Axeman's Jazz

9

A WHITE PINE building, three blocks from Bitter’s house, GROCERY/RIBS painted on its side. There’s a pay phone in a weedy lot out front. Across the street this morning, on the porch of a rickety row house, four old men guzzle Forties. In front of the store three b-boys with a boom box smoke blunts and give me a cocky once-over. LL Cool J is rapping about knocking you out. (Yeah, this white chick’s heard Cool J, I could tell the boys. I don’t live entirely on another planet.) Sausage sizzles inside; a wet, earthy smell rolls from the open doorway. Next to the phone, near a stack of rotting boxes, a rat pulls a shank bone into some shade.

I punch in my phone card code, then my friend Shirley’s number. She’s been feeding my fish and birds. I call her a friend, though I see her socially only at the happy hours after work (she’s just down the hall, in Social Services). It rarely occurs to me to invite my coworkers home for dinner. I’m not sure why. Shirley is high yellow, too, so I feel comfortable with her, though we’ve never schmoozed about skin.

She answers on the third ring and seems happy to hear my voice. No problem, she says, take a few extra days. I promise to write her a check for the additional food when I get back. Maybe in the next two weeks I can talk Bitter into seeing a doctor. Maybe I can get my name on the prison’s guest list. “How are Crockett and Bowie?” I ask.

“Such good birds. Crockett’s picked up a couple new words. My fault, I’m afraid. I did like you said, made myself at home, spent a little time with them. The other night, while they ate, I stayed and watched NYPD Blue. Today, Crockett’s going, ‘Scumbag. Skel.’ Sorry.”

I laugh, though this does bother me. A barrage of insults when I walk in the door?

“Telisha, I wanted to ask you … you know Dwayne Jefferson, don’t you? He said you were pals.”

The name stings. “Yes. Why?”

“He’s been calling me, asking me out. I think it turns him on, I was a finalist for the Cowboys cheerleading thing? I like him well enough, I guess, but there’s something … a kind of arrogance …”

“Stay away from him.” My own force shocks me.

“Really? What do you know?”

“Nothing, just … I agree with you. About the arrogance.” Do I lay it all out for her? What purpose would that serve? Can I trust her, or would the story get out, all over the mayor’s office? I’ve never had a white black woman. “Just be careful, Shirk I don’t think he’s a good guy.”

“Okay, thanks.” She’s disappointed.

She says she’s run through the Terra Fin flake food. I tell her to make things easy for herself and get some long-term feeding tablets for the aquarium. My voice wobbles, saying good-bye. It’s not Shirley’s fault — she asked an innocent question — but I’m angry at her for unsettling me.

“Say, fly lady, I’m amp over here,” one of the b-boys calls. “I ain’t gaffling you, babe, come on over now and check out my hard, honey bozack. It’s fiending for you. No shit, sugar.”

His posse cracks up. “Aw, get off the woman’s bra strap, G. She come backed up.”

“I just want her to lamp wit’ me.”

“Look to me like a Mickey T.”

I step through the weeds, watching for rats, annoyed at my thready jeans, which attract sticker burrs left and right, but grateful I didn’t put on shorts this morning, which might have amped the boys even more. Hide as much flesh as you can — a habit with me. Cool J’s rapping now about a “playette” with toe rings whose sexual prowess can turn a prince into a king. I cross the street, pause on a dirt path where a sidewalk should be, and pluck the thorns from my pants. At the happy hours with Shirley and others from work, in Fuddruckers or Fridays or Chilis, rock-and-roll muzak usually plays, but occasionally a rap tune will jump through the speakers. “You ever really listen to this shit, the hardcore stuff?” a mayor’s aide asked the table one evening. “It’s ‘mothafucka mothafucka mothafucka.’ That’s it.”

“Maybe they’ll all kill themselves and save us the trouble,” said a buddy of his.

The men on the porch are doing a pretty good job, right now, of erasing themselves. The yard is littered with drained malt liquor cans, blue as diamonds in the sunlight. The old scarecrow from the gut bucket is with them, swaying on the balls of his feet, eyes closed, grinning at the secrets in his head.

I cut through several more overgrown fields, back to Bitter’s. Compared with Dallas, Houston is magnificently lush. Willows, pines, magnolias. Big D is mostly parking lots now, especially downtown, where all-day parking can cost as little as seventy-five cents, so many lots are competing — a consequence of the development addiction that kicked in during the eighties and hasn’t let up since. I recall shopping one day, about six years ago, and realizing how much Dallas felt like Disneyland now, standardized and gaudy, not a place where real people lived and worked (though amazingly we did work there, stuffed into our power-lunch costumes — like so many smiling mice).

Bitter’s not home — just a note saying, “Errands.” I gather my laundry, pass through the kitchen to the back porch pantry and Bitter’s old washer. Maybe I should buy a couple new T-shirts to tide me over, the next ten days or so. I check Bitter’s room, to see if he’s left any dirty clothes. A pair of boxers, socks, and a shirt. I snatch them up, glimpse by his bed, in a squatty bookshelf, half a dozen paperbacks: titles and authors I’ve never seen. Donald Goines, Iceberg Slim. Trick Baby. Pimp: The Story of My Life. Bookplates stiffen the back covers: “Property of Buck Jackson,” the barber who Bitter said used to run a lending library out of his shop. The books look silly, but I stand for a minute absorbing their fusty smell, the scent of all the years I lost when I should have been here, reading the same trash Uncle read, listening to his music, eating his bad fried food.

