1.
The shirt is too tight. Momma wants him to wear a tie, but he says no, no momma, I’m not wearing no tie, it’s like it’s choking me, momma. So she assents, and she looks him up and down, and she smiles ’cause he shines so bright in that navy blue suit and his black shirt. When he unbuttons that top clasp, it’s almost like he’s his daddy on stage. So momma touches his cheek and she kisses his forehead.

“Oh, baby,” she says, her eyes shimmering. “You’re gonna knock ’em dead.”

His hands are shaking, and even though he doesn’t want to admit it his throat is dry. God is his throat dry, it’s almost as though he’s never had a drink of water in his life before. But he puts on the brave face, the one daddy showed him how, and he gives her a smile, and he says, “I’m, alright. Don’t you worry ’bout me.”

But she will, he knows. As she kisses him once more on the forehead, the lingering warmth of her lips like a budding flower opening during Georgian spring, he knows she’ll wander back to her seat and wring her hands around her purse–the expensive one daddy bought her a few years back. He scraped up all the double shifts he could, washing dishes in boiling water, getting bossed around, thrown around, run down, but he got the cash and he brought momma out on a fancy date and he took her to that purse shop she always eyes when they drive by. And he waltzed in with her and spread his arms out and said, you pick your favorite one, baby.

So, she did, and that purse, with its white leather and gold zippers and fancy buttons, that’s the one she wrings like it’s a damp washcloth while her baby boy walks up on stage. That’s the one she digs her lacquered nails into.

‘Cause he’s gonna knock ’em dead, but Lord is she nervous.


2.
The piano starts, halting and slow. Momma watches her boy, peering over a redheaded man with a haircut buzzed a little too short in the back, and she beams as her boy, her little man, the one who used to steal her coffee when he wasn’t older than two, spreads his arms as if he’s about to give a sermon.

And oh, yes, Lord, the song does come. It soars from his throat like a biblical declaration, as if Sam Cooke himself descended from the heavens and inhabited this young man’s soul. And momma can’t help but let the tears flow from her hot eyes. She stops wringing the purse, and she brings her hands up to her mouth, steepled, and the salty tears spill down her knuckles.


3.
His heart hammers in his chest, and he looks back and forth out at the audience, just like his daddy told him, and he tries not to look at momma because, if he does, he knows he’s gonna stagger. He’s gonna lose this flow he has, and the last thing he wants to do is embarrass them. Not after she bought him this suit with the last of the tips she earned working at Chili’s. Not after both she and daddy fought tooth and nail with their managers to get the night off, so they could bring him, so they could see him sing the song he spent weeks practicing in his bedroom, with worn headphones clasped around his ears and his eyes closed.

But when he’s looking back and forth, he sees a man in the audience. A man with skin like porcelain, with blue eyes that burn, not with passion but with hunger. It unlocks in his chest as he sings: a fear. A horror. A knowledge, bestowed somehow upon him in that moment, and when he tears his eyes away from the man, he somehow knows the name that goes along with those blue eyes.

Samuel Caldwell.


4.
He is still singing, but he is also losing contact with his body, like a fuzzy radio signal that warbles in and out. He’s there, the notes coming smooth and easy, just as he prayed they would, and then he’s somewhere else. Somewhere dark. Somewhere that smells of must and stale beer and three-day-old pizza.


5.
“I’m tellin you, kid,” Samuel says. “Your momma is gonna understand. What momma doesn’t want her child to play a gig like this? You understand who’s gonna be there, right?”

He nods and knits his fingers together. He sits in the uncomfortable chair, and he looks across at Samuel, whose blue eyes burn their way into his soul.

“Yeah,” he says. “Your friend from Interscope.”

“That’s right,” Samuel nods. “And my friend from Interscope, you know what he said to me?”

“What?”

