Jazz Girl Chapters 2 and 3
Dec. 20th, 2024 06:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dinogrrl posting in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
antishurtugal_rebornETA: Wow I effed up my formatting and somehow got a cut inside a cut. Never broken my code that way before! Should be fixed now.
Soon as I walked in the house a familiar smell put Amy Frank and the other neighbor girls clear out of my mine.
You mean, as soon as you got done with the reminiscing about playing organ back in Atlanta? Kelly still has no idea how to pace things and make her prose follow a logical mental timeline.
Nanny is making ham, onions, and chitlins, and Williams recalls the stories she used to tell.
Nanny's stories were mostly fearsome tales about ghosts and spooks. The same ghosts and spooks that were in my visions and mixed up with the music in my head.
Maybe the reason the ghosts are in your head are because your grandma's been telling you these stories since you were born? I dunno, I'm no psychology pro, but that seems like a logical conclusion to me.
Her favorite, and the scariest, story was the one about the Ghost Dog. She begs Nanny to tell it to her again, and Nanny of course obliges.
Long ago, Nanny was in her kitchen working when she heard a commotion by the front door. She ran to the door to see a boy from nearby, very upset and begging her to 'Keep that thing from gettin' me!'
Wow, Kelly does know what an exclamation point is!
"I jus' saw the worst looking creature I ever seen in my life."
If you're going to type out an accent, don't do it half-heartedly. It should be "lookin'." And she has immediately forgotten what an exclamation point is, I see.
The boy says, in continued fail to consistently notate the elided 'g's on gerunds, that he was walking past the graveyard when he saw a huge, scary, white dog. It chased him all the way back up the road to Nanny's house.
"And ever after that awful evening there were many more tales of the dreadful Ghost Dog."
...that's it. That's the scary Ghost Dog story.
Nanny continues to work on cooking the chitlins and ham, and Williams is getting hungrier by the second, but the story Nanny just told gave me the worst shakes. That Ghost Dog was as real to me as the ham hocks and chitlins boiling on the stove.
The child has a very active imagination. Or is it...
"I seen that Ghost Dog rise up out of the swamp, Nanny. And lots of other spooks too."
"That's 'cause our house was built on top of a sunken cemetery," my nanny said.
Then maybe the thought of there being ghost dogs around shouldn't have been so surprising or scary?
Williams does some reminiscing about their house in Atlanta.
The kind of house where if you shot a gun through the front door the bullet passed through all the rooms and into the backyard, likely ending up in the privy.
*sigh*
I'm not sure if Kelly actually meant a shotgun house, or was just trying to describe a run-down building by incorrectly applying that terminology. Very much like our old friend, 'curling one's lip' being used to describe smiling when it very much means 'snarling' in American English.
Anyway, Williams says the house was not only haunted, but also hosted weekend drinking fests with Mama and Nanny being the only ones actually partying, because they were tired after a week of working for white folks. Mama especially, because she used to be pretty but got a bent back from carrying all the laundry and such.
The drinking didn't let up when we moved north. Turned out Mama and Nanny still had to knuckle under to white folks for us to get by. They washed and ironed all day just like they did in Atlanta and that's how we got on, same as we always had. Only it was so cold.
This reads like they've been living in Pennsylvania for a while now. It's still just been a week, as far as I can tell. Kelly please learn pacing.
Williams continues to gripe about how she doesn't fit in in their new neighborhood, and how even her own family treated her badly because her skin was so dark. She's homesick for Atlanta and all the spirits and ghosts she used to play with. Pittsburgh is nothing like Atlanta, there's a lot of smoke from the steel mills, where most of their neighbors work--so their neighbors are also poor, like Williams' family, and some are recent immigrants to America. The only other Black people she sees are comparatively light-skinned.
The white and light-skinned colored kids treated me like I had the plague. They thought I was too dark to play with. Even their mamas acted hateful.
Still very stilted prose. However I do stand by my statement earlier that this is still reading better than the Vivaldi books. I think this style of writing is working better from a first-person perspective than third. Interesting.
There's a short break, and now we're on to the next day from the jump rope incident. Williams tries again, seeing if she can join their game of hopscotch. In short order, Amy Frank's mother comes running out with a knife in hand, threatening her and dissing her mom. In her fear, Williams sees Frank's mother as the Ghost Dog, and she cowers.
Suddenly! Her Grandpa shows up and tells her to leave Williams alone.
Mrs. Frank's knife-wagging fist dropped to her side. She seemed all fuddled. "Well...I...that was right silly of me, wasn't it?" She laughed, kind of, more like a titter. "Here I was in my kitchen carving up a chicken when I hear a great commotion among the children. And I come running outside not even realizing I'm still holding on to this thing." Her eyes moved from Grandpa to me and her lips became more firmly set. "I'm right sorry if I scared you."
