Sylvia never knew her parents and was raised in a colored children’s orphan asylum, just north of the Bronx. She’d read that Ella was there for a short time after her mother died. The people in charge made sure she got her three squares a day, received Salvation Army clothing and learned her three R’s. But while Sylvia was taken care of, she never felt cared for. However, the dance craze, which grabbed hold of the country in the 1920′s, hugged itself around her like no one else ever had. The radio gave Sylvia a crash course in the music of the day. By the time she hit the dance floor, what she’d been listening to tingled in every joint of her body. Men and women, who would’ve never given Sylvia a second look, wanted to partner up with her. And if it was a night when Ella was appearing, she’d dance until closing time, as the band squeezed all the swing out of the last song they played.

Sylvia believed it would always be that way. But the War came and boys who were dancing partners left to do their manly duty; and girls exchanged their bobby socks for stockings, taking over the jobs their boyfriends and husbands had done. Because of the shortage of men, Sylvia often danced with other women on Friday and Saturday nights when she went to the Savoy. However, many refused to dance with anyone, especially on the last one of the night, saying they were saving it for their sweethearts who would come home and pick up the dance right where they left off. But the War lasted longer than anyone expected. And the music turned toward a more downhearted mood and away from the light, bouncy tunes Sylvia loved to hear Ella sing, like “Chew-Chew-Chew, Your Bubble Gum”, “Five O’Clock Whistle”, and “Deedle-De-Dum.”

Sylvia took her seat in the orchestra of the Apollo, a few rows from the stage, as the audience continued to file in. She didn’t want to believe that a drum beat in her ears and shoe leather on a dance floor had lost the youthful sizzle it had before the War. If that was true, she’d come to the right place. Who but Ella could take a song like, “Into Each Life, Some Rain Must Fall,” and make Sylvia feel she was still too young for the Blues.

Ella parted the curtains slightly at the end of the stage and looked at the audience. Her eyes hopscotched over people filing in and those already seated. But Ella couldn’t find the woman, like she always did, when performing in New York. The first time she saw her was at the Savoy. Chick Webb had died and Ella took over as band leader with war brewing overseas. She was worried that guys in the band and people who paid to hear them play would think she wasn’t good enough to have her name on the marquee where Webb’s had been. Ella remembered standing off to the side of the stage, listening to the band doing “Stairway to the Stars”, and waiting for her cue to approach the microphone. Her eyes caught the hostile stare before anything else. It was heat the color of tar, coming right out of the woman’s eyes toward Ella. She jerked her head away, just as she would’ve done if her hand had reached into a pot of scalding water. Ella steadied herself and moved to the mic in step with the bass player’s strumming lead-in to the first landing of the “Stairway to the Stars”. By the end of the second chorus, Ella relaxed. The horns sprayed the air with the melody and it floated through her ears, nose and throat. When she opened her mouth for another climb into the heavens, everything she needed from the band was right there in her voice.
Let’s build a stairway to the stars
And climb that stairway to the stars
Yes, we’re climbing, climbing
the stairway to the stars, stars, stars
Sounds of violins
way out yonder where the blue begins
The moon will guide us
as we go drift, drift, drifting along
Ella finger snapped herself into a groove that danced in her shoulders. She made eye contact with the woman again. But the burning tar in the whites of her eyes had cooled to warm fudge from Ella’s honey-sweetened voice. Ella took in the rest of the woman, who was high-waisted and healthy in the hips. The hostility made sense. A woman of Ella’s size knew how it felt to be put down. She’d probably schooled herself in using her eyes to put people in their place before they did it to her. And who better to cut with your eyes than someone just like you. But Ella must’ve changed her mind. Because that was the only time that disapproval burned in the woman’s eyes.

Ella had spent most of her life wiping those looks off people’s faces. She did whatever it took to give them something to think about other than how she looked. Ella was eight years old when the “Charleston” stepped into an America waiting for something to get it up on its feet after the hangover of World War I. Once she saw a dance, it was a snapshot her body put into motion instantly. Ella and a few friends would sneak down on the train from Yonkers to Harlem and find out what new dances were creating a commotion at the Savoy. She was the one kids and grown-ups gathered around, if they wanted the latest steps to “The Shuffle off to Buffalo” and the “Susie Q.” Swift as Ella’s eyes were to catch on to a new dance, her ears were even quicker. She listened on the radio to the recordings of Louis Armstrong, Bing Crosby and Connee Boswell. And their voices washed through her ears, into her throat and out of her mouth.

Ella was all of seventeen in 1934, when she decided to try her luck at one of the auditions in a Harlem amateur night contest at the Apollo. The ache of her mother’s death, two years before, from a heart attack at the age of thirty-eight, was still with her. A few months later, Ella’s stepfather was stricken with a fatal heart attack as well. She never got along with him and felt dying was his way of doing them both a favor by leaving Ella alone for good and following, into eternity, the one person he cared about the most. Ella went to live with an aunt in Harlem. But with a younger sister and several cousins living in the apartment, there were too many voices vying to be the center of attention for Ella to have the audience to display her talents.

Since her family couldn’t provide what she needed, Ella satisfied her cravings, earning nickels in the streets and in off-the-beaten path joints where there were contests for hoofers, singers and anyone playing whatever pieced together instrument might make a joyful noise. Ella dropped out of school, making extra money running numbers and being a lookout for sporting houses. She was picked up for truancy and sent to a colored children’s orphan asylum. But the rules and punishments for breaking them proved too much for someone with as much giddy-up as Ella. She soon ran away and was living hand to mouth in Harlem when the Apollo started regular amateur night shows.

Ella intended to tap some shoe leather into the floor of the stage. But she heard that a well known sister dance duo was scheduled to go on in brocade studded dresses and shiny dancing pumps. She slid into a pit of doubts about herself, which wasn’t helped by wearing a shabby, patch work of a dress and men’s brogans. Ella told the MC she’d changed her mind and would sing instead. She stepped into the spotlight on stage and started to sing a few bars of ‘The Object of My Affection’. But her voice faltered. Ella heard murmurs and restlessness in the audience. The MC stopped her and gently asked that she start over. The piano player began the intro to the song again in the key she asked for. Ella took another breath and opened her mouth.
The object of my affection
will change my complexion
from bright to rosy red.
The sound of the words sparkled in her throat, showing the way out of the dark dungeon she’d fallen into. The incandescence of Ella’s voice spread through the Apollo. The audience held its breath and then drenched her in applause. Ella knew she’d found the ‘objects of her affection’ that would never let her down. And she promised herself never to take either for granted.

Since Ella didn’t look the part of someone whose voice brought out the whoopee in even the most hard-hearted Hannahs and Henrys, musicians had to be persuaded to hear her after being turned off by their first impression. This was the case with band leader, Chick Webb, when a fellow musician introduced him to Ella as a possible vocalist for his band. Webb was brutally frank in his lack of interest. However, after much cajoling, he reluctantly agreed to listen, and was brought to attention by her clear as water voice that allowed him to hear all the way through it with nothing in the way to muddy it up. But what impressed him just as much was the hard-wired nerve it took to remain unfazed by his harsh words and still do what she came to his apartment to do. Webb knew something about getting your props from people ready to write you off after just one look. His runt-sized body and hunched back had folks assuming he was a circus curiosity when he first broke into the music business. But once Webb showed off his wares on the drums, he left the hands of many a drummer death, dumb and numb. Not stopping there, he went on to lead one of the top bands of the 1930′s, setting up housekeeping at the Savoy and daring any band to come into his house and evict him. Webb heard and felt something of himself in Ella. So he took a chance that paid off big time.

