Clayton Byrd Goes Underground Read online

  “That’s bull.”

  “Watch it, jailbird.”

  Clayton sighed.

  “He hurt the little girl in her. Too many times. You know about being hurt too many times.”

  Clayton knew.

  His father said, “The hurt just never went away. It’s like she’s still that little girl waiting at the window.”

  Clayton felt his father’s eyes on him, as if he expected him to say something. Clayton said nothing. He didn’t care about his mother’s hurt.

  “You’re mad at her like she’s been mad at Papa.”

  Clayton still said nothing.

  They were getting close to his father’s house.

  “I heard about the yard sale,” his father said. “And while I know you’re still mad at her, I want you to think about one thing.”

  “What.” He didn’t really ask because he didn’t want to know.

  “Your mother gave you two things I never had: a father and a grandfather.”

  Clayton’s father parked and shut down the engine once they pulled into the garage. He unbuckled his seat belt, although Clayton left his seat belt locked.

  “What?” his father asked.

  “Can I ask you something?”

  His father raised his eyebrows and shrugged. “Anything.”

  “Cool Papa wasn’t sick like Grandmama. Why’d he die like that?”

  His father thought for a minute. Clayton wanted to hear what his father would say more than he wanted the actual answer.

  “Son,” his father said. “I don’t know.”

  Clayton sat, both let down and relieved. Still, he liked the way his father said it. Plain and true. I don’t know.

  “Hey.” His father slugged his shoulder. “Thought you were hungry.”

  “I am,” Clayton said. “Just one more thing.”

  “I got all day. All night.”

  “Okay,” Clayton began. “Where do you go when you die? Not your body. Your . . . you. Your spirit. Does it stay and hang around the house or does it go to the places it liked or remembers? Does it go inside things or other people and become something else? Someone else? Dad, where does your spirit go? The part that’s you?”

  Clayton’s father laughed. Laughed real long. Then stopped.

  “I’m not laughing at you,” he said. “No . . . I am.” He laughed some more. “Clayton, when you finally decide to say something . . .” He caught his breath. “Okay,” his father said. “People believe different things. It’s all in what you believe. But honestly, Clayton, no one really knows.”

  Clayton let that sink in. Was it that simple? He thought about what he believed and where he believed Cool Papa’s spirit went.

  His father tapped him on the shoulder. “Come on.”

  Clayton undid his seat belt. He reached for his blues harp, deep in his new pocket. He was ready to go inside and tell his father almost everything.

  SOMETIMES A GHOST NOTE

  It seemed as if Clayton had been gone long. Gone out into the world on a small boat. Out to the four corners of the world, answering the sea’s call.

  Just like the tide had pulled Pablo de Pablo out to sea, the tide pulled Clayton back to shore.

  Back to school and Ms. Treadwell’s class, with a doctor’s note that said he didn’t have to read The Four Corners of the World in class. Back to his desk, where he sang “This Land Is Your Land” while the lizard darted out from his rock den to feast on Egyptian clover.

  Back on the school bus with his best friend, Omar, and with the other kids who still called him “Sleepster.”

  Back to his block where his mother’s house wasn’t far from his father’s house, and his mother and father no longer seemed so far apart.

  Back home, where the house smelled of pork chops, peas, and potatoes—his least favorite meal, but there would be one less angel at the table, and that made Clayton smile. Eventually, that made Juanita Byrd laugh. A little.

  “Wash up,” his mother told him when he walked through the door. “And put your things away.”

  He dashed by her so fast, he missed her smile.

  Clayton climbed the stairs and pushed open his bedroom door. He stood in the doorway, unable to move. Across the armrest of Cool Papa’s watcher’s chair lay the old guitar that had once cried and twanged hot electric chords and sometimes a ghost note out into the night. He ran his fingers against the smooth wood, and then up the neck, and down the strings. Finally, he picked up and held the guitar, and tried to remember how Cool Papa used to hold her. Clayton held it tightly with one hand, but looser in the other. He couldn’t play her like a bluesman yet, or at all, for that matter, but one day he’d make her laugh and cry. His Wah-Wah Nita.

