Kansas City Lightning (12 page)

That's how Octavia managed to deliver Rebecca to Charlie. Birdy Ruffin never asked any questions when the older and younger sister left their new home together. On Saturdays they arranged to meet him at the movies, and on Sundays the sisters always went to hear him play with Lawrence Keyes and the Deans of Swing, either at Lincoln Hall or Paseo Hall. That became their regular habit.

Keyes, however, broke up his band in early 1936. So did Oliver Todd. But a local booking agency made Todd an offer to start another one. And when Todd started holding auditions for the new group, at a home on Brooklyn Avenue between Fourteenth and Fifteenth Streets, the first person to show up was Charlie Parker. “Shouldn't you be in school?” Todd remembered asking. “His answer was, ‘Do you want this to be a quiz program or are you interested in a saxophone player? But since you asked, I'll tell you. The teachers think I was a bore, and I thought they were bores. So I think the best thing I could do is leave them alone so they could leave me alone.' ”

Soon Todd was building his new band. Robert Simpson joined, as did Jimmy Keith and James Ross, two of the Lincoln High musicians who had laughed so hard at Charlie when he sat in with them. After rehearsals, the new band would head out in Todd's car to see what was happening at the many Kansas City jam sessions. By now, apparently, Charlie had been around enough for the professionals to know just who he was—if not to welcome him into the fraternity. When Todd and his gang came in, the musicians did something so extra, it was clearly special. They all stopped when they saw Charlie. Todd was startled by the
contempt these older musicians showed the young alto saxophonist. “It irked me to see these guys get up because the man walked in,” Todd said. “They'd say, ‘Well, if this guy's going to play—forget it!' And this happened so many times.”

Other than music, Charlie Parker had one more thing on his mind: Rebecca Ruffin. She'd been sneaking out to see him faithfully, month after month, and Birdy Ruffin hadn't caught on at all. Then, on a Friday evening that was a bad summer night for the Negro race, June 19, 1936, the young star-crossed lovers made a decision.

THAT NIGHT WAS
the night of the first fight between Joe Louis and Max Schmeling.

Joe Louis was the Alabama masterpiece of boxing, a black man who regularly whipped white men in the ring and walked the streets of Negro America with a handsome brown-skinned charisma. Who moved through the world telegraphing, with his very posture and easy confidence, that it hadn't seen anything yet. Who thrilled Negro boys and girls as they sat near radios listening to the blow-by-blow descriptions of his bouts, watching as ecstatic adults hooted holes in the roof at each new victory. Whose photograph, torn from magazine articles and newspaper clippings, was as basic to Negro homes as Christian iconography.

Joe Louis, whose parents were both children of freed slaves, was a symbol of what Negroes could do when they got a fair chance, not a favor. His story belied the fiction that all Negroes were weak-willed buffoons, as they were depicted in advertisements, in novels, in movies, in nearly all popular entertainment. He stood as a combination of Nat Turner and John Henry, a latter-day truth that could not be denied: proof beyond denial that black people could rebel with quality.

What sealed Joe Louis's role as a completely modern hero, however, was his relationship to electric technology. His individual achievements were caught on film as they happened, taken beyond the context of the present and recorded as a timeless presence that could be stopped and repeated, if anyone should require confirmation of what they'd just seen. He fought first as a man, then as a part of
the public record, a record that was functionally indifferent to racist practices or beliefs. Each new document gave Joe Louis's fans a chance to admire his talent, his grace, the example he laid before the world. Yet it also offered an opportunity to study that example, to admirers and opponents alike. And one of those would-be opponents was a German national named Max Schmeling.

Benefiting from technology, Schmeling had studied the “Negro people's champ” through his fight films the same way jazz musicians studied the recordings of the competition. He picked up on the details of Louis's style and developed a perfect strategy for counterattack: when Louis unconsciously lowered his left hand after throwing a jab, as the films showed he sometimes did, Schmeling would throw him a hard right. Louis would never see it coming. And on that June night in 1936, just as Ethiopia was being slapped silly by Italy, Max Schmeling was using everything he had learned in those films to batter Joe Louis nearer and nearer to unconsciousness.

