A Love Song for Ricki Wilde (26)

Without his family, he didn’t belong anywhere in the world. He was furious about the way they’d died. In terror. Who sets a church ablaze? What kind of people can do that and walk away feeling… right? That was what seized him with rage. Breeze knew that in the stories these people told, they were right. That fire was justified to them; it was entertainment. The sheriff’s wife had even taken photographs! Breeze heard they’d been passed around dinner parties at the finer Fallon County homes, until the postmaster ruined it with spilled gin.

Eight years later, the blaze was surely forgotten. That mob’s grandkids and their grandkids’ kids wouldn’t even know their forefathers were monsters. And Breeze knew that what you haven’t reckoned with, you’re doomed to repeat. America was a ghost story with no end.

But Breeze was also lucky. He had a gift. He was lucky to be discovered at the right speakeasy by the right people. To be a man with no wife or children depending on him—he just had endless time to tinker with the notes that would blanket his brain.

Breeze knew he was lucky when he talked to the chorus line understudies and learned about the overtime work they did to stay afloat. When he thought of their mothers, rising before the sun to walk in a grim, humiliating parade down Fifth Avenue in the 1850s and ’60s, calling out to the white women of the houses lining the block in hopes of being invited in for a day of cleaning, cooking, or babysitting. A modern selling block, to be sure.

My thoughts are a graveyard, he thought.

Sometimes, Breeze dreamed of drinking, smoking, or shooting up to forget. But he had no vices. He was too lucky to justify them. The least he could do to honor his fallen family was to feel their loss. To remember.

But Breeze didn’t tell Olive any of this. He was sad and angry—but not insane. Instead, he finished his seltzer and said gently, “Please take no offense, but our music was revolutionary before whites liked it, and it will be after.”

Olive’s eyes widened with surprise.

“Enough about me,” said Breeze with an affable grin. “Let’s talk about Eden Lounge.”

“Are you telling me how to do my job, Mr. Walker?” she asked with a combative spark.

“Me? Never. I can’t tell a writer what to write. I named a song ‘Hotcha Gotcha.’”

With a yelp of amusement, she continued jotting down notes and moved on to her next batch of questions.

A few minutes later, Breeze heard the BANG, BANG, BANG at the back-of-house door, and he jolted upright. Apologizing to Olive, he headed backstage in a flash. Winding past instrument cases, costume racks, and understudies smoking in huddles, he made it to the door, pushing it open against the brisk November winds.

It was Sonny. A gaunt, haunted figure with two black eyes, and the knee ripped from his trousers. No coat, no hat. He looked predictably ragged. But this time, he had shown up with something new: a mangy mud-colored terrier with eyes as hollow as his. He sat at Sonny’s worn shoes, looking miserable and panting erratically.

“Ezra. Breeze. Cuz. Help me, please. Just a dollar. Fifty cents.”

Breeze peered behind him to make sure no one could hear Sonny in this state. Everyone knew his cousin had turned into a dope fiend. Sonny was past caring what people thought, but Breeze always wanted to protect him.

Last year, Sonny had been caught necking with a white woman, parked in his new Model T Ford down in Brooklyn. Some Irishmen ran out of a bar with bats, bashing the car and then Sonny. But first, they made him take off his clothes. They left him naked, bloody, and humiliated in front of his woman and the cops, who threw him in jail. For a man like Sonny, the incident was akin to death. The attack hadn’t truly killed him, though, so heroin was the next best thing.

They wanna be us, Sonny had once said with faulty confidence. But Breeze knew different. Yeah, they want to dance, dress, and talk like us. But inhabit our skin? Nah.

Breeze had moved Sonny in for a time, but Sonny kept disappearing. One day, he never returned. But sometimes, he’d show up to Breeze’s gigs like this, begging. Breeze handed him five dollars from his billfold, the way he always did. His cousin grabbed it with his scarred right hand—the constant reminder of his status as the only survivor of the Fallon County church fire. “Survivor” was debatable. Yes, he’d been the only person to walk away from that fire, but the Sonny that Ezra knew from before had faded to an almost-unidentifiable cipher. Yet another family member lost.

In thanks, Sonny held the cash to his heart. Before he scuttled off, Breeze grabbed his shoulder.

“Hey, remember what you told me?” Breeze asked, his voice unexpectedly cracking. “Ain’t no place in America for a humble Negro. Remember who you used to be, Sonny. He’s still in there.”

Sonny chuckled sadly, most of his teeth missing. “He’s been humbled.”

And then he was gone.

Breeze stood there for what felt like an eternity. It wasn’t until he heard the low, hungry rumble by his feet that he realized Sonny’d left his dog behind.


An hour later, Breeze sat at the bar, fighting off a numbing melancholy and wondering what the hell he was going to do with a dog. The mutt hadn’t left his side since he’d tossed him some bacon from the kitchen.

Breeze didn’t believe in pets. It seemed unnatural to keep an animal inside the house, anthropomorphizing it. But then he looked down into the dog’s watery, soulful eyes and folded.