Coq au Vin by Charlotte Carter Read Free Book Online Page B

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    It was Andre who pointed out the American Embassy building to me, near the place de la Concorde. But more important to him was the spot a couple of buildings away where once had stood the deluxe club Les Ambassadeurs. I heard all about Florence Mills’s success there in 1926 and how Richard Wright had brought Katherine Dunham’s dance troupe there to perform in the forties.
    As we swept up the Champs Elysées, he listed what Chester Himes and his wife had had for lunch at Fouquet’s in 1959. All right, all right—slight exaggeration.
    Sidney Bechet this, Henry Tanner that, Kenny Clarke this, Cyrus Colter that…Was I aware that Art Blakey aux Champs-Elysées was the only live jazz record that…Did I want to visit the site of Chez Josephine, la Baker’s nightclub, before or after we saw the cabaret where Satie, Milhaud, and Ravel used to hang with her…In 1961, you know, both Bud and Dexter backed up Carmen McRae at the Paris Blue Note, but it wasn’t called that anymore…
    Who had told this child he wasn’t black enough? Not to play amateur Freudian, but his encyclopedic knowledge of our people in Paris was way past the maybe-I’ll-write-a-book stage. It was obviously at the level of obsession. Who was he trying to vindicate?
    It was late and I was starving. “I’m buying,” I told Andre. “What do you suggest?”
    â€œYou shouldn’t treat,” he said. “You’ve been buying all day.”
    â€œIt’s okay. I’ll write it off on my taxes under Educational Expenses.”
    â€œYou know, there is a place I want to try.”
    â€œName it.”
    â€œBricktop’s. It’s in the ninth.”
    He was putting me on. “Oh sure,” I said, laughing. “Maybe we’ll run into Mabel Mercer and her friend Cole Porter. Scott and Zelda, too.” Bricktop, the oh-so-sophisticated cabaret singer, and the club bearing her name were roaring twenties legends, I knew. He had to be putting me on.
    â€œNo, no. It’s there. Really.”
    I looked at him then, truly worried. “Jesus. You’re really over the edge. I mean, you think we’ve been transported back to 1928, don’t you? I understood that Bricktop’s closed about sixty years ago.”
    He grinned mischievously at me. “Yes, you’re right. It did. But there’s a place with the same name now. I’d like to see what it’s like.”
    â€œThat’s better,” I said. “I guess we won’t have to get the net for you after all. Are we dressed for it?”
    â€œI think we’re cool. It’s just a place with down-home food and a piano player.”
    Back to funky Pigalle. I had crisscrossed most of these streets before, in my scattershot search for Vivian. Well, this time I wasn’t sitting around in the lobbies of grunge hotels, searching for down-and-out bars or the Parisian equivalent to a soup kitchen. I was being escorted around the hallowed grounds of our ancestors, so to speak. The hotel where Bud Powell lived. The cabaret (at least the address where once there had been a cabaret) where one celebrated musician reportedly shot another to death. And, of course, the site of the original Bricktop’s on the rue Fontaine.
    I felt a flash of guilt about having taken the day off like this. That would be old Ernestine trying to shame me: Vivian’s suffering! she was reminding me. Vivian’s lost—broke—Vivian’s dying! And here you are, drinking the day away with some man , chasing after some phantom of the glamorous black past.
    Yes, ma’am, I answered meekly. I am having too much fun and he is too good-looking. Tomorrow I widen the search for Aunt Viv. I swear.
    Cole Porter and Mabel Mercer were definitely not in residence. No ladies in bare-back evening gowns and diamonds. Not a tuxedo in sight. The new Bricktop’s was African-American kitsch. Autographed photos of the