  A NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

  Years ago I saw a video of rapper Doug E. Fresh alternately beatboxing and playing the harmonica in his live show. I was used to hearing the harmonica played in blues and in country-and-western music, but this mash-up clicked instantly for me! Of course, the blues and hip-hop! While the blues wasn’t necessarily a young person’s music when it was first played, its raw beginnings, tone, and themes conveyed the same feelings of invisibility, swagger, and injustice as hip-hop, its descendant. I knew I would write something about this pairing, but I was in the middle of another novel. Like many fascinations, I tucked it away for later.

  I had my mother to thank for my introduction to the blues, among many other musical forms. She played albums by Billie Holiday, T-Bone Walker, Ray Charles, and others while parting and braiding my hair for kindergarten. The music wasn’t at all happy or for children. The blues was strictly “grown folks’ music.” The sun wouldn’t come out and shine for Billie Holiday, T-Bone Walker lived in a mean old world, and poor Ray Charles couldn’t pay his bills and was always “busted.” I couldn’t understand why my mother loved this music. Yet she’d talk back to the lyrics and to the sassy, brassy horns in her unique voice. What I didn’t know at age five was that my mother, like so many blues lovers, found strength, cunning, humor, and vindication in blues lyrics. Much later, as a graduate student, I’d trace the origin of the blues to West African oral traditions, particularly “call-and-response.” In twelve-bar blues, the “call” is seen in A, the first line, and is then repeated more or less in the second line, also A. The eight bars of the AA call are then answered in the following four bars, or B, the response.

  Call: Trouble, don’t you find me; Trouble, leave me alone. [A]

  Call: I SAID, Trouble, keep your distance, Trouble; you better leave me alone. [A]

  Response: Every time I think I kicked you to the curb, Trouble, I turn around and find you hanging on. [B]

  The call-and-response pattern poured out of African Americans of the Deep South in the forms of spirituals, field hollers, work songs, and personal testimonies or narratives. From the late nineteenth century through the early twentieth century, typical blues lyrics spoke of hard work, hard times, broken hearts, and broken people, often accompanied on equally broken-down or handmade instruments. The blues was thought to be low-down and was called “the devil’s music.”

  As African Americans left the South for larger cities in the Great Migration, the blues traveled with them and evolved. Musical instruments were store-bought. The sound and subject matter of the blues became sophisticated, reflecting urban living, while each big city developed its own distinct blues sound. Today the blues is recognized as authentic American music that gave birth to or influenced gospel, rhythm and blues, rock and roll, funk, and country music. Whether I understood the blues or not as a child, I was grateful for my early exposure. When blues legend Willie Mae “Big Mama” Thornton performed at my elementary school in Seaside, California, I had an advantage over my schoolmates. I knew who Thornton was and could sing her version of “Hound Dog” while she performed.

  As a teen I couldn’t help but love popular music, but I also took note of its changing trends. One night while in college, a friend and I left our dorm at Hofstra University, “dressed to impr
ess” to dance the Hustle at a club in Long Island. Clubs were very strict about their dress code and many advertised a “no sneaker, no hip-hop” policy, referring to both clothing and a style of dance. When we pulled into the parking lot, there were two couples dancing outside. The first couple, two men, did incredible lifts and spins; however, it was the other couple that caught my eye. They looked more ready to play basketball than to dance in a club. The girl wore a faded denim vest and cut-off jeans, and both she and her partner wore high-top sneakers. Although the couple danced the Hustle, it was their hard-swinging partnering, accented with equally hard rock-backs and high-hops that distinguished their athletic style from the smooth, sophisticated glide I was used to seeing and dancing. My friend and I stayed outside in the parking lot to watch the dancers, who weren’t welcome inside the club. Months later, the same girl had enrolled at Hofstra. I would see her and a crew of guys (B-boys) body spinning and dancing in the campus quad on pieces of cardboard boxes. She wore the same high-top sneakers, but instead of doing her hip-hop Hustle, she was break dancing.

