2024/005: Cahokia Jazz — Francis Spufford

2024/005: Cahokia Jazz — Francis Spufford

'If you don’t pay attention to what things mean, you miss a piece of the puzzle. Without the meaning of things, without the stories people tell about them – that people believe about them – you can’t understand events, Detective. You can’t understand this city.’ [loc. 475]

Joe Barrow is an orphan who's drifted south from the icy winds of Chicago to Cahokia, that cosmopolitan city on the banks of the Mississippi 'where red and white and black have lived together in trust and confidence for fifty years'. It's 1922: the Ku Klux Klan is popular amongst the minority takata (folk of European origin); the taklousa (of African origin) have flocked south in the Mississippi Renaissance, to a city without Jim Crow laws; and the takouma (Native American), the majority of the city's population, have ensured that land, water and power are communally owned. Barrow, of mixed takouta and taklousa blood -- but without any comprehension of Anopa, the takouma lingua franca -- is working as a policeman, but that's just a job. He'd like to be playing piano with one or another of the jazz bands that swings through the city. The events of the week chronicled in Cahokia Jazz will force him to decide which life he truly wants.

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