She had never seen anyone that dark. He was the color of a lonely street in the middle of the night. Almost indigo. He had a wide nose that became a bulb at the end, and large lips that curved to a fine point at the top. It was all Miriam could do not to kiss them. And his hair—Miriam stopped herself from running a hand through it. She could tell his hair was curly because even though it was cut short, waves slick with sheen glistened in the shop’s morning light.
Taking in the full measure of the man, Miriam felt something in her insides stir. He wore the same Marine Corps uniform that had been her father’s. Khaki shirt, left breast ablaze with ribbons detailing where he had been stationed, the medals he had received. Dark-green trousers, a cloth hat that folded into the tuck of a belt. Her mother still pressed her father’s old uniforms every few months or so. She’d catch her mother laying them all out on her sleigh bed and staring at them for hours, before putting them away again.
Miriam knew she should answer this young man, but for the first time in her life, she had lost the power of speech. She figured if she spoke, she’d only stutter out some half word. She sat and stared at him, slightly open-mouthed and blinking. She felt a deep blush start and spread to her fingertips.
“So,” the man said slow. He rocked back and forth on his heels, hands thrust in his pockets. “I’ve got to say, and I hope you don’t mind. You must hear this all the time. But you have the prettiest eyes. They’d give Miss Diana Ross a run for her money. Say, I’m new to Memphis. Well, Millington. I’m at the base out there. Just made first lieutenant. Sorry. I feel like I’m rambling. I talk too much, Mazz always says. Mazz—Mazzeo—Antonio Mazzeo. Jesus, I was just making bee sounds at you. Mazz. Mazz. He’s this friend of mine back on base. Say, what are you doing tomorrow? Saturday night? Sorry, you probably know tomorrow is Saturday. Don’t need me telling you. Anyway. A few of us are going to the Officers’ Club. It’s nice, I promise. And there’ll be other girls there. Sorry, other women. Girlfriends and wives. Not that I’m asking you to get married. Did I mention I talk too much? Say, is it always this hot down here? How you survive it?”
His shy smile, his nervous laughter, the way he ran his hands through the soft waves of his hair throughout his rambling put Miriam at ease. Perhaps, just maybe, Cupid had struck them down both.
Miriam straightened in her seat, squared her shoulders. Tried to conceal the long exhale from her quivering lips. She bit her lip. Lifted a page from her novel and dog-eared it. “You in Memphis now. No more EJ,” she said and rose from her seat. “The only white boy we listen to down here from Tupelo.”
She pushed open the small swing gate that contained her behind the counter. She made sure to sway her hips as she walked down the crowded aisles of the tiny record store. Made sure to brush against the man’s khaki sleeve ever so slightly as she did.
“Well,” she said, pausing, calling out over her shoulder. “Ain’t you coming?”
They spent the rest of Miriam’s shift rummaging through Elvis records, telling each other their life stories, sneaking shy glances, falling in love. Talking Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, they agreed how none of them, not a single one of those white boys, could write a sentence as good as Zora Neale Hurston.
He told her everything. How he had fled Chicago. Enlisted even to the surprise of his twin brother, Bird. But he had to leave that city. Had to. Bird, eventually, had understood. Both had been born the year of the bird flu pandemic of ’57 that claimed thousands. But not their mother. Marvel pushed her twin boys out into a frigid November night, coughing all the while from the virus. He told her of how he had risen in the Corps. Arrived from the accelerated officers’ program in Quantico, Virginia, to be stationed as a first lieutenant in Millington. Not a half-hour away. He had arrived in May to find Memphis in full bloom. Memphis in May reminded him of Coleridge’s ode to Xanadu—stately pleasure domes were massive plantation houses with wrap-around porches on every tier, and the majesty of the Mississippi River could put to shame any sacredness of the Alph. Magnolias were white with bloom and as fragrant as honeysuckle. The air was thick with green. In the evenings, no matter the day, he could smell barbecue roasting in warm smokers, and on Fridays, the countless church fish fries permeated the moist humid air, made it crackle. There was music. There was always music in Memphis. Old gramophones and Cadillacs blaring, and oval-shaped wooden home radios were always, always on and at full blast, and he heard voices that would shame the Archangel Gabriel—Big Mama Thornton, Furry Lewis, the long, immortal wail of Howlin’ Wolf. Jax noticed that niggas in Memphis strutted. Not that Black folk in Chicago didn’t, but Jax could only remember the fierce wind of his city, images of Black figures bundled in layers of down walking slanted against the brute force of the angry wind off Lake Michigan. Here, Memphis niggas waltzed down the street as if in tempo to the music that was as omnipresent as God. Black folk loving every second of their Blackness. At night, he would head to Beale Street with the other single officers, eyes wide with awe—all the Black streets held nothing but Black bodies. Beale was filled with Black folk drinking whiskey and laughing and loving in dark corners and singing and drawing switchblades and tuning guitars and chewing tobacco and dancing. Cotton was knee-high. Green fields were tilled in neat rows of cotton overflowing white. There were fields of the inedible fruit—the crop that had brought his ancestors and the ancestors of every other Black person he ever knew, to this country to pluck and to pick without a cent, without acknowledgment of their dignity for four hundred years. Now that he had arrived in the South, he told Miriam, he didn’t understand how anyone could ever leave it.
And Miriam told him everything, too: How she was helping to raise her baby sister, August—well, her half sister, technically, but her whole sister in every way that mattered. How her mother had turned militant in her quest for civil rights, for equality. She told him that if he loved Memphis, he would cherish Douglass, her North Memphis neighborhood. How their house—gorgeous, filled with antiques, and built by her own father—had turned into a haven for Black intellectuals, politicians, protestors. How, on a random Tuesday morning, Al Green himself had stopped by the house, and Miriam would never in her entire Black life forget how he and fourteen-year-old August banged away on those keys in the parlor. She told him about Miss Dawn, her quasi-grandmother—her leaning house, her sassy tone, her spells. Miriam told the young Marine in front of her that she had never been in love.
Miriam wasn’t sure when exactly she learned his name that afternoon. But she must have. Because she went to sleep that night, and his name was the prayer she recited. His name morphing into butterscotch, twirling, performing acrobatic pirouettes in her mouth: Jax. Jax. Jax.
* * *
—
The very next evening, Jax drove her to the Officers’ Club on base in Millington. After scouring both hers and her mother’s wardrobe, Miriam had chosen a red sequined shift dress with a low back and a high slit. She paired it with black kitten heels and a small black envelope purse. Her mother knew about the date and let her go, quite happily.
“Young folk should always be together. Lord knows, not a soul on this earth could have stopped me from meeting your daddy,” Hazel had said, helping Miriam sift through closets and chests and armoires for the perfect dress.