I have...no idea wtf I'm supposed to think about this scene. Is she being sincere? Is she still being threatening? Did Grandpa put some sort of spell on her to get her to back off? It's not explained.
All the white kids are staring in shock, and their own mothers, who had been watching the scene from their houses, come running to hurry their children home. Grandpa yells at them to leave Williams alone, and then he walks her home. He tells Williams to not let stupid people scare her, and she tells him that she "...had one of my fearful visions," in which Mrs. Frank became the Ghost Dog. Grandpa says that Nanny should never have told her those stories, but Williams is still convinced it was real.
"Your vision are nothing to fear, child, and neither are those fool white folks. If my pappy could overcome his fears, you surely can." He starts telling her about how his Pappy would always be afraid when he took his basket of cotton to the gin house. Williams is confused because she doesn't know that what a gin house is (she thinks people go there to drink gin), so Grandpa has to explain to her what a cotton gin is.
"The gin house where the cotton gin be."
"Cotton gin? What's that?"
"Cotton gin's a wooden box with a crank on its side that splits up the cotton fiber from the seeds. Slaves called it white man's magic."
"Was it really magic?"
"No, child. Gin mean engines. It just be an invention with different parts that works together for a single purpose, like any machine."
Ah, there's the Powerpoint exposition! Dang we're cranking through my list of predictions at an alarming rate for this only being the second chapter.
Grandpa explains that Pappy was always afraid when it came time to bring his basket of cotton to the gin because if it fell short of the weight he was expected to bring in, he'd get whipped afterwards. This upsets Williams, so Grandpa holds her close and says "It weren't all so bad, child."
OH FFS I know he's trying to comfort a child but did you SERIOUSLY just say that slavery 'wasn't all that bad'?
"My pappy also tell me about the music. How when the sun just breaking across the fields the slaves would come from all directions singing and the fields a-ringing with their song. Hundreds of 'em lifting their voices like the heavenly host itself."
There's some brief talk about what sorts of things they sang, specifically quoting a sad song about being sold from their families into Tennessee, we get an instance of 'prickly wet' used for being about to cry, and hrgh.
The celebration of African-American music from the pre-Civil War era South cannot be removed from the fact that these people were in slavery. I am not qualified to go into any sort of detailed analysis about it beyond saying that I hope this is the last instance we hear of it in this book, because I don't think Kelly is qualified, either. Maybe she is, and maybe this is indeed just an awkward scene because Grandpa is trying to comfort Williams and he knows she likes music. I am not convinced.
Oh, are we finally going to learn about her stepfather here? I mean, the one I can actually find named in online biographes?
Mrs. Frank was right about one thing. My mama didn't know how I got started. AKA, if Mama knows who William's real father is, she's never said. The only father she's know is her stepdad Winn who got crushed by gravel in an earlier chapter. Winn made it very clear that he did not think of Williams as his own child, specifically mentioning how dark William's skin is. Williams thinks perhaps the caul she was born with made her that dark, and that's why her mother doesn't love her.
Jesus, Kelly. What is it with you and your main female characters' mother being unloving creatures?
Williams thinks that maybe the Ghost Dog is Winn come back to haunt her, but Grandpa says no way, just ignore whatever he told you because he's not blood. Williams is still upset because it's not just Winn who hated her because she's so dark-skinned, but Grandpa tells her that people come in all shades, and you don't get a say in the matter.
What Grandpa said put me in mind of music. Music comes in all shades of color too. Only with music you don't see the colors, you hear them. My special gift of seeing was a hearing thing too. I called those hearing kinds of color sound colors. And sound colors were everywhere.
So your special gift is synaesthesia? Cool, cool, me too. Franz Liszt likely did too, for that matter. /random side note
Williams longs to turn the sound colors into music, but her family still doesn't have any instruments at home (I'm not sure where in the timeline we are now in relation to their move to Pittsburgh). However, plenty of her neighbors have pianos. But since Williams isn't pretty (*cough*light-skinned*cough*) or likeable like her sister Mamie, she doesn't get along with the neighbors. This is followed by more angsting about how her mother doesn't love her, and how maybe if she wasn't so dark and peculiar, she might.
Oh, we're just a few days after the Mrs. Frank/butcher knife/Ghost Dog incident. Grandpa brings a young lad with him from the work yard under the pretext of the family inviting him for supper. A thinly-veiled disguise for hooking him up with Mama, and even Williams immediatelythinks he's hot likes him. Less than a week later, Mama has married this Fletcher Burley, and Williams has herself a new dad.