On the top shelf of his open closet, a familiar white shape: one of Mama’s quilts. My heartbeat quickens. I pull it down. It’s fusty, too, a cloud of mothballs and lint. I never learned the patterns, though I remember Mama talking about Log Cabins, Bow Ties, Shooflies. On this one, uneven lines dodge through rough squares, triangles tipple over rows of heavy brown knots. The cotton backing is soft and cool.

“Follow the gourd …” She used to sing to me as she stuffed thick batting between fabric layers. I’d be sitting at her feet in Bitter’s kitchen, watching. How did it go? “The river’s bank” something something. “Dead trees …” I’ve lost it. I hummed the tune as she sang, rocking on the hardwood floor, delighting in the winglike movements of her hands, fluttering across jagged strips of brown, green, gold. “‘Nother river on the other side …”

Later, in my teens, I felt ashamed of her work, its ripply lines and apparently random designs; embarrassed when company came and saw the quilts curled across the couch. I felt her amateurishness would reflect badly on me. In Dale Licht’s house she sewed in a tiny room just off the kitchen overlooking her backyard flower garden, azaleas and purple irises. When I’d get home from school and rummage through the fridge for string cheese, pickles, or strawberries, she’d call to me from that sunny little room, ask me to come sit with her as she snipped thread or appliquéd beads to raffia cloth. Usually I refused, mumbling, “Homework.” When I did linger, I was struck by how much her hands had slowed over the years, how tough it was for her to tie a simple knot. Still, she worked with patience, humming peacefully, and occasionally I’d feel pleasure in watching her bring something out of nothing, a magic as great as the spells Bitter extolled.

I sit on his bed now with the quilt across my knees, hoping to catch Mama’s smell in the stitches, adding small tears to the patchwork.

Bitter’s still not back. Probably he’s doing what he always does when I’m not around, buying food, hanging out with his friends, living his life, but his health’s got me so flummoxed, his every absence feels chancy. I fold the clean clothes, sweep and dust, straighten the sofa. The Angela Davis Reader sits, heat-curled, on the coffee table. I remember Reggie mentioning the other night he had meetings each morning this week, “lovefests with potential donors,” but he’d be in his office at the Row Houses in the afternoons. In a couple of hours, then, I’ll return his damn book to him.

I fix a cup of tea, then stroll past the Magnolia Blossom, along a low stone wall where Ariyeh and I used to capture frogs after rain. I recall this neighborhood, in the early seventies, as lazy and quiet, buzzing with cicadas, the low purring of mourning doves, mockingbirds’ sneers. Doors remained open, always, offering odors of bacon and eggs, or ribs and potatoes in the evening; through them, you’d glimpse Bruce Lee posters on living room walls, platform shoes lined up in long hallways, people in dashikis sitting on the floor bobbing their heads to Stevie Wonder, Curtis Mayfield, or the hi hat hiss of Isaac Hayes’s “Shaft.” Now, every other door is boarded up, weeds choke windows. The air trembles to hip-hop.

Am I romanticizing, or were men more polite back then? They’d lean over and spit in the street gutters instead of directly on the sidewalk where people had to step. They’d look you in the eye and say hello. “Hi there, sister,” or “A salaam alaikum.”

But then, there were those, like the b-boys this morning — “Hey, big legs!” “Boo-tay!‘ “Look to me like she with the itty-bitty titty committee.” “Well fuck you, bitch, won’t talk to me. You ain’t shit, nohow.” It is easy — too easy, of course — to airbrush the past. Did Mama ever look back with longing, even for a moment? Did she ever regret stealing away? Worry about losing the accuracy of her memories?

The propped-up Caddy down the street, rusting on cinder blocks, is one of a handful of altars for preachers of the dozens. You ain’t got game, Lame, watch me, watch me work. I went to your house to ask for money, your mama rip off her drawers, say, “Fuck me, honey.”

Your mama eat shit.

Your mama eat dogyummies.

Word!

Some of the boys wear wool caps and hooded sweatshirts, despite the late-morning broil, or shuffle about in heavy winter boots. They wear dungaree jackets turned inside out. Others high-style it in black and silver L.A. Raiders shirts, Kangor caps, and Tommy Hilfiger jeans — which nearly slide off their butts. Even from a distance, their capped teeth gleam in the sun; knuckle rings, neck chains sizzle and flash. These are the fellows missing from Etta’s on Sunday nights.

Every other corner’s got a clocker with a beeper, every vacant lot a lost soul ready to beam up to Scotty. The old winos, the King Cobras I remember trying to avoid as a girl, seem quaint and harmless next to the freebasers and skeezers screaming to themselves, weaving through fields of broken glass. As I turn back toward Bitter’s, a lanky kid in Kani’s and Tims stumbles into me out of the boneyard, marble-eyed, drooling, haranguing the trees. Our collision knocks the cup from my hand, and it shatters on the wall.

“Miss Thang!” I turn to see a Beamer take the corner. The man Reggie called Rue Morgue. “Well well. We out cool chilling. You with that, babe?”

