Page 47 of Safe Enough

Ten years ago the net was not what it is today. But it was far enough along to give me what I needed. There were message boards and fan forums, and websites with old photographs, and jazz history sites, and some political stuff, mostly in French. Long story short, Cuthbert Jackson was born in 1925 in a no-account shit-hole in the Florida Panhandle. There was one piano in town and he played it all the time. He was such a prodigy that by the time he was four people were so used to it they stopped mentioning it. At the age of eighteen he was drafted by the US Army and trained up as a support engineer. He was sent to Europe with the D-Day invasion. He was sent to Paris to march in the GI parade after liberation. He never left. At first he was listed as AWOL, and then he was forgotten about.

He played the piano in Paris, all through the grim postwar years, sweating in tiny downstairs clubs, for people desperate for something new to believe in, who found part of it in American music played by an exiled black man. He would have said he was evolving the music, not just playing it, perhaps faster and more radically because of his isolation. He wasn’t in LA or Greenwich Village. He wasn’t really hearing anyone else’s stuff. Which made some folks call his direction a school or a movement, which led to existential disputes with devotees of other schools and movements. Which led to growing fame, which in an adopted French way made him more and more reclusive, which made him more and more famous. What little he said, he considered plain common sense, but when translated into French he sounded like Socrates. His record sales went through the roof. In France. Nowhere else. It was a thing back then. There were black writers and poets and painters, all Americans, all living in Paris, all doing well. News weeklies did a couple of stories. Cuthbert Jackson’s name came up.

Because of the political stuff. France was moving right along. It had aerospace and automobiles and nuclear bombs. Everyone was doing pretty well. Except Americans were doing better. Which led to a heady mixture of disdain and envy. Which led to criticism. Which led to a question: Why do your black people do better when they come over here?

Which was kind of smug, and totally circular, because it wasn’t really a question, but a move in the game. Either way it was buried by the gigantic storms already brewing at home. By contrast it seemed quaint and civilized. People agreed a movie could be made. People wondered if a State Department memo could be optioned.

Cuthbert Jackson himself generally ignored the issue, but if asked a direct question, he would answer, with what he considered plain common sense, though as he got older and terser the French translations came out more and more weird and philosophical. One guy wrote a whole book about Jackson’s five-word answer to a question about the likely future of mankind.

His most recent CD was with his regular trio, and it had sold pretty well.

His most recent public statement was that he had a brother.

On my map the address everyone seemed to agree on looked to be in hardscrabble country, most of a day’s drive away, so I left early. I was sure there would be no motels. I figured I would sleep in the car. Anything and anywhere. I had rent to pay.

The town was as bad as I had expected. Maybe a little meaner. It was all low houses, grouped tight around what looked like the archaeological ruins of a previous civilization. Some kind of an old factory, maybe sugar, and the stores and the banks that followed, some in decent buildings, even handsome, in a modest, three-story kind of way, all abandoned decades ago, now overgrown and falling down. I got out of the car where I saw a group of men gathered. They were all waiting for something. There was a mixture of impatience for it and certainty it would arrive.

I asked a guy, “What’s coming?”

He said, “The pizza truck.”

It showed up right on time and turned out to be their new version of a bar, since their last real bar fell down. The pizza guy had cans of beer in a cooler, which might or might not have complied with county ordinances, but which either way turned eating pizza into a standing-around event, like the best kind of place, with the beer playing the role of the beer, and the pizza standing in for the potato chips and the salted peanuts. I counted twenty people. I told one of them I was looking for Cuthbert Jackson’s brother.

He said, “Who?”

“Cuthbert Jackson. He played the piano. He had a brother.”

Another guy said, “Who?”

And then another. They all seemed interested. Maybe they ran out of things to say about pizza.

I said, “He’s famous in France.”

No reaction.

I asked, “Who is the oldest person here?”

Turned out to be a guy aged eighty, eating a pepperoni pie and drinking a High Life.

I asked him, “Do you remember World War Two?”

He said, “Sure I do.”

“Cuthbert Jackson went in the army when he was eighteen, which would make you sixteen at the time. Prior to that he could play the piano real well. You probably heard him.”

“That kid never came back.”

“Because he stayed in France.”

“We thought he was killed.”

“He wasn’t. Now he says he has a brother.”

“Is he still a musician?”

“Very much so.”

“Then maybe it’s a metaphor. You know what it’s like, with artistic people. Maybe he had some kind of spiritual epiphany. All about the brotherhood of man.”

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