“He said, ‘You put that kid on stage, and if he can sing I’ll put him in the studio.’ Honest to God, that’s the truth. Boy, all you gotta do is sing your soul out, just like you has been these past few years, and when you’re on the other side, you’ll have the money to take care of your daddy, to take care of your momma. What’d they always want when you were growin’ up? What, a nice, big house? A fancy car?”

He doesn’t respond because momma didn’t want none of those things. Though he’s sure she’s harbored more than a few material desires, she’s never been so arrogant as to let anyone know it. She’s happy enough with their five-hundred-square-foot apartment and the small stoop it came with. The stoop where she sits on the porch and drinks her coffee and people watches. Sometimes, he joins her, and she points out a man in a fine suit and says, “Well, he’s off to apologize to somebody.”

Samuel reaches across the gap between their chairs and pats him on his knee. “It’s gonna be great. Just you wait.” Then, after a pause, he asks, “What, don’t you trust me?”

He looks into those blue eyes, and he’s not confident he does. But he does know Samuel holds the keys to everything he’s ever wanted: comfort for his parents and a chance to sing his soul out.

Those blue eyes crinkle, and Samuel says, “Atta-boy.”


6.
It was good. At first. Momma got a fancy new coffee maker and Dad went out and got a ’68 Mustang from Reggie three blocks down. Reggie hadn’t wanted to part with it, but, well, a price was a price. He felt bad, when he turned in the passenger’s seat and saw Reggie watching them drive away, but he also couldn’t deny how much it filled his soul with summer sunshine every time he saw his daddy dutifully washing that gorgeous car on the street. They didn’t have hose hookups, so his daddy brought out buckets of sudsy water and a great big sponge, and he put every ounce of elbow grease into keeping that car sparkling. By God, if some dimwit in a galloping SUV so much as sprayed a dollop of mud on the tire, his daddy walked right back into the house and refilled the bucket with fresh, hot water.

And for a time, Samuel didn’t push them hard. Part of that was momma. Jesus and school, she’d say, come before this deal of yours. She strictly enforced it, too, so much so that, when he turned fourteen, he was terrified to admit to her that he didn’t believe so much anymore. Maybe a little bit. Maybe when the dark was a little too deep, or when he took daddy’s ’68 Mustang out in the middle of the night to impress a white girl from his middle school. Yeah, then it was easy to believe in a God, ’cause how else could he have survived? The truck missed him by about four inches, must’ve been, and Annie never did talk to him after that.

But those checks kept food on the table when daddy lost his job, and those checks got momma’s insulin when she was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes, and so it was hard for momma or daddy or for him to argue with Samuel and his blue eyes whenever he came around knocking, mentioning a new opportunity, another gig, a television appearance, a radio show, this and that and the other, until daddy decided it was better not to show momma the report card that sported three Cs and two Bs–a disturbing reversal of his sterling record.

“Let me tell you something that’s just good sense,” Samuel said one of those nights he was about to perform for a bunch of adults. “Don’t matter who your favorite singer is, ain’t none of ’em needed an A in algebra. You understand?”

It broke his heart to nod, but he did, because Samuel was right in that regard.


7.
He held the pen over the paper. Momma and Dad were there, and momma was rubbing his back, and Dad was looking on solemnly. But the pen was in his hand, and when he looked up from the page, Samuel stared down at him, hands clasped patiently.

“This is it, kid,” he said. “Everything you’ve wanted. It’s yours to take.”

And Momma rubbed his back and whispered in his ear, “Knock ’em dead, baby.”

He signed his scrawl that never felt formal enough to be a signature, and he pushed the papers away. His mouth was dry, so very dry, and he asked for water, but when Samuel brought it and he gulped it down, his tongue still felt swollen and thick.

“This is gonna be good,” Samuel said. “You wait and see.”


8.
He sings that song again and again, but it never quite reaches the power of that first time, in that school auditorium, with parents watching and the blue suit and the shirt that was a little too tight. It never rolls off his tongue the right way. The notes come easily, they always have, but there’s something integral missing. Momma calls it soul, but she tells him time and time again that he’s got soul, baby, Lord does he have soul.

