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antishurtugal_rebornMerr Crimmas and Happy Honk! Let's settle in for more of Jazz Girl.
We are almost halfway through the book and nothing noteworthy has really happened. It's been a very dull read so far.
Sunday, and Williams is afraid Nanny's going to scold her for going out to Daddy Fletcher's gambling parlor. Even though they kept it a secret. But no, Nanny's just in the kitchen humming her favorite song, "My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me". I found a recording of Williams performing it in 1977 or so, but on a quick search I can't find if the song was around earlier.
I went to the piano and played the song and while I played I sang the words.
That is the single clumsiest sentence I have ever read with my own two eyes.
I thought this would please Nanny. It didn't.
"What's that caterwaulin' I hear?" she shouted from the kitchen. "You can't carry a tune with both hands, girl!"
Nanny was right. My hands were meant for making music at the piano, not my voice for singing.
The relentless pessimism is well past being old at this point.
Williams keeps playing the piano and we get her eyes 'prickling' with tears again. She thinks about how Daddy Fletcher was so proud of her for earning that money at the parlor, and how he had introduced her as if she was his own blood offspring, and that makes her feel like an actual person for once.
Daddy Fletcher comes in and asks Williams to play some blues.
"Blues? What's that, Daddy Fletcher?" I said, my heart a-leaping and hopping with happiness at all the special attention he was giving me.
Borderline shot there. I'll let this one pass, if only so I can give the caffeine jitters a chance to resolve.
"The blues come from slavery," he said...
*groan* and we're back to this.
"...from spirituals and field hollers, and from the chants of our African ancestors."
"What do blues sound like?" I asked.
"Let me whistle you some."
Powerpoint slides do not good dialogue make.
Williams listens to him whistling, then tries it on the piano.
Then I tried to play what I heard on the piano, crushing and sliding those blue notes with the fire than come straight from my heart.
That's a close second to the clumsiest sentence ever.
For the rest of that day I thought about what Daddy Fletcher said. How the blues come from slavery. It brought to mind the story Grandpa told me about the Good Spirit being the shared spirit of the slaves' African ancestors. And I realized something. Now that there was no more slavery and no new spirituals or field hollers the Good Spirit was moving through a new kind of music--the blues.
This is just...so confusing to me. It doesn't follow any sort of logic from Williams. And the term 'field holler' has neer been used in this book until now, so when did Williams learn about it?
Daddy Fletcher is so impressed by her playing the blues that he hands her a whole FIFTEEN DOLLARS right then and there. Half of the earnings from the previous night. Williams hides the money from Mama by stuffing it under her mattress. (Hmm, is Mama going to be like Chiara and go through William's personal belongs like Chiara did to Annina?)
We get more talk about how horrible alcohol is, then more griping about how Mama either didn't know or didn't care who Williams' real father was.
What troubled me most was how Mama'd always tacked a name to the end of mine. The name of a man called Scruggs who she knew before I was born. That's what she'd always told everybody my name was. Mary Scruggs.
WE HAVE NEVER BEEN GIVEN EVIDENCE OF THIS. ANYWHERE.
So when Mama married Daddy Fletcher I decided it was okay to make my name like his.
WHEN. WHEN DID YOU DO THIS. SHOW US.
Williams comes back from hiding her money and out the window she can see Max doing typical stupid teenager things like riding his bike with no hands.
The sight of him made me quivery inside. A good quivering, not the kind I got from dreams and visions of the Ghost Dog.
Ah, there's shot #12.
She runs out to greet him, and asks him if he wants to hear the new song she's been working on. He says of course, and they both go back inside.
I sat down and started playing my latest rendition of "My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me." That song had come to be my specialty.
In the few hours that you've been playing it? Okay.
Max is absolutely gobsmacked and asks where she learned to play like that. Williams says she taught herself, and Max says she should be playing at a high-end club or something. She plays him some more stuff.
And whenever he was by my side my heart leaped around so much that music bounced in my head like a bunch of India rubber balls.