In the years just after Chick Webb’s death and the start of the Second World War, Ella’s records weren’t rising to the top of the hit parade, as they once did; and there was a younger crop of boy and girl singers, like Frank Sinatra and Jo Stafford, whose matinee idol faces and narrow hips were talked about as much as their singing. But what caught most of Ella’s attention was the change in her voice. It had been bottled up in her head, coming out through her nose and mouth. The years of seasoning caused the sound to ripen, swelling out of the stomach into the chest and throat. When the pressure rising up in Ella’s throat could no longer be held back, the cork popped, leaving a fizz around her voice that hadn’t been there before. This change altered the way she used her tongue, lips and teeth when taking flight into scat singing. For years, Ella had easily chased down the somersaults out of the mouths of musicians like Louis Armstrong. Eventually, she figured out how to make spitting images of sounds played on just about any instrument.

Sylvia still wasn’t comfortable going to theaters like the Apollo or clubs that were built for sitting, without much room for the dancing urge to enter a foot race with a band. But she did it, reluctantly, as a favor to her friends who wanted to see where a younger, up and coming, group of musicians were headed. Wherever they were headed, Sylvia didn’t want to watch from a chair. And the War, having turned people her age away from the good times which were so much a part of being young, began to push Sylvia and her friends away from dancing where one good twirl deserved another.

Sylvia knew Wardell from high school, a smooth talker whose words were as slick as his processed hair. He rarely gave her more than a nod at school. However, when Wardell spotted her cutting some serious steps into the dance floor of the Savoy, the nod he gave her was followed by his hand reaching for hers. Wardell didn’t reach out to many girls. They were the ones usually doing the reaching. So even though he talked a lot of shuck and jive, Sylvia was never more excited when he stopped talking and gave his undivided attention to the moves she swung his way.

There were two others, a white girl and boy who came together but never danced with one another. His name was Danny and all he did was listen to the band and never said much. That was great for Wardell who liked people who were all ears, especially while he held court. The girl’s name was Anna and had chubby arms and legs and a topsy, turvy head of hair like Little Orphan Annie in the Funny papers. When Wardell asked her to dance, Sylvia was impressed by how quickly she caught on. As Wardell continued to make his tour of eligible dance partners, Sylvia went over and introduced herself to Anna. And and in no time had her doing the “lindy hop.”

That’s how it started. But it wasn’t until after they’d gone their separate ways that Sylvia realized the special bond between them worked best when they were confined to the Savoy. Some of the young men, that the War didn’t take away, like Wardell and Danny, were taken away by the music of a new crop of musicians who didn’t see dancing going hand in glove with what they were playing in small clubs and after hour spots. Even Anna fell under the spell of one of the girl singers, named Sarah Vaughan who was part of the new music scene and whose voice moved around so much from tone to tempo that Sylvia could never follow her. Sylvia’s final break with her dancing chums from the Savoy occurred when she discovered that Wardell and Anna broke the unspoken dance rule of never moving any closer to one another than the brushing of a shirt against a blouse and trousers against a skirt. Anna tried to explain that what happened was less about wanting to find out what it was like to dance underneath each other’s clothes than getting the comfort they needed after Danny turned his head and heart away from them in favor of Charlie Parker. Sylvia could only shake her head. How dumb did Anna think she was? She never knew Danny that well. But whatever Anna and Wardell felt about losing Danny was just an excuse to satisfy a hunger for each other’s skin that was at least equal to the give and take of their bodies on the dance floor. And skin color was part of it. As someone in the low brown color scheme of the world, Sylvia saw enough men and women of both races grabbing after the light, bright and sho’ nuff white, as well as the beige, berry and darkest cherry, to know that color was never far from anything that happened between day and night. Sylvia had to admit that when she bedded down with a man of whatever color, which wasn’t that often, the feeling was neither as good as she hoped nor as bad as she feared. And compared to where dancing took her, it was no contest.

Wardell asked Sylvia to go with him to hear Sarah Vaughan sing at the Onyx in mid-Manhattan on New Year’s Eve. They’d never been out together before and Sylvia agreed more out of curiosity about Wardell’s intentions than any interest in hearing Sarah Vaughan. The club was packed tight and from the bar Sylvia caught sight of Anna at one of the tables.

“Did you see Anna over there?” she asked.

“No. But I’ve seen enough of her, so I don’t need to see no more.”

“Is that so?

“I just said it was.”

“Wardell, whatever happened between you and Anna ain’t my business. So don’t make it mine by taking it out on me.”

The set began with Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie, playing behind Sarah Vaughan. Sylvia found herself foot tapping and head bobbing to the music. And while the close quarters didn’t cramp the style or sound of the musicians, the high speed chase the combo led the audience on still didn’t do as much for Sylvia as almost any band would’ve done on a Saturday night at the Savoy. They left after the first set, passing Danny at the end of the bar, who was in such a trance that he didn’t notice them. It was not quite 10 P.M. Most of the street revelers were making their way toward Times Square. Wardell and Sylvia found a restaurant down the block on 52nd Street.

“I was out a line earlier, talking to you the way I did,” Wardell said, as they ate.

“Damn, Wardell. An apology coming from you is gonna have me fanning myself with a brick!”

“Don’t get too hot and bothered about it, ’cause there ain’t likely to be another one anytime soon.”

“So why did you ask me out?”

“Why not?”

“No. I asked you first,” she said.

“I wanted to see how it felt.”

“And?”

“It feels fine.”

“And how did ‘it’ feel being around me before tonight?”

“You know you’ve always been all right with me.”

“Just all right.”

“Come on, Sylvia. It ain’t like you ever went out a your way to let me know how you felt.”

“Maybe I did but you were too busy to notice.”

“Is that a fact?”

“Is what a fact? That I was interested in you or you were too busy?”

“I’m not busy now.”

“I doubt that.”

“I’ll prove it to you.”

“What are you gonna prove? That you got inspiration or perspiration?”

“Both!”

“I’m not sure you know the difference.”

“I’m not following you, Sylvia.”

“That figures ’cause when you on the dance floor, all you wanna do is lead.”

“Why don’t you show me the way then?”

After arriving at Sylvia’s building, she stood facing Wardell with her back against the door of her apartment. She’d danced with him hundreds of times. And over the years, they’d flirted back and forth like they did at dinner. But Sylvia had never sized him up as a serious romantic possibility before. A wolfish grin high-lighted the gold trim around his two tobacco stained front teeth and traces of saliva at the corners of his mouth. Slivers of kinky hair poked through the slicked down conk and his breath had the smell of sour milk, making her a bit light-headed. It was usually the case that Sylvia opened up to guys who showed some interest in her. She’d never given much thought to liking or disliking someone without knowing or caring what they felt about her. And here was Wardell, not on the dance floor, asking her to dance, but standing at her apartment door, a place she’d never imagined he would be.

