Security people converge on me. Do I hold a delegate’s pass? No? They think it would be best if I leave. No, it is not a public event. They don’t care about my letter. I am in the lobby. I am out on the street. I am walking up the front steps of the Saint James Hotel, carrying my guitar. The doorman, dark as I am, won’t let me any further. He looks at me like I’m crazy for even wanting to try. I have to go through the alley, past the trash cans, into the stink. My clothes are fine. The alley does not touch me. It is an old guitar, the varnish worn away on the back, the neck repaired more than once. The doorman makes me turn down the alley and this is how I make my way into the Saint James Hotel. Through the kitchen and up the back stairs. The room the record company has hired is at the end of a corridor where guests won’t walk past. Discreet. They’ve put a row of wooden chairs outside. Two other Negroes are already waiting, a man and a woman. He has a banjo, on her lap is a tambourine. We nod at each other. No one wants to risk a conversation. This is not our place. A word wrong here and there could be consequences. The door is half-open, and I see two white men sitting in front of an electrical box, wearing headphones. One smiles at me in a welcoming way. The other comes out and shakes my hand, calling me Mister Shaw. I look around to check no one else has heard. They are from New York City. They don’t know how to behave. He hands me a printed sheet of paper.
Walxr (part of the Wallace Magnolia Group) is a leading provider of detention, correctional and community reentry services with 58 facilities, approximately 25,500 beds, and 8,000 employees around the globe. Walxr operates in the United States, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom, Australia and Afghanistan. Our goal is to assist our clients in serving those assigned to their care through provision of high-quality cost-effective solutions, including design, construction and financing of state and federal prisons, detention centers and community reentry facilities as well as the provision of community supervision services, using advanced networked monitoring technologies.
There are two rooms together, a kind of suite. One is the control room where Mister Zachary and Mister Joel sit. Wires go under the connecting door to a microphone on a stand. You sit in the far corner of the room and face the microphone. You sit facing into the corner like a naughty schoolboy. They say it’s better for the sound. It’s like singing for yourself, without caring if anyone’s listening. They’re friendly in a way that makes me nervous, a way that could rub other people up wrong. Mister Shaw. You don’t call a Negro mister. They say it gives us ideas.
I sing the first number. Right away, they tell me they liked it and I should do it again. This time they will be recording.
I sit facing in to the wall. I finish one song and take a sip of water. I try to read their expressions. What they like and what they don’t. What song shall I sing next? Which kind of song?
—No more of those church numbers, Charlie. What else you got?
—I got the other kind. I know a lot of songs.
And I sing into the microphone, not too close, bet they thought they’d have to show me how. Just because I never had the chance before, doesn’t mean I don’t know. And the sound goes down the wire to the recording box and the vibrating needle writes it on their wax disk. The two white men in headphones, listening and nodding and smiling at me. A white envelope with a ten dollar bill. And they take the wax disk away and shut it carefully in a case and drive it off somewhere and press a record on marbled shellac and the record sells and later I have to go to Mr. Speir’s to have my portrait made and I wear a good suit with wide lapels and well-shined shoes and I hold a brand-new rosewood guitar. It is the portrait I will use when I become a name, a household word, when they advertise my records in the newspaper and the rich invite me to dine and I take a steamship to France to sing for the crown heads.
Mister Zachary and Mister Joel glance at their watches.
—Looks like he ain’t coming.
—On a drunk, probably. Speir said he was the type. OK, scratch him. Who else we got out there?
And just like that, I am gone. Never to be remembered. Never to be spoken of again. My voice, the way I bend a string, the way I can play a bassline with my thumb, filling in a melody with my other fingers so that it sounds like two or even three players at once. No one has my style, my particular style. And just like that it is gone, vanished into the past.
I go back to the boardinghouse. The red sign blazes over the roof line. In my stifling little room that does not smell of lavender I change clothes and make my way back along Farish Street and down a side alley by the Saint James Hotel. I go down the alley, with the dented trash cans and the rotten smell. This is the way they make me come in. I enter through the kitchen, past the chefs shouting orders and slamming trays into ovens, the waiters pinning tickets to a board. And no one notices me, because in my white shirt and black pants I look like one of them. A valued team member. A faceless face. So no one questions me in the kitchen. No one pays attention when I pick up a steak knife and step through the swing doors into the service corridor.
In the lobby a cocktail party is taking place. The lights are low. Middle-aged corrections officers network with service providers in the romantic light. There is Cornelius Wallace, shaking more hands, then taking a phone call, breaking away from the party and heading to the elevator. I get in beside him. He sees my uniform. That is all he sees. Someone like him never really sees someone like me. He gets out on a high floor and I wait for a moment, until the elevator doors start to shut, then I follow him along the corridor. I stay a few paces behind. If he knows I am there, he pays no attention. Cornelius, fiddling with a keycard, pushing it into the lock. As he opens the door, I come up behind him and shove him inside.
Something breaks. My knife seeks Corny’s back, finds only air. Blade cutting through smoke. I am elsewhere, in some other time and place. My eyes take a moment to adjust. Through the haze I see a well-furnished suite, a green baize card table laid out with an ashtray and a tray of fresh glasses, as if later on there is going to be a game. A man is sitting in an armchair, next to a standing lamp. He wears old-fashioned lace-up boots under his seersucker suit.
—We’re stag here, so we can afford to relax a little.
The room is full of cigar smoke. I cannot see his face. Then he moves and the light catches him and I see it is Jack Wallace. There are other people in the shadows. Big Jim Wallace, Carter’s father, Don. Wilbur, the judge. All the generations here and now. Cornelius stands at the back, whispering in the ear of another man I don’t know. Time is flattened here in the back room. Tight collars are loosened. A discreet button on the pants. Drinks are poured, though not for me. Jack Wallace sighs.
—Look, son. The Judge and I were thinking that there must be a way to work things out. You seem very agitated.
He gestures with his cigar at the knife in my hand. The Judge nods.
—You’re right, Jack. He looks upset. What’s on your mind, son?
I am dead. I am down in the levee.