Samuel takes him across the country, and every new place is like a glittering star system waiting to be discovered. He looks up at the skyscrapers in Boston, and then he considers the glowing billboards in Minneapolis, and he gawks at Times Square, and he feels lost and small in Los Angeles. But Samuel is there every step of the way.

Sometimes Momma comes with. That first record broke the charts, and she was able to quit that job waiting tables. No more men gawking at her legs, no more angry customers spitting on the receipt, no sir, no ma’am. Now it’s just coffee and people watching and good books and maybe a little bit of The People’s Court, as an indulgence, of course.

When she does come out with him on the road, he feels that spark, but he can’t look at her when he sings. He’ll mess it up, he just knows it. He’ll forget a line, or he’ll miss the pitch, or he’ll just make a dumb face and some paparazzi somewhere will snap it and put it on the cover of a newspaper. Everything spreads now, his father says, like blood in the water, like ink in oil. It spreads, baby.

He writes some new songs, but when he brings them to Samuel, those blue eyes crinkle and he pulls his mouth inward like he’s bitten a lemon.

“You trust the team we’ve got,” he says. “They write some great songs. Two of ’em won a Grammy. You don’t gotta worry ’bout that.”

So he stores those songs, written out on torn sheafs of looseleaf paper in messy scrawl, in a binder. And that binder grows in size, even as he sings the same twelve songs repeatedly, for crowds that grow increasingly similar, blending together. And he just misses being a nobody. He misses the way that suit felt so long ago.

And he misses his momma.


9.
He meets Reynelle in a smoke-filled bar. She’s drinking a whisky sour and when he asks for a beer she turns and glances at him, and God, her smile knocks him dead. He’s only felt like that three times in his life–once, when he took Annie out in his dad’s ’68 Mustang, when the moon hung over them like a giant jewel; twice, when he slow-danced at prom with his first true girlfriend, Maddie, and leaned in for that first kiss; thrice, now, staring at Reynelle through the gouts of faint smoke, with Janis Joplin pouring from the speakers and the bartender handing over some domestic swill that cost a couple bucks to swallow.

Her skin sparkles in the dim light. The world seems to freeze. And he knows, in that moment, if he doesn’t say something, he’s going to regret it for the rest of his life.

So, he leans closer and says, “Mind if I buy you a drink?”

And she smiles coyly and responds, “That’s the best you got?”


10.
Reynelle goes on the road with him, and those days are magical. He spends his nights entwined with her in hotel beds, and he spends mornings drinking coffee with her, and he spends afternoons (when he’s not singing) wandering around new cities, exploring them, finding himself in those monstrous concrete jungles and their twisting highways that resemble bowls of undercooked spaghetti.

He calls home. Momma has a new phone, and Dad shows her how to work it. Momma stares at Reynelle with reservation. She’s not cold, she’s just momma protecting her baby bear, and as much as he wishes she would just embrace this woman who means the world to him, he understands why her eyes resemble a roiling fire.

The songs come to him like campers coming to a warm fire, and when he opens his mouth he feels the music. It’s not just music, it’s poetry. It’s not just harmonies, it’s his being. The essence of his soul. He leaves a little bit of it on every stage, and he locks eyes with Reynelle when he sings, and he smiles a little every time he watches her squirm and smirk in her chair, when she tucks a lock of her perfect, black hair behind her ear.

He’s never known a love like this. Never known how good an embrace can feel in the middle of the night. Never known how much he wants to aimlessly refill glasses of water for her while she curls up in bed and bats her puppy-dog eyes at him.

That’s what makes it all the more heartbreaking when, after a show in Queens, he comes back to the hotel room and sees a note lying on the kitchenette counter.

Sorry, baby. XOXO.


