Don't Worry About the Kids (11 page)

Minor Sixths, Diminished Sevenths

H
E
WAS
THERE
and he was not there. His brother Eddie was playing lead guitar, Jimmy backing him on piano, Kinnard on bass, Captain Sammy Barber carrying the four-four time on the snare drum, round and round so that Jimmy felt the wire brushes caress the inner curve of his skull. He drifted toward sleep, floated inside the music, low, then rose through to the surface for air, kept rising, looked below and imagined himself heading downstream, feet first, arms rigid at his side.

There's a somebody I'm longing to see—I hope that he—turns out to be—someone who'll watch over me
.…

The stream widened, curved gently between lush green banks. An old Philco radio, copper wires unfurling from the rear of its wooden case, sat in the center of a meadow. The song he and Eddie had recorded so many years ago drifted lazily across the grass and wildflowers. Cool, brother. So cool.

Jimmy's hands moved across the keys, the blocked chords—minor sixths, diminished sevenths—giving Eddie the solid ground he needed. Without that ground, Eddie was lost; with that ground beneath him, Eddie found purchase on this world, could set the music inside him free, could take off in sweet riffs like nobody else. Play it, brother. Play it sweet and blue. Eddie's left hand was high on the guitar's throat, his fingers glancing against the frets in a dazzling explosion of harmonics: pure crystal bells. Jimmy watched his own hands navigate the keys—steadily moving north in parallel chords, his left hand doubling the melody in the bass—and he wondered, as ever, how it was they knew where to go. He was not aware of giving them direction.

There and not there. Of course: Eddie was in Brooklyn with his wife and his two boys; Jimmy was in Paris, leaving the nightclub. Le Jardin Noir. Jimmy turned back, said good night to the doorman.
Eh bien, M'sieur Jimmy. Bonne nuit
.

Now came Jimmy's favorite time—the long walk home, alone, after a night of making music. I've got it all now, brother. Music. Home. Family. I've got it all and that ain't bad.

Jimmy looked up, imagined green and gold clouds of dry ice spinning through the neon script above the nightclub door. The letters circled gracefully and Jimmy cooled himself by riding inside the glass tubes the way he swam inside his music. Let's ride, brother. Let's ride this song…

I'm a little lamb who's lost in the wood
—I
know I could—always he good—to one who'll watch over me.…

He was there and he was not there.

He imagined himself brain-dead, his hands locked in position at the wrists, his fingers marching like tired soldiers across yellowed piano keys. He looked down at black sleeves, white cuffs, mother-of-pearl cufflinks. He paid attention to his wrists, his knuckles, his fingers, kept the sound full by adding a sixth note in the left hand, a third below the melody.

Jimmy shook hands with the other musicians. They set down their cases, lit cigarettes, mumbled farewells.
Bonne nuit.… Sois sage, Jimmy
.… A
demain…

Arriving in Paris, emerging from a taxi, Eddie would be impressed by Jimmy's rap, by how well he spoke the language. Elegance. You always had elegance, man. My big brother got elegance and ain't that hot shit! Jimmy would laugh, would introduce him all around. They would go back inside, despite the hour, turn on the lights, open their cases, play a set together, then another, then jam until dawn. Jimmy and Eddie would show them. Music alone would live. Sure.

Jimmy heard the melody, the round he and Eddie and the others had sung on their tour: in Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama, South Carolina, Virginia. White and black, rich and poor, young and old—holding hands, the music swelling. New York City, too. Sure. Pete Seeger and Odetta at the microphone, Jimmy and Eddie behind them.

All things shall perish from under the sky.… Music alone shall live.… Music alone shall live.…

They had believed that things might change, that they might yet redeem their native land.
We must love one another or die
. Seventeen thousand people singing in parts, the minor thirds breaking Jimmy's heart. He wept without shame.
We shall overcome
. Madison Square Garden, April the seventeenth, nineteen hundred and sixty-six. Martin King and Bobby Kennedy were still alive. Medgar Evers was in the ground. Twenty-four years. Twenty-four years gone by under the sky.

