The Year's Best Science Fiction 9

I had the weight that night

I mean I had the blues and no one hides the blues away

You got to wash them out

Or you end up riding a slow drag to nowhere

You got to let them fly

I mean you got to

I play trumpet in this barrelhouse off Main Street

Never mind the name of it

It’s like scumpteen other cellar drink dens

Where the downtown ofays bring their loot and jive talk

And listen to us try to blow out notes

As white and pure as we can never be

Like I told you, I was gully low that night

Brassing at the great White way

Lipping back a sass in jazz that Rone got off in words

And died for

Hitting at the jug and loaded

Spiking gin and rage with shaking miseries

I had no food in me and wanted none

I broke myself to pieces in a hungry night

This white I’m getting off on showed at ten

Collared him a table near the stand

And sat there nursing at a glass of wine

Just casing us

All the way into the late watch he was there

He never budged or spoke a word

But I could see that he was picking up

On what was going down

He got into my mouth, man

He bothered me

At four I crawled down off the stand

And that was when this ofay stood and put his grabber on my arm

“May I speak to you?” he asked

The way I felt I took no shine

To pink hands wrinkling up my gabardine

“Broom off, stud,” I let him know

“Please,” he said, “I have to speak to you.”

Call me blowtop, call me Uncle Tom

Man, you’re not far wrong

Maybe my brain was nowhere

But I sat down with Mister Pink

and told him—lay his racket

“You’ve lost someone,” he said.

It hit me like a belly chord

“What do you know about it, white man?”

I felt that hating pick up tempo in my guts again

“I don’t know anything about it,” he replied

“I only know you’ve lost someone

“You’ve told it to me with your horn a hundred times.”

I felt evil crawling in my belly

“Let’s get this straight,” I said

“Don’t hype me, man; don’t give me stuff”

“Listen to me then,” he said.

“Jazz isn’t only music

“It’s a language too

“A language born of protest

“Torn in bloody ragtime from the womb of anger and despair

“A secret tongue with which the legions of abused

“Cry out their misery and their troubled hates.”

“This language has a million dialects and accents

“It may be a tone of bitter-sweetness whispered in a brass-lined throat

“Or rush of frenzy screaming out of reed mouths

“Or hammering at strings in vibrant piano hearts

“Or pulsing, savage, under taut-drawn hides

“In dark-peaked stridencies it can reveal the aching core of sorrow

“Or cry out the new millennium

“Its voices are without number

“Its forms beyond statistic

“It is, in very fact, an endless tonal revolution

“The pleading furies of the damned

“Against the cruelty of their damnation

“I know this language, friend,” he said.

“What about my—?” I began and cut off quick

“Your—what, friend?” he inquired

“Someone near to you; I know that much

“Not a woman though; your trumpet wasn’t grieving for a woman loss

“Someone in your family; your father maybe

“Or your brother.”

I gave him words that tiger prowled behind my teeth

“You’re hanging over trouble, man

“Don’t break the thread

“Give it to me straight.”

So Mister Pink leaned in and laid it down

“I have a sound machine,” he said

“Which can convert the forms of jazz

“Into the sympathies which made them

“If, into my machine, I play a sorrowing blues

“From out the speaker comes the human sentiment

“Which felt those blues

“And fashioned them into the secret tongue of jazz.”

He dug the same old question stashed behind my eyes

“How do I know you’ve lost someone?” he asked

“I’ve heard so many blues and stomps and strutting jazzes

“Changed, in my machine, to sounds of anger, hopelessness and joy

“That I can understand the language now

“The story that you told was not a new one

“Did you think you were inviolate behind your tapestry of woven brass?”

“Don’t hype me, man,” I said

I let my fingers rigor mortis on his arm

He didn’t ruffle up a hair

“If you don’t believe me, come and see,” he said

“Listen to my machine

“Play your trumpet into it

“You’ll see that everything I’ve said is true.’’

I felt shivers like a walking bass inside my skin

“Well, will you come?” he asked.

Rain was pressing drum rolls on the roof

As Mister Pink turned tires onto Main Street

I sat dummied in his coupe

My sacked-up trumpet on my lap

Listening while he rolled off words

Like Stacy runnings on a tinkle box

“Consider your top artists in the genre

“Armstrong, Bechet, Waller, Hines

“Goodman, Mezzrow, Spanier, dozens more both male and female

“Jew and Negroes all and why?

“Why are the greatest jazz interpreters

“Those who live beneath the constant gravity of prejudice?

