Page 11 of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

“Breeze! A juice joint is a speak. A speakeasy.”

“I know what a speakeasy is. Don’t talk at me like I don’t know nothing.”

“You don’t. We need to review a few things before tonight. I’ll give you a quick education so you don’t sound like a neophyte.”

“Neophyte? I’ll neophyte you right here.” Breeze had asixth-grade education. But he read everything he got his hands on. He was delighted by words.

“Would you rather I call you a Russian?”

Breeze frowned. “A what?”

Chuckling, Sonny took a drag from his cigarette. “A Russian is a Negro just arrived from down south. You know, ’cause you wasrushin’ to git up nawth.”

“So you, a year ago,” snarked Breeze. Then he froze, apple in mouth.

Three girls swept past him in a haze of rich brown skin, expensive perfume, and confidence. They looked like they’d stepped out of a picture show, wearing satin heels and cloche hats with marcel-waved bobs. One turned her head and winked at him. The other two giggled and kept sauntering down the sidewalk, making puddles out of every man in their wake.

Breeze was aware he was gawking. He couldn’t help it; he’d never seen Black women dressed so finely. He’d never seenwhitewomen dressed so finely.

Sonny grabbed him by the elbow and shook him out of his daze. “When I was a Russian, at least I had the sense not to stroll down Lenox in work pants and a collarless shirt, looking like a sharecropper,” whisper-yelled Sonny.

Breezewasa sharecropper. His whole family was. He was born in Fallon, South Carolina, a dusty wretched town, to a long line of men named Ezra Walker. (His first son would be named Ezra, too. No clue why. It was a tradition, and most traditions didn’t make sense.)

He’d been a quiet baby in a family of musically inclined juggernauts. Big Ezra, his harmonica-playing dad, had traveled with a vaudeville troupe as a kid. Breeze’s mom, Hazel, had taught ukulele, and his sister Minnie’s alto had brought the congregation to weeping. So when Breeze was born, folks waited for theday he’d reveal his musicality. But he had none. He didn’t sing, hum, or even talk for years. He just listened to the world, with his little brow furrowed. Then, on his third birthday, he ran up to the piano after service and, with his daddy’s heartbreaking grin, banged out “Down in the River to Pray” with a pitch-perfect ear and astonishingly adult emotion. The toddler had range! Like he’d been at it forever. Cool as a fan, smooth as a breeze.

When the applause died down, he peered out at the congregation and spoke his first word, a question. “More?”

After this, the congregation somehow pooled their money together to buy Breeze a secondhand nineteenth-century piano with missing keys and shredded wires. By five, he could play anything: ragtime, boogie-woogie, hymns, field songs. By seven, he was playing at services all over Fallon County. By thirteen, he’d learned a few life lessons: banging keys for the Lord got you the prettiest girls; gigging in the jook joints got you fast cash; and playing brothels when your God-fearing parents thought you were working as a night watchman at a textile mill—well, that gave you a better education than you’d get at a shitty country schoolhouse.

Breeze escaped in 1917, when he was drafted to the all-Negro Ninety-Third Infantry Division and stationed in France during World War I. It was brutal business, but better than home, because he was valued, and under the command of the French troops, his unit was spared the senseless, exhausting rage of white American men drunk on a racial lie they’d invented. It had never occurred to him that white people weren’t the same everywhere.

France was Breeze’s first taste of freedom. He savored it, excelling in combat, leading his infantry band, and even introducing awestruck Frenchies to wild piano in gin-soaked dives.

And when it all ended, Breeze returned home a decorated soldier. It was June 1919, and he was a changed man. He hoped America had changed, too. Later, the papers would call this seasonthe Red Summer. All over the country, white mobs unleashed horrific violence on Colored communities, proving a point to uppity soldiers who dared hope for equity.

One day, Breeze made the near-fatal mistake of saying “thank you” to a white shopkeeper in a tone that, apparently, “suggested superiority.” The shopkeeper and his sons strangled him to blackout. He regained consciousness some hours later, facedown in a barren field, outside town.

