"I see that," said the girl. "You do it good." She smiled as she said it.

Peggy had come over. "Hello," she said, and put her hands behind her back.

"Hello y'self," said the girl. Her foot was tapping, too, Rudford noticed.

"We come here a lot," Peggy said. "We're Charles's best friends."

"Well, ain't that glad news!" said the girl, winking at Rudford.

Black Charles came in from the kitchen, drying his huge, slender hands on a towel.

"Lida Louise," he said, "these here's my friends, Mr. Rudford and Miss Mar-gar-reet." he turned to the children. "This here's my sister's chile, Miss Lida Louise Jones."

"We met," said his niece. "We all met at Lord Plushbottom's last fortnight." She pointed at Rudford. "Him and me was playin' mahjong out on the piazza."

"How 'bout you singin' somethin' for these here chillern?" Black Charles suggested.

Lida Louise passed over it. She was looking at Peggy. "You and him sweeties?" she asked her.

Rudford said quickly, "No."

"Yes," said Peggy.

"Why you like this little ole boy like you do?" Lida Louise asked Peggy.

"I don't know," Peggy said. "I like the way he stands at the blackboard."

Rudford considered the remark disgusting, but Lida Louise's threnodic eyes picked it up and looked away with it. She said to Black Charles, "Uncle, you hear what this here ole Margar-reet say?"

"No. What she say?" said Black Charles. He had the cover of his piano raised and was looking for something in the strings--a cigarette butt perhaps, or the top of a catsup bottle.

"She say she like this ole boy on accounta the way he stands at the blackboard."

"That right?" said Black Charles, taking his head out of the piano. "You sing somethin' for these here chillern Lida Louise," he said.

"Okay, what song they like?... Who stole my cigarettes? I had 'em right here by my side."

"You smoke too much. You a too-much gal. Sing," said her uncle. He sat down at his piano. "Sing 'Nobody Good Around.'"

"That ain't no song for kiddies."

"These here kiddies like that kinda song real good."

"Okay," said Lida Louise. She stood up, in close to the piano. She was a very tall girl. Rudford and Peggy already sitting at the floor, had to look way up at her.

"What key you want it?"

Linda Louise shrugged. "A, B, C, D, E, F, F," she said and winked at the children. "Who cares? Gimme a green one. Gotta match my shoes."

Black Charles struck a chord, and his niece's voice slipped into it. She sang "Nobody Good Around." When she was finished, Rudford had gooseflesh from his neck to his waist. Peggy's fist was in his coat pocket. He hadn't felt it go in and he didn't make her take it out.

Now years later Rudford was making a great point of explaining to me that Lida Louise's voice cannot be described, until I told him I happened to have most of her records and knew what he meant. Actually, though, a fair attempt to describe Lida Louise's voice can be made. She had a powerful soft voice. Every note she sang was detonated individually. She blasted you tenderly to pieces. In saying her voice can't be described, Rudford probably meant that it can't be classified. And that's true.

Finished with "Nobody Good Around." Lida Louise stooped over and picked up her cigarettes from under her uncle's bench. "Where you been?" she asked them and lit one. The two children didn't take their eyes off her.

Black Charles stood up. "I got spareribs," he announced. "Who want some?"

During Christmas week Lida Louise began singing nights at her Uncle Charles's. Rudford and Peggy both got permission, on her opening night, to attend a hygiene lecture at school. So they were there. Black Charles gave them the table nearest the piano and put two bottles of sarsaparilla on it, but they were both too excited to drink. Peggy nervously tapped the mouth of her bottle against her front teeth; Rudford didn't even pick his bottle up. Some of the high-school and college crowd thought the children were cute. They were dealt with. Around nine o'clock, when the place was packed, Black Charles suddenly stood up from his piano and raised a hand. The gesture, however, had no effect on the noisy, home-for-Christmas crowd, so Peggy turned around in her seat and, never a lady, yelled at them, "Y'all be quiet!" and finally the room quieted down. Charles's announcement was to the point. "I got my sister's chile, Lida Louise, her t'night and she gonna sing for you." Then he sat down and Lida Louise came out, in her yellow dress, and walked up to her uncle's piano. Thje crowd applauded politely, but clearly expected nothing special. Lida Louise bent over Rudford and Peggy's table, snapped her finger against Rudford's ear, and asked, "Nobody Good Around?" They both answered, "Yes!"

Lida Loise sang that, and it turned the place upside down. Peggy started to cry so hard that when Rudford had asked her, "What's the matter?" and she had sobbed back, "I don't know," he suddenly assured her, himself transported, "I love you good, Peggy!" which made the child cry so uncontrollably he had to take her home.

