The singer in the black and white photo grips an old-style microphone. It looks like a giant beetle with crosshatched ribs. She is singing to the glory of God.
Thomas Waters, the sound man, says to Willy, his sidekick, “That’s a high C, brother. She gon break all the glass in New York.”
Willy replies, “She be holdin’ that note forever. Guess she don’t needa breathe.”
She is Merle Divine Brown, better known as MDB, granddaughter of slaves, daughter of sharecroppers, wearer of Alaskan fur, alcoholic, pansexual, and possessor of a voice to summon the angels. She is twenty-two years old and about to release a masterpiece.
“She gon be heard from Brooklyn to Berlin,” says Waters, the sound man.
“She sing like a canary,” says Cornelius Wenschetter, the money man.
“She drunk as hell,” says her sister, Rubella Divine Brown, better-known as The Shrew.
A shingle beach. Stones under her feet. A kind of cracking. She is hungover and broke and remembering the days when she sang in front of three thousand people in Carnegie Hall and the world was her plaything. She could hit a note, any note, in her pajamas, half asleep. She could hit a top C in a room full of smoke with a martini in her hand and a lover’s arm around her waist.
And now she is holed up with her sister in a beach town called Playa Merinda. They sent her here to straighten herself out because someone told her the sound of the ocean would cure all things. They lied.
She is an alien here. People stare at her black skin. Her shadow is too long. The rhythms of the waves confound her because they don’t syncopate like Jackie Finkleton’s drumbeats. Instead of city sirens and jazz, all she hears is ghostly winds going woo woo through the wooden frame of the door. Salt accumulates in her hair and the water lashes the shore.
And worse, she just finished the last bottle of Jim Beam in a two hundred mile radius and The Shrew says it’s time to go cold turkey.
Ugh. Cold turkey. The days and the nights roll into one. Agonies untold. The song of the crow ringing in her ears. The smear of lipstick on the mirror. Jerusalem, Athens, London, all the places she sang, the voices in her head. She’ll never be whole again.
“Sing it.”
MDB says, “Why I gotta sing these goddam plantation songs? I likes show tunes.”
“You’ll do show tunes next record,” says Cornelius Wenschetter, the money man. “These spirituals are what the people wanna hear.”
“Goddamit,” she says. “Gimme the note.”
The piano player hits a middle D.
“May I call you Merle?”
“Tha’s ma name.”
“Or do you prefer Miss Brown?”
“I’m missus.”
“So Mrs. Brown?”
“Call me Merle. Or Divine.”
“I’ll call you Divine. One month after you recorded your eighth album, ‘The Beautiful Life,’ you went to Playa Merinda and disappeared from the music scene. Can you tell us about that?”
“I had me some troubles. My sister Rubella say to me we gon hide away for a few month where no one find us. So we rents a house in a lil beach town in Mexico.”
“What happened there?”
“Ain’t nothin’ happen there. Tha’s the point.”
“But you were a changed woman when you came back to civilization a year later.”
“The thing you call civilization ain’t what I call civilization. I known hammerhead sharks wi’ mo’ civilization than I ever seen in the United States o’ America.”
“What are you? Jazz? Rhythm and blues? Soul? Gospel?”
“I’m a singer, Mister. You gimme a tune, I sing it.”
She is twenty-two years old, small, dark-eyed, not yet the firework she will become. Wenschetter says, “I can’t market that. I gotta know what you are.”
“Then let me sing.”
“Sure. Sure. You sing. But first, tell me, why is it you wanna be a singer?”
“You think I have a choice in the matter, Mister? When all my other options be exhausted, this the only thing I can do to set me free.”
“To set you free?”
“Maybe you don’t understan’. Music the only thing Black folks got that be ours.”
But she’s wrong. It isn’t hers. Mr. Wenschetter steals her voice, overlays a jazz accompaniment, slips it onto a vinyl disc, wraps it in a bright blue plastic cover, and makes a million dollars in eight months. MLB barely makes the rent.
Hell, I practice for so long sometimes I falls asleep at the piano. I wakes up wi’ my head on the keys an’ my face full o’ strange indentations, like somebody be moldin’ me out o’ clay. An’ sometimes the ghost o’ my granddaddy be sittin’ there on the piano, holdin’ a pipe and jus’ grinnin’ at me like I his lil girl agin.
I’s twenty-one year old. Gits me a job as the piano player in a bar. I goes up to the barman and asks where I can find the owner, Harry Newson. He say Harry busy and ask me to wait. He offer me a drink. I ain’t never been in a bar befo’, so I asks for a glass o’ milk. A half dozen rough-lookin’ Irish laborers turn they heads an’ laugh.