Those German rights kept landing in the ring at Yankee Stadium, and the Alabama wonder began coming apart, round after round, three minutes each—the same length as a 78-rpm record, all a jazz band needed to make a complete musical statement. Such technology could open a sonic world as it was right then; it would no longer be heard in isolation from other ideas and feelings. Isolation was losing the upper hand in modern life. Everything—accurate, inaccurate, fanciful if not distorted—was moving up front in a hurry. Three minutes was a long time—and it seemed even longer if you were being mysteriously pulverized in the middle of your ascent to a championship that had been off-limits to black boxers for nearly thirty years, since the days of Louis's wicked predecessor, Jack Johnson.

Or that's what some people had thought he was—wicked. On December 26, 1908, the boxer Jack Johnson, a figure who incensed a generation of white men because he was arrogant enough to consider himself a man just like they were, who had traveled from his chosen hometown of Chicago to Australia to measure his fate, nailed a career coffin closed for an Australian fighter named Tommy Burns. In defeating Burns, Johnson became the new heavyweight champion of the world, and the crown he won bestowed some real athletic royalty upon him. The man who wore it could feel and perhaps live like an emperor, the roughest
scrapper in the world, come one, come all.

Johnson won that crown in a fight that was promoted in the press as a battle between a man and a huge ape. The insolent, panther-black Johnson seemed willing to thumb his nose at white men with no apparent fear of losing the digit. He was the king of the white man's blues, wearing a royal crown that added an ominous shine to his hairless head. As if loving all the deep notes of a particularly lowdown gutbucket song, this uptown ruler barreled downtown behind the wheel of an aggressively stunning car with mufflers loud enough to wake the dead. He draped his big presence in expensive duds, gold in his teeth and diamonds encircling his fingers. He did not seem to care that he was a brunette in a blond town that had rules and a place for him. Culturally hard of hearing, perhaps deaf, Jack Johnson went his own way, as if he were composing a strange new tune called the “Infuriation Blues.”

Johnson retained his crown for more than six years. And he became a legendary, challenging figure on the American landscape. He partied night and day with white women, plenty of wine, gourmet food, and songful jazz music in which he even played the bass and conducted bands in a turning style, slowly spinning around and doing dance steps with a baton in his hand. And he became more than obliquely important to the aesthetic world of blues and swing—most directly because he owned some expensive sporting rooms, and when he sold the one in New York known as the Club Deluxe, the sizable four-hundred-seat room was remade into a swank imitation of a plantation with log cabins and renamed the Cotton Club.

Under its new moniker, the Cotton Club became a high-society upstairs hideout way up in Harlem. But it was off-limits to Negroes, who were not allowed to cross the color line of segregation—Jack Johnson, of course, being one of the few exceptions. The club became a showcase for the hoary tropes of the minstrel tradition, maintained by Negroes entertaining white folks while in tattered plantation attire, or other, equally noxious costumes if the routines called for them. One favorite was a titillating skit about hero flyboys lost after crashing in the jungle of the cartoon dark continent, reveling among attractive, light-skinned, comely, savage, and sexy women ready to have at it with a light-skinned or a so politely tan, tall, and terrific flier—while other, more frightening men lurked nearby,
grunting in rhythm: dark brown savages growling while they waited to devour the fallen sky boys. It was a place where white customers could experience so-called “jungle nights” in Harlem, full of what they thought to be the darkies' “natural” behavior—authentically imbecilic, if not amusingly or intriguingly subhuman, much like the thug-and-slut hip-hop world of today.

