Nanette Hayes: Rhode Island Red Part 23

"I don't know if I can hold up my end all in French," he said.

"That's okay. Do the best you can." I then began to speak in my senior-year seminar French accent, enunciating clearly but keeping my vocabulary colloquial, everyday: "First off, tell me what you're doing over here, if it's any of my business. Are you in school?"

"No. I got a little bit of money after my mother died-insurance-and I just headed straight over here. I'm planning to be..."

"Be what?" I asked when he hesitated.

"Famous maybe."

I cracked up.

"Well, you sure can play that violin. Is that what's going to make you famous?"

"Yeah. Well, yes and no. I want to do something with the music, sure. But I'm also taking notes for this book I'm thinking about writing."

"No kidding? What kind of book?"

"About black people in Paris. Musicians mostly, but others too-dancers, soldiers, poets, whoever I come across. And not just the big ones like Josephine Baker and Wright and them. I mean people who worked to get over here and would do anything to stay. They were excited-proud to be here. Not like tourists, you know? Like there was something really at stake for them. People like me." He paused there. "And you."

I couldn't help it. I was f.u.c.king happy he had included me.

"I want to walk around in their footsteps," he continued, "look up their friends and families, if they had any, visit the places where they lived. Give them their due. It's hard to do something like that-start over in a strange place. Hard. Lonely. Scary. There's more than one way to be a black hero-to me, anyway. I want to tell people how admirable some of those folks were."

"Formidable," I said. "So there is a little of the race man in you after all."

His face went scarlet around the edges. But, thankfully, he laughed rather than bristled.

"Where'd you study music?" I asked.

"I went to Curtis."

"You're from Philadelphia?"

"No. Detroit, originally." There was a sourish expression on his face.

"Sounds like you didn't like it much."

He shrugged. "Wasn't just Detroit. I didn't like anything that much in the States."

"I can hear that," I said.

I wanted to say something more than that, but I couldn't quite form the words yet. The permutations of our relations.h.i.+p to the whole of America were endless. You could hate white people but not hate America. You could come to terms with the racism but never accept the insipid culture. You could view our disenfranchis.e.m.e.nt as a kind of ma.s.sive swindle-all that blood, sorrow, loyalty, hope, and patience deposited over the centuries, and the check keeps bouncing. You could simply self-destruct. Like I said, endless. I figured I'd hear the particulars of his take on the thing soon enough.

"Like Baldwin said, 'I had to get out before I killed somebody.' Is that how you felt?"

"Something like that," he answered, not looking at me. "More than likely, if anybody was gonna end up dead, it would have been me. Like I told you before, I'm hardly anybody's idea of fierce. Keep in mind that when I was little I used to have to walk home carrying a violin. And these thick gla.s.ses. It was like wearing a sign that said KICK THE s.h.i.+T OUT OF ME."

"Kids are real nice to each other, aren't they?" I said, chuckling, but angry too. I was thinking about my friend Aubrey's treatment at the hands of some of our peers. "Who was it that saw your musical stuff and put you in school?"

"My mother. She could talk you out of your teeth. Got me scholars.h.i.+ps to everything. We didn't have much. My father died when I was seven."

"What was she like, your mother?"

"White. Which made things even more interesting than they might have been."

Yeah, I thought as much. Aggressive as our DNA is, there were still little hints of the other in his face. "Tell me more," I said.

I divided the last of the coffee between our two cups. Boy! did I want a cigarette.

"Well, like they say, nothing lasts forever," he said. "You get over yourself, one way or another. I stopped running from fights. And the fellas stopped wanting to fight me around the time we all discovered s.e.x. See, the girls liked me."

I grinned. "Yaaay, Andre! So you went from being the four-eyed sissy to the neighborhood p.u.s.s.y magnet."

"You got it. For however brief a time, I was a hero."

"Fierce at last!" I raised the fist to him.

"No, I told you, I'm not. But I'll tell you who was. My mom. I don't know how she did it, exactly, but she's the one who-" He stopped there and didn't talk again until he had drained his cup.