And it surprised her that she wasn’t at all excited.

“You gonna ask me in?”

Sylvia heard something in the breath pushing out his words that didn’t sound all that eager.

“I don’t know, Wardell. You’re hell on wheels on the dance floor. But I don’t think you got the wind you’d need to come inside.”

“Maybe I could get up to speed, if you’d show me how to whistle.”

“I’m afraid I don’t have the wind for that.”

“Well, that’s the way it goes,” he said with a shrug. “First your money, then your clothes.”

Sylvia laughed so hard the back of her head hit the door.

“Yeah! I love you too, Sylvia. I’ll see you around” he said, leaning down and kissing her on the cheek.

“No you won’t, if it’s like the place we went tonight.”

“Never say never.”

“I think we just got finished doing that.” Wardell turned to go and Sylvia couldn’t help herself.

“Tell me, Wardell? What did Anna see in you?”

“Like you said before, you don’t need for me to make my business yours.”

One thing Sylvia did make her business was to find as many ways as possible to stay on the dance floor. She joined up with two sisters who were developing an act of daring dance steps that tapped in time with a band or revved up an audience as the opening act before the main attraction took the stage. They called themselves “Six Feet of Thunder” and performed wherever there was a call for hoofers. Sylvia hoped they would get a call to put their heels and toes up against Ella and the Lionel Hampton Band. But when they finally got a few minutes of Hampton’s time and gave him a sketch of their stepping thunder, his wet-mouthed grin spilled out the polite but chilly words that he wasn’t keen on the idea of sharing the spotlight with some upstarts nobody knew who might upstage the band. Despite the unceremonious brush off from Hampton, Sylvia decided against making the rounds with her dancing partners, on a night when they could’ve picked up a nice piece of change, and hustled herself over to the Apollo to hear Ella with the Hampton Band.

Ella was alone in her dressing room, not wanting anyone around her before getting the call to join the band on stage. Her nerves were rubbed raw with the usual worry about whether people would like her. And it didn’t help not seeing the woman in the audience. The only thing that relaxed her was reading the Funnies. Ella’s favorite was “Little Orphan Annie,” which she’d been reading since she was a child. Annie’s ability to get herself in and out of trouble with the just in-the-nick of time help of her well heeled but forever on the go guardian, ‘Daddy’ Warbucks, struck a note that Ella liked the sound of. Having never known her father or gotten along with her stepfather, she searched for a Daddy Warbucks of her own who didn’t have to save the day but just stay put. When Ella was a sensation all over the nation with her recording of “A-Tisket, A-Tasket”, guys were up in her face, coming out of the side of their mouths with reasons why they were the ‘Daddy’ she was looking for. She even married one of them. But it didn’t last long once Ella realized the only knot he wanted to tie was the one to her purse strings. And when the public turned a deaf ear to Ella’s records, the eyes that these half-stepping talkers had for her went blind.

Ella heard the applause from the audience, signaling the entrance of the Lionel Hampton Band on stage. She’d never sang Hampton’s hit recording, ‘Flying Home’, in public before. No one had ever done a scat version of Illinois Jacquet’s no holds barred saxophone solo that left all competitors gagging on the exhaust of his horn fumes. But what did she have to lose? She’d sung herself to a stand-still; and playing with the Hampton Band was a chance for Ella to see what she could make of herself, having outgrown the voice and the songs that made her popular. With gigs in big bands not as plentiful as they were before the War, Ella spent a lot of time jamming with a group of younger musicians that included Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Thelonious Monk and Mary Lou Williams. She marveled at the blinding speed of their playing, daring anyone to keep up. The longer Ella listened to what they were reaching for, the more she could hear her own voice changing in her ears.

She would stand in front of a mirror and sing the melody of “Flying Home.” And without fail, there were certain things she kept doing inside and outside of her mouth. With words like(big boy blue), Ella opened her mouth and pressed her lips against her teeth or pushed them out in a shape to blow smoke rings. With others like (do the dipsy doodle), she pushed her tongue against the roof of her mouth or the back of her front teeth. And in other words such as (love, lady luck and lulu), her tongue played freely, teasing her lips, teeth and gums. The sounds she kept using started with the letters B, D and L. Of course, it was one thing to sing this high speed scat chatter in front of a mirror and quite another to mouth off before an Apollo audience known to rough up anyone, regardless of reputation, who stepped out on stage and didn’t deliver the goods in a timely and tuneful fashion. Which was another reason why she’d made a point of looking out in the audience for the woman who showed up to hear her no matter what.

The Hampton Band was playing, “All My Life” with its extended piano introduction. Ella remembered singing it years before at the Savoy as a tribute to Billie Holiday who’d recorded it first. She could hear the lyrics in her head:
All my life/I’ve been waiting for you/
My wonderful one/I’ve begun living all my life.
Ella was always a little intimidated by Lady Day. Billie was not much older but had come into prominence, a few years before Ella, as a stylist, picking up where Armstrong left off with unforgettable interpretations of lyrics through a mastery of phrasing and intonation. Like Satchmo, Billie wrung the guts out of a song, leaving herself and the audience hung out to dry. All Ella wanted was to sing the song, not turn herself into it. Even after her voice lost its baby fat, there was still a lighter than air quality that was never far away from the bounce of jumping rope. Ella heard all the whispered talk about her not being a singer who could sing the Blues with conviction, and for that reason couldn’t be taken seriously. Ella had to admit she’d never cared much for the Blues. She knew what it was to be down and out but used singing to take her away from all that. Besides, all these people flapping their tongues so much about the Blues probably never had them. And on those occasions when Ella sang about heartbreak, she had no intention of breaking her heart while doing it.

After Ella sang, “All My Life” the band took a break. Ella was sitting at a table and was surprised to see Billie walking toward her in a drop dead, gorgeous, off the shoulder lavender dress. Billie’s head was crowned with a peacock feathered hat and her trademark gardenia pinned to her hair. Seeing Billie made Ella feel her body pushing against the seams of her tight fitting dress. She noticed people staring and shifted uncomfortably in her chair. When Ella sang, nothing but the song got under her skin. But when she wasn’t singing and feeling thin-skinned, like she was at that moment, her mind did a jack knife dive out of her body and watched the people staring, without feeling the sting from their eyes.

“How’re you doin’, Ella girl?” Billie asked, sitting down.

“I’m fine, Billie. I’m so glad you came tonight!”

“I bet you are, with “All My Life” comin’ out your mouth like I’m goin’ out a style.” A smile moved around in Billie’s mouth but the rest of her face was drum tight.

“Did it bother you that I sang that song?” Ella asked. “I meant it as a compliment.”

“I could tell that’s HOW you meant it.”

“That sounds like you don’t believe I did all that well.”

“I wouldn’t worry about it, Ella. You got a whole octave more than I do to play around with. So you can go a lot farther into the wild blue yonder than me.”

“You know Billie, there’s a rumor going around that when people talk about me, they say: How high is the sky? But when they talk about you, they say: How deep is the ocean?”

