He had a valuable collection of old jazz albums that included Louis Armstrong, Lionel Hampton, Art Blakey on drums, and female vocalists like Carmen McRae, Ella Fitzgerald and Billie Holiday. He loved how I could listen to Carmen McRae singing "Bye Bye Blackbird" and then imitate her. He said I did a wonderful job imitating Ella Fitzgerald's "Lullaby of Birdland," He would play it and I would sing along. I could see the deep pleasure in his face whenever I performed for him. If Mama was there, she would thumb through one of her beauty magazines and look up at me occasionally, torn between giving me a compliment and complaining about me being content at home with them or my disinterest in the music girls my age loved.
"You're turning her into some weird kid. She doesn't listen to hip-hop or any of the music kids her age listen to and it's because of you. Cameron." she would grumble.
"I'm just listening to real music," Daddy would reply. "And she enjoys it. What's wrong with that?"
"Real music." Mama muttered. ''My idea of real music is going somewhere to hear it and dance and have a good time, not sitting in your living room tapping your fingers on the side of an armchair."
They did go out on weekends occasionally, but Mama was never happy about the places Daddy took her.
The people there were either too old or too calm or out of touch with what was really happening.
"You're not out in the world like I am," she would tell him. "You just don't know."
Daddy didn't argue. He drew his music around him like a curtain of steel and sat contented, as contented as someone soaking in a warm bath. I listened, sang, learned about tempo and beat, phrasing and rhythm while Mama pouted or went into her bedroom to turn on the television set very loud. Those nights, we drove silence out the window.
Finally. Mama really decided to do something about me, to take control of my destiny, just as she had threatened. She was back to that idea that some girls just needed a little push. Well, she was going to give me more than a little push. She was going to give me a firm shove.
She returned one afternoon, stepped into my bedroom while I was sprawled on my bed doing my math homework, and made an astonishing
announcement.
"Thank your lucky stars. girl. I got you a date with a handsome young man."
"What?" I asked, turning.
"I got you a date for Saturday night. We got to go out and buy you something decent to wear and then I have to help you get yourself together, fix your hair, do your makeup. When you go out with someone, you represent me, too," she declared. "'People gonna say that's Lena Goodman's daughter and by the time I'm finished fixing you up, people gonna say. 'I would have known anywhere that was Lena's girl, a girl that pretty has to be her daughter.'"
"What do you mean, a date?" I asked, my heart thudding like a fist on stone.
"I know you kids don't like to think of it as a date. Somehow the word became old-fashioned. You just what--'hang out with someone' nowadays?" She smirked and shook her head. "Well, to me a date's a date. The man picks you up, takes you somewhere nice, and pays for everything. That's still a date in my book."
"What man?" I asked, sitting up.
"Louella Carter's younger brother Shawn. He's gonna be home from boot camp on leave this weekend, and we arranged for you two to be together Saturday night. He's a very good-looking boy and a boy in the army is gonna be well mannered. too. I spoke with him on the phone myself and he was all, 'Yes ma'am' and 'No ma'am' and 'Thank you. ma'am."
"I'm not going out with someone I never met. Mama." I protested.
"Of course you are. Didn't you ever hear of something called blind dates? You either got your nose in your schoolbooks or your father's old record albums, but you must've heard of that."
"I don't like blind dates," I said.
"You've never been on one! You've never been on any date, blind or otherwise, so how can you say you don't like it. Ice?"
"I just know I don't," I said.
"Well, this time you're gonna make an effort to like something I do for you. I didn't just go looking for a date for you, you know. I screened a lot of young men first. Louella's a girlfriend of mine and her brother's got to be a good boy who won't take advantage of an innocent girl such as yourself. I'm not saying he won't want to kiss you and such, but you know when to stop.-
She thought a moment.
"Don't you?" she asked. "I mean, you learned all about that stuff in school. right?"
I nodded.
"Good. Then it's all set."
"Nothing's set," I said.
She glared at me a moment and then she stepped farther into my room, her eyes heating over, her jaw tightening, her hands folding into small fists pressed firmly into her thighs as she hovered over me.