The Apprenticeship of Jelly Roll Morton

—Romare Bearden, collage of various papers with ink, graphite, and surface abrasion on fiberboard, sight: 24.1 x 34.9 cm (9 ½ x 13 ¾)

No Eden, Storyville. No green thought in a green glade here, where sometimes night is a black palm sweating at the window and other times just a knuckled claw reaching through

this shotgun shack in the Quarter. Bearden got it right. The women are only background, where they bend to retrieve their drawers and striped stockings where they fell,

and the bottle of hothouse hooch, Raleigh Rye, sways on the upright. Out on Gravier Street, catcalls shatter like glass and the late moon, old yellow tom, hooks his claw,

but here Jelly Roll swoops and stomps a jazz so good it answers its own questions and makes the live oaks let down their hair of heat lightning and Spanish moss. Each note’s an Amen to the one that came before—

he plays like a preacher working a tent revival when your soul is simply burning like venom to be saved. Brother, sister, come to me, Lord, Lord. The women pull off or on their dresses depending who’s coming or going while

that Wurlitzer wails and its keys go on talking to each other. The way he plays, the way he plays, those women could almost save themselves. No Jesus, no deliverance but his— Not today, they know, when the small of their backs

is a knot of fever and ache and those orchids tucked in their hair do nothing but wilt behind one ear— Still, as long as those hands are walking, their future’s a reverie

run up the keyboard on one hand. The way Jelly Roll plays, it won’t be long until those women— like Lazarus, conjure women each— rise and walk the waters off the Gulf.