Ella watched Billie’s Adam’s apple move up and down, like she’d swallowed something caught in her throat that loosened the stiffness in her neck and face. Billie’s lips then gave way to a show of teeth and laughter that came from deep in her belly. She reached out and placed her hand gently on Ella’s arm.

“That’s a rumor I wish I’d started,” she said.

“Do you think it’s true?”

“Well, there’s that old saying, that you gotta get down before you get up.”

“What does that mean?” Ella asked.

“Just that, I take people to where they live, which is where they have to go before you take them where they ain’t never been. It’s different strokes for different folks, Ella. And I don’t like nobody barking up behind what I’m doing, which is what bothered me when I heard you singing “All My Life.”

“I meant no disrespect, Billie. You’ve been an idol of mine.” Billie pulled her hand away from Ella’s arm.

“Shit! I ain’t your mama. I only got a few years on you. I don’t wanna be nobody’s idol. All I wanna do is sing and get what’s due me. And maybe have a hit record or two like you!”

“Do you hold that against me?”

“Ella! I hope you don’t trouble yourself too much about what I think about you. I’ll get over it. And if I don’t, I’ll get over that too.”

Since they’d had that conversation before the War, the fortune which smiled on Ella shifted to Billie who felt she’d been marking time in bands that refused to see her as, not just a ‘girl’ singer, but a serious musician. However, with the 1939 New York performance at Cafe Society and recording of “Strange Fruit,” Billie declared herself a singer, ready and willing to voice the noise in the hearts of her listeners that made them tremble for more. And Ella, whose voice took the country to delirious heights, like no one since Charles Lindberg’s 1927 transatlantic flight to Paris, was now scuffling to reinvent herself as her popularity plunged into a free fall.

The Hampton band played the last few bars of “All My Life.” Ella wondered if doing her version of Lionel Hampton’s hit record, “Flying Home” would begin to pull her out of this nose dive. She heard the ear-ringing gongs from Lionel Hampton’s vibraharp over the speaker in her dressing room. Up on her feet, Ella made her way down a narrow hallway, getting into the swing of things, as the piano and bass danced arm-in-arm in a jitterbug tempo to “Flying Home.” Recorded only two years before, the stories about the effect of Hampton’s tune on audiences had risen to the level of folklore! In one, the band whipped several couples up into such an overheated state on the dance floor that they had to be rushed to the hospital and treated for sweat burns. In another, a man, who’d gotten a contact high from weed being smoked in the balcony of the Apollo, became so disoriented by what appeared to be smoldering heat billowing up from the orchestra level, that he decided it would be safer to leap from the balcony in an effort to ‘fly’ home.

Recalling these stories didn’t do much for Ella’s confidence, as she hit the steps, leading up to the stage. She was given a hand microphone just off stage at the point in the tune where tenor saxophonist, Illinois Jacquet, launched into his solo. Ella opened her mouth to sing and, as always, was surprised that a voice came out with the same ease as breathing and banished all her worries. Ella’s first flurry of scat sounds jabbed the audience with the power of B,D and L behind them. And they roared their approval even before she was visible on stage. Illinois Jacquet blew his way into the band’s runaway train tempo. Ella sidled up to him, with a chug-a-long slide step, raised a hand to an ear and nodded to the audience how impressed she was. And there she was, dead center, a few rows back: the woman who was never a no show. Ella was ready for Jacquet now! And would get rough if necessary! With every horn honking spurt from Jacquet, she mimed his body talk to perfection: from the jutting chin, the seesaw of shoulders, the swivel in the hips, the buckling knees, holding an imaginary saxophone in outstretched hands and turning it in a circle as though stirring the stew cooked up by the band.

Hampton flashed his eyes and teeth Ella’s way as a signal for her to stir the pot. She spooned her voice in to taste the tune that was making the seats in the audience too hot to sit in. Ella’s devoted fan was the first to bolt from her seat and hit the aisle to dance out the fire from blazing seats. Taking flight above the heat, Ella watched the woman’s every move, mouthing in time to the hot-footed hops, skips and jumps. She matched Jacquet’s spit fired tenor talk tit for tat, her voice hurling a swinging strike into the mitt of everyone’s ears who had no clue what would be thrown at them next. By the time Ella and the Hampton Band brought “Flying Home” in for a landing, everything played after that was a rest stop on the way to getting home for those who could still walk.

Sylvia summoned the courage to go backstage to Ella’s dressing room, something she’d never done before. As the crowd of well-wishers dwindled, Ella caught sight of her and flashed a gapped tooth, girlish grin. Once they were alone, Ella and Sylvia were at a loss for words that didn’t have music around them.

“You’re so good on your feet,” Ella said, finally, “asking you to sit is probably a letdown.”

“Being in your company could never be a letdown, Miss Fitzgerald.”

“Seeing you in the audience always gives me a boost. Have you ever missed a performance of mine in New York?”

“Never!”

“What’s your name?”

“Sylvia.”

“How’d you learn to dance like that?”

“Listening to you and Chick Webb.”

“Well, it seems like we have something in common.”

“That’s not all.”

“Oh?”

“You were a few years ahead of me. But we were both in the same orphanage.” The muscles in Ella’s jaws tightened.

“You were in that place?”

“Until I was seventeen.”

“You had no kinfolk who could’ve taken you in?”

“If I did, nobody ever came to claim me.”

“You ever try running away?” Ella asked.

“To where?”

“Anywhere! That’s what I did.”

“But you had a voice to carry you. All I had were my feet.”

“They did all right on “Flying Home” a little while ago.”

“That’s because I got lucky and found a home at the Savoy.” Hearing the mention of the ‘Savoy’ pushed distress out of Ella’s face.

“I felt the same way after Chick asked me join his band.”

“Do you miss it?” Sylvia asked.

“A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about it and wish everything could be like it was before Chick died.”

“Dancing and hearing you sing is how I make that wish come true for me.”

“But my voice isn’t the same as it used to be. And neither is the world.”

“That doesn’t bother me ’cause you’re the only singer who makes me feel like the War hasn’t taken the swing out of things that make folks wanna dance.”

Ella dropped her head and put a hand against her forehead to keep the pleasure of Sylvia’s words from showing on her face.

“Did you like my singing the first time you saw me?”

“Oh yes! Seeing a woman like you who reminded me of myself made hearing you even better!”

Ella lifted her head, took her hand away and met herself in the flesh weighing heavy in Sylvia’s shoulders and bosom.

“That’s nice of you to say, Sylvia. You know, I’m a believer that the only thing better than singing is more singing. I just haven’t figured out how to get my kicks the rest of the time.”

“If you figure that out, I hope you let me know.”

“What about in the meantime, when you’re not dancing or coming to hear me, and you want to get that feeling of how things used to be?”

“I read ‘Little Orphan Annie’.” Ella shook her head, tickled that there was something else they had in common.

“What does Orphan Annie do for you?” she asked.

“She stays the same when everything else around her is changing. What about you, Miss Fitzgerald? When you’re not singing, how do you get back to the way things were before?”

“I try not to stuff my mouth with food,” she said, coughing up a laugh that sounded forced. But a sudden rise in Ella’s eyebrows had her rummaging through a draw of the make-up table until she pulled out something rolled up in a ball.

