jazzy

i stumbled onto a jazz band rehearsing this evening in a cafe i support because it is independent and black owned and NOT the new starbucks on 118th and 8th ave. i walked in to buy a chai as i waited for some people who define the term colored people because the only time they know is cp.
i asked if i could sit because it looked like there was commotion and i was told there would be a rehearsal going on, if i didn't mind. so i sat and i pulled out my book, jazz by toni morrison (oh so appropriate, right?) and began to read while they hooked the mics and tuned the bass and adjusted the levels of sound. and then the singing began and the words on the page danced away and the book dropped to the table and my toes started tapping and my eyes closed and i started to smile and the vocalist said "cut" and tossed this line to me- "you are making my day right now you are so making my day."
for once my anal desire for punctuality from all people in my life was assuaged as i, in a new move, actually enjoyed waiting for a colored person. ;)

free jazz tomorrow night at 6 at tribal spears gallery and cafe, 117th and 8th avenue, harlem.
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now, of course, i am reading and i am blogging and that means i am going to share an excerpt with you because this wouldn't really be me if i didn't.

I have stood in cane fields in the middle of the night when the sound of it rustling hid the slither of the snakes and I stood still waiting for him and not stirring a speck in case he was near and I would miss him, and damn the snakes my man was coming for me and who or what was going to keep me from him? Plenty times, plenty times I have carried the welts given me by a two-tone peckerwood because I was late in the field row the next morning. Plenty times, plenty, I chopped twice the wood that was needed into short logs and kindlin so as to make sure the crackers had enough and wouldn't go hollering for me when I was bound to meet my Joe Trace don't care what and do what you will or may he was my Joe Trace. Mine. I picked him out from all the others wasn't nobody like Joe he make anybody stand in cane in the middle of the night; make any woman dream about him in the daytime so hard she miss the rut and have to work hard to get the mules back on the track. Any woman, not just me. Maybe that is what she saw. Not the fifty-year-old man toting a sample case, but my Joe Trace, my Virginia Joe Trace who carried a light inside him, whose shoulders were razor sharp and who looked at me with two-color eyes and never saw anybody else...Is that why he let her scoop the melty part from around the edges of his pint of ice cream, stick her hand down in his salt-and-butter popcorn.
(p. 97, jazz)

kinda like the love song the jazz lady sang