Time for the Kelly drinking game, where we take a shot for every instance of sexualization of a minor! We're at two now. How well do you hold your liquor?
Soon as I walked in the house a familiar smell put Amy Frank and the other neighbor girls clear out of my mine.
You mean, as soon as you got done with the reminiscing about playing organ back in Atlanta? Kelly still has no idea how to pace things and make her prose follow a logical mental timeline.
Nanny is making ham, onions, and chitlins, and Williams recalls the stories she used to tell.
Nanny's stories were mostly fearsome tales about ghosts and spooks. The same ghosts and spooks that were in my visions and mixed up with the music in my head.
Maybe the reason the ghosts are in your head are because your grandma's been telling you these stories since you were born? I dunno, I'm no psychology pro, but that seems like a logical conclusion to me.
Her favorite, and the scariest, story was the one about the Ghost Dog. She begs Nanny to tell it to her again, and Nanny of course obliges.
Long ago, Nanny was in her kitchen working when she heard a commotion by the front door. She ran to the door to see a boy from nearby, very upset and begging her to 'Keep that thing from gettin' me!'
Wow, Kelly does know what an exclamation point is!
"I jus' saw the worst looking creature I ever seen in my life."
If you're going to type out an accent, don't do it half-heartedly. It should be "lookin'." And she has immediately forgotten what an exclamation point is, I see.
The boy says, in continued fail to consistently notate the elided 'g's on gerunds, that he was walking past the graveyard when he saw a huge, scary, white dog. It chased him all the way back up the road to Nanny's house.
"And ever after that awful evening there were many more tales of the dreadful Ghost Dog."
...that's it. That's the scary Ghost Dog story.
Nanny continues to work on cooking the chitlins and ham, and Williams is getting hungrier by the second, but the story Nanny just told gave me the worst shakes. That Ghost Dog was as real to me as the ham hocks and chitlins boiling on the stove.
The child has a very active imagination. Or is it...
"I seen that Ghost Dog rise up out of the swamp, Nanny. And lots of other spooks too."
"That's 'cause our house was built on top of a sunken cemetery," my nanny said.
Then maybe the thought of there being ghost dogs around shouldn't have been so surprising or scary?
Williams does some reminiscing about their house in Atlanta.
The kind of house where if you shot a gun through the front door the bullet passed through all the rooms and into the backyard, likely ending up in the privy.
*sigh*
I'm not sure if Kelly actually meant a shotgun house, or was just trying to describe a run-down building by incorrectly applying that terminology. Very much like our old friend, 'curling one's lip' being used to describe smiling when it very much means 'snarling' in American English.
Anyway, Williams says the house was not only haunted, but also hosted weekend drinking fests with Mama and Nanny being the only ones actually partying, because they were tired after a week of working for white folks. Mama especially, because she used to be pretty but got a bent back from carrying all the laundry and such.
The drinking didn't let up when we moved north. Turned out Mama and Nanny still had to knuckle under to white folks for us to get by. They washed and ironed all day just like they did in Atlanta and that's how we got on, same as we always had. Only it was so cold.
This reads like they've been living in Pennsylvania for a while now. It's still just been a week, as far as I can tell. Kelly please learn pacing.
Williams continues to gripe about how she doesn't fit in in their new neighborhood, and how even her own family treated her badly because her skin was so dark. She's homesick for Atlanta and all the spirits and ghosts she used to play with. Pittsburgh is nothing like Atlanta, there's a lot of smoke from the steel mills, where most of their neighbors work--so their neighbors are also poor, like Williams' family, and some are recent immigrants to America. The only other Black people she sees are comparatively light-skinned.
The white and light-skinned colored kids treated me like I had the plague. They thought I was too dark to play with. Even their mamas acted hateful.
Still very stilted prose. However I do stand by my statement earlier that this is still reading better than the Vivaldi books. I think this style of writing is working better from a first-person perspective than third. Interesting.
There's a short break, and now we're on to the next day from the jump rope incident. Williams tries again, seeing if she can join their game of hopscotch. In short order, Amy Frank's mother comes running out with a knife in hand, threatening her and dissing her mom. In her fear, Williams sees Frank's mother as the Ghost Dog, and she cowers.
Suddenly! Her Grandpa shows up and tells her to leave Williams alone.
Mrs. Frank's knife-wagging fist dropped to her side. She seemed all fuddled. "Well...I...that was right silly of me, wasn't it?" She laughed, kind of, more like a titter. "Here I was in my kitchen carving up a chicken when I hear a great commotion among the children. And I come running outside not even realizing I'm still holding on to this thing." Her eyes moved from Grandpa to me and her lips became more firmly set. "I'm right sorry if I scared you."
