Kansas City Lightning (10 page)

The regime of segregation would last about ninety years from its point of inception in 1877. Its intent was to put the recently freed Negro back in his place, to stop him from being publicly elected, and to get the colored people back as close to where they were before the Civil War as white power
could push them. And yet, as he fixed his gaze upon the adult world, Charlie Parker was preparing to join a league of dignified musicians like Duke Ellington, of athletes like Jack Johnson and Joe Louis, of generations of lay persons who were buffeted about until they got their bearings and found as many ways to be unsentimentally happy as they could. It was a league of Negro Americans who assumed a triumphant sense of life in the face of the shortcomings that came to one or to the group or to everyone, regardless of color. These men and women shared a vision of life in which vitality was powerful, in which everyone understood that it was better to learn how to make delicious lemonade—somehow, loudly or quietly—than to cry perpetually over sour lemons. This tradition was waiting for Charlie, too, just like that cotton sack.

And so, in a different way, was Rebecca Ruffin.

When she graduated from Lincoln High School in the summer of 1935, Rebecca and Charlie had been going together for more than a year. Mrs. Parker had taken a great liking to her—she was crazy about the girl, if only because Charlie was. Birdy Ruffin was somewhat reconciled but still essentially hostile.

One reason was Addie Parker's boyfriend, a deacon at Ebenezer Church who had a wife and family. Ebenezer was on the corner of Sixteenth Street and Lydia, a brief walk away. Though Rebecca remembered him visiting Charlie's mother on Sundays and Thursdays, Ophelia Ruffin said that “he was by there practically
every
night. Mama didn't like that at
all
. Mama didn't work, so she was nearly there all the time, nearby. She knew everything. Charlie did, too.”

Charlie sarcastically referred to the man as “Paw,” greeting him when he visited and sometimes sitting in the parlor while the deacon made love to his mother behind the sliding doors of Addie Parker's bedroom. “I don't know,” Rebecca said, “if Mrs. Parker knew how much she hurt Charlie doing that. Charlie was alone in the living room. I could cry for him when I think of how he looked. All of us would go downstairs there and play the piano with him. But when we went to bed, Charlie had to go across the hall from his mother's room, where he would sleep. Yes, Charlie was alone with all that. And they had been going together for years.”

Charlie never went to church.

Still, the atmosphere at 1516 Olive was festive during Rebecca's last week in
public school. She was about to join Winfrey and Octavia on the other side of high school. Everything was just fine. She was nearly a grown woman now, and she knew what she wanted.

“All I could think about was Charlie. Yes, I just loved him. Even if I had knew what he was going to do to himself and do to me, I think I still would have loved him. I couldn't help it. I really couldn't. I just loved him, that's all.”

Charlie was at Lincoln High by now, too. School records suggest he hadn't gotten very far there, but no one ever saw his report cards. He and Mrs. Parker had secrets between them. You didn't come between Addie Parker and Charlie when it came to secrets. All you got was silence. That was all right with Rebecca, though, it was all right with her. She was too excited to be bothered about anything.

As Rebecca walked down the aisle during the graduation ceremony, thrilled by the prospect of commencement, of being out of school and eventually getting married, she looked at the band—and there Charlie was, puffing into a big baritone horn for all he was worth. She was so happy to see him there in that band, having himself such a time. The two of them were so much closer then. He was her first love and she was his.

The program for Rebecca's graduation shows us that we have not always understood the recent American past as well as we might think. Conventions of this era lead many to believe that, before the 1960s, Negroes had no sense of their own history, of the battles fought to move American democracy closer to a fulfillment of its own ideals. Such was not the case at all. The graduation program for Lincoln High School's class of 1935 was informed by the work of post–Civil War Negroes, from the East and the South, bent on bringing education to the illiterate masses. The ceremony featured recitations of poems ranging from the eighteenth-century Negro poet Phillis Wheatley to the then-contemporary work of poets who had gained fame during the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s. Those recitations made clear the substantial position of Negroes in American history and cast an unblinking eye on the social inequities of the time without defeatist moaning.

