Axeman's Jazz

5

LOCUST TREES throb with cicadas. The city’s old grid pattern gives way to the new: the faded remnants of east-west streets poke through grass and weeds, petering out where fresh roads, following the latest commercial lures, tug the city in whole new directions. Driving south through Houston, on my way to find Elias Woods, I’m reminded why I was drawn to city planning, a job that combined my love of history with memories of my first bruised neighborhood.

My first boss used to quote Le Corbusier to me: “Architecture or revolution. Revolution can be avoided,” meaning if we build better buildings, we’ll shape happier lives. An unfeasible ideal but, as the boss used to say, worth fighting for.

“When’s the last time you saw a decent porch?” a planner once asked me. “Your grandma’s house, right? Homebuilders nowadays, they don’t know a porch from their own patooties.” His unfeasible goal was to save Dallas by heralding the second coming of the porch. “I don’t know how we’ll do it,” he said, “but I’ll bet we can lock in some porch incentives in the land development code.” He sent me out to measure distances between sidewalks and front doors, to count porches or note their absence, to see whether space existed for chairs or a swing … he wanted me to research blackberries; he remembered a blackberry vine around his own grandmother’s porch and was convinced the plant could humanize our neighborhoods. The first field guide I turned to said “BLACKBERRY: any of various erect-growing perennial brambles that bear black or sometimes whitish fruits.” Black or sometimes whitish: unlocking that phrase, it seemed to me, was the key to humanizing our cities, but I couldn’t explain this to my planner.

I loved doing research at night: passing houses in the dark, seeing the lighted windows, the warm shadows of those inside. The city seemed cozy, then, safe.

One night, I drove through a tired neighborhood across the Trinity River from downtown Dallas. One of the older areas. Skyscrapers blazed like free-standing chandeliers. The air was hot. Frogs chrr-ed. The river smelled both fetid and sweet, like apples gone bad. I was counting porches — quite a few over here, though most were ancient and saggy — when something moved on a parked car in the street. I glanced over: a mud-brown owl the size of an open accordion. It swiveled its head to watch me. Eyes yellow as fall leaves. Ruffled air, a soft chop: another owl landed nearby. Then another appeared, settling on a bent, unreadable sign. All around me, feathered beats grew thick as walls; the night became a house of wings. A Goya dream. I felt exhilarated, frightened. The birds called to one another, a chorus so mournful, I thought a sob had escaped the sky. The birds blinked at me as I inched the car down the street. Their calm, after my initial shock at their presence, relaxed me. I didn’t feel judged. Or even quite real. A piercing detachment suffused their gazes, as though they saw past surfaces. I felt stripped of my body and skin — no bothersome hair, no menstrual spotting to worry about — reduced (in their eyes) to pure, natural movement. I couldn’t sustain it, but for a moment I felt more at home in the world than I ever had: a current of light or heat. A pickup turned the corner, loose headlights swaying like dance-floor strobes. The owls scattered.

Now I pass rickety porches, reminders of that night. A smell of coffee on the breeze, from a nearby processing plant. Rust. Car exhaust.

Reinerman Street is on my way, so I turn and park by the yellow house. Corn leaves rustle in the old lady’s vegetable patch. Teenagers circle Brock’s Combo Burger in dirty, dented cars, yelling at one another, flirting. Bitter’s hoo-raw hasn’t changed the neighborhood’s looks for me or given me a clearer glimpse of history, but as with the owls, I feel an uneasy shifting in the air, as though the present weren’t quite real. It’s the same sensation that overcame me when, on return visits here, Mama told me, “You don’t belong here anymore. This is not your place now.” I could almost feel my identity slip, like a cheap, tossed-off mask — but what was beneath it, I hadn’t a clue. The teenagers’ voices grow murky, a rush of underwater bubbles. Sweat soaks the back of my shirt. I picture Cletus’s face and feel myself melting into him, a thrilling freedom, a scary drift. Eyes closed, I know myself to be walking, walking … my body heavier, more massive in the upper arms and thighs, burdened, tight … the day’s a scorcher so I remove my cap. My buddies do the same. A streetcar clatters behind us, but we prefer to stroll rather than sit in the back of a car, enduring a white conductor’s contemptuous stare. It’s the morning of Thursday, August 23, twelve hours before the riot for which we’ll eventually hang. For now, on R&R, we’re carefree and happy. Unarmed.