Please. Please do not put the word 'balls' anywhere near this weird incestuous obsession.
The rest of the paragraph is a weird smush of what seems like a time skip, where Williams is complaining about not getting enough time to herself to practice.
So I pounded the music out on the piano one part at a time then tried to put it all together real slow.
You haven't seemed to need to do this before? Also, see above note about 'balls' and apply to 'pound.'
Sometimes I had to do that pounding of each part over and over.
Williams figures this is an okay way to make music because according to her book from Miss Milholland, Beethoven had to do the same thing. She wonders if Beethoven was born with a caul like she was, because it sure seemed like he was so great he had to have been.
His way of making music came from his suffering and the best music comes from suffering like Grandpa said.
>8|
Fuck you all the way for implying that the only way to make are is for the artist to be suffering (fun fact: we artists work best when we're not fucking fighting for our emotional or physical wellbeing), double fuck you for comparing it to slavery and insinuating slavery was therefore a good and useful thing. For the sake of art. Fuck you fuck you fuck you.
Williams decides to move into Grandpa's basement room so that she'll have some peace for herself. Nobody seems to mind this. She cries some more about missing Grandpa. And then she turns that pain into music when she practices piano in the morning.
Miss Milholland has told the other teachers about Williams' musical abilities, and she finds herself going to their boarding house to play. She even gets Kool-Aid as a treat! Kool-Aid was invented in 1927 :} however its predecessor Fruit Smack would have been around at the time of this book's story. They even give her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which she's never had before. She's not a huge fan (she prefers her ham hocks and collard greens) but she's smart enough to not turn down a decent meal. Williams ends up going to the boarding house every day after school and the teachers give her money for it. Not as much as the gambling parlor but still nothing to sneeze at.
Williams still doesn't tell Mama about her lucrative little side business. She saves her money until she can buy a nice dress from the secondhand store, and decent shoes. She lies to Mama about where she got them from, saying the teachers gave it to her so she'd look nice when she went to the boarding house after school. Nanny doesn't buy it though, and confronts her about it one day when she comes home. She calls the music (jazz) evil (though I have no idea how she knows what music Williams is playing for the teachers), and Williams argues, saying the teachers like it, and Nanny says well the devil wouldn't use something that makes you sad to lure you, now would he?
Williams fake-apologizes, thinking that Nanny and Mama's drinking is a more sure way to hell yes yes, we get it.
For some reason the Ghost Dog shows up that night, and for some reason Williams wants to talk to Nanny about it. Nanny refuses to tell her more about the Ghost Dog, so Williams resolves to find more info on her own.
With a title like that, you just know we're going to get some more shots in us in short order.
The next day, Williams sees Max on his bike as she comes home from school.
I looked at his hands clutching the handlebars and closed my eyes and pretended it was me he was holding.
*sigh* Thirteen...
He hops off his bike and puts his arm around her, like Grandpa used to do.
My insides went a-hopping and the hopping felt good.
Fourteen.
Inside her is a raging battle between her love of music and her weird attraction to her cousin. If only the two could be together! But after the tongue-lashing Nanny gave her last night, she thinks Max is winning for now.
She decides to tell Max about the Ghost Dog. Max tells her that Nanny is full of bullshit.
"Sounds like your grandpa had some sense in his head. You should've listened to him."
I guess I should've," I said, hanging my head.
Punctuation lapse spotted!
Max lifted my chin ever so gentle and touched his lips to mine. The most tingly feeling I ever felt went all through me.
FUCK IT. NO MORE SHOTS. TOSS BACK THE WHOLE BOTTLE RIGHT THIS SECOND.
The next day when he comes over to hear her play piano, she's feeling down for some reason.
...and started to play for him in a kind of lopy way.
'Lopy' is literally not even a word.
But with Max there, she starts feeling better again.
The blood started rushing through my hands making them leap around something fierce.
And still, with two books about music, Kelly cannot find a decent way to describe anything musical. Sounds more to me like she's having some sort of seizure.
Max once again asks her how she can play so well, once again tells her she's going to be great some day.
