Emancipation Day (13 page)

But all that could change with a moment’s inattention. Some slip, some fluke, somebody sticking their nose where it didn’t belong. Someone hearing the old man call him Jackson instead of Jack. One false step and he’d be shining shoes down at the train station, or breathing in plaster dust all day with Benny and the old man.

So he was glad when his squad wheeled away from the sidelines and the Army cadets were behind him. His arms felt like lead from holding the trombone up while the fifes and drums fought it out behind him. The All-Whites knew seventeen field drills, twenty-six marches. They even had a symphony section that played in Riverside Park on civic holidays, a band within a band, although Jack wasn’t part of it.

Peter Barnes, first trumpet, two over on Jack’s right, was in the symphony. Peter was white, a doctor’s son, had the world fed to him on a silver spoon. But he was all right. Jack usually went to Peter’s house after band practice, which wouldn’t happen if he thought Jack was coloured. It was the fourth year of the war
that was supposed to have lasted only a few months, a year at most. People were still saying it would be over any day now that the Yanks were in it, but the Yanks had been in it for nearly two years and the war was getting worse, if anything. Jack was glad of it. The war was the future waiting for him, his ticket out.

At Peter’s house they sat in an open area on the second floor, at the top of the stairs, usually with Della, Peter’s mother, who talked to him in a way no white woman ever had before. No woman, come to think of it. She seemed to actually like having him around. He never got the look from her, she never talked as though there were things she knew that he would never know. Whatever she knew, she shared with him and with Peter. There was a fireplace, two soft chairs and heavy red curtains held open during the day by braided gold cords, closed at night because of the blackout; he could stand at one of the windows, pull aside the curtain a fraction and look out over the deserted street, above the tips of the chestnut trees, and she would not say, Come away from there.

It felt safe, but it was dangerous for Jack in this house. He was pretty sure Peter and his mother didn’t know anything about his family, but he couldn’t be certain. Peter probably wouldn’t rat on him if he did know, but he couldn’t be sure of that, either. The Barneses were white and they were rich, and he didn’t really understand such people, didn’t know what they were capable of, how fiercely they would protect their own. Coming to Peter’s house, talking to Peter’s mother, even calling her Della, was like putting his hand on a hot stove to see how long he could stand
the heat. Even if he could stand it, he’d end up with a burned hand. But if he wanted to join the Navy, he had to pass all the tests, and so far he had.

Doc Barnes had been away with the Navy for a year and a half. The surgery, when he was home, took up half the ground floor, but it was closed for the duration. Passing the pocket doors on the way to the stairs, Jack hardly noticed the antiseptic smell anymore. On the second floor, Peter and Jack and Della drank tea and listened to jazz on the radio, which stood on a low, mahogany table between the windows, beside a photograph of Peter’s father: the doc in his white Navy uniform, his collar insignia that looked like a walking stick with two snakes twisted around it. The radio was tuned to a Detroit station, Detroit bands. Jack liked the big swing bands, it was like being in the All-Whites, the same feeling of belonging, an all-encompassing, tightly controlled sound, each lick, even the improvised solos, strictly choreographed. Harry James ran his band like the ringleader of a circus. Once you were in a band like that, you were set for life. You’d passed. He’d heard that Calloway was making fifty thousand a year in New York before the war. Not that he wanted to play trombone in Calloway’s band. Calloway was coloured, all his band members were coloured. There were plenty of better bands around.

Parting the curtains on one of the windows and squinting through the chestnut trees, he could see the Detroit River and the anti-aircraft barrage blimps anchored to the shore. Detroit was a prime target. If German bombers came up the river, they
would hit the chains holding the blimps and crash into the river, or maybe into Detroit. But how would German airplanes get this far inland? They’d have to have flown up the St. Lawrence River all the way from Newfoundland, and then over Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, without being detected. Such a thing was impossible, but every time anyone heard a plane overhead, or train cars shunting together down on the tracks, they looked nervously up at the sky. Jack imagined what a hundred Junkers Ju 88s would sound like as they flew in—a long, steady, low E minor, the first note of a symphony with no end.