“Excuse me,” I mumble, stepping around the car. It tails me. Rue waves and grins, hanging out the passenger window. An insignia on his baseball cap shows a guy caught in crosshairs. “Come chill wit’ us, aight?”

I keep my head down. I remember overhearing a colleague of mine in Social Services say one morning, to a bruised young girl, “There’s no type of woman who gets hit. We could all get hit, okay?”

Trailing us, the lanky kid calls, “Yo! Right chere!”

Rue laughs at him. “Yeah? And how I know you ain’t some knocko, G?”

“Come on, man, look at me.” He holds out a twenty dollar bill.

“Fucking pipehead. Go change it for singles. We meet you ‘round the corner in five.”

The kid ambles off. The driver mutters something to the Man in Charge. “Yeah yeah, aight,” Rue says, mock-serious. “We got mo’ business now,” he tells me. “My crew is in effect. But later, cakes, hm?” He aims a gun-barrel finger my way. “Maybe we knock boots, Jiggy. Lay us some pipe.” He cackles. The driver glides them down the street.

On my car radio, a woman says Houston has surpassed L.A. as the nation’s smog capital. A caller says, “I agree with Governor Bush. It’s not that I’m against clean air. I just don’t think the federales should tell Texans what to do with their cars.”

I park next to an abandoned taco stand and a boxing gym rumbling with youthful energy. My hands have been trembling ever since the Beamer. Reggie’s office is open, but no one’s around. He’s got a new picture on his wall: an Emerge magazine sketch — Clarence Thomas as a lawn jockey. The place smells of tuna fish and potato salad. A desk fan stirs warm air.

A hip-hop groove drills through the back wall, from Natalie’s apartment. In the open doorway, her boy, Michael, in a red Houston Rockets jersey, gyres and slashes the sunlight — Listen up, suckers! I step outside. He sees me and stops. “What’s the haps?” he says, looking braver than he sounds.

“Reggie around?”

“Hang. He be here. Holding a meet for the ‘hood.”

“Looks like you’re helping him get organized.”

“Yeah. He axed me to grab him some records — wantsa talk up the talk. You cruising or what? I seen you here before.”

“I’m Ariyeh’s cousin.”

“That right?” He looks skeptical. He turns back inside and stacks CDs: Puff Daddy, Low G, Rasheed.

“Your mom?”

“Down at the U. Economics class.”

“Tupac?” I ask, a wild guess, nodding at his boom box.

“Wu-Tang Clan,” he sneers, but his face perks up. “You like this shit?”

“Sure.”

“A ‘bout it ‘bout it chick, eh? You a wigger? Flipping the script?”

“What do you mean?”

“White person wantsa be a niggah, know’m say’n?”

I laugh. “Show me. Who do you like?”

“All right. Really?”

“Really.”

Seems he’s a young performer, waiting for an audience, or maybe he’s just happy to have someone listen to him talk about anything. “Here it is, then. In all the o-fficial talk, in the papers and shit, ‘Fifth Ward’ is what they say when they want to say ‘niggah’ ‘thout really saying it,” he says, lowering his voice like a DJ. “So these here the original voices of Fifth Ward, Texas: Bushwick Bill, Scarface, Willie D — the Geto Boys.”

For a year, Willie D and Scarface had a falling-out, he tells me — Willie’s name shit in Southside, and a few niggahs died — but things are cool again, and the music’s as dope as ever. He plays me some cuts on the boom box: “Mind of a Lunatic,” “No Nuts No Glory,” “Murder after Midnight.” Fifth Ward, Texas.

“Yeah,” Michael says, watching my face. “This ain’t no Cristal-sipping, Versace-wearing shit. Boys keeping it real.”

As I listen I realize, more forcefully than before, that I’m stuck in the early seventies: civil rights / street agitation / black is beautiful: Uncle Bitter’s world. Reggie is right — I feel it now in my gut. The world has moved beyond the mere low-down of the blues and into a bloody mess. Crack-capitalism rules the streets, not protest marches. Needles, not Ripple. I glance at Michael. Kids like him don’t expect to live past twenty-five. I think of the boys disappearing from Ariyeh’s school … a sacrifice of children, forfeiture of the future, but why?…

Suddenly, Bushwick is dwarfed by a louder beat from the street. Michael runs to the door. “Motherfucker,” he says. Over his shoulder I glimpse the Beamer.

“Little rag! Little bitch-boy! You got that twinkie for me yet?”

“Fuck you, motherfucker! You dealing with a niggah that’s greater than you!”

Rue Morgue removes his baseball cap. He’s got a wide bald head. Shades, small mouth. He doesn’t smile. “Got a body bag waiting for you, little rag.” He waves to me. “Miss Ann! You everywhere, boogee. I’s thinking you just a tourist, enjoying our fine vacation grounds. You living here now?”

“Michael, come back inside.”

“Wants to hang with a Big Willie, Miss Thang? See how it’s done? I’m your man. Come on over here, hm?” My palm trembles on Michael’s shoulder. He shrugs me away.

“Come on, baby, slide on over here now.”

“No, thank you.”

“Damn, she a polite dime piece,” the driver says. Rue coos, “I know you want it, sugar.”

Michael’s shivering with fury. Just as I’m certain he’s about to make a move, the car spins away. “I be looking for you, Ann! You too, little rag! The Lord gon’ be harvesting you soon.”

