Please Come Home for Christmas

Jane had graduated from Tomlinson High School in 1946. She had distant relatives who had moved to New York City years before. They urged her to leave the South and come live with them until she could make a way for herself. Her mother and father were for it. So, like many blacks searching for a better life, she boarded an Atlantic Coast Line train and headed north. At her first job, she washed and pressed clothes at a laundry. Next, she became a waitress at a diner. After taking some night classes at a community center, she became a secretary. After Pearl graduated from Tomlinson, she followed Jane to New York and began working as a waitress. They got a small apartment together. Big-city life was a world apart from small-town farm life in South Carolina—particularly in the attitudes. There was racism in New York, but it wasn’t that hostile, in-your-face, oppressive, condescending-type that was the norm down South. Work in the city was more plentiful—and more satisfying—than slaving in the tobacco and cotton fields back home. Moreover, there were places to go and things to see, especially on warm summer Saturday nights in Harlem. Back then, Harlem was the nation’s center of black life. The nightclubs in the city beat anything back home—though she didn’t know if there were any nightclubs in Kingstree for blacks or not. There were places that were off the road, back in the woods, where “colored” people went. They were little more than shacks, but people had a good time eating highly seasoned fatty-foods and listening to music. There was always somebody pounding out boogie-woogie on an old piano, or some old man blowing the blues out of a harmonica, or maybe it was an old jukebox blues-ing away with 78-rpm records. In Harlem, along with the nightclubs, there were boutiques and hairdressers and barbershops and markets and everything. Coney Island and Atlantic City were only a short train or bus ride away. But the warm Saturday nights in Harlem were the best. And could those city “coloreds” dress for a Saturday night on the town. The ladies wore elegant dresses and skirts. Some tight. Some not. Some high. Some not. Some homemade; but all stylish—with bouquets, beads, and earrings. Some accented their hair with an artificial flower. They stepped high and proud in heels and pretended not to notice—or want—the attention of the equally dressed young men. And those gents—some with cars, some not; some in suits, some not—with ties and wide-collar shirts, looking like proud colored soldiers of fashion; looking like the male peacocks that they were. And what music could small numbers of black—and a few white—musicians make at those nightclubs on those warm Saturday nights, sounding as big as any symphony orchestra. They played jazz. Jazz that celebrated life with all of its joys and toils; jazz with all the color of the blues. And they played blues; blues that moaned with pent-up sorrow; blues that cried with the truths of the human condition; blues that had the conviction of the mother that gave it birth. It was blues born in the Southern fields from old Negro spirituals and gospels. It was blues that longed for a better day. And sometimes they played gospel itself. And since those old spirituals and gospels gave life to the blues—and since good jazz was nothing more than happy blues—it didn’t matter what they played. It was all good—Edward Kennedy Ellington “the Duke,” Bessie Smith, the Count Basie Orchestra. It was on one of those warm summer Saturday nights in Harlem, at one of those nightclubs where Jane and Pearl met their husbands. Earl had apparently forgotten his nightclub days, but Jane and Pearl remembered. They had gone to the Crescent Moon Lounge to hear Billie Holiday sing her slow and sultry brand of jazz. Across the dark, smoky room, Pearl saw a handsome young man looking at her. The way that she remembered was that she didn’t want to look back at him. But she remembered thinking that he must have done physically demanding work, because under his pinstriped suit, it looked like he had arms that could sweep her up and take her into the night or to anywhere that he pleased. She must have looked back at him. Pearl didn’t think that she was pretty. She didn’t have what American society thought of as “attractive” features. Unlike Jane—who had light skin, thin lips, and naturally straight hair—Pearl was dark skinned with thick lips, a wide nose, and naturally nappy hair. Pearl was a “black” woman with standout, almost chiseled, Negroid features. But apparently, to that handsome young man in the pinstriped suit who stared at her, she was Pearl, Queen of Harlem—maybe even Pearl, Queen of New York City. He came over and asked her to dance. She wanted to turn him down. She almost did turn him down, until she saw Jane giving her the get-off-your-butt-and-dance-with-the-man look. She did. And when Billie Holiday began singing Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me, she felt like Pearl, Queen of Harlem, Queen of New York City. Not only did he have strong arms, he had eyes that stared straight into her soul. That same night while Pearl, Queen of Harlem, danced with the man with the eyes, a waitress brought a drink over and sat it in front of Jane. When Jane told the waitress that she had not ordered a fresh drink, the waitress told her to look toward the bar. At the bar, she saw this man dressed in a suit—a white suit—giving her the eye with a smile on his face. She smiled politely. If she didn’t smile politely, or sincerely, it didn’t matter because he came over anyway. She wasn’t sure that she had wanted him to come over. Wearing all white was bold in a genteel kind of way. Not only was it bold, but also it was overdressing. She didn’t want any man dressing prettier than she did. When he came over, he asked her to dance. She did. As Billie Holiday glided through her slow and sultry version of April in Paris, Jane danced with the man in the bold, but genteel, white suit; while the man with the soul-staring eyes enchanted Pearl, Queen of Harlem.