“Come with me,” she said.

“Where?” Sylvia asked.

“You didn’t need to know that when the band played ‘Flying Home’.”

Sylvia followed Ella down a flight of steps, down a narrow hallway and through a door. The street behind the theater was deserted. Ella removed the rubber band, holding the ball together and it unraveled into a rope. She took hold of both ends and began jumping. The rope slapped the sidewalk under her feet just as they left the ground. Sylvia was amazed that, for someone her size, Ella jumped effortlessly without much exertion at all.

“Come on, if you comin’,” Ella said.

Sylvia hadn’t jumped rope in years. But like dancing or anything you did without thinking, she listened for the silent interval between the scraping sound of the rope against the sidewalk and Ella’s feet hitting the ground. When Sylvia heard it, she leaped inside the silence and the rope; and there was Ella’s gapped tooth, school girl giggle waiting for her. Ella tried to remember one of the rhymes she recited when jumping rope as a child, but they were all scrambled up in her head. But she wasn’t about to let that stop her:
Miss Mary Mack, Mack, Mack,
sang at the drop of a hat, hat, hat.
And each note she hit, hit, hit,
sent chills up the back, back, back.
She met a girl, girl, girl,
who danced the shimmy with a twirl, twirl, twirl.
And they jumped and skipped, skipped, skipped,
right out of this world, world, world.

I was more interested in being like Cab Calloway, who I’d first heard on the radio, stretching his voice like taffy and yelling ‘hi de, hi de, ho’.  And that got my attention a lot more than all the hollering

Johnny Weissmuller did to shake up the jungle in, “Tarzan, the Ape Man.”  When I finally got a good look at him in a movie about a Chinaman who invented a little picture box called television, Calloway had slick black hair and tiger teeth.  He wore a lemon yellow tuxedo and tails with matching shoes that were lightning fast, as he led his band into battle with a stick that he jabbed and waved like a sword.  Cab’s band played just about every night at the Cotton Club but no colored people were allowed in unless they were in the show.  My older brother, Roscoe, who was a numbers runner, saw Calloway at a lot of after hour joints in Harlem. He told me Cab was always looking to have a good time but wouldn’t stand for no one giving him a hard time.  Somehow, I knew I had to meet this man whose mouth was on the go, full of words I’d never heard of–  like Zazz Zu Zazz.

The manager of the store said no one could leave until the police got there.  The Spanish kid was lifting his shoulders and letting them drop like Jimmy Cagney.  But he wasn’t fooling me none.  I knew he was shittin’ bricks.  I wasn’t that far off from shittin’ a few myself, cause the last thing I needed was to have my father find out I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.  He would blame me for being anywhere near trouble.

When the police arrived, it took them a while to figure out what happened.  Come to find out, the kid hadn’t stolen anything.  But when the man watching for shoplifters asked him what he wanted, the kid tried to run.  The police called an ambulance for the guy who got bitten.  They told the kid never to run if he didn’t do anything and promised to put a flat foot up his ass the next time he was caught run- ning anywhere.  I couldn’t stop myself from laughing.

“You think this is funny,” one of the cops said, grabbing me by the arm.

“No!” I said, feeling his grip tighten.

“What’s your name?”

“War-dell!” I said, trying to show them I wasn’t no punk.

“Well, let me tell you something, War-dell. Another sound out of you and we’ll take you to the station house and see how funny you think it is when your folks have to come and get their smart mouth son!”

I started to say something to show them just how smart my mouth could get but changed my mind.

The cops booted us out of the store together.  They were watching us, so all we did was stare at each other before going our separate ways.  By the time I got to my block, everybody was already beatin their gums about what happened at the drug store.  But the story was all different.  The word on the street was that somebody working at the store called  the cops on a colored kid who took something without paying.  When the cops got there, they beat up on the him real bad and arrested a woman who told them to stop.  The kid was taken to the hospital and someone working there said he overheard a doctor say the boy was dead when the ambulance got there.

Men were standing outside a barbershop, like they did every afternoon when I got home from school.

“I got no problem believing that’s what happened,” one said.

“I thought seeing was believing,” another said..

“A colored kid getting beat to death by a cop is something I don’t need to see to believe it.”

“This is just more of the same old same old!”

The voice came from behind me.  I turned and saw a man in a long robe that hung from his neck to   his feet like a curtain. Some kind of cloth was wrapped tight around his head just above his eyes, which made them look scary.

“Well, if it ain’t Brother Abdul,” said a barbershop regular.  “We ain’t seen you since you up and married that numbers policy queen and moved on up with the folks who live on the hill.  The grapevine has it that you frontin’ a vegetable stand for the white folks you told us not to buy from unless they  gave some jobs to the colored.”

Brother Abdul moved his arms underneath his robe before he said anything.

“I’d hoped you curbside prophets would a figured out how to stay ahead of the game for a change, instead of standing on the sidelines watching the game go by.  But you lames are still out here, signify-

ing, with nothing in your pockets but your hands!”

Brother Abdul definitely knew his way around words.  The younger guys laughed and slapped palms with him.  The older heads chuckled or kept quiet.

“Don’t be too hard on us, Abdul,” one of the older crew said.  “We just wanted see if your mouth had become a stumble bum since you been gone.  What do you think’s gonna happen?”

“I don’t know.”

“So if we take our hands out of our pockets, where should we put them?”

“Wherever you put them, you need to decide whether you want them open or closed.”

I felt a hand on my shoulder.

“What you doing out here, son?”

As usual, Papa was wearing his chauffeur’s get-up: black suit, white shirt, slim jim black tie and shiny brimmed hat like the cops wear.

“I’m listening to what they saying about what happened on a hundred twenty-fifth street.”

“You’d be better off paying attention to what your teachers are trying to get into your head.”

“But Papa, they’re saying something real bad might happen.”

“How would they know?  They never move from this spot all day.”

I jerked my head back to the men who’d stopped talking and were looking in our direction.

“Well, if it ain’t Mr. Cecil Fortune,” an old timer said, “Always glad to see there’s one colored man in the driver’s seat while the rest of us standing still.”

“Ain’t nobody holding you so you can’t move.”

The ones who were not much older than me and the others who were around my father’s age got stiff in the neck and put a lock on both of us with their eyes.  I don’t know why he always had to keep rubbing his words in until they burned. Papa might as well have taken a strap to Roscoe when he told him that if he kept breaking the law, running numbers and chiseling colored folks out of what little money they had, this would turn our dead  mother’s peaceful rest in heaven into sleepless nights full of weeping.  Papa must’ve thought his words would get my brother to think about giving up the street life.

But Roscoe packed his clothes and left the apartment without saying a word.  After that, Papa lightened up a bit when he chastised me.  But even though it wasn’t me doing the talking in front of the barbershop.  I knew the next time I passed any of  these guys on the street, I’d get all the heat from what

Papa said that got underneath their skin.

“You got a point, Cecil,” the old timer said.  “You better off than the rest of us.  Cause at least you get to see where the white folks is headed, which is more than the rest of us can say.”

The laughter came out in sneezing shouts that got a hold of everyone except Papa and Brother Abdul who stared at each other.  I thought what the guy said was funny too.  But no way was I gonna laugh at what somebody said about my father that he didn’t think was funny.