When he spoke again, his voice had become thick. "A lot of things make me want to kill. And a lot of things I just don't give a f.u.c.k about anymore. All I care about now is becoming excellent at my work and being legit over here. Getting my papers, steady gigs, an apartment, whatever. 'Cause I am not going back. By the way, that was a load of c.r.a.p I gave you about being a legal resident and having a permit, just in case you didn't already know.

"About the only thing that makes me want to fight now is other people telling me who I am and what I ought to be doing and who I ought to be doing it with."

"You mean you don't like having your blackness challenged?"

"My blackness is not open to challenge. My father was black, so that means I'm black. Period. I guess what I mean is, my people deserve to be honored by me, and I'm serious about doing that-but I deserve some honor too, right? Who doesn't?"

"Yeah," I said. "Who doesn't? Are you all on your own now? No family?"

"No."

"How long have you been in Paris?"

"Five months."

"Made any friends yet?"

He shook his head. "Not really. Just some guys I met playing around town. The place I'm staying at belongs to one of my profs, but he isn't there now. I'm subletting from him."

"What are you-"

He cut me off. "Just a minute! Hold up! Question after question after question. We're only talking about me. I want to know something about you and your stuff."

"You will, you will," I said. "Tell you what. Wait for me in the cafe downstairs while I get ready."

"Ready for what?"

"We're going to get seriously drunk."

"Are you joking?"

"Seriously, intentionally drunk."

"It's only ten-thirty," he said giddily. "In the morning."

"I know. But I'm about to tell you my life story, right? That's not something you do sober, my brother. And you've got to show me your Paris before I show you mine."

He picked up his violin and practically danced over to the door.

"It's good to be an international n.i.g.g.e.r, don't you find, Nan?"

"Yes, mon frere. It is kind of da bomb."

Instead of waiting downstairs, he had run home to drop off his violin.

By late afternoon, we'd been walking and talking and drinking for hours.

I didn't figure on another excursion to the Right Bank so soon. But that was okay. Andre and I were wending our way all over the 8th while his nonstop Negro-in-Paris history rap unreeled like a guided tour ca.s.sette. The kid was amazing.

He had just given me the complete history of the concert hall called the Salle Pleyel, on the rue du Faubourg St. Honore, where every famous brown person who had ever set foot in Paris-from the players in the old la revue Negre to W.E.B. Du Bois to Herbie Hanc.o.c.k to Howlin Wolf-had drawn an audience.

We stopped briefly for another drink, exchanged more life story tidbits, and pressed on.

It was Andre who pointed out the American Emba.s.sy building to me, near the place de la Concorde. But more important to him was the spot a couple of buildings away where once had stood the deluxe club Les Amba.s.sadeurs. I heard all about Florence Mills's success there in 1926 and how Richard Wright had brought Katherine Dunham's dance troupe there to perform in the forties.

As we swept up the Champs Elysees, he listed what Chester Himes and his wife had had for lunch at Fouquet's in 1959. All right, all right-slight exaggeration.

Sidney Bechet this, Henry Tanner that, Kenny Clarke this, Cyrus Colter that...Was I aware that Art Blakey aux Champs-Elysees was the only live jazz record that...Did I want to visit the site of Chez Josephine, la Baker's nightclub, before or after we saw the cabaret where Satie, Milhaud, and Ravel used to hang with her...In 1961, you know, both Bud and Dexter backed up Carmen McRae at the Paris Blue Note, but it wasn't called that anymore...

Who had told this child he wasn't black enough? Not to play amateur Freudian, but his encyclopedic knowledge of our people in Paris was way past the maybe-I'll-write-a-book stage. It was obviously at the level of obsession. Who was he trying to vindicate?

It was late and I was starving. "I'm buying," I told Andre. "What do you suggest?"

"You shouldn't treat," he said. "You've been buying all day."

"It's okay. I'll write it off on my taxes under Educational Expenses."

"You know, there is a place I want to try."

"Name it."

"Bricktop's. It's in the ninth."

He was putting me on. "Oh sure," I said, laughing. "Maybe we'll run into Mabel Mercer and her friend Cole Porter. Scott and Zelda, too." Bricktop, the oh-so-sophisticated cabaret singer, and the club bearing her name were roaring twenties legends, I knew. He had to be putting me on.