I’s to perform from 10:00 p.m. to 4:00 a.m. in this bar, wi’ a break o’ ten minutes every hour. I don’t need no sheet music. I knows it all in my head. When I were jus’ a kid, I decided to be the greatest piano player ever. So now I’s wearin’ a silk dress I done borrow from my auntie and holdin’ my head up high an’ imaginin’ I’s playin’ in Carnegie Hall or the Metropolitan. I imagines a audience o’ princes an’ film stars an’ fellow classical musicians instead o’ the drunk bums at the bar.
I plays hunnerds o’ show tunes that first night. On my breaks, they gives me all the milk I can drink, but I soon learns not to take too much o’ it ‘cause otherwise I needs to use the restroom every thirty minutes.
At the end o’ the night, when they done kicked out the last o’ the drunks, the boss come up to me an’ say, “You sure play nice but why didn’t you sing?” I says, “I aint no singer. I’s a piano player.” An’ he pulls the cheroot outta his mouth an’ says, “Tomorrow you’re a singer or you’re out of a job.”
So I rassles up every song I done learned in church when I were a little bitty child and I done become a singer. An’ ‘cause I has to play six hours a night, I learns to improvise. I messes around wi’ the songs, changes the lyrics, repeats lines agin and agin, an’ worries the notes. An’ tha’s how I learns to be a singer.
I does my show, takes the money, drinks my milk, and leaves. They don’t mess wi’ me. Never try to rip me off or tell me what to play. I plays any damn thing I wants to play.
One day a agent see me and ask me to meet wi’ him afterward. When I done playin’, I go outside an’ see him leanin’ against his vehicle, both of ‘em sleek an’ lean as a catfish.
“This yo car?” I asks.
“This ain’t no car, cupcake. This here be a Ford Thunderbird. You gon git in or what?”
I gits in the front seat nex’ to him an’ he say, “You too good for this place. Let me git you some real gigs.”
I looks at him. He wearin’ a nice suit, an’ holdin’ a fat cigar. He look like money. That night I done drink champagne for the first time. I ain’t barely stopped drinkin’ it since.
A day later, I signs on the dotted line wi’out even readin’ the fine print and befo’ the year is through I plays the Blue Note, the Pied Piper, Fat Sam’s, The Malone Concert Hall, Finman’s Ballroom, the Apollo. I done Philadelphia, Chicago, New York, New Orleans, D.C., Pittsburgh, San Diego. I done it all.
It were two year later I realize I workin’ like a dog but my bank balance ain’t changed none. But that agent, Dixie Wright were his name, he start travelin’ firs’ class and ridin’ in a Chevy. The only thing he did fo’ me were one day he knock on the door o’ my hotel room. I opens it a crack. He grinnin’ like a bear an’ holdin’ a big brown box.
“Look what I got you,” he say.
I opens the box an’ it be a fur coat.
“Alaskan,” he say.
Well, tha’s sure nice o’ him, but I be thinkin’ why the hell I need an Alaskan fur coat in New Orleans in August?
A month later I marry him anyways, just for the hell o’ it, but I keeps my name. I knew he weren’t no good, but the champagne done made me say I do.
On tour, I hangs out wi’ my reg’lar crew o’ musicians an’ roadies, gits to know em real good. Everbody have a history ‘cept me. Waters, the sound man, say he done throw a guy off of a roof. Killed him stone dead. Got away with it ‘cause there weren’t no witnesses.
The engineer, Bilko, done spent ten year in jail. He lose he job as a security man in a bank, an’ two weeks later he go back to the bank wearin’ some cheap-ass Batman mask an’ he done hold up the bank wi’ a empty gun. When the arrestin’ police officer remove Bilko’s mask, the bank manager shout out, “Bilko! Sonofabitch!” an’ one o’ the tellers up and slap him clean across the jaw even as Bilko be gettin’ arrested. At the trial Bilko say the gun weren’t loaded, but the judge give him ten years anyways.
Mamie Washington, my helper, say she descended from a tribe in Somalia where everbody six feet six inches tall. She say she come over hidden in a barrel on a boat when she were five year old. When they pull her out, she be starvin’ to death. She never knowed her real name neither. Got adopted by a family name o’ Washington and they done name her Mamie.
Yeah, everbody got a skeleton in they closet ‘cept me. I just got a ghost in my bedroom.
“When was it the problems began? That your sister felt she needed to take you to Playa Merinda?”
“They problems always there. Y’see, singin’ disturb me. Sometimes it break my heart.”
“But you’re a singer!”
“The tunes an’ lyrics stay in my head fo’ days, an’ keep me awake. Music don’t give me no peace. Tha’s why I done take to other medication.”
