reading retrograde
installment i :Black Birds [excerpted]
Black Birds is a manuscript of literary fiction and emotional memory, centering New Orleans communities beyond and before points of manmade, ecological disaster.
*if you live with post-traumatic stress syndrome caused or triggered by experiences associated with ecological disasters — floods, or race-based vulnerabilities — violences, this text could be triggering.*
Spade leaned over the pot, watching the bubbles snap around the edges of the dough he’d spooned into the grease. He ashed a cigar-sized blunt, into the lid of a mason jar with a quick flick of his finger, and looked around for the newspaper covered box-top he’d need once the dough started to bob and spin. The beignets puffed and crusted, and the warm sweet smell mixed with the sharp, funk of good weed.
Spade retrieved a sweaty glass from the top of the icebox, and took a long sip: the crown and ice had separated into layers of clear and brown. Six of the neighborhood boys circled around him, on their tiptoes to peer into the fryer. On Friday’s Spade made donuts from scratch. His were even better than the ones at Café du Monde; they were lighter, sweeter.
“Back up now. Ya’ll know I make enough for everybody. This grease is hot.” Most of the boys backed up, but two brothers, Shiloh and Shawn, just looked up at him. The slightly older one, Shiloh, hooked his thumbs into the belt-loops of his pants and pulled them up on his behind — an action Spade’s grandmother would have called manish, but it made Spade chuckle.
Spade lifted the first of the beignets from the pot to the news-papered tray, just as Jax walked through the door. Jax was Spade’s best friend and band-mate. Jax sat his case down beside the door and popped a purple bag from the pocket of his jeans like a magic trick.
“Right on time. I just ran out.” Spade said.
Spade pulled the last of his donuts out the grease, and sat the tray on the counter for the boys.
“Ya’ll leave me and uncle Jax a few hear.” Jax, had already taken his trumpet from the case and laid it on the chair beside him. Their rituals were more exact than science, next he was going to fix a drink, and mention the name of everybody that died since yesterday.
“You heard about that Williams boy from Saint Aug? They say he had a football scholarship to Grambling.”
“Yeah, I heard. They say it was the brother they were looking for, and he just got in the way.”
Jax pushed a long breath of air through the gap in his teeth and shook his head before he brought the trumpet to his lips. The boys looked up with greasy mouths and sticky hands; the delight wiped clean from their faces.
The clubhouse was one long room. A velvety, two-toned green couch slouched by the front door. There was no real kitchen, just an old icebox and a white stove plugged in on the left wall, a few scattered chairs. Spade’s tuba curled like a giant, silver snake on the floor. The room was full of them, gold and silvery things twisting and coiling around on themselves. JuJu, still in diapers, toddled up to the biggest one and stepped a chubby, ashy leg into the circle it made on the floor. Spade and Jax watched from the rusted metal folding chairs that lined the back wall. They didn’t think he would get both legs over the side, but before they could point across the room JuJu had already leaned over and blown into the snake’s mouth; imitating what he had seen. A deep, long note blasted out.
“You heard that?” Jax whispered to Spade.
“Yeah I heard it.” Spade had leaned so far back in the metal chair that both front legs were off the ground; he leaned back against the wall, head sideways, arms flung open like the baby’s note had really blown him way.
“That boy got some wind.” Spade said softly.
These moments weren’t uncommon at the Club House: the seasoned musicians always marveled at the talent of the neighborhood kids. Just last week Martha’s boy had come in banging around on poor-man’s drums — empty buckets turned upside down, and two old pots he took from somebody’s cabinet. He didn’t even have real drumsticks, just flimsy wooden rulers, but Jax could tell that he had good wrists, great rhythm.
But even Spade and Jax had been shocked when the baby stepped in the center of the tuba and blew a whole note. The next few days Spade and Jax told the story over and over again to their friends and the clubhouse regulars. As soon as they found a non-believer, one of them would go to the doorway of the clubhouse and call him.
