As a boy, Henry had first gone into Albert’s shop because his mother played a little piano, enough to perform at church or for the Christmas show at the grade school where she taught. Henry’s father was a traveling salesman, and rarely home. When he was, he seemed angry, as though he couldn’t wait to leave again. He finally died in a car crash in Lawton, Oklahoma, when Henry was seventeen, but by then he was little more than a bad memory. Throughout Henry’s boyhood, though, his father had always been out there, like a storm that might blow through town at any time. Albert Norris’s store became an escape from all that, and more. It was a magic portal into the mysteries of the universe—not made-up mysteries like the ones his friends read about in books or watched at the Arcade theater, but real ones. Secrets so potent that they changed your life irrevocably the moment you were initiated into them.
A month ago, Henry had dug up an old photograph that showed the store during its heyday. He’d been stunned by how small it looked in comparison to the image in his mind. Held off the ground by pyramid-shaped concrete blocks, the Emporium was actually a converted residence built of unpainted cypress and weathered by decades of sun. Albert had cut a big display window into the front wall to show off the pianos and organs he kept in stock.
One of the store’s secrets was that it wasn’t merely a building, but a musical instrument in its own right, a sound chamber tuned by an accident of construction and played by whoever happened to be jamming inside it: sometimes a leathery old blues shouter thrashing a twangy imitation Stratocaster, other times a first-class pickup band—four or five gifted guys shaking the building with a transformative beat that boomed across the road and out into the little town amid the cotton fields. Often those pickup bands had included Jimmy Revels, Luther Davis, Pooky Wilson, and other local masters of their craft. But the music that people most remembered was Albert himself alone at the piano, playing after hours. That sound was so mournful and exquisitely pure that everyone who lived or worked within earshot—white or black—had asked Albert to leave his doors and windows open when he played. That was Henry’s first encounter with the paradox of how music that sounded so sad could lift the soul like nothing else in the world.
The two years he’d spent in and out of Albert’s store were the most vivid of Henry’s life. Nothing that happened to him afterward ever touched the live-wire euphoria he’d felt within the vibrating walls of that building, or the longing he’d suffered when he was trapped somewhere else, thinking about getting back to it.
Most of the musicians who came through Albert’s store were fast-aging boys who would still be boys when they found their graves. Albert himself was a wise man of fifty who’d never let the world beat his dreams out of him. His eyes were deep brown pools set in a darker brown face, and his hands, unlike those of the other black men Henry knew, weren’t cracked and broken from backbreaking labor, but soft and long-fingered, like the hands of a surgeon or a classical violinist.
Albert was so well liked in the community that during the nineteen years since the Japanese surrender, a practice unheard-of almost anywhere else in the South had become the norm there. Albert not only served white customers, but white women—white women were known to browse his store’s extensive library of sheet music—white women alone, with Albert the only other person present. Henry’s mother had told him this was highly unusual, but she herself bought hymn music in Albert’s store. Moreover, in those days, every family that could afford one had a piano in the parlor, and Albert had traveled the parish tuning the instruments for five dollars less than the white tuner charged. Apparently, the white husbands’ racism didn’t extend to paying extra to have a white man tune their pianos.
Henry’s secret odyssey through Albert’s store had begun with piano lessons, first with the proprietor, but later with Albert’s daughter Swan, who’d been named after a black opera singer from Natchez. Born a slave in 1824, Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield had traveled to London and sung for the queen in Buckingham Palace, where opera enthusiasts christened her the Black Swan. Albert Norris had known all about the Black Swan, of course. Swan’s mother had tried to call her Elizabeth, but the child had such beauty and grace that no one ever called her anything but Swan. Like her father, Swan was a musical prodigy, and by seventeen she was handling the majority of Albert’s lessons.
One of Swan’s pupils was a gangly white fourteen-year-old named Henry Sexton. Despite Albert’s strong improvisational style, as a teacher he was a stickler for theory. Henry sometimes felt more bullied by Albert in the teaching room than he did by the redneck coaches on the football field at Ferriday Junior High. But Swan was different. She might run him through a few scales at the beginning of each lesson, but this bored her, and she only did it to please her father. She delighted in teaching Henry to play the songs he really wanted to learn, hits he’d heard on the radio, mostly. Henry lived for the hour he spent with the older girl every Thursday afternoon, confined in the eight-by-ten room with a Baldwin upright and a scent so primally feminine that he could hardly think of anything else.
A narrow vertical window had been set in the door of the teaching room, and Henry had cursed it a thousand times. Albert used the window to keep an eye on Swan when she was teaching boys. Since the store was elevated off the ground, the floorboards always creaked, and Henry used those creaks as a Distant Early Warning System to keep track of Albert’s movements. The problem was, some customer was usually playing a piano in the main room, and this masked the sound of Albert’s walk. Bass guitars were even worse. To Henry’s everlasting gratitude, Albert sometimes taught piano in the display room at the same time Swan was teaching him. And it was one of these afternoons that Swan had given Henry the greatest shock, and the greatest gift, of his life.
He’d been trying to copy her technique on Bach, which was torture when 95 percent of his concentration was on the shapely thigh of the beautiful girl sitting hip to hip with him. He was also praying she wouldn’t notice the taut little tent in his lap, which had become a regular feature of the lessons, and which Henry simply could not control. As he struggled to keep his left hand in rhythm, Swan’s hand settled on that tent as softly as a butterfly. Then she began to rub it.
“Keep playing,” she whispered.
Henry stopped anyway, his heart and lungs expanding like balloons hooked to a high-pressure cylinder.