—Who?
—Dipper.
—Armstrong?
—That right.
She hummed again, and looked at me.
—Be what you be. That what he said. And that the way he plays.
She rubbed the blanket like it was a cat on her lap.
—Want to meet him?
—Yeah.
—You never know, she said. —Maybe he can cure you being Irish.
—He already has, I said.
—No, brother, she said. —Ain’t that easy.
He was dressed only in big white towels, one around his waist, the other wrapped around his neck. He’d been off the stage ten minutes but the sweat was still flowing onto his neck and down his chest and arms. He wiped his forehead with the handkerchief he’d had with him onstage. Off the stage, he was a small man but his smile and his face were huge, and everything and everyone surrounded him. The dressing room was crowded with sharp-dressed white men and women, but I could see none of the other musicians.
Dora had just introduced me to him. She was white tonight – this once, for me – the only way to get us together through the big, leather-padded doors. The white boys in charge of the door knew her; they knew her when she was black too, but that didn’t matter. Tonight she was white, and she was with a white man. She was inside the rules.
He was sitting deep in a broken chair, but he stood up to meet me. He stood in front of me and held out his hand. Then he saw something, and the hand went further, and gently grabbed one of my lapels. He felt its threads with the fingers that had helped him to his impossible notes – a long line of them that had sliced the roof a few minutes earlier. I could feel the heat of his fingers close to my face. He was standing right against me. I could smell his work and genius.
—That’s a mighty sharp vine, Pops, he said.
More than three years after I’d bought it, the suit was still an eye-catcher; my first American suit, my own wear and tear hadn’t worn down the fabric.
—It one of Mister Piper’s? he asked.
—Don’t know him, I said.
—Mister Scotty Piper, he said. —Fine, fine tailor.
—It’s not one of his.
He looked down at the trousers.
—And the nice wide pants, he said.
—I saw them coming, I told him.
He smiled.
I was remembering how, giving it the old Henry.
—I got there before the rest, I said. —But, you know yourself, it’s the shoulders. The difference between a good suit and a bad one.
—Well, that the truth, he said.
He laughed and slapped my shoulders. He looked at me carefully. Then he looked at Dora.
—He features somebody I know, he said.
He looked at me again. He looked up at my face.
—We met before, Pops?
—No, I said.
—No, he said. —But it’s a problem. You ofays all look the same to me.
That got laughs; I didn’t mind.
—An ofay that can carry a coloured suit, he said. —We got to talk, Pops.
He picked up his trousers, then turned to me again.
—Hang around.
Dora shoved me with her hip.
I was in.
It was the same night that Sacco and Vanzetti were finally strapped to the chair and cooked; I saw it on the front pages the day after. But I was happy that night. I’d been to see The General at the Paradise, my first film since New York. I sat through it twice, laughed twice as hard at Buster Keaton, and forgot that my girl wasn’t at my side. She was sitting above me, in the gods, up in nigger heaven. She was black that afternoon. And now my hand was still wet with Louis Armstrong’s sweat. He’d held my hand; he’d seen the man I used to be. A man who carried a good suit through checkpoints and locked doors. Louis Armstrong had looked at me and seen someone he wanted, a man he needed to know, a man who’d stroll right on with him. He’d seen Henry Smart.
It was months before we spoke again but it didn’t matter. I waited and, sometimes, I knew.
I waited now for Dora.
Sometimes she got off her streetcar three blocks before her stop, and sometimes she didn’t. She sat in the car and looked ahead or down at her book as I stood and watched her pass. She looked older, coming home from work. And, sometimes, maybe once a week, she stepped off and there I was, sometimes. Sometimes, she went straight past me and, sometimes, I jumped on the car and left her there.
She was white enough to work in the Loop but she’d given that up. She worked for a family now, in Oak Park.
—Clean some, cook some. Do what the bitch should do her own self.
Doing the black woman’s work. It paid less than the Loop dress shop had, and the hours were longer, but she wasn’t pretending now. No more hair straighteners or powders, no more care with the accent.
—Don’t play it up neither. I just be Dora.
—So you’re happier.
—Don’t be so dumb, Henry S.
I took care; I even noticed – but I still didn’t get it. I’d spent three years trying not to be Irish, but I didn’t understand. I thought I did, but I was never close enough.
—You think they live here cos they want to? she asked me once, when she met me off the trolley, before she got too angry to talk to me. —There’s a line, Henry S., and you don’t see it cos you don’t have to. But we do.
—I only said I liked it, I told her.
But she’d gone. I watched her stride away, under a string of rabbits that hung from a telegraph pole, across the pavement, to a window above a butcher’s door. Her anger made the rabbits swing. The red in her head-rag caught the yellow streetlight, threw it back.
That was all I’d said: I liked the place. I saw the alleys. I saw the kids – the rickets and glaucoma. I saw what the houses were, the old rotten homes of the rich, worse, more packed, than the one I slept in; as bad, sometimes, as the one I’d been born in. And I’d seen few black men working in the packing houses. And fewer in the push of men at the gates every morning, hoping for their turn and the nod. And none in the Loop going in and out the front doors, none that weren’t moving off the streets, getting quickly to where they were going.
