2013 Brooklyn Non-Fiction Prize Finalist
by
Jeanine DeHoney
I can still see the glow from the
blue lightbulb from our floor lamp as it illumined our livingroom in our fifth
floor apartment in Brownsville, Brooklyn. To me I was living in not the
concrete urban jungle as Brownsville was often referred to, (Journalist Jimmy Breslin
wrote in 1968 that Brownsville reminded him of Berlin after World War II; block
after block of burned-out shells of houses, streets littered with decaying
automobile hulks. The stores on the avenues are empty and the streets are lined
with deserted apartment houses or buildings that have empty apartments on every
floor. It was an oasis.)
Brownsville to me, the Van Dyke
projects in which I lived with my parents and sister was a
place I proudly called home. I had
friends above and below me and in buildings across the
walkway. I had Betsy Head Pool to
stick my toes in on a hot summer day. I had a Jewish
neighbor, a kindly old woman who
opened her apartment door after peeping through her
peephole when she saw me coming down
the hall to offer me freshly baked cookies. And I had
my father.
I was around seven or eight then, spending time with the
most perfect man in the universe, my father on a Friday night. To say I was
biased about him, an inspiring jazz musician would be an understatement. I was
tone death to everyone else’s critiques, incensed sighs, and loud enough for me
to hear whispers especially my mother’s.
Music was the heart and soul of my father. He had saved up
what little money he had working odd jobs to buy a pretty golden saxophone in a
red velvet lined case. As his baby girl, the one who was always underfoot, I
learned early on if I wanted to be in his company, I had to learn to tolerate
if not love his music.
My father, James Dillard Rushing, was the only son out of
three daughters of my paternal grandparents. Spoiled like buttermilk,” was what
my grandmother referred to him as being and, not within earshot of my mother,
she’d also say he was, “A lady’s man.”
He was tall and dark and had natural not processed
waves in his slicked back hair. It was what had won my mother over when they
first crossed paths, she living in a tenement on Sumpter Street in Bedford
Stuyvesant Brooklyn. He living a block away on Herkimer Street with his parents
and sisters and neighbors with comical names like Mr. Boatride and Sweetcakes.
My father, who allowed me and my sister to call him by his
nickname Sonny, put everything on the line to play his music even his marriage.
Having a steady job wasn’t important which caused my mother to fuss and nag.
Sometimes I’d take a glass and press it against my bedroom wall which was
connected to theirs to eavesdrop on their late night rifts.
“The rent is due,”
my mother would say.
“Your daughters need some new school clothes,” my mother
would say. “You need to get a job.”
“I’m trying my
best. Got a gig in Harlem…” my father would say.
I could hear the enthusiasm in his voice when he talked
about “his gig”, playing his
saxophone. It was like he was a child waking up on Christmas
morning to see a Tonka truck or a bicycle or model train set under the tree
after his parents told him Santa Claus was going to bypass their house that
year because money was short.
I loved hearing that shimmershine in
his voice when he talked about his music. I wished at times I could have put it
in an empty coke bottle and sealed it up to offer to him when he needed a boost.
At that young of an age, my concerns weren’t the same as my mother’s. It didn’t
bother me that my stomach growled when hungry or knotted up from a week of
black eyed pea leftovers. I didn’t care about shopping downtown on Fulton Street
at Mays Department Store for new clothes. I longed for my father to play his
music just as much as he longed to play it.
Whenever my father had a gig or jam
session with his musician friends, I plopped myself on the edge of his bed to
watch him practice. He’d set up his rickety music stand in my bedroom, put a
number two pencil behind his ears so that he could make notations on his sheet
music, a handkerchief over one shoulder for his sweat, and would play. After that
he would shower and I’d still be there watching him get ready. Pants were
ironed to a crease, a white shirt from the cleaners was pulled out of plastic
from the closet and shoes got a quick swipe of black polish.
His face was slapped with Old Spice,
his rosary was put around his neck and saxophone wiped
of any thumbprints until it twinkled
like gold.
Watching him I’d stick my bony chest out with conceit
wanting to call all of my girlfriends to see the treasure that was in my house;
both my father and his saxophone.
I hated to see my father leave though. Sometimes I was
always afraid he wouldn’t come back. In our housing project that we lived in on
Blake Avenue I had seen many fathers do that. Some for far less than to follow
their dream. A neighbor once told my mother her husband went out for a pack of
cigarettes and never came home.
So I kept vigil even if my father’s gig or jam session was
on a school night. While my mother and sister slept, I’d wait for him as I sat
on a pillow on my bedroom radiator watching the L train at the Sutter Avenue
station go by. Sometimes after watching at least six trains rumble by I would
finally see him coming up the walkway with saxophone case in hand.
And then listening for his footsteps and deep hum to spill
out of the elevator, I would open the door.
“Tell me what you played? Who was there? Did you get a standin’
ovation?” I bombarded him with. And he whispered in my ear names to this day I
don’t remember, names he could have made up just for me, before picking me up
and tucking me in my bed.