"No, no. It's there. Really."

I looked at him then, truly worried. "Jesus. You're really over the edge. I mean, you think we've been transported back to 1928, don't you? I understood that Bricktop's closed about sixty years ago."

He grinned mischievously at me. "Yes, you're right. It did. But there's a place with the same name now. I'd like to see what it's like."

"That's better," I said. "I guess we won't have to get the net for you after all. Are we dressed for it?"

"I think we're cool. It's just a place with down-home food and a piano player."

Back to funky Pigalle. I had crisscrossed most of these streets before, in my scattershot search for Vivian. Well, this time I wasn't sitting around in the lobbies of grunge hotels, searching for down-and-out bars or the Parisian equivalent to a soup kitchen. I was being escorted around the hallowed grounds of our ancestors, so to speak. The hotel where Bud Powell lived. The cabaret (at least the address where once there had been a cabaret) where one celebrated musician reportedly shot another to death. And, of course, the site of the original Bricktop's on the rue Fontaine.

I felt a flash of guilt about having taken the day off like this. That would be old Ernestine trying to shame me: Vivian's suffering! she was reminding me. Vivian's lost-broke-Vivian's dying! And here you are, drinking the day away with some man, chasing after some phantom of the glamorous black past.

Yes, ma'am, I answered meekly. I am having too much fun and he is too good-looking. Tomorrow I widen the search for Aunt Viv. I swear.

Cole Porter and Mabel Mercer were definitely not in residence. No ladies in bare-back evening gowns and diamonds. Not a tuxedo in sight. The new Bricktop's was African-American kitsch. Autographed photos of the namesake lady herself, of Louis Armstrong and Lady Day, Alberta Hunter and you name them. Stuffed piccaninny dolls. Posters for Oscar Micheaux movies. Laminated Bessie Smith records. Items on the menu named after this or that famous personage. The food wasn't half bad, though. We devoured hot cornbread and smothered chicken and collards while we goofed on the place. The generic old black gentleman at the baby grand played terrific stride.

They were doing a fairly brisk business in the place, too. Mostly older black people occupied the tables, but quite a few younger couples-black, white, black and white-were chowing down as well. Some musician types were drinking and bulls.h.i.+tting with the bartender up front.

A loquacious elderly gentleman we took to be the owner, because of the deference being paid him by what appeared to be the regulars, was holding court at a large round table near the back. The drinks were flowing back there and spirits were high. One woman at his table we recognized as an up-and-coming diva from the States-you know, in one meteoric arc she goes from the church choir in Stomach Ache, Mississippi, to rave reviews at the Met. When Andre kept glancing over there, I a.s.sumed it was Miss Thing that he was staring at.

But no, he said, he was looking at the old man. There was something about him-something vaguely familiar-that he couldn't quite put his finger on.

"He was probably Eubie Blake's butler or something-somebody only you would know," I said mockingly.

He blushed. At least he had enough perspective to be embarra.s.sed.

I called for the check.

What a day it had been. We began the long walk back to the 5th, still talking, confiding in each other the way you do in the early stages of a friends.h.i.+p. Occasionally I'd point out a cafe or a restaurant or a street corner where I'd dined with friends, met a lover, made a discovery of one sort or another.

Back at last at the hotel, we were reluctant to say good night. I invited Andre up for a gla.s.s of the brandy I'd been smart enough to purchase and lay away in the armoire.

We set our chairs in front of the open window and went on talking. It wasn't long before a weird kind of chill went up my back. I knew it wasn't from the night air. It was a bizarre sensation and I managed to push it away quickly enough, but I had become somewhat distracted.

"I think I got it!" Andre exclaimed, seemingly out of the blue.

It was as if his voice were coming at me from the bottom of a well. "What? What did you say?"

I had been staring, transfixed, over at the top of the bureau.

"You know that old man-the one who owns Bricktop's?"

"Yeah. What about him?"

"Didn't someone call him Mr. Melson-or Melons?"

"I may have heard somebody call him something like that. Why?"

"I think I know who he is."

"Who?"