I turn. Reggie’s standing, arms crossed, in front of his office. He offers me a grim smile, but says only, “Michael, you got those records for me? The meeting’s about to start.”

We move slowly, as if a spell has been snapped. Rue’s expression, it occurs to me, was like the shut-in boy’s years ago, gazing at me as if he knew me better than I did …

Boys Michael’s age and a few years older gather in Reggie’s office. They’re wearing basketball jerseys and colorful, roomy shorts. One’s T-shirt reads, “The bitch set me up.” Quo Vadis and fade haircuts, old-fashioned baldie beans. Some of the boys sip noisily from 7-Eleven cups or sports drink bottles. Everyone defers to the two or three kids with knuckle rings.

Reggie’s finishing up some business with a man in a gray suit, slender and tall, wearing a small silver earring. Dark. Patient smile. “Amazing stuff out there,” he tells Reggie. “The other day I clicked onto a site about the brain — its reactions to skin color. Believe it or not, some researchers have found that glucose activity kicks in heavily, in a certain part of the brain, whenever a person sees someone of a different race.”

“So … we’re hard-wired for hate?”

The man grins. “Well, it’s the kind of subject your boys here can debate once they’re on-line.”

“Right. I’m sorry I’ve got this meeting here — ”

“I need to run, anyway. I’ll hit you back later.”

“See you over at the gallery tonight? We’ll talk more then?”

“You got it.” They shake hands. The man steps out the door.

Reggie swigs water from a plastic bottle. The boys are getting settled, laughing loudly in groups. I pull Angela Davis from my purse. My hands are jittery. “You disagree with Sister Davis?” Reggie says. He screws the cap onto his bottle, which hisses and pops.

“‘The myth of the black rapist has been conjured up when recurrent waves of terror against the black community required a convincing explanation’?”

“Just thought you’d be interested.”

“So any time a black man is accused of assault, the accuser is ‘perpetuating a racial stereotype’?”

“She’s a provocative writer, isn’t she?”

“Talk about stereotyped — ”

“I’ve got a meeting here.” He taps the bottle on his knee. “Stick around.”

“No thanks.” I brush a hand across my eyes.

“Really. Hang for a while.” Before I can slip away, he claps his hands and calls the meeting to order. The boys sit still, their faces wide with admiration, animation, curiosity. The neighborhood can’t afford to lose them, I think, the way it lost me, or I lost hold of it…

Reggie tells Michael to play a record; Michael punches a button on the boom box. The Geto Boys rap about white cops in coffins. “These your homies, right?” Reggie says, smiling at the boys.

“You got it, you got it.”

“Keeping it real.”

“Word, man.”

They juke their shoulders, dip their heads.

“But see, I listen this shit,” Reggie says, “and — whether it’s just words or not — what I hear is a black man telling other brothers they got to eighty-six each other. Prove who’s king.”

“Tha’s the way it is, G. Get the niggah ‘fore he get you.”

“Ever hear of minstrel shows? ‘Jasper Jack’? ‘Zip Coon’?” Reggie asks. “You think Scarface something new?”

The boys look confused.

“He the same ol’ imbecile Negro been entertaining white folks for centuries. ‘Cause you know who’s buying these records? I know y’all ain’t losing money on them. You copping them from the stores.”

Uneasy grins.

“It’s the white kids in the ‘burbs buying this shit. It’s like, ‘It’s cool to be black,’ but underneath that, it’s ‘Look at that imbecile Negro dance. Entertain me, boy’ Stone, you ain’t with that?” He points to a tall, bald boy in the back of the room who looks at the floor, scratches his thigh. “Yeah, but … yeah, but …”

“Speak up, Stone. You ain’t no dumb nigger, are you?”

“Fuck, no.”

“Then talk like a man.”

The boy stiffens his back. “Reggie, man, Scarface talking the talk. What it’s like on the street. Not in no suburb.”

“What it’s like, or what some E-light record producer on his fat Beverly Hills ass tells you it’s like?”

I’m with the boys on this one. How many Rue Morgues are out there cruising right now?

“What sells in the ‘burbs is the thrill of black danger. White kids thinking they getting close to something scary, something real, just by listening to the music, without having to risk anything.” He glances at me, then paces the room. “You think the smart record producers don’t know that? You think Scarface out thugging all the time? Hell, he probably in some swank business office somewhere, in a strategy session, planning his next marketing campaign.”

Michael crouches by the boom box, tight-lipped and still.

“Besides, you think you learning street life from these tunes? What you learning? Guns kill people? That’s news?”

Despite my tiff with him, it’s a pleasure watching a man take intellectual responsibility in front of other males, instead of playing dumb just to hang with the crowd. That’s an act I’ve seen all too often in the mayor’s office.

“But yo, Reggie, we valid when we respected.”

“That’s wack, guys. Real messed up.”

“You was living large. You did bids.”

“That I did, slick. And when I got out I was a fucking hero.”

“Word.”