Friday nights were the nights I anticipated the most. It
was then my father offered me lessons that would carry me through the cycles in
my life especially when he was gone.
Lesson number one under a blue light. I learned about the
importance of rituals; how they create a sacred place in your heart for
something you are passionate about. My father had a ritual he performed each
time he listened to jazz. First he opened a window even if it was the dead of
window. And then he watched as the curtains danced in front of him as if they
had an innate rhythm in their fabric.
Next, he placed a bottle of Ballantine beer on the floor
for himself and handed me a can of orange Crush soda. He filled a small plastic
Tupperware bowl with potato chips and pretzels for us to snack on. He’d then
put a blue light bulb in our floor lamp before finally spreading his collection
of jazz albums on the floor like giant dominoes, asking me to pick one out.
I’d always pick the dark skinned man who looked like him,
Miles Davis. Their expressions were analogous for they both seemed bitter and
sweet at the same time. After he poured a glass of beer, and was satisfied that
I was comfortable he’d inspect the album I had picked, take his handkerchief
and rub its vinyl slowly, methodically, wiping away any minuscule particle only
his eyes were trained to see. Then he’d place it on our record player and wait
until needle and vinyl connected before he sat down.
“Good choice,” my father would tell me as I crossed my
legs Indian style on the couch crunching a mouthful of salty chips and pretzels
and taking a swig of soda in the same manner I saw him drink his beer. When
Miles began to serenade us with his trumpet, all sounds around us ceased. The
rumbling from the L train at the Sutter Avenue Station, a stray cat’s meowing
for food, an ambulance speeding through the streets, people cursing and
fighting, were all blocked out. We were frozen in some kind of rapture and shut
out the world.
Nestled close to him, I inhaled an aroma of serenity in my
father. And I witnessed my father’s metamorphosis what I could testify to the
saved and sanctified at my grandmother church, First AME Zion on Macdonough
Street. It was like he had stepped through those doors and the preacher had
laid hands on him.
Thus I never wanted his vinyl albums to stop spinning on
my mother’s prized French Provincial record player that she scrimped and saved
for from a furniture store on Broadway in Brooklyn. I wanted our Friday nights
to be endless, ever embryonic. But those nights ended the usual way, with my
mother calling my name for bed, and her hands on her hips letting my father
know the music was too damn loud and the neighbors were going to start banging
on the pipes or worst call the police.
I would stomp away with an ugly pout that my mother said
would stay if I didn’t straighten up my face. Slowly, like the sand in an
hourglass though a smile would tease my lips. There was always next Friday and
the Friday after next.
Lesson number two under a blue light. I learned the
importance of the word “Hush.” When you are silent you can hear the nuances of
life and reap introspection. My father taught me to hush when I was in
attendance of anything magnificent such as his music. He taught me that
mediocre music was music that could be interrupted but great music by such
artists as Miles Davis, John Coltrane, Oscar Peterson, and Thelonious Monk required
concentration and the hush of everything around you including your voice.
That was the only way to get to know an artist’s story. So I learned to “hush”
in the midst of not only magnificent music, but people and even food.
Lesson number three under a blue light. I learned not to
let my dreams dry up like those wrinkly raisins in a stale box of cereal. I
watched a slow death in my father when he let his dream die. He eventually got
a good job at the Post Office in Manhattan and pawned his saxophone at a pawn
shop on Pitkin Avenue before I graduated from my elementary school, P.S. 255 in
Sheepshead Bay.
Although at times I blamed my mother for killing his
dream, deep down I knew it wasn’t her. She had once believed in him. She had
bragged about how my father played the saxophone at their wedding. It was just
that the rent had to be paid and she wanted the world for her two girls. I know
that now. She wanted us to leave Brownsville Brooklyn, and move on up like the
Jefferson’s. It was my father’s own demons; demons of self-doubt that slayed
his dream.
My father died in 1996 from kidney complications after
spending many years on dialysis in the same apartment we listened to his jazz
music in under a blue light. Married then with a family of my own, I was living
in East New York. We didn’t talk much. When we did our words were scarce. I
knew it was because of his failing health.
I often wish I could write a different chapter for our
lives at the end of his. If I could I’d remind him of his schooling; something
I would have never received from books. I would have picked at least one Friday
night a month to have a listening party of two, spreading his old jazz albums
on the floor for old times’ sake, putting a blue light bulb in the lamp to take
his mind off of dying. Music does that you know. It carries you away from your
troubles to a better realm. It was what my father had done for me, as a little black
girl growing up on Blake Avenue in Brownsville. He bequeathed me with a piece of
Heaven on earth.
Langston Hughes once stated, “Jazz is a great big sea. It
washes up all kinds of fish and shells and spume and waves with a steady old
beat, or off-beat.” Thanks to my father, jazz artist James Dillard Rushing who
lived in Brooklyn all of his life, I’m a swimmin’ in that bottomless indigo sea
and staying afloat.
Footnote:
Jimmy Breslin’s reference to Brownsville Wikipedia
article: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brownsville,_Brooklyn
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