Chapters (31)
- Cover
- Title Page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Room in the Dark I
- Fawns of the Diaspora Court Liliane in Paris, While Tabou Combo Whispers “Coq Qualité” in Her Ears
- Room in the Dark II
- “I Usedta Drink, Smoke and Do the Hoochie-Koo,” or What’s a Girl to Do When Her Mother Looks Like Ruth Brown
- Room in the Dark III
- “El Bochinche” es que only Fe Cortijo Knows or All the LeBron Brothers Know If Victor-Jésus María Sang Lili to Her Freedom
- Room in the Dark IV
- And Where Is Garnett Mimms?
- Room in the Dark V
- I Know Where Kansas City Is, But Did Wilbert Harrison Ever Get There?
- Room in the Dark VI
- Zoom Went the Strings of Liliane’s Heart, But Arsenio Rodriguez Could Have Told Her the Music Sounds Just as Sweet When We’re Blind and Still We See
- Room in the Dark VII
- I Know Where the E Train Stops But I’m “Sendin’ Out an S.O.S.” and I’m Not Edwin Starr Either
- Room in the Dark VIII
- “Happy, Happy Birthday, Baby” or Wouldn’t It Be Great If the Lead Singer of The Crests Wasn’t a White Boy and I Could Be My Mother?
- Room in the Dark IX
- Every Time My Lil World Seems Blue, I Just Haveta Look at You and Learn Eye-Hand Coordination
- Room in the Dark X
- “That’s Why I Love Her So and Yeah, Yeah, Yeah, I Want to Know” or Why Jackie Wilson Died in Silence
- Room in the Dark XI
- There’s No Use Cryin’ “Forever” or Hyacinthe Returns from a Very Blue Holiday for Real B(l)ack at Ya
- Room in the Dark XII
- Lollie Struts Her Stuff Thru “The Sea of Love” or the Brides of Frankenstein Catch the Bouquet
- By Ntozake Shange
- Acknowledgments
- Copyright
——— “Betcha by golly, wow.” Ciao.
I Know Where Kansas City Is, But Did Wilbert Harrison Ever Get There?
Five generations of Malveaux had graduated St. Augustine’s in New Orleans. Five generations of Malveaux had set the pace for the best of the race througout Louisiana. Why, through some parts of East Texas and western Mississippi folks would recount, with great seriousness, the accomplishments and achievements of this Creole phenomenon, the Malveaux, who could have turned their backs on their darker brothers, but did not, never had, and sposed ta never woulda, but Sawyer Malveaux III musta come from some extraordinarily recessive DNA combine. St. Emma’s, the by-the-rules-for-you-rich-colored-boys-what-act-the-fool school, didn’t even want him. This was not true for any girl named Emma, Raelene, Raelette, Nancy, Eugenia, Alexandria, Beth, Ann, Annie, Annabelle, or Liliane. That’s me.
St. Louis in the spring break was a giant ball for young well-to-do Midwestern and Southeastern children of the Talented Tenth. Every other child I met was going to see me at Wellesley or Fisk. The young boys won cross-country and tennis scholarships to Yale and Princeton or Tennessee A&T. It depended on how one’s parents felt about uplifting the race. Some would die before you went to Harvard. Some would die if you didn’t. But that wasn’t really the point. The issue was this issue: that we should crossbreed or intrafertilize and become the Beyond Belief Brood (offspring) of the Talented Tenth.
I knew I was part of this process. I’d yearned for what Papa had promised: a courageous colored man with enough niggah in him to make any niggah at ease and enough class to make them wonder about theirs. And this Sawyer Malveaux III could do without so much as lifting his pinkie, which he would sometimes do to make sure we knew his nails were manicured regularly. They were.
They were long, delicate fingers that arched and contracted. There was a spiderlike quality to his movements: practiced, intricate, manipulative, and beautiful. He liked that he was actually prettier than most of us; the one he chose, the one he let know he had decided against, and the poor creatures he didn’t even see. He always walked into a party or strode the deck of someone’s yacht as if Hannibal and his elephants in the Alps wasn’t nothin’, Foxes of Harrow and lil Inches’s Mother he coulda written in his sleep one night and Jackie Wilson on the same stage as Chuck Jackson and Smokey Robinson singin’ the Paragons and the Jester’s greatest hits wasn’t nothin’. Sawyer Malveaux III was an irredeemable hoodlum.