Jazz Girl Chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7
Dec. 22nd, 2024 06:15 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
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antishurtugal_rebornWilliams has successfully roped her sister Mamie into her plan to get the neighborhood kids to like her. They go outside and Mamie starts bragging on her little sister to the girls, about how Williams is the best music player out there.
It works. The girls are so intrigued that Amy sneaks Williams into her house while her knife-wielding mother is out and takes her directly to their upright piano. Williams is at first scared because she hasn't played a piano before, only a pump organ. But she has to live up to her sister's claims, and she manages to play a spiritual that Grandpa taught her.
Amy immediately clocks it as a colored song, and she's not thrilled about that.
"It's a spiritual," I said, feeling more shivery and tongue-tied than ever. "A song colored folks used to sing during slavery."
"Hmmph!" Amy said with her nose scrunched like she was smelling something bad. "Figures somebody with skin as black as yours couldn't play anything but colored songs. You're nothing but trash, like my mother says."
For all of Kelly's attempts at writing out accents, she completely forgoes any attempt at writing out a stutter. Probably for the best.
Williams is hurt by that and all the other girls start to laugh at her again.
I almost tripped over my feet trying to get to the door, my head ready to bust from all the tears pushing to get out. I felt like my heart had smashed into a million pieces. Those smashed pieces were like bits of broken glass that floated around in my pricking and poking and tearing me up inside.
Not a necessarily bad piece of writing but it still doesn't have the emotional impact to me that it should. Can't put a finger on the why.
Since we'd moved to Pittsburgh I oftentimes had that torn up feeling. When it came all I could do was try to sing back together all the broken pieces of my heart since I had no organ or piano.
And yet we were told earlier that you didn't sing because your mom (or was it Nanny?) said you had no vocal talent whatsoever.
And now I couldn't play piano at the neighbor's houses anymore.
And what lead you to this conclusion?
I couldn't abid them gibing me about my darkness. Until I got my own piano I'd just have to sing out those feelings that sizzled inside my like fire spitting up from a stove.
Oh hey, there's Kelly's old standby of 'sizzle'. I seriously will never be able to use that word again.
Not that my singing was any good.
Oh, there we are. Yes, it was Nanny who said she sounds like a screeching cat, and her stuttering didn't help.
A quick Google search will bring up plenty of info on stuttering actually being helped by singing, because it's a different mental and physical exercise than speaking. Even though they didn't have all that medical and scientific info back in the early 1900s, I highly doubt that anyone would have missed the fact that stutterers can sing just fine.
Williams goes from griping about stuttering to griping about Mama not loving her again, and how maybe if Mama had loved her, she wouldn't stutter. Or something. Then she starts saying that she wanted her mother's love so badly that she often did naughty things to get her attention, which of course we have not been shown, but we're about to get exposition about it! Back in Atlanta, Williams cut the roses off Nanny's rose bush, intending to give them to Mama as a present. Nanny was not pleased about it, and Mama didn't care.
Williams finally makes it the short distance from Amy's house back to hers, and Daddy Fletcher is home. She starts complaining to him about Amy, and Fletcher tells her to ignore Amy, she's got way more talent than that wicked girl.
She goes to get him his cigarettes...
And I about fell over at the sight I beheld soon as the fog cleared from my eyes. Over in the far corner of the parlor sat a big tall wooden thing.
"A piano!" I squeaked, all of a sudden forgetting my torn up feelings.
Ah, Kelly still doesn't know how to hold on to tension at all. She's still bringing up a problem and then miraculously solving it on the next page.
Fletcher says it's not just a piano, but a player piano, so if she wants to hear other music by the most famous players, she just has to play the rolls. So they sit to listening to all the rolls, old ballads, waltzes, opera tunes, marches, ragtime--for someone whose musical education is extremely limited, she sure does know a lot about different forms of music.
They get to one she hasn't heard before, which I find impossible to believe because it's the one she probably would have been the most likely to hear in this era--boogie. She loves it, and the rags. She loves Jelly Roll Morton's stuff, in particular his song "The Pearls," which she describes as [not] perky like the boogie tunes but real smooth and pretty. Are we listening to the same song?
She spends the rest of the day going over and over The Pearls with the roll showing her which keys to press, until she memorizes it.
I find myself wondering where they're storing all these piano rolls, and where Fletcher even got them to begin with.
The next morning, she's about tripping over herself to get back to playing on 'her' piano.
Before I could even get to the piano the sounds in my head got me jumping and hopping like a leapfrog which was a dangerous way to be in my house.
