Authors: Christine Fletcher
I glided to the doorway and peeked inside. Another window in here, and next to it, I could make out the pale glimmer of a shirt. A long gleam of brass and, on the windowsill, in a sliver of light from a streetlamp, papers covered with scratches and musical notes.
"Are you going to play that after the break?" I asked.
The brass gleam shifted. Scrape of a match. I glimpsed him in the tiny sudden flame, bending to it with his cigarette. Strong curved cheeks, blunt nose. Eyelashes curling up, almost as pretty as a girl's. I wondered if he'd ever gotten teased about them.
Ozzie shook out the match. Behind me, up the hallway, I heard girls' chatter loud, then faint. Girls coming out of the Ladies'. I eased inside the doorway so they wouldn't see me.
Ozzie said, "You ever hear anything like that in this dump?"
"No," I said.
"Then no. I'm not playing it after the break."
"Where, then?"
"Lily's. My cousin's joint."
The flyer he'd given me, my first night at the Starlight. Yvonne threatening to have him fired if he bothered the customers.
"Hottest jazz in Chicago," I said. "You're in the band."
"That's right," Ozzie said, surprised. By this time I could make him out pretty good in the dim light: he'd taken off his too-small tuxedo jacket, loosened his tie. He tilted his head back, looking at me more closely. "Okay, I know you. You almost slugged one of the customers."
The silver dollar. I decided to ignore that. "Can I have one of those?" I asked, pointing to his cigarette.
Rustle of a pack. He leaned forward, the cigarette in his hand. I took it and put it in my mouth and bent to the match and lit it. The flame snuffed out. Prickly scent of match smoke.
"You just flick your ashes on the floor?" Ozzie said.
"No," I said, even though I had.
"That pipsqueak Del sees ashes on the floor, he'll chase me outta here. Then I'll have to sit with those geezy old-timers in the band, listen to them jawing about the old days until I'm about to pull my own head off. Maybe you better get back where you belong."
"Maybe I'll invite all the girls back here. It gets awfully crowded in that Ladies' room."
Ozzie could've been a dragon, he blew his smoke that hard. His chair creaked, and an ashtray thumped onto the windowsill. I stepped over and tapped my cig against the rim. Before I could thank him, he started humming again, his fingers floating over the trumpet keys. Message plain as day: shut up. So I did. I laid my aching head back against the wall, and I listened. My fingers caught the beat and tapped in the air, silent.
The rap on the door almost made me gasp. I was standing behind it, and it swung inward, toward my face. "Man, what you always got to be sitting in the dark like this for?" The voice rusty-old. Not Del. "You want to write music, ought to do it in the light."
"I think better in the dark," Ozzie said. Scraping his papers together fast. He grabbed his trumpet and his jacket and then they both were gone.
I wondered what Del would do, if he caught a girl talking with a colored musician. It seemed like one of those things you wouldn't have to make a rule about, because nobody would dream of doing it.
So I hadn't gone back to the little room. Ozzie and I kept catching each other's eyes at least once a night, though, usually when Hamp, the bandleader, struck up groaners like "Sweet Sue, Just You" or "Champagne Charlie." Ozzie'd make a face, or I would. Once he let his eyes flutter upward, like he was dying. I'd busted up into giggles just as I was taking a fellow's ticket. He'd snatched it back and walked off, muttering he didn't see what was so danged funny.
Manny steered me smooth and easy across the floor. "I bet we can find you some real music," he said. "What do you say?"
He had a nice round face. Lively eyes, a sweet smile. A lot of snap in his moves, too. I bit my lip and glanced away. Saw Nora slip into the shadows with a customer, his hand already gripping her keister. Across the hall, Yvonne tipped her head and smiled at one of her fish. Not an hour ago, in the Ladies', I'd heard her call him a toad with the brains of a brick. The song ended, and from the bandstand came the first strains of "Tiptoe Through the Tulips."
I looked up at Manny and smiled. "Sounds swell," I said.
I didn't worry anymore about getting home late. Overtime, I'd told Ma. At first she made a fuss, but that didn't last long. I think she was secretly glad—not only because overtime meant extra wages, but now she had an excuse not to sit up for me. Night after night in the parlor chair was making her joints hurt so bad, she could barely walk.
By the time me and Peggy changed our clothes and cashed in our tickets, Manny and Alonso had a cab waiting. We ran for it through stinging sleet, jamming in together, us girls sandwiched between the men. Once we were in the cab, Manny pulled a hip flask out of his pocket. He offered it to me. I hesitated, then tipped it back.