Charlie — Corporal Baltimore, a provost guard and model soldier — suggests we head up San Felipe to get a cool soda. We notice two mounted policemen down the block; I know one of them, a mammoth named Rufus Daniels. The colored housekeepers here refer to him as “Dan’l Boone, a nigger-baiter, one of the meanest cops around.” I tell Charlie and Ben, my other companion, we should stay to one side of the street and keep our heads down. The officers see us. They turn their stallions to keep us in view, straighten in their saddles. We pass an alley, and my stomach clenches. A pair of colored teens is kneeling in the dirt, throwing dice. Canned goods, the community calls its boys. Don’t matter what they do — even if they doing nothing — they just canned goods for the cops. Lately, the police have mounted an intense campaign against crap-shooting, citywide, increasing neighborhood tension. I quicken my stride, so if Daniel Boone stops to inspect us, we’ll be past the alley and he won’t see the boys. But the boys look up, hear the hoofbeats, and hightail it out of there. Charlie, Ben, and I fall back, startled, as the kids run foolishly up the street, in plain sight. The stallions crackle past us, knocking us over; a tail whips my face, a breath-stealing sting.

The kids swing past a woman at a clothesline. She’s wearing a man’s T-shirt and shorts, her brown skin wet with sweat. The cops dismount; Daniels fires his pistol at a slat fence the boys have leaped. The woman screams and falls to the grass, covering her ears. Daniels’s partner, a thin, box-faced man, peers around the fence, shakes his head. “Little devils are gone,” he says. “Quick as damn greyhounds.” Daniels jerks the woman to her feet. “You know them nigger kids, hm? Tell me where they live!” She shivers in his grip. The T-shirt rides up her waist. Daniels laughs. “I’m waiting, Mammy. Where they at?”

Charlie steps forward, toward the yard. I lay my hand on his arm, whisper, “No.”

“You … you raised your six-shooter,” the woman stammers. “They was just kids!”

“No ma’am,” Daniels says. “I fired into the ground. It was only a warning shot. Right?”

She stares at him as if at a haint.

“Right?”

“Charlie, no!” I hiss, but it’s too late. “Excuse me, officer,” Charlie says, stepping onto the lawn. On the clothesline behind him, bedsheets flutter like herons. “I think it’s pretty clear this woman doesn’t know anything.”

Daniels shoves her to the ground. “You uppity son of a bitch,” he says, planting his feet, a dime-novel gunslinger. “You questioning an officer of the law?”

“No sir. I’m just saying — ”

“You uppity son of a bitch,” he says again. “Ever’ since you goddam soldiers got here, biggety nigger women like this one trying to take the town. Feeling confident and brave with y’all around, eh? Well, I’ll show you confident.” He swings his pistol, clipping Charlie on the cheek. Charlie staggers back. Daniels is on him again, clubbing his forehead. The other cop trains his gun on Ben and me. Daniels hovers over Charlie now, kicking his ribs. “What say we send this cow to the Pea Farm, eh? Give her ninety days to think about refusing to aid justice. And as for you, you uppity son of a bitch, I guess I gotta keep hitting you till your heart’s right.” He kicks Charlie twice in the groin.

According to testimony I’ll offer later at the trial — all of which Daniels’s partner will refute — the big cop turns to me, then. “You and your friend get the hell out of here now, and don’t never come back to this neighborhood, hear? Spread the word at that monkey’s nest. We don’t want to see you monkeys no more.”

