I get a room near Victoria where the landlady accept one pound in advance, and next day I find a job in the kitchen of a private hotel close by. But I don’t stay there long. I hear of another job going in a big store - altering ladies’ dresses and I get that. I lie and tell them I work in very expensive New York shop. I speak bold and smooth faced, and they never check up on me. I make a friend there - Clarice - very light coloured, very smart, she have a lot to do with the customers and she laugh at some of them behind their backs. But I say it’s not their fault if the dress don’t fit. Special dress for one person only - that’s expensive in London. So it’s take in, or let out, all the time. Clarice have two rooms not far from the store. She furnish herself gradual and she gives parties sometimes Saturday nights. It’s there I start whistling the Holloway Song. A man comes up to me and says, “Let’s hear that again.” So I whistle it again (I never sing now) and he tells me “Not bad”. Clarice have an old piano somebody give her to store and he plays the tune, jazzing it up. I say “No, not like that,” but everybody else say the way he do it is first class. Well I think no more of this till I get a letter from him telling me he has sold the song and as I was quite a help he encloses five pounds with thanks.
I read the letter and I could cry. For after all, that song was all I had. I don’t belong nowhere really, and I haven’t money to buy my way to belonging. I don’t want to either.
But when that girl sing, she sing to me and she sing for me. I was there because I was meant to be there. It was meant I should hear it - this I know.
Now I’ve let them play it wrong, and it will go from me like all the other songs - like everything. Nothing left for me at all.
But then I tell myself all this is foolishness. Even if they played it on trumpets, even if they played it just right, like I wanted - no walls would fall so soon. “So let them call it jazz,” I think, and let them play it wrong. That won’t make no difference to the song I heard.
I buy myself a dusty pink dress with the money.
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from Let Them Call It Jazz And Other Stories
by Jean Rhys
Penguin Books Ltd 1995
ISBN 0-14-600059-5
