Day 13 (2).

This might have legs.

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One of the many cameras that night in the crowd, or idling at the big stage’s sides, belonged to Wendell Blue. Later, when he developed it in a sweating darkroom, he didnt understand that he had taken such a photograph–in fact, didnt recall it at all. Six years hence, when Hattie Robinson died, barbiturates and hard liquor seizing her blood, he published it–and nothing else as significant again–to wild acclaim, a remote awe: Hattie under the harsh wash of stagelight, looking askance over a bare shoulder to her band, where, unfocused, Germain Odette paid out a lonesome yearning groan on his bent trumpet: Hattie, a thin veil of sweat cooling on her dark skin, her eyes wide and skeptical, a shuttered hope dimming in quiet increments, her longfingered hand fastened for time immemorial onto the microphone in its stand. Depending on when you looked at it, at her tensed arm, the shimmer of her gown, it seemed as though she was looking back and beyond the parameters of her infamy, mouth downturned and pleading, all of her, to find some way back–back to a time she sang of how she was, when the first measure of Tender Tender didnt churn her stomach with a thick bile of throat and mind: Hattie pleading, with her eyes and fingers and lips, with anything else if it took nothing else, to remove her from how she wasnt and how she would forever be.