11.
“Whatever you had, you’re losing it,” Samuel says, snapping his fingers. “And they can smell it. They’re like god damn vultures, kid. I tell ya that. They’re vultures and they can smell blood in the air. So, what you’re gonna do, you’re gonna go on Colbert tonight, and you’re gonna sing your song. Alright, son? You’re gonna sing about that coming change, and you’re gonna leave everything out on the damn floor. I wanna see blood in your teeth, you got me? And when you come back for the interview, we’ll show ’em why you’re the best thing since fried pickles. You got me?”

He doesn’t got Samuel, though. Not by a long shot. He loves Sam Cooke, but every time he sings the song, he forgets the reason why he chose it way back when, at that school talent show. Every time he belts it out for clasped hands and wide green eyes, he can’t help but wonder how much of this is music for Samuel, how much of it is genuine affection, and how much of it is dollars and cents and Spotify streams and record sales and merchandise.

So, he calls his momma.

She answers the phone. Her voice is cracked, a little worn, but elegantly so. Like a jazz singer’s. That’s right. And he calls her, and he says, “Momma, I don’t know if I wanna do this anymore.”

She sighs, and she takes the phone into the other room, and she says so softly, so sweetly, so tenderly it almost devastates him, “Baby, if you wanna come home, just come home.”

But in that moment, as his eyes well up with tears, a flash of something great courses through him. After talking with his momma, he hangs up and he walks over to the little kitchenette. He turns over Reynelle’s note, and he starts writing. It pours out of him, and he lets it. He’ll scratch lines out later. He’ll polish it tomorrow. He tells himself this as he delivers what is an honest-to-God masterpiece. And he stares down at it, and he calls up the band that’s been backing him. They’re good guys, more on his side than Samuel’s, and he sends them the music.

“It’s a risk,” Tony, the lead guitar player, says. “Got no time to practice. Could be a royal fuck up.”

“Yeah,” he admits. “Or it could be magic.” And then he hangs up and calls his momma again and says three words.

“Watch me tonight.”


12.
He steps out onto that stage, and Stephen Colbert calls out his name and the new record he cut. He looks out at the crowd. He looks directly at Samuel. Into his blue eyes.

The band starts behind him, and he can’t help the half-smile that spreads into his cheeks as he watches Samuel’s face pale, as he leans forward a little in his seat. It’s as if he can hear the old man’s thoughts.

This ain’t “Change Gonna Come.”

And you’re damn right. It’s not. It’s something new. Something honest. Something from his heart. He loves Sam Cooke, it’s true, but he’s gotta be true to himself.

But he does do one thing Samuel told him. He leaves it all on the stage. Sweat stings his eyes, or maybe those are tears. He gives it everything, as if his entire life is riding on it, and maybe it is. But in that moment, he also feels the spark. He feels the soul, as if the ancients are spreading around him, arms wide, beckoning for him, telling him to push, to dive, to pull every inch of his innards out for that audience.

And he does.


13.
Back in the green room, he wipes sweat from his brow. Samuel rushes in with a boulder’s force, and he sticks a finger in his face, and he glowers.

“What the fuck were you thinking? I told you to sing Sam Cooke. Is that so god damned hard? I didn’t tell you go to sing some stupid fucking love song, and for good reason! Did you ever think that maybe something like that drivel could tank your career? Or am I the only one who gives a shit about it anymore? Are you truly this stupid, boy?”

All the joy from the performance is drained. He sits there and he looks up at Samuel as his face turns red and his eyes bulge in his skull, and he shoves that finger closer and closer.

“Don’t ever do that again,” he spits. “Or I’ll send you back to the fucking sewer where you belong.”

Samuel slams the door behind him when he leaves.

It’s as if he’s been hollowed out. He wants to curl up in bed. He hates how, somehow, he does feel like he’s made a mistake, even though there was no misconstruing the audience’s reaction or Mr. Colbert’s stunned expression, or the band’s excitement, or his own.

