Blues, Jazz, and the Story I’ve Been Waiting to Tell
My first flirtation with Jazz, Blues, and the Harlem Renaissance was a 10th grade English class. I don’t remember my teacher’s name but I can see his face when I close my eyes. I remember how he was always trying to feed us (candy, pastries, fruit, whatever) and only in hindsight do I realize why. I remember that he was always so excited — about what we were reading, about our thoughts, even about the silence that often met his enthusiastic lessons. He wasn’t my favorite teacher but that’s only because the competition between truly inspiring teachers was pretty damn stiff. He was good though.
We had to write a paper. I don’t remember the guidelines, I don’t even remember who recommended my topic, all I know is that I ended up at the Berkeley Public Library. (Main Branch. This is important because it was literally just up the street from my high school. I wasn’t traveling far for research. My, how times have changed.) I checked out a very thick biography of Bessie Smith.
If you don’t know Bessie Smith, I will not be giving you her biography. Like I said, the one I read was very thick. But I do have recommendations:
Read: Jackie Kay, Bessie Smith: A Poet’s Biography of a Blues Legend
Watch: Bessie (2015) streaming on HBO Max
Listen: Empress of the Blues
I don’t remember the book I read and it’s for the best because I plagiarized the fuck out of it. I was fifteen, still learning about plagiarism and citations, sue me. (Please don’t sue me.) I turned in a 25-page paper, who knows how much of it was stolen. I failed the assignment, but my teacher (still unnamed in my memory) was so excited that I was excited about Bessie Smith, so that was nice. At the time, I wasn’t planning to go to college anyway, what did I care if I failed the assignment? I passed the class.
I still don’t know what stuck in my brain about Bessie, but I do remember falling in love with the Blues. A year later, I had my first serious breakup and I responded accordingly: stopped by the Tower Records on Shattuck Avenue, bought The Ultimate Billie Holiday album on cd, walked home, lugged my stereo (YES, STEREO!) into the bathroom, and played that album on full blast while I cried in the shower. As you do.
I knew long before I discovered Bessie that I liked girls and not in the “aren’t my friends pretty?!” kind of way, but in the “I kissed my best friend under the covers at a sleepover and I never forgot how it felt (not even when I realized she was a terrible friend and we grew apart)” kind of way. But reading about Bessie and so many of the other queer women in Blues and Jazz was like having a lightbulb turn on in my head. I knew queer people, I knew lesbians, it just somehow never dawned on me until that biography that not everyone kissed their best friend under the covers, and some girls did even more.
Imagine that.
It was years and many more innocent (and not so innocent) encounters with other girls before I realized what to do with that information. You know, besides the obvious.
When I was a graduate student at Ohio State University, I spent years as a teaching assistant for a wild collection of professors. Some were fantastic at their jobs, some were just there so they didn’t get fined, most were somewhere in between. One of my favorite professors to TA for was an adjunct, people who are, generally speaking, some of the best professors at any college or university — they have to be because the next semester’s worth of classes is never guaranteed. She was a white Jewish lesbian who always smelled like cigarette smoke because she smoked a cigarette on the way to class and another after. She was also a brilliant teacher. (Yes, I’ve forgotten her name, but that’s because I’m terrible with names. It’s not any of you, it’s me!) Anyway, she, as most adjuncts do, always taught large lecture courses and each time I was her TA, I sat in class alternating between editing my master’s thesis and learning at her feet. She taught the Harlem Renaissance through art — music, paintings, poems — with a focus on women and my favorite reading in her class reader was Gertrude ‘Ma’ Rainey’s “Prove It On Me Blues.” No matter what work I had due, I always stopped to watch her guide students through this song — we listened and then read and then took every line in turn. The song is very gay, very fun, kinda sexy, and for her students (most of whom were white Christian Midwesterners who thought of Columbus as ‘the big city’) revelatory.
I used to say on Twitter (rip) that the aversion to sex and queerness when talking about (Black) history is so odd because the ancestors were fucking and not just to procreate. Some of them were adventurous and daring and filthy, just like some of us are. Some of them had to hide; often they hid in plain sight, sometimes they never hid at all. History is complicated. The history of queer people is complicated, but it exists.
When I started writing A Blue Note, there were very few of a few things that I noted: Black sapphic romances, Black queer historical romances, Black historical romances set in the 20th century. [There are far more (contemporary) Black sapphic romances now. So, that’s a change. There could always be more and more and more.] At the time, I was saying that I didn’t want to write historical romances (I’m still working on it), but I did want to dip my toe into historical fiction.
I wanted to write this story.
A Blue Note is a dual timeline historical fiction novel about two women connected by a name and a deep desire to find a place where they could be themselves unapologetically. Some stories start with a scene playing out in my head. Hilariously, the one that sparked A Blue Note didn’t even make it into the book, but I can describe it to you:
Pauletta is wandering through a deserted archive late at night, Lady Day is singing the blues softly, distantly in the background. Her fingertips move lightly over a card catalogue, an unknown woman’s love poem ringing in her head. Footsteps — heavy, steady — jolt her out of her contemplation. She knows that sound. The man who makes them also makes her heart race. He makes Pauletta feel something after years of a drowning numbness. The poem in her head makes even more sense now.
Ninety years ago, a woman with skin so dark it drinks up the light, short but loud, lies in a disheveled bed, naked on a cool summer’s night, her pen scratching over rough paper, while her lover, half-dressed, her small breasts resting on her soft stomach, has a trumpet pressed to her lips, the soft, melancholy melody drifting off into a busy Harlem night.
That was the book Bessie, Billie, Ma Rainey, and all my teachers inspired me to write.
I love all my books, but A Blue Note is the story I’ve been waiting all my life to tell.