Free A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles

a bit like a threat, but he can see Mr. Turpin is smiling in the mirror, gently tapping the thin layer at the top of his head with his fingers. “Say, Dorsey, how come a good-looking young fellow like you isn’t hitched yet?”
    Dorsey flicks lather off the blade, rinses it clean in the pan. “Oh, I been studyin it, Mr. Turpin. Got a gal picked out.”
    “That’s good to hear.” The pharmacist winks. Dorsey always hates it when they wink, especially if there’s a nasty story coming after. “Before we know it you’ll have a whole tribe of pickaninnies to support.”
    Dorsey turns away, strops the blade hard on the leather. “Whatever you say, Mr. Turpin.”
    “The tyranny of numbers,” grumbles the Judge. “If we bred like damned jackrabbits we might stand a chance.”
    Mr. Turpin leaves two nickels on the counter and turns at the door. “Don’t you worry, Judge,” he calls. “Plans are being formulated. Prominent citizens are involved.” With that he steps out onto the street, setting his hat over his haircut before the breeze can muss it.
    Colonel Waddell settles into the next chair as Hoke flaps the cloth out and drapes it around his neck. “If a move to remedy the situation is afoot,” he says, frowning, “I have not yet been informed of it.”
    The Judge seems lost in thought, and the lather has been sitting on his face long enough. Dorsey reaches two fingers under but doesn’t quite touch him. “Chin?”
    The white man grunts and tilts his head back for the razor.
    Miss Loretta envies the colored girl her fingers. Her own were never long enough, never nimble enough to do justice to Chopin, her left hand adequate at tempo but her right fumbling to arpeggiate his harmonies. She had to think too far in advance, worrying about what pitfall lay ahead, and would lose the emotional thread of the music. But this one, Jessie, glides over the keys, rocking back and forth slightly as she plays the nocturne, closing her eyes for the darker passages and talking softly to her teacher, not so much distracted from the music as allowing it to take on the color of her mood.
    “I love him so much .”
    She does not mean Chopin.
    Miss Loretta does not allow herself to smile. She can recall making much the same statement, in much the same desperate tone, to old Aunt Kizzy while the servant combed her hair out at night. “ Chile ,” Kizzy would say, shaking her head, “ you got yo life all in a knot .”
    “Being in love is a state to be envied,” Miss Loretta responds, flipping through the sheet music in her lap as Jessie lets the final tone decay. “Let’s go back to the études—try the Number Three.”
    The colored girl picks out a single E, hums it, then rocks forward into the Tristesse .
    She has worked so diligently, this one, advancing between lessons much more than she does during them, working at the purely technical exercises without complaint, listening to criticism and acting upon it gracefully. But there is something more, beyond what application and hours at the bench can achieve. She has the gift.
    “This is a stroll through a beautiful wooded glade,” Professor Einhorn said once when Miss Loretta, in her own student days, was struggling through one of the lovelier preludes. “You, young lady, are pulling up stumps.”
    She had been the favorite target of his epigrams, and after each she would press on all the more doggedly with her inadequate digits, clenching her jaw, humiliation roiling within her but never allowing it to color her performance. Not like this one—
    “My father will never accept him,” says Jessie, shaking her head as if it is a new realization, something the music has just informed her of, and not the recurring opera seria that has accompanied every lesson this year.
    “That is what fathers are for, I’m afraid.”
    “If he had any idea of how I feel, he’d lock me in the attic.”
    Jessie plays the agitato departure in the middle of the étude, frowning at the keys.