Fall on your Knees

Frances has the baby in a distant hospital. James and Lily only get a telegram telling them that it is a boy, healthy. When Mercedes and Frances return days later, however, they tell James and Lily that the baby, named Aloysius, died from crib death.

Mercedes tells Lily that the bishop wants to meet with her about her gift to heal the sick. Determined to save Frances from the pain of coming across the baptismal gown in the hope chest, Lily goes to the attic to dispose of it, but finds the family cat dead, entangled in it. A distraught Lily takes the cat out to the garden to bury it. When she digs the shallow grave, however, she comes across a baby’s skull. She has found her brother.

Frances wants Lily to go to New York and find out what happened to Kathleen. She gives the girl the Lourdes money, more than $3000, and Kathleen’s diary. As they finish their talk, Frances opens her nightgown and tells Lily to suckle her. That night, Lily leaves for New York. She is 15.

Kathleen’s diary of her time in New York runs for more than 50 pages. The diary, which Lily is reading on the train to New York, reveals Kathleen’s earliest days under the tutelage of a discipline-driven German voice teacher. The practice sessions are grueling, and Kathleen fears she is not up to being a world-class opera singer. The voice drills seem strange to her and require extreme exertion—and she never satisfies the teacher (whom Kathleen nicknames The Kaiser): “I know what people mean when they say they suffer for their art” (426).

Kathleen wanders the streets of the city, relishing the exotic odors, the crowds of people, and the noisy shops: “Everything in New York is a photograph” (428). She starts to sneak out at night despite the vigilance of her chaperone, Giles, and heads to the jazz clubs in Harlem, drawn by the syncopated rhythms, the lively melodies, and the passionate dancing.

One morning, The Kaiser introduces Kathleen to a new accompanist, a beautiful young Black woman named Rose Lacroix. Kathleen is enthralled by Rose’s piano playing and by her looks. She comes early to listen to Rose practice jazz and ragtime with flair and freedom.

Kathleen has a flirtation with David, who is too stodgy to dance in the jazz clubs, but is willing to go there with Kathleen. The two have casual sex. Kathleen is sure she is only “half in love” (435) with him. Her infatuation with Rose grows. Rose helps Kathleen with technique, but Kathleen loves to listen to Rose improvise music at the keyboard. They have dinners together. One Sunday morning, Kathleen follows Rose to a Harlem church and is dazzled by the energy of the congregation and the joy in the music.

Their friendship deepens. Rose introduces Kathleen to Harlem jazz. With Kathleen’s audition approaching (she will sing a demanding aria from Carmen), Rose helps Kathleen prepare. Their flirtations take on an overtly sexual feel until one night they kiss, and Kathleen blurts out, “I love you” (448). Kathleen cannot stop thinking about Rose until finally the two have sex and Kathleen tastes “the joyful mystery of Rose” (455). The experience is intense: “She kept her hand down there until my head stopped spinning and my stomach cooled down” (457).

Rose and Kathleen start going out to Mecca, a jazz club where other multiracial couples go. Rose dresses like a man, a convincing disguise. Kathleen loves the adventure, loves kissing Rose in public and dirty dancing to jazz ballads. Later, Kathleen meets Rose’s mother, a gentle and loving white woman with a heroin addiction. “I am addicted to Rose” (476), Kathleen writes.

The diary ends on the day of Kathleen’s audition at the Metropolitan Opera House. Kathleen is full of joy: “There is love, there is music, there is no limit […] I am amazed at how blest I am” (482).

After finishing Kathleen’s diary, Lily gets to New York and looks up the address of Rose Lacroix in Harlem. Lily introduces herself to a man in baggy trousers with eyes that “looked like they had forgotten music” (487). Lily correctly suspects that this is Rose. Rose begins to cry, and Lily, moved, holds the sobbing woman. Rose utters the word “Kathleen,” and keens. Struggling to control herself, Rose says she wrote to Kathleen, but her letters were always returned unopened. Rose made plans to go to Nova Scotia to find Kathleen, but Giles, Kathleen’s chaperone, told her Kathleen had died of the flu. Lily and Rose share tea, and Rose plays the piano for Lily. Lily shows Rose the money Frances saved for the trip to Lourdes.

In 1939, Mercedes visits a Baptist orphanage, the “Nova Scotia Home for Coloured Children” in Halifax County, to meet six-year-old Anthony. The meeting is awkward, but Mercedes dutifully drills the boy on the Catechism to make sure he had been raised Catholic. Sheepishly, Anthony asks whether Mercedes is the “nice lady” who brought him here and made sure he has “clothes and food” (492).

The novel flashes back to 1918. James receives the anonymous letter from New York telling him about Kathleen’s behavior. He heads to New York and storms into Kathleen’s apartment building in Greenwich Village. The apartment is unlocked, and James finds his daughter having sex with what he assumes is a Black man, “His daughter’s hand traveling over a black back” (494). Enraged, James pummels the lover—actually Rose—and chases the lover out of the apartment. He returns to his daughter and, telling her how much he loves her, strikes her in the mouth and then rapes her.

Rose fights her way through the victory parades. She now regrets sending the anonymous letter to Kathleen’s father—she had only wanted to protect Kathleen from a dangerous affair. Her mother consoles her when she sees her daughter’s battered face and tells her softly how great she will be as a pianist. When Rose tries to visit Kathleen later that day, Giles tells her she went home with her father.

Rose starts living as the male Doc Rose and leads what becomes one of the most popular jazz trios in Harlem.

The novel flashes forward to 1955. Frances is dying from complications of pneumonia. She is weak and coughing. She listens to records all day long, among them a live recording by the legendary Doc Rose Trio. Frances asks Mercedes if she knows where Lily is—their estrangement has caused her much pain. Frances reveals to Mercedes that James, before his death, confessed to raping Kathleen and that Kathleen had forgiven him. Frances wants to make sure that Mercedes understands what happened.

Later that day, with Mercedes at her bedside, Frances dies. The funeral is sparsely attended. Among the attendees, however, is Teresa Taylor, the woman who shot Frances. Mercedes, watching as the shovels drop dirt onto Frances’s casket, understands the power of hope: “Hope is a gift. You can’t choose to have it. To believe and yet have no hope is to thirst beside a fountain” (503-04). Mercedes sees it is time to give Anthony a home.

Rose is 65. As Doc Rose, she has become a fixture in jazz clubs, an iconic figure in music. Lily, now 45, lives with Rose and travels with her. One night, a young Black man who identifies himself as Anthony Piper stops by.

Anthony has just arrived in New York. He is upbeat and optimistic about life, as his years in the orphanage have shaped his determination to find happiness in the world’s wealth of opportunity. Anthony is a musician. When Mercedes died, she left him Lily’s name and address. She also instructed him to give Lily a gift— Mercedes’s meticulously kept family tree scroll. The family tree lays out the entire true story of the Piper family, including the relationship between Rose and Kathleen. “Sit down,” Lily tells the young man, “[W]hile I tell you about your mother” (508).