Diary Of A Blues Goddess

When I was almost seventeen, my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer. It was late-stage before they found it because she was too busy tending to me to take care of herself. Suddenly, hating her for her decidedly bad taste in clothes and bedspreads (mine was still Barbie in high school) was pointless.

I read to her while she was sick in bed. She liked romances with happy endings, and that’s what she got, though I was at an age when I didn’t believe in happy endings. I still don’t. “I can see you rolling your eyes, Georgia,” she weakly said one afternoon.

“Mom, happy endings are bullshit.”

“Georgia Ray, the language.”

“Fine. But they’re still bullshit. Happy endings aren’t for people like me.”

“What exactly is a person like you?” she asked, breathless. Everything, every word, took so much effort.

“An outsider. Different.”

“You’re New Orleans born and bred. How does that make you an outsider, Georgia?”

“No father, for one.” As soon as I said it, I regretted it. Now that she was sick, I was trying so hard not to wound her, but sometimes my resentments were right there on the surface.

I tried to explain to her that happy endings were for the popular girls, not for me with my kinky hair that I never quite accepted, and my exotic looks in the southern state of Louisiana, the social scene in high school dominated by Magnolia Queens and blond debutantes with beautiful drawls. Happy endings weren’t for Damon either, with his lust for the homecoming king—not queen. His desire to be the homecoming queen. Yet complaining about my hair seemed selfish, when my mother’s own perfect coiffure fell out in clumps in the shower one day, swirling down the tub and clogging the drain. I dropped the subject and kept reading to her.

Damon used to come over and give her makeovers, drawing on eyebrows and tying up colorful turbans out of silk scarves. One time, he did her eyes and eyebrows like Elizabeth Taylor in Cleopatra.

“You look just like Liz, Mrs. Miller,” Damon said, painting on the last of her new eyebrows.

“Hand me a mirror.”

I went to get a hand mirror, knowing she would freak out the second she saw herself.

“Now, you just have to go with it.” Damon stood and surveyed his handiwork.

I handed her the mirror, bracing myself for her reaction. But it wasn’t what I expected. She howled with laughter until tears rolled down her face, all the while Damon was begging her, “Don’t cry, don’t cry. It’ll all run.” Soon, she had black tear stains tracing a path down her now-thin face. Then Damon and I started laughing, too. After that, for the first time, my mother started to relax a little, to laugh with us. Maybe she was trying to leave some good memories for me.

Surrounded by death at home, I tried to be a normal teenager knowing my mother was slipping away and my father had stopped sending postcards when I was in the tenth grade. I tried to eat lunch with Damon and study about the Civil War with Mr. Hoffman, my favorite teacher, and learn about sines, cosines and tangents in math class. I tried to carry my lunch tray without tripping and open my locker without getting crushed by the crowds in the hallway.

We eventually moved in with Nan, selling our two-bedroom house in a parish outside New Orleans and coming into the city to live with my grandmother and her ghost. Nan had always been more like Auntie Mame than a grandmother. Strong, adventurous, feminist, stubborn, she tried to will my mother into getting well. But my mother had always wilted in the face of her mother, just as I wilted in the shade of my own mother’s shadow, and so Nan’s will aside, my mother was gone before winter was out. She died in a hospital, something she never wanted to do. Nan and I were there. It was the first time I ever saw a dead body.

That night, I cried until my stomach ached, and then I cried more but without any tears. I had never been perfect for her, and now I wouldn’t have the chance to lose the adolescent brooding and be nice to her, and maybe get a prom date while she was alive. I wouldn’t be able to prove to her that I wasn’t the rebellious girl she thought I was, with the messy room that drove her crazy. “Georgia, I can’t see the floor in here,” was her mantra. I had been angry for so many years, and she had loved me when I didn’t deserve it, and now she was gone.

Casanova Jones came to the wake. I remember sitting in the front of the muffled and velvet funeral parlor, my mother in her best dress—the one she’d been saving for a “special occasion.” She looked serene, but most definitely not like my mother. She was thin and bony and looked as if she was made of wax. Damon was wailing in the bathroom, unable to even come in to view her body. Nan sat next to me, patting my hand and accepting my used tissues, which she discreetly shoved into her vintage clutch purse.

I looked up, face blotchy and red, and mascara-streaked, my hair an unkempt mass of curls, and saw Casanova Jones heading straight toward me. He even had on a tie. His black curly hair fell past the collar of his white shirt, and his swagger, half man, half boy, was still evident, but as my grandmother whispered to me, “He cleans up good.” Rick, aka Casanova, mumbled an “I’m sorry” in the awkward way of high-school kids unsure of what to say when thrust into an adult situation. I loved him in that moment. Actually, I’d been in love with him all of high school. Something about how he pushed his hands through his luxurious head of curls—curls that behaved, unlike my own—and sort of shook his hair into place, about his pale blue eyes, or how he played with a lock of my hair while flirting with me threw me right over the edge. He was my crush. He was my obsession. And he picked my mother’s funeral to show he really cared and wasn’t just toying with me. I was too numb to care.

The last few months of high school passed in a blur of grief. I had originally planned to go far away from my mother after I graduated. I wanted to go to college in Manhattan, rooming with Damon, who longed to go to the Fashion Institute of Technology. Instead, I chose to go to the Newcomb Department of Music at Tulane. That way I could live with Nan. She possessed the spirit I wanted. She could bring out the Georgia who was buried beneath wild hair, hateful adolescence, and all that eyeliner. In Nan, I had a kindred spirit. She saw something in me—a spark of life she called it. I don’t think she ever forgave my mother for living an ordinary life, for being a homemaker and not burning her bra and changing the world.

