Jerome looked at Chris, who had heard what his father said. They both shrugged their shoulders and Chris took off the sweater that his mother had bought for him a few days earlier.
Daddy just stood there. As though he was waiting for something. They hardly dared to resume their playing.
‘Can we go get ice cream?’
Daddy appeared not to hear.
‘Please, Dad?’
‘What?’
‘Ice cream. It’s hot as anything. Can we go get ice cream?’
Jerome looked at his father. It was as though he didn’t understand what they said. He gazed past them with a skittish look in his eye. Jerome went up to him and tugged on his arm. ‘Daddy.’
‘Sure thing, kiddo.’ He dug in his jeans pocket and pulled out a few pennies. ‘This enough?’
The boys burst out laughing.
‘Another fifty cents,’ Chris said, nudging him and raising his eyebrows.
‘And keep your head held up straight,’ Daddy said. ‘Look those white motherfuckers right in the eye. They can’t take that. Never look down, never. You boys promise me?’
They nodded. Held out their hands so their father could give them the coins.
‘Now beat it, you two.’
‘But the ice cream money … ’ Jerome said.
‘Go ask your mother.’
They played on the field beyond the river. Jerome, his brother Chris, his best friend Reggie Watson, and the other kids in the neighborhood. It was summertime. Every morning, older boys and girls from the other side of Akron came to the Elizabeth Park Projects to play with the children and to organize games and competitions. Handball, football, races, hide-and-seek. Sleepy Johnson was older, about twenty, and towered above everyone else. He was heavyset but when he walked his movements were so supple and light it was as though his body wasn’t even touching the ground. Everybody liked Sleepy. He had a low, melodious voice; so low that when he laughed it felt as though the ground was shaking.
One afternoon Sleepy went into the woods to pee. The woods were off limits to the children; they were big, dense, and dark, and in the middle there was a lake they called Mud Bottom because there was mud on the bottom. People had drowned in Mud Bottom. Sucked up by the mud.
When Sleepy Johnson returned from the woods a little while later he lingered at the edge of the field, watching the kids play. He leaned his heavy body against the trunk of a weeping willow, as though hiding from them under its low-hanging branches.
‘Hey, Jerome,’ he called.
Jerome looked up from his game. They were playing ball and he was behind. Out of the corner of his eye he had kept watch on the spot where Sleepy had gone into the woods.
‘I’ve got something to tell you,’ Sleepy said.
Jerome went over to him, pushing away the willow branches as though drawing a curtain.
‘Sonny Huling’s your father, right?’
‘Yeah, so?’ he answered, quasi-indifferently.
‘He was in the woods. I saw him sitting on the bank of the lake, alone. He’s a great player, d’you know that? Real fine jazz. Don’t you let anybody say your daddy’s crazy, okay? Nobody, you understand?’
Jerome nodded. Sleepy’s words made him proud, but at the same time he felt like he’d been caught at something. He thought of the deer. He smelled the warm scent of the pine trees. His father always went to the woods alone. And if anybody spoke to him, he seemed not to hear them, as though he’d forgotten where he was. Then he’d take his trumpet and go out the kitchen door, across the creek and the field, and vanish into the woods. Jerome imagined that he could hear the gentle, fluid tones of the trumpet singing through the trees.
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AKRON, OHIO, SEPTEMBER 2001
Barbara Jean Fuller
‘Sonny and I knew each other from the Palace on Howard Street. He used to perform there sometimes with a pickup band. He never played loud, it was more lazy and melodious. He had a beautiful voice. “Little Harlem”, that’s what they called Howard Street, because there were so many clubs and theaters. The Palace, and dance places like the Army, East Market Gardens. Duke Ellington, Ella Fitzgerald, the Count Basie Orchestra, and Billy Eckstine, they all came to the Palace. Sometimes the big bands also played at the East Market Gardens, because it was better for dancing. At the Palace you had to sit in seats. Howard Street was a nice street in those days. The rubber shop was booming and Akron was well off.
One evening I was sitting in the Palace, up close to the stage. I saw Sonny looking at me while he was playing. He was a little older than me, eighteen or nineteen. A handsome guy. At a certain point he got up and walked over with his saxophone. He kept on playing, his eyes glued to me the whole time. I could see the smile on his lips. Back then he just played the sax. The trumpet came later.
My father worked at Goodyear. Thirty-six years he worked there. He came from Macon, Georgia. My mother was from Plantersville, Alabama. We lived on Hickory Street, across from a farm where they had stables. For a few cents you could ride one of their horses down the street. On Fridays my brothers played polo. I was the ninth child, and after me there were three more. I don’t know much about my family. There’s a street in Akron named after my grandfather, George Washington Fuller. He was an overseer at a cotton plantation in Georgia and came north with a few slaves. He married my grandmother Martha, who had done housekeeping for the plantation owners. She came from Czechoslovakia. That’s why some of my children are so light-skinned. I remember my father telling us that he never liked his mother taking him to school. He was ashamed of her because she was white.
Sonny and I got married when I was expecting Larry. I was fifteen. That’s when I met Sonny’s family. We moved to Detroit because Sonny could get a job there in the Ford factory. On weekends he played in clubs on Hastings Street. We had it good. But one day at work he nearly fell into a melting furnace, y’know, this crucible thing where they melted steel. I don’t know exactly what happened, but from that day on Sonny refused to go to the factory. We went back to Akron, moved in with his parents. Jerome was still a baby.
Life at the Hulings was so different than what I was used to. I don’t know what it was with Elizabeth Huling; she was very introverted. Maybe things happened in Alabama that we don’t know about. That must be it. She never wanted him to play music. It was like she just couldn’t allow him to enjoy anything, allow him to be good at anything. She was always yelling at him. “Quit it with that music,” she’d say, “you’ll never be a musician. Get a job.”
His father was a well-educated man. He came from the same town in Georgia as Elijah Muhammed from the Nation of Islam. He talked about him a lot. He wasn’t a Muslim, but occasionally he went to the Nation’s meetings in Chicago on Saturday. He was no match for Elizabeth.
I think there was something not right in Sonny’s head. He never worked anywhere for more than a few days. Later, on North Street, the court had put a restraining order on him. Couldn’t come anywhere near the house. Actually Sonny was a good guy, but he had problems. He drank. I don’t know for sure.’
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Untitled (1957)
Shoeshine shoeshine give your soul a treat
Shoeshine shoeshine can’t be beat
-
AKRON, OHIO, 1960
Dora
‘Yo, Jerome, where you going?’
Reggie Watson shouted and waved to him from across Wooster Ave. ‘M-m-mammio baked a pie,’ he said. ‘She says for you come over.’
Jerome