I wasn’t a sap.
—I only said I liked it here.
I ran after her.
—You fuckin’ like it.
—Go away, fool.
But I kept up, got beside her, made men and women step out of our way.
—What you doing?
It wasn’t fair; I knew that. I was drawing attention, dragging it to her, just to prove her wrong. To prove that we could stand here and talk, that we could do it as long as we wanted.
Past the Palace-de-Luxe Beauty Shop, and no one in the window took much notice. I looked back, and I was right – three lye-soaked heads waiting for the next sight to see – we were already gone. The loan bank, the bargain store, the storefront church – no hard eyes or mutters. Past the poolroom and barber shop and the hard men who always stood outside. They stared, more frankly than white men ever did, but it wasn’t me they were looking at. They were gawking at a good-looking woman.
The Stroll was lighting up.
—You wait, she said.
I wasn’t getting in. If she brought a white man home, she was working – she told me this. If she brought him home more than twice, or he started arriving by himself, using what looked like his own key, started nodding at folks, patting the heads of kids on the steps – the stoop, she was attracting bad attention. I hadn’t been back to her room. And the room wasn’t hers. She shared the rent with four other girls. They’d been on a round-trip excursion to Memphis the first night she’d parked herself in front of me. They left on Friday night, got back on Monday morning, partied all the way and back—
—A dance on wheels, she said.
—Ever do it yourself?
—No reason to, she said.
—back in time for the charge to work. But they’d mis
sed the train, all four of them, and rolled back into town a whole week late.
While she changed, took off the servant’s head-rag and threw it in a corner with the years she didn’t want, I waited on the corner of 35th and State, the district’s big corner, and listened to a tailgate band, on the back of a flatbed truck parked right against the pavement. There was a piano player I’d seen and heard before. Albert Ammons. He was up there with a trombone player and a drummer, and a guitarist, sharing the stool with Mister Ammons, all on the back of the truck, under a banner advertising the same trip that had sent Dora’s flat-mates south, the Illinois Central round-trip excursion to Memphis. There was a barker too, in a sharp suit and polished derby, sitting on the fireplug, waving tickets, and often selling, to anyone who stopped to hear the band.
—I got them here, folks! Got them right here!
He stayed away from me.
—Tickets here to Paradise! All way home to the land of cotton and change in your pocket!
It was good music. Men grabbed home-bound women, made a dance floor right outside the loan bank.
—If you can’t do it a long time, do it twice!
It was the rough sound of home, played for city floors and pavements; it was good-time music for homesick slickers.
—Oh, shake your wicked knees!
There were four couples dancing now, flinging and flung, moving just enough, watched and clapped by dozens more, six or seven couples now, and Mister Ammons thumping out the steps and shouting as the barker shouted. This was what I’d meant; this was what I liked. The back-home music of Manhattan’s Lower East Side had been miserable; even the reels were meant to draw the tears. But these men here were beating out the blues, and laughing as they worked. The steps hadn’t come north with the dancers; they were made up, there, on the sidewalk, and abandoned when the barker decided that enough was enough. There was no one left buying. They could come back in an hour, the next day, next week, and the steps would be brand-new different.
The dancers sensed it, knew it in the shift in tempo.
—Oh, shake, shake, shake your fat fanny!
Their dance was nearly over. The guitar man climbed over the side of the truck, and the dancers turned and grabbed each other; they left the ground, inches below, a whirr of hats and elbows. The streetlight couldn’t hold them clear.
Oh, play that thing.
The barker had the last word before he hopped onto the running board.
—These fine, high-powered maestros be playing their fine, high-powered stomps and boogie-blues, in the fine, high-powered choo-choo train, all the way to Memphis, Tennessee. The Shimmy, the Black Bottom, the Charleston. All can be dooed in the Coloured Only car. All night, all the way. Every number a gassuh.
The trombone player jumped from the back of the truck, holding the instrument high. He waved back, and walked away. The truck moved out in the opposite direction, to join the State Street crawl. Mister Ammons was still belting away, although the other men held onto the sides of the truck. And, as they crept over the intersection and moved more freely south, his piano was joined and swallowed by other pianos and horns and drums that took over the street, the streets, same time, every night.
Oh, play that thing.
This was living like I’d never seen it. This wasn’t drowning the sorrow, the great escape, happy or unhappy. It was life itself, the thing and the point of it. No excuses: it was why these men and women lived.
Dora took her time, but standing on that corner was a very good night out. I soaked in the sounds, the victory and joy. The packing house was far away. I wasn’t going to stay there. The pay was bad, the work was bad, and they’d be getting worse as autumn – fall – surrendered to my first Chicago winter. I’d had enough of Packingtown. I hadn’t moved west to live with Lithuanians and Poles. They were grand, but impenetrable. Big decent, grunting people. They ate too much, too fast; they prayed too much, too often – they were too like the fuckin’ Irish. I was safe there, but that was all.
