Breaking Sloanes

“Like clockwork.” Thomas III said through gritted teeth.  Finally surrendering to a war of things he could never control, he pulled up to the notorious light to sit a while.

If anyone had closely observed Thomas Sloane the III earlier that day, they could very well have seen not one, but two wars taking place.  One with the past and one grappling with how to heal his present. This struggle, spurred by a revelatory black book, had made Thomas’ pale knuckles even whiter with tension and had almost consumed his entire body with white rage he hadn’t encountered ever in his fifty nine fairly mild mannered years. A grin appeared. Though usually level-headed to the point of exhaustion, he had to laugh at his earlier consideration to hurl the book out of his Mercedes and into the murky James River beside him. But in this moment, he simply sat. Gently gripping the steering wheel, eyeing the little black book in his passenger seat, and waiting for what his family had dubbed the “forever light” to turn.

Jazz flowed from the car stereo, although some hesitated to call it “jazz”. Critics might have demeaned the emanations as watered down versions of originals made solely for those craving jazz’s joy, without accessing the necessary pain required to make the notes truly soar. “Smooth jazz”, was the most popular classification, and it filled Thomas III’s once favorite radio program, though now he was unsure of that superlative.

He lightly cursed Sal, the host of “Sal’s Smooth Jazz Saturday”  (that favorite show  of Thomas III, but also of his deceased father, Thomas II, as fate would have it) and turned the dial to a syncopated drum song with a vaguely familiar bass line. Thomas felt a twinge of redemption for skipping Sal’s frequent reflections on jazz culture. Salvatore, as it were, had scant credentials regarding  “the blues”, or the struggle and strife of black musicians, and certainly lacked them on the perennial and curious jubilation of the black people who inhabited that culture. Thomas III somewhat understood now why Sal’s musings came across as unconvincingly hollow.  He spoke often of people whose lives were continuously stomped on and stamped out by other people. Due to the books contents, Thomas III had gotten a stark glimpse of those “other people” and now even Sal’s smooth baritone voice, usually providing nostalgia, was now a blaring horn sounding the sins of his father and father’s father—all this as the light finally changed from red to green ahead.

The song reached its peak, light change notwithstanding, and yet Thomas remained. Still pestered by the nagging importance of that musical phrasing, the bassist unleashed a flurry of jazz licks, and Thomas suddenly remembered a smaller performance at a very quaint venue, where his son had performed his own rendition. That would be the youngest Sloane namesake and the eldest child of Thomas III, one Thomas Sloane IV or  “Four Leaf” to his bandmates and close friends. Admittedly, a performance Thomas had almost completely forgotten.

“I mean, you really don’t have to, but yeah, it’s at seven” his son hesitated to remind him. Then prompted by his bandmate’s carhorn in the driveway, he gathered his second hand bass guitar and issued another reminder, “And Dad, for the last time it’s hip-hop. Hip-hop/jazz fusion. Can you at LEAST remember that?” and shut the door.  His agitation spurred solely by his father’s frequent misclassification of the hybrid style that he had begun to flourish. 

Memories of that night began flooding back. Like the wise, gently-suggested words of “Try to have fun,” coming from his loving and eternally beautiful wife, Latrice, followed by her old adage, “and TRY to be good”; Esther, his eighty-five-year-old, housekeeper and her maternal grin while secretly passing his backup phone battery and affectionately swatting his backside; and the night’s most salient memory, the sound of his son slamming the car door and storming inside. Four Leaf seemed annoyed by the meager tip given to the underused valet attendant, the color almost of the book facilitating all these memories.  But in Latrice’s way, she uncovered the offender was the blue glow in his father’s discreetly plugged ear (clearly focused more on the voice shouting stock values than the sweaty black bodies performing with surprising virtuoso before him) exposing his disinterest, or worse, ambivalence to the passion of the very one that might rectify the tarnished Sloane name.

These recollections hit Thomas with a weight not encompassed solely by the book itself (weighing less than a pound maybe) but ultimately by the presently fading figures scrawled on one of its pages. Now he could never not know those figures were actual figures, living and breathing, and possibly weighing only several pounds more than the book that had ascribed an arbitrary value at their conception.

“little blacks”.

Thomas III heard the phrase used by his father before (and no doubt all other fathers and fathers past starting with the patriarch, Thomas Sloane) with no perceived malice, he once foolishly thought. A phrase he often explained away as simply a colloquialism from an easier time when his wife privately bristled at the term in reference to their very own biracial children. He could not have known how much those words bore with them a reckoning of everything he claimed to know and possess, down to the comfortably heated seat, (etched with that infamous three pointed star) of the four door sedan that finally accelerated through the green light and into the cemetery.  

 “Sloane family plot, please..”

He whispered the name to the sleepy attendant who pointed him to where he already knew to go. He parked and once again set his gaze on the “little black” book beside him. Picking it up, he quickly skipped over the now-less important pages of his grandfather’s thoughts and feelings and went to the page that catalogued those who had not yet begun to form either, for they had only just begun to think and process the world around them. He turned to the page consisting of names, ages, amounts, and locations, essentially spelling out his destiny and reread those fading lines.