“You mean drugs.”
“Drugs, champagne, sex, it all the same. It take reality away. I caint take too much reality. Not many Black folks can unless they blind an’ dumb as a rock.”
When you captures the audience, it be like electricity hangin’ in the air. Like a storm gone an’ shook the place. You do it right, you touch they soul.
I never gives the band the playlist till right before the concert ‘cause I don’t choose the playlist till I see the mood o’ the audience an’ hear the acoustics an’ feel wha’s goin’ on inside my heart. It’s only then I knows what I gon play. The band, they gotta adapt. They don’t adapt, they on the street.
For two hours, you lost in the music. Time don’t exist, nothin’ exist ‘cept the music. It be the most beautiful thing in the world ‘cause it be the only thing in the world. Notes hangin’ in the air like rainbows. Big John Chooty blowin’ his horn. Bo Richardson on rhythm guitar. The brush o’ Finkleton’s snare drum. He say it sound like leaves in the wind!
But when you done finish, you hit the floor. You come down from yo high. You just another bum in the bar. When the lights go up an’ the music stop, it all over an’ ain’t nobody there but you an’ the lil devil whisperin’ in yo ear, “You a nobody. You no good. You jus’ a performin’ monkey dancin’ for loose change. You drop dead tomorrow, they pull up another monkey to git yo spot quicker n it take for spit to hit the floor.”
She plays in the first mixed race show in Birmingham, Alabama. It’s organized to support the desegregation movement. There are death threats and bomb scares. Someone ties a noose to the spotlight the night before.
The show is held at one end of a disused soccer field, with a stage made from planks of wood held up by coffins from the local black mortuary. The crowd swells to forty-thousand. When she hits that first note and hears the roar, she thinks her people will sing their way to the Promised Land.
At the end of the show she is escorted by security to a bus. In front of and behind the bus, police cars lead her to the hotel. Security tells her to stay away from the windows because the rednecks are armed to the teeth and looking for a kill. At two in the morning, she peeks through a curtain to see the moon and, instead, on the rooftops all around the hotel she sees federal marshals with rifles. She sings and prays that night, surrounded by band members and roadies and her manager, and she doesn’t sleep for one second, not until the plane takes off for New York the next morning.
She plays six-hour shows seven nights a week until one day the exhaustion hits her. Her hands tremble. Her head pounds. She has visions: white lights and beams falling from the sky. Her waking hours are a series of surrealist daydreams interspersed with rare moments of lucidity when she thinks she sees the truth beneath the surface of everything.
On stage, her subconscious takes over. She has been playing these songs for so long that she can play them without thinking or knowing what her hands and voice are doing. The music is part of her surroundings like the roof or the walls or the floor. It’s just there. When the tour is over, she sleeps for four days and nights. The world roars all around her—wars, assassinations, strikes, earthquakes, coups—and she curls up like a cat on a cushion and shuts her eyes, her granddaddy’s ghost watching over her.
By now, she is knee deep in it. If it isn’t champagne, it’s whisky. If it isn’t whiskey, it’s gin. If it isn’t gin, it’s cocaine. If it isn’t cocaine, it’s men. If it isn’t men, it’s women. Most mornings she wakes up and doesn’t know which city she is in or whose body she is lying next to or which drug is sliding through her veins.
One day she shows up at a concert hall in her little black dress. She is the main act, but they won’t let her in. A bald white man in a suit says “no coloreds” and closes the door. She stands on the steps outside the hall and sings a capella for two hours to an audience of three hundred. They are craning their necks. Cars slow down. Birds on a wire stop to listen. It makes national news.
But this is the end. Wenschetter, the Money Man, is dead. Dixie Wright, the agent-turned-husband, is in prison. She feels betrayed by music promoters, by fellow musicians, by lovers, by friends, but most of all she feels betrayed by America. So she flies to Liberia.
In Liberia, a taxi driver takes one look at her and drives her straight to a witch doctor in a tin shack. The room is hot. She is standing under a bare bulb. The witch doctor throws some bones on the floor and says something to himself in a strange language. He does this several times. Finally, he says, “There is a ghost following you. You need to free him.”
Her grandfather is long dead but his spirit won’t leave her in peace.
The witch doctor says, “Put a bag of cotton under your bed. Stay in that bed for two days and nights. Do not talk to anyone. Bury the cotton next to a tree. If you do not do as I say, your grandfather’s ghost will never rest.”
She does as he says and at the end of the second day lying in bed, she feels the presence of her grandfather in the room. And then his absence.
