“You know what?” Alonzo said to him. “Man’s got a right to choose his master.” He patted the seat.
And Thomas climbed up beside him.
They swayed and jostled down the street, the gasping, heaving coolie pulling them at a steady rhythmic lope. Thomas felt almost sick, sweat popping out, though whether it was his discomfort with the coolie or the rocking motion roiling his overambitious breakfast, he was not sure. Alonzo seemed wholly undisturbed, placid almost, as he gazed down at the traffic, so Thomas forced his mind off the rickshaw puller, instead ranging back over what other musicians had told him about Shanghai before he left Seattle.
“Freest place on earth,” Roger Felton had said. “Pleasure every damn place you look, and your money just as good as any white man’s. Think on that! Fellows earn a lot, no two ways about it, but there isn’t a one of them I’ve seen come back with a penny. They spend it all.”
Not I, had been Thomas’s silent reaction. I can save money. He had been much more sobered by what Roger had said when he asked about politics. “Say the Japanese fighting the Chinese, and the Chinese fighting each other. Say gangsters running the city. People disagree, they end up dead, so you best play your music and keep clear of it. Hear?”
The money Lin Ming had quoted him seemed to override such concerns, not to mention his own insufficient skills: fifty dollars a week for band members, and one hundred dollars a week for him, the leader. Granted, those were Shanghai dollars, worth only a third of American, but Lin had said Shanghai prices were as low as dirt-twelve dollars for a tailor-made suit, two for dinner in a restaurant, three dollars for a woman, all night. And in Shanghai he could have any woman, no race laws, a thought that would not stop tugging at him as they steamed across the Pacific.
At home, in Maryland, he’d had his share of white women. Sometimes, when he played a party, he got lucky with a good-time girl afterward, and once in a while, when he was performing as an Egyptian or an Argentine, that girl would be white. None of them were the kind of girls he could know, or call on; they were janes, party girls, girls with bobbed hair and short flapper skirts who liked to be drunk every night, and were still young and pretty enough to do it. Actually there were very few girls back in Baltimore that he could call on, because he had never earned enough money to court the kind of respectable girl he wanted. He hoped Shanghai was going to be different.
On the ship, in his tiny metal-riveted cabin, in the small mirror screwed to the wall, he assessed his face as he tried to put his hopes in order. He took after his father’s family, everyone always said so, light-skinned people. His father’s mother had been a teacher, and her father a chemist and an officer in the Twenty-fifth Infantry regiment in the Indian Wars. He had inherited his father’s looks and his mother’s ear for music, which came in turn from her own mother. But that grandmother fell in love with a landowning man during the Reconstruction years and became a farm wife outside Easton on the Chesapeake’s far shore. She never wavered, his grandmother; a cream and tan beauty in her youth, she played the rest of her life on a parlor upright, performing works that asked hard, crashing questions with no easy answers, pouring through open windows to dissipate in the tangled woods. He had loved that place.
But it was gone, separated from him first by a continent on the rails, and now by the blue Pacific. He had never been at sea before, or on any vessel larger than the flat-bottomed scow he and his cousins had used to explore the tributaries of the Chesapeake up and down Talbot County. He stayed in his cabin that whole first day aboard ship, so afraid was he. It was not until the sun was dropping into the December horizon that he heard the thump of music from Lin Ming’s cabin, and stood with his ear to the metal wall. He knew the song, he had heard it on the radio, back on Creel Street-“Memphis Blues,” by Fletcher Henderson. In a rush of longing, home came back to him, the velvet air, damp and biting in winter, sweet in summer. He almost heard the far-off roar of the crowd at an Orioles game, the slipping, satisfying ring of leather shoes on white marble steps. He had left that world, but not its music, for that had crossed the ocean and was here with him, making him bold. He stepped out and knocked on Lin Ming’s door.
His knuckle had barely touched the metal when the door swung back. Lin looked at him like a thirsty man seeing water; farther along, Thomas would understand how much the other man hated to be alone. “Come in! I thought you would never be emerging. What?” He followed Thomas’s gaze to his ankle-length Chinese gown, slit up each side for easy movement, worn over trousers. “You never saw one? It is freedom. Try sometime. You like Fletcher Henderson?”
“Very much,” said Thomas, always appreciative of the musician’s formality and control.
Lin looked pleased. “He is high level. And to me, he sounds like someone who works from the sheet music. Like you. What’s wrong? You look like you want to show a clean pair of heels! Don’t be embarrassed. I could see that you work by the reading and writing. Now here.” He piled a stack of seventy-eights into Thomas’s arms. “Take these to your room. Take my gramophone. These are songs the Kansas City Kings play, and we have twenty-two days to Shanghai, enough time for you to write them out. At least you can arrive with something.”
Raised on obstacles, Thomas felt the surprise of gratitude almost like a blow. In his experience, one got help from friends, from family, not outsiders. “Thank you.”
Lin waved him away. “Don’t thank me yet. I am taking you to China, where things are as precarious as a pile of eggs. Japan is invading us, they need land and food and the labor of our millions. They already occupy part of the north and are pushing south. China should be united to fight them, but we are divided into the two sides who want to kill each other-the Nationalists and Communists.”
“Whose side are you on?”
“Neither. And I tell you why. The Nationalists and Communists may be poles apart, heaven in the north and the earth in the south, but they do agree on one thing-they think jazz is a dangerous element, and must be banned. So! How can I support either side?”
“Ban jazz?”
“I know.” Lin shook his head. “The arrogance. One hundred mouths could not explain it away. And how could the government ever ban any type of music anyway? This is the age of radio! But Little Greene, listen.” He had started using the nickname on account of Thomas being twenty-five to his twenty-eight. “When you get to Shanghai, Japanese people will try to tell you we Chinese are incapable of governing ourselves. That is their superstition, that we are lazy and disorganized, stupid, we are children who need them to take care of us. They will tell you that we want them there.”
“I don’t think they’ll tell me anything. I’m a musician.”
“Just remember, no matter what they say, do not believe it. They want us as their slaves.” He stretched, settled his gown, and said, “I am dying of the hunger. Let us go to dinner.”
It was the twentieth of December when they finally steamed up the Huangpu, watching from the rail in the cold as lines of coolies carried goods to and from the docks at the water’s edge. They sailed around a turn in the river and the Bund came into view, an imposing colonnaded line of eclectic façades topped with cupolas and clock towers. Behind it crouched a city of low brown buildings.
The ship dropped anchor, and passengers lined up to board the lighter that would take them to shore. He could see the Bund was thick with traffic, its sidewalks crowded. The energy seemed to come right through his feet the moment they bumped the dock and he stepped on the ground again, dear solid ground; he dodged through the crowd behind Lin Ming. All around them passengers swirled away to meet friends, relatives, and servants, then dispersed across a narrow strip of grass directly onto the boulevard.