Jazz Funeral by Julie Smith

sang, (“CCrrrryy, baaaaaaaaby!” or “Ttttrrrrryyyyyyyyyyy just a little bit harder!”) she had thought, I didn’t know a white woman could do that . She knew Etta and Irma, Bessie Smith, Billie Holiday, all the great blues singers—Ham had given her a terrific music education—but she’d simply had no idea a white woman could produce a sound like that. Ti-Belle sang great, sure—Melody’d love to be as good as Ti-Belle—but the fullness of Janis, the total involvement, the feeling there—that was something else again. She felt almost reverent about it.
    Okay. She would write the song, and then next year, after “Get It While You Can,” she’d sing it. It would be a beautiful tribute, and she owed it to Janis, who inspired her personally as well as artistically.
    Melody got a comfortable, warm feeling, thinking about it, about all the good things to come. It was like being in a cocoon, or sitting dry in front of a fire on a rainy day. She came out, she saw the crowd, and through the magic of her inner television, she saw herself onstage, belting her heart out. Joel was there—she had another identity now, but she could trust Joel and she’d take him with her, straight to the top. He was the only one from her past life she could trust, but at least there was one. He was lead guitar. She had a huge band behind her. Huge. All black. And she was black too. Somehow in the fantasy, she’d turned black.
    I wish , she thought. Don’t I wish.
    She tried to readjust the daydream, see herself in a more realistic way, but she couldn’t. She didn’t know what the new Melody would look like, the Melody who wasn’t a girl, wasn’t a wannabe, but the one who’d metamorphosed—who was an artist and a woman, respected as such by the world. Not her family (her late family, she meant), not the kids at Country Day, but the whole world! She had that potential now, to be that person.
    But she had no cultural context for it. Her dad was a businessman, her mom—what?
    Somebody who gets her nails done.
    Neither had graduated from college, but that wasn’t the point. The point was, they didn’t take her seriously. They didn’t know what she was, didn’t understand her. She hadn’t been named Melody because they hoped she’d have musical talent, but because her mom had thought it was cute. Ham had been the one who introduced her to music. If it hadn’t been for Ham, she’d probably be on drugs. Because music was her escape. Her escape and her inspiration. A place she could go to get away, to be somebody else, not to have to live where she lived, with those odd people she was related to. She didn’t understand them. Why would you spend your life selling sandwiches? Melody could see it if you really needed to, but her dad loved it. What kind of person would make that his whole life, ignore his family, ignore the daughter he had late in life, who should have been the apple of his eye? Actually, he said she was, but he never paid attention to her except to forbid something. That was the way she’d describe her father: forbidding.
    Her mother was worse. She didn’t care about anything except her damned appearance. Melody was never going to wear makeup, never going to color her hair, certainly never going to have manicured nails. You couldn’t even play the piano with nails like that.
    Why couldn’t she have been born a Boucree, like Joel? It wasn’t so impossible; New Orleans was full of families like the Boucrees—the Nevilles, the Marsalises, the Batistes, the Thomases, the Lasties, the Jordans—families where music was life. It was the family business and you went into it. They taught you to play the minute you were old enough to hold a drumstick, and you were performing at JazzFest by the time you were seven. It had happened to Joel. She’d watched him play last year with the Boucrees and had nearly jumped up and down, shouting that she knew him, and not only that, she played in a band with him. That she, Melody