“…please blame it on the Son of the Morning”
– Jay-Z
Lincoln Crowder loved music, even before his birth. His mother Zora would sit next to the radio when she had late night cravings for spicy foods, or if the movement of the baby made it hard to sleep, and she would scan the stations, a few seconds at each frequency, to see how Lincoln would respond; if he would kick with excitement or settle into what she assumed to be sleep. He would kick uncomfortably at classical orchestral music but he would fall still at any instrumental jazz. Zora discovered that he was a fan of Wynton Marsalis one afternoon she was sitting next to a speaker while his Selections from Swinging Into the 21st played, and she got up to check a roast in the kitchen that was out of earshot of the music. As soon as she was in the kitchen, Lincoln moved around seemingly in protest, until she was back at her seat next to the speaker.
When he was born, she used Marsalis to lull both her sons to sleep, and the music became a nightly ritual in the Crowder household.
Lincoln lived his entire life to a soundtrack. He listened to CDs on the bus to and from school and when he wandered the streets of Ladoga. He only took off his headphones when he was asked to, or when he played with neighbor kids. He was well liked by his peers. He was a good looking boy with light brown skin that was almost golden and sometimes he would entertain them on the playground by singing or rapping the thousands of songs that he had passively learned over the years listening to music somewhat obsessively.
When older people saw him performing, people pushing seventy who had lived their entire lives in Ladoga and were a living well of the town’s history, they would say that he looked just like his great grandfather Afonso, though no one could say for sure who was actually related to Afonso because he only did the work to make children but was never around long enough to have his name on any birth certificates or to submit to DNA tests. There was only one man that listed Afonso’s government name as his biological father on his birth certificate and he was a junior. His name was Timarius Barnes and his family was well known and regarded in Ladoga. He was a police officer before retirement and fathered five children, none of whom were thought to be related to Lincoln’s father, Richard Crowder.
In fact, Richard never knew his father, he’d only heard stories about the man from his aunt Seven who raised him. Seven wasn’t actually his aunt, the two weren’t related by blood, but she’d been a good friend to Richard’s mother who struggled with drugs and disappeared from Ladoga, leaving Richard in Seven’s care, adding to the three children she already mostly raised on her own. She told Richard that his father was indeed the son of a man called Afonso, nee Timarius Barnes, who was the only Ladoga native known to travel with the circus in the late 1940s and 50s.
But Richard never told these stories to his wife or his children because even though the man called Afonso was something like a legend in the Bottoms of Ladoga, Richard didn’t think there was anything admirable about a man who never took care of his children and hadn’t taught his own son how to care for his. Richard didn’t want anything to do with the legend of the Great Afonso, and if he ever heard the old folks make the comparison to his youngest son, Lincoln, he would stop it short. He could become aggressive in his condemnation of Afonso, and it was the only time anyone saw him lose his temper. Richard Crowder was a genial man with light skin like his youngest son and good looks that attracted females, and he was very good with the children he taught at the high school. Maybe it was possible that he was related to Afonso, but he was determined not to emulate the man and he would live his life as a testament to everything Afonso wasn’t.
Richard discouraged his son from performing for crowds. “All that lead to, son, is a lifetime of chasing attention, and that’s bound to get lonely.” Even though he told himself that the great Afonso meant less than nothing to him, the man loomed large in Richard’s mind as resentments buried deep that he only added to and left unexamined for fear of caring too much. He didn’t want his son to experience love and admiration that could outsize and stand in place of the intimate love and admiration from family and neighbors who become friends then family. Too much love was a drug that he was convinced made the man Afonso capable of making and deserting so many children.
Lincoln did enjoy performing for others and he did it often despite his father’s disapproval. When he was twelve, he liked to sing while his friend Snot played the keyboard his mother had given him to practice the songs he played at church. When Snot’s cousin Brandon came to town to visit with his family, he would bring his acoustic guitar that his father was teaching him to play, and they would all make music together. Lincoln liked Brandon and they all got along well enough that they would play together for years.
When they were twelve, Lincoln envied Brandon’s ability with the guitar. Snot was good on the keyboard, but Brandon could play most anything he heard on the radio and he was making his own songs that sounded like real songs.
“I can make up the music…” Brandon said one summer afternoon as they sat under the covered driveway at Snot’s house. The driveway led to a side entrance into the house that had another entrance that faced the street, and one that led to the ample backyard that came to another street. The construction of the covering over the driveway, and the smooth pavement of the driveway itself, created a space with nice acoustics that Lincoln and his friends enjoyed playing inside of.
“…but I wish I could write songs,” Brandon continued as he plucked at his guitar. They were all fans of hip-hop music and they liked to play acoustic versions of the songs that they heard on the radio. “Lincoln, you should be able to write a song, all them songs you done memorized by now. All them words in yo head.”
Lincoln thought about this, and it made sense. He had never thought of writing his own songs, there were already so many that he loved and he knew there were even some that he had never heard before.
He went home tossing the idea around in his mind. He thought about the different types of songs that he loved. Some were love songs, either professing or lamenting it. The religious ones were similar but the object of love was always God, or maybe Jesus. Rap songs were usually very personal and seemed to be about the rapper’s direct experience with poverty, a life selling drugs, or sex.
He was home before the dread of an encounter with his mother hit him all at once. If he hadn’t been distracted, he would have wandered around the neighborhood to see if his brother Anthony was still out with his friends, and if he was, Lincoln would listen to music until his brother was done and they would go home together. Even though it was summer time, their father taught summer school and he wasn’t home until the late afternoon.
Lincoln was afraid of his mother and he could only tolerate her with his brother or father around. When he was alone with her, she was usually quiet, and even though this silence was thick and unnatural, Lincoln preferred it to the times when she would say something to him. Her words were often religious in nature, but religious or not, she always said the same mean and hateful things to him. When his father and brother were around, she mostly ignored him, like he was just the golden shadow of his brother or a halo in boy form that was an extension of his father.
When he made it to the backdoor of his house, which was on the corner where F— ran into M— street, he cursed out loud at his lack of forethought. Maybe she would be taking a nap, Lincoln hoped to himself, and she would be out until someone else came home while he watched whatever cartoons he could find on PBS. But she was sitting at the kitchen table when he finally gathered the nerve to go inside, Bible open in front of her, and she seemed to be having a conversation with someone in the seat across from her that Lincoln couldn’t see.
PRL Serials 