“That son of a bitch has a lot to answer for.”
“I gave him an act of penance down on Bleecker Street. I bloodied his nose. He was giving heat to Tremont.”
“Best news I heard all day.”
“Did you hear Tremont broke up a riot on Bleecker Street?” Quinn asked Roy.
“I heard he misbehaved,” Roy said.
“Whites in cars came through with Molotovs and got trapped, people hacking, kicking one another, knives, wrecked cars, two or three houses on fire, and then Tremont walks out of the alley, unwraps his AR-15 and bang bangety bang—‘Enough,’ Tremont says, and the riot falls apart. People run off, cops arrive, not much left for them to do, but they arrest a dozen and carry off the wounded. I think Tremont saved lives. The AR-15 is his musical instrument of choice. You can’t predict Tremont. At the First Church he serenaded the protesters with ‘Coon, Coon, Coon, I Wish My Color Would Fade.’”
“I remember that,” Martin said. “Nineteen-oh-one. A huge hit.”
George sang the second line:“Coon, coon, coon, I want a different shade. .”
“We don’t have to sing it, Pop,” Quinn said. “I thought they’d strangle Tremont so I got him out quicktime.”
“They wouldn’ta strangled me,” Tremont said.
“You never know with liberals. I wasn’t taking chances.”
“Why’d you sing that, Tremont?” Roy asked.
“I’m sick of them songs about overcomin’. What we gotta do is change color. We’d fit in better. Wouldn’t need no segregation.”
“You’re a clown, Tremont, but you can’t do that old shit, tommin’ the crowd, scratchin’ your head.”
“‘Man in the Moon Is a Coon,’” Tremont said. “‘Shine,’ ‘All Coons Look Alike to Me.’”
“Right,” said Roy. “Deep trash.”
“My daddy made a career singin’ those tunes. That’s the way it was.”
“Long gone.”
“You ever hear the Mills Brothers and Bing Crosby do ‘Shine’?” Quinn asked.
“Doesn’t matter. You can’t shine shit.”
Cody had been listening to the talk, standing behind Roy.
“I recorded ‘Shine’ with Count Basie,” he said, pulling a chair next to Roy.
“I heard you do it with Crosby when I was a kid,” Quinn said. “It was great.”
“When Bing and the Mills Brothers sing it it’s a joke. Always was. And the joke’s on the guy who calls you shine.”
“All right,” Roy said, “all right. If Cody does it it’s all right.”
“Cody’s all right,” Tremont said, “but my daddy’s shit you can’t shine.”
“Not your daddy, Tremont, the coon, the coon. Je-zus.”
“Satchmo sang ‘Shine,’” Tremont said.
“Satchmo,” Roy said. “He smiles a whole lot for white people.”
“Ella sang ‘Shine,’” Cody said. “So did Django.”
“Hey, Roy,” Quinn said. “What happened to your sense of humor? Tremont was putting everybody on. That song is so far out it’s anti-racist.”
“Coons aren’t funny,” Roy said. “All that coon stuff is rat shit. Flush it all.”
“How about shines?” Cody said.
“Oh, man, oh, man,” Roy said, and he twisted in his chair to face Gloria.
“Don’t get excited, Roy,” she said. “Tonight’s important, don’t fight with your father.”
“Damn,” Roy said, “it’s so nice you’re here. But I don’t want you here. I want you someplace else. We’ll blow this joint.”
“To go where?”
“Someplace quiet.”
The father and son squabbling over the coon factor crystallized a musical lineage for Quinn — the slaves singing, dancing, cakewalking in their Pinkster revels, whites imitating them by blackening up as minstrels and turning it all into a theatrical phenomenon that would last more than a century, blacks then blackening their blackness and creating their own minstrel stage — mocking the white imitation of their cakewalk and the white-black argot, and filling theaters; Big Jim making the leap from sideshow minstrel to black theater and he’s along for the ride when the slave song and dance (and the coon factor) arrive on Broadway, a long walk from slavery. Bert Williams is Broadway’s black megastar as a singing blackface shuffler, Al Jolson is a white Broadway megastar in blackface, Satchmo, the ragtime genius trumpeter sings to the world in his arcane language of scat, and ragtime turns into jazz, a word Satchmo never liked. Bing Crosby and the Mills Brothers learn scat from Satchmo and rock the world with “Shine” and “Dinah.” Fats, another smiling clown and musical wizard, discovers Cody Mason plays fine piano, and Cody emerges into jazz, formerly ragtime, first accompanist and early lover of Billie Holiday, the great-granddaughter of a slave: how those slaves do rise. Cody sees all these connections, understands where he came from, and how he got here, understands also that Roy now wants to obliterate this matrix that created his father and himself; and Cody quietly implodes.
But he changes the subject and says to Quinn, “It was great you got that lawyer. Roy called me about being busted, said he might get out on bail but didn’t know how much. Next thing, he taps me on the shoulder. You and Max make things happen.”
“Some things you can do so you do them. How are you and your lungs doing after all that exercise?”
“I’m holding. Didn’t fall over.”
“Bit of a generation gap here with Roy.”
“He’s in a hurry to forget things.”
“You don’t want to forget.”
“It’s so tough to get anyplace, you got to remember the moves. Big Jimmy, he was no coon. He owned that routine, turned it inside out, giant tapdancer, the singing shine, and he made it pay. He played coon like I play piano and he got someplace way beyond Coontown. He was big and he got bigger, he had clout. He opened that club and he took me in when I left New York. We blew a whole lot of jazz in his place and I turned a corner and down the road I got my own club.”
“What happened that you lost that record date in New York missing a train?”
“Didn’t miss any train. I cut a record with Brunswick, one session, eight tunes. I was going down to do eight more and then weed out the dogs, but the Brunswick big boys didn’t like my first takes. John Hammond calls me leavin’ the house, says you gotta know this, Sonny. They don’t want a second session, I’m sorry. So I missed the train.”
What they didn’t like was Cody’s timing — a little off on two cuts, speeded up, then fell back, but he’d been playing alone for months, no rhythm backup, could’ve been fixed, just give him a drummer. But he also blinked a few notes on two or three cuts, that won’t do. You had to be Art Tatum to sell solo piano records. They put a label on Sonny because he’s a little off one day, and it dogs him, and he’s at the bar and meets these cats comin’ through and they say, Here, Sonny, have a few, and they slip him some. He goes to his room and there’s a knock on the door, what are you doin’, man? I’m having a good time, he says, and they take him to the judge and somebody says he’s a dope pusher. I’m no pusher, judge, I was just way down and I met these cats and they gave me a few. Three months. My old gal Billie died a junkie. Cops busted her for possession and all she had was eighty-seven cents. Forty-four-year-old queen of the damn world with eighty-seven cents.
“Your ‘Blues for Fats’ was very fine. You recorded it?”
“New record coming this month. Hank O’Neal put it together.”
“I should write a piece on that. Anybody recording this concert?”
“I think Hank’s got it covered.”
Vivian reached across the table and touched Cody’s arm. “Cody, George has a request. When you go back to play could you do a waltz? George was a prize waltzer. Do you play waltzes?”