“You’da thought I’d won an Academy Award. But I’m telling you, man, a felony rap, you done. Ass out. I’m lucky I savvied in time. Turn up the volume, flash your rings, you might get noticed for a while. But it’s like shooting from the outside without a good inside game. Pretty soon, the world’ll figure your ass out and shut you down. You got no extra moves, you nailed. And Wilson, what’s this shit?” He plucks a green sports drink bottle from a pudgy boy’s grip, whips off the top, and dumps a slushy, sour apple-smelling mixture onto the floor. “Tequila? Gin-and-something? You freeze it in the morning, let it melt all day till it’s good and lethal? Who you think you fooling? You want to kill yourself, boy? That what you after?”

“Sorry, Reggie.”

“You’re going to clean up my floor when we’re done here.” He tosses the bottle onto the slush.

Michael stands up and jams his hands into his pockets. “Reggie, I thought you liked rap, man.”

“I like it fine. All I’m saying is, it’s just music, packaged to make a profit. It ain’t a way of life, all right?”

The boys mumble.

“Let me leave you with this. What’s gonna happen when all these white kids, these image chameleons, lose their hip-hop jones and go to work for Merrill Lynch, hm? Where you gonna be? You down with that? Stone? You down?”

“Yeah. Fuck yeah. I’m down wit’ that.”

“All right, then.” Reggie tells them they’ll meet again next week to learn why Clyde Drexler is the exception that proves the rule.

“What rule?” Stone asks.

“Hoops ain’t your way out the ‘hood.”

“Shit, G, you spoiling all our fun.”

“Better find a new jones,” Reggie says, checking his watch. “Wilson, mop’s in the closet over there.”

“Aw, Reggie — ”

“Go get it, now. And don’t bring that shit into my house no more.” To me he says, “Telisha, I’ve got another meeting in half an hour, downtown. Sorry. I’m afraid I haven’t organized my afternoon very well. Here’s what I’m thinking. Come to this gallery tonight.” He hands me a card. Brazos Fine Art. “We’ll discuss Sister Davis.”

“Wait — ”

“It’s a fund-raising party for the Row Houses. A few of our regular donors — ”

“I don’t think so, Reggie. Do your business, and — ”

“Ariyeh will be there. Wine and cheese, very relaxed.” He chugs water from his bottle. “And I promise I’ll give you a chance to tell me what a prick I am. Seven o’clock. Check you then.”

“Reggie — ”

“Seven. Ariyeh’ll be glad to see you.” A quick wave and he’s gone. Making me wait because he can. Arrogant bastard. But I have to smile. He’s smooth.

I find the keys in my purse. Several of the boys are bouncing and passing a basketball outside, laughing and taunting one another. I’m nervous, watching them scatter down the street. What’s waiting for them just around the corner? Behind Reggie’s desk, beneath the list of donors on the wall, Michael, sullen, packs away his tunes.

Bitter and his friend Grady sit in the grass in front of the mud-dauber shack, picking dandelions. Grady looks like he’s on a short furlough from the boneyard and is due back any minute.

“Hi,” I say.

“Hangover,” Grady says and plucks a flower. Bitter nods hello. With a kitchen knife he slices a catfish on the ground. He sets the knife down, dribbles fish blood on a pile of petals and stems, then rolls them into a ball in his hands. Some kind of gris-gris for the shakes? He doesn’t explain and I don’t bother asking.

I tell him I’ll be eating out tonight, meeting Ariyeh and Reggie. Can I bring him anything?

“We be fine. Mosey down the block here after while, get some chicken or something.”

“I washed and folded your clothes.”

“Saw that. Thank you, Seam.”

“I noticed you’ve got one of Mama’s old quilts.”

“Got two or three of ‘em somewheres in the house.”

“Do you remember the song she used to sing while she sewed? Something about ‘Follow the gourd’? I’ve been trying to recall it.”

He grins. “Sure,” he says and begins:

“That’s it!” I say. Grady sways in the grass, humming.

Grady grips his belly. “Whoa now,” Uncle says and squeezes his buddy’s arm. He picks up the fish, shakes blood from a gash beneath its gills. With narrowed eyes he signals me to go.

I nod. “Thank you for the song,” I say. “You brought her back to me there for a minute.”

He looks like he might cry. “Say hi to Ariyeh. Oh, Seam — you got some kinda ‘fficial-looking letter. Come today.”

“Yeah?”

“Kitchen table.”

“Thanks.”

It’s official, all right: Texas Department of Corrections. From the man I’d talked to on the phone. I’d told him I worked for Dallas’s mayor, and that seems to have done the trick. He informs me that Elias Woods has granted me a visit and I should call the prison to set up an appointment. No pencil, paper, tape recorders, or cameras. “TDC rules prohibit inmates from receiving any gifts.” Fine and dandy, I think, amazed at how easy this was. What did Uncle say about a waiting list? Mr. Woods must not get many guests.

I wash up and change: plum-colored skirt, light yellow blouse. My job requires a few gallery-hopping outfits, and it’s become a habit with me to pack them whenever I travel. When I leave the house, Bitter is rocking Grady on the lawn, his hands around the fellow’s arms. “You gointer be fine,” he’s saying. “Let it go. Just let it all go.”

The Brazos Fine Art Gallery sits between a rare book dealer and a Guatemalan weaving shop on Bissonnet Street just down the block from the Contemporary Arts Museum, whose sleek metallic walls reflect the setting pink sunlight. Caddies and Beamers crowd the small parking lot. The cars are newer and cleaner than the ones in Freedmen’s Town, but their purpose is the same, and I’m coming to recognize it has more to do with proclaiming power and prestige than with providing simple transportation. Claiming the highest ground of all, a bumper sticker on a gold LeBaron says, COMES THE RAPTURE/YOU CAN HAVE THIS CAR.

