Jazz Funeral

friend of yours.”
    “Well, not exactly. You know that program I’m in at Tulane? She’s my adviser.”
    It was always that way. Cindy Lou collected men the way a kid picked up shells at the beach—utterly effortlessly. And all of them seriously flawed. Skip would have thought she simply wasn’t discriminating if she hadn’t seen the ones Cindy Lou dumped—the ones the average psychologist might have called “suitable.”
    “Well, I would too,” Cindy Lou had said when Skip remarked upon it. “I just don’t like suitable men.”

CHAPTER FIFTEEN
    Melody had walked right by a friend of her mother’s with no problem at all. So when she saw Chuckie Parsons, a kid from school who had a crush on her, she deliberately caught his eye and smiled seductively around the snoball she was working on. He actually looked around to see who she was smiling at. Of course, she wouldn’t have dared do it without the red shades, even with the makeup and hair and all, but even that might have been okay. Her eyes looked like something off of Cleopatra’s barge.
    She would see people she knew at Ti-Belle’s set, she was sure of that, but she felt pretty confident. Meanwhile, she was waiting in the gospel tent, her perennial favorite.
    Most of the groups were black and many came from high schools, schools Melody had never heard of. Some of the singing was incredibly good. All of it was fun. But the thing that fascinated Melody, the amazing thing that had struck her the first time Ham had taken her here when she was eight or nine, was the way some of these kids were really adults. The stars, that is.
    What would happen was that the star—it could be a girl or a boy—would step forward and perhaps speak first, say a few words for Jesus, sounding like a preacher, getting to do something completely adult, unlike anything in Melody’s experience any white kid ever got to do. Maybe the kid wouldn’t speak, maybe she’d just sing. Then she’d get the whole choir going, she’d be leading her own choir. She’d get the audience to join in, and here would be this crowd of people from all over the country, adults in every kind of job—blue collar, white collar, anything you could name—this incredibly disparate audience ranging from good churchgoing people, folks from the Seventh Ward, to sophisticated music-lovers who’d made the trek from California or New York—and a seventeen-year-old kid would have the audience in the palm of her hand. She’d have been taught everything she needed to know, the poise, the leadership, the musicianship, and she’d be an adult and a star.
    Melody watched the New Orleans Spiritualettes, the Christianaires, and the Second Morning Star Mass Choir, then took off for Ti-Belle’s gig.
    Ti-Belle looked fabulous. She had on a yellow dress with black polka dots, kind of a sheath thing, with a square neck—very retro, very Ti-Belle. Her long, gorgeous hair was platinum, stunning against her olive skin; it was parted on the side and usually fell over her eye, which meant she had to shake it back pretty often, and that was always dramatic. She was positively elegant in her raw skinniness. Melody was rhapsodic, just looking at her.
    Then Ti-Belle began to talk about Ham.
    Melody blinked tears. She should have realized this was coming. Ti-Belle was talking about their time together, how much he’d meant to her and to her career, her music, how easygoing he was, how patient, how everyone depended on him because he never got mad, he never got upset. Melody was struggling like hell not to cry. She truly couldn’t afford to ruin her makeup. She couldn’t cry—after all, Ti-Belle wasn’t crying. And why not? she wondered. What had she done to keep herself together?
    Melody knew. She knew exactly what Ti-Belle had done. She had seen her do the same thing countless times—she’d stood in front of the mirror and practiced and practiced until she was perfect. Ti-Belle did not ad lib. No way was she going to get onstage without having it down pat, without knowing she could stay in one piece while saying it. Melody didn’t even know how many hours it might have taken; it could have taken all night, and Ti-Belle wouldn’t have flinched. She was a perfectionist.
    She said now that her set was for Ham, that this first song in particular was dedicated to Ham, that it was what she had to do now. Then she sang a verse, a cappella, of “St. James Infirmary,” belting as if this was a talent contest and the