The heading: “​little blacks​”, he read aloud, ​fit to be sold this 18th day of May

“jeremiah, 7yo, to charleston, sc - $3,366.00

mary, 10yo,  $421.00, to tuskaloosa, al

ezekiel (“zeke”), 4yo,  to atlanta, ga - $​ 2,254.00,​ $1,127.00 (prone to fits) 

isiah, $2,567.22, 13yo, to Richmond, va

esther, $921.00 (?)”

At the sight of this name he stupidly thought to check the dates in his head. Tears started to well up in his eyes and he quickly wiped them away, not willing, or even capable of dwelling on his complicity in these bitter truths. He continued.

“jo​hn boy jr., $2,000.00,​ (stillborne)

young girl, (mulatto) 9yo, New orleans, la, $723.00

xxx, 1,899.00, 5yo (kin to runaways)

james, $5,000.00, 16yo, to williamsburg, va

mark, $3,975.78, 14yo, to minister johnson, five miles yonder

the sum of all these bodies, dead or alive, shall go to my firstborn, Thomas II”

Thomas III quickly totaled the amounts to an even $20,000.00. Bought and sold bodies, drenched with the blood, sweat, and tears of their life givers who thrust them into a likewise embittered legacy they would spend their whole lives wishing to retract.

Thomas figured the amount to be, today’s terms, almost $500,000.00. A dollar amount he had long before achieved, mostly on his own so he thought, at the tender age of thirty one. 

Thirty one years old. Also the age that he finally proposed to the love of his life, Latrice. He asked, and without skipping a beat, she replied. 

“Hell no!”, and laughed her way into his arms forever. 

What he wished he had said to her when she made her stern and final behest to clean out the attic, that deed ultimately unearthing the book that had set everything into motion. 

“Hell no!”

Then another memory emerged, as if it had happened moments before, and not the forty some odd years ago when the check was bequeathed. A check, signed by his father, the amount equal to that of the black book’s page, now fully stained with Thomas III’s tears. He remembered his bewilderment at the unexpectedly large sum, and also his father’s slightly-slurred words as he handed the tainted sum over to him.

“Hear ye, on this your 21st birthday, like my father and his father before him, I give to you Thomas Sloane III, your birthright of $20,000.00. To life, to liberty, and to whatever the hell can bring you happiness. Happy birthday.”

And just like that, with a slight belch, and the panache of someone who had ingested generous amounts of a thirty-five-year-old Macallan, Thomas II passed down his slice of the Sloane legacy. 

Now standing at the plots holding his forefathers Thomas tore out that one page and wedged the little black book, much simpler now, between two tufts of flowers, separating his father from his grandfather. Those flowers wilting but willing to take on the burden of history that the tiny book had created for him. A flawed history that had come before Thomas III, but now finally lay before him, and there it would stay forever. His birthright, that save the frighteningly measured warning of Latrice, to “get up there and get cleaning and try to be GOOD” he might not ever have known the true and complete essence of the gift.

Lovely Latrice.

Her words were now the only thing on his mind as he sped out of the cemetery, past the now napping attendant, and back down past the James River, tossing the only page he possessed from the little black book into the river, that violently swallowed up three generations of Sloane history in one white capped wave.

He opened the front door and was met with sounds of full-bodied laughter from Latrice and Esther in the kitchen, as well as savory, Southern, aromas wafting like smooth jazz, from pots and saucepans.

“There you are, Mister Sloane the Third, I was ready to send a search party. What you think, Esther? Dinner in about twenty minutes?”

“If you’d keep your foot out of your mouth and in them collards, I’d say ten minutes”, Esther replied.

As they settled back into their usual playful banter, Thomas left the kitchen and began to haul a large guitar-shaped box, as well as an altogether different little black book, up the winding stairs to the room of his eldest son. He heard the shower running in the adjacent bathroom, so he took the moment to lay out a box containing a new, shiny, black bass guitar onto his son’s bed and removed the almost $20,000.00 price tag from the instrument. He opened the book, pages fresh and clean, ready to record the next storied generation of Sloane history. Fresh and clean, except for the first page, on which was written:

“Hear ye, herein lies a little black bass guitar for my eldest son, Four Leaf. Whether it is jazz, or “HIP HOP/JAZZ FUSION” I thought this would help out. Enjoy it. And, like all things in life, try to have fun, and if not, just try to be GOOD. Happy birthday. Love Dad PS: Let’s talk man to man soon okay?.”

Thomas Sloane III walked out of his son’s bedroom, not knowing what that conversation might entail or when, but he was convinced that he would also try to be good, despite any generational or historical notions that tried to force him otherwise. Of that he could be certain. That and “Sal’s Smooth Jazz Saturday”, of course, his favorite radio program, for now he guessed. Flipping it on again when he got to his own bedroom, he danced a little he then hopped in the shower, took the deepest of breaths, and proceeded to wash off the sins of Sloanes past, for good.