“I think because the scaldings of external bias

“Focus all their vehemence and suffering

“To a hot, explosive core

“And, from this nucleus of restriction

“Comes all manner of fissions, violent and slow

“Breaking loose in brief expression

“Of the tortures underneath

“Crying for deliverance in the unbreakable code of jazz.”

He smiled. “Unbreakable till now,” he said.

“Rip bop doesn’t do it

“Jump and mop-mop only cloud the issue

“They’re like jellied coatings over true response

“Only the authentic jazz can break the pinions of repression

“Liberate the heart-deep mournings

“Unbind the passions, give freedom to the longing essence

“You understand?” he asked.

“I understand,” I said, knowing why I came.

Inside his room, he flipped the light on, shut the door

Walked across the room and slid away a cloth that covered his machine

“Come here,” he said

I suspicioned him of hyping me but good

His jazz machine was just a jungleful of scraggy tubes and wheels

And scumpteen wires boogity-boogity

Like a black snake brawl

I double-o’ed the heap

“That’s really in there, man,” I said

And couldn’t help but smile a cutting smile

Right off he grabbed a platter, stuck it down

“Heebie-Jeebies; Armstrong

“First, I’ll play the record by itself,” he said

Any other time I bust my conk on Satchmo’s scatting

But I had the crawling heavies in me

And I couldn’t even loosen up a grin

I stood there feeling nowhere

While Daddy-O was tromping down the English tongue

Rip-bip-dee-doo-dee-doot-doo!

The Satch recited in his Model T baritone

Then white man threw a switch

In one hot second all the crazy scat was nixed

Instead, all pounding in my head

There came a sound like bottled blowtops scuffling up a jamboree

Like twenty tongue-tied hipsters in the next apartment

Having them a ball

Something frosted up my spine

I felt the shakes do get-off chorus in my gut

And even though I knew that Mister Pink was smiling at me

I couldn’t look him back

My heart was set to knock a doorway through my chest

Before he cut his jazz machine

“You see?” he asked.

I couldn’t talk. He had the up on me

“Electrically, I’ve caught the secret heart of jazz

“Oh, I could play you many records

“That would illustrate the many moods

“Which generate this complicated tongue

“But I would like for you to play in my machine

“Record a minute’s worth of solo

“Then we’ll play the record through the other speaker

“And we’ll hear exactly what you’re feeling

“Stripped of every sonic superficial. Right?”

I had to know

I couldn’t leave that place no more than fly

So, while white man set his record-maker up,

I unsacked my trumpet, limbered up my lip

All the time the heebies rising in my craw

Like ice cubes piling

Then I blew it out again

The weight

The dragging misery

The bringdown blues that hung inside me

Like twenty irons on a string

And the string stuck to my guts with twenty hooks

That kept on slicing me away

I played for Rone, my brother

Rone who could have died a hundred different times and ways

Rone who died, instead, down in the Murder Belt

Where he was born

Rone who thought he didn’t have to take that same old stuff

Rone who forgot and rumbled back as if he was a man

And not a spade

Rone who died without a single word

Underneath the boots of Mississippi peckerwoods

Who hated him for thinking he was human

And kicked his brains out for it

That’s what I played for

I blew it hard and right

And when I finished and it all came rushing back to me

Like screaming in a black-walled pit

I felt a coat of evil on my back

With every scream a button that held the dark coat closer

Till I couldn’t get the air

That’s when I crashed my horn on his machine

That’s when I knocked it on the floor

And craunched it down and kicked it to a thousand pieces

“You fool!” That’s what he called me

“You damned black fool!”

All the time until I left

I didn’t know it then

I thought that I was kicking back for every kick

That took away my only brother

But now it’s done and I can get off all the words

I should have given Mister Pink

Listen, white man; listen to me good

Buddy ghee, it wasn’t you

I didn’t have no hate for you

Even though it was your kind that put my brother

In his final place

I’ll knock it to you why I broke your jazz machine

I broke it cause I had to

Cause it did just what you said it did

And, if I let it stand,

It would have robbed us of the only thing we have

That’s ours alone

The thing no boot can kick away

Or rope can choke

You cruel us and you kill us

But, listen white man,

These are only needles in our skin

But if I’d let you keep on working your machine

You’d know all our secrets

And you’d steal the last of us

And we’d blow away and never be again

Take everything you want, Man

You will because you have

But don’t come scuffling for our souls.