It was all I could do not to cough. My eyes watered and I blinked back tears, afraid if they fell they'd take half my mascara with them. I passed the flask to Peggy.
"So where you boys taking us?" she asked, after she'd taken a slug, her voice gaspy and hoarse as if it'd been squashed by a car.
"If you want a black and tan," the cabbie called over his shoulder, "then you want the Hoot Owl." He shifted the cab into gear.
"Hold your horses, we haven't decided yet," Alonso said.
The cabbie threw his elbow over the seat and hoisted himself around. "Look, Pinoy," he said, "you know damn well you ain't headed nowhere with these girls but to a black and tan. Now, the meter's running, the Hoot Owl is the best in town, that's all there is to it." He shlumped around again and pulled into the street. I wondered what a black and tan was, but Peggy was talking to Alonso and I couldn't ask her.
"Hell with him," Alonso said. "I'm not going to the Hoot Owl just so he can get a kickback for steering us there."
The swallow of whiskey had turned into a small sun in my stomach. Warmth oozed into my muscles, and the aches in my feet turned dull and distant, as though someone had swathed my feet in cotton. The buildings on the street seemed to float past, blurry from sleet.
"I want someplace different," Alonso was saying. "Someplace with real wild jazz."
Real wild jazz.
Where had I heard that before?
Best jazz in Chicago . . . you got a customer wants to hear
real
music, you bring him down.
"I know someplace," I said.
"You?" Peggy laughed. "Since when?" But I was already digging through my coat pocket. Where was that flyer Ozzie had given me? Had I thrown it out? I'd meant to . . . a folded bit of paper tumbled past my fingertips. I grabbed it, flattened it open on my knee. Manny took it from me and tilted it toward the window, trying to catch the light of streetlamps as we cruised down Western Avenue.
"Lily's,"
he read.
"Jump and jive . . ."
Alonso glanced across me at Manny. I felt Manny shrug. He peered at the flyer and read the address to the cabbie, who snorted and changed direction.
"You know that's in Bronzeville," Peggy whispered to me. I didn't answer. Bronzeville was the Negro neighborhood, east of the Yards, between us and Lake Michigan. I'd never been there. Ma once said she'd skin us alive if she found us within a mile of it.
I didn't glimpse much of it that night. Outside, it was black as the inside of a coal bin, sleeting and howling with wind, that's all I saw, and you can bet we didn't stand around gawking. Me and Peggy jumped out of the cab and ran down the outside stairs to the basement entry, snatching at the iron rail to keep from slipping, our pocketbooks held over our heads. We found ourselves in a tiny front room with unpainted wood walls and a gray-haired Negro man sitting on a stool behind a cash register. To our right was an even tinier checkroom; to our left, a heavy velvet curtain. From behind the curtain came the stomp of drums, a hail of beats too fast to sort out, and over them, the scream and soar of a trumpet. Kicking my heart into high gear, thrumming down to my feet. I forgot the ache.
"Swell joint, kid." Peggy shook the sleet off her pocketbook. Glanced around at the bare walls. "Good thing I've had my tetanus shot."
I was already shimmying out of my coat and hat and handing them to the hatcheck girl. Alonso paid our admission, and then, Manny behind me, I stepped through the curtain into a blast of trombone. The entire club was maybe half the size of the Starlight's dance floor. Dimmer, and warm, stale with cigarettes, perfume, beer. A dozen or so little square tables, about half of them full. Mostly Negroes, a few whites, their foreheads and cheeks shining in the light of tiny yellow-shaded lamps, shining coffee-and-milk, shining pink, shining mahogany-wood brown.
Of course, I saw Negroes all the time, on the streetcar and the el, and when I was at the packinghouse I'd even worked with one, Evelyn, who cleaned the floors. But I'd never been in a place that was mostly Negro. I'd certainly never seen Negro and white sitting together. Dancing together. Holding hands. I stood frozen, unsure what to do.
Someone touched my elbow. I jumped, and looked up to see Manny grinning. He nodded at the band, crammed on a platform barely raised above the floor, at the tables, at the three couples dancing.
"Great!" he shouted over the music. "This is great!"
I grabbed Peggy's arm and put my mouth up to her ear. "What kind of place is this?"
"You're the one who brought us here, don't you know? This is a black and tan. You think a regular joint would let us in, with
them?"