  By the late seventies to the mid-eighties, hip-hop had risen from the underground and trickled into the mainstream with its own style of music, dance, language, art, fashion, and activism. Although the Bronx is credited as its birthplace, the culture spread quickly to the college scene, and Long Island was no exception. The dances I attended as a freshman at Hofstra were a far cry from the dances I attended as a senior in the early hip-hop era. Legendary hip-hop producer Hank Shocklee was a student at Hofstra and was also a much sought-after DJ for black fraternity and sorority dances. It wasn’t enough for a DJ to spin records on turntables. The DJ’s crew put on a show that included scratching and cutting, mixing, beatboxing, light shows, crowd interaction, and rap battles. Through it all, the hip-hop beat reigned supreme. Once kept on the outside, the sneaker-wearing crowd that ushered in hip-hop—branded a passing fad—continued to dictate popular culture into the twenty-first century.

  Fast-forward to decades later. In between writing projects I thought about Clayton Byrd Goes Underground. I had main characters, a story idea, and my own brief bout with narcolepsy (a disorder that makes one fall asleep at inappropriate times) to draw on. I had an overall sense of connection between basic blues and old-school hip-hop, such as their mature language and subject matter, use of “signifying”—the art of verbal jousting African American style—and their raw-to-refined evolution, among other similarities. What I was looking for lay beneath the surface of what I knew or could research. It wasn’t until I sat in on a blues lecture given by Kathi Appelt at Vermont College of Fine Arts that I felt a tingling in my brain that brought me back to Doug E. Fresh beatboxing and playing the blues harp, another name for the harmonica. The same breath that produced hi-hats and tom-toms through beatboxing also produced trills and wails on the blues harp. Beneath the “down deep” breath was the essential blues cry that Kathi spoke of, but also the holler of a new generation. Both beatboxing and playing the blues harp relied upon inventiveness in a language churned up from the gut and out through breath, throat, tongue, teeth, lips, and spit to amplify the musician’s voice and emotional road beyond mere words. I confess that at the moment my brain was firing, I had stopped taking lecture notes and began to lock into the noise and pain that would send Clayton Byrd on his way.

  BACK AD

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  Photo by Ferdinand Leyro

  RITA WILLIAMS-GARCIA is the author of the Newbery Honor Book One Crazy Summer, which was a winner of the Coretta Scott King Award, a National Book Award finalist, the recipient of the Scott O’Dell Award for Historical Fiction, and a New York Times bestseller. The sequels, P.S. Be Eleven and Gone Crazy in Alabama, were both Coretta Scott King Award winners. She is also the author of six distinguished novels for young adults: Jumped, a National Book Award finalist; No Laughter Here, Every Time a Rainbow Dies (a Publishers Weekly Best Children’s Book), and Fast Talk on a Slow Track (all ALA Best Books for Young Adults); Blue Tights; and Like Sisters on the Homefront, a Coretta Scott King Honor Book. Rita Williams-Garcia lives in Jamaica, New York, with her husband and has two adult daughters, Stephanie and Michelle, and a son-in-law, Adam. You can visit her online at www.ritawg.com.

  Discover great authors, exclusive offers, and more at hc.com.

  BOOKS BY RITA WILLIAMS-GARCIA

  FOR YOUNG READERS

  One Crazy Summer

  P.S. Be Eleven

  Gone Crazy in Alabama

  FOR TEENS

  Jumped

  No Laughter Here

  Every Time a Rainbow Dies

  Like Sisters on the Homefront

  Fast Talk on a Slow Track

  Blue Tights

  CREDITS

  Cover art © 2017 by Frank Morrison

  Cover design by Heather Daugherty

  COPYRIGHT

  Amistad is an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.

  Going Down

  Words and Music by Don Nix

  Copyright © 1969 IRVING MUSIC, INC. and DEERWOOD MUSIC

  Copyright Renewed

  All Rights Controlled and Administered by IRVING MUSIC, INC.

  All Rights Reserved Used by Permission

  Reprinted by Permission of Hal Leonard Corporation

  CLAYTON BYRD GOES UNDERGROUND. Text copyright © 2017 by Rita Williams-Garcia. Illustrations copyright © 2017 by Frank Morrison. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

  www.harpercollinschildrens.com

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  Library of Congress Control Number: 2016950351

  ISBN 978-0-06-221591-8

  EPub Edition © April 2017 ISBN 9780062215949

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  FIRST EDITION

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