Memphis: A Novel(7)
“Well,” she said, pausing, calling out over her shoulder. “Ain’t you coming?”
They spent the rest of Miriam’s shift rummaging through Elvis records, telling each other their life stories, sneaking shy glances, falling in love. Talking Hemingway and Fitzgerald and Faulkner, they agreed how none of them, not a single one of those white boys, could write a sentence as good as Zora Neale Hurston.
He told her everything. How he had fled Chicago. Enlisted even to the surprise of his twin brother, Bird. But he had to leave that city. Had to. Bird, eventually, had understood. Both had been born the year of the bird flu pandemic of ’57 that claimed thousands. But not their mother. Marvel pushed her twin boys out into a frigid November night, coughing all the while from the virus. He told her of how he had risen in the Corps. Arrived from the accelerated officers’ program in Quantico, Virginia, to be stationed as a first lieutenant in Millington. Not a half-hour away. He had arrived in May to find Memphis in full bloom. Memphis in May reminded him of Coleridge’s ode to Xanadu—stately pleasure domes were massive plantation houses with wrap-around porches on every tier, and the majesty of the Mississippi River could put to shame any sacredness of the Alph. Magnolias were white with bloom and as fragrant as honeysuckle. The air was thick with green. In the evenings, no matter the day, he could smell barbecue roasting in warm smokers, and on Fridays, the countless church fish fries permeated the moist humid air, made it crackle. There was music. There was always music in Memphis. Old gramophones and Cadillacs blaring, and oval-shaped wooden home radios were always, always on and at full blast, and he heard voices that would shame the Archangel Gabriel—Big Mama Thornton, Furry Lewis, the long, immortal wail of Howlin’ Wolf. Jax noticed that niggas in Memphis strutted. Not that Black folk in Chicago didn’t, but Jax could only remember the fierce wind of his city, images of Black figures bundled in layers of down walking slanted against the brute force of the angry wind off Lake Michigan. Here, Memphis niggas waltzed down the street as if in tempo to the music that was as omnipresent as God. Black folk loving every second of their Blackness. At night, he would head to Beale Street with the other single officers, eyes wide with awe—all the Black streets held nothing but Black bodies. Beale was filled with Black folk drinking whiskey and laughing and loving in dark corners and singing and drawing switchblades and tuning guitars and chewing tobacco and dancing. Cotton was knee-high. Green fields were tilled in neat rows of cotton overflowing white. There were fields of the inedible fruit—the crop that had brought his ancestors and the ancestors of every other Black person he ever knew, to this country to pluck and to pick without a cent, without acknowledgment of their dignity for four hundred years. Now that he had arrived in the South, he told Miriam, he didn’t understand how anyone could ever leave it.
And Miriam told him everything, too: How she was helping to raise her baby sister, August—well, her half sister, technically, but her whole sister in every way that mattered. How her mother had turned militant in her quest for civil rights, for equality. She told him that if he loved Memphis, he would cherish Douglass, her North Memphis neighborhood. How their house—gorgeous, filled with antiques, and built by her own father—had turned into a haven for Black intellectuals, politicians, protestors. How, on a random Tuesday morning, Al Green himself had stopped by the house, and Miriam would never in her entire Black life forget how he and fourteen-year-old August banged away on those keys in the parlor. She told him about Miss Dawn, her quasi-grandmother—her leaning house, her sassy tone, her spells. Miriam told the young Marine in front of her that she had never been in love.
Miriam wasn’t sure when exactly she learned his name that afternoon. But she must have. Because she went to sleep that night, and his name was the prayer she recited. His name morphing into butterscotch, twirling, performing acrobatic pirouettes in her mouth: Jax. Jax. Jax.
* * *
—
The very next evening, Jax drove her to the Officers’ Club on base in Millington. After scouring both hers and her mother’s wardrobe, Miriam had chosen a red sequined shift dress with a low back and a high slit. She paired it with black kitten heels and a small black envelope purse. Her mother knew about the date and let her go, quite happily.
“Young folk should always be together. Lord knows, not a soul on this earth could have stopped me from meeting your daddy,” Hazel had said, helping Miriam sift through closets and chests and armoires for the perfect dress.
Her mother stopped then. Went over to the edge of Miriam’s bed and sat on it, tired suddenly.
“I’ll be home right at midnight, Mama,” Miriam had said.
Miriam heard a honk. She opened the front door promptly at seven-thirty to find Jax at the curb standing beside what looked like a time machine, holding a small bouquet of African violets and staring at her, open-mouthed.
He made not a move. He seemed paralyzed, transfixed, as Miriam’s kitten heels clicked on the pavement leading from her porch to the street.
She, too, was taken aback. Jax drove a sports car the likes of which she had never before seen. It was a color darker than the night around them. Once inside the car, she noticed that it smelled like Jax: musk, leather, cigarettes, and shoe polish. She took in a deep breath.
At the club, Miriam met Antonio Mazzeo, known to all as Mazz, from Chicago’s North Side. He and Jax had been inseparable since boot camp, five years prior. Both still carried with them their Chicago accents—sharp Cs and even sharper short vowels. They shared their love of the Cubs, of a Polish loaded with hot peppers, of summers in a city that dazzled emerald against the waters of Lake Michigan. Mazz belonged to the only Italian American family living in a hard Irish neighborhood. He could walk out of his family’s fourth-floor brownstone where, below, the first floor held the family bakery that served cannoli and cappuccinos and hand-stuffed potato gnocchi, walk right out to see Ernie Banks at first. Jax and Mazz had formed a brotherhood in boot camp. Jax had been shocked—Mazz was the first white boy he had ever met that didn’t either try to spit on him or kill him. Being spat upon by their drill sergeants instead, they felt a kinship—both hated for their bloodline and both hailing from one of the greatest cities in the world.