He scrunched his eyes like Grandpa used to do.
Oh yeah, we're also getting comparisons of Max to Grandpa, so now it's not only an underage incestuous relationship, there's father-figure issues mixed in there as well.
"How do you move your fingers like that?"
"I practice with my mind and my mind moves my fingers. I don't worry about my hands at all. Just my mind."
And Kelly is once again making an absolute mockery of what it takes to be a musician. Even true prodigies still need to actually fucking practice, if for no other reason than to keep their muscles in shape.
"But...I don't see how a girl can play like that."
Oh, now Kelly's decided to throw sexism in there?
"I don't think much about being a girl when I play piano," I told him. "If you get carried away in your work you really don't know if you're a boy or girl."
...score one for Kelly (likely unintentionally) throwing out a bone for the queer folks? For implying that anyone who gets 'in the zone' of whatever they're doing loses their sense of gender? I don't know. I wouldn't be having weird thoughts about this passage, which isn't all that bad on its own, if Kelly didn't keep throwing so much weird shit in her stories.
"Well I know you're a girl."
uuuuuuuugh heeby jeebies
They go back and forth with Max laying the flattery on his 12-year-old cousin about how pretty she is, Williams has more knee issues in that her knees 'turn to jelly', he kisses her again, Williams has heart problems like Annina did in that her 'heart about jumps out of her chest'.
He smiled at me and winked then told me he had to go. His mama was expecting him.
I liked it that Max paid his mama so much mind. That was a fine thing for a boy to do and meant he knew how to treat ladies nice.
8|
Last one for this post!
Miss Milholland and the other teacher laides must've really liked the jazzy music I played at their boardinghouse 'cause they planned a tea party in my honor. All the girls in my class were invited and their mothers too.
Sure, this could show everyone how talented Williams is. Or it could spectaularly backfire and make them even more hateful!
Mama is, surprisingly, very pleased about the idea of the tea party. She even fixes up Williams' hair in a ponytail like the white girls wear. Williams is happy to have that nice time with her.
Williams is so excited that she wears a new dress she bought and saved for the occassion, to school that morning. Gee, this can't possibly go wrong.
Amazingly, it does not. Her bullies don't touch her. That seems very un-bully-like, but maybe they've all been told by their own moms to be on their best behavior or something.
When school is out, Williams rushes to the boarding house, and waits for the others to arrive. She feels pretty all done up like she is and she kinda wants the other ladies to tell her she looks pretty. They all arrive. But not Mama. They wait and wait. And Mama never shows up.
Okay, I lied. That chapter was so short, and this one is too, that I'm going for one more.
So Williams manages to still play for the tea party despite her own mother not being there. One of the mothers does compliment her, and she starts to feel like she belongs in their community.
No surprise, Mama had been drinking, and she wakes up the next day hung over. Williams tries to fix her hair up in two ponytails, but her hair is back to being kinky so instead she ends up with two pompoms on the sides of her head. She decides to go to school with her hair like that anyway. The other students seem surprised by it, then they start laughing. Williams is hurt by their teasing, but! she does not cry until after school is out. She runs home, collapses on her bed, and then starts crying.
She decides the only thing that'll make her feel better is to practice piano.
I was tired of the kids at school calling me Scary Mary.
SINCE WHEN. WHEN DID THEY CALL YOU THIS. EVER.
And we're back to Williams knowing everyone thinks she's weird, and the visions, and the Ghost Dog, yadda yadda.
After a page of this wandering about in self-loathing, we get back to what happened the minute Williams got home from school. wtf even is logical timeline. Mama was drunk and saying "Don't got no need to go to some gladragging white folks's tea party," or something like that.
Yes, we get it. Drinking bad. Mama bad. Nobody loves Williams. Music good. There, I just told the whole story. You're welcome.
Yeah so this book is just...incredibly dull and boring and repetative and I'm getting cranky about it which probably means I'm hangry so I'mma head over to my parents' place and have some Christmas food (no collard greens or chitlins but we do have ham!). See y'all later!