He’s so caught up in his own mind, in his fear, that he misses momma’s call. But he hears her voicemail later, that night, in the hotel room.

“You make us so proud, baby. You always do.”


14.
He knows something is wrong when he wakes in the morning. As he rolls over in the bed and paws at his phone, he sees four missed calls, all from Dad. He sits up ramrod straight, and his head is swimming, and he can’t get a thought out of his head.

You missed momma’s call, you missed her call and now she’s dead, you missed her call and for what?

The line trills and rings and whines and it feels like ages before he hears the click and his father’s worn, warm tone.

“Is it momma?” he asks.

A long pause. There’s a sound in the background. A series of atonal beeps.

“I think you should come home,” Dad says.


15.
“No, absolutely not,” Samuel says, sitting in a chair across from the bed.

He is running around the room, pulling on a shirt, throwing things in a suitcase, barely hearing the anger in his manager’s voice, barely noticing the quaver.

“I’m not arguing with you,” he says, and he’s not. He grabs his charger from the wall and throws it alongside his boxers and his shirts and his jeans.

“I don’t care,” Samuel shouts. He slaps a palm against his knee. “You got a show in Kansas City tonight and you’re doin’ a radio show and by God if I decide you’re gonna practice a new song you’ll do that to. You ain’t doin’ nothin’ without my say so, and if you think I’mma let you run off back home because your Ma got a little banged up then you’re dumber than I ever took ya for.”

“She’s in a god damned coma, Sam!” he shouts, as if that’ll make a difference to the bloated old fart’s rotten brain.

“Oh fucking well,” Sam says, standing. His blue eyes pierce, and he jabs a finger into his chest with those puckered lips working and his nostrils flaring. “In case ya forgot I pay the bills around here. I make the magic happen. You’re a little puppet runnin’ around and I let you think you was cute for a while, but I pull the trigger on the horse race, ya feel.”

“Oh yeah?” he says, approaching Samuel, pressing his nose into the old man’s face. “You make the magic happen? Well go on, sing me a line. Sing me about a change gonna come, Sam. Lemme hear it, you egotistical son-of-a-bitch.”

Samuel’s upper lip flares like an angry dog’s snarl.

“Yeah, that’s right. You know why I think you got in this business? I think you tried to join a choir and God ran you outta the church. I think you tried to get singing lessons and the teacher told you to try out carpentry. You hate the fact that I don’t even gotta try and I sound better than you ever did and ever will. This ain’t about business; this’s about your dead soul and I’m tired o’ filling your fucking pockets.” “You walk out that door, and I will ruin you,” Samuel seethes. “What Elvis’s manager did is gonna look like fuckin’ chump change compared to the invoices I’ll pile you with. And we both know you ain’t gonna be able to survive on chump change, ain’t gonna survive on kind old white ladies tossin’ you a dollar into an empty guitar case. You need me, boy, but I ain’t need you.

He doesn’t realize he’s going to hit Samuel until the old man is down on the floor and spilling blood onto the hotel carpet. He stands over those blue eyes, and he glares down into them. The rage percolates in his gut, but when he looks at his knuckles marred with that cherry hue, he turns away, grabs his bag, zips it up in one go, and leaves.

He doesn’t look back.


16.
Momma dies while he’s on the plane heading home.


17.
Samuel didn’t lie. He hits them with so many bills and charges and invoices that he gets a headache whenever he stares at the piles of envelopes. The news is running stories now, too. Samuel didn’t go to the cops; he went on Anderson Cooper. Samuel didn’t file charges; he went to the Times and gave them pull quotes. Now he’s known as the angry black man who sucker punched his manager and stormed off. He’s been typified, and every time he lays down to sleep, he can see those blue eyes blazing. He can see the seething hatred in them.

He can see the bloodlust.

He pulls out his phone and he opens that voicemail momma left. He listens to her voice, repeating it until sleep yanks at his eyelids and he can’t resist their heaviness.