“JuJu, aw JuJu, come play us a note.”
Nobody had ever seen JuJu in shoes or pants, most days just a saggy diaper so full of shit it nearly drug the ground. Spade and Jax found out where the boy’s mama stayed, and sent some clothes by the house for him. They weren’t the diaper changing type: they were musicians — out most of the night, sleep half the day, but they had a soft spot for kids like JuJu.
Jax and Spade grew up around the corner from each other. They met in first grade at St. Mary’s. If Spade’s mama had still been alive, and if Jax had ever had one they would have had a million pictures together from kindergarten to graduation, but that’s not the kind of homes they came from. Instead they had a million undocumented memories, a thousand songs, a trillion notes played. They were the ones from the neighborhood that made it. And by ‘made it’, to be clear, meant white folks money, and tuxedo gigs at the Columns.
Shiloh and Shawn brought JuJu to the clubhouse when their mama was gone, so they didn’t have to stay home to watch him. They couldn’t have been more than eight and nine, but they were some young hustlers. Last Thursday Jax had come in off the street with an icy bottle of water that dripped as he drank it. When Spade asked where he got it, Jax said he’d bought it in the French Quarters from Shiloh and Shawn. Spade didn’t remember them by name, so Jax extended his hand, palm down and waist high to represent the height of the boys.
“They look almost like twins, I think they live off Governor Nicholles,” he’d said, before draining the bottle in large gulps. “I guess they sell water in the Quarters now.”
Spade was impressed, but he didn’t approve. Jax slurped the last of his water; then lifted the empty bottle to Spade in toast fashion.
Spade just shook his head. The Quarters wasn’t the place for young black boys that needed money. Spade had seen them, the two brothers, coming out of the corner store on St. Phillips with bags of groceries; toilet paper, eggs, bread. Something about the careful way they held the bags — the older brother holding the door, the younger brother steadying the carton of eggs with his hand — told him they were taking care of themselves.
A few days later he got one good look at the mama, and didn’t have to ask any more questions. She was on that stuff, and out there bad; bare-foot in the street, grinning in every man’s face, begging for change to ‘catch the bus’.
When Spade was younger he had a cousin, Billy, whose mama was on that stuff. She let him wander everywhere on his own. Billy used to be in and out of every type of place in the quarters, begging mostly, and then later tap dancing on plywood with coke cans on his shoes for the tourist. He remembers Billy, slick bellied and shiny with sweat from dancing non-stop in the heat of the day. Spade wasn’t the dancing type, but he looked up to Billy for easing dollars from the grips of strangers, even if it meant sweating buckets in the sun.
In the sixth grade, Spade took a page from Billy’s book and got a trio of friends together to play in the quarters. Spade played tuba, Jax played trumpet, and another boy, Leon, struggled with the trombone — Leon wasn’t from their neighborhood, so he got a pass. They turned a hat upside down in front of them to collect the money, and played a medley of simple songs on repeat.
That summer Spade had seen Billy almost twice every day. He usually caught him walking with his wooden board tucked under his arm and his homemade tap shoes dangling from the opposite hand. Either they passed each other on Billy’s way to go make money or headed back home with his daily wages already jangling in his pockets.
At the end of that summer Billy went missing. And after three days of nobody hearing from him, their Great-Aunt Thelma had called the police. They only mentioned Billy’s name once in the news, but a hundred black hands pressed flyers of Billy’s face into every hotel, bar, and juke joint in the city. If someone remembered something about a shirtless, tap dancing, black boy these would be the folks. Eventually, it was the police that found him and another boy. They were hanging from a tree, their bodies so badly decomposed that both services had to be closed casket.
They said that some white men had been trading the boys; that, most likely, they met one big spender who had whispered about them to his friends. Spade never knew why it seemed a forgone conclusion that Billy had ended up hanged just because he had let a rich white man touch him for money, but everyone who told the story had made it sound like there was no difference between the one thing and the other. Even as a boy, Spade knew that everyone who had sex for money didn’t end up dead. He just couldn’t figure out what had changed Billy from the whip-smart, trickster who taught himself to tap dance into a mangled body in a closed casket.
