Shadowbahn(59)

? ? ?

A young woman brings a cup to the tall professor, who disdainfully regards what’s in it before pouring it on the ground. The young woman appears crestfallen, mumbling apologies—“Never mind,” he says, “just get me water”—and Jesse realizes that for the first time since he arrived in Bloozpark, all the music and bar noise has succumbed to the rest of the country’s silence, but for the speaker. “Now, when I was in prison,” he says, taking a cup of water from another young woman, “I became a man of words. Mr. Dreiser. Herr von Goethe. The Viscount Morley,” he says, “of Blackburn. White men, let it be acknowledged and noted—not Negro professors with their PhDs in Advanced Uncle Tomism—white men who, in brief epiphanies, overcame their inner devils to grasp truth. In prison I pondered words and their meanings. So for a moment, brothers and sisters, let us ponder together the meaning of the word strain, and as we do, let us ponder our dilemma long enough to realize it is no dilemma at all, because whether the cracker is cracked one way or the other, oppressor or liberator, our resolve does not change, our strategy is cracked too, but cracked in a manner less fractured than wise and multipurposed. We shall trust whatever part of the cracker’s misbegotten life we can make of value to us, the only value his life ever had until this moment from the moment he was born, that value being his life’s capacity for white destruction. We shall be wary as well, because he is a white fool in whose being, as in the being of any white fool, lies our destruction, too. No other recourse makes sense than that we be both wary and trustful at once. To do only one is to miss the opportunities or warnings of the other. In the meantime, as for the word strain,” he concludes with a small smile, “it has numerous meanings. Of course, strain can mean an effort that involves great exertion. It can mean something stretched to a fragile if not ultimately broken point. But most irresistibly for our purposes, most fascinating is that somehow, for some unfathomably philologic reason, the same word that applies to a virus also is used to describe a theme of music.”





get ready


Tossing and turning in his cage once again, that night Jesse dozes to the distant crackling—through one of the nearby windows—of the 45 played over and over. Although the unfamiliar flipside of “Oh Shenandoah” is sung in a foreign language, in semiconsciousness Jesse hears the lyric in English anyway, in what is or is not his voice, more spoken than sung.

Here come the planes, so you better . . .

When he finally shakes himself to consciousness with a start, unmistakably the cage is settled on solid ground, with its door open.

? ? ?

The night around him beginning to pale in the east, Jesse pulls himself out.

No one else is in sight. He follows the sound of the 45 across a square, passing embers of fires blazing hours before, along stone steps winding up the foothills to a house in the trees enshrouded in leaf and shrub. Berserk scents of ebb tide blow in with the squawk of distant gulls. At the top of the steps, a small wooden patio leads into a long single room where the record plays, although it takes Jesse a moment in the dark to determine the alcove with the turntable.





the song in the dark


He stands over the turntable watching its arm and stylus reach the end of the record, then rise from the final groove and return to the beginning. For a while Jesse is transfixed by the notion of a song playing endlessly, when his eyes drift in the dark to other records filed next to the turntable, a poster on the alcove wall for “jazz at Massey Hall” by “the quintet,” as though there could be only one quintet that mattered, which in this case is nearly so. Finally Jesse realizes that the tall professorial man who addressed him and the gathered townspeople hours earlier is lying on a mattress just feet away.

? ? ?

While the man appears asleep, Jesse makes out the glint of dawn off the dark-rimmed glasses on his face. Jesse takes the needle from the record and takes the record from the turntable; the plain white sleeve that’s held the 45 all this time is nowhere to be seen. Suddenly Jesse is seized by a certainty. “Luna,” he says out loud, convinced he’s found what he’s looking for, although if he thought about it at all he would realize this doesn’t make sense. The sleeper along the wall stirs. “Only loon in this room, my man,” Jesse hears from the mattress, “is you.”





the corrupted song


Jesse says, “Figured you was awake. The glasses.”

“Even in my darkness,” comes the reply, “I remain a man of vision. I would have smelled the devil from you in any case, the moment you entered my room—that steam of your missing half and the cloud of malignancy about you.”

“Yes, sir,” agrees Jesse.

“Of course I do not approve of music. The only music Allah listens to is the desert wind blowing from Mecca. Notwithstanding the righteous aspirations of Brothers Monk and Trane, bop is the sound of my corrupted past exhaling its dying breath, the jungle sigh of lindy-hopping and reefers and burning lye in the hair to make it white-devil straight. The sobs of women I pimped, passing as ecstatic moans in the way a fallen brother attempts to pass for white. In prison, I renounced music for words. But just between us, the world’s angriest black man and a white-devil intruder in the dark—”

“Well now, about that, this is my record and you did take it, after all. . . .”