘is ‘cause I’s Puredee Spirit, a running-buddy of the Angel of Death Hisself. What y’all wastrels wallow in every day, your so-called worldly pleasures, they make me want to spit, ‘cept’—he hastens to unveil this, out of the blue — ’very fond I am of jazz music’ (The preachers, of course, always used to tell us jazz was Lucifer’s tunes.) ‘So I swear by all the devils in the netherworld, them that’s swinging in their rooms Sunday nights’ll be spared. But them that ain’t jazzing, beware!’”
Bitter swirls his malt liquor can. “Wellsir, that Sunday eve, everybody made damn sure they had ‘em some hot stuff on the phonograph. Those that didn’t have no stacks of wax stole ‘em. And no one croaked that night. After a few more shaky Sabbaths like this, the Axeman, he up and vanished. Shuffled on back to Hell where he belonged, folks said, toting his blade and a fiery clarinet, which you can still hear sometimes late at night, like a faraway train: a warning you been spared for now, but next time and tomorrow, who knows?
“Ever’ since, it’s kind of a saying ‘round here. You know: you looking for peace of mind, we say you chasing the Axeman’s Jazz.”
“Yes sir, that’s what I’m here for,” I say. “You got it.” He laughs. “You got it.” After a minute I venture, “Mama asked for you at the end.”
He looks at his hands. “Shoulda ask for me long time ago. So you ain’t got a job now, or what? How come you can abandon the mayor and just hang here awhile?”
“I’m on sabbatical.”
“That like church?”
“No. It’s earned leave. A friend of mine is watching my fish and my birds — ”
“Oh, so you a zookeeper now, too? Lot I don’t know ‘bout you, Seam. Like I say, your letter was short.”
“There’s a lot I don’t know, too, Uncle Bitter.”
“Might be you ready to ask?”
“Might be.”
“I don’t know all the answers.”
“But you know some of them?”
He shrugs, rises stiffly, and orders another round of drinks at the bar. His buddies watch me closely, nodding and smiling. One says, “Telisha. That like dee-lish?” I excuse myself.
The ladies’ room smells of vomit and lilac perfume. The Tampax machine lies broken on the floor. I open a stall door. Just then one of the brandy women barrels in, heading for the stall next to mine. She gives me a hooded look — something she does with her brows — like, What your snowflake ass doing in here?