His partner raises his pistol and breaks the air twice. Ben sprints down the alley. I walk slowly — the only defiance I can muster — glancing back at Charlie, motionless on the grass, his head a bloody pulp. My knees are weak, and I tremble like a puppet. With each step I feel earth hammering my heel bones, up my legs and spine, into the base of my brain. My comrades at the camp will swarm like hornets when they hear the cops have killed Charlie. For no reason. No reason at all. Sweat streaks my neck as I’m walking, crying, walking, walking … into Brock’s Combo Burger to order a sandwich to go. A teenage girl wearing braces hands me a Coke and a straw. I must look dazed; she exaggerates her movements to catch my attention, and I take the drink from her. The smell of sizzling meat and melted cheese, the rank intimacy of human sweat, churns my stomach. I wipe my eyes, spill coins near the register. The girl has to count them for me. When I walk back outside, gripping my food bag, the heat slaps me in the face. Across the street, the old woman turns a hose on her garden.

The Gulf Coast seethes in the sun. In scorched rice paddies, still water steams lightly, brown and mud-thickened, rippling with finger-thin snakes and waterstriders, mosquito larvae, chiggers. Gator country. The air smells like burnt paper. Ahead of me, just off the highway, I see the edge of hundreds of miles of oil refineries and chemical storage tanks ringing the coast, a skeletal city. I eat my burger quickly, before the odors get worse. Clouds bank against the blue, foamy as sea waves.

The address Bitter gave me for Elias Woods is in a cheap housing development for oil workers, boxes built on a swamp. As I slow, looking for street names, I’m aware of more and more water seeping boisterously onto the asphalt, until finally I can go no farther. The neighborhood is submerged. Ahead of me, roofs poke out of slimy brown whirlpools; treetops — big, arthritic hands — twist from algae swells. An empty boat bumps against a basketball goal whose backboard barely breaks the muddy surface. Two dogs paddle through willows, past a listing hound’s-tooth couch snagged on something metal. A wooden sign propped against a chimney says DAMN. Or DAMNED.

I get out of my car and stand at the mess’s lip. Water laps at my shoes, scummy, a green and purple film in its center. The back of my mouth aches in the ashy air. Through mistletoe limbs, clustered on the eastern horizon, I see refinery flames wrinkling the air like cellophane. Texas City. Seagulls startle me, cawing overhead, sounding like scared little girls, and I imagine Mama running through a mushroom cloud.

If Elias Woods lives here, he uses a scuba tank. The address paper sticks to my palm like a delicate dogwood blossom. I return to the car, back out, and head for the first functioning building I see, a filling station, Blake’s Service and Handi Lube. A gray-haired man in a dirty green suit kneels by the gas pumps, tracing their shadows on cracked cement with a piece of blue chalk. He grins, embarrassed, when I pull up. “Bid’ness slow today,” he says through my open window. “Just trying to stay occupied. Fill ‘er up?”

“No, actually, I’m looking for this address.”

He studies the runny numbers. “Sunk,” he says.

“What happened?”

“Hurrican’. Blew through here two, three year ago, just about drownded us all. City promising to drain and rebuild, but we ain’t seen nothing yet.”

“Where did people go?”

“God knows. Wherever they could. Grabbed up whatever was left and skeedaddled.”

“Did you know a man named Elias Woods?”

He scratches his head with the chalk, etching a blue line in his hair above his right ear. “Seem kindly familiar but I ain’t rightly sure. Tell you what, there’s a man might could he’p you, down this road a ways. Junkyard-looking place on the right, ‘bout three mile.”

I thank him and leave him coloring the concrete. The road narrows between fields of green reeds and some kind of cane. It winds beneath a freeway then turns into gravel and dirt. Huge apple trees, tangled in dewberry vines, lean as if weary to the ground. Rusty barrels (fertilizer? oil?). Gardens gone to seed. An ad for SERPENTS, THREE MI. EAST. Someone’s hung a sign in an oak: JESUS IS COMING. Someone else has changed it; now it reads JESUS HAS COME. On the right, another wooden sign, painted white: ANTIQUES AND INFORMAL MULTICULTURAL MUSEUM, and below that, KWAKO DOBIE-BEDICHECK JONES, PROP. I park beneath the leafy fans of a fat banana tree.

