What I remember is that I could not sit still. What I remember is the music — washboard, squeezebox, searing guitar and drums — Cajun Zydeco. What I remember is the beer and the plate of beans and rice and the silky black waitress sweeping and swaying between tables, hoisting trays, cutting between customers. Packed house. Arms and legs hanging vine-like from the little balcony above, folks leaning over the rail, and the laughter and the hollers and the nodding, grinning in the darkness. Spotlight on the band. Raucous, full-throated and joyous.
What I remember is the music and how it filled the room, how it swept through the place like smoke on the wind, like creekwater over rocks, splashing over all of us, wrapping us all into its flow, all together, enveloping us in breezes, gusts and gales. And how it swirled through my veins, the music I heard as a kid, in my bones and blood, pulsing, soaring, wailing; throbbing bass rhythms; happy, dancing music. And how I could not sit still.
What I remember then is the little black man, dressed all in red, from shiny shoes to small-brimmed hat, how he got up and began to dance — the first to break loose from his chair, a wiry, graying, 70-year-old man, white suspenders, flower tie and vest. Tapping feet. Bojangles and Gene Kelly. He got up — there was no dance floor — and he started rocking and rolling, dancing to the drumbeat, to the sounds streaming ribbons through his soul, and how all the people clapped and cheered him on. And how then he danced, sort of scooched — eyes squenched, shoulders squeezed — between the tables at this wood-floor restaurant-bar, sliding and shuffling, eventually over to the blonde — the young one looking professional in her gray suit and black string-tie.
He put out his hand.
He didn't stop dancing, never lost the sound; but he extended his arm and you could see the cufflinks sparkle in the spotlights and then all eyes fixed on the pretty young blonde . . . and how she took his hand and got up from her chair and how then she boogied with him, her hips and hair swinging. The broad-shouldered men at her table hooting and clapping.
Then the young black boy — the one who looked too little to be bussing tables, the one in his knee-hole bluejeans and red Calvary Baptist Church T-shirt — grinned from ear to ear, his white teeth gleaming. And my wife smiling radiantly, transfixed by the motion and the music and the feel-good shaking of it all. And the white Southern-gentleman type in the baby- blue seersucker suit getting up with his pearl-wearing wife, hand-in-hand, joining in. And the others getting up — black and white, Creole, mulatto — all of us togther. No room really to dance. The jumbled intimacy of a crowd.
Grabbing my wife's hand. Finding a place in the gyrating middle. With the band playing on. Not stopping or slowing. Getting louder. Pure, loud, soul-cleansing music.
What I remember is Beale Street in the spring. Memphis, Tennessee: The home of the blues, the Mississippi delta blues. John Lee Hooker, Muddy Waters, Lightnin' Hopkins. Cotton fields — cotton-pickin' fields — and Old Man River. Steamboats, slavery and Martin Luther King. The annual Cajun music festival there by the banks of the Mississippi. What I remember is eight or 10 bars there on Beale Street, downtown, not far from the wide and rolling river, the channel draining the middle of America. Ten bucks gets you into all of 'em and you can hear it live and loud — rock and blues and the happy, jumpin' Zydeco.
It was early in the evening when the red-dressed man got up and got it started in B.B. King's place up the hill. The night went on till morning. Then after nightfall a second night of jammin' in places jammed tight with people cuttin' loose. Tiny little dance floors. The raging Cajun musicmakers. And that one guy — solitary blues man — at the corner place playing quiet and alone. People eating there — barbecue, cornbread, black-eyed peas and greens. Soulful. That band down the alleyway, outside, playing funky rhythm and blues. And the long-haired rockers playing SRO at the dance hall down the street.
And I remember all the people, both inside and out. The ones dancing and the ones watching — everyone happy. The others milling about, up street and down; street closed to traffic, open to the people rich and poor, street people and status-kings, black and white, young and old. Rambunctious college kids and older folks whose tired lives got them up for a night on the town. And I remember how we were all there together. Sharing like family in the good times. Music and song, dancing and laughter. How the music had brought us all down here together. How the music made us one.
And I remember thinking this is how it should be, this is how it should be all the time, all of us wrapped together in the music, connected and bound by what brings us together — the music and the food. And how on those nights, when darkness fell upon the town, how it didn't matter, the differences really didn't matter. None of us was thinking those things. Those things that divide us — the anger, injustices and hate. The distrust. The me versus you.
And not just racial stuff, racial lines, demarcations of birth and ethnicity, but also those class resentments and who has what and who lives where.
And I remembered back to once upon a time when I thought we'd all be coming together then and how music was part of what we shared. We danced to each other's drummer, sang each other's songs.
I was young then, probably romantic and naive. Maybe it wasn't what I thought. Maybe I didn't see what it looked like from the other side. I'm sure it takes more than music to clear away all that's come before and lingers here and still makes our differences what we see. But I do sometimes wonder just what happened, how things once so hopeful and ascendant could now feel so futile and so wrong.
I suppose it is equally romantic and naive to think a weekend dancing in Memphis would effect any substantial change. Or even begin to make a difference in the way our lives are lived. But what I remember is the music and the bands whose voices blended black and white, their instruments making sounds that all came out together and made the people dance, and how we all danced there together — singing, bumping, jostling, exchanging smiles of recognition — with no one ever getting mad. What I remember is a red-dressed guy dancing like a madman with a woman who matched his step, and how that memory from Memphis showed us what a fine place the world could be.