“Come on, Wardell,” Papa said, pushing me toward the corner.  “I think you’ve heard enough of these loudmouths for one day.”

We walked down the block to our building.  In all the excitement I’d forgotten I was in that drug- store and saw what happened.  And all the talk about a colored kid getting killed by the cops wasn’t true.  Papa seeing me laugh would’ve been bad enough.  But telling him how I knew what really happened would’ve been worse.  I’d learned how talking about things that happened could make things worse when Mama died.  I was ten when she came down with something called rheumatic fever.  I remember her in bed, talking to us.  And then she stopped breathing.  Sometimes I wonder why it wasn’t me instead of her.  I was sick all the time when I was a baby.  I had pneumonia and just when it seemed like I was getting better, I got it again. Mama washed me, fed me and never left me alone until I was well.  Roscoe, Papa and me did the same for her but it didn’t do no good.  Once Mama was gone, there was no one to pull us tightly together, like she did when she taught me how to lace up my shoes.

Without her, we didn’t fit snug anymore. We walked around, tripping over each other like our shoes were untied.

Later, when we ate dinner, I asked Papa if he knew Brother Abdul.

“I know who he is.”

“You ever talked to him?”

“We’ve had words.”

“What about?”

“About something he did.”

“Like what?”

“Like up and leaving after getting colored folks to see if they stuck together, they could better themselves.”

“Maybe he couldn’t help it.”

“The only thing he couldn’t help was helping himself to the hard earned pennies of folks who got their hopes up and were let down.”

My mind kind of left me for a minute. And when it came back, I was angry with Mama for leaving me.  I’d felt like this before.  But this was the first time I had the feeling that Mama knew, the way she found out just about everything I tried to keep from her.  She’d push the flesh above her top lip under her nostrils, breathe in and say: ”When’s the last time you had a bath?”  I’d lie and she’d say it was time for another one.  It didn’t feel so bad because she never said it around Papa or Roscoe.  But she was letting me know there was nothing I did that she couldn’t smell. And even though Mama was dead, I had the feeling she could smell my anger.

“What you thinking about?” Papa asked.

I wasn’t about to tell him the truth.

“You ever listen to the Cab Calloway Band?”

“I can’t believe you fill your head with the nonsense from that clown.”

“I been hearing a lot of his music lately.”

“I know your brother likes that trash. But why would you waste your time listening to some fool sing about hop heads and people who ain’t interested in nothing but having a good time? You better get your mind right, boy!”

After Papa left for work, I looked out of the fourth floor window of our sixth floor walk-up.  It was just getting dark and streets were bubbling up with talk, getting hotter all the time.  The itch to hear what they had to say got to be too much.  So I dashed down the stairs and hit the sidewalk running.

The voice I was hearing from our apartment window turned out to be a guy I’d heard speaking a lot on the corner.  He always wore a dark suit; the jacket rode up his wrists every time he raised his arms and his hiked up pants showed white socks coming out of shoes run down on one side. When he talked, his eyes dug into everyone like fish hooks.

The word ‘class’ came out of his mouth more than any other. He put it together with other words like ‘struggle’ and ‘working’ that reminded me of the words Papa used when he said I struggled so much with my school work cause I didn’t pay enough attention in class. Maybe this guy was saying that people struggled with another kind of class work after they stopped going to school.

When I got to the corner, he was standing on a platform. He’d worked himself into a sweat and his jacket sleeves were almost to the elbows.  As usual, his white sidekick was moving through the crowd, passing out leaflets.

“The killing of a colored boy after he was accused of stealing from a five and dime store tells us all we need to know about the value of property over a human life. The owners of these stores snatch the nickels and dimes out of your hands and then cry thief when you reach for a share of the money that was taken from you in the first place. But taking from those who took even more from you, is not the answer. The answer is– jobs!  Not just for Negroes, as some have demanded, who would replace whites in stores on 125^th Street.  That plays into the hands of the merchants who would have you believe that jobs cannot be had except by giving them to one class of workers and taking them away from another.  The Young Communist League is the party for only one race of people: the working class.   We refuse to be tricked by the tight-fisted shopkeepers into fighting each other along racial lines.  And we’re calling for the arrest of the police officers involved in the fatal beating and the release of the Negro and white workers who were arrested while protesting the actions of the police.”

Some people started clapping, but they didn’t look too happy doing it.

“Hey, little brother! What you doing out here?”

Roscoe had on his stingy brim hat, broke down in the front and on the right side.  He flashed a gold front tooth I hadn’t seen before. And thick black suspenders made tracks up his eggnog colored shirt.

“Listening, same as you.”

“Papa must be at work. Otherwise you wouldn’t be out here.”

“I don’t have to sneak and do stuff I wanna do!”

“If you say so… How’re things at home?”

“All right I guess. Papa’s never at home. He’s always working.”

“Don’t he ever hang out with any of his old friends?”

“He did for a while after Mama died. But when you left…”

“Yeah, well anyway… What did you think of what that guy had to say?”

“I don’t know. I guess he’s right about having a job being better than stealing.”

“Well there’s one thing some of these communists don’t understand. They think a party is only something you belong to.  But until they know how- to- party, nobody’s gonna be interested in anything else they can do. They could learn a lot from Cab Calloway.”

I wondered if Roscoe believed that Papa was a lot like the communists.  I was about to ask him    when someone else got up on the platform to speak.  I t was Brother Abdul.  He still had on that long robe and his arms jumped around in the sleeves like Cab Calloway’s did in front of his band.

“The human race began in Africa,” he said, pointing down Lenox Avenue, which I figured was the direction Africa was in. “And by rights, the so called Negro should be the most favored of races.

But what happened earlier today is just another example of how the black man receives the least favored treatment in America.  That’s why we of the ‘Brotherhood of the Blood’ are determined to thicken our race pride with doing for ourselves and ridding our ranks of all the deadbeats who don’t do but tell you what they can’t do.  So I’m gonna tell you what you ‘can’ do.  You can let the merchants on a hundred twenty-fifth know that we can do to them what we did to Dutch Schultz a few years back, when he tried to take over the numbers business. We told him he’d get no traction in Harlem unless we got some of the action.”

The crowd liked that and started chanting.

“You’ll get no traction, unless we get some action!”

Brother Abdul smiled, stepped off the platform and joined in.  Then someone in the crowd yelled.

“Fuck all this!  Let’s show these whiteys some other kind of action!”

Something jerked all of us forward, like being on the subway car and having the motorman slam on the brakes. I was stuck in the crowd and couldn’t get out as it chugged down Lenox Avenue.  But a hand grabbed hold of my arm and pulled me out.

“You all right?” Roscoe said.

“I think so.”

“Looks like the crowd’s gotten out of Brother Abdul’s hands.”

“Where’s everybody going?”

“A hundred twenty-fifth, where it all started.”

“But it didn’t happen like everybody’s saying it did.”

“What are you talking about?”

“I was there.”

“So what did you see?”

“The kid was Spanish. The police didn’t kill him  He wasn’t even beaten. The ambulance was called for the man the kid bit.”