“You make us so proud, baby. You always do.”


18.
Momma looks as regal as ever in her coffin, but her skin is paler than usual and it’s cold, so cold, and it’s waxy against his lips when he bends down and kisses her forehead. He wants her to move. He wants her to blink. It would scare the hell out of him, but he’d laugh afterward, and he’d hug her, and everything would be okay.

Dad’s got his fine suit on, and it gleams under the funeral parlor’s lights. Family watches. He watches as the old man gives Momma’s eulogy, as he recounts how they met, their life together, how proud she was of her baby boy, how much she loved life.

And then, seemingly too soon, seemingly after ages, Dad gets down from the podium, and it’s silent, and nobody’s going up to the podium, so he stands up, even though his palms are clammy, and his throat is hot, and yes, the suit is too tight around his throat, though that detail feels cruel and unjust. As if God is staring down at him with blue eyes, laughing, laughing,

He stands at the podium, and he looks out at the crowd, and he opens his mouth, but what can he say? Dad summed it up. Momma’s life. Momma’s passions. Momma’s joys. Momma’s fears.

He clasps his hands, and he looks down at the podium’s chipped wood, and he closes his eyes, terrified. He’s never felt a fear as dark as this, never felt trapped like he does, like in some horror story, like some oil slick is ripping the skin from his feet.

The song is only natural, and it spills from his mouth before he realizes he’s singing it. It sounds tired now, so tired. He’s sung it so many times every syllable could be the rubbed edge of a coffee table. The notes come, as they always have, but they are ragged and full of despair and regret. But he sings because he doesn’t know what else to do.

It’s there, in the dark, singing about change, just singing about change, baby, that he feels that warbling sensation. Hands grasp his shoulders, joining him. Dozens and dozens and dozens, all singing, all tear-stricken, all horrified and angry and full of insecurities, unsure of what to do, so they all just sing. So many versions of himself that hoped and bled and sobbed and feared and followed. So many. And the change hadn’t come yet. Wasn’t that the truth?

The change was always coming but it never did come.


19.
He opens his eyes. He’s back in that auditorium all those years ago. The suit is too tight. Eyes are on him. And he is staring at Samuel. At those blue eyes. They’re hungry.

He turns away, turns his entire body, turns his back to Samuel, and he searches, searches, searches …

His gaze lands on Momma. She’s standing, her hands clasped and pressed against her lips. Tears speckle her cheeks. He loses his flow a little bit. It’s not as confident. It’s not as smooth. But it doesn’t need to be.

Because he’s not singing for anybody other than Momma.

And he knows Momma is proud. She always has been.


20.
“You were amazing baby,” she gasps, hugging him.

Other parents are chatting with dad, passing pleasantries, telling him wow and your kid’s got some pipes and my Lord what a child. But he holds Momma. He refuses to let go. He buries his face in her dress and he smells her perfume, and he savors the feeling of her fingers running over his hair, and he treasures her voice.

“Mr. Bailey?” a familiar voice croons, smooth as silk.

Hushed voices. Upticks in tenor. Excitement. Curiosity.

“Honey,” Dad says. “This is Mr. Samuel Caldwell. He says he’s a manager. Wanted to talk to us about Jordan.”

“No, momma,” he whispers, clutching her tighter. “No, momma. Please.”

She looks down at him, and her hand tips his chin so he’s staring up at her. “What is it, baby?”

“Please, momma,” he whispers. It’s all he can think to say. “Please don’t talk to that man.”

She touches his cheek and brushes away the tears with her thumb.

“Ma’am, if I could have a few minutes, I just wanted to talk to you about Jordan’s future,” Samuel says.

“No, momma,” he whispers.

She leans down and kisses his forehead, and she brushes away his tears. Then, she turns to Samuel.

Momma isn’t cruel, but her voice takes on a darkness that’s unmistakable. She stares him in his blue eyes.

“Goodbye, Mr. Caldwell.”