while the cynical banjo covered unplumbable depths with a plinking surface of staccato gaiety, like the sparkling bubbles that rise on deep water over a man who has just drowned himself:
Or else he never would a gone so far from me …
then the band stopped with a long-drawn-out wail from the cornet and a flippant little laugh from the drums.
A great burst of applause swept over the room, and the musicians immediately began to play again. This time just blues, not the “St. Louis,” nor the “Memphis,” nor the “Yellow Dog”—but just the plain old familiar blues, heartbreaking and extravagant, ma-baby’s-gone-from-me blues.
Nobody thought about anyone else then. Bodies sweatily close, arms locked, cheek to cheek, breast to breast, couples rocked to the pulse-like beat of the rhythm, yet quite oblivious each person of the other. It was true that men and women were dancing together, but their feet had gone down through the floor into the earth, each dancer’s alone—down into the center of things—and their minds had gone off to the heart of loneliness, where they didn’t even hear the words, the sometimes lying, sometimes laughing words that Benbow, leaning on the piano, was singing against this background of utterly despondent music:
When de blues is got you,
Ain’t no use to run away.
When de blue-blues got you,
Ain’t no use to run away,
’Cause de blues is like a woman
That can turn yo’ good hair grey.
Umn-ump! … Umn! … Umn-ump!
Well, I tole ma baby,
Says baby, baby, babe, be mine,
But ma baby was deceitful.
She must a thought that I was blind.
De-da! De-da! … De da! De da! Dee!
O, Lawdy, Lawdy, Lawdy,
Lawdy, Lawdy, Lawd … Lawd … Lawd!
She quit me fo’ a Texas gambler,
So I had to git another broad.
Whaw-whaw! … Whaw-whaw-whaw! As though the laughter of a cornet could reach the heart of loneliness.
These mean old weary blues coming from a little orchestra of four men who needed no written music because they couldn’t have read it. Four men and a leader—Rattle Benbow from Galveston; Benbow’s buddy, the drummer, from Houston; his banjoist from Birmingham; his cornetist from Atlanta; and the pianist, long-fingered, sissyfied, a coal-black lad from New Orleans who had brought with him an exaggerated ragtime which he called jazz.
“I’m jazzin’ it, creepers!” he sometimes yelled as he rolled his eyes towards the dancers and let his fingers beat the keys to a frenzy. … But now the piano was cryin’ the blues!
Four homeless, plug-ugly niggers, that’s all they were, playing mean old loveless blues in a hot, crowded little dance-hall in a Kansas town on Friday night. Playing the heart out of loneliness with a wide-mouthed leader, who sang everybody’s troubles until they became his own. The improvising piano, the whanging banjo, the throbbing bass-drum, the hard-hearted little snare-drum, the brassy comet that laughed, Whaw-whaw-whaw. … Whaw! were the waves in this lonesome sea of harmony from which Benbow’s melancholy voice rose:
You gonna wake up some mawnin’
An’ turn yo’ smilin’ face.
Wake up some early mawnin’,
Says turn yo’ smilin’ face,
Look at yo’ sweetie’s pillow—
An’ find an’ empty place!
Then the music whipped itself into a slow fury, an awkward, elemental, foot-stamping fury, with the banjo running terrifiedly away in a windy moan and then coming back again, with the cornet wailing like a woman who don’t know what it’s all about:
Then you gonna call yo’ baby,
Call yo’ lovin’ baby dear—
But you can keep on callin’,
’Cause I won’t be here!
And for a moment nothing was heard save the shuf-shuf-shuffle of feet and the immense booming of the bass-drum like a living vein pulsing at the heart of loneliness.
“Sandy! … Sandy! … My stars! Where is that child? … Has anybody seen my little nephew?” All over the hall. … “Sandy! … Oh‑o‑o, Lord!” Finally, with a sigh of relief: “You little brat, darn you, hiding up here in the balcony where nobody could find you! … Sandy, wake up! It’s past four o’clock and I’ll get killed.”
Harriett vigorously shook the sleeping child, who lay stretched on the dusty chairs; then she began to drag him down the narrow steps before he was scarcely awake. The hall was almost empty and the chubby little black drummer was waddling across the floor carrying his drums in canvas cases. Someone was switching off the lights one by one. A mustard-colored man stood near the door quarrelling with a black woman. She began to cry and he slapped her full in the mouth, then turned his back and left with another girl of maple-sugar brown. Harriett jerked Sandy past this linked couple and pulled the boy down the long flight of stairs into the street, where Mingo stood waiting, with a lighted cigarette making a white line against his black skin.
“You better git a move on,” he said. “Daylight ain’t holdin’ itself back for you!” And he told the truth, for the night had already begun to pale.
Sandy felt sick at the stomach. To be awakened precipitately made him cross and ill-humored, but the fresh, cool air soon caused him to feel less sleepy and not quite so ill. He took a deep breath as he trotted rapidly along on the sidewalk beside his striding aunt and her boyfriend. He watched the blue-grey dawn blot out the night in the sky; and then pearl-grey blot out the blue, while the stars faded to points of dying fire. And he listened to the birds chirping and trilling in the trees as though they were calling the sun. Then, as he became fully awake, the child began to feel very proud of himself, for this was the first time he had ever been away from home all night.
Harriett was fussing with Mingo. “You shouldn’t’ve kept me out like that,” she said. “Why didn’t you tell me what time it was? … I didn’t know.”
And Mingo came back: “Hey, didn’t I try to drag you away at midnight and you wouldn’t come? And ain’t I called you at one o’clock and you said: ‘Wait a minute’—dancin’ with some yaller
