“How much school you had?” Mohammed asked.
“Couple years,” Sonny said. In truth, he couldn’t remember finishing one year in any one place, so much had he skipped school, moved around, gotten kicked out. One year, out of sheer desperation, his mother had tried to get him into one of the fancy white schools in Manhattan. She’d marched into the office wearing glasses and carrying her best pen. While Sonny looked at the pristine building, clean and shiny, with smartly dressed white children entering and exiting as calmly as can be, he’d thought about his own schools, the ones in Harlem that had the ceiling falling in and smelled of some unnameable funk, and he was surprised that both things could even be called “schools.” Sonny could remember how the white school officials had asked his mother if she wanted some coffee. They’d told her that it just wasn’t possible for him to go there. It just wasn’t possible. Sonny could remember Willie squeezing his hand with one of hers as they walked back to Harlem, wiping away tears with the other. To comfort her, Sonny said he didn’t mind his schools because he never went, and Willie said the fact that he never went was what was wrong with them.
“That ain’t enough for the one thing I heard about,” Mohammed said.
“I gotta work, Mohammed. I got to.”
Mohammed nodded slowly, thinking, and the next week he gave Sonny the number of a man who had left the Nation and now owned a bar. Two weeks later Sonny was taking drink orders at Jazzmine, the new jazz club in East Harlem.
Sonny moved his things out of his mother’s house the night he found out he got the job. He didn’t tell her where he was working because he already knew she didn’t approve of jazz or any other kind of secular music. She sang for the church, used her voice for Christ, and that was it. Sonny had asked her once if she had ever wanted to be famous like Billie Holiday, singing so sweet that even white people had to pay attention, but his mother just looked away and told him to be careful of “that kind of life.”
Jazzmine was too new to attract the big-time clients and players. Most days, the club was half-empty, and the workers, many of whom were musicians themselves, hoping to be seen by the kind of people who could make their careers, quit before the club was even six months old. It wasn’t long before Sonny became head bartender.
“Gimme a whiskey,” a muffled voice called to Sonny one night. He could tell it was a woman’s voice, but he couldn’t see her face. She was sitting all the way down at the end of the bar, and her head was in her hands.
“Can’t serve ya if I can’t see ya,” he said, and slowly she lifted her head. “Why don’t you come on down here and get your drink?”
He had never seen a woman move that slowly. It was like she had to wade through deep and mucky waters to get to him. She couldn’t have been more than nineteen years old, but she moved like a world-weary old woman, like sudden movements would break her bones. And when she plopped herself down on the stool in front of him, she still seemed in no hurry.
“Long day?” Sonny asked.
She smiled. “Ain’t all days long?”
Sonny got her the drink, and she sipped it just as slowly as she had done everything else.
“My name’s Sonny,” he said.
She slipped him another smile, and her eyes grew amused. “Amani Zulema.”
Sonny chuckled. “What kind of name is that?” he asked.
“Mine.” She stood up, and with the same slow stroll took her drink across the bar and up onto the stage.
The band that had been playing seemed to bow before her. Without Amani needing to say anything at all, the pianist stood up to give her the stool and the others cleared the stage.
She set her drink on top of the piano and started running her hands along the keys. Here, on the piano, was the same lack of urgency that Sonny had noticed before, just fingers lazily ambling along.
It was when she started singing that the room grew really quiet. She was a small woman, but her voice was so deep, it made her look much larger. There was a gravelly quality to the sound too, like she had been gargling with pebbles to prepare herself. She swayed while she sang. First one way, then a cock of the head before moving the other way. When she started to scat, the small crowd grunted and moaned and even shouted “Amen!” once or twice. A few people came in off the street and stood in the doorway, just trying to catch sight of her.
She ended in a hum, a sound that seemed to come from the fullest part of her gut, where some said the soul lived. It reminded Sonny of his childhood, of the first day his mother sang out in church. He was young, and Josephine was just a baby bopping on Eli’s knee. His mother had dropped her songbook on the ground and the whole congregation had been startled by the noise, looking up at her. Sonny felt his heart catch in his throat. He remembered that he had been embarrassed for her. Back then, he was always angry at or embarrassed by her. But then she had started to sing. “I shall wear a crown,” she sang. I shall wear a crown.
It was the most beautiful thing Sonny had ever heard, and he loved his mother then, like he had never loved her before. The congregation said, “Sing, Willie” and “Amen” and “Bless God,” and it seemed to Sonny then that his mother didn’t have to wait for Heaven for her reward. He could see it; she was already wearing her crown.
Amani finished her humming and smiled at the crowd as they started to roar with clapping and praise. She picked her drink up from the top of the piano and drank it all the way down. She walked back toward Sonny and set the empty glass in front of him. She didn’t say another word as she made her way out.
—
Sonny was staying in some projects on the East Side with some folks he kind of knew. Against his better judgment, he had given his mother his address, and he knew she had given it to Lucille when the woman showed up holding his daughter.
“Sonny!” she shouted. She was standing on the sidewalk outside the apartment building. There could have been upwards of a hundred Sonnys in Harlem. He didn’t want to admit that this one was him.
“Carson Clifton, I know you up there.”
There was no back door to the apartment, and it would only be a matter of time before Lucille figured out a way up.
Sonny leaned the top half of his body out of his third-floor window. “Whatchu want, Luce?” he asked. He hadn’t seen his daughter in nearly a year. The child was big, too big to be cocked against her tiny mother’s hip, but Lucille had always had strength enough to spare.
“Come let us up!” she hollered back, and he sighed one of what Josephine called his “old lady sighs” before going down to get them.
Lucille wasn’t in the room but ten seconds before Sonny regretted letting her in.
“We need money, Sonny.”
“I know my mama been payin’ you.”
“What I’m supposed to feed this child? Air? Air can’t grow a child.”
“I ain’t got nothin’ for you, Lucille.”
“You got this apartment. Angela told me you gave her somethin’ just last month.”
Sonny shook his head. The lies these women told each other and themselves. “I ain’t seen Angela in longer than I seen you.”
Lucille harrumphed. “What kind of father are you!”
Sonny was angry now. He hadn’t wanted any children, but somehow he had ended up with three. The first was Angela’s girl, the second Rhonda’s, and the third was Lucille’s girl, who had come out a little slow. His mother gave them all some money each month even though he had told her to stop and told each of his women to stop asking her. They didn’t listen.