Deep in my heart, Jimmy thought. Oh, yes. Deep in my heart I need someone who'll watch over me too. That's why I'm here, in my new life. That's why I have Monique and Henri—my wife and my son. Don't you see?

Jimmy moved forward, separate from the others now, and he imagined he was walking through the streets of Paris with Eddie, talking about music, women, baseball—about the Hollywood Bar, at 133rd Street and Seventh Avenue, the cutting contests Jimmy had been in with other pianists, in the back room, each man showing his stuff, challenging the others to do better, modulating to a key like B or E, doubling the tempo with a strong left hand to make things more
interesting
for the next man up. Oh, yes. You could get by with all kinds of slop in a rhythm section, but there was no cheating when you played solo. You were the main man then. Jimmy had loved those sessions, had used them to educate himself in styles not his own: stride, boogie, swing, bebop.

It would be wonderful to wander this city late at night with his brother, without fear. What
couldn't
they talk about?

I worry about you, though. I worry about you all the time.

Eddie laughed. Well. I worry about you too, man.

When he arrived home, he would telephone, would find out how Eddie was doing. He would ask about Eddie's wife and sons. The boys—Pete and Mike, twins—would be 15 years old by now. Jimmy had never met them. Nor had Eddie ever met Monique and Henri.

Eddie still played with some of the same old gang: Kinnard, Barber, Carr. If Eddie were short on cash, Jimmy would send money, but only if Eddie asked him to. The important thing was not to condescend. The important thing, always, was to act as if they were equals—as if it were so—to let Eddie know that Jimmy would come to him in the same way should things turn sour in his own life, should he be needy.

But you never are.

Monique's tone, calm and knowing, was one Jimmy did not like. What did she know, after all, about what he and Eddie had been through together, about how and why they'd made their choices? She had not been in Mississippi in the summer of 1964. She had not been with them in New York when the noose began to pull tight on the Movement. She had not been with Eddie when the FBI put shotguns to his head and hauled him out of his flat on 139th Street. She had not been with Eddie through the trial, through his four years in prison. She had not been with Jimmy through those years when, though he knew letting Eddie take the rap was the only smart thing to do, he'd burned to change places with his brother. She had never known what it was like to wake up scared and powerless every morning of your life—to wake up with a bucketful of rage and nothing to do with it except swallow.

Earlier in the evening, between sets, a young American woman had approached him, had asked about Eddie, about the albums they'd made together in the Sixties, about their work in the civil-rights movement, about Eddie's four years in jail, about the years since they had seen each other. Of course. That was why his head was so full—why he was thinking too much of what he usually preferred not to think of: how well he had or had not watched over his brother once upon a time.

Bien entendu, mon vieux. Ne t'inquiète pas trop. Ton frère t'aime, malgré tout…

He spoke to himself in French. Detached in this way, his words and thoughts seemed more precise. Jimmy savored clarity. In his music, there was no mud: no false notes, no shortcuts, no old man's tricks.

Because, he asserted, I have been there and it is so. If you blindfold a group of knowledgeable musicians and have a series of black and white pianists play, the musicians cannot determine if the music emanates from black fingers or white.

Jimmy thought of the blind pianists he'd known: George Shearing, Ray Charles, Watertown Willie. Let the blind judge the blind, Jimmy thought. Let skeptics choose any of the others: Nichols or Tatum or Evans, Lewis or McKenna or Peterson or Tristano or Price or Jimmy Wilson himself. Mister Jimmy Wilson.

N
ous vous présentons, Mister Jimmy Wilson…

Jimmy saw himself step into the lights and the applause, incline his head. When he finished the first number, he spoke to the audience, his voice rolling at them like warm water over loose gravel. If they were blindfolded, these elegant French, would they guess the nationality, much less the color, of the man addressing them? Jimmy's accent was impeccable. When asked if he'd fought with the French in the war, if he'd been raised in one of the colonies, if he'd attended French schools as a child, he smiled. He loved to speak French, to turn his mouth around the liquid sounds. The French! The arrogant French, never showing their feelings or their souls, never giving away anything. He loved the idea that he could sometimes speak French better than they. Here, he could tell Eddie, was a new cutting contest.

And you're winning, right?

Right, Jimmy said.