Lida Louise sang nights at Black Charles's for about six months straight. Then, inevitably, Lewis harold Meadows heard her and took her back to Memphis with him. She went without being perceptibly thrilled over the Great Opportunity. She went without being visibly impressed by the sacred words "Beale Street.". But she went. In Rudford's opinion, she went because she was looking for somebody, or because she wanted somebody to find her. It sounds very reasonable to me.

But as long as Agersburg could hold her, she was adored, deified, by the young people there. They knew, most of them, just how good she was, and those who didn't know pretended to. They brought their friends home for the week-end to have a look at her. The ones who wrote for their college papers sanctified her in glorious prose. Others grew smug or blase when foreigners turned dormitory conversation to Viloet Henry or Priscilla Jordan, blues singers who were killing other foreigners in Harlem or New Orleans or Chicago. If you didn't have Lida Louise, where you lived, you didn't have anybody. What's more, you were a bore.

In return for all this love and deification, Lida Louise was very, very good with the Agesburg kids. No matter what they asked her to sing, or how many times they asked her to sing it, she gave them what there was of her smile, said, "Nice tune," and gave.

One very interesting Saturday night a college boy in a Tuxedo--somebody said he was a visiting Yale man--came rather big-time-ily up to the piano and asked Lida Louise, "Do you know 'Slow Train to Jacksonville,' by any chance?"

Lida Louise looked at the boy quickly, then carefully, and answered, "Where you hear that song, boy?"

The boy who was supposed to be a visiting Yale man said, "A fella in New York played it for me."

Lida Louise asked him, "Colored man?"

The boy nodded impatiently.

Lida Louise asked him, "His name Endicott Wilson? You know?"

The boy answered, "I don't know. Little guy. Had a mustache."

Lida Louise nodded. "He in New York now?" she asked.

The boy answered, "Well, I don't know if he's there now. I guess so...How 'bout singin' it if you know it?"

Lida Louise nodded and sat down at the piano herself. She played and sang "Slow Train to Jacksonville."

According to those who heard it, it was a very good number, original atleast in melody, about an unfortunate man with the wrong shade of lipstick on his collar. She sang it through once and, so far as Rudford or I know, never again. Nor has the number ever been recorded by anybody, to my knowledge.

Here we go into jazz history just a little bit. Lida Louise sang at Lewis Harold Meadows's famous Jazz Emporium, on Beale Street in Memphis, for not quite four months. (She started there in late May of 1927 and quit early in September of the same year.) But time, or the lack of it, like everything else, depends entirely upon who's using it. Lida Louise hadn't been singing on Beale Street for more than two weeks before the customers started lining up outside Meadows's an hour before Lida Loiuse went on. Record companies got after her almost immediately. A month after she had hit Beale Street she had made eighteen sides, including "Smile Town," "Brown Gal Blues," "Rainy Day Boy," "Nobody Good Around" and "Seems Like Home."

Everybody who had anything to do with jazz--anything straight, that is--somehow got to hear her while she was there. Russell hopton, John Raymond Jewel, Izzie Field, Louis Armstrong, Much Mcneill, Freddie Jenks, Jack Teagarden, Bernie and Mortie gold, Willie Fuchs, Goodman, Beiderbecke, Johnson, Earl Slagle--all the boys.

One Saturday night a big Sedan from Chicago, pulled up in front og Meadows's. Among those who piled out of it were Joe and Sonny Varioni. They didn't go back with the others, the next morning. They stayed at the Peabody for two nights, writing a song. Before they went back to Chicago they gave Lida Louise "Soupy Peggy." It was about a sentimental little girl who falls in love with a little boy standing at the blackboard in school. (You can't buy a copy of "Soupy Peggy" today, for any price. The other side of it had a fault, and the company only turned out a very few copies.

Nobody knew for certain why Lida Louise quit Meadows's and left Memphis. Rudford and a few others reasonably suspected that her quitting had something--or everything--to do with the corner-of-Beale-Street incident.

Around noon on the day she quit Meadows's, Lida Louise was seen talking in the street with a rather short well-dressed colored man. Whoever he was, she suddenly hit him full in the face with her handbag. Then she ran into Meadows's, whizzed past a crew of waiters and orchestra boys, and slammed her dressing room door behind her. An hour later she was packed and ready to go.

She went back to Agersberg. She didn't go back with a new flossy wardrobe, and she and her mother didn't move into a bigger and better apartment. She just went back.

On the afternoon of her return she wrote a note to Rudford and Peggy. Probably on Black Charles's say-so--like every body else in Agersberg, he was terrified of Rudford's father--she sent the note around to Peggy's house. It read:

Dear kittys I am back and got some real nice new songs for you so you come around quick and see me.