There’d be no hero’s welcome.

The next day was Sunday. Reverend Green had planned a special service for the returning military men. Breeze was struggling; his breathing was labored, his ears ringing and throat ablaze. Hazel was worried. She insisted her son stay put while the family represented him at First Baptist. On the way out, she kissed his fevered forehead. Minnie punched his shoulder and, trying to make him laugh, whispered, “I know you ain’t feelin’ poorly—you just skippin’ services to call on Ida-Prue Freedman.” Big Ezra, with a quietly furious furrow to his brow, stood in the doorway and gave his son a military salute.

Breeze never saw them again.

The Klan torched the church, lynching the entire congregation. Men, women, children. No one survived, save for Sonny, who, soon after, fled north with his right arm still raw to the shoulder. But Breeze stayed, despite his cousin’s pleas. He stayed and shattered into a million pieces that couldn’t be put back together.

He deserved to stay in that hellscape, haunted by the ghosts of the family he couldn’t save. He deserved to remain in that shack, where the straw mattress on the floor served as a constant reminder that he’d been fuckingnappingwhile his family burned to death. Breeze’s penance was to usher in the grief and let it destroy him.

It should’ve been me.The thought rang in his head every second as he returned to the fields. He stopped talking, and he stopped playing music. For four lost years, Breeze listened to life go by as he picked cotton, the sack weighty on his back. And when his back gave out, he’d crawl, picking two rows at a time, back and forth. He listened as he primed tobacco, the sticky, itchy goo dying his hands purple. He listened, closely and critically, as he hoed the fields—and in the mornings, he’d wake to his restless hands tapping out a rhythm on his chest.

Whenever he had time, he read the Colored newspapers Sonny sent him in the post. The headlines told of a glittering, hopeful world that was completely alien to Breeze, of blinding lights, fast nights, and music. He felt an insistent tug, a pull. Harlem was beckoning.

In the papers, he learned that four legendary jazz pianists lived there: James P. Johnson, Fats Waller, Willie “the Lion” Smith, and some kid named Duke Ellington, who was not, in fact, royalty. They wereit. (Especially Johnson, who was currently composing a surefire hit called “The Charleston.”) They played a new kind of jazz called stride, and it washed over Harlem like a gin baptism. On Friday nights, at secret locations, they hosted “piano cutting contests,” where Johnson would play his battle song, the hard-as-hell-to-master “Carolina Shout,” and challenge every pianist in the house to try it himself. If the pianist was good? He got instant respect that led to gigs, recordings, fame. If he was booed? Time to hightail it back to Tuscaloosa.

One day, Breeze received an oversized parcel in the post. Sonny had sent him the “Carolina Shout” record. He sprinted four miles to church and played it on the creaky phonograph, and in one listen, his entire world sharpened into focus. His piano-playing drought was over.

Late at night, exhausted from the fields, he’d sit at his secondhand piano and teach himself to play the tune. In no time, he could replicate James Johnson’s recording. But as he conjured the notes over and over, imprinting them on his brain, Breeze sensed a newer sound just beyond his fingertips, one he couldn’t grasp yet. And he knew that in Fallon, he never would.

When he decided he was good enough, Breeze booked a one-way ticket to New York City, wearing the clothes on his back. Nothing was keeping him in Fallon, an unholy hellscape that smote everyone he loved from the earth, carving out his insides and leaving him hollow. On the train ride out of town, he stared out the window as the dusty landscape got smaller and smaller, every passing minute putting more distance between himself and the plantation he’d worked and lived on his whole life. The plantation run by the people who’d owned his ancestors. The plantation where Big Ezra, Hazel, and Minnie Walker had, despite odds that had nothing to do with them, made a loving home. Shutting his eyes, he sent his family a silent promise to make them proud, to make the Walker name immortal.

---