The Songbook of Benny Lament - Amy Harmon Page 0,161

a man more committed to his country.”

Maybe that was true. I didn’t know. But if it was, he had so little to show for it.

No relationships. No mourners. No one to throw flowers on his grave. Our son, Bo Johnson Lament, was an infant in Esther’s arms, and he would never know his great-grandfather. We left before they laid Rudolf Alexander in the ground, and I never got close enough to the casket to see whether he had all his fingers.

If there was wealth he’d left behind, I don’t know what became of it. I’m sure his diplomat son received a handsome inheritance, but Esther wasn’t ever openly acknowledged. We were visited a month after his death by his estate lawyer, though, and he informed us a scholarship had been created in Maude Alexander’s name, and that it could be applied to any music program or college in the state. First consideration was to be made to Negro students or students with mixed heritage. He said Esther had been named an administrator and could choose the yearly recipients if she wished. It was a small concession to her identity, to her existence, and after some thought, she agreed to review the applicants and select the winners each year.

It occurred to me, sitting at the funeral service for Rudolf Alexander, that he’d rejected the things I too had once disdained. Family. Connection. Posterity. Responsibility. Like me, he was a man who had loved his work, but at the end of his life no one had loved him. Esther had saved me from that, and sadly, she could have saved Rudolf Alexander from the same thing had he chosen differently.

How could I have any regrets? We met Bobby Kennedy in ’64 when the Civil Rights Act was passed, and we marked our five-year wedding anniversary by performing at the White House in ’65. In ’67, the Supreme Court ruled that the laws against interracial marriage were unconstitutional, but our celebrations were short-lived. In July of that same year, riots broke out in Detroit down Twelfth Street over housing, unemployment, and charges of citywide racial discrimination. The powder keg Mrs. Esther Gordy Edwards had warned about in ’60 exploded after a police raid, and the resulting riots lasted five long, hot days.

The newscasts and papers reported breathlessly on the fallout with enough hate and destruction in the background to make people shake their heads and take sides. When the smoke cleared, a black deliveryman named Jack Lament was among the dead, and Esther and I knew it was him. We’d seen him a few times in the years after Chicago. He would show up unannounced and spend an hour or two. He never had much to say. He just wanted to check on us. He got to hold his grandsons.

No one else ever knew that Bo “the Bomb” Johnson had lost his final bout.

We went to Detroit to claim his body. Esther had to show her identification to establish a relationship. The name on her passport was “Esther Lament,” and the shared name was proof enough for their purposes. Ironic that their names had matched for the first time.

“He was your father?” they asked her.

“He was my father,” she said.

We took his body back to New York and buried him beside Maude Alexander in Woodlawn Cemetery. It was the only home they were ever going to have together.

In ’68, Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis, making us wonder if his dream would ever come to pass. Rumors of mob involvement, questions about politics and payoffs and inside deals abounded, just like they had when JFK was killed in ’63. And like most things, I doubted that what we saw and what we were told was really the truth. I knew better. There were riots after King’s death too, the bubbling cauldron spilling over in places that had welcomed us and a few that had run us off. Those were the darkest days for me, when the ugliness seemed to overwhelm the beautiful, where I was convinced my father was right and only the rotten survived.

“His dream will come true,” Esther had reminded me then. “The biggest dreams always do. I dreamed of you, didn’t I?”

She had dreamed of me, a mobster’s kid who played piano and wrote songs, and for all his faults and failings, Pop had made that dream come true. Not one day, not one minute, not one hour did I ever regret the day I followed him to