I’d be safe here too, but alive again. I didn’t know what I’d do, but I knew I’d be doing it here. I didn’t know why – it was stupid, sentimental; I could see that. And dangerous. But not tonight, it wasn’t. I was ready again, excited. I believed.
Her hand was on my arm, fingers quickly tucked in to my chest.
Her anger had been thrown in the corner, gone the way of her head-rag. She was glowing, happy, younger than she was, already dancing to the tunes and steps that were fighting it out around us. It was officially night time now, play time, and we could be together. We’d be looked at. She was gorgeous and I wasn’t far off it. Henry Smart again, because she’d looked at me. I’d come out of hiding. And here was a woman who’d got there before me; she’d stopped hiding too.
—We were made for each other, I said.
—No, she said. —We were not.
—Where’ll we go?
—Well, now, she said. —You a white man on a coloured street that ain’t your street. That the problem? No, sir. A coloured lady on her own coloured street. She the problem.
She moved, and took me with her.
—But tonight, Henry S., we got the answer to that problem.
Through men on their way home, and women on their way out, past pimps and preachers, a one-legged man with a begging cup – war or stockyards, I couldn’t tell; past two black cops – I hadn’t seen black cops before. We passed restaurants, cabarets, and loud speakeasies. We passed because we couldn’t go there. She could enter some, or I could. But we couldn’t enter together.
We strolled at a clip; she knew where we were going. They were all there, on or just off State Street: the Dreamland, the Sunset, the Plantation, the Elite Café, the De Luxe. All fighting, grabbing as we passed. But they weren’t for us tonight.
We stopped a block short of the Panama Café. She let go of my arm. I knew the trick by now.
We could walk into the Panama Café.
The words had made me jump when she’d first whispered them. I went for the gun I didn’t have.
—A black and what?
—Tan.
—Black and Tan?
—Yes, Henry S. What the matter?
—What the fuck is a black and tan?
—Where your blood go, Henry? You gone all pale.
I told her all about the Black and Tans. (The headlights caught the corners of our eyes, then sprayed across our shoulders and made black shadows of the way ahead. We heard the boot nails scratch wood as the Tans abandoned the tenders to chase us. They were right behind us now. We could feel their pace in the ground. They were fit, angry men, an army of them on our backs. We ran out of the power of their headlights. But a flare zipped above us, and crackled. And there we were, caught in bright red, running across a hopeless field, far from the next stone wall. And the firing started.)
The sweepings of England’s jails, Jack Dalton had called the Black and Tans, back when they landed and declared war on every man and woman in Ireland, with the secret blessing of their government. They burnt towns. They took people from houses and shot them. They shot livestock. They murdered priests and mayors.
—Sound like the Klan, said Dora.
—What clan?
—Go on. You finish first.
They burnt the creameries. They stole wedding rings. They declared all Irish people Shinners and made terrorists of them all. They were veterans who’d been unable to get work in England and Scotland after the war. And they’d been promised good money, ten shillings a day, to sort out Ireland. They were foreign and savage, and their presence in the country was proof that we were winning. And, all the time, we were the puppet masters. We knew how to make them set fire to the right creamery, how to draw them to the right house. We controlled them. We pulled the trigger and they went off.
(I felt the bullet in Miss O’Shea’s arm; it shook mine. We kept running. She didn’t slow down. She didn’t even moan. The blood slid down between our hands.)
—That was a war?
said Dora.
—Yeah. I suppose it was.
—Didn’t hear about that one.
—It was only small.
—You win?
That was a hard one.
—Yes and no.
(We were still in the middle of nowhere. I felt another bullet. They were killing her slowly.)
—She die?
—No.
(She dashed ahead of me, knocked forward by the shot. She squeezed my hand, let go. I grabbed it back. I wanted her pain. I wanted it all. I’d carry her the rest of the way. I ran ahead. I turned to lift her as she caught up and, as I raised my arm to hoist her to my shoulder, the bullet slid in.)
—That the scar I like?
—One of them, yeah.
(I was falling hard. I couldn’t see anything, I didn’t know anything. When I was able to see again and think, when I looked and saw the ground jumping below me, she was carrying me.)
—Good for she, said Dora.
—Yeah.
—Where she now?
—Don’t know.
—Alive?
—I’d say so.
—Care?
—Yeah.
It was a while before she spoke.
—Well, Henry S., I’m willing to carry you on my back but I don’t think I’ll be needing to. Less’n you misbehave. Black an’ tan is just a club. Where you and me can dance.
The Panama Café was a black and tan, and a black and tan was a club where white men and black women – and black men and white women, although I never saw it – had licence to dance, together.
She went first. We could both go in, but not together. Once in, we could dance together; we could dance, but not sit together. There were no written rules, nothing to point at; they had to be learnt and remembered. It was all about money, of course; the whites stayed away if the mingling stepped too close to permanence. It was tricky and stupid but it was better than the nothing that other establishments offered.
I watched her walk past the doormen. Their eyes followed as she walked under the canopy. In the same dress she wore the night I first saw her, the silver sequined thing she always threw on when we stepped out together.
—How many dresses you reckon I got? she said. —How many dresses the women have in Ireland?