Wooden Coke bottle boxes lie scattered among collard greens in the yard. Sculptures welded from car parts, boat motors, and plumbing supplies line a white, broken-shell path toward a small wooden house. Seagulls trot contentedly in the high grass. Saxophone jazz swells inside the house. In the doorway, a small woman in a red scarf and light blue muumuu hammers a loose picture frame. She’s light-skinned but darker than I am, the color of pine bark. Rounded cheeks, narrow eyes. She looks up and smiles at me, but keeps her arms in, close to her body, a defensive posture. “Hello. You’re here for a tour?” she asks. Before I can answer, she’s pointing to a gate west of the house. “Museum grounds are that way. It’s a dollar donation — you can stick it in the coffee can nailed to the fence over there. I’ll be here when you’re done.” She resumes her hammering.

I’m not sure what to do, but then I think, It’s only a dollar. What does an “Informal Multicultural Museum” look like? I can wait fifteen minutes to ask my questions.

So I slip a bill into the can, step past the gate and into an overgrown pasture filled with junk. Bathtubs, sinks with drains the color of sunset; hubcaps and tires; an old phone booth, glass shattered, bell insignia painted on its side; dishes, martini glasses, garlic stalks; street signs in Spanish and English; garden tools, rusty rifles, flagpoles, plastic toy swords; a toilet bowl turned into a planter, African violets spilling over its sides. I’ve been scammed out of a buck. I glance back at the house, a shack really, barely upright in a jungle of vines, salt air, refinery fumes, and hurricane threats. What’s a dollar? Good luck to these folks. I watch the woman hammer the frame. She’s like the Flower Man, saving it all, especially the ugly, stupid stuff … finding beauty in it. If you live in a wasteland — a poor neighborhood, soon to be extinct — what choice but to celebrate the trash? Shoring fragments against the ruin …

A bird statue, tall as I am, made of table legs and fenders, with two umbrellas for wings, greets me at the end of my tour. Multicultural, I don’t know. Multitextured, certainly. The sax spits fire at the sky. Them that ain’t jazzing, beware! I approach the house. “See anything you want?” the woman asks, setting aside the frame. I notice, now, a scrap bag of blue and white cotton slung across her shoulder. My mama used to own a bag just like it, to keep her piecework in.

“Oh … no. But it’s all very interesting.”

“I’m Barbara. My husband, Kwako, he’s the artist, the sculptor. There’s more inside.” She nods at the house.

“Actually, I’d like to ask you … do you know a man named Elias Woods?” She turns rigid, suspicious of me, so I spill it all fast. “I think he knew my daddy, who I never met. My uncle gave me his name. I’d like to ask him some questions.”

“Hm. Let’s go see Kwako,” she says, still stiff. She leads me, past rain barrels, wooden TV cable spools, and carburetor parts, to the back of the house. There, beneath a green canvas awning on the porch, surrounded by glass wind chimes, a man in a steel mask welds an S-shaped pipe to a tiny freezer. He’s tall and thin, wearing gray overalls. Barbara calls to him over the flame’s howling breath. He looks up, snuffs the torch. A last burst of sparks jitters into the yard: a lightning bug swarm. An adobe-colored quilt hangs across a porch rail behind him. He ditches the mask, smiles. Sparse, crooked teeth. A gray goatee, hair dense and matted, like transistor radio wiring. “Welcome, sister,” he says. “You’re a lover of our culture’s great diversity, are you?”

I don’t know what to say. “Sure.”

“It’s okay, sister, no call to be scared. You know, our whole society, it’s based on fear,” he says aggressively, as though I’ve asked him the Secret of Life. He wipes his hands on a rag. “They sell you threats and illusions, lies about each other, all the different races and such, keep us separate. But here at the Multicultural Museum, we strip away the lies, celebrate God’s bounty as it is.” God’s bounty being castoffs, broken plumbing, old axles and tires, I guess. “This freeway over here?” He points past drooping banana leaves. “S’posed to been built forty years ago, ever since I’s a boy. They still ain’t finished it. So you think politicians gon’ take care your future? No ma’am.” His verbal shifts rattle me. Barbara’s heard it all before, I can tell — part sermon, part stump speech, part sales pitch. She stands patiently, a bored, polite smile on her face. Bees flit through a willow behind her. The sax sputters, feints, jabs.