Confusion laced with fear made Spade work harder on his music, and keep his nose clean. Because who knew how much was too much? How far was too far? One minute you could be dancing on the street for a dollar, and the next you could be dead.
That summer they started calling him Spade, and stopped calling him Lil Reggi. After Billy got killed he never lost a game. He learned how to play his hand; only the cards he was holding. That alone had been enough to beat all the boys and some of the men in the Sixth Ward. He figured Billy had taught him that, not to cheat himself, and not to overbid either.
Juju had all the cards he needed to be a damn good musician from what Spade could see, so Spade showed him the fingering for the tuba; one tiny thing each day. Jax and the rest of the gang just watched and held their breath as baby JuJu struggled to push the valves down with his tiny baby fingers.
Over the years JuJu got almost as tall as the tuba. They started to hold it up around him so he could reach the mouthpiece and the valves at the same time. But JuJu learned ten times faster than he grew. So Spade had the bright idea to suggest that he play trombone instead, and JuJu, now five or six, fell out screaming and crying in the floor before Spade could get all the words out. The boy liked to have made himself sick, so Spade left it alone.
Later Spade offered him five dollars just to pick up the trombone and try. He even promised to get him his own horn if he liked it. But JuJu had learned to push throaty croaks from the tuba before he had learned his own name. He was going to be a tuba player, and that was that.
It was almost a month later when Spade finally convinced him that he could learn to play both; that trying the trombone wasn’t the same as never playing the tuba again. Having two horns — instead of giving up the biggest one for a smaller one — sounded like a good deal to six-year-old JuJu, so he tried it, and learned to play both.
By the time he was eight, JuJu could play any song he’d ever heard, and then some. Every weekend, when the bands played their new material, JuJu could play it by Monday. But he always played it a little different: with his own special touch. So — in that way that only black folks can do — they turned his name into a verb, and anytime a song called for some freshness, or a quick jazzing up, they would say “just JuJu it a little.”
At ten years old, Juju made his own style wearing clothes that were too big. Old pieces he found here and there; a navy pageboy hat that came down over his eyes and bobbed a bit when he walked, Tuxedo pants that he cut, and rolled up in a wide cuff at the ankle. He had to wear suspenders to hold them up, but even those seemed to fit his look. JuJu’s life was looking more and more like luck and promise, and less like fatherless crack-baby. Then a big storm hit the city.
His sisters and brothers didn’t leave until after the lights had been out for almost two days and everybody was hungry. They decided to walk to the dome for the hot meals that they heard would be served there. JuJu fought like a wildcat to stay home. He didn’t want to leave the neighborhood, even if he was hungry. Eventually, he had walked toward the dome with his family for a few blocks, but when they turned a corner into a crowd of people, he ducked off and ran the whole way back to the clubhouse. By the time they realized he wasn’t following them, they were almost there. They kept walking; sure that he’d find his way. Juju always did.
Even though Spade had locked the door to the clubhouse, JuJu could still get in through the back window. The glass pane slipped right out if you knew where to press on the sill.
No sooner than JuJu climbed in through the window, the water started spilling in through the base of the door. Juju grabbed the practice instruments and lugged them up the narrow stairs two and three at a time. He hunted around the small bedroom for a high place to put the instruments, and seeing none positioned them carefully on the bed in a circle just wide enough for him to climb in the middle. JuJu laid on top of Spade’s twisted sheets evenly between the tuba and trombone, careful not to show any favoritism. It was the first time he’d ever been alone in the clubhouse. He had only been upstairs in Spade’s apartment on errands, to retrieve a set of keys or a lighter from the dresser.