“How did you become interested in music, Jack?” Della asked him. She was wearing a cream-coloured blouse with a collar that knotted at her throat and hung down like a tie over the mother-of-pearl buttons that gleamed in the weak light. She seemed young to be Peter’s mother, more like an older sister, like Alvina. Her blouse and skin, their paleness accentuated by bright red lipstick, made her look as though she’d been carved from a kind of stone, alabaster or marble, something that if you rubbed became soft and warm in your hands. She looked like one of those women in the magazines who wore party dresses and high heels while doing housework, or while pouring a cup of Maxwell House coffee for her husband. Jack had never seen her doing any sort of housework. She was the kind of woman who would hire someone like his mother to do it for her.

“My grandfather was a bandleader,” Jack said. “On my mother’s side.”

“Is that why you joined the All-Whites, because your grandfather was a bandleader?” Her knitting needles clicked in time with the music. “Socks,” she’d said on one of his first nights there, “for the boys in the trenches.”

“Foxholes, Mother, not trenches,” Peter had corrected her, and she had smiled.

“My mother says it’s in the blood,” Jack said.

“What is?”

“Music.”

“Is she musical?”

“No, not very.”

“Martin Luther called the trombone ‘the voice of God,’ ” Della said, brushing her blonde hair back over her ear. He didn’t know who Martin Luther was, but he remembered standing beside his mother in First Baptist, watching her sing with her head thrown back, swaying on her feet, mouth open, eyes closed, the pages of her hymnal flapping in her gloved hands like the wings of a frightened pigeon. The voice of God. He’d never felt comfortable in that church; people gave him too wide a berth.

Della paused in her knitting to look up at Jack. “But perhaps musicality skips a generation.”

“It didn’t with us,” Peter said.

“Gracious, look at the time.” Della pressed what she had knitted against her thigh. “There’s one finished. One sock a day, that’s my limit. Time for a drink.”

Peter, still at the window, turned to Jack. “We’re thinking of going over to Detroit. Want to come?”

“To Detroit?”

“I’m sure you’ve heard of it. Large city, just across the river? If it weren’t for the blackout we could see the lights from here.”

“But won’t everything be closed?”

“Not everything,” Della said, getting up. “There’s a war on, you know.”

Peter drove and Della sat beside him on the passenger side, with Jack in the back admiring the play of the red dashboard lights on Della’s hair. The nape of her neck glistened. It was June and the night was hot and humid, a typical Windsor night, smelling of heat and overripe vegetation and, as they neared the river, dead fish and creosote. With the top halves of the car’s headlights taped, they couldn’t see very far ahead. Gas was rationed, but Peter could always get it because of the doctor’s licence plates. They drove down into the tunnel and stopped at Customs and Immigration to show their nonresident alien cards. With their windows down, the heat from the tunnel was stifling. The guard looked at Jack’s card longer than necessary. When he finally handed it back and waved them through, Jack showed the card to Della.

He read aloud: “ ‘Height: five-ten; Color: White; Hair: Black.’ Wouldn’t you say my hair was more brown?”

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you in daylight,” Della said, taking the card from him. “It also says you have a scar on your left cheek.” She turned in her seat and looked at him for what felt like ages. “I hadn’t noticed that, either.”

“Oh, yeah,” Jack said. “Long time ago. Cut myself shaving.”

They cruised along Woodward and stopped in front of the Paradise Theatre. The streets were dark but busy with traffic, trolley cars on Woodward and pedestrians on both sidewalks. A long line of people snaked from under the Paradise’s unlit marquee up Woodward and around a corner. Peter drove north as far as East Adams, then turned right and parked in front of the Horse Shoe jazz club, a long, narrow tavern with octagonal windows on either side of a deeply recessed door. Jack had been to the Horse Shoe before, with Alvina. It was a black-and-tan, open to both coloureds and whites, but few whites ventured this far into Detroit’s Black Bottom district. Most went to places on Hastings. Why were they coming here? he wondered, but didn’t ask. Peter dropped Jack and Della off in front of the club and went to find a parking space. Jack held the lounge’s heavy wooden door open for Della, trying not to look like a doorman, and when they were inside Della breezed past the bar and found them a table near a small platform on which three dark-skinned men were sitting on chairs, blowing horns that had cigarette smoke coming out through the bells. Another man, wreathed in smoke, was playing a banged-up set of drums, bass, snare, hi-hat and two toms. The alto sax and clarinet deferred to the tall, lighter man with the trumpet. The tune was fast and jittery, a lick that might have started as one song but long ago had lost its train of thought. At the tables around them, coloured men and women engaged in conversations that had, with the noise and the smoke and the booze, become improvised shouting matches,
as though the music were there not to give them something to listen to but to rise above.