She tipped her head toward the men. Alonso caught her eye, and she smiled at him. "Let go of my dress," she said to me. "You're wrinkling it."
A woman slipped past a knot of people toward us. "Welcome to Lily's," she said. She was tiny, and Ozzie was tall, but I could see the resemblance: wide-apart eyes, curved cheeks. Hers rounder than his but ending in the same strong chin. She was shorter than me but bigger hipped, her black hair rolled into an elegant updo.
"We're from the Starlight Dance Academy," I said. I had to raise my voice over the music. "Ozzie told us about this place!"
She nodded and waved us to follow her. She slipped between tables and I had to scoot to keep up, sure I was going to trip over someone's foot or my own. She put us at a table off to the side, just a few feet from the band and the couples jitterbugging on a bare patch of floor.
I felt like I had eyes all over my skin, taking in everything. The blue tablecloths and battered tin ashtrays. The rippling waves of the men's hair, combed straight back and gleaming. The men in zoot suits—I didn't know the name for them, I asked Manny, later—sharkskin gray, kelly green, royal blue, each with broad shoulders and nipped-in waists, coats and silver watch chains hanging almost to their baggy knees.
A trumpet blare caught my ear, a ratta-tat-tat solo so catchy my feet started jitterbugging under the table. It was Ozzie, all right, only an Ozzie so different from the trumpeter at the dance hall I hardly recognized him. Instead of a tuxedo, he wore a checked cotton shirt and a regular tie, and his jacket was unbuttoned. He wasn't bored now. He leaned back like a tree in a gale, his trumpet aimed someplace far gone from here, his cheeks puffed out and eyes squeezed shut and the sweat pouring down. Did he do this every night—play six hours at the Starlight, then come straight here?
Ozzie poured on the gas and so did the dancers. I thought I knew how to Lindy Hop—but I didn't, not like this. One girl threw her arm high in the air, her other hand gripping the man's hard, and they twisted low to the floor, knees wide, her body one long curve from fingers to hips, both of them light and lively on the balls of their feet. Kicking out to the side, the girl's Cuban heel flashing an inch from our table. Peggy jerked backward.
Ozzie lowered his trumpet, his solo done. People clapped and shouted. Alonso whistled.
"Dance?" Manny shouted in my ear. I grabbed his hand and leaped to my feet. I didn't care if he was Filipino or Chinese or Negro or Polish. I didn't care that I didn't know how to dance like this. I could hoof it well enough, the beat was fast and wild and I couldn't stay sitting.
Manny danced a hundred times better than Stan Dudek, a thousand times better than Art. He twirled and finger-popped, and we twisted and swung, my skirt flaring wide. After a while we staggered back to the table, and I found a drink at my seat. Coca-Cola and some kind of liquor, harsh under the sweetness. I didn't care; I was thirsty. I drank it down and we headed out to the floor again. A tall, thin Negro girl had stepped up onstage. She wore a pretty red dress that showed a scatter of freckles, big as raindrops, across her chest. She didn't look any older than Ozzie, no older than me. She carried herself like she wasn't sure where to put her hands or what to do with her shoulders, and for a second I thought she'd wandered up there by mistake. But the people at the tables whistled and called
Sing it, Ophelia,
and she did. There was no microphone, but she had the pipes to carry the whole room, a throaty scat and wail and, I tell you, my feet flew and Manny was right there, jump and turn and swing, his hand tight on mine. I glanced up at the bandstand and saw Ozzie watching her. He'd been so wrapped up in the music all night, I didn't think he'd noticed anything past the end of his trumpet. He sure hadn't noticed me. But he saw Ophelia, all right, the look on his face like the music itself had put on a dress and come up to him and said hello. But she didn't toss so much as a glance his way.
After a while, Ophelia took a break. Manny and Alonso lit up cigarettes at the table. I followed Peggy to the ladies' room. My legs shook, my dress stuck to my back, my hair felt five feet wide and a yard high. I didn't care. My feet hurt, but I didn't care about that, either. Let them be sore tomorrow, just please, keep them hopping tonight.
The ladies' room had only one stall and one mirror, although the mirror was a good size and had Hollywood lights over it. That'd be Lily's touch. A man wouldn't know about girls trying to fix their faces in shadows. Not that those lights did me any good. I tapped shoulders and said, "Excuse me," and these Negro girls said, "Yes, ma'am, hang on just a sec," and went right on dabbing their faces. Except that they were colored, it was just like the Starlight during a break: too many girls and not enough mirror, and every girl out for herself.