Jazz: Chapters 1–2

A poisoned silence floated through the rooms like a big fishnet that Violet alone slashed through with loud recriminations.

Joe’s daytime listlessness and both their worrying nights must have wore her down.

Below is shadow where any blase thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women.

Regular people corner thieves in alleys for quick retribution and, if he is stupid and has robbed wrong, thieves corner him too.

And although the hair of the first class of colored nurses was declared unseemly for the official Bellevue nurse’s cap, there are thirty-five of them now—all dedicated and superb in their profession.

I agree that I close off in places, but if you have been left standing, as I have, while your partner overstays at another appointment, or promises to give you exclusive attention after supper, but is falling asleep just as you have begun to speak—well, it can make you inhospitable if you aren’t careful, the last thing I want to be.

A host of thoughtful people looked at the signs (the weather, the number, their own dreams) and believed it was the commencement of all sorts of destruction. That the scandal was a message sent to warn the good and rip up the faithless.

The service trails, of course, are worn, and there are paths slick from the forays of members of one group into the territory of another where it is believed something curious or thrilling lies.

The girl’s face looks greedy, haughty and very lazy.

Having a knack for it, but no supervised training, and therefore no license to do it, Violet can only charge twenty-five or fifty cents anyway, but since that business at Dorcas’ funeral, many of her regular customers have found reasons to do their own hair or have a daughter heat up the irons.

They fill their mind and hands with soap and repair and dicey confrontations because what is waiting for them, in a suddenly idle moment, is the seep of rage.

She was very surprised because the Dumfrey women were graceful, citified ladies whose father owned a store on 136th Street, and themselves had nice paper-handling jobs: one took tickets at the Lafayette; the other worked in the counting house.

When the baby was in her arms, she inched its blanket up around the cheeks against the threat of wind too cool for its honey-sweet, butter-colored face. Its big-eyed noncommittal stare made her smile.

The Sister, chastised, took baby, buggy, and “Trombone Blues” back up the steps.

Extricating herself from these collapses is not too hard, because nobody presses her.

Less excusable than a wayward mouth is an independent hand that can find in a parrot’s cage a knife lost for weeks.

Maybe everybody has a renegade tongue yearning to be on its own.

Someone whose touch is a reassurance, not an affront or a nuisance.

He minds her death, is so sorry about it, but minded more the possibility of his memory failing to conjure up the dearness.

Even then, listening to her talk, to the terrible things she said, he felt he was losing the timbre of her voice and what happened to her eyelids when they made love.

That you could replay in the brain the scene of ecstasy, of murder, of tenderness, but it was drained of everything but the language to say it in.

Even if the room they rented was smaller than the heifer’s stall and darker than a morning privy, they stayed to look at their number, hear themselves in an audience, feel themselves moving down the street among hundreds of others who moved the way they did, and who, when they spoke, regardless of the accent, treated language like the same intricate, malleable toy designed for their play.

Even if the room they rented was smaller than the heifer’s stall and darker than a morning privy, they stayed to look at their number, hear themselves in an audience, feel themselves moving down the street among hundreds of others who moved the way they did, and who, when they spoke, regardless of the accent, treated language like the same intricate, malleable toy designed for their play.

Even if the room they rented was smaller than the heifer’s stall and darker than a morning privy, they stayed to look at their number, hear themselves in an audience, feel themselves moving down the street among hundreds of others who moved the way they did, and who, when they spoke, regardless of the accent, treated language like the same intricate, malleable toy designed for their play.

Part of why they loved it was the specter they left behind.

The praying palms, the raspy breathing, the quiet children of the ones who had escaped from Springfield Ohio, Springfield Indiana, Greensburg Indiana, Wilmington Delaware, New Orleans Louisiana, after raving whites had foamed all over the lanes and yards of home.

Nothing can pry them away from that; the City is what they want it to be: thriftless, warm, scary and full of amiable strangers.

Looking at it, this nightsky booming over a glittering city, it’s possible for me to avoid dreaming of what I know is in the ocean, and the bays and tributaries it feeds: the two-seat aeroplanes, nose down in the muck, pilot and passenger staring at schools of passing bluefish; money, soaked and salty in canvas bags, or waving their edges gently from metal bands made to hold them forever.

Otherwise, if it wanted to, it could show me stars cut from the lamé gowns of chorus girls, or mirrored in the eyes of sweethearts furtive and happy under the pressure of a deep, touchable sky.

He rented a room from a neighbor who knows the exact cost of her discretion.

The sad moment came when she read the letter to Panama from Winsome Clark complaining to her husband who worked in the Canal Zone about the paltriness and insufficiency of the money he had sent her—money of so little help she was giving up her job, picking up the children and returning to Barbados.

A vocational school student had sent a matchbook application to a correspondence law school along with the required, but now missing, dollar bill.

“You be surprised what you can save if you like me and don’t drink, smoke, gamble or tithe.”

“I don’t want nothing ornery, and I don’t want to be hanging out in clubs and such. I just want some nice female company.”

So the weekends, destined to disappoint, are strident, sullen, sprinkled with bruises and dots of blood.