“I knew she’d get here sooner or later,” Hooper said. He leaned in toward Francis and stage-whispered: “Now the show’s about to start.”
Conversations faded and just as the bass player gave the strings a thrum, a voice filled the room, bright and aching all at once: Sum—mer—time… the rich, plump notes of the bass filled in the gaps she left between syllables, between words…and the livin’ is—ea—sy… She started high, then brought it low. She knew the song was as much a celebration as a bitter joke. The room heard it, and didn’t they know it, too. Five words into the song and every eye in the room was straining for a glimpse of Lorena Briggs.
HOOPER COULDN’T SAY exactly when he had been swept up in Lorena’s wake. He had first met her when he was thirteen and she was just a year or so younger when she moved into his neighborhood after some family trouble in DC. Baltimore wasn’t far from Anacostia but it was far enough, and Lorena arrived with a sense of mystery around her. Right away her aunt brought her to the church where Hooper’s father was the pastor, and overnight, it seemed, Lorena was the star of the choir. She had never sung in a little girl’s crystalline soprano, at least not since Hooper had known her. Lorena’s voice could rumble like thunder, flare like heat lightning, and soothe the congregation with soft rain. At first the older ladies in the choir didn’t like it, not one bit: Who is this girl who comes out of nowhere and thinks she’s going to be the one? But they couldn’t harden themselves for long against that voice or against the skinny little girl with the ribboned plaits and the grave face. The ladies would cluck their tongues and say that she was an old soul. And with a voice like that but no mama to look after her? The Lord does give gifts but He can ask a heavy price. Lorena had arrived in Baltimore with one aunt, but inside of a month she had fifteen. Later this would make life difficult for Hooper, to have the eyes of so many aunts on Lorena.
At first, Hooper thought she was just another girl who was always at the church—rehearsing with the choir, helping his mother with the potluck, leading the children’s Bible study—and anyhow Hooper already had five sisters; he didn’t need any more girls in his life. But by the time Lorena was sixteen, she was no longer a stripling girl but a young woman whose body was catching up to that old soul. Hooper wasn’t just smitten, he was signed and sealed for life.
Music was the language of their love. Hooper could hear light and dark tones in her voice that no one else could. And Lorena would listen to Hooper work his way up and down the valves of the trumpet, listen to him feinting and jabbing with the trombone, even listen when he mauled the piano like a man who thought the keyboard was the steering wheel of a garbage truck. She was never shy about pointing out his limitations, never just an audience, and certainly never a dewy-eyed admirer. She would listen, seemingly rapt, as a teenage Hooper pumped his way through “West End Blues,” doing his best to sound like the second coming of Satchmo, but as soon as he blew the last note she would start with a string of questions that weren’t really questions. These critiques had hurt his boyish pride until he realized two truths: one, she was right, almost without fail, and two, she also believed that he could be one of the greats—she just had a better idea of what it would take to get there. And then there was a third truth, which he realized only after he stopped letting his pride get in the way: he saw that she loved him and that if he wanted that love to grow, he had better listen to what she had to say.
It was true that Lorena told jokes on him and often turned to his chorus of younger sisters with a Can you believe this fool? look, but she loved him so fiercely that sometimes she thought her body would burn from it. The jokes, the rolled eyes, the Lord have mercys when he told one of his leg-stretchers—those were just the valves that released the pressure threatening to burst her heart. How else could you live with a happiness too bold to be real? How else could you hold on to a love you didn’t think you deserved? Lorena had an uncle in Philadelphia who had bought himself an almost-new car, a two-tone Packard, brown and creamy yellow like a cake in a bakery window. The day he bought it, he took a baseball bat to one of the fenders and made a dent bigger than a dinner plate for everyone to see. “Drive around with a machine this nice and someone’s not gonna like it,” he said. “Now I don’t have to worry about somebody else taking the shine off my apple.” Lorena thought about that sometimes when she was with Hooper. If she was too full of smiles about this man, the world was sure to take notice. Someone wasn’t gonna like it.
When Hooper left for Howard University, Lorena was sure that someone must have seen, and stolen, her joy. Though it was barely forty miles from Baltimore to Howard, Hooper returned only rarely, and his parents made certain to fill his visits with family time. The Reverend and Mrs. Hooper had always been kind to her, but there was kind and then there was kin. She knew they had more in mind for their only son than life with an orphan girl whose parents were still whispered about. “Such a skinny little thing,” Mrs. Hooper would say. “And so dark.” No one saw Lorena shed a single tear when Hooper left town—You do your crying on your own time, her mama had told her—and she kept on singing on Sundays like nothing had changed. If people in the congregation didn’t notice the knot of hurt that she tied into every song, then they just weren’t listening.
Although her aunt didn’t like it, Lorena wasn’t singing only on Sundays. A man from church had a brother who owned a nightclub that needed a girl singer for the slow numbers, when the couples liked to take things nice and easy, and Lorena had the voice and the bruised heart to make those songs purr.
By his second year in college, Hooper was spending less of his time in his lectures and more of it toting his trumpet to any band on U Street in need of the next Louis Armstrong. The summer after his sophomore year, he signed on with a territory band playing beach resorts and one-nighters from Chesapeake Bay to Sea Island, Georgia. For eight weeks, the band slept on the bus in towns where no hotel would take them. They played for white crowds who paid the price of admission and then spat insults between songs. They played dances where a rope was laid across the floor: whites on one side and colored folks on the other. The band had been booked to play late in the tour at a dance hall that practically straddled the Georgia–South Carolina state line. As they approached the town, a midsummer carnival appeared to be in full swing: a large crowd had gathered, a bonfire sent sparks into the twilight, and children chased each other through a field. The only thing missing was the music.