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
“We spent the night on the beach by a small fire and wrapped in each other. I was a bit timid, kept imagining he thought me fast or loose like my grandma said all white men thought about us. I worried would he explore me like virgin timberland, Lewis and Clark of the avant-garde, or was I a performance piece of his. An unwitnessed happening. I checked to see if his neck was red. It wasn’t. I sleep soundly.”
That’s not all they experienced together, a common dream, a common sweat raspy with inarticulate spurious desire. Zoom turns out to have a name, Joel, given him by his white parents who always told him to be nice to everybody, especially the “Negroes,” whose life was so hard.
“I don’t need you to be nice to me, goddamn you. We’ve never needed white people to do anything for us, let alone be nice to us. And just what was your poor white trash ass gonna do for me anyway? Huh? Teach me about what? Lincoln and Bix whatever his name is? This isn’t going to work. It’s not even a sane activity. Why didn’t you just play your little tune, get on your bike and go wherever white men go after they’ve been somewhere they don’t belong?”
“Listen to yourself, Liliane,” Zoom firmly but softly utters the first words of his pattern of seduction that keeps my Lili constantly reevaluating the immediate effects of racism on her and her loved ones. “Listen to yourself, Lili,” like that was going to absolve him of any association with the bloody limits of our expectations and hopes dashed on barbed wire and ropes. With the charm of Dave Brubeck and the guts of Stan Getz he wound his way through Lili’s perceptions, changing lenses constantly, reframing her instincts, her sense of touch. If she held him tentatively, with caution, that was her own racism keeping her from him. When she heard nothing in Steve Lacy’s escapades, she had closed herself off. If Paul Whiteman was not the King of Jazz, she didn’t know that music has no boundaries, is a gift, is universal. Humph, just a ball of confusion, my Lili, mi corazón.
“Victor-Jésus, do you know there are some of us who have gone off with some of them and we never see each other?” I didn’t understand.