We are almost halfway through the book and nothing noteworthy has really happened. It's been a very dull read so far.
Sunday, and Williams is afraid Nanny's going to scold her for going out to Daddy Fletcher's gambling parlor. Even though they kept it a secret. But no, Nanny's just in the kitchen humming her favorite song, "My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me". I found a recording of Williams performing it in 1977 or so, but on a quick search I can't find if the song was around earlier.
I went to the piano and played the song and while I played I sang the words.
That is the single clumsiest sentence I have ever read with my own two eyes.
I thought this would please Nanny. It didn't.
"What's that caterwaulin' I hear?" she shouted from the kitchen. "You can't carry a tune with both hands, girl!"
Nanny was right. My hands were meant for making music at the piano, not my voice for singing.
The relentless pessimism is well past being old at this point.
Williams keeps playing the piano and we get her eyes 'prickling' with tears again. She thinks about how Daddy Fletcher was so proud of her for earning that money at the parlor, and how he had introduced her as if she was his own blood offspring, and that makes her feel like an actual person for once.
Daddy Fletcher comes in and asks Williams to play some blues.
"Blues? What's that, Daddy Fletcher?" I said, my heart a-leaping and hopping with happiness at all the special attention he was giving me.
Borderline shot there. I'll let this one pass, if only so I can give the caffeine jitters a chance to resolve.
"The blues come from slavery," he said...
*groan* and we're back to this.
"...from spirituals and field hollers, and from the chants of our African ancestors."
"What do blues sound like?" I asked.
"Let me whistle you some."
Powerpoint slides do not good dialogue make.
Williams listens to him whistling, then tries it on the piano.
Then I tried to play what I heard on the piano, crushing and sliding those blue notes with the fire than come straight from my heart.
That's a close second to the clumsiest sentence ever.
For the rest of that day I thought about what Daddy Fletcher said. How the blues come from slavery. It brought to mind the story Grandpa told me about the Good Spirit being the shared spirit of the slaves' African ancestors. And I realized something. Now that there was no more slavery and no new spirituals or field hollers the Good Spirit was moving through a new kind of music--the blues.
This is just...so confusing to me. It doesn't follow any sort of logic from Williams. And the term 'field holler' has neer been used in this book until now, so when did Williams learn about it?
Daddy Fletcher is so impressed by her playing the blues that he hands her a whole FIFTEEN DOLLARS right then and there. Half of the earnings from the previous night. Williams hides the money from Mama by stuffing it under her mattress. (Hmm, is Mama going to be like Chiara and go through William's personal belongs like Chiara did to Annina?)
We get more talk about how horrible alcohol is, then more griping about how Mama either didn't know or didn't care who Williams' real father was.
What troubled me most was how Mama'd always tacked a name to the end of mine. The name of a man called Scruggs who she knew before I was born. That's what she'd always told everybody my name was. Mary Scruggs.
WE HAVE NEVER BEEN GIVEN EVIDENCE OF THIS. ANYWHERE.
So when Mama married Daddy Fletcher I decided it was okay to make my name like his.
WHEN. WHEN DID YOU DO THIS. SHOW US.
Williams comes back from hiding her money and out the window she can see Max doing typical stupid teenager things like riding his bike with no hands.
The sight of him made me quivery inside. A good quivering, not the kind I got from dreams and visions of the Ghost Dog.
Ah, there's shot #12.
She runs out to greet him, and asks him if he wants to hear the new song she's been working on. He says of course, and they both go back inside.
I sat down and started playing my latest rendition of "My Mama Pinned a Rose on Me." That song had come to be my specialty.
In the few hours that you've been playing it? Okay.
Max is absolutely gobsmacked and asks where she learned to play like that. Williams says she taught herself, and Max says she should be playing at a high-end club or something. She plays him some more stuff.
And whenever he was by my side my heart leaped around so much that music bounced in my head like a bunch of India rubber balls.
Please. Please do not put the word 'balls' anywhere near this weird incestuous obsession.
