Status Updates From Jazz

“Committed as Violet was to hip development, even she couldn’t drink the remaining malt—watery, warm, and flat-tasting. She buttoned her coat and left the drugstore and noticed, at the same moment as *that* Violet did, that it was spring. In the City.”

“…laughter is more serious. More complicated, more serious than tears.
Crumpled over, shoulders shaking, Violet thought about how she must have looked at the funeral, at what her mission was. The sight of herself trying to do something bluesy, something hep, fumbling the knife, too late anyway…She laughed till she coughed and Alice had to make them both settling tea.”

“…her hand thrust through the leaves, the white flowers, would be enough to say that she knew him to be the one, the son she had fourteen years ago, and ran away from, but not too far. Just far enough away to annoy everybody because she was not completely gone, and close enough to scare everybody because she creeps about and hides and touches and laughs à low sweet babygirl laugh in the cane.”

“Just a sign, he said, just show me your hand, he said, and I’ll know don’t you know I have to know? She wouldn’t have to say anything; it wouldn’t have to be words; he didn’t need words or even want them bexause he knew how they could lie, could heat your blood and disappear. She wouldn’t even have to say the word ‘mother.’ Nothing like that…”

Reading this in harlem was a next level experience