Nan was the first person to encourage me to sing. My mother said I had a pretty voice as a child, before my father left, but she was the kind of person who didn’t believe in showing off or attracting attention. I remember once being invited to a birthday party when I was a little girl. More than anything, I wanted to wear my new pink dress with the ruffles and crinoline—okay, so what did I know about fashion then? What I didn’t realize, until years later, was that the birthday girl was poor. If I wore my new party dress, I would outshine her at her own party. So my mother made me wear something old and, to my eyes, ugly. This was another of a thousand misunderstandings that only made sense after she had died.

With the wisdom of hindsight, now I see that she couldn’t risk me leaving New Orleans to follow my fortunes as a musician or a singer. I needed to do something “steady”; I had to have “something to fall back on” when I failed, as she was certain I would. The odds of succeeding as a jazz singer or musician are a million to one. For every Harry Connick Jr., every Wynton Marsalis, every Diana Krall, there are ten thousand men like my father, broken down and tormented by their music just as much as they desire it. Some blues singers, like Billie Holiday, embodied both success and destruction. Strung out on heroin, she was a poster child for how the music business can destroy you. My mother wasn’t about to let me risk anything. Least of all my life.

Now, Nan is a different story. I’m not sure how the two of them were even related. My mother occasionally used to sigh at her own mother and mutter something about “baby-switching” at the hospital. Nan was a rebel and risk-taker all her life. She was the kind of woman who wore flaming-red lipstick and kept her hair short, in the latest “Parisian” styles, as a young woman. She had a sense of self that stares back at you in the black-and-white photos in her albums, her high cheekbones and dark eyes commanding attention. She rode in a motorcycle sidecar across the United States with one of her boyfriends, and she danced on a bar with Ernest Hemingway in Key West. She ran the brothel until Sadie died, and even after she married my grandfather, a professional gambler and whiskey importer, she threw parties that made the newspapers. She also never let her racial heritage define her, even down here where sometimes you step off the St. Charles streetcar and swear it’s another era.

Nan was the one to sneak me off to R-rated movies before I was even thirteen. She bought me Junior Mints and filled my head with talk of love affairs and Paris, and the way a man loves a woman with a “bosom.” My mother couldn’t even say the word bra to me. She couldn’t look me in the eyes when I told her I got my first period. Everything about womanhood embarrassed my mother, while Nan encouraged me to embrace it all. Nan was velvet and lipstick. Mom was a buttoned-up oxford shirt and Ivory soap.

Nan pushed me into voice lessons in high school, and then in college she was always there behind me nudging me into the spotlight, telling me that’s where I belonged, “Out where people can see and hear you, for God’s sake, Georgie. Anybody can stand in the shadows. It takes courage to shine.”

Yes, Nan is a character all her own. And I knew on the pressing issue of Casanova Jones her advice would be quite simple. Nan believes approaching summer drives all of us in New Orleans mad. It has its roots in Mardi Gras, whose long finger extends madness throughout the year. But deeper than that, it has its roots in the bayou and the mist.

When summer comes, she believes we all need romance, because, as she puts it, “Georgia, there’s nothing to do in the Crescent City heat but drink mint juleps, make passionate love, lay naked afterward underneath the ceiling fan and listen to the blues.”

chapter

7

A rriving home, I stood in front of our house, its ancient brick weathered and elegant. The house did seem to be alive. Some nights, Nan and I would hear a woman walking upstairs, her heels clicking across old floorboards. Occasionally, I smelled perfume in my room, a complex mix of jasmine and lily of the valley. Not my perfume, yet an intoxicatingly familiar scent. The way I could smell it just in one spot in the room as I crossed my floor made me feel as if I was being watched by someone. I wanted to whisper to Sadie’s ghost, What is it you want from me? But I think I was afraid of the answer.

I stepped inside the house and found Nan in the kitchen preparing a feast. All the members of Georgia’s Saints would be attending Sunday Saints Supper, along with Dominique, Gary’s wife, Annie, Maggie—and Red.

“Smells good, Nan. What’re you making?”

“Georgia, for goodness’ sake, you’ve lived in New Orleans since the day you were born. Can’t you smell it?”

“Jambalaya?”

“Mmm, hmm. Mighty spicy, too.”

“Red’s coming. I hope that’s all right.”

She looked genuinely pleased—as she did every Sunday we went through this little charade. “Of course that’s fine, Georgia. You set another place at the dining-room table.”

Thank God my grandfather left Nan “loaded,” as they say, because she likes to entertain with style. Every Sunday bottles of good red wine are uncorked to breathe, champagne chills in the refrigerator, and delicious smells emanate from brewing pots and pans. Our dining-room table could fit twenty, its cherry-wood surface polished to a brilliant sheen. The house recalls the grandeur of New Orleans, and the antiques give it character. At any moment, you half expect a Southern belle with a hoop skirt, or a flapper from the 1920s, to walk down the stairs…or Sadie to return to life.

I pulled another plate out of the china cabinet. The plates had been imported from France at the turn of the twentieth century by my great-great-grandmother. It made me nervous serving on them. Each of them, hand-painted with a pattern of tea roses, was probably worth more than the band pulled in on a Friday night, but my grandmother doesn’t believe in saving the good china for fancy occasions. Her motto is: “Having your friends gathered around your table is occasion enough.” We’d lost a plate and a saucer or two, as well as several teacups—three when we opened our house to a Christmastime historic-homes tour—but we still had most of the pieces, and the table did look spectacular each Sunday, with ivory-colored linen napkins and stemware sparkling beneath a chandelier dangling with Austrian crystals.

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