“You wanna try telling that to those folks hellbent on their way to 1-2-5?”

I looked at the crowd, moving down Lenox Avenue, not paying attention to nothing except what was ahead of them and all bodied up at the shoulders and hips.

“They wouldn’t listen to me.  It’d have to be somebody who wasn’t a kid.”

“You got anybody in mind?”

“Cab Calloway,” was out of my mouth before I knew it.

Roscoe looked at me like I’d just grown another head.

“You think that’s dumb?”

“Don’t get all bent out a shape, little brother. If anybody could turn that crowd around, it’d be the

Hi De Ho man. But it’s too late. They only got one thing on their mind now.”

The crowd got lost in the night sky, but I could hear what they had on their mind: balloon popping sounds, smashing glass and screaming a long way off like I heard during baseball games when I stood on Edgecombe Avenue above the Polo Grounds.

“What they doing don’t make sense,” I said.

“Why not? So what if it didn’t happen like they think. Nine out a ten times it would a been.”

“That don’t make it right!” I said.

“Right ain’t got nothing to do with it. But you hung up on what’s right. Just like Papa.”

“What about you?”

“Hey! I’m the same way. When me and Papa had our falling out, we both thought we was right.

That’s why I left and why there’s still no understanding between us.”

The horns from fire engines and the sirens from police cars was making me rubber-legged.

“What’s wrong, little brother?  You look a little out of it.”

“I’m all right.”

“Why don’t you hang with me for a while. There’s something I want to show you.”

“Like what?”

“Don’t worry.  I’ll tell you when we get there.”

We walked up Lenox Avenue and turned into the block around the corner from the Cotton Club.

I followed Roscoe to a door.  He knocked and it opened with a man, as wide as the doorway, standing in front of us.

“Hey Kong,” Roscoe said.

“Hey yourself.”

“We’re here to see ‘the man’.”

Kong’s eyes stood still in a face the color of cooked liver.

“Wait here,” he said and closed the door.

“Who’re we supposed to be seeing?” I asked.

“Who do you think?”

“You gotta be kidding!”

“Is pig pork?”

The door opened again.

“Follow me,” Kong said.

As soon as we got through the door, I was hit by blasting horns and the click clacking of tapping feet on stage.  Kong put up his slab-sized hand for us to stop.  He walked a little further down a hallway and stuck his head in an open doorway.

“Is ‘Kong’ supposed to be short for King Kong?” I whispered to Roscoe.

“The last cat asked him that– Kong put a hurting on him so bad, he couldn’t remember his own name.”

Kong waved for us to come on. I followed Roscoe into the room and Kong closed the door behind us.

“How’s it going, Cab?”

“Everything’s on the upside, Roscoe. ”

The room was tight and narrow. And with Roscoe in front of me, he was blocking me from getting a good look at Cab Calloway.

“I want you to meet my little brother, Wardell.”

Roscoe stepped to the side and there he was in the flesh.

“What’s up, young squire? Gimme some splah!”

He held out his hand.  I slapped his palm and he did the same to mine. I couldn’t speak right away cause he looked nothing like I thought he would. He moved a toothpick around in his mouth; and his hair was poked straight up like the porcupines I’d seen in picture books.  He looked like he hadn’t gotten much sleep cause there were swollen pouches under his eyes. And all he had on was a tee shirt, boxer shorts and knee-high socks held up by garters.

“It’s great to meet you, Mr. Calloway,” I said.

“You can nix that mister stuff with me, Wardell. A straight shot to ‘Cab’ suits me fine.”

“Okay, Cab,” I said, still not feeling all that comfortable, having his first name come out of my mouth.

“Roscoe tells me you’re wigged out on my band’s ‘hi de ho’ groove.”

“I listen to you whenever you’re on the radio.”

“Cab. Did you get the lowdown on what happened today on 1-2-5 ?” Roscoe asked.

“Yeah. Everybody’s been running off at the jibs about it all day.”

“Right before we came here, a crowd was headed for 1-2-5.  It looked like they was aiming to put a serious dent in the game the store owners been running.  And Wardell got it into his head that you could a stopped ‘em.”

“What made you think that?” Cab asked me.

I swallowed and hoped I wouldn’t lose the words before I could say them.

“You know the ins and out of words so good, I figured you could get them to do something where nobody’d get hurt.”

Cab’s head snapped back and a howl shot out of his mouth that sent the tooth pick flying.

“Well now, Wardell, that’s some righteous spiel you just laid on me. As a member of the black and tan, I ain’t above cutting a fool of any persuasion who gets on the wrong side of me.  And I’m down with the fraughty issue in Harlem of ofays wearing dark glasses like they don’t see us while picking our pockets.  It’s the changing same, whether it’s on 1-2-5 or here at the Cotton Club.  But the clam bake them splibs having on 1-2-5 ain’t on my tab.  If I frisk my whiskers, it’s to keep this joint jumping no matter what’s shaking anywhere else.”

Listening to him do all those tricks with words seemed like just another way for him to put on a show even without his band.  I’d a been lying if I said I understood everything he was saying but I didn’t want him to stop neither.

The door opened.

“It’s about that time,” Kong growled.

“Well, gents, it’d be a gasser to jib jab with you some more, but it’s time for me go on and break my conk for the paying customers.”

“Thanks Cab, for taking the time to beat the gums a taste with my brother,” Roscoe said.

“It was solidly murderous to riff with you a skosh bit.”

Cab stood up.

“Knock me some skin before you raise up,” he said, and slapped palms with Roscoe and me.

When Roscoe and me were back on the street, we walked without talking.  And I was glad cause there was a lotta banging in my head.  I didn’t know how I felt anymore about what’d happened.  If I believed Papa, Brother Abdul talked out of both sides of his mouth and Roscoe was a no account son who broke the laws of God every time he hit the streets to run the numbers or listened to one of the devil’s main disciples, Cab Calloway.  But if I believed Roscoe, it didn’t matter if nobody but me and the other people in the drug store had the story right cause what was right didn’t always help you under- stand why things went wrong. And then there was Cab Calloway.  Could I believe somebody whose words tap danced so fast when he talked that I couldn’t see what he was saying?

I started hearing a low humming sound coming from down the avenue toward 125^th Street.  Then out of the dark, the sidewalk and street got swollen up with people.   And I could hear the drag and shuffle of their feet getting closer.  Whatever they’d done on 1-2-5, it sounded like a lot more was taken from them than anything they was bringing back.  The humming turned into words I couldn’t make out at first.  But they got clearer in my ears the more I heard them.

“Hi de, hi de, hi de ho, Cab Calloway’s got to show!”

“Hi de. hi de, hi de ho, Cab Calloway’s got to show!”

“You hear that?” I asked.

“Yeah.”

“What you think’s gonna happen?”

“I don’t know, little brother.  But I ain’t going nowhere till I find out.”

The crowd jammed into the street on Lenox Avenue.  And police had search lights all over the front of the Cotton Club. Patrol cars blocked off 132^nd & 133^rd Street, so no more people could get in.  Cops on foot talked into bullhorns for  the crowd to break it up and go home.  But nobody moved.  Then a voice started shouting:

“We ain’t gonna go, till Cab Calloway show!”