The first few hours he sat straight up in the bed wide-eyed, standing guard. When his eyelids got too heavy to hold open, just before he fell asleep, he did a silly thing, and covered all the instruments with Spade’s bedspread, tucking it carefully around and between them.
The tuba seemed as big as a whole person in the bed, the bell sticking out and resting nicely on Spade’s pillow, the others were small lumps and bumps under the blanket, except for the snare drum, which was a perfectly quilted circle at the bottom corner. JuJu couldn’t resist slapping the snare to hear the muffled sound of the quilted drum. He played exactly one note on each of the other instruments to make it fair. He told them goodnight out loud before he drifted off, tucked into a tight ball in the center of the family.
In a sweaty sleep JuJu’s stomach knotted from emptiness. In his dreams, they were waiting out the storm together: Uncle Spade, Uncle Jax, King Tut, and everybody sitting all around on the floor. Uncle Spade guzzling Crown Royal and slurring everything but his notes, King Tut smoking until the whites of his eyes were the color of sunset. Uncle Jax whipping up a special hurricane gumbo in a crock-pot, the kind he only made for Thanksgiving. The gumbo was so hot it scorched the roof of Juju’s mouth, and the spices tingled and pricked his lips long after he slurped the bowl clean. It felt so real he had forgotten it was a dream.
The sirens woke him up — the sirens and his bladder. The bathroom was just in the hall outside the bedroom door, but JuJu didn’t want to leave the room so he darted to the long window, and crawled out onto the tiny smoker’s balcony. He squinted, but couldn’t find the place where the whirls of the sirens were coming from. Then his eyes adjusted to find that everything was covered in water, with no dry land in sight. The heat was all but unbearable, and the water made everything smell like spoiled meat and lake water. Crying sounds fell from the windows down the block. Murky, brown water slapped against the roofs of the parked cars on the street, and the tiny hairs in his nose itched and burned. Everything was covered in dirty water anyway so JuJu pissed right in it.
JuJu never set out to start playing the sounds he heard from the balcony, but he was twelve and alone so he did the only thing anybody in his shoes could have done. He found a way to comfort himself. The tuba had been his first friend so he played it first, mimicking the different noises. Deep, low notes like the people crying, shrill screaming ones like the sirens.
A woman’s voice wove its way into the clatter. One voice, as loud as three, belted church hymns from the second floor of somewhere. Juju strained his ears to hear the song more clearly. He’d never stepped inside a church before, but he’d heard these songs. She sang one song over and over again: until the sound snuck from his ears, down his throat, and into his fingers. JuJu switched to trombone, caught the refrain, and played it back to her — the way he did with uncle Spade. They fell in rhythm: She would sing, and he would play it back, almost the same way. He pulled the wind from his gut, and stood with his weight in his heels. As long as she had breath to sing, JuJu had breath to play. An hour passed . . . and then another. . . another. . . too many to count.
JuJu played on that balcony long after his lips had cracked and began to bleed, long after he couldn’t hear the woman’s far off voice lifted to God. He played the last hymn until a rescue patrol found him up on the second floor of the clubhouse, clinging to his horn like it was part of himself. He still had the brass to his mouth when they wrapped him in a blanket — even though it was hot — and put him into a noisy motorboat with the survivors from his block. Juju counted five. The passengers rode in silence, floating sometimes with the engine off to listen for more people.
They spotted a man sitting gap-legged on his roof, his head in his hands. The rescue men tied the boat to a telephone pole, and plunked down into the water to go get him. Only the black faces remained. No one said a word. A girl behind him started to hum. Juju spun around to meet her eyes. Couldn’t be; she was even younger than he was, ten at the most. Juju turned back around, and pulled the blanket tighter around his shoulders. He heard a low chuckle behind his back.
“I thought you’d be bigger too,” the little girl said.
*This piece is a celebration of recollection and return. It is dedicated to all souls ever found holding-space, underwater — rising; and jodi nicole of the Black Sex Workers Visibility Project for their unflinching gaze in the face of many violences.
