The Taste of Salt Read Online Free PDF

from club to club. In the fifties, it was Muddy Waters and Coltrane and all the big names. Later, Motown moved in—Smokey Robinson and the Miracles and the Supremes and God only knows who else. But you can bet it was somebody good. They all came through Cleveland. If you walk down 105th now, the street is nearly a ghost town in the few places where it isn’t covered by the hulking red-brown buildings of the Cleveland Clinic. 105th Street near Euclid is a series of shabby attempts at strip malls and a dazzling number of fast-food places and boarded-up businesses and factories. Head further downtown into the East Sixties and Seventies and the scene is much the same.
    But when Ray met Sarah at Leo’s Casino on East Seventy-ninth in 1969, this was all in the future. Aretha Franklin was coming through that night. The air was alive, sparkling. Ray was nursing a beer when my mother came in. Sarah was tiny and delicate-boned—she looked like music and sunshine. She had big brown eyes and the prettiest smile he’d ever seen. She came in with a girlfriend, but the girlfriend didn’t make much of an impression on Ray. The women sat down at the bar, just a stool away from him, andordered some girly kind of drinks. Something pink with a silly name. Sarah sat there like a little bird, looking at everything that was going on around her, so interested. Ray found himself looking at her mouth as she sipped at her drink. After a few minutes he got up and walked over to them.
    â€œHello, ladies,” he said. The friend made a little pout and looked away, but Sarah looked up and looked Ray right in the eye. “Hello,” she said.
    â€œWhat brings you here tonight?”
    â€œWe love Aretha Franklin.” This was from the friend, who immediately established herself as the bossy one. Ray played along—he could wait. And if they were friends, no sense alienating the one when you wanted to get to the other.
    â€œOh, yeah, that sister is all right. Y’all from down south?”
    â€œNo sir,” said the friend. “We both come from Chicago. We came here to go to school. We’ve been here about two months. We go to the Bolton nursing school—in that new building over at Case Western.”
    Nursing school? An educated woman? A pretty black woman like her knows enough about having a good time to come out and see Aretha
and
is in nursing school? Ray felt as though he must have done something right that day to meet someone like her. He thought of his small, book-clutteredroom and how he didn’t dare tell anyone he worked with about how much he loved to read—they found out later, but not then. “What you wanna know all that white-boy stuff for?” they would ask. And laugh. He couldn’t explain it to them. That it wasn’t “white boy” stuff. It was human stuff. That’s why he loved it so: because he just felt human when he read it. Maybe a college girl would appreciate that. No one from back home in Alabama did—not that he ever even talked to them anymore. There was no one he could share it with. He looked at the friend again and said, “Well, can you ladies tell me your names before I buy us all another round?”
    The friend, who seemed to feel that she should do all the talking, said, “Thanks. My name’s Elizabeth and this here is Sarah.” Sarah turned her gaze on Ray and smiled, and that was it. He was gone. Choirs of angels and all the rest. He said to both of them but mostly looking at Sarah, “Well, it’s nice to meet you.” But Elizabeth might as well have been a post, a tree, a rock. He managed to take a step closer to Sarah and she said, her voice music only he could hear, “Nice to meet you, too.”
    So that was it. They talked, they drank, they listened to Aretha (who rocked the house; she tore up “I Say a Little Prayer” that night). He somehow managed to maneuver himself so that he was