Abbey's Roads

Abridged journal of a week on assignment in Philly, Newark and New York, with Sonia Sanchez, the spirit of Abbey Lincoln, and the people in them steering.

Abbey’s Roads

All of them are haunted by torches, the butterfly twitching of one eyelid after a performance. That murmur, casual depletion, imperceptible to onlookers as it metronomes her gaze, could indicate a magnesium deficiency, drunkenness everlasting, the kind of stupor that makes those in it too lucid to dissociate and too far gone to come-to, or unlimited isolationism finding its interval in pulses that become ghost nudges at the vacant altar or her seeing. On stage and film, she offers us spectacles of her discomfort in exchange for our rapture. We grow accustomed to this and associate it with self-actualized womanhood, late-stage divaism. Her archive slurs like a dreamgirl a few drinks in then recovers the public image and leaves you breathless. I have to decide which person to bring to the surface. Her song “People in Me” is autobiographical and I use it as my map and detour. It takes its logic from the IChing, from categories of change that fold in on themselves to become the changing same. I spend the day with her at Rutgers then escape on the 5 PM train to New York. At a bar called Dante which reminds me of hell and paradise and how my friends and I are rereading Amiri Baraka’s revision of his underworld, I meet a Canadian puppeteer outside of the bathroom. He’s taking a photograph of the light fixtures, the same pendulum of torches my friend who just quit his job in tech tells me are inspiring his new obsession with interior design. He’ll never code again, he explains, half-mournfully, he’ll only prompt AI using his twenty years of training and experience writing code. I ponder machine grammar and how it burdens the heart, imagine myself trying to outsource these very memories to that system of hoaxes, shudder, shore up my precision to stave off the body snatchers coming for language as if it too is a program, which it is. We must break it open and outlive its demons and false psalms.

He’s chosen this bar based on the lighting. The spotlight chooses us back. We’re all kind of crazy aren’t we, the puppeteer turns to me and declares, we take photos and never look back at them. I think it’s reached the point where the compulsive photographing is what triggers the memory, it’s us whispering to our futures, I want to remember the texture of this moment, this glance, and outsourcing that preemptive nostalgia to the machine, a maneuver both harrowing and pathetic. What do you do for work, I ask, sensing some bottomless self-critique at the root of his whimsy. He tells me he’s stationed at the Theater of the Eye in Canada, which he names in French. He’s impressed I can translate. I’m impressed, I tell him, that he treats his own inclinations as suspicious as he might a marionette’s. These small intimacies which loom large enough to make it from gesture to language and back are our best songs. He took a photograph of the lamps and I took one of the coaster that read Dante, as if it harkens Amiri’s Dante, as if I’d step out to meet Amiri around the corner at the Blue Note where we first met in 2007 or 8 over similar conversation. I’d told him his eyes were familiar before I’d realized how or why. Here we are at the theater of eye bonding over our voyeurism of our own experience, trivializing the present to recall it, falling in love with lighting and the way we’re seen and unseen. Scene.

Off-roading

Zinc Bar remembrance, metonymic. Zinc and Magnesium need one another as minerals, their codependency electrifies the blood, loosens and makes supple the muscles, helps the designer vitamin corporations sell you health in jars when real vitality is in a chance conversation about what cannot be extracted from its source by some mechanical vapor and made into a pharmacy-part that may help reconstitute your immune system. I take them both. I touch the bulb, you touch the lamp, maybe a current will form of our shared misunderstanding of the spirit. Later we pass the Village Vanguard and I overhear some NYU students discussing the difference between macros and nutrition and which matters more. Macros, I turn around and declare, loving words too much to miss a collective improvisation about our collective malnourishment on the crowded Avenue of the Americas. Right answer, he smiles, we part. I think of Roy Hargrove’s face after hours at the Vanguard, the sharp sweetness of his regard, how his aura glowed like his tone. How’d you get so pretty, he whispered, unassumingly, not even flirting, just inviting me inside his theater of the eye after an evening in his sound.

I’ll live a lush life in some small dive, the crooners would threaten, delighting their rivals and their worst selves. It’s hard in the archives, of memory and of print matter, to not conflate lived experience with the scribblings in a series of diaries and project my light heart onto another woman’s sorrow or my almost melancholia onto her whole-hearted irreverence. How do I complete the biography of a stolen life? I inquire within. By stealing my own back, I answer my own question. The book begins again.

The story senses some roots in Philadelphia, my next destination, my iron lung. I’m there to interview Sonia Sanchez. I become friends with everyone at the Loews Hotel and the local health food store, Mom’s, in the process. We’re all trapped indoors as the sky makes a spontaneous lake of fire. Someone blames Canada. Someone else blames the mayor for burning live refuse. I think of Dante, the trickster puppeteer, averting his eyes to alert ours to chaos no machine will name but a poet might, under dire circumstances. They force our hands. I meet with poets in a vacant conference room at the Loews to trade verses. I meet with Sonia on her porch and by phone and she tells me stories about her band with Max Roach, Abbey’s once-upon-a-time husband. We meet on a mission and pull up Sun Ra’s doorstep. Some bad ass kids look into the car and smile, the pilgrimage across distances is a success. I run into Alice Coltrane’s nephew. I run and run and run back into my own graces on a gradient of patience I didn’t know I possessed, against the looming spirit of rage or dejection, this series of crazy triumphs. The music went from his hands to my mouth, Sonia explained of her rapport with Max on stage, their making of a band. Roy, LeRoi, Baraka, Dante, Max, Abbey, people in me, kings, queens, jesters, ghosts in search of macrobiotic reckoning. A glimpse of what it means to be on assignment, to steal your life back as if avenging the stolen lives of others. I’m home now, full of wanderlust and the momentum of these conversations that don’t end. Sonia called in the morning after keeping vigil over my night flight, and to make sure there’s no hand in my mouth offstage.