Jazz: Chapters 9–10

Sweetheart weather, the prettiest day of the year. And that’s when it started. On a day so pure and steady trees preened.

Disabled veterans in half uniform and half civilian stopped looking gloomy at working-men; they went to Father Divine’s wagon and after they’d eaten they rolled cigarettes and settled down on the curb as though it were a Duncan Phyfe.

Some on 254 where there is no protective railing; another at 131, the one with the apple-green water tank, and somebody right next to it, 133, where lard cans of tomato plants are kept, and a pallet for sleeping at night.

“When they’d come home, they’d kiss me and give me things, like my opal ring, but what they really wanted to do was go out dancing somewhere (my mother) or sleep (my father)..."

In school all sorts of boys wanted to talk to her. But then they stopped; nothing came of it. It couldn’t have been her personality because she was a good talker, liked to joke and tease. Nothing standoffish about her.

I mean it was like she wanted them to do something scary all the time. Steal things, or go back in the store and slap the face of a white salesgirl who wouldn’t wait on her, or cuss out somebody who had snubbed her.

Out of spite, I suppose, but she gave it to me and I love it, and only lent it to Dorcas because she begged so hard and the silver of it did match the bracelets at her elbow.

She was doing for Acton what the old man did for her—giving him little presents she bought from the money she wheedled out of the old man and from Mrs. Manfred.

"He’s as argumentative as ever, but happier because riding trains he gets to see Negroes play baseball..."

And he is handsome. For an old man, I mean. Nothing flabby on him. Nice-shaped head, carries himself like he’s somebody. Like my father when he’s being a proud Pullman porter seeing the world, and baseball and not cooped up in Tuxedo Junction.

Dorcas needed an alibi and I was it.

My mother will like that—she can’t stand the cold—and my father, chasing around looking for colored baseball players 'in the flesh and on the lot,’ hollering, jumping up and down when he recounts the plays to his friends, he’ll be happy too.

“Her catfish was pretty good. Not as good as the way my grandmother used to do it, or my mother used to before her chest wore out. Too much hot pepper in the dredging flour the way Mrs. Trace fixed it. I drank a lot of water so as not to hurt her feelings. It eased the pain.”

Bolts of lightning, little rivulets of thunder. And I the eye of the storm. Mourning the split trees, hens starving on rooftops. Figuring out what can be done to save them since they cannot save themselves without me because—well, it’s my storm, isn’t it?

They knew how little I could be counted on; how poorly, how shabbily my know-it-all self covered helplessness.

Busy, they were, busy being original, complicated, changeable—human, I guess you’d say, while I was the predictable one, confused in my solitude into arrogance, thinking my space, my view was the only one that was or that mattered.

As though it might be another, as though a presumptuous neighbor or a young ghost with bad skin might be there instead.

(They like these men, although Violet is worried that one or another of them will tip the wood box or the broken chair he stands on, or that somebody among the group will shout something that hurts the man’s feelings. Joe, loving the long-distance eyes, is always supportive and chimes in at appropriate moments with encouraging words.)

They took the cage to the roof one Saturday, where the wind blew and so did the musicians in shirts billowing out behind them.

Powder blue, maybe, although that would be risky with the soot flying and all, but Joe is partial to blue.

On a table near the cookstove stood an enamel basin—speckled blue and white and chipped all round its rim.

On a table near the cookstove stood an enamel basin—speckled blue and white and chipped all round its rim.

The heat was relentless, insinuating.

The heat was relentless, insinuating.

Like the voices of the women in houses nearby singing “Go down, go down, way down in Egypt land...” Answering each other from yard to yard with a verse or its variation.

He looked at the fingernails hard as her palm skin, and noticed for the first time how shapely her hands were.

Even when they are not there, when whole city blocks downtown and acres of lawned neighborhoods in Sag Harbor cannot see them, the clicking is there. In the T-strap shoes of Long Island debutantes, the sparkling fringes of daring short skirts that swish and glide to music that intoxicates them more than the champagne.

Even when they are not there, when whole city blocks downtown and acres of lawned neighborhoods in Sag Harbor cannot see them, the clicking is there. In the T-strap shoes of Long Island debutantes, the sparkling fringes of daring short skirts that swish and glide to music that intoxicates them more than the champagne.

I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure.

I started out believing that life was made just so the world would have some way to think about itself, but that it had gone awry with humans because flesh, pinioned by misery, hangs on to it with pleasure.