I turned the printed message over in my hand while Darius sat on my folding stool beside the crate of Sam Cooke, and I read the name at the top of the page a third time. Leon Barksdale. It was the name Calvin used to say on the last night of every year after his second glass of whiskey, with his big hand around mine. Leon, who played harmonica. Leon, who was the best friend he ever had. I had not heard that name since the funeral, and I had never met the man.
The message was long and written entirely in capital letters, the way old men type who learned on a manual machine. He said he had watched for the collection for two years, ever since the death of Calvin was printed in the Commercial Appeal. He said he knew that one record in those eight hundred was not like the others, and he described the sleeve. Otis Redding. A tear on the top left corner. A hand drawn star in red pencil. And he said that he was prepared to pay thirty six hundred dollars for that one record and no other.
Darius looked up at me with his mouth open. “Mama, I put the whole lot at four hundred. This man offered nine times that for a single album?” I told him to hush. I stood up, turned off the little turntable, and knelt beside the crate of the doubles. The Otis Redding was there. I had played it myself an hour before. I pulled it out and turned it over in the light, and there was the tear, and the star, in red pencil, so faint I had never noticed it.
I did not slide the record out at first. I held the sleeve and let my fingers feel the weight. Then I looked inside. It was not the Otis Redding at all. It was a single disc of black lacquer on an aluminum base, scuffed, in a plain paper jacket, with a typed label that read: Beale Street Five, Session 2, March 1971. And below it, written by hand in blue ink: For Mavis. Not to be played until Leon is ready. C.
A promise kept in silence for fifty years is not a secret but a gift, waiting patiently for the hour it can be given.
I sat down on the stool where Darius had been. He rose and stood beside me, his hand on my shoulder, and I told him the story I had been told only in pieces. Mavis had been the wife of Leon, a singer with a voice like warm honey, and the band had recorded a session at a studio on McLemore Avenue in the spring of 1971. She died of pneumonia two years later, in the winter. Leon had never been able to listen to the recording again. He had asked Calvin to keep it safe until the day he was ready.
I called the number at the bottom of the message from the pay phone of the flea market, because I did not trust myself to find the words by any other means. A gentle voice answered. When I said my name, there was a long silence, and then he said, “Madam. I have waited fifty three years to hear you say it.” He lived in Southaven, in a small brick house with a porch. He was eighty four. He said he would be at my booth in an hour, if he could find a ride, and he arrived in forty minutes.
He came leaning on a cane, in a pressed gray suit and a straw hat, and he took it off when he saw me. For a while, neither of us said anything. Darius brought him a chair. I set the little turntable on a crate and cleaned the disc with a soft cloth, as Calvin used to do. Leon watched me with eyes the color of dark coffee. When the needle touched the lacquer, there was the soft crackle of fifty three years, and then, out of the dark, a bass line I knew like my own pulse.
The harmonica came in next, low and sweet. Then a woman voice, young and clear and unafraid, singing a song about a river. Leon put his hat over his heart. The whole row of the flea market had gone still. A woman selling quilts across the aisle stood up. Four minutes and nine seconds. When the song ended, nobody clapped. Leon sat with his eyes closed and tears moving down the lines of his face, and then he whispered, “There she is. There she is.”
I would not accept the thirty six hundred dollars. I told him the record had never been mine to sell. Calvin had kept his word for fifty years, and I intended to keep it for him. I put the disc into the paper jacket, and I laid it in his hands. He tried to refuse. I closed his fingers around it and said, “Mr. Leon, my husband carried this for you for half a century. Please let me finish the walk.” He bowed his head, and I do believe I heard his heart.
Darius stood by with his arms crossed over his chest, quiet, and I watched him change. He said he had been a fool, that he had seen eight hundred records and had not seen a single one. Then he borrowed a pen and asked Leon if he could make a copy of the song, properly, at a studio. Leon agreed. A week later we sat in the studio of a friend of Gloria on Cooper Street, and listened as a young engineer transferred the acetate onto a clean digital file, with great care.
We pressed three hundred copies the next month, with the picture of Mavis on the front, courtesy of Leon. We sold them at my booth for twenty dollars apiece, and every cent went into a scholarship fund at the Stax Music Academy in the name of Calvin and Mavis. Leon came on Saturdays to sit beside me, with his harmonica in his pocket. When the customers asked about the song, he would play a few bars, and they would stand listening with their packages in their arms.
Darius has turned the front room of my house into a listening room. The shelves are full again, eight hundred and one records now, and he plays them for me on Sunday afternoons on a turntable he bought with his own money. He asks me to tell him the stories behind each one. The bass of Calvin stands in its case in the corner, and each night I still say good night to it. Lately, I think I hear it answer in a low, warm note.