Some cops that had all kinds of medals on their coats stood away from the others and talked.  One

of them went inside the Cotton Club. And the shouting got louder:

“We ain’t gonna go, till Cab Calloway show!”

“You think he’s coming out?” I asked.

“Maybe. The cops don’t wanna have no fracas out here with all them big spenders inside.”

People started coming out of the Cotton Club, dressed in their best threads.  Folks in the crowd screamed when they spotted some movie stars.  The cops pushed them back, so nobody got too close.

The music from inside the Cotton Club was a blast of hot air that blew the doors open.  The band strutted out.  Some were playing and others started singing:

It was at the Cotton Club the other night

there was really quite a sight

Tables were filled with gaudy frails

chewing on their fingernails

Drinks were served six bits a throw

things were moving kind of slow

All at once the room would fill

Men forgot all about their bills

Who should enter but the man from Harlem.

A lemon yellow pant leg and shoe swung out the door.  The rest of Cab followed in matching tuxedo and tails.  His shoes cut loose with quick heel and toe tap chatter that took him to the front of the band.

He jerked his head from side to side and his slick hair snapped like a whip. The crowd whooped  and hollered when two of the movie stars got footloose along with Cab.  They twisted in and out at the   knees and swung their heels out after every step.  It they hadn’t held onto each other around the waist, their legs would’ve run out from under them.

Cab flapped his elbows and squawked like a rooster.  The horns in the band quieted down and he opened his mouth like he was yawning.

“Listen up folks while I give you a wake-up call and all the lowdown. This is a great night I never thought I’d see.  But our friends who pound a beat…”

Boos lit up the night air.

“I know they ain’t exactly been your ace boon coons. But they’ve agreed to let me and my band make a little frolic pad out here, so you can see what you’ve never been allowed to see inside…”

Shouts jabbed back at him.

“Make it plain, Cab!”

“That’s right! Give em the gospel according to US!”

Cab raised his arms for quiet.

“Now I wanna get one thing straight. I’m not out here to rile you up or simmer you down. That

ain’t my calling. You got enough people telling you whether you is or you ain’t, whether you can or you can’t or whether you will or you won’t.  I mix up the do’s and the don’ts and come up with something that nobody can quite figure out…called Zazz Zu Zazz!”

The trumpets played first, sounding like they wanted to take their time before Cab told the story of these strange words I’d only heard about from Roscoe.  The trombones jumped in and got loud, pushing the trumpets to hurry up so Cab could get started– which he did.

Now here’s a very entrancing phrase.

It will put you in a daze.

To me it don’t mean a thing.

But it’s got a very peculiar swing—

Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zay!

The words weren’t even out of his mouth good before the crowd was giving them right back to him.

Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zay!

This loosened everybody up with Cab changing the words up to see if we could follow.

Zu Zay, Zu Zu Zay!

I felt myself start to sway back and forth at the neck, shoulders and hips. Roscoe and everybody around us was doing the same.  Even the cops were taking it easy, lightening up on the tight grip they had on their faces and billy clubs.  I wondered how folks felt who’d gone down to a hundred twenty fifth street.  And was it anything like this?  The bass player took over from Cab and pulled at the strings. He strummed the sound of  Zazz Zu Zazz like Cab did.  And we zazzed right along with him until Cab sang his way back in.

It makes no difference where you go.

There’s one thing that they sure do know.

There’s no need for them to be blue.

Cause Zazz Zu Zazz will see them through.

Cab gave us Zazz Zu Zazz one last time, gargled it in his throat and spit it out in stutters and dribbles until it was all gone.  Nobody clapped or hollered but there was heat in the air that revved people up a lot more than when they listened to Brother Abdul and the communists.

“That’s the all of it, y’all,” Cab said. “You just got the last show.  They’ll be no more shows at the

Cotton Club tonight!”

The crowds packed into the block started breaking up.  There were folks trying to get autographs from the movies stars but most people were moving away from the front of the Cotton Club. Cab and the band were nowhere in sight.

“So!  What do you think?” Roscoe asked.

His voice surprised me. I’d forgotten he’d been standing next to me all that time.

“I can’t think of nothing to say.”

“That’s saying a lot right there.”

“I should go on home before Papa gets off work,” I said

“Yeah, I guess you better.”

“Roscoe?”

“Yeah?”

“You ever wish things was the way they used to be before Mama died?”

“What for?  It’s never gonna be that way again.”

“Why not?”

“Cause it ain’t.”

“What about Zazz Zu Zazz?”

“What about it?”

“Didn’t you feel it?  What happened to everybody when Cab did that song. Nothing nobody did today made people feel like that.”

“It probably won’t happen again.”

“Then why’d you want me to meet him?”

“Cause I wanted you to see that there’s men that ain’t like Papa .”

“But you talk like you don’t really believe in him.”

“Cab don’t need me or you to believe in him. He’s doing that pretty well by himself.  That’s the difference between him and a lot of these shysters up here in Harlem.  They want you to believe in them but not in yourself.  The sooner you stop looking for yourself in other people, the better off you gonna be.”

“That’s not what I’m doing!  I want us to be a family again.”

“I can’t help you there. You gonna have to work that out for yourself.”

“But what about you and Papa?”

“That’s between us. Not you.”

“You don’t understand me no better than Papa.”

“Well, the branch don’t fall that far from the tree.”

“Mama was also part a that tree.”

“She’s gone, Wardell. It’s time you accepted it. I know you think she was a saint cause she nursed you back from death’s door.  But that’s what she was good at.  Running other people’s lives. When she got sick, she didn’t know how to let us help her get well. She needed to be in charge of that too.”

“You jealous cause I was her favorite!” I yelled.

Roscoe smiled at me. It surprised me cause it was soft like a feather.

“That’s right, little brother. But I got over it. You haven’t.”

I turned and walked away.

“That’s part of Zazz Zu Zazz too, Wardell. It ain’t just about having things the way you want ‘em.”

When I got home, I was even more turned around than I was when I found out people believed something that never happened at the drug store.  And just when I met Cab and found out about Zazz Zu Zazz, here was Roscoe telling me I couldn’t even count on that to make anything better.  The only thing I wanted to do was sleep.  I got in bed and tried to talk myself to sleep by saying the words to Zazz Zu Zazz in my head.  I heard the door to the apartment open.  I hoped Papa wouldn’t come into my room to look in on me like he always did after driving all night.  I heard him walk past my room and into the kitchen as the words to Zazz Zu Zazz got louder.

Now here’s a very entrancing phrase.

It will put you in a daze.

To me it don’t mean a thing.

But it’s got a very peculiar swing—

Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zazz Zu, Zay!

I couldn’t believe it when the voice I was hearing wasn’t in my head.  I got out of bed and went into the kitchen. Papa was sitting at the table, staring at the wall.

“What you doing up, Wardell?”

“I couldn’t sleep.”

“Well, go on back to bed, son.”

“Papa. What was you saying when you came in?”

I saw something in his face. But he dropped his head like he didn’t want me to see.

“You must a been dreaming.”

“But I heard you!”

“Go to bed. It’s late.”

I went back to my room, wondering if I’d been dreaming.  If I was, I wanted to keep doing it.