The past rushed back like an odorless wind, but one heavy with gravity. She was Monica again, the 10-year-old girl living in Southside Atlanta, where cheap rental apartments crowded together beneath tangled power lines and flickering street lights. On weekends, her mother, Lorraine Harris, took on a second job at a jazz bar called Blue Lantern. Not being able to afford a babysitter, she took Monica with her. She would sit quietly at the back of the room near the speakers with a glass of Coca-Cola and a notebook for practice.
But what fascinated her more than any toy were the old man in the soft felt hat sitting beside the rickety upright piano on stage. His skin was darker than the night, his hands wrinkled with nails sometimes stained with cigarette resin. But when he played, the world stopped. His name was Elias Smooth McCoy. The man everyone in the neighborhood called the one who speaks through the piano.
On nights when the bar had few customers, he would let Monica sit on the cushion chair, his hand gently resting on hers, guiding. Her through each note. Can you hear it, kid? It's not the sound, it's the emotion. Some people spend 10 years learning to hit the right notes.
Some people, like you just need to listen to know how to tell the story. He didn't teach with books. He taught with his gaze, with the way he kept rhythm with his knee, and by allowing her to make mistakes and then figure out how to correct them. Every night when she went home, Monica couldn't sleep. She'd lie in bed clutching her pillow, replaying the short blues piece he'd taught her that evening.
Back then, music was the biggest and most beautiful secret she had ever kept. But then her mother got sick. Terminal liver cancer, no insurance, no money for treatment. Monica had just been accepted for a partial scholarship to Minor Hill Music Academy. Not enough to cover everything.
But it was her dream to step into the professional world. She didn't go. She chose to work at the laundromat, then deliver food at night. She sold an old electric guitar on Craigslist, exchanged it for a money counter and GMAT prep materials. She became a woman of the real world, earning money, paying bills, setting goals, and burying the only thing that ever allowed her to breathe.
After her mother passed, she never returned to Blue Lantern. The bar closed a few months later for lack of funds. Elias McCoy, the only teacher she'd ever had, vanished like the last wisp of smoke in the night. Years passed. Monica started a business, failed, started again, faced discrimination for being a woman, ignored for being black, looked down on for not having an Ivy League degree.
She fought in the way they understood, balance sheets, growth strategies, investment contracts. She spoke their language, but she was never herself. She had never mentioned Elias, never brought up the old bar, never played a note. Even though at charity events sponsored by Ardium Holdings for small arts schools, she was often invited to play something for fun. She always declined, smiling.
I'm an investor, not an artist. But late at night, when all the emails had been answered, Monica sat alone in her 18th floor apartment in Cambridge, Boston. Her hand would rest on the table, tapping out a rhythm unconsciously. Old notes would rise, fragments of music with no names, no staves, only existing within her body, like children never born. This morning when she touched the piano at Stratford, all those buried memories rose on their own.