After a year on the Liberian coast, she returns to America. She can’t go back to the Deep South. She does a residency in New York, playing with session musicians half as good as her old crew. Everyone’s got to make a buck. Even her.
She is involved in The Struggle. They tell her to embrace nonviolence. How do you embrace nonviolence when white folks are spitting on you, calling you nigger, pouring boiling coffee on you, beating you, stabbing you, jailing you for no reason except your blackness, lynching you? Gandhi did it. Martin did it. John Lewis did it. But can she do it with all her fury and wildness? There’s a voice in her head saying that ain’t courage that turning the other cheek. That be liftin yo ass in the air so the massa can whup you.
Another year passes and she decamps to Paris. She gets a residency in a nightclub called Palais des Rombards, in Pigalle, and finds an apartment next door to a whorehouse in the Latin Quarter. Her street smells of piss but she loves it anyway. No one calls her a nigger or stops her from entering her own show. Men delight in her flesh. Women too. She dresses like a flapper and plays four-hour sets and learns to sing in French. She meets Baldwin and Wright and walks the bridges at dusk marveling at the barges on the Seine.
She buys pamphlets from booksellers on the streets and spends hours nursing cups of coffee in the wicker chairs of the cafes, eyeing the passersby.
Some call it the City of Light but she prefers it in darkness when the electric lamps make strange shadows and the bats hover around the bell towers of the cathedrals.
She goes to salons and drinks cheap red wine with artists and philosophers. There are Spaniards, Poles, Americans, Algerians, Hungarians – all the lost souls washed up in Pigalle and they all have dreams of a big show or a big book or a big exhibition to mark their place in their world.
One day, she gets lost and wanders into a cemetery in Montmartre and begins reading the inscriptions on the tombstones.
Here lies the king of the world.
Rest in peace for you will rest for eternity.
The woman of the earth returns to the earth.
I will be the breeze that brings you relief.
Two years pass and she receives a letter. Her father is dead. She catches the first plane home and her sister Rubella The Shrew meets her at the airport. They hug each other without a word. She makes it in time for the funeral at the local church and stands at the head of a line of mourners, arm in arm with her weeping mother. No one asks her to sing.
Afterwards, Rubella corners her. “You’re needed here,” she says.
“Who need me?”
“Momma, the movement, everbody.”
“I ain’t got no place to stay.”
“Sure you have, Merle. Momma kept yo’ bedroom.”
“I ain’t stayin’. Ain’t nothin here but bad memories and the Klan.”
“Ain’t nothin here? Yo momma be here.”
Two weeks later, she moves back to the south, to her childhood home. She sells her Alaskan fur coat and buys a new bed to replace the planks of wood she slept on as a child. Her grandfather’s ghost stays away. So does her father’s.
There is a tree in the yard. Under it, there is a headstone that says Eloisa Brown, beloved wife of Charlie, mother of Rubella and Merle. She lasted barely a year after her husband’s passing.
She lives alone in her mother’s house. It takes six months to find a buyer. She packs objects into boxes, the final one a black and white photo of a singer holding an old-style microphone. It looks like a giant beetle with crosshatched ribs. The singer, in the days when she was still called Merle Divine Brown, is singing to the glory of God.
“You lived a full life, Miss Brown.”
“I’m missus. And I ain’t dead yet.”
“I mean you spent time in Liberia and France. You toured the world.” The interviewer looks at her. She looks at him.
She says, “You ain’t asked a question. You jus told me ‘bout my life. What you want to know?”
“Do you have any regrets?”
“I lived the way a free person live. I paid my dues and sung my songs. I ain’t regret nothing.”
“What are your biggest achievements?”
“I ain’t achieve nothin’ much. A few good records. A concert down in Mississippi one time in 54 or 55 for my brothers an’ sisters. One in Paris France made me a star over there. But all them notes an’ all that warblin’, what it worth? Ain’t nothin’ but the song of a crow on a roof.”
She pauses.
“But hell I can still sing a high C. Can hit it clean. Like the sound man once said when he thought I cain’t hear him, ‘she gon break all the glass in New York.’”
And sometimes when she sleeps, she hears the wash of the waves that lap the shores of Playa Merinda two thousand miles away and feels the air shake with the presence of her grandfather or her father, something there but not there, and above all she feels Finkleton’s snare drum pulsing in her heart, hushing the cacophony of the world outside to nothing.
JJ Amaworo Wilson is a German-born Anglo-Nigerian-American writer. He is the author or co-author of over twenty books and serves as writer-in-residence at Western New Mexico University and as a faculty member on Stonecoast’s MFA in Creative Writing. His first novel, Damnificados, won four major awards and was an Oprah Top Pick. His most recent novel is Nazaré.