When Peter joined them, Della smiled a welcome. Jack thought she looked more at ease here, in this place where the three of them stood out like beacons, than she had in her own house, and it made a kind of perverse sense to him, because he felt more at home in her house than he did at his own. He was faintly jealous of Peter; Peter lived with her all the time, not just on Thursday nights. Peter saw her in daylight.

“Who’s at the Paradise?” Peter asked the waiter, who leaned over to wipe the table and say something close to Peter’s ear that sounded like
Billy Eckstine
.

“Big crowd,” Peter said. The waiter nodded and left.

Jack didn’t care who was at the Paradise, or here either, he didn’t like this jungle music, this tribal jiggaboo jazz. They really should be over on Hastings, at the Three Star or the Flame Show Bar, where it was busier, better lit, safer. He liked his music smooth and mellow, flowing like a deep, continuous river. There was nothing mellow about these boys, their cheeks and eyes bulging out of their heads, sweat shining on their faces. They looked as though they’d been carved out of hard, wet coal. This music wasn’t the voice of God.

But Della was watching the trumpet player like she was trying to get inside the man’s skin. Her head was turned slightly away so that he could see, in the bluish light coming from the Pabst sign above the bar, the pulse in her throat keeping time with the music. He allowed his eyes to caress the contours of her blouse
in the smoky darkness. Everything around her was in motion, moving waves of sound, yet she was calm and still, fearless. He marvelled at her, a white woman in a room full of coloureds, a doctor’s wife surrounded by assembly linemen, machine-shop workers, drill-pressers, tool-and-die punchers, men who made tanks and bombs for a living, who swept floors and cleaned toilets, who eyed white women in ways that could get them arrested if a white man caught them at it. They were eyeing her now, looking her over between outbursts of laughter, calculating, sizing up him and Peter. What’s she doing here? they were thinking. What does she want? When she picked up her glass and put it to her lips they followed the liquid as it slid down her throat. Jack knew she could feel them watching her because she never took her eyes off the stage, not even to look at him.

“They’re good tonight,” she said when the waiter brought their drinks.

“They picked up when you come in,” the waiter said.

Peter was watching the trumpet player. Jack leaned forward, elbows on the table, aware of the men watching him from under soft caps pulled down tight on their foreheads, loose shirts with greasy collars, sleeves rolled up over glistening biceps. The women were bolder, better dressed, probably office workers. They sat with their legs crossed and their sweaters draped over their shoulders, buttoned at the throat, dark skin showing through white blouses. The men met his eyes before looking away. The women held his gaze coolly, like they were reading his thoughts.

The set ended in a long, sinking chord, a train whistle running out of steam, and Peter laughed, picked up his beer and drained it.

“Man!” he said, looking at Jack, eyes glowing. “That has guts!”

“You like guts?” Jack asked.

“Damn right I do.”

“Not really something you could dance to, is it?” Jack said, turning to Della.

“Would you like to dance, Jack?” she asked, smiling at him.

For a second he thought she was serious. “No, not really.”

“Well, then.”

Before leaving, she went up and said something to the trumpet player, who nodded and said something back, looking over at their table. Peter waved at him. Jack saw Della hold the coloured man’s hand for too long, and squeeze it before letting go. He thought, she must have been giving him a tip.

Jack told Peter to drop him off at the tunnel exit and he would walk home. Della turned in her seat to look at him.

“What about your trombone?” she asked him. “Didn’t you leave it at our house?”

“I’ll come and get it tomorrow.”

“Are you sure, Jack?” Peter said. “We can pick it up now and drive you home.”