I have...no idea wtf I'm supposed to think about this scene. Is she being sincere? Is she still being threatening? Did Grandpa put some sort of spell on her to get her to back off? It's not explained.
All the white kids are staring in shock, and their own mothers, who had been watching the scene from their houses, come running to hurry their children home. Grandpa yells at them to leave Williams alone, and then he walks her home. He tells Williams to not let stupid people scare her, and she tells him that she "...had one of my fearful visions," in which Mrs. Frank became the Ghost Dog. Grandpa says that Nanny should never have told her those stories, but Williams is still convinced it was real.
"Your vision are nothing to fear, child, and neither are those fool white folks. If my pappy could overcome his fears, you surely can." He starts telling her about how his Pappy would always be afraid when he took his basket of cotton to the gin house. Williams is confused because she doesn't know that what a gin house is (she thinks people go there to drink gin), so Grandpa has to explain to her what a cotton gin is.
"The gin house where the cotton gin be."
"Cotton gin? What's that?"
"Cotton gin's a wooden box with a crank on its side that splits up the cotton fiber from the seeds. Slaves called it white man's magic."
"Was it really magic?"
"No, child. Gin mean engines. It just be an invention with different parts that works together for a single purpose, like any machine."
Ah, there's the Powerpoint exposition! Dang we're cranking through my list of predictions at an alarming rate for this only being the second chapter.
Grandpa explains that Pappy was always afraid when it came time to bring his basket of cotton to the gin because if it fell short of the weight he was expected to bring in, he'd get whipped afterwards. This upsets Williams, so Grandpa holds her close and says "It weren't all so bad, child."
OH FFS I know he's trying to comfort a child but did you SERIOUSLY just say that slavery 'wasn't all that bad'?
"My pappy also tell me about the music. How when the sun just breaking across the fields the slaves would come from all directions singing and the fields a-ringing with their song. Hundreds of 'em lifting their voices like the heavenly host itself."
There's some brief talk about what sorts of things they sang, specifically quoting a sad song about being sold from their families into Tennessee, we get an instance of 'prickly wet' used for being about to cry, and hrgh.
The celebration of African-American music from the pre-Civil War era South cannot be removed from the fact that these people were in slavery. I am not qualified to go into any sort of detailed analysis about it beyond saying that I hope this is the last instance we hear of it in this book, because I don't think Kelly is qualified, either. Maybe she is, and maybe this is indeed just an awkward scene because Grandpa is trying to comfort Williams and he knows she likes music. I am not convinced.
Oh, are we finally going to learn about her stepfather here? I mean, the one I can actually find named in online biographes?
Mrs. Frank was right about one thing. My mama didn't know how I got started. AKA, if Mama knows who William's real father is, she's never said. The only father she's know is her stepdad Winn who got crushed by gravel in an earlier chapter. Winn made it very clear that he did not think of Williams as his own child, specifically mentioning how dark William's skin is. Williams thinks perhaps the caul she was born with made her that dark, and that's why her mother doesn't love her.
Jesus, Kelly. What is it with you and your main female characters' mother being unloving creatures?
Williams thinks that maybe the Ghost Dog is Winn come back to haunt her, but Grandpa says no way, just ignore whatever he told you because he's not blood. Williams is still upset because it's not just Winn who hated her because she's so dark-skinned, but Grandpa tells her that people come in all shades, and you don't get a say in the matter.
What Grandpa said put me in mind of music. Music comes in all shades of color too. Only with music you don't see the colors, you hear them. My special gift of seeing was a hearing thing too. I called those hearing kinds of color sound colors. And sound colors were everywhere.
So your special gift is synaesthesia? Cool, cool, me too. Franz Liszt likely did too, for that matter. /random side note
Williams longs to turn the sound colors into music, but her family still doesn't have any instruments at home (I'm not sure where in the timeline we are now in relation to their move to Pittsburgh). However, plenty of her neighbors have pianos. But since Williams isn't pretty (*cough*light-skinned*cough*) or likeable like her sister Mamie, she doesn't get along with the neighbors. This is followed by more angsting about how her mother doesn't love her, and how maybe if she wasn't so dark and peculiar, she might.
Oh, we're just a few days after the Mrs. Frank/butcher knife/Ghost Dog incident. Grandpa brings a young lad with him from the work yard under the pretext of the family inviting him for supper. A thinly-veiled disguise for hooking him up with Mama, and even Williams immediately
Time for the Kelly drinking game, where we take a shot for every instance of sexualization of a minor! We're at two now. How well do you hold your liquor?