The poems delivered that evening included “Tableau” by Countee Cullen, the widely published Harlem Renaissance poet, and “America” by the Jamaican
writer Claude McKay, a Harlem Renaissance novelist and poet whose “If We Must Die” was made famous after Winston Churchill was widely rumored to have quoted it during a World War II broadcast.

From Langston Hughes came “I, Too”:

And from Gwendolyn Bennett came “To a Dark Girl,” a battle cry of the spirit:

Ralph Ellison, who was born in 1914 and played a Conn trumpet in Oklahoma City's Frederick Douglass High School Band under the direction of Mrs. Zelia N. Breaux, recalled his similar high school experience with awe. “Those Negroes who taught us were both idealistic and optimistic. Theirs was a
social
world of segregation, of course. I emphasize the word
social
because they had taken it upon themselves to make sure that we never became segregated in our
minds
. We were prepared as though we were cadets fated to go into battle, battle which we might lose as easily on the basis of poor preparation and lack of will as we might lose on the basis of bad luck.”

Ellison recognized in his teachers an example of forward-looking education. “We must remember that the human mind is integrative by nature, that it makes use of everything that comes before it, judging some things as more important than others, but never failing to perceive. We know that culture is at least partially about the way in which we are taught to perceive, and those Negroes were determined to prepare us to understand as much about the world as we could. They understood perfectly the challenges of our democracy, and they were up to those challenges because they were not about to allow us to have segregated visions of
human
possibility. They had a mission, and their mission was to make sure that we never became provincial about our own race or about anything else.”

In particular, Ellison recalled, the teachers at Frederick Douglass High School “made sure that we were accountable to the rich diversity of America and the world at large. We grew up hearing all kinds of music, Negroes singing the classics, Negroes singing spirituals, Negroes performing classical piano pieces in the Negro churches, and so on. We did European folk dances, and we observed jazz musicians broadening the identities of the instruments they were playing.” Everything was open to adaptation. “Hell, you could learn a lot from listening to the white cornet players in the circus bands, and Negroes
did
learn a lot from them. Our world may have been segregated, but our objectives were not. . . .

“And that is one of the reasons why the music that came out of those territory bands had such a lilt,” Ellison recalled. “It brought together all of the idealism, the humor, the tragedy, the eroticism, and just about anything human that could fit into music. Those Negro musicians had so much to choose from, and they didn't avoid sampling whatever they found worthwhile whenever and wherever they could.”

It was in that atmosphere—of optimism and opportunity—that Rebecca Ruffin sat through the recitations, sat and listened as Charlie Parker performed with the band. Rebecca had seen Charlie at practice. “You could go and watch them in the auditorium,” she recalled. “So you know it had to be that some girls would sneak around and look at the boys with their instruments. Like other girls was with their young men, I was interested in everything Charlie Parker did. He excited me. I was in love with him. . . . So there I was happy to watch him doing something.

“I was surprised, too. Charlie played
every
instrument. One time he was blowing the bugle, another time he blowed the same one Dizzy Gillespie blows—the trumpet. He beat the drum. He beat it good, too. You know Charlie had rhythm. Charlie played that big thing you pluck and set on the floor—the bass fiddle. I was wondering what he was doing going from one instrument a little to the next and then another one after that. Charlie was looking for what he wanted to play. He needed a feeling of what he had to do. Charlie was looking for that feeling from his heart, what he couldn't express in words.”

At some point, Charlie must have played the sousaphone, because Addie Parker
told Robert Reisner she didn't like the way her son looked with that big thing twisted around his head. She was glad when he finally got moved to saxophone, and bought him a beat-up alto that cost more to repair than it did to buy. He really seemed to like music, she recalled, and he was always going over to see Lawrence Keyes, a local piano player he was close to at the time, to get more knowledge. As Rebecca recalled, “Sooner or later he settled for the saxophone. That saxophone did it for him. It let him speak his heart. But he didn't start with it.”

