Free Blue Hole Back Home: A Novel by Joy Jordan-Lake Page B

small meant their flimsy walls couldn’t contain all the life pent up inside.
    On a corner where our truck pulled to a stop at a red light, a group of young men huddled just outside one of the buildings, metal bars over the neon of its windows. Their arms around one another and their heads tipped toward the inside of the circle they’d formed, they looked like they were waiting for a quarterback to shout them their plays. I shrunk tighter into my corner, watched the new girl’s face for signs of abject terror at being stuck at a stoplight in this part of town, where white people, we’d been told all our lives, were not welcome and, God knew, not safe. Sanna’s face registered, so far, that she didn’t understand the danger we were in, a truck bed full of white teenagers, and one new girl from someplace we’d only recently learned to find on a map, all of us with no doors we could lock.
    But she was leaning out over the side of the truck. And so was Bo. Trying to listen.
    I suddenly realized what she was trying to hear. The young men—at least ten of them circled there on the Seventh Street sidewalk—were singing. One of them bent first forward and then back, lifting a fully extended trombone toward the sky. A saxophone flashed, red neon reflecting off its brass, and a trumpet flared high and clear about the melody.
    “One would surmise,” L. J. said into my ear, “they were too hot inside. With which one can sympathize.” He nodded toward the low-slung building where bodies pressed into each other as they squeezed through the door and emerged, swaying, hands on each others’ waists, following the band into the night.
    The red traffic light was just turning green, but Emerson kept the truck where it was. The musicians ignored us, each of them finding his part, breaking into harmonies and half-harmonies, falsettos and rhythms I’d heard nothing quite like. Not in person at least. Their knees bent and straightened in time to the beat so that the whole huddle sank and rose to their tune.
I was alone, I took a ride, I didn’t know what I would find there.
Another road, where maybe I could see another kind of mind there …
     
    I waited for the young men to notice us staring at them from the truck, until I realized their eyes were closed, most of them, and the ones that were open were not watching us. They’d been swept into their own music and swam there still, feeling the rapids and steering together. We were nothing but far-off spectators on shore, irrelevant.
    Jimbo snatched up a shovel and put its handle to his mouth as a mike. He leaned forward over the edge of the truck bed in time to supply the Ooohs of the next lines.
    I leaned in toward L. J. “Beatles,” I whispered, recognizing the song and savoring a moment of superior knowledge. “This is their song.”
    L. J. cut his eyes at me. “Earth, Wind and Fire’s covering of this song is the far superior version, as demonstrated by this group’s rendition. Complete,” he nodded toward the band, “with homemade kalimba.” He pointed toward the wooden box someone had nailed metal spoons to, and now strummed with his thumbs.
    A group of five women slipped out onto the sidewalk from another one of the shacks. They looked middle-aged, one of them heavy, another one of them tall and stalk-slender, and she tucked her own arm under the heavy one’s for support. They were well dressed, the tall one in heels and the heavy one in a floral print dress with a wide scoop of lace at her collar. At least three of the ladies carried books under their arms that maybe were Bibles. I’d noticed once the way Jimbo cradled his own; there’s a certain way people carry them, gingerly, like there was something inside they were a little scared of, something that might go off if you treated it roughly or ignored it too long.
    For a moment, I expected the ladies to charge through the huddle of young men and into the bar and clear it of all iniquity. Or maybe to turn to