Kinda an awkward way to describe hearing music in your head, but okay. She explains that doing that would likely get her a whipping from her mother because all the commotion gave her a headache.
No wonder the way she slugged the gin night after night. You'd think Mama would be right tickled to be living in this fine new house with a fine new husband and she'd stop drinking so much. Her drinking didn't let up though. I'm guessing the gin made her feel happy. Least for a little while. It also made her meaner than ever when the happy feeling worse off. Those were the times I had to be real careful about.
All the telling with no showing and it's interrupting the flow of the story >:[.
However, today Williams is too excited to care about all of that (so why tell us?), and she greets Mama as soon as she comes out of her room, showing her 'her' piano. Mama says nothing and goes to the kitchen.
"But, Mama, all my visions that get mixed up with music in my head are gonna turn into something real now. Something wonderful. I'm gonna make music that'll bring folks together. Music that'll turn their hearts."
"That be the devil playin' round in your head," she said while she poured herself some coffee with a shaky hand. "You best not be conjurin' up more of them visions like you done before."
"I don't mean to conjure visions," I said, my head hanging.
"You sure enough put folks in mind of spooks. Cursed you is, by the sign of the caul. All the time scarin' folks with your peculiar ways."
"Sorry, Mama," I said, and tears pricked my eyes.
Can we please come up with a different way to describe impending tears?
Anyway, Mama is not moved by Williams' words, and the chapter ends. It was a long chapter, by this book's standards.
Nanny and Mama are talking about how Williams won't stop playing piano, how they can hardly get her away long enough to eat, and how people will think they're starving her from how thin she is. They try to convince Williams to go eat something, but she declines so that she can keep practicing. Nanny and Mama get fed up with arguing with her and go into the kitchen to drink. Williams hates that they're drinking, hates that Grandpa goes to the basement to keep away from their drinking so he can't be with Williams in the parlor while she plays. She hates how all the drinking is keeping the family apart. Even though it's Prohibition Era, they still drink almost every day.
That's the end of the first section.
On the Friday before Christmas, some of the neighbors come by to celebrate (by drinking) with their family. Except Grandpa, because he doesn't like it, and neither does her sister Mamie. Mamie ends up staying out with her friends more often to stay away from it all.
Okay so this page is pretty much just repeating all the info that we just got in the previous section. Get on with it, already.
Seemed like things were getting almost back to how they were in Atlanta when I used to follow him [Grandpa] to his backyard shed and sit at his knee while he tinkered with his mechanical contraptions. Sometimes he let me take something apart, like a clock, then he'd show my how to put it back together. And he told me about how things work. Trains for instance.
Okay so by getting on with it already, we're on to more tell-not-show exposition.
They would watch the trains pass by on the trestle that connected the parts of town where the African-Americans lived with where the white people lived. Williams thought it was sad they were apart like that, but at least they were connected at all.
Grandpa was the only person who made me feel connected like that. Oh Daddy Fletcher's handsome grin still gave me a thrill and I sure was appreciative of the fine piano he bought me.
And there's shot number three, of alcohol or caffeinated beverage, whatever your preferred poison is.
Williams remembers listening to the train sounds as they passed by, how all the noise was so rhythmic and catchy that it would become music in her mind.
Now we're back in their basement in Pittsburgh, and Williams has a big question to ask him.
"How do trains work, Grandpa?"
Grandpa talks about how people invented a way to use steam to make the engines even stronger than horses, and that steam can move anything from trains to ships.
Somehow I knew music had that kind of power too. There's something about the way all the parts of music, like its tune and beat and feelings, come together to make folks feel connected.
That night I dreamed my head was a steam engine. And in this dream I knew the pressure of the music building in my head would make things move someday.
Honestly this is a pretty well-written section.
And then the rest of the chapter is another jumbled mess of Williams griping about how her mother doesn't love her, and she compares her mother to the Ghost Dog (no it doesn't make sense to me either), how she feels alone and that's because she doesn't know who her real daddy is and that means she didn't really know who she herself was, and she's afraid that Grandpa and Daddy Fletcher would leave her in the same way.
I have to say, so far the relentless pessimism is a real drag.
The next day, Williams and Grandpa are the first ones awake, and she immediately goes to practice.
I went straight to my piano first thing and started working out some new sounds that had been sizzling inside me.
I hereby ban Kelly from using 'sizzling' ever again. Just stop. It's annoying me.