The rest of the paragraph is a weird smush of what seems like a time skip, where Williams is complaining about not getting enough time to herself to practice.
So I pounded the music out on the piano one part at a time then tried to put it all together real slow.
You haven't seemed to need to do this before? Also, see above note about 'balls' and apply to 'pound.'
Sometimes I had to do that pounding of each part over and over.
Williams figures this is an okay way to make music because according to her book from Miss Milholland, Beethoven had to do the same thing. She wonders if Beethoven was born with a caul like she was, because it sure seemed like he was so great he had to have been.
His way of making music came from his suffering and the best music comes from suffering like Grandpa said.
>8|
Fuck you all the way for implying that the only way to make are is for the artist to be suffering (fun fact: we artists work best when we're not fucking fighting for our emotional or physical wellbeing), double fuck you for comparing it to slavery and insinuating slavery was therefore a good and useful thing. For the sake of art. Fuck you fuck you fuck you.
Williams decides to move into Grandpa's basement room so that she'll have some peace for herself. Nobody seems to mind this. She cries some more about missing Grandpa. And then she turns that pain into music when she practices piano in the morning.
Miss Milholland has told the other teachers about Williams' musical abilities, and she finds herself going to their boarding house to play. She even gets Kool-Aid as a treat! Kool-Aid was invented in 1927 :} however its predecessor Fruit Smack would have been around at the time of this book's story. They even give her a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, which she's never had before. She's not a huge fan (she prefers her ham hocks and collard greens) but she's smart enough to not turn down a decent meal. Williams ends up going to the boarding house every day after school and the teachers give her money for it. Not as much as the gambling parlor but still nothing to sneeze at.
Williams still doesn't tell Mama about her lucrative little side business. She saves her money until she can buy a nice dress from the secondhand store, and decent shoes. She lies to Mama about where she got them from, saying the teachers gave it to her so she'd look nice when she went to the boarding house after school. Nanny doesn't buy it though, and confronts her about it one day when she comes home. She calls the music (jazz) evil (though I have no idea how she knows what music Williams is playing for the teachers), and Williams argues, saying the teachers like it, and Nanny says well the devil wouldn't use something that makes you sad to lure you, now would he?
Williams fake-apologizes, thinking that Nanny and Mama's drinking is a more sure way to hell yes yes, we get it.
For some reason the Ghost Dog shows up that night, and for some reason Williams wants to talk to Nanny about it. Nanny refuses to tell her more about the Ghost Dog, so Williams resolves to find more info on her own.
With a title like that, you just know we're going to get some more shots in us in short order.
The next day, Williams sees Max on his bike as she comes home from school.
I looked at his hands clutching the handlebars and closed my eyes and pretended it was me he was holding.
*sigh* Thirteen...
He hops off his bike and puts his arm around her, like Grandpa used to do.
My insides went a-hopping and the hopping felt good.
Fourteen.
Inside her is a raging battle between her love of music and her weird attraction to her cousin. If only the two could be together! But after the tongue-lashing Nanny gave her last night, she thinks Max is winning for now.
She decides to tell Max about the Ghost Dog. Max tells her that Nanny is full of bullshit.
"Sounds like your grandpa had some sense in his head. You should've listened to him."
I guess I should've," I said, hanging my head.
Punctuation lapse spotted!
Max lifted my chin ever so gentle and touched his lips to mine. The most tingly feeling I ever felt went all through me.
FUCK IT. NO MORE SHOTS. TOSS BACK THE WHOLE BOTTLE RIGHT THIS SECOND.
The next day when he comes over to hear her play piano, she's feeling down for some reason.
...and started to play for him in a kind of lopy way.
'Lopy' is literally not even a word.
But with Max there, she starts feeling better again.
The blood started rushing through my hands making them leap around something fierce.
And still, with two books about music, Kelly cannot find a decent way to describe anything musical. Sounds more to me like she's having some sort of seizure.
Max once again asks her how she can play so well, once again tells her she's going to be great some day.