Tinted green windows frame the gallery’s narrow front door. Red brick, white wooden trim. Inside, an aggressive odor of floor wax and blue cheese, grapes, expensive sweet perfume. A roomful of buppies. After a few days in Freedmen’s Town, among the Nikes and back-ass-ward baseball caps, the filthy shoes and shirts, it’s a shock to see blacks decked out in fine silk dresses and pearls, Ralph Lauren polo pants, and one or two wildly red and yellow Rush Limbaugh ties. I scold myself for typecasting my own folks.

The man serving wine has the darkest skin in the room. Some things don’t change. I take a glass of merlot and squeeze into a corner between a pair of sharp metal sculptures. I don’t see Reggie or Ariyeh, but the room is packed and I don’t have the gumption yet to push through milling bodies. Thin fluorescent tubes — red, yellow, white, and blue — line the walls, spotlighting the ceiling, drawing it closer to the eye. A posted statement by the door says the tube sculpture is by Dan Flavin, a noted Minimalist who worked with mass-produced industrial materials to question the primacy of the arrist’s hand and to challenge traditional notions of art. I think of Kwako’s beer can birds and car bumper serpents, improvised using mass-produced materials, not to make a “statement,” but because that’s all he can afford to use. I wonder how this crowd feels about the art at the Row Houses — primitive, I’m sure, by the gallery’s standards. Quaint and naïve. But presumably these are a few of Reggie’s donors, Houston’s black upper class. They must have seen where their money goes.

A glimpse of Ariyeh’s pretty smile. She’s in the back, next to a framed abstraction, green and white. Her bright blue dress nicely complements the painting. Reggie, beside her, appears to be displaying Natalie as though she were a rare carving. Her grin wavers, and her whole body lunges awkwardly whenever she reaches to shake someone’s hand. It will take me a few minutes to wend my way to them; from a table I snatch a cracker with some cheese, then begin my slide through the press of buttocks and backs, shoulders and arms.

“… victimization,” someone behind me insists. “In the magazines, the movies. When’s the last time you saw a well-off black man in the media or on the news — aside from Bill Cosby or Michael Jordan?”

“Telling you, man, the camera loves black ‘pathology.’”

I slip by a big bearded man, accidentally smearing brie on his coat. He doesn’t notice and I can’t turn around, now, to tell him. I move on.

“… things’ll play if Dubya makes it to Pennsylvania Avenue?”

“Seems to me he’s been pretty fair on race.”

“He’s been absent on race.”

“Hey, ‘absent’ is fair, in my book.”

“I don’t know. He likes having his picture taken eating tacos. That shows facial awareness.”

Laughter. I clutch my cup.

“… blab and blab all you want about the legacy of colonialism in Africa, but I’m sorry, you do «oí kill babies …”

“… no, to me, Art is Romare Bearden …”

“… afraid of the stock market? Why? You know what a million dollars is? It’s just a stack of pennies like your grandma used to save …”

“God bless the child that’s got his own.”

“No problem, kissing ass. That’s why God invented mouthwash!”

“T, glad you could make it.” Ariyeh gives me a hug. Natalie nods hello. Reggie is deep in conversation with the tall, slender man I saw at the Row Houses today. “… on the Internet you have no skin,” Reggie insists, punching the air for emphasis. He bumps the painting.

“Precisely. You can be whoever you want without fear of prejudice.”

“So. Just so I’m straight on this. Six computers plus all the software — ”

“Whatever you need. And we can cover the initial hookup with AOL. Now, for us … should you make the arrangements, or shall I talk to her?”

For the first time since I’ve met him, Reggie seems indecisive. He crosses his arms. The man turns to me. “Rufus Bowen,” he says, extending a hand.

“Telisha is Ariyeh’s cousin,” Reggie says.

“Is that right?”

“A city planner in Dallas.”

“Well now. Tell me. Is it too late to save Houston?”

“No, no …”

He laughs. “I run a small Internet firm here in town. Civic health is of great concern to me. What’s your guiding principle as a planner? The New Urbanism? Village neighborhoods?”

Another smooth bastard. Gracious and poised. But he appears to offer a rare depth of attention that asks for a serious answer. Or maybe I just like rising to the challenge. I begin, slowly, “Aristotle? He said, ‘It’s most satisfactory to see any object whole, at a single glance, so that its unity can be understood.’ I agree. I favor buildings on a human scale.”

Rufus Bowen smiles. “Understanding unity. A good rule for sizing up people as well, would you say?” The crowd nudges Natalie closer to us; Bowen reaches past me to shake her hand. “I’m sorry, please excuse us for a moment,” he tells me and pulls her aside. She looks like a doe in klieg lights. I want to tell Reggie, Get her out of here. He touches my shoulder. “So. I was telling Ariyeh about your little flare-up.”

I take my eyes from Bowen. “It wasn’t a flare-up.”

“I don’t blame you, honey,” Ariyeh says. “I would have felt the same. I used to admire Angela Davis, but she’s gotten too extreme.”

