A Love Song for Ricki Wilde (11)

And all this shit was Black. In every incarnation. Ebony, honey, pancake pale, short, fat, tall. Doctors, bandleaders, attorneys, chorus girls, clergymen, debutantes, poets: all afire with a showy swagger that would’ve bought trouble anywhere else. Here, in this enclave of citified habitués, the old rules were dead, and Black wasn’t wrong. Black was right.

Breeze knew in his bones that he was supposed to be here, in this cosmopolitan land of plenty. Everything up to this point felt like a lie.

“Tonight,” continued Sonny, “I’m taking you to a juice joint.”

“What, they got special juice over there?”

Sonny slapped his palm across his forehead. A full head shorter than Breeze, with frenetic Chihuahua energy, Sonny was sharp in spats, a wool suit, and a panama hat. Breeze may have gotten all the good looks and height in the family, but Sonny had flash.

“Breeze! A juice joint is a speak. A speakeasy.”

“I know what a speakeasy is. Don’t talk at me like I don’t know nothing.”

“You don’t. We need to review a few things before tonight. I’ll give you a quick education so you don’t sound like a neophyte.”

“Neophyte? I’ll neophyte you right here.” Breeze had a sixth-grade education. But he read everything he got his hands on. He was delighted by words.

“Would you rather I call you a Russian?”

Breeze frowned. “A what?”

Chuckling, Sonny took a drag from his cigarette. “A Russian is a Negro just arrived from down south. You know, ’cause you was rushin’ to git up nawth.”

“So you, a year ago,” snarked Breeze. Then he froze, apple in mouth.

Three girls swept past him in a haze of rich brown skin, expensive perfume, and confidence. They looked like they’d stepped out of a picture show, wearing satin heels and cloche hats with marcel-waved bobs. One turned her head and winked at him. The other two giggled and kept sauntering down the sidewalk, making puddles out of every man in their wake.

Breeze was aware he was gawking. He couldn’t help it; he’d never seen Black women dressed so finely. He’d never seen white women dressed so finely.

Sonny grabbed him by the elbow and shook him out of his daze. “When I was a Russian, at least I had the sense not to stroll down Lenox in work pants and a collarless shirt, looking like a sharecropper,” whisper-yelled Sonny.

Breeze was a sharecropper. His whole family was. He was born in Fallon, South Carolina, a dusty wretched town, to a long line of men named Ezra Walker. (His first son would be named Ezra, too. No clue why. It was a tradition, and most traditions didn’t make sense.)

He’d been a quiet baby in a family of musically inclined juggernauts. Big Ezra, his harmonica-playing dad, had traveled with a vaudeville troupe as a kid. Breeze’s mom, Hazel, had taught ukulele, and his sister Minnie’s alto had brought the congregation to weeping. So when Breeze was born, folks waited for the day he’d reveal his musicality. But he had none. He didn’t sing, hum, or even talk for years. He just listened to the world, with his little brow furrowed. Then, on his third birthday, he ran up to the piano after service and, with his daddy’s heartbreaking grin, banged out “Down in the River to Pray” with a pitch-perfect ear and astonishingly adult emotion. The toddler had range! Like he’d been at it forever. Cool as a fan, smooth as a breeze.

When the applause died down, he peered out at the congregation and spoke his first word, a question. “More?”

After this, the congregation somehow pooled their money together to buy Breeze a secondhand nineteenth-century piano with missing keys and shredded wires. By five, he could play anything: ragtime, boogie-woogie, hymns, field songs. By seven, he was playing at services all over Fallon County. By thirteen, he’d learned a few life lessons: banging keys for the Lord got you the prettiest girls; gigging in the jook joints got you fast cash; and playing brothels when your God-fearing parents thought you were working as a night watchman at a textile mill—well, that gave you a better education than you’d get at a shitty country schoolhouse.

Breeze escaped in 1917, when he was drafted to the all-Negro Ninety-Third Infantry Division and stationed in France during World War I. It was brutal business, but better than home, because he was valued, and under the command of the French troops, his unit was spared the senseless, exhausting rage of white American men drunk on a racial lie they’d invented. It had never occurred to him that white people weren’t the same everywhere.

France was Breeze’s first taste of freedom. He savored it, excelling in combat, leading his infantry band, and even introducing awestruck Frenchies to wild piano in gin-soaked dives.

And when it all ended, Breeze returned home a decorated soldier. It was June 1919, and he was a changed man. He hoped America had changed, too. Later, the papers would call this season the Red Summer. All over the country, white mobs unleashed horrific violence on Colored communities, proving a point to uppity soldiers who dared hope for equity.

One day, Breeze made the near-fatal mistake of saying “thank you” to a white shopkeeper in a tone that, apparently, “suggested superiority.” The shopkeeper and his sons strangled him to blackout. He regained consciousness some hours later, facedown in a barren field, outside town.

There’d be no hero’s welcome.

The next day was Sunday. Reverend Green had planned a special service for the returning military men. Breeze was struggling; his breathing was labored, his ears ringing and throat ablaze. Hazel was worried. She insisted her son stay put while the family represented him at First Baptist. On the way out, she kissed his fevered forehead. Minnie punched his shoulder and, trying to make him laugh, whispered, “I know you ain’t feelin’ poorly—you just skippin’ services to call on Ida-Prue Freedman.” Big Ezra, with a quietly furious furrow to his brow, stood in the doorway and gave his son a military salute.