“Now me, I ain’t had no schooling,” Kwako continues, “but I made up for that with travel and with comparative thinking. I seen the way things are, see, I seen past the lies. I freed myself. Now, I don’t want to step on your heart, sister, as a Caucasian woman and all, but I know it’s the truth: Caucasians need to ask themselves, ‘Am I willing to let go some of that sneak-gotten wealth?’—see, you didn’t oppose African Americans, maybe, but your ancestors did, and you benefited from that.” As he talks, he pulls on a pair of gloves, picks up a brush, and begins slathering black wax on his sculpture. “Now me, as a man of color, I know my responsibility is to prepare myself to understand my brothers and sisters worldwide. English, Spanish, French, Creole, Garifuna — I gots to learn these tongues so I ain’t, you know, alienated from the others. We’re all influenced with the African DNA. That makes us kin. Global communication, it’s the key to mankind’s unity.”

I’m spinning with heat and the speed of his talk. His sentences mirror his art, I think: fragments from here and there, stuck wildly together to form … God knows. Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe the whole point is just to form something. Is this the way my daddy sang his songs? Lived his life? Improvising, shifting place to place, from family to family, maybe, leaving behind all his messes, his women …

Barbara maintains her patient expression. It must be exhausting to be married to a self-styled visionary. She’s still gripping the hammer. Crazy white woman, no business here, who knows what she’ll do? “She wants to know, do we know Elias Woods?” she says when Kwako stops to clean his brush.

He cocks his head at me. “Why’s that?”

“He might be a friend of my daddy’s,” I say.

“Who she never met,” Barbara adds.

“My uncle gave me his address, but apparently the house is underwater.”

“Who’s your daddy?”

“Jim Washington. Old blues player around here, some time ago?”

“Well now.” Kwako bobs his head to the bebop sax. He looks me over, more closely. “I guess you are a lover of diversity, then. Mm-hm. I gotta tell you, though, Elias, he’s gone.”

“Dead?”

“More or less. They got him up in Huntsville. Deaf row. Kilt his wife.”

“Oh.”

“Sorry to bear you bad tides.”

Barbara, softening, watching my face, finally sets the hammer down. “Would you like some coffee or tea?”

“No. Thank you. I think I … I think I should get back to my uncle now. Let him know.” Truth is, I don’t know what to do with myself, and this is plain to the couple.

“You sure?” Barbara asks.

I’m not sure of anything anymore. “Yes.” It’s like when Mama told me I didn’t have a place here now. A girl with no trails to follow, in, out, anywhere. A whore for warmth and certainty, but not deserving any.

Kwako pulls a card from his shirt pocket. “All right, then, if you say so. Phone don’t always work,” he says. “Seem like every time it rains or the wind blows, the lines come down ‘round here. But give a call if you want to. Sound like ‘multicultural’ right up your alley.”

I take the card. These fragments I shore …

“And I’m fulla talk, as you hear.” He laughs.

“Thank you. I appreciate your time.”

Barbara sees me glance at her quilt. “You do piecework, sugar?”

“My mama did. This reminds me of her. It’s beautiful. Yours?”

“Yes. Got more inside. You’re welcome to look.”

“Not today, thanks. I really should go.”

“Come back sometime, will you?” Kwako says. “Tell us about your fambly. Look at more quilts. We’ll give you a good price on one.”

“I will.” I shake their hands. My arm feels as weightless as cork.

From my angle on the freeway, driving back to town, Houston’s skyscrapers blaze like Zippos. Mirrored glass buildings soak up the sun. I’m still pondering Elias Woods when I cross the San Jacinto River and remember that several years ago, under this bridge, a squatter’s camp formed — “Tent City,” the media called it. Out-of-work oil laborers, desperate steel men who’d hit the road once the northern mills shut down, gathered in the mud here, living off garbage. Newspaper photographers loved it. But Tent City wasn’t the image Houston’s city planners wanted loose in the world. Along with the Chamber of Commerce, they talked the cops into chasing the squatters away.