Grandpa says he'll give her fifty cents(! that's a lot back then!) if she plays him his music from his favorite opera. He means the Anvil Chorus from Verdi's 'Il trovatore', which I doubt Grandpa has ever seen or heard so wtf. For some reason, it reads like Williams hadn't heard this particular one before, though with how eagerly she listened to all those piano rolls earlier I doubt it, but whatever. Grandpa loves it, stomping along with the strong hammer beats until Nanny yells at them to stop making so much racket.
Grandpa and Williams ignore her, and she follows along on the piano keys as the roll plays, and once she's gone through the song, she starts playing it by herself. Grandpa is so pleased that he follows through with his earlier offer and gives her fifty cents. He tells her that she's been blessed with her gifts.
Williams decides that she'll give Grandpa a Christmas gift of his own song, which she calls "Messy's Stomp" (Messy being his nickname for her). She uses the left hand part from the Anvil Chorus but puts her own tune on top of it. When she plays it for him on Christmas Eve, he doesn't react quite as she hoped but he is still appreciative of it. She apologizes that she didn't write it down, as she doesn't know how to actually read music, so he could have it for himself, but he says that's just fine.
"I'd as soon hear the music come direct from your heart than look at it on a piece of paper. You don't get sounds and feelings from paper."
Williams decides he's right, and that some day she'll learn how to read and write music, but for now she'll just keep playing.
Christmas Day. They have a scrawny little pine tree for a Christmas tree. Grandpa caught a muskie in the Allegheny River and Nanny is cooking it for dinner (not sure how clean a fish from the Allegheny would be at that time, given the nonexistent industrial waste laws and all the steel mills around). Williams and Grandpa went walking around the neighborhood earlier to look at all the Christmas lights through the windows of their neighbor's houses. Williams is jealous of the electric lights that are hung on all their trees.
According to what I can find, some large cities had outdoor electric Christmas light displays earlier in the century, but they weren't really available for domestic use until the 1930s. This is the end of 1922.
Nanny says that they couldn't afford that nonsense, and that's not what Christmas is about anyway.
"When I was a youngun we didn't worry none about fancy lights. Most exciting thing was how every child rose early Christmas morning to see the Johnkankus."
Mamie rolled her eyes. "You slay me, Nanny," she said, acting all uppity with her teenage slang.
I just checked and yes 'slay' was used as slang back then.
Grandpa says that yes, there was the Johnkankus, and it was a music event for the whole community, black and white. In that white people would join in, but "the colored folks knowed the goings-on were really about the ancient African chief Johnkankus."
We are not given any further information about Johnkankus himself.
Williams is very interested in this, though I find it hard to believe that it's the first time she's heard this story. Grandpa and Nanny say that people would get dressed up in costumes and masks. And we get more of Kelly's stellar exposition skills:
"What about the music?" I asked.
"Oh there was loud sounds and chants with lots of rhythm sung to the beat of gumba boxes," Grandpa said.
"What are gumba boxes, Grandpa?"
"Gumba boxes be nothing but animal skins pulled over a frame, like most any drum. There was other instruments too made from animal bones, sticks, reeds, and cow horns. Whatever odds and ends folks could find that would make a joyful noise, like the Good Book say."
Williams asks what else they did for Christmas.
"Back in slavery days there was always the corn shucking that started the Christmas season."
Maybe things were different back then but at least in my area, corn is generally ready to harvest, and therefore shuck, in late summer or early fall. Williams is also confused, as shucking corn is not a particularly festive activity.
"During the end of November and start of December the plantation masters invited the slaves of nearby planters to come shuck corn on a particular night."
...invited. They 'invited' their neighbor's slaves over. Are you sure, are you positive, that is the way you want to describe it, Kelly?
Anyway, so there'd be 'one or two hundred slaves' sitting around, yeah I'm really sure that any slave owner would just let that many of their slaves sit around together without someone there to keep an eye on them, and they would sing and shuck corn until daybreak.
"That sure sounds like a lot of work, Grandpa."
"It surely was, but the music made the work light."
Fuck you, Kelly.
Williams asks Grandpa to sing one of the songs, and he does, and soon everyone (except Mama and Daddy Fletcher, who are drinking in the kitchen) is up and dancing around and having a great time.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-23 08:46 pm (UTC)Poor Williams!
Not a necessarily bad piece of writing but it still doesn't have the emotional impact to me that it should. Can't put a finger on the why.
Well, the first bit, about her head feeling ready to burst, does work for me... I think it's that the metaphor is all too complex for someone in her situation. If she thinks about how the pieces of her broken heart are stabbing her, she probably isn't as distraught as all that.
