House of Rougeaux(68)
Gerard Batiste left the Conservatory for another appointment after Eleanor’s first year was complete. He nodded to her in the halls, but that was all. She avoided his classes, assuming that would be to their mutual relief. If he ever had his way with other students she never heard about it. By the end of her studies Eleanor had received numerous recognitions, and upon graduation was offered an assistant professorship.
In the next few years, as the century raced toward its end, she spent her days with her young pupils at the Conservatory, and her evenings in private lessons, anything to get together a few more dollars to send home to her brother Ross. Despite the opportunities afforded to her by the Conservatory, there were few avenues indeed where a musician who was a woman, and colored too, could make her living. The private lessons had to be sought among colored folks, where funds were generally scarce; teaching children, often reluctant ones, was uninteresting at best. Eleanor understood how fortunate she was to have her work at the Conservatory, but even there she wasn’t truly herself. Her art was playing music, not teaching.
Eleanor enjoyed the annual Conservatory Faculty Recital, as she was always one of the few invited to play more than one piece. In those first years after graduation she traveled the city to various auditions. Mrs. Thurber encouraged her to go, and gave her personal letters of introduction and endorsement to give to each company and orchestra director, yet no one ever hired her. Again and again Eleanor saw her former classmates and colleagues, always men, almost invariably white men whose talents did not come close to matching hers, succeed. While Eleanor walked to the homes of her pupils in the worst weather to save a few cents, and endured the humiliation of each failed audition, her musical counterparts secured positions and acclaim and professional ascension of every kind.
Still and all, life in New York City had a lot to offer. Friday and Saturday nights, Eleanor went with Alma and other friends to parties, and dance halls on occasions when she could spare the money, where a new music called Ragtime had exploded onto the scene. And music was not the only thing in the air. Folks talked, debated the essays of W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, and articles in Negro papers like the New York Age. They discussed what must be done against the violence and poverty that afflicted them all, especially, almost unspeakably, those in the Southern States. A great deal was said about the advancement of the race, advancement in opportunity, in achievement, in equality. Over and again Eleanor felt as if she were waking up to the world, and to her own place in it, however lost or found that might turn out to be.
In her daily life Eleanor flew from one place to another. She could almost always keep ahead of the loneliness that trailed her like a shadow. She missed her family, her home, and her mother. Jeannette Thurber once said to her at tea that loneliness was like malaria. Once infected you are never entirely free of it. You have your spells. But back to her home was where she could not go, because now there was another. A little boy to whom she had given life and a name, but not given herself. She had violated a sacred contract that she had never meant to sign, and could never undo, slashed a wound that nature couldn’t heal.
When she stopped long enough she wrote letters to Papa, to Auntie, to Melody and the others. She asked after Gerard. Tilly had another child now and so he was one of three. Eleanor was relieved to hear from Melody that Tilly cared for him, that Melody herself often helped with the children and that Gerard was a fine little fellow. And that Jonty and Dax took him out riding whenever Jonty was home off duty from the railroad. The first year after Eleanor had graduated from the Conservatory, Melody wrote letter after letter asking when she would return to Montreal. “There is no talk whatsoever,” she assured her sister. Orphans were a dime a dozen, really; it was the rare family that didn’t at some point take in a parentless child. Eleanor sometimes replied “next year” to Melody’s queries. It was a decision she deferred, especially while life continued to unfold in New York. But any time she saw a little boy Gerard’s age, one of her private pupils perhaps, the sight stabbed at her heart with steady insistence.
Alma was doing well for herself, performing in clubs and private concerts. Singing was a razor-thin avenue where a woman might succeed in music. No club would hire a woman to play any instrument, least of all a piano. Eleanor was happy for Alma, to be sure, but with a measure of envy. Alma, having met many new friends in her work, was going with a young man called Jack Zebulon who was a brilliant musician. Though Jack had no formal training, he played anything and everything with strings–guitar, banjo, mandolin–and could burn up a piano without even trying. Jack had a friend, Sam Jupiter, who was a big talker. He aimed at putting together an all-Negro orchestra that would tour Europe as representatives of Dr. W.E.B. Du Bois’ “Talented Tenth.” It all seemed terribly far-fetched to Eleanor, but times were changing. Who knew what was possible?
* * *
“Frangipani,” Sam Jupiter said one night. He, Jack and Alma sat with Eleanor and Sam Higgins, clustered around a tiny table at the crowded club where Alma was between sets. Alma always put Eleanor on her guest list, and gave her dresses now and then, saying she couldn’t wear them anymore, but Alma never lorded it over her.
“Frangipani,” said Alma, “what’s that?”
“A tropical flower,” said Joop. Now that there were two Sams everyone took to calling Jupiter “Joop” and Higgins “Hig.”