Colson Whitehead - John Henry Days

“No thank you,” Jennifer says and nearly runs out. She stops a few stores down, her face hot. She has a dime. She could walk two blocks down to the Five and Dime but it seems so far. Jennifer looks up the street and sees the stained black awning of the Tip Top and immediately turns away to face the music store. Halfway between the Candy Store and the Tip Top, around the corner from her house and yet she’s never seen this store before. Seen it from across the street of course but there’s no name on the outside. From here, her face in the glass, she sees records taped up all across the window, so many that she can’t see in the shop. She doesn’t know any of the names on the records. Billie Holiday, Bessie Smith and W. C. Handy. The sun has faded the record covers so that they cling on the glass as blanched barnacles of what they had been. She has a dime. She doesn’t know why, she pushes the door.

Jennifer smells air that at bottom is dusty and musty, and up top sweet and slightly acrid. The light allowed by the record covers in the window, all those sliver cracks, merges into a limp gray that is defeated only at the end of the room, where a naked bulb shines down over the counter. The room is narrow, and the aisles between the boxes of records and stacks of old, amber magazines remind her of the tramped spaces in the park, the beaten-down grass that through wordless agreement of all who pass makes a path. The two men at the counter stare at her interruption. The one behind the counter is a fat man in a striped red sweater whose palms are pressed down resolutely on the cluttered counter, as if it might levitate. His head is shaved and the sweat glistens on the short hairs, like dew impaled on grass. The man leaning against the register slouches with his shoulders forward in a bony landslide, his head ducking beneath a cloud of slow smoke. He’s dressed in jeans and a denim shirt with one tail tucked in. He exhales out of the corner of his mouth, looking at Jennifer, sticks a toothpick between his lips and passes a tiny cigarette to the man behind the counter, who secrets it out of sight.

Jennifer turns her face to the record crate nearest her and starts fingering the heavy 78s, trying to be obscure. W. C. Handy spreads his hands wide on the cover of the first, his band behind him poised at their instruments. She flips quickly through them for a few moments to kill time. What is she going to do with a dime and a Victrola at home she’s not even allowed to touch? The phonograph sits in the parlor, polished to gleam. Not that she could do anything with it anyway, since her parents don’t own any records. It’s like a vase, or the candlesticks in the downstairs hallway, something that roosts in the Sutter brownstone in its designated place. For show. She hears the men on the other side of the room begin to murmur to each other. They’ve gotten over her intrusion here. She smells the strange air in the place and remembers that her mother told her to practice for her recital and thinks she should go home. Her mother won’t like it if she messes up in the middle of Jacques Wolfe’s “Shortnin’ Bread” while Jimmy Mason and Sojourner Gardiner, with their flute and recorder and snotty attitudes, get through their songs fine. Scandalized by her pretty little girl in front of the Sepia Ladies Club. She’s about to leave the store when it occurs to her: she can buy sheet music. Then she has an excuse to be here in this store her mother would obviously not approve of, with its dirt and shiftless-looking clientele, just two doors down from the Tip Top. She glances over at the counter. The two men face her, heads tipped together and saying something she can’t hear. The man with the toothpick pulls it out of his mouth like tugging a weed, looks down at it and replaces it on the other side of his mouth.

She makes her way between the piles of newspapers, steps over a broom currently enjoying an indefinite period of unemployment and deeper into the sweet cigarette smell at the back of the store. She looks up at the owner and waits for him to say, “Can I help you?” be friendly like Mr. Polaski, but he continues talking, obviously seeing her there but not saying anything. He has twin moles on each cheek waxing over his bushy black goatee.

“Do you sell sheet music?” Jennifer asks.

The owner’s head rolls on his neck and he stares down at her. “I got sheet music over there, I got sheet music all over the floor over there, what kind of stuff you looking for?” His tone like she’s been asking him questions all day. His eyes shift over quickly to his friend in message, then return to Jennifer. “I got Hit Parade shit, jazz, I got New Orleans, what do you want?”

“Do you have anything for ten cents, please?”

“Ten cents? Ten cents won’t get you a dime in here. I’m just a man trying to make a living here,” he says, opening the cash drawer with a button and a smart chime, and then slamming it shut again to underscore his point.

“Why don’t you give her a break, man?” asks the man with the toothpick.

The owner squints at his Saturday afternoon companion. “What did you say?”

“Give her a break, man”—clearing his throat with a gush—“she’s a little girl.” He smiles down at Jennifer, parting lips to promenade gums and three loyal teeth.

“You got other places to be, right? I know you got other places to be.” The toothpick man shrugs and looks down at his feet. The owner looks down at Jennifer again, grimacing. “I’ll tell you what,” he says, “I have some old stuff in the back that I can’t get rid of. Why don’t you wait a minute and then you can see what you see.” He condemns his friend with a stare and disappears behind dusty green curtains into the back before Jennifer can say thank you.

The man reaches behind the counter and retrieves the cigarette. “Little crotchety,” he says to Jennifer as he lights the end. He removes the toothpick and holds it straight up in his fist as if there were a balloon at the tip of it. Jennifer watches him inhale with dedication and then he adds, without letting smoke escape, “He’s crazy.” He nods to himself, agreeing anew with what he just said. Jennifer spies an autographed photo on the counter of the owner with his arms around a big woman in a black dress. She can’t make out the signature or the dedication. In the photograph, the owner is much slimmer and wears a smart pinstripe suit and a homburg hat. His slim mustache then is now somewhere in his overgrown goatee. Hearing movement in the back room, the man exhales quickly and returns the slim cigarette behind the counter. Toothpick back in his lips.

“Here we are,” the owner says. As he parts the curtain with the corners of the Coca-Cola crate, he sniffs, nostrils flapping like bellows, and he frowns at his friend. “Pipes burst in the basement and soaked all this through,” he says, setting it down on the floor. “Some of it — you can see for yourself. That’s all I got for ten cents.”

“Thank you,” Jennifer says.

While the owner starts berating his friend in a low voice, Jennifer kneels before the crate. A strong gust of cellar hits her from the water-ruffled paper. There’s grit on her fingers as soon as she touches the first one, “Hallelujah, I’m a Bum” by Jack Waite. Black clumps of mold bloom in some spots on the wrinkled pages, and each page she touches releases more of the musty smell. She’s going to have to wash her hands as soon as she gets home. She hears a match struck. She doesn’t recognize any of the composers or the songs. Mr.

Fuller doesn’t teach her songs like these. “Abdul Abulbul Amir” by Frank Crumit, “Swingin’ Down the Lane” by Isham James. They’re really old, these songs, over twenty years old, from 1928 and 1920 and 1923. She looks at the dust on her fingers, looks down to make sure her dress isn’t touching the floor. She can’t find anything she wants, and her mother would take one look at whatever came from this box and put in it the fireplace. It’s dirty. But she doesn’t feel she can just walk out without buying something because the crotchety owner went all the way downstairs, so she grabs the next piece of music, “The Ballad of John Henry” by Jake Rose, and rises from the box.