smiling.
“I’m just tired of singing all your parts, you lazy ox,” she shot back, and the audience roared in laughter.
We bickered back and forth for a minute before I was shooed back to the bench, and we kicked off three more songs—“Chicken,” which the audience loved, “No Shoes,” and “Maybe,” by the Ink Spots, just to give the audience another song they knew.
“We only have time for one more song,” Esther said as the clapping faded.
The audience booed, and Esther nodded sadly.
“I know. I know. I’ll miss you too. Even more than I missed poor Benny tonight.” She turned and waved at me, and the crowd chuckled.
“And because you’ve been so kind, and I’ll miss you so much, I’m going to leave something with you. A little piece of myself. I sing this song everywhere I go now. This is a song about my daddy and the woman he loved.” The audience stilled. I stilled.
“Some people say I look like my mother. But I think she looked more like you. Or you.” Esther pointed at a white girl to her right and another to her left.
“And my daddy looked like you,” she said slowly. Clearly. She pointed to a big, dark-skinned man on the balcony. “That’s right. You heard me. My mother was a white and my daddy was colored. And he was the best heavyweight boxing champion in all the world. They called him Bo ‘the Bomb’ Johnson. He was big and strong. But not strong enough, I guess. Not strong enough for this world. Not strong enough to love a white girl like Maude Alexander.”
It was so quiet in the hall I could hear the hum of the sound system and Lee Otis shifting nervously on his stool.
“Now Bo Johnson is gone, and nobody knows where he is,” Esther said, her voice ringing. “The woman he loved is dead. I think she died of a broken heart. But I’ll never get to ask her.”
Esther was an actress on a stage, selling the story and delivering the words in a voice that filled the farthest corners of the room and rose to the dripping chandeliers above us. And the audience hung on every word.
“But her song isn’t gone, because I’m here.” Esther spread her arms wide. “I’m here, and I’m standing up here telling you their story. I’m telling you my story too. Maybe my story will have a different ending.”
She sang the first verse the way we’d done on Barry Gray’s show, no accompaniment, no intro. But she was perfectly on pitch, and when she dropped into the chorus, we all came in on the downbeat, double time. Money sang my lines though he couldn’t hit the lowest notes and had to improvise; it didn’t matter. The song was a hit, and when Esther blew the crowd a kiss and we all bowed and waved, the whole place was on their feet.
An intermission was announced, the curtain went down, and the stage was readied for Ray Charles. At least I would have a microphone for the second show. Sloppy, rushed sound checks made for sloppy, rushed shows, but we’d made it. And Esther had risen to a whole new level. She’d opened herself up wide in front of her audience. She’d made them love her. She’d made them listen. And she’d done it all by herself.
News that the Drifters weren’t going to perform had spread, but when the curtain rose for the ten thirty show, we were met with polite clapping and the curious craning of necks, but no surprise and no obvious disappointment. The audience was gawking. Word had spread about our closing song; word had spread about us.
We kicked it up immediately, moving from one number to the next without slowing. I had a microphone, and the crowd seemed to enjoy our tug-of-war, but it became clear almost immediately that they were waiting for something. The expectation in the audience was palpable. By the time we debuted the heartbeat song, which we hadn’t played in the first show, the whole place had started to thrum. Lee Otis’s drums parried with our musical conversation and the elevated pulse of the crowd.
“I hear your heart, or is it mine?”
Everyone was on their feet when we finished, and I knew it was time to give them what they’d been waiting for. They wanted to hear Esther’s story.
“Hey, Esther,” I said.
“Yes, Benny?” Esther said.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”
“Well, Benny. I was thinking we were gonna sing some more.”
The audience