He scrunched his eyes like Grandpa used to do.
Oh yeah, we're also getting comparisons of Max to Grandpa, so now it's not only an underage incestuous relationship, there's father-figure issues mixed in there as well.
"How do you move your fingers like that?"
"I practice with my mind and my mind moves my fingers. I don't worry about my hands at all. Just my mind."
And Kelly is once again making an absolute mockery of what it takes to be a musician. Even true prodigies still need to actually fucking practice, if for no other reason than to keep their muscles in shape.
"But...I don't see how a girl can play like that."
Oh, now Kelly's decided to throw sexism in there?
"I don't think much about being a girl when I play piano," I told him. "If you get carried away in your work you really don't know if you're a boy or girl."
...score one for Kelly (likely unintentionally) throwing out a bone for the queer folks? For implying that anyone who gets 'in the zone' of whatever they're doing loses their sense of gender? I don't know. I wouldn't be having weird thoughts about this passage, which isn't all that bad on its own, if Kelly didn't keep throwing so much weird shit in her stories.
"Well I know you're a girl."
uuuuuuuugh heeby jeebies
They go back and forth with Max laying the flattery on his 12-year-old cousin about how pretty she is, Williams has more knee issues in that her knees 'turn to jelly', he kisses her again, Williams has heart problems like Annina did in that her 'heart about jumps out of her chest'.
He smiled at me and winked then told me he had to go. His mama was expecting him.
I liked it that Max paid his mama so much mind. That was a fine thing for a boy to do and meant he knew how to treat ladies nice.
8|
Last one for this post!
Miss Milholland and the other teacher laides must've really liked the jazzy music I played at their boardinghouse 'cause they planned a tea party in my honor. All the girls in my class were invited and their mothers too.
Sure, this could show everyone how talented Williams is. Or it could spectaularly backfire and make them even more hateful!
Mama is, surprisingly, very pleased about the idea of the tea party. She even fixes up Williams' hair in a ponytail like the white girls wear. Williams is happy to have that nice time with her.
Williams is so excited that she wears a new dress she bought and saved for the occassion, to school that morning. Gee, this can't possibly go wrong.
Amazingly, it does not. Her bullies don't touch her. That seems very un-bully-like, but maybe they've all been told by their own moms to be on their best behavior or something.
When school is out, Williams rushes to the boarding house, and waits for the others to arrive. She feels pretty all done up like she is and she kinda wants the other ladies to tell her she looks pretty. They all arrive. But not Mama. They wait and wait. And Mama never shows up.
Okay, I lied. That chapter was so short, and this one is too, that I'm going for one more.
So Williams manages to still play for the tea party despite her own mother not being there. One of the mothers does compliment her, and she starts to feel like she belongs in their community.
No surprise, Mama had been drinking, and she wakes up the next day hung over. Williams tries to fix her hair up in two ponytails, but her hair is back to being kinky so instead she ends up with two pompoms on the sides of her head. She decides to go to school with her hair like that anyway. The other students seem surprised by it, then they start laughing. Williams is hurt by their teasing, but! she does not cry until after school is out. She runs home, collapses on her bed, and then starts crying.
She decides the only thing that'll make her feel better is to practice piano.
I was tired of the kids at school calling me Scary Mary.
SINCE WHEN. WHEN DID THEY CALL YOU THIS. EVER.
And we're back to Williams knowing everyone thinks she's weird, and the visions, and the Ghost Dog, yadda yadda.
After a page of this wandering about in self-loathing, we get back to what happened the minute Williams got home from school. wtf even is logical timeline. Mama was drunk and saying "Don't got no need to go to some gladragging white folks's tea party," or something like that.
Yes, we get it. Drinking bad. Mama bad. Nobody loves Williams. Music good. There, I just told the whole story. You're welcome.
Yeah so this book is just...incredibly dull and boring and repetative and I'm getting cranky about it which probably means I'm hangry so I'mma head over to my parents' place and have some Christmas food (no collard greens or chitlins but we do have ham!). See y'all later!