Neither Rebecca nor Charlie knew what would happen to them after graduation, what the music would have to do with it all. All they knew was that they wanted to have some fun. The excitement blew into them like air into a balloon, and they swelled with it.

Charlie had never been much of a dancer, but apparently that, too, had changed. “After graduation, we went downstairs in the gymnasium, the junior/senior reception,” Rebecca recalled. “We ballroomed all over the floor. He could really dance. I was surprised. Charlie Parker could surprise. You couldn't be sure what he knowed and what he didn't know. If he was interested, he would study. If there was information, Charlie would get it. I don't know where he learned, but there he was at the reception dancing just as good as he wanted. He danced on his heels. Oh, he was so proper. He really did grow up. . . . The band was playing, and we were just out there on almost every dance, turning this way and turning that.

“It was a perfect evening. We were so in love. Cupid had shot us good.”

AT SCHOOL, CHARLIE
was interested only in music; by the time Rebecca graduated, he was barely attending his other classes. “I went in as a freshman,” he later joked, “and I left as a freshman.” But it didn't matter to Addie as long as he was staying home and letting her take care of him, and he was happy with Rebecca living right upstairs.

Edward Mayfield Jr. remembered Charlie as a difficult character. “He was kind of a bully,” he told Robert Reisner. “He was kind of a mean boy. He pushed you aside and got his horn first out of the music closet in school. If you didn't
like it . . . you liked it anyway. He was larger than we were. He didn't stand any kind of pushing around. He didn't pick on you, but he would pop you in a minute.” But Charlie was serious about his music. “He was a good reader, both words and the dots. He managed to make his music classes pretty regular. He was that type of four-flusher. He mostly associated with older fellows. He was smoking and that sort of thing, and we didn't smoke. He was just an older type guy.”

Charlie was moved up to alto saxophone by the school's demanding music instructor, Alonzo Davis. “Alonzo was really a good musician,” recalled Julian Hamilton, a classmate of Charlie's. “If you didn't want to do the music right, you stayed out of
there
.” Davis put Charlie on alto after he shifted all his other saxophone players to clarinet, on the theory that once they learned the clarinet, they could go back to saxophone and master it with greater ease. Hamilton, who had been playing the alto saxophone before Charlie, recalled him as a good baritone horn player but not as accomplished as Freddie Culliver, his predecessor. “Charlie was good, now. Charlie was good. But he wasn't on the same level as Freddie.” Another player who studied at Davis's knee was Lawrence Keyes. The young piano player “was coming in there still, even though he had graduated in 1933. He was playing orchestra vibes and learning as much as he could from Alonzo Davis.”

Alonzo Davis was part of a tradition that dated back to the nineteenth century, when free black people started moving into the world of American entertainment after the fall of the Confederacy. While black show business was developing on the road and in rehearsals, usually in minstrel shows and circuses, another arena of preparation was coming into being that would influence the course of Negro talent after the Civil War. A legacy of photographs of serious-looking, uniformed young people holding instruments and surrounding a confident adult attests to the growth of thriving music departments at Negro colleges and public schools, headed by almost mythic figures who made sure their students learned to read, sing, or play in tune, and to negotiate material as different as Handel oratorios and Negro spirituals. Engaged in the expanding concentric circles of musical education that had begun in eastern universities early in the nineteenth century, they tattooed their
knowledge on the brain cells of many young musicians who went on to shape the evolution of vernacular Negro American music. Known for rigorous discipline—they left behind many stories of thrown erasers, hands smacked with rulers, noggins thumped, backsides paddled, and knuckleheads verbally dressed down—those Negro teachers had been educated in conservatories and in apprenticeship situations, often taking over the departments at black colleges or returning home to make sure first-class instruction was available in the communities where they'd grown up. Some of these instructors were composers; others developed crack marching bands. Many also taught privately when they couldn't find a school position; they were part of the reason that so many Negroes who were able purchased pianos and got lessons for their children.