“I will make an effort to be more courteous,” Yeats said, “but I am certain that our search for answers—answers that will benefit us both—lies this way.” He pointed down the street, deeper into the unknown city.
Yeats might have wanted answers to the state of things, but Michael wanted only to get back to the way things were. Not back to the seminary or even to Ballyrath—just back to being himself. If he were to wake tomorrow, his senses intact but no memory of how any of it had happened, he would call off the search, he would ask no questions, and he would merely live.
THE WORLD’S FAIR
AFTER THREE HOURS ON the balcony of the Savoy Pavilion, Hooper’s mind had started to wander. Here he was, one of the star attractions at the World’s Fair, but it had to be said: The gig was a snooze. What’s that you say, Professor? No sooner did he stretch the truth—thinking he was some kind of star—than he heard Lorena’s voice in his mind, calling him on it. Oh, so you’re the big attraction? Don’t let it go to your head, Professor. He knew she loved him, but that woman could cut him to the quick like no one else. She was the only one who still called him Professor, like it was his given Christian name. Others had knocked it down to Fess, a mark of honor in its own way (or so he told himself). You had to be somebody to get a nickname, the kind that stuck, the kind that other people recognized: Satchmo, Count, Duke. He had been tagged “Professor” during his first months in Harlem by one of the old-timers at Monroe’s. If anyone asked, Hooper said it was on account of the years he’d spent at Howard, before he left school to become the next Louis Armstrong. If you asked the regulars at any of the late-night jam sessions, they’d say it was because Fess Hooper was always trying to tell you what was what and how to do it properly.
But that was after hours, and this was his day job: five days a week, dressed like a rail-riding hobo, blowing into a dinged-up bugle while a pair of dancers gave a preview of what was waiting inside. Paying customers got a bigger, better-dressed band and even more dancers whirling through the Lindy Hop, the big apple, the mutiny, and other steps made famous at Lenox and 141st Street. In the front windows of the pavilion, life-size marionettes herky-jerked through the big dances of the day, while along the side, beneath big red letters that proclaimed THE WORLD’S GREATEST COLORED DANCERS, Hooper and his bandmates did their thing. It was jim-dandy with Hooper to make the dancers the center of attention, but he wished that more thought had gone into the music on the balcony—a set list that he had complained was little more than hoots and hollers. So while his horn pumped out one tune after another, his mind would wander away from the pavilion and around the Amusement Zone, where the Savoy jostled for attention with the Parachute Jump and the Drive-A-Drome, Skee Ball and the Silver Streak.
The brochures and the big talkers could say that the mission of the fair was to usher in a new era of peace between nations or to showcase the abundance and industrial might of America’s great corporations, but they were wrong on each count. The Amusement Zone was the sticky-sweet, candy-apple heart of the whole operation. Maybe the fair proper, with its Trylon, Perisphere, and Futurama, had its eyes fixed on the world of tomorrow, but the Amusement Zone, with its carnival barkers and twenty-five-cent thrills, was all about the world of today, and offered the clearest picture of what poor, restless, down-at-the-heels America truly wanted. After years of scrimping and making do, America wanted a thrill. America wanted pizzazz. America wanted to have a good time.
Is that all, Professor?
End of lecture, Lorena. And now back to the tour.
Just down the lane from the Savoy Pavilion was Little Miracle Town, with its tiny houses, tiny horses, and tiny people. Around the corner was the Sun Worshippers court, where near-naked white girls lounged on chaises and frolicked among the trees while fairgoers snapped pictures of these free-spirited natural wonders. If that didn’t beat all, bare-breasted women posed in the Living Magazines exhibit and twirled in the Crystal Lassies building, and if your tastes ran to the more exotic, there were topless mermaids on one side of the Amusement Zone and topless Amazons on the other. But he let his mind wander past all of that—just as his feet would follow in another few hours—because even in New York, the powers that be weren’t so keen on black folks gandering at naked white girls. Next on the tour were the Chinese acrobats and the Seminole Village, then the two-story chrome cash register that logged the fair’s attendance as if every visitor were another coin in the drawer. The tour of the zone always led back to Frank Buck’s Jungleland, which was the biggest nonsense of all. Maybe the apes on Baboon Island were the real thing but one peek at those elephants and Hooper knew they were Indian, not African—You just have to look at their ears, he had said to Lorena.
Yes, Professor, she’d said. Gotta look them in the ears if you want to know what’s what.
But that wasn’t even the worst of it. Those real live African tribesmen, dressed in leopard skins and beating their conga drums? One of them was a neighbor on 130th, Harlem-born and Harlem-bred.
HE HAD SET it up with the other horn player to cover his Saturday shift so he could play the wedding gig, which was a whole different brand of nonsense. Lorena had already made him promise to be long gone from Woodlawn by nightfall—she knew where the city’s color lines were drawn—but the job paid better than a day at the fair and even Lorena couldn’t argue with that. He’d heard one of the old lions at Minton’s talking about making seventy-five a week when he played with Ellington at the Cotton Club during Prohibition, but no one had seen scratch like that in ages. Nowadays a man showed up from points south, horn in hand, ready to blow up a storm, only to learn a lesson as soon as his feet touched Harlem ground. The clubs where the colored folks had their fun didn’t pay much. It was hard to get the big dollars out when the big spenders weren’t the ones coming in. The downtown clubs paid better, but they wanted white folks in the seats and white faces in the band; looking out for their own by looking only at their own. Sure, there were exceptions: since Basie had held court at the Famous Door, most of Fifty-Second Street had gotten wise and made room for one or two of Harlem’s finest on their bandstands. And once you made a name for yourself, there was Europe. Duke was there now, as was Lester Young. Hooper had dreams of a European tour of his own someday, when he and Lorena would sip champagne at the top of the Eiffel Tower. They would raise their glasses in the direction of Baltimore and say, How do you like me now?