“Look, I’m sorry I upset you. I don’t know what happened between you and your colleague, all right?” Reggie says. “I’m not making any judgments. I was just using Angela to point out that ‘black man’ and ‘rape’ are paper and fire — ”

I drain my wine. “Excuse me, Ariyeh, but I’ve got to say it. You are a prick,” I tell him. “You think I don’t know about racism — ”

“Hold on now — ”

“—and lynching? What do you think brought me back here, hm?”

“Bravo, honey.” Ariyeh links her arm in his, teasing him with a grin. Reggie shrugs, an exaggerated surrender. “Okay, okay. But I got you to think, didn’t I?”

“Jesus, Reggie.”

“I’m quite capable of thinking on my own,” I say.

“I see that. I’m glad.”

“What’s going on over here?” Ariyeh asks him.

Reggie glances at Natalie and Bowen. “A little discussion.”

“She doesn’t look pleased.”

To say the least. Her eyes flick back and forth but her jaw is fixed, puffing her cheeks. Her shoulders droop. The man looks taller in her presence, all upper arms and chest: an enormous held breath, ready to blow down the room. He’s Reggie without the attitude, Dwayne with Visa Gold, Rue Morgue on a higher evolutionary scale. Whatever arrangement is being made, a woman this uncertain has no business next to a man so assured. The power imbalance is as palpable as the cheese smell in the room. Nothing abstract here: hunter and prey, stark and real as hell. Is this how I looked in Dwayne’s cramped car, with his hands all over my tits? Is this how I carry my own vulnerability, an invitation like a bared neck? I turn away.

Ariyeh tells me this little soiree will wind up soon; she and Reggie and a few of the donors he’s working will then head over to Blind Billy’s, a blues joint near the Ragin’ Cajun. “Come along. You and I can relax and chat.”

Bowen squeezes Natalie’s arm, then swivels and shakes Reggie’s hand. “I’ll be in touch,” he says. He tells Ariyeh he was charmed to meet her. “Human scale.” He winks at me. “I’ll remember that.” Then he saunters through the crowd and out the door, earring flashing. Natalie slumps against the wall — hungering, I’ll wager, for Kibbles and Bits.

“You understand, you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do,” Reggie tells her.

“It’s a job, I guess.” She primps her hair and wipes some sweat from her chin. “Anyways. I gotta go pick up my daughter now. The babysitter needs to get home.”

“Sure, sure.” Reggie fishes in his pocket.

“It’s all right. I got bus fare.”

We walk her to the door. The gathering is thinning, but still loud. “… let’s face it, the whole notion of prisoner rehabilitation is completely outdated …”

“… culture of narcissism …”

“… old Saturday Night Live skit? White crime: guy goes to work, shoots a dozen people, then himself. Black crime: guy runs from a liquor store with a six pack, trips, gets snatched by the cops.”

In the doorway, Reggie kisses Natalie’s cheek. “We’ll figure it all out tomorrow, okay?” A bright Metro stops behind her, its doors sighing open. “Sleep well.” She nods.

Then, while Ariyeh and I wait outside, he plays the room one last time, pumping hands, smiling, laughing, patting backs. “He’s good,” I say.

“Yes.” Ariyeh rubs her eyes. “Too good. I don’t like the looks of this Bowen fellow.”

“It’s really impressive, the way he moves between worlds. Comfy with the money in there, whereas this afternoon he was getting down with the neighborhood boys.”

“He certainly doesn’t lack opinions, does he? I’m sorry about that book business. Sorry I ever mentioned — ”

I wave it off. I’m about to ask after the vanished schoolchildten when Reggie shows up saying he’s ready. An irresistible energy gust. Ariyeh tosses the rest of her wine, and I follow Reggie’s Honda down the street.

Blind Billy’s green wooden walls are lined with black-and-white photos from the thirties, forties, and fifties: KCOH, Houston’s only all-black radio station, now defunct. The DJs, King Bee, Daddy Deepthroat, Mister El Toro, in suits and ties behind long boom mikes, grip fresh-pressed 45s — “race records” before they were labeled “rhythm and blues.” Emancipation Park, Shady’s Playhouse, Club Ebony, and the El Dorado: places from which the station broadcast during June-teenth celebrations.

The long-gone DJs, encased behind glass, are among the few black faces in the place, and Blind Billy’s is a far cry from Club Ebony. The room is vast, with a dance floor, stage, and round plastic tables. Two hundred, three hundred people, young lawyers, investment advisors — well-educated, on-the-make professionals, the kind who pop in and out of the mayor’s office. Hart, Shaffner & Marx on his second pint of Guinness flirting with dainty, martini-soaked Talbot’s.

Signs for Route 66, Texaco filling stations, hand soaps, and seductive colognes — the signs are carefully tarnished and pleasingly scratched so as to appear old and authentic. The room smells stale and sweaty, but sweetly so, a mix of White Shoulders and organic shampoos.

The band, piano and brass, six lanky black men in gray suits, is tightly in synch: three-chord blues with no rough edges, measured, leveled, buzz-sawed to boring perfection. Between songs, the singer, Quo Vadis in wraparound shades, tries to hype the crowd. “And they say the blues is dead in Houston! Lemme tell you, tonight we all the way live!” But his voice is weary, his stage gestures lazy. The audience seems pleased, anyway, clapping, whistling, stomping.

