Page 25 of A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

Just then, a tap on his shoulder shook Breeze out of his momentary reverie.

Appearing before him was a serious-looking blonde, maybetwenty-five, with clear green eyes. She had the carriage and demeanor of a well-bred exclamation point. Her visual opposite, Mickey, stood next to her with a big grin.

“Hey, Breeze, this is Miss Olive Randall of theTimes. She’s got questions for our maestro.”

Breeze tipped his hat and offered her a pleasant smile. “Welcome to Eden, ma’am.”

“Oh, I’ve been here before, Mr. Walker. Many times.”

He gestured for the clarinet player to fill in for him, then led the reporter to the bar. She followed him, notebook-first.

Breeze pulled out a barstool for Olive. Without asking, the bartender slid him a seltzer.

“What’re you having, Miss Randall?” asked Breeze, taking a seat.

“Just a Jack Rose, no ice. And do call me Olive. Please. No need for formalities.”

Okay, thought Breeze.She’s liberated and liberal and wants me to know it.

“It’s such an honor to meet you, Breeze Walker,” she gushed, tapping the eraser of her pencil on her pad, ready to roll. “I listen to your orchestra every Friday night, when Eden Lounge broadcasts on the radio! How did you get your start? Sources say you were discovered at a speakeasy about five years ago?”

He sipped his seltzer, nodding. “The Nest. I won a piano cutting contest and met Duke, who taught me how to write and read sheet music. Through him, I met this Brooklyn kid who’d written a few compositions for Broadway, George Gershwin. He gave me my first break. We collaborated on music for a show featuring a hoofer named Frank Astaire… no, Fred.”

Poor fella, thought Breeze.He wanted to work in Hollywood, but the studios said he was too bald to star in pictures. Hope he gets his chance.

“After that, I made a name for myself playing the Swing Street speakeasies, and—”

“And the rest is history!” Olive tucked her fashionable bob behind an ear, her eyes scanning the room. “I love all your songs—‘Hotcha Gotcha,’ ‘Midnight Jasmine’—but ‘Happy Sad’ is wild. Reckless. It taps into something primitive, wouldn’t you say?”

Breeze would not, in fact, say “primitive.” So he changed the subject.

“Can I ask why you’re writing this article?”

“Well, because I love the scene, the art, your music. Up here, it’s the only place I feel alive!” She stared up into his face earnestly. “Your music has lured whites up to Harlem. That act alone will change the world. It’s revolutionary.”

I don’t have the heart to tell you it won’t, thought Breeze.It won’t change the fact that where I’m from, we’re hunted for sport. Won’t change that left of Lenox, landlords charge us triple rent for infested slums ’cause they know we’re so desperate to escape Mississippi, Alabama, or Tennessee that we’ll work ourselves sick to pay it. Won’t change that Harlem is a Band-Aid on cancer and that the hobo who keeps banging down Eden Lounge’s door is most definitely my cousin Sonny, who destroyed himself with dope to forget what he’s seen in our hometown. The world won’t change simply ’cause you ventured uptown to have a good ole sexy Black time. All it means is you have good taste.

Breeze was so tired.

On some days, the bad days, every step, breath, and note weighted him down, like shackles. And so he poured it into his music. The papers wrote things like “Breeze’s sound is tailor-made for crowds heady with hedonism!” And “Wild music for wild times!” And “Breeze Walker captures euphoria in a bottle!”

What they heard as frenzied abandonment was the sound of his rage. Their joyous release was his escape, his chance to outrun thememories that stalked him. Jazz was freedom. But grief was his fuel. It was that simple and that terrible.

Breeze missed his family with a blazing ache. He’d make himself feel the memories and then pour their bitter taste into music. Into something good.

He remembered chaperoning his sister, Minnie, on dark country roads, her chatting relentlessly while they walked her pet bunny, Hops. (The walks were largely pointless, as Hops was made out of a flour sack and straw. But, as his dad had drilled into him,It don’t matter the why or when; always be a gentleman.) He remembered that late at night, when he couldn’t let go of whatever new song he was trying to master, his mom had calmed him by reciting recipes for collard greens, stewed okra, and shortbread, the singsongy cadence of her native Gullah dialect soothing him to sleep. He remembered the way his dad had hugged him, abrupt and fierce, at the depot before Breeze shipped off to war. Big Ezra did not hug. In fact, it happened so fast that for weeks after, Breeze thought he’d imagined it.

Without his family, he didn’t belong anywhere in the world. He was furious about the way they’d died. In terror.Who sets a church ablaze?What kind of people can do that and walk away feeling…right? That was what seized him with rage. Breeze knew that in the stories these people told, they were right. That fire was justified to them; it was entertainment. The sheriff’s wife had even taken photographs! Breeze heard they’d been passed around dinner parties at the finer Fallon County homes, until the postmaster ruined it with spilled gin.

Eight years later, the blaze was surely forgotten. That mob’s grandkids and their grandkids’ kids wouldn’t even know their forefathers were monsters. And Breeze knew that what you haven’t reckoned with, you’re doomed to repeat. America was a ghost story with no end.

But Breeze was also lucky. He had a gift. He was lucky to be discovered at the right speakeasy by the right people. To be a man with no wife or children depending on him—he just had endless time to tinker with the notes that would blanket his brain.

Breeze knew he was lucky when he talked to the chorus line understudies and learned about the overtime work they did to stay afloat. When he thought of their mothers, rising before the sun to walk in a grim, humiliating parade down Fifth Avenue in the 1850s and ’60s, calling out to the white women of the houses lining the block in hopes of being invited in for a day of cleaning, cooking, or babysitting. A modern selling block, to be sure.

My thoughts are a graveyard, he thought.

Sometimes, Breeze dreamed of drinking, smoking, or shooting up to forget. But he had no vices. He was too lucky to justify them. The least he could do to honor his fallen family was to feel their loss. To remember.

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