Free The Jazz Palace by Mary Morris Page A

restless and afraid. Its melody drifted until it came upon a dark-eyed girl who was sitting up in bed.
    Pearl was wide-awake, listening. The music had a rhythm to it that made her think of that boy, the one who was drumming his fingers on the railing just before the
Eastland
sank. Pearl could still see his hands, moving, and the sound that rose from below coaxed her out of bed. She tiptoed to the landing, pausing there.
    A trumpeter had a horn to his mouth. His thick lips were pressed against the mouthpiece as rivulets of sweat poured down his face. He was blasting out a tune until his eyes floated upward and all she could see were the whites. When he brought his trumpet down, he glanced at the girl in her pink nightgown. She froze on the landing. “Well, what have we got here?” he said, a smile breaking across his face. “Looks like a little night owl, don’t she?” Hearing the deep rumble of his laughter, Pearl scurried back up the stairs.

Seven

    The Potawatomi, before they were driven west of the Mississippi, had a saying. The first white person to settle in Chicago was a Negro. Pearl learned this in Illinois history class. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable was a handsome well-educated Negro who settled in Chicagoua. Some say he’d come from Santo Domingo and planned a settlement for free Negroes on the shores of Lake Michigan. Others said he was the descendant of a slave and a French fur trader. For sixteen years he lived with his Potawatomi wife and two children at the site of the evil smell.
    Outside of the picture of DuSable in her history book, Pearl had never seen many black men. The ones who came north settled near Twelfth Street Station where the train let them off. Few ventured to the North Side. Pearl imagined they would speak French, be tall and lean, with onyx skin. She hadn’t envisioned the stout trumpeter with the coffee-colored skin, thick lips, and an accent that came from the depths of the delta. But week after week, as the music found her upstairs, awake in her bed, she made her way more boldly down to the saloon.
    There was a space under the stairs and she tucked herself inside, thinking that if she curled into a ball, small enough, no one would know she was there. Of course everyone knew, but they pretended not to. It was dusty and cobwebbed, but Pearl was more comfortablein that space than she was in her own bed. Many nights after the bar closed Jonah carried her back upstairs, asleep, gently laying her in the middle, between her sisters, and pulling the covers up to her chin.
    Napoleon took a liking to the girl with the dark eyes and hair to match who looked mysterious, shadowy, to him. She was plain, it was true, not like the fiery sisters she was sandwiched between, but there was something about her Napoleon couldn’t quite put his finger on. He’d see her crouched under the bar, her legs tucked beneath her nightie, gazing out as if she couldn’t be seen. She had something the others seemed to be lacking. If he had to give it a word, he’d say that she was curious. She seemed to take everything around her in. Each night he waited for her to answer when he called, “Hey, girl, what’s your name?”
    Pearl crouched down, as if she could make herself into her namesake, a smooth rounded gem. But he could still see her. He called out and taunted her until finally, after seeing him week after week for months, in a whisper she told him. “I’m Pearl.”
    Napoleon was struck by her deep, throaty voice. “Pearl.” He rolled her name around on his tongue like a marble. At any moment he knew she’d dart up the stairs. “I’m going to write a lullaby for you. The next time I see you, we’ll have…” He hesitated, and then chuckled, “We’ll have an oyster for Pearl.” Then he picked up his trumpet as she stayed hidden under the stairs.
    Pearl was growing used to the black man who laughed so loudly, but she feared he was saying these things to tease her. When Napoleon came to play on