The Parable of Jimmy Grey

A Wicked Writing Contest Story

Photo by KrayBoul on Unsplash

Jimmy Grey, he had a voice fit to break even the devil’s heart. The first time I walked up the gravel drive to that little country church and heard his voice come floating out the window, carried by the same breeze that riffled the pages of my little black book and swished my white cotton dress, I knew Jimmy was something special.

The people in those pews were no different than the people who filled every pew of every church across the whole swathe of the Bible belt, but when Jimmy sang, those little old grandmas and crusty old men and broad-shouldered field workers and bone-tired mamas and ragged rapscallion kids changed. Their ears really listened, their voices joined him, and, for a little while, sometimes even after the music stopped, their eyes looked at the world with a clearer sight.

But Jimmy Grey, he didn’t quite understand. He saw the upturned faces, the raised hands. He was young, and he thought they were meant for him. Perhaps, for some of those Sunday pew-fillers, they were. But now quiet little Jimmy Grey walked with a new spring in his step, holding his shoulders a little straighter, his head a little higher.

When his eager gaze roved over the ecstatic faces, the clapping and stomping congregation, his eyes landed on me in my white cotton dress, a new face in his little country church.

He smiled a bright, toothy grin, and I smiled back.

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Jimmy Grey held my hand when I walked him into the record label’s headquarters. He looked for all the world like my attentive sweetheart, but I knew behind that swagger he was scared stiff.

“You got the voice of an angel, Jimmy Grey,” I whispered. “Don’t you forget it, and don’t you let them forget it neither.”

The producer did not look at Jimmy with wide-eyed wonder when he listened to the track. There was approval in his eyes, but appraisal too.

“You got talent, kid,” he said. “But talent will only get you so far. To really make it big, it’s all about who you know.”

“Make it big?” Jimmy said, and I could feel him pulling back from me, from the producer, from the big city and the long bus ride to get here, from all of it. “What does that mean? How will I know when I’ve made it big?”

“You can make it big, Jimmy,” I whispered. “Ain’t nobody else got a voice like yours.”

Jimmy was almost onto the secret, that the further you make it, the further the finish line moves. But he was young, with an open-faced smile and a voice that could squeeze the anger and sadness right out of a human’s heart. He didn’t listen to that quiet little voice inside that tugged him away from all of it. Instead he signed his name to a labyrinth of white papers and got caught like a fly trapped in honey.

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Jimmy didn’t stay in the little quartet where the producer stuck him, oh no. His voice wasn’t the blending kind. Jimmy Grey was chasing real music – heart-clutching, hair-tossing, wide-armed music, the kind that gives soul its name.

From gospel to soul, from little backroads churches to a soft-walled recording studio, from quartet to solo act. Then to a shiny platform and screaming audience whose faces he couldn’t see through the bright stage lights.

Big stars don’t stay with their down-home sweethearts. I knew that fact the day I walked Jimmy Grey into that big producer’s office, and after a while, Jimmy figured it out too.

But I stayed in that big, pulsing city, and I watched Jimmy rise. I watched in the audience, my face among hundreds of others, blotted out by the blinding stage lights. Across the street from his shows, I stood in the crowd, watching.

I watched from a distance when it started to fall apart. When he first tried the stuff that looked like his mama’s baking soda but burned the inside of his nose and set his brain on fire. When he stopped chasing the music and started chasing the voices that whispered in his ear, Jimmy Grey, ain’t nobody else got a voice like yours. I watched when the next hit didn’t come, when a new golden boy began to rise.

I watched Jimmy Grey rip at the seams, sprinting after a finish line that kept moving further off in the distance, and settling for a hit within arm’s reach.

His beautiful voice frayed at the edges, ragged with neglect. He didn’t visit his little backroads town anymore, and he stopped calling home to his mama.

I was watching when one day, his door never opened, his curtains never fluttered. Night fell, and no light turned on in his house.

The locked door didn’t stop me.

I made my way through the living room, its angles too sharp and colors too bright. I ran my finger along the sleek back of his couch, now littered with empty bottles and the grainy remains of the stuff that naïve little Jimmy had once thought was his mama’s baking soda.

Up the carpeted steps to the upstairs hallway.

A smell, sweet as rotting fruit and acrid as poison, heavy and familiar.

His bedroom door was stuck open, caught on a discarded shirt. I slipped inside, toward the smell.

A mess of a room, a mess of a life.

There was Jimmy Grey, his big brown eyes open and still and shot with red, his body crumpled and stiff on his bed. Smudges of white dusted his nostrils and his bedside table.

Moonlight seeped through a gap in his curtains, pooling on his throat as if lamenting his lost, beautiful voice.

By the window, the record player turned, still spinning, though the music had long since gone silent. With one finger, I plucked up the needle and laid it down at the record’s edge, starting the song over again.

Music flooded the rancid room, a wailing song of hardship and coming change. The melody rose and fell, rolling like the sea in the dead, empty house.

Caressed by the tide of the music, I pulled out my little black book, and I smiled.

I opened to the newest page, and with one thick line crossed out Jimmy Grey.

Poor little backwoods, soul-singing Jimmy Grey, he was an easy target. That’s the funny thing about people, that the ones with the greatest gifts so often are the quickest to fall.

I stepped over trash and dirty clothes on my way out the door, and the mournful music followed me, swelling in the air like a living thing.

There I went, out of the sleek, sterile house, onto the quiet, sleeping street and into the world that didn’t yet know it now held one less beautiful thing.

I’d better be careful next time. Because Jimmy Grey, he’d had a voice fit to break even the devil’s heart.

I pulled out my black book once more, looking down at the new name printed in tight inky letters, pondering what gifts this new target had, what hidden, tender insecurities I would find.

Then I tucked my little book back into my pocket, stepped out into the street, and walked toward the cold light of the setting moon, the night air swishing my white cotton dress.

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Thank you so much for reading!

Here is a link to the song referenced near the end of the story, “A Change is Gonna Come” by the inimitable Sam Cooke.