A Love Song for Ricki Wilde (12)
Breeze never saw them again.
The Klan torched the church, lynching the entire congregation. Men, women, children. No one survived, save for Sonny, who, soon after, fled north with his right arm still raw to the shoulder. But Breeze stayed, despite his cousin’s pleas. He stayed and shattered into a million pieces that couldn’t be put back together.
He deserved to stay in that hellscape, haunted by the ghosts of the family he couldn’t save. He deserved to remain in that shack, where the straw mattress on the floor served as a constant reminder that he’d been fucking napping while his family burned to death. Breeze’s penance was to usher in the grief and let it destroy him.
It should’ve been me. The thought rang in his head every second as he returned to the fields. He stopped talking, and he stopped playing music. For four lost years, Breeze listened to life go by as he picked cotton, the sack weighty on his back. And when his back gave out, he’d crawl, picking two rows at a time, back and forth. He listened as he primed tobacco, the sticky, itchy goo dying his hands purple. He listened, closely and critically, as he hoed the fields—and in the mornings, he’d wake to his restless hands tapping out a rhythm on his chest.
Whenever he had time, he read the Colored newspapers Sonny sent him in the post. The headlines told of a glittering, hopeful world that was completely alien to Breeze, of blinding lights, fast nights, and music. He felt an insistent tug, a pull. Harlem was beckoning.
In the papers, he learned that four legendary jazz pianists lived there: James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Willie “the Lion” Smith, and some kid named Duke Ellington, who was not, in fact, royalty. They were it. (Especially Johnson, who was currently composing a surefire hit called “The Charleston.”) They played a new kind of jazz called stride, and it washed over Harlem like a gin baptism. On Friday nights, at secret locations, they hosted “piano cutting contests,” where Johnson would play his battle song, the hard-as-hell-to-master “Carolina Shout,” and challenge every pianist in the house to try it himself. If the pianist was good? He got instant respect that led to gigs, recordings, fame. If he was booed? Time to hightail it back to Tuscaloosa.
One day, Breeze received an oversized parcel in the post. Sonny had sent him the “Carolina Shout” record. He sprinted four miles to church and played it on the creaky phonograph, and in one listen, his entire world sharpened into focus. His piano-playing drought was over.
Late at night, exhausted from the fields, he’d sit at his secondhand piano and teach himself to play the tune. In no time, he could replicate James Johnson’s recording. But as he conjured the notes over and over, imprinting them on his brain, Breeze sensed a newer sound just beyond his fingertips, one he couldn’t grasp yet. And he knew that in Fallon, he never would.
When he decided he was good enough, Breeze booked a one-way ticket to New York City, wearing the clothes on his back. Nothing was keeping him in Fallon, an unholy hellscape that smote everyone he loved from the earth, carving out his insides and leaving him hollow. On the train ride out of town, he stared out the window as the dusty landscape got smaller and smaller, every passing minute putting more distance between himself and the plantation he’d worked and lived on his whole life. The plantation run by the people who’d owned his ancestors. The plantation where Big Ezra, Hazel, and Minnie Walker had, despite odds that had nothing to do with them, made a loving home. Shutting his eyes, he sent his family a silent promise to make them proud, to make the Walker name immortal.
In Manhattan, Breeze wasn’t sure of anything. Where would he live? Could he keep chickens there? Which subway would take him to the meatpacking job Sonny had fixed for him? He barely even understood northern accents (he’d actually departed the train in New Jersey, because the train announcer’s “Newark” sounded like New York). The city might swallow him whole, but first, he had one piece of business. To find tonight’s piano cutting contest and play the hell out of “Carolina Shout.”
The only truth Breeze Walker held was that he was a great jazz pianist. When he played, for those few minutes, his broken world slotted back together, like a jigsaw puzzle. But his confidence was unearned. Tonight, he wanted to prove it.
“You listening?” Sonny snapped his discolored, burn-scarred fingers in front of Breeze’s face. “Keep walking—we’re almost at the suit shop. We’re hitting the town tonight; you gotta look spiffy. Never know who you’ll see at the cabarets. Somebody’s plumber, Zora Hurston, my dentist, Mae West, Louis Armstrong, the dame who hawks collards on 143rd, all in the same joint!” Sonny plucked a rose from a bouquet outside of a deli, handed it to a swanky-looking lady, and hollered behind his shoulder, “Put it on my tab, James!”
Prohibition was currently keeping Sonny employed as a bagman. His job was to slip cops bags of cash in exchange for allowing liquor to lubricate the finer establishments in town. He and Breeze were raised the same way, living in identical tin-roof shacks with no electricity, running water, heat, or shoes. For Breeze, Sonny’s cosmopolitan persona was brand new, and it was both amusing and annoying.
“Does Mae West know that when you first moved up here, you tried to turn off an electric light by blowing on it?”
“You lie like a no-legged dog,” protested Sonny, looking around to make sure no one overheard. “I regret writing you all those letters.”
Sonny paused to tip his hat to a white cop and shake his hand. They clearly worked together. Breeze ducked his head instinctively, careful not to meet the cop’s eyes.