I’d venture to guess that when most people think of San Francisco, they think of one of the following: the ’60s, with flower children and LSD; an epicenter of the gay rights revolution; or the tech era with highpriced real estate.
In the early 1900s, though, San Francisco was “The Harlem of the West”. African-Americans leaving the relentless discrimination, danger and poverty of the South formed a thriving cultural center in the Fillmore District. Billie Holliday, Miles Davis, Dizzy Gillespie, Sarah Vaughn, Ella Fitzgerald, John Coltrane and Charlie Parker played and sang in the jazz clubs — Bop City, Jack’s, Flamingo’s, the Champagne Supper Club. And there were the basement clubs, just a space in someone’s home where local performers would entertain the neighbours.
In the Fillmore, Negroes occupied a world among themselves. The butcher was a Negro, the seamstress was a Negro, the baker was a Negro, as was the loan shark.
On the Rooftop is set in this era, and beautifully captures the spirit of the community as well as the lives of the protagonists, a family of women on the edges of the music scene. Vivian is the widowed mother of three girls — Ruth, Esther and Chloe — aged twenty to twenty-four. All the girls are immensely talented singers, and Vivian trains the trio (The Salvations) on their rooftop, two hours a day.
Chloe was as black as her daddy, with Vivian’s slight soft features. Ruth was Vivian’s complexion, so white she might pass, if the very thought of it didn’t sicken her, but she had Ellis’s [thick, kinky] hair. Esther had come out red as the dirt on Vivian’s grandmother’s land, Vivian’s hair straight down her back.
Ruth is now twenty-four, and Vivian sees her as the leader of the group. She is a motherly sort. Vivian has always needed to work long hours as a nurse, and from necessity, Ruth has helped bring up the girls and run the house. Ruth has a lovely voice, but is a career as a singer her own choice, or Vivian’s? For her, there is a alternative option: a life with Gerry, the boy next door.
Esther works in a bookstore owned by Harold. She is the hardest working of the girls, the one who needs to practice her footwork, who is slightly offkey or comes in just a bit late. She is drawn to activism, and writes protest songs in secret.
And lastly, there is Chloe:
One day, the baby girl who couldn’t even use the bathroom reliably sang two octaves above middle C without strain.
Central to the community is the church and its deacon. Also widowed, he and Vivian have danced around their mutual attraction for years; it plays out through the book, but I found it less compelling that the stories of the girls. Where the deacon vividly comes to the forefront is in a scene at church.
He paced back and forth on the podium. [..] He shouted ‘Can I hear an amen?’ [..] And then he asked ‘How many of y’all follow Christ?’ And they all raised their hands.
‘And when I’m going through something, I like to look back at other experiences where I’ve questioned Him […]’
The church let out a loud, harmonious moan as they were wont to do anytime Preacher spoke.
‘Tell it Preacher,’ one of them shouted, and the others followed suit.
It’s a lively, thriving working-class environment, but it’s no utopia.
[Chloe] knew to look down when the whites passed. She knew to let them sit on the streetcar first. She knew to stay this side of Geary.
In the background, looming ever closer, are the white city managers who want to ‘revitalize’ and ‘beautify’ the area in the name of ‘urban renewal’, buying out or forcing out the black residents of the Fillmore area, and breaking up the community.
Margaret Sexton puts the four women firmly in the foreground, with Vivian’s hopes for the trio beginning to compete with the girls’ own personalities and desires. The novel is firmly set in its milieu, and the people of the community nicely flesh out the background: Drunk Freddy, who lives on the streets but is fed by every household; Mr Gaines the butcher with his ‘roaming eye’; Miss Fox with no teeth who buses tables for free drinks; Miss Edna who posts the lottery numbers; Lena who runs the Barbeque Restaurant. Next door lives Mary:
Although she still set her hair [every Sunday], the gray had overtaken it years before. Mary fought everything else: the postman when he was late, [..],Lena’s when the meat came to her white instead of dark. More than that, she spoke with authority on even the most benign subjects: whether you ought to brown beef before you roasted it, how long to hang the sheets from the line, whether a baby should take the bottle or the breast. […] She delivered her suggestions like expectations: “It might be time to prune those lilies” came out like “Girl, you better fix those flowers before I snap them off.”
The tight familial bonds, the bickering and teasing between the sisters, the food they cook for themselves and for the supper parties, the pressing and curling and primping before shows, and most of all the music are all very enjoyably described.
This evocative charmer describes a bygone, often-forgotten era of San Francisco. Anyone who knows the city will enjoy the references to ’rounding the intersection of Post’ or ”. It’s more than nostalgia, however. It’s startling how completely the setting in this novel has completely disappeared, it’s sobering to see it happening in other cities as well, and I was saddened to realize I knew nothing of the time and community in San Francisco before reading this novel.
How ‘Urban Renewal’ Decimated the Fillmore District, and Took Jazz With It [kqed.org]
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