Free Downtown Strut: An Edna Ferber Mystery (Edna Ferber Mysteries) by Ed Ifkovic

praised the way she used jazz vernacular in her clipped, tight sentences to mimic street chatter and nightclub atmosphere.
    Roddy read one paragraph of a short story he was beginning to sketch out: an exhausted woman swept the stairs in a tenement, her head swathed in old ripped rags, while her spoiled son, decked out in spats and a shiny razzle-dazzle green suit, maneuvered around her down the stairs. I thought it a little contrived though beautifully written, and said so. He kept nodding furiously, the nervous schoolboy, but finally conceded that he didn’t know what to do with the paragraph. “I can’t find the story I want to write.” He shrugged his shoulders. “I don’t know why I brought this piece today.” He dropped the sheet into his lap, folded his hands over it.
    Waters read a two-page story in a faltering, wispy voice, which surprised me. Ellie commented that she liked the way he shot immediately into the heart of the scene. He looked up, grinned at her, almost misty eyed.
    Harriet got jittery when it was her turn, painfully clearing her throat and beginning over. But once she moved past her opening lines, her voice took on authority, force, almost belligerence. She read the opening paragraph of an essay she said was intended for the NAACP’s Crisis , a rousing manifesto of the young leftist Negro in America, climbing what Langston Hughes called the “racial mountain.” Finished, she sat back, triumphant, but no one commented. The look on her face said that she’d made her point.
    I kept my mouth shut.
    Lawson decided to stand when it was his turn. He’d purposely saved himself to the end, something not lost on everyone there. The star attraction. “Everyone expects me to read part of a scene from my play. But no, I won’t. You’re probably all sick of hearing about my play.” He grinned. “You all know that my play can’t seem to find a home on Broadway.” A long, deliberate pause. “Rejected because it…it is too realistic. Rent parties with ten-gallon crocks of gin and grapefruit juice. The Victrola playing scratchy Bessie Smith records. Because it shows Negro life…”
    Harriet interrupted. “Soapbox, Lawson. Get on with it.”
    A flash of anger. “Which is, of course, what your article is all about.”
    “Would Langston Hughes praise it?” Harriet’s voice was sarcastic. And then, surprisingly, a sotto voce remark. “The way he praised Miss Ferber’s short stories?”
    It was a cruel, bitter line, hardly civil, especially since I’d just fed the young lass. Everyone in the room bristled. Waters half-rose, a chivalric knight in defense of damsel Miss Edna, and from the kitchen I could hear Rebecca tsk tsk as she eavesdropped on the conversation.
    Lawson spoke through clenched teeth. “Could you remember where you are, Harriet?” Then he breathed in and smiled. “No, friends, I’m gonna share my fiction this time.”
    Bella groaned, but Lawson ignored her. What he did read, in a deep, throaty voice, was actually riveting: perhaps one hundred words about two men sitting next to each other on the “A” train, one young man irreverently humming a spiritual while the other, a disheveled old man, recalls a race riot he’d lived through as a boy. Simple, evocative prose, unsentimental.
    “Those are characters from your play,” Roddy noted. He looked at Lawson quizzically, mystified.
    “So what?”
    “I like it,” I said. “What happened to your play?”
    Another groan from Bella, though she followed it with a smile.
    Lawson shrugged. “ Harlem River , Miss Ferber. It’s been rejected over and over, even uptown at the Lincoln. Negro producers afraid of its…rawness. I don’t understand why.” He was walking around now, antsy, a bead of sweat on his brow, and he moved quietly to the window. He turned to face us. “You know how it is.” The line thundered in the room, stark and bold, and emphatically ended the conversation. “So now I’ll go back to my