I Have Lost My Way(7)

When I was one minute old, I sang my first song. That was the story my father told me. When I was born, I didn’t cry or make a sound, and for a minute, my father said, his heart stopped because he thought there was something wrong with me. All the doctors and nurses swooped in. Then I made a noise, not a baby noise, not a cry or a grunt, but something undeniably musical. “It was a perfect A sharp,” my father told me, sustained for at least a second or two. The medical personnel all started laughing in relief. “You were born singing,” my father told me. “And you haven’t stopped since.”

“That’s dumb,” my sister Sabrina declared. “Babies aren’t born doing anything, let alone singing.” But she just said that because she was jealous. Our father hadn’t been in the delivery room when she was born four years before me. He was out playing a gig, and by the time he got word Mom was in labor, Sabrina had already arrived, and though nobody reported it, I would guess she was born not singing but scowling.

Maybe because he was in the delivery room, maybe because I was born singing, or maybe because we looked alike, I belonged to my father, and Sabrina to my mother. It was almost like they decided on a split-custody arrangement before they even got divorced. Sabrina would spend her evenings with Mom, doing crossword puzzles or rearranging the kitchen cabinets. I would spend my afternoons with my father, huddled in the tiny closet he used as a studio. There, amid boxes of old LPs and cassettes, he would play me recordings of his favorite artists: American singers like Billie Holiday and Nina Simone and Josephine Baker, and Ethiopian singers like Aster Aweke and Gigi. “Hear how they sing their sorrows? How they sing what they can’t say?” He’d show me pictures of these women, who had beautiful voices and beautiful faces. “Blessed twice like the jacaranda tree,” he’d say. “Like you.”

There were no jacaranda trees in White Plains, where we lived at the time, but my father had already told me about how in spring in Addis Ababa, they bloomed with magnificent blossoms, purple and fragrant, blessed twice. He told me about how in winters, which were cold but nothing like here, the air filled with the smell of eucalyptus smoke. He told me of his mother’s cooking, which he missed so much. The tibs she would make for him, the shiro, the goat they would roast before the fasting holidays, the fermented injera bread. He took me into the city to restaurants that served his favorite foods, which became my favorite foods. He let me sip the bitter coffee and the sweet honey wine. He showed me how to eat with my fingers, not dropping any bits. “Konjo, konjo,” the waitresses who looked like me would say to him. “Beautiful.”

He promised one day he would take me to Ethiopia with him. He promised one day he would take me to the clubs in New York City where once upon a time Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane had played. He promised one day he’d take me to hear his hero, the Ethiopian jazz musician Mulatu Astatke, whose career he had moved to America to emulate. “People thought it was not possible to combine the Ethiopian and the American, but listen to the proof,” he would say, playing me recordings of Astatke. “And look at the proof,” he would say, smiling at me.

“Sing with me, Freaulai,” he would say, and I would sing. And whenever I did, he closed his eyes and smiled. “Born singing.”

“Be quiet!” my sister would call from the other room. Like my mother, she had no interest in Astatke or tibs or ever going to Ethiopia. “We live here,” they would tell my father when he mused about moving us home, nearer to his family. “We are your family,” they would tell him.

“Stop singing!” Sabrina would yell if I didn’t shut up.

“Promise me you’ll never stop singing,” my father would whisper to me.

I promised. Unlike him, I kept my promises.



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— — —

Sabrina claimed that once upon a time, our parents laughed together and danced in the living room. That Mom used to go to our father’s gigs, googly-eyed, convinced that love could overcome the wide gap between a Jewish girl from Westchester and a jazz musician from Addis.

Sabrina said that all changed when I came along. Was this true? Or was this Sabrina being Sabrina? Sabrina, who would squeeze my wrist until she left red marks. “Love twists,” she called them, to remind me who loved me. Sabrina, who would whisper in my ear: “Your breath stinks. Your hair is nappy,” and who grew angry if I cried. “If people who love you can’t tell you the truth, who can?” she’d say.

As for my parents once loving each other, I couldn’t say. The staccato beat and locked horns of their fights were nearly as constant a soundtrack to my childhood as the music my father played me. Though like so many things, I didn’t really realize this until the sound stopped and silence engulfed us.



* * *



— — —

When I was ten years old, I came home from school one day to find my father awake, which was unusual enough. He was a driver for a car service at night in the city, getting off late and trying to get a minute or two on stage somewhere at the dwindling number of clubs in the Village. He often came home as Sabrina and I were getting up for school and slept until it was time to work again that evening. But that day, he was up. The table was set with the round platters of Ethiopian food.

I was so excited by the meal and my father being home that I failed to notice his packed bag and trumpet case in the hall. But I wouldn’t have thought much of it. It was not unusual for my father to go on short tours, though it hadn’t happened for a few years.