Jazz Moon by Joe Okonkwo Page B

in the dogwood groves.”
    â€œWillful sodomized Ben.”
    Dogwood shunned the Charles family. Visitors no longer called. His ma was ousted from the roster of church-cleaning women. Folks who’d known his pa for decades walked by without a word or a nod. At church no one spoke to them or even sat in the same pew.
    He heard his folks murmuring behind the barn and in their room, conspiring. At supper a week after Trina’s funeral, they disclosed their plan.
    â€œOl’ man Zachary’s plantation need cotton pickers,” his ma said. “We sending you there for the season. You’ll bring your wages home. Maybe by the time you get back, folks’ll forget this mess. Or at least forgive a little.”
    The Zachary plantation sat twenty miles east of town. A contingent of colored folks from Dogwood was heading there to seek work, traveling in a caravan of wagons. Ben’s ma packed him some salt pork and a canteen of sassafras tea for the trip. Sitting in the back of the flatbed wagon, some of his neighbors stared at him or whispered to one another or laughed. Others turned eyes, heads, whole bodies away in disgust. Trina Ledger had sinned, but her sin had been natural. Ben’s marked him a degenerate.
    Picking cotton was hard, hard, hard work. A picker needed quick, agile hands and flinty skin on his fingers to repel the burrs from the cotton stalks. A strong back was a blessing since the stalks were low and you had to bend down to pick. Ben’s first few days were wretched. His fingers bled and his lower back ached so bad, he had to stagger on his knees to pick in the damning heat. The plantation paid forty cents for each hundred pounds picked. In his first week, he couldn’t even get to a hundred pounds a day.
    But blockheaded determination prevailed. His hands became impervious to the burrs. He heeded the advice of veteran pickers who advised him to stretch his back in the morning and at night to fend off the soreness. He soon upped his totals to three hundred pounds a day and more.
    The workers hailed from a medley of nearby towns. Ben barely spoke to any of them, afraid that Dogwood tongues had wagged about him. At night, he slept under the spreading branches of the laurel oak trees, like most of the workers. He could have rented floor space in someone’s shack, but that would cost. He didn’t want to spend any more than necessary.
    He had a plan. One that required money.
    One night after a particularly brutal day of picking, he lay motionless under the trees, trying to catch what there was of a breeze. The night was cave-black except for a quarter slice of moon, the stars strewn across the sky. Snores and whispers of the other workers thrummed around him, while only vague outlines of bodies were visible. He listened in on two men’s conversation.
    â€œWhere you wanna go?”
    â€œPhilly.”
    â€œWhere’s that?
    â€œI don’t know.”
    â€œHow you gone go someplace and you don’t even know where it’s at?”
    â€œIt’s up north. All I gotta know.”
    They talked Boston, Newark, Pittsburgh. Aside from being Up North, neither man knew the particulars of any of these utopias, with one exception.
    â€œThey say New York City ain’t nothin’ but pretty lights, pretty girls, and some pretty loose women!”
    â€œIs it big?”
    â€œTen thousand of people live there.”
    Ten thousand people . I could get lost among ten thousand, be anonymous, start over.
    â€œAnd they got lots of jazz music.”
    â€œWhat’s jazz music?”
    â€œWhat? Boy, you ain’t never heard jazz?”
    â€œIs it like church hymns?”
    â€œNo, it ain’t like no church hymns!”
    â€œWhat’s it like?”
    The man considered. “Fire. Magic. Dancin’. You ever read poetry?”
    â€œYou know I can’t read.”
    â€œPretend you can. Then take fire, magic, dancing, and poetry, mix ’em