I imagine tents, now, made of old quilts; then army tents. The river’s curves through mossy magnolias remind me of the Twenty-fourth Infantry’s camp. How must Cletus have felt after leaving Corporal Baltimore — dead, for all he knew — at the feet of the brutal cops? How must he have felt, returning to camp, breaking the news to his comrades? How did he react when Sergeant Vida Henry swore they’d taken enough shit in this cracker city, and it was time for the troops to show some balls? What did he think, later, lifting his rifle, marching into the dark?

The trial transcripts say nothing about why Vida Henry snapped, or how he was able to sway others into bucking their training and common sense. At first, in the heady fury over the cops’ behavior, the troops must have felt their cause was righteous (“To hell with fighting in France! We got to stick by our own and clean up this city, right here, right now!”). But at some point, after shots had been fired, houses damaged, people killed — including Rufus Daniels, the “nigger-baiting” cop who’d beaten Charlie Baltimore — horror must have set in, fear over what they’d done. It must have occurred to Cletus Hayes that Vida Henry had lost his mind.

I imagine them together by the bayou. I’m drifting again; I slow down, concentrate on the road, but even so, my skin no longer holds me … the night is drizzling rain. Most of the soldiers have scattered by now, hoping to make it back to camp before they’re caught. “Ain’t going back, Cletus,” Vida Henry says. He leans against a chinaberry tree and rolls a cigarette. “You know what’ll happen, we go back.”

All around us, frogs are as loud as bass drums, making it hard to think. “Maybe not,” I say. “Maybe they won’t know it was us.”

Henry laughs. “Yeah, and maybe you’ll wake up tomorrow morning white as chalk.”

“I’m not going on, Sarge. It’s foolishness. Won’t bring Charlie back.”

“You’re the one saw him sprawled there. How can you not fight for him?”

“How is this fighting for him? Shooting at houses?” My head’s as heavy as a crate of boots. I smell like mud. “I’m done.”

“Do me a favor, then.”

“What’s that?”

He offers me his rifle.

“No.”

“Save me the trouble of shooting myself. Please.”

I stand, unsteadily, start to walk away. Owls bellow in the trees. “Good luck to you, Cletus,” Henry says. “You’re going to need it.”

I stumble through blackberry brambles, bayou water sloshing in my boots. A loud click, then a lid slamming shut. The rifle report freezes my spine, but I force myself to move. Nothing can salvage this night or redeem my shameful behavior, but crossing rails past empty, uncoupled boxcars, I think of Sarah Morgan. One last time, I think of planting seeds.

Can’t we all just get along? A planner I worked with, a liberal white man who grew up in L.A. and who was profoundly disturbed by the Rodney King riots, once proposed a multifamily public housing project built around courtyards, with lush landscaping and bright ceramic tiles. His idea was that each family would sacrifice ten percent of its interior square footage to create a shared neighborhood center: mailboxes, washers and dryers, a community kitchen, a child-care room. “The shared public space will enforce a sense of collective responsibility,” he reasoned. “It’ll be perfect, especially for single-parent families, who need all the help they can get. I mean, let’s face it, right now, our public housing sucks. We have inner cities that aren’t worth caring about. That leads to a nation not worth defending. At the very least, a nation vulnerable to black rage.”

I liked him. He used to quote Walt Whitman in the office. “You know what Walt used to say? He asked America to become a vast ‘city of friends’ basking in ‘robust love.’ Now that’s a vision of city planning!”

Like all Utopians I’ve known, he was crushed when others ruled his dreams unfeasible. He quit his job and became a VISTA volunteer. Later, I heard he was killed one night in a drive-by, serving food outside a homeless shelter in a dying neighborhood, still trying to breathe life into his vision.

I went through a phase of promoting getting along. I’d hear an ofay make a racist joke, then spring the news on him I was black. Inevitably, instead of apologizing, he’d make an excuse, usually a long-winded list of his hardships. Failed athletic careers. Lost rock-and-roll dreams. School rejections. “The whole damn world’s elitist, all right?” a fellow told me once.” You people don’t have a patent on suffering.” I learned to keep my mouth shut. To expect misunderstandings and fear. To approach planning with skepticism and diminished expectations. To relinquish Eden, a city of friends.