Ariyeh quarrels with Reggie at our corner table. Seems Rufus Bowen will provide Reggie with computers if Natalie will work for him as a gofer/hostess, entertaining his out-of-town clients. “It’s not right, and you know it,” Ariyeh says, stirring her Tom Collins with a lacquered fingernail. “She’s going to school, raising her kids — ”

“A job right now won’t hurt her. When her year at the Row Houses is up, she’ll need someplace to go.”

“A year from now. Why rush it? I thought the whole idea was to give a young mother a break, some breathing space — anyway, anyway, why Natalie? Who is this guy?”

“He’s a perfectly legitimate businessman, and one of the few black CEOs in the city. I don’t know — when he dropped by the other day, he took a shine to Natalie. Which, I have to tell you, I count as a personal success. She’s really turned herself around since coming to us. It’s not like he’s forcing her to prostitute herself or anything — ”

“You’re sure about that?”

“Of course I am. He just wants her to keep some people company, escort them to restaurants, concerts … this could be a good, long-term thing for her, part of her recovery. He sees her potential. And he asked, honey. He doesn’t need our permission. Natalie’s an adult. But he asked. He wouldn’t dream of interfering with our program.”

“Since when did the Row Houses become a vocational school for computer training? You said the project was about restoring neighborhood pride — ”

“Exactly, sugar! And pride begins with education.”

Ariyeh shakes her head, sips her drink.

Reggie turns to me. “You gonna lecture me, too? Another dispatch from the mayor?”

I spread my hands.

“Yeah, but you thinking it.” He leans over and kisses Ariyeh’s cheek. “I gotta go sell myself to these wallets now.” He nods at a nearby table, where five or six men from the gallery laugh and pass around pitchers of Bud. “You may not like cutting deals, baby, but there’s honor in it if the goal is noble.”

“I know that, Reggie.”

“You used to be proud of me.”

She strokes his face. “I still am, sweetie. But I worry about Natalie.”

“So do I. I won’t let anything happen to her. Promise.”

“Go schmooze.”

“I love you, baby.”

“Go, go.” She smiles.

I reach over and squeeze her arm, the way I did when we were girls and Bitter had scared us with the Needle Men. We listen to the music, not speaking. She looks tired, and I don’t want to trouble her with questions about school or the missing kids. I want her to be able to depend on me, the way I’m counting on her, a self-possessed young woman, a confident, successful black woman who can show me how to be.

There again: race. Always, and ever, race. How sick I am of it! Even now, the frat boys at the next table eye me up and down. They don’t know what to make of me. Am I white enough for you, frat boy? Look close, Charley, do you see a hint of yellow, the shadow of a shadow, a leaf-tip turning in early fall? Do you imagine me naked? What do you think? Do you suppose my nipples look more chocolate than strawberry? Do you think I don’t know you, don’t despise you, don’t want you?

“Hey, honey.” Ariyeh pries her hand from mine. “Not so hard.”

We order another round of drinks. The band takes a break, and when they return I’m surprised to see big Earl joining them onstage. Tonight he looks completely different from the way he does at Etta’s. The purple suit is gone; he’s wearing a tux. Hair slicked back. The energy I’ve seen him put into flirting is channeled now into flattering the crowd. “Y’all doing all right? Sure is good to see y’all.” Masking in front of the ofays. Watering it down for the mainstream. Just another imbecile Negro. Goddam.

“Look. Earl’s moonlighting,” I say.

Ariyeh laughs.

“Ariyeh, you ever date a white boy?”

“Cuz, there’s more than thirty-one flavors. Why would I choose the blandest?” She rubs my arm. “They’re not all like … what was it, Dwayne? And forget Sister Davis.”

Clattery laughter rolls from the bar. Earl launches into a ballad, “Heads or tails, you lose.”

I listen closer. I’ve heard this before. The other night at Etta’s. Bayou Slim. But before that.

“… lose!” Earl shouts.

I don’t remember. My head spins. I finish my wine, pull a few bills from my purse.

“Party-pooper,” Ariyeh says.

I’d like to crawl into bed with her and hold her all night. “I’ll call you.” I kiss her cheek. “I didn’t want to spoil the evening with it, but I think we need a plan, soon, for getting Bitter to a doctor.”

“All right, honey. You’re right. I been thinking about that, too. We’ll work it out. Sleep well.” She glances sadly at Reggie. He’s several tables away with a group of men, adding figures on a napkin. I wave but he doesn’t see me.

I push through the door, past King Bee and Daddy Deepthroat, into the hot, billowy air. I drive with my windows down, humming the blues, trying to picture Slim’s face. I’ve not seen it well through the smoke in Etta’s Place. I pass the glass towers of Greenway Plaza, a few gated communities (military security as domestic architecture; money as gris-gris, casting a spell, or an illusion, of safety) then, back on Bissonnet, the CAM, the Museum of Fine Arts, several bistros and wine bars — white folks enjoying late dinnets at cozy sidewalk tables — then the new brick homes of gentrified Montrose. I miss the sound of my aquarium at night, bubbling steadily in the dark, the soft purring of my sweet old parrots.

Finally, I’m back in the Quarter: weed lots, broken windows, hip-hop pounding its way out of a Caddy. Somebody has pumped a boarded grocery full of bullet holes. A calling card. A warning. Proving who’s king.