THE SONGBIRD OF JACKSON STREET

By Chris Bauer

Illustration by Georgia DuCharme

South Philadelphia, February 1955

Sara Jane lay spent on the cement cellar floor, a nest of newspapers cradling her, an old winter coat opened flat beneath her legs, its gray lining wet with melted snow and red-black birthing fluids. She worked her jaw from side to side, cramped from the cloth diaper she’d clenched between her teeth. It was three a.m. She had awakened no one.

The memories that mattered and the faces they belonged to would not stay where she put them. She weathered their intrusion, her new baby girl pulled tightly to her chest. All came rushing at her in whatever fashion her disheveled mind could arrange:

A faded, scalloped photograph showing her as a child in the driver’s seat of her father’s Studebaker. Her small hands were on the steering wheel, her short black curls just above the car’s window ledge with her father leaning on his elbow and smiling at her, and her smiling at the camera, her two front teeth missing.

A stabbing memory from a year later, with her at the top of a Ferris wheel sobbing wildly, her father dead from a coronary in the seat next to her.

Another photo, this one of her squirt brother in cowboy boots and she in a pink skirt and white bobby sox, her arm around his shoulder, the two of them in front of the Liberty Bell.

An image of her mother’s favorite shot glass, a sickening hint of whiskey in its amber stained concavity. No photograph, yet one indelible memory: her mother’s cord-veined neck, seething face, roadmap eyes, and a lower lip wet from a spray of sarcasm. Her mother’s words like a noose: “Good riddance to you and your crazy voices. Don’t none of you come back.”

She felt for her tapestry satchel, an eggshell tan overgrown with embroidered roses, their ruby petals blooming through caked street soot, her keepsakes and necessities inside. She opened her eyes, retrieved the two photographs from the bag, brought them closer to her new daughter’s contented, suckling face. Introductions all around, followed by a special prayer of thanks to Mrs. Yancy, from one new mother to another, the woman asleep with her own child two floors above her.

This was a good neighborhood. Clean, quiet, busy. Two-story brick rowhomes, most with nice couples living in them, some still waiting for their husbands to return for good from the wars.

Couples like the Yancys. Husband, wife, and a newborn girl of two months, their first child. Sara Jane’s face flushed at this impression.

The caring Mrs. Yancy always had a tenderness in her eyes. Next door to the Yancys, their front stoop shared, lived the Charmagnes, Mrs. Yancy’s pregnant older sister and her husband, who was still on active duty. Mrs. Charmagne’s look at Sara Jane on the street was different. Curious. Interested. Like a child on a bench in the park with a trail of breadcrumbs leading to her feet. Mrs. Charmagne’s latest gift to Sara Jane had been a receiving blanket.

On colder nights, the cellar doors to both sisters’ homes were left unlocked. Sara Jane accepted this charity by way of quiet, late-night entrances from the alley, and exits before dawn.

Hers was a confused life made simpler two years ago, when at age seventeen she left home. A life now contained in one soot-stained, lumpy tan and red fabric bag that followed her in a corroded toy wagon with rust-pocked white wheels as she walked the narrow streets of South Philadelphia.

But things had changed. Simple had become complicated.

Her fabric bag was good for it. It could handle another life.

Sara Jane was not sick, she was not crazy. She was burdened. Yesterday, today, always. It was only one voice that came to her, she’d told her hardened mother. Always just one voice, and this voice was lovely, and musical, and real. And, unlike her mother, it would never hurt her.

***

The Yancys’ coal furnace hatch was open; Sara Jane needed it for light and warmth. The furnace fire was almost out, the cellar chilly now, a rosy pre-dawn horizon brightening the dusty casement window above the coal bin, the bin’s planked door ajar at the edge of the coal pile.

Her head drooped then rose as she fought her exhaustion, her pale palm and the fingers of one hand black from stray lumps of coal she’d flicked into the furnace’s belly. Her head drooped again, came to rest temple-to-temple with her baby and stayed there as Sara Jane closed her motherly eyes. She would sleep now, would let her dreams comfort her, would let them diminish the remnants of another bruising day, the taunts from the streets still ricocheting: vagrant; beggar; pregnant whore; and the cruelest of them, a play on her S-J initials, Straitjacket. All names that shamed her, yet there was one name that did not: the Songbird of Jackson Street.

But the beautiful voice that had earned her this label, the spirited soprano that often burst through her lips uninvited as she and her bagladen wagon moved from street corner to street corner, this voice was not, and had never been, her own.

She and this songbird with the beautiful voice dreamed.

The furnace belched. Two tiny coal fireballs skidded onto the cellar floor, one settling on the lining of her coat, the other on a greasy rag left on the fringe of the coal bin overflow.

Her songbird took flight in their dream and chattered at her in earnest from the treetops, pleading for Sara Jane and her baby to wake up, to flee the fiery predator that was about to devour them, to join the songbird in safety.

In the deadly, carbon-monoxide-filled air, the new mother was too tired to fly.

Chris Bauer is a brute force author with seven novels published, the crime thriller “2 Street” the latest. A Philadelphia native, he's a veteran of street sports played on blacktop and concrete, fistfights, row houses, and twelve years of well-intentioned Catholic school discipline. Find him at ChrisBauerAuthor.com, facebook.com/cgbauer/, twitter.com/cgbauer, instagram.com/ cntbauer1/.