Well, my brother always did love to win.

Won't you tell him please to put on some speed—follow my lead—oh, how I need—someone to watch over me.…

Was he inside the music or was the music inside him?

The young woman had asked a question about ragtime, about its origins, about African polyrhythms. Was she flirting, showing off? She let him know she was on her junior year abroad, studying at the university in Aix-en-Provence. She was blonde, pretty, a long, thick braid down her back. Her face was boyish, handsome, her lips full, her teeth clean and straight, like those of all the young Americans. She had done her homework, he thought. He gave her that. But she was not, she admitted, a musician. Nor, he wanted to add, are you black or in exile.

Her very forthrightness angered him—the freedom she had to approach him with such openness in her eyes, such unabashed enthusiasm? Her eyes were a pale, marbled green, he recalled: like the eyes of his cat. He'd had the urge, he realized now, to strike her—to somehow blast the innocence from those eyes, to put the red mark of his hand on her smooth, fair-skinned cheeks. Instead, without looking directly at her, he'd given her a speech he'd made many times before: Racists of all colors will try to tell you differently, he stated, but I have seen it happen and it is so. Melanin and the blues are not linked eternally in some perverse biological bondage. Rhythm, harmony, and melody are the property of all men, individual talent the property of some, genius the property of few. The particular music that I play—that derives from our heritage as Africans and as slaves—the gift we have made ours and given to the world, is not particular because a minuscule portion of recombinant DNA has within it both the cause of pigmentation and of jazz but because of history, culture, and individual talent. With enough time and practice, I can appreciate and reproduce Mozart, Bach, and Chopin as naturally as you, had you my gifts, could produce Waller, Monk, and Ellington.…

Thank you, she said, her eyes downcast. She held an album under her arm but did not ask him to autograph it.

Oh, you're a bad man, Jimmy Wilson, ain't you now? Takes a bad man to beat on a young white bitch that way.

You would have done the same.

Wouldn't have had the words. Only, tell me, brother—when'd you give that speech before? Ain't one I ever heard.

In my mind, Jimmy said. Many times. I gave her the abridged version.

Yeah. So I wouldn't think you
really
cruel, right?

Jimmy strode across the Pont Marie, toward the Îie Saint Louis. He was alone, between the worlds he loved—his working life and his home—living within his favored hour, knowing his wife and son would be safely in their beds, lost and found in their separate dreams, when he arrived.

God bless the child. God bless the child that's got his own
.…

Jimmy was in Paris and Jimmy was in Brooklyn and in both places the music was the same, although it was night here and morning there. Against probability, Jimmy had
made
the life that gave him his freedom. Monique sometimes accused Jimmy of being distant, of cutting himself off from his past too utterly. But Monique did not walk with him between midnight and dawn. Monique was not inside him when he played, riding the currents that flowed from his brain to his fingers.

When he spoke French, he translated still—he searched for the correct word, for equivalents. His skill with language was acquired, and he worked to master the deep, rolling consonants, the mannered cadences. But when he made music, there was no translation, no shadow needing shape, no darkness needing light. He worked hard, studied hard, drove himself toward perfection. Of course. But when he was ready, he was ready. When his practicing and rehearsals were done and he sat down to perform the music he loved, then all hesitation was gone—then he did not need to search for phrasings or notes, words or feelings. Everything was there, without translation, and he was neither inside nor outside. But how could anyone else understand what he felt, unless they were there too, with him?

He walked next to the Jardin des Plantes, along Rue Cuvier. To his right was the Universite Pierre et Marie Curie. He glanced at signs plastered to the walls, urging this or that cause. He did not concern himself with French politics. It all seemed like so much squabbling. Even the Communists and anarchists seemed to him, in this beautiful and civilized city, to be working to advance privilege.

He imagined Eddie coming toward him, the young American woman walking beside Eddie, her hands deep in the pockets of her raincoat. He felt his heart bump down slightly and he did not deny what he felt: that he wanted to be there, in one of those pockets, safe within the hollow of the young woman's warm hand. He saw himself greeting Eddie, kissing his brother on both cheeks. The girl was gone, Eddie was smiling.