And now I couldn't play piano at the neighbor's houses anymore.
I mean, you couldn't do it before now, either. And, indeed, who's to say that she can't play at the others?
Oh hey, there's Kelly's old standby of 'sizzle'. I seriously will never be able to use that word again.
Yeah, that's a quite bad word to use here. She needs to let her emotions go, after all, so they're hardly "sizzling".
Good on her for getting to play the piano, I guess?
All the telling with no showing and it's interrupting the flow of the story >:[.
I wonder if Kelly was thinking of this stuff as she wrote it and remembered she needed to explain what was going on.
Do we get any reason why Mama thinks it's bad that Williams will bring people together?
For drinking during Prohibition, I suppose it's possible?
Yes, I do really like some parts, but I don't get the feeling that Kelly knew what she wanted to write about here, so we just got reiterations of how bad it is for Williams. And it is, but I think this should maybe be a bit more focused on the music instead.
Grandpa says he'll give her fifty cents(! that's a lot back then!) if she plays him his music from his favorite opera.
Using an inflation calculator, that would be $9.40 now. That's certainly quite much for this!
Yes, this is more what I wanted.
At least muskellunges do live in that area?
Oh, I see "Johnkankus" actually is a thing even in the present day. The way Kelly makes it sound, it died out before the twentieth century.
"During the end of November and start of December the plantation masters invited the slaves of nearby planters to come shuck corn on a particular night."
I... why does Grandpa sound like he doesn't actually know what slavery was? At the least, Kelly desperately needed to do more research.
Until next time!
no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 01:44 am (UTC)Admittedly we're not told where Williams' Grandpa's family was kept, but if they were in the Georgia area then they may not have celebrated Johnkankus at all. Seems to be more of a Caribbean thing, or some places here in North Carolina (I was not familiar with the term before reading this book, so perhaps not in my area of the state).
no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 04:25 am (UTC)It doesn't work because it's so over-the-top melodramatic.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 04:24 am (UTC)What a truly awful piece of description.
Don't you just love how gracefully and subtly implied the racism is here? And say hello to another of Kelly's ridiculously over-the-top bully characters. She and Chiara must be related.
Wow, she really IS Chiara 2.0
"I'm Cockney now for some reason. Blimey!"
And neither am I. Could this possibly be any more ham-fisted?
ALCOHOL BAD!!!
I think everyone has gotten it by now, Kelly.
Does anyone else have a sudden craving for sausages and/or bacon or is it just me?
You'd think an AUTHOR who expresses feelings and such via words on paper (or at least attempts to) would know better than to put in something like this, but apparently not.
Wow. No.
WE GET IT ALREADY. EXCESSIVE DRINKING DRIVES FAMILIES APART. FFS.
no subject
Date: 2024-12-24 04:12 pm (UTC)Honestly the blatant racism is probably fairly accurate to the era, however the way Kelly keeps whacking us over the head with it is annoying. It's like she doesn't know how what 'subtlety' even is.
I keep thinking that the character's skin is boiling in the noonday summer sun whenever she says 'sizzle'. Even if it's the wrong time of year and the character's skin is darker than mine and therefore probably wouldn't 'sizzle' >>'.
You'd think an AUTHOR who expresses feelings and such via words on paper (or at least attempts to) would know better than to put in something like this, but apparently not.
YES EXACTLY. And as a musician herself, who supposedly would have been trained to interpret written music, like...I get it, you can have characters who believe things other than what you do, but given the above notes about Kelly not knowing how to use subtlety, one can only assume whatever she says is meant to be taken literally.
All of Kelly's references to slavery so far (until an upcoming section, briefly, and the exaggerated statements by the anti-Williams crowd) read as someone who was raised on revisionist history and hasn't, for whatever reason, shaken that mindset. In 2011. Once again...something a competent editor should have at least been like 'hey you may want to rethink some of these lines.'
no subject
Date: 2024-12-25 07:38 am (UTC)A lot of the time, at least today anyway, people will prejudice against you without actively telling you they're being an ass to you because you're black/disabled/female/Jewish or whatever. You just keep not getting opportunities for reasons presented as completely unrelated and generally being disrespected without any actual slurs being yelled. No doubt it was indeed far more overt back then, but it still feels like the author is laying it on far too thick, like she just HAS to beat us over the head with how racist people were back then to make sure we all get it.
Yeeeaaah, even as a white person it's making me really uncomfortable.