A Love Song for Ricki Wilde

Ezra and Ricki’s all-day date is a mainstay of the romance genre; readers may be reminded of similar scenes in romance movies, typically rendered through montage. This date serves to highlight their similarities, which play into the theme of The Subtle Imprint of History: Ricki’s vintage fashion and passion for the Harlem Renaissance match Ezra’s; Ricki doesn’t judge his outdated speaking style, appreciating adding new, eccentric words to her vocabulary; and Ezra’s knowledge of Harlem Renaissance culture is fascinating for Ricki, while Ezra is rapt by her silly puns. Ezra is a strong proponent of earlier technologies: “The first model may not be the flashiest, but it’s the smartest. Take the internet. Sure, it changed the world. But the telegraph is its great-granddaddy, and that was smarter. That was the unfathomable leap. Before that, information traveled as fast as some fella on a horse” (150). Ezra has been selective about adopting new technology over the decades; he thinks that while the new may improve upon the old, breakthroughs that paved the way should not be forgotten.

The Harlem Renaissance is brought to the forefront through another flashback to the 1920s, in which we hear about popular creatives of the era, including sociologist W. E. B. Du Bois, novelist Countee Cullen, and patron of the arts Harold Jackman. Shifting away from Ezra’s perception of Harlem as a young man, readers see Della’s memories of Harlem from her childhood: “a place she’d always romanticized, for many reasons,” imagining it like a “cage-rattling, Edenic fantasy” (169). The rich cultural scene of Harlem seduced Della, though in her case, part of the appeal is the fact that in Harlem she could be reunited with her mother Felice.

In this section, several of the novel’s mysteries are solved. In Chapter 14, Tuesday becomes a quasi-detective, breaking into Ezra’s home to find clues about his real identity. There, she uncovers evidence that points to Ezra’s real age: Sheet music with his handwritten notes dates much further back than he looks, suggesting that his claims of immortality may be true. The use of detective genre tropes continues as Ricki digs into Ezra’s confession, researching the Harlem Renaissance and interviewing Della about the house to gather witness testimony. Her doggedness pays off: We learn that Della is actually Felice’s daughter, Adelaide, that Della has the pearl bracelet Ezra gave Felice on their last night together, and that the location of Felice’s curse and suicide is Della’s brownstone.

The novel portrays Felice as a stereotypical practitioner of Africa-derived magic, making her a flat antagonist. The text conflates hoodoo, a folk spiritual practice with origins in African traditions and developed by enslaved Black people in the US, with voodoo (or vodou), a religion and healing practice developed in Haiti in the 16th through 19th centuries. Rather than investigating the separate belief systems, the novel plays into stereotypes that depict practitioners as witches performing harmful and destructive magic fueled by vengeance and the need for control. Felice is an irredeemably evil romantic partner whose motivations are purely selfish. Ezra’s attraction is dismissed as the product of grief: Their relationship begins after Sonny dies of an overdose, when Ezra is “desperate to forget his pain [and] Felice’s black hole of volatility did for him that drinking and drugging did for everyone else” (173). The novel’s main magic user, Felice hurts fellow performers to get ahead, relies on emotional blackmail to manipulate Ezra (“He couldn’t be late. When she was displeased, her sweetness curdled into something dark” [176]), and eventually curses him to a life of lonely pining when he doesn’t want to marry her. However, Felice is a woman who faces sexual predation, feels forced to abandon a baby she has as a teenager, and is one who dies by suicide—decisions that point to the complexity of experience that the novel does not explore.

The concept of Perennials that Ezra explains to Ricki showcases the Freedom and Empowerment in Expression. As he explains, Perennials are mystical muses whose life’s work is inspiring other artists because their influence is so quickly forgotten:

I become that foggy memory everyone’s felt at some time or another. You ever repeat a story you heard somewhere, and can’t remember who told you? That was a Perennial. You ever have a déjà vu feeling, a flash memory of a person you kinda recall but not really? Perennial. Ever look at old photos of yourself, group shots, and see someone you can’t place? Perennial (189).

Since becoming immortal, Ezra has left many lasting imprints on the lives of fellow musicians—a valuable endeavor for a man who finds purpose in being needed and valued for his contributions. Although doomed to a ghost-like existence with no escape, Ezra has made the best of his supernatural gift, ensuring that future generations of artists reach their full potential.