Free A Moment in the Sun by John Sayles Page A

Miss Loretta has never thought of colored living in homes with attics before, but the Luncefords are quality people, Episcopalians, Jessie’s father a graduate of a northern medical college and her mother one of the doyennes of what Daddy calls “sepia society.” They have a lovely house on Nun Street, keep a carriage and a servant girl.
    “You have a well-developed sense of drama, Jessie.”
    “But I’m serious!”
    “I do not doubt that for a moment.”
    Miss Loretta’s father scolded and harangued but never took her seriously. Nor did Professor Einhorn, constantly bemoaning of her lack of Empfindsamkeit . Men. Self-important men, towering edifices of consequence. At least now when Daddy interrupts her playing with one of his perambulating tirades she is allowed to continue throughout his aria . Her piece must be slow and unobtrusive, of course—once she accompanied his outburst with the Heroic Polonaise and was cursed for mocking him. I am forty years of age, she thinks, and my father treats me like a dim schoolgirl.
    Jessie leans back as she begins the return, softening her touch, the notes achingly beautiful, the first pale rays of sunshine after a storm, and looks to Miss Loretta with tears in her eyes. Sometimes it is the composition, sometimes her own sixteen-year-old’s romantic anguish—it does not much matter. She is not the singer that little Carrie was and has none of her ambition, but she is a channel for the music the way the truly gifted ones are. A prodigy, yes, though any of the colored girls who can make their way through a classical piece is labeled thus, and the term devalued. With this one Miss Loretta has to concentrate to be of any help, to resist the urge to stop judging and surrender to mere listening. The music is always of a piece when Jessie plays.
    “I know you’re using them all, Miss Butler,” Professor Einhorn said to her once, “but I’m only hearing the white keys.”
    It is, at times, difficult not to be jealous. The girl coming in at twelve and playing, flawlessly, the Minute Waltz , and when her teacher professed amazement saying, innocently, “But Miss Loretta, it’s a song .” And now—
    “Idiocy!” thunders Daddy from the next room.
    He stalks in waving the Messenger. Jessie leaps immediately into the Number Four, attacca il presto as Chopin himself suggested, the piece she likes to call “Off to the Races.”
    “ ‘There is no gain,’ ” Daddy reads in the voice he uses to quote men he thinks to be fools, “ ‘that may be won through the peaceful machinations of diplomacy and commerce equal to that which is ripped from the enemy in the grisly pursuit of war!’ Have you ever heard such rot in your life?”
    “I know, Daddy, it’s terrible.”
    The sixteenth notes scurry after each other, Jessie seemingly unaware of the old man’s estimable presence in the room. Miss Loretta has heard this piece plagiarized in a particularly vulgar melodrama, underscoring the action as hero and villain chased each other around the stage and heroine wriggled helplessly tied across a railroad track.
    “Imbeciles!” he cries, God’s angry man. “A pack of yellow dogs! Jingo-istic, profiteering, mealy-mouthed—”
    The veins are standing out in his neck in the manner that worries her so, Daddy thwacking the rolled newspaper against his thigh to emphasize each new deprecation, and Jessie plays through it all, now politely twisting her head to acknowledge his presence, accustomed to his reports from the editorial page. Roaring Jack Butler, his few living friends call him, and his enemies too, though with an implication that he is not of right mind. That the Union prevailed in the great conflict did nothing to mitigate their opinion of him as a scalawag and heretic, and there are few of Wilmington’s great men who will meet his eye in passing.
    “—self-serving, sanctimonious—”
    “Daddy, I have a student—”
    “They want an em pire!” He crushes the paper in his