Yours Sincerely, (Miss) Lida Louise Jones

The same September that Lida Louise returned to Agersberg, Rudford was sent away to boarding school. Before he left, Black Charles, Lida Louise, Louise's mother and Peggy gave him a farewell picnic.

Rudford called for Peggy around eleven on a Saturday morning. They were picked up in Black Charles's bashed-in old car and driven out to a place called Tuckett's Creek.

Black Charles, with a fascinating knife, cut the strings on all the wonderful looking boxes. Peggy was a specialist on cold spareribs. Rudford was more of a fried-chicken man. Lida Louise was one of those people who take two bites out of a drumstick, then light a cigarette.

The children ate until the ants got all over everything, then Black Charles, keeping out a last sparerib for Peggy and a last wing for Redford, neatly tied all the boxes.

Mrs. Jones stretched out on the grass and went to sleep. Black Charles and Lida Loise began to play casino. Peggy had with her some sun-pictures of people like Richard Barthelmess and Richard Dix and Reginald Denny. She propped them up against a tree in the bright light and watched possessively over them.

Rudford lay on his back in the grass and watched great cotton clouds slip through the sky. Peculiarly, he shut his eyes when the sun was momentarily clouded out; opened them when the sun returned scarlet against his eyelids. The trouble was the world might end while his eyes were shut.

It did. His world, in any case.

He suddenly heard a brief, terrible, woman's scream behind him. Jerking his head around, he saw Lida Louise writhing in the grass. She was holding her flat, small stomach. Black Charles was trying awkwardly to turn her toward him, to get her somehow out of the frightening, queer position her body had assumed in its apparent agony. His face was gray.

Rudford and Peggy both reached the terrible spot at the same time.

"What she et? What she done et?" Mrs. Jones demanded hysterically of her brother.

"Nothin'! She done et hardly nothin'," Black Charles answered, miserable. He was still trying to do something constructive with Lida Louise's twisting body.

Something came to Rudford's head, something out of his father's "First Aid for Americans." Nervously he dropped to his knees and pressed Lida Louise's abdomen with two fingers. Lida Louise responded with a curdling scream.

"It's her appendix. She's busted her appendix. Or it's gonna bust," Rudford wildly informed Black Charles. "We gotta get her to a hospital."

Understanding, at least in part, Black Charles nodded. "You take her foots," he directed his sister.

Mrs. Jones, however, dropped her end of the burden on the way to the car. Rudford and Peggy each grabbed a leg, and with their help Black Charles hoisted the moaning girl into the front seat. Rudford and Peggy also climbed in the front. Peggy held Lida Louise's head. Mrs. Jones was obliged to sit alone in the back. She was making far more anguished sounds than those coming from her daughter.

"Take her to Samaritan. ON Benton Street," Rudford told Black Charles.

Black Charles's hands were shaking so violently he couldn't get the car going. Rudford pushed his hand through the spokes of the driver's wheel and turned on the ignition. The car started up.

"That there Samaritan's a private hospital," Black Charles said grinding his gears.

"What's the difference? Hurry up. Hurry up, Charles," Rudford said, and told the older man when to shift into second and when into third. Charles knew enough, though, to make good, unlawful time.

Peggy stroked Lida Louise's forehead. Rudford watched the road. Mrs. Jones, in the back, whimpered unceasingly. Lida Louise lay across the children's laps with her eyes shut, moaning intermittently. The car finally reached Samaritan Hospital, about a mile and a half away.

"Go in the front way," Rudford prompted.

Black Charles looked at him. "The front way, boy?" he said.

"The front way, the front way," Rudford said, and excitedly punched the older man on the knee.

Black Charles obediently semicircled the gravel driveway and pulled up in front of the great white entrance.

Rudford jumped out of the car without opening the door, and rushed into the hospital.

At the reception desk a nurse sat with earphones on her head.

"Lida Louise is outside, and she's dying," Rudford said to her. "She's gotta have her appendix out right away."

"Shhh," said the nurse, listening to her earphones.

"Please. She's dying, I tellya."

"Shhh," said the nurse, listening to her earphones.

Rudford pulled them off her head. "Please," he said. "You've gotta get a guy to help us get her in and everything. She's dying."

"The singer?" said the nurse.

"Yes! Lida Louise!" said the boy, almost happy and making it strong.

"I'm sorry but the rules of the hospital do not permit Negro patients. I'm very sorry."

Rudford stood for a moment with his mouth open.

"Will you please let go of my phones?" the nurse said quietly. A woman who controlled herself under all circumstances.

Rudford let go of the phones, turned, and ran out of the building.

He climbed back into the car, ordering, "Go to Jefferson. Spruce and Fenton."

Black Charles said nothing. He started up the motor--he had turned it off--and jerked the car to a fast start.