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.