In 1927, that sort of show business muck was undercut by the music of Duke Ellington, who beat out Louis Armstrong's New Orleans mentor, King Oliver, to become leader of the Cotton Club's house orchestra. The still-budding but soon to become formidable Ellington used a wide variety of music—some written by others, but much of it arranged and composed by him alone—for his nightly shows at the club. This allowed him to meet the demands of the assignment and refine his own style, as had so many black musicians before him. As his early film appearances reveal, Ellington was still working in a milieu that included less enlightened Negroes. But Ellington never spoke in the broken-up way some black entertainers did—a voice that Armstrong lampooned to answer the dialect-dribbling explanation delivered by Lionel Hampton on their 1931 recording of “You're Driving Me Crazy.”

Though Ellington's roles in film demonstrated that he wasn't above or beyond humor and bandstand enthusiasm, he never submitted to the happy fool imagery of the time. He learned how to keep his cool and move respectfully and respectably through his job at the Cotton Club. For the easeful quality of his bearing, for his special brand of elegance, Ellington became an inspirational example of deportment to upcoming generations, who would soon become impatient with any kind of minstrel demand, within or outside of show business. The Cotton Club served him well: the pay was good, the suits the Duke and his men wore to work were plenty all right, and the gangsters who owned the room, led by the English-born Owney Madden, kept others from bothering them in town and on the road—or else the others would have to pay a slapped or gushing fine, red and slippery. After hours, Ellington and his drummer, Sonny Greer, played private parties for Madden as a duo, rendering requests for the popular tunes of the day, sometimes crooned by the percussion player to Ellington's accompaniment.

Ellington took his Cotton Club fame and parlayed it into international status through the medium of recorded music. By releasing records of sophisticated compositions such as “Black and Tan Fantasy” and “Creole Love Call,” he did the same things for his art that D. W. Griffith had done for film (racism aside), and that Joe Louis would do for the world of athletics: his recorded work revealed exactly how the game should be played.

Ellington's cool and elegant refusal to conduct himself like a cooperative buffoon made him a hero to black musicians. Singer Billy Eckstine, who became an important sponsor for musicians of Charlie Parker's generation, has pointed out that much of what has been said about the supposedly revolutionary bebop movement is wrong because it overlooks Ellington's importance to the young men who made the new music, all of whom began paying close attention to his distinctive music and his equally distinctive demeanor on and off the bandstand.

Eckstine saw Ellington's conduct as a rejoinder to spectacles like one he saw in the Howard Theatre in Washington, DC, where the band of Fess Williams was presented as “monkeys in trees playing saxophones.” The display nearly killed Eckstine's enthusiasm for show business—until Ellington played the same venue a few weeks later.

As Eckstine recalled, “The way he looked when the curtain went up, the way he walked to the microphone, the beautiful clothes, and how he talked were all so charming, and so far away from that other shit, he brought me back to my dream of getting out there with Cab Calloway—except in my own way. That's what a truly bad motherfucker will do for you; he will inspire you to keep reaching for your own shit until you get your hands on it—if you are lucky enough to have something that is your own.”

As Eckstine made clear, younger Negroes were beginning to resent the impositions of minstrelsy while keeping an eye out for possibilities that could lead them in other, more promising directions. None of them, old or young, had ever been quite what some would call happy in the face of their names being scandalized so casually and so consistently. Another future conspirator for a fresh, swinging interpretation of the jazz aesthetic, Carolina country boy Dizzy Gillespie, was almost hypnotized when he saw Ellington in a short film, with Sonny Greer sitting behind a big set of drums. The duo, and the whole band, gave
the little Southern boy correctly named John Gillespie a very special early dream of becoming a professional. And his influence was even more pronounced on Charlie Parker than on Eckstine or Gillespie.

“Dizzy and I were known to have short tempers,” Eckstine recalled. Sometimes, when you were out on the road, “you had to stand up behind your own talent.” To a live wire like Billy or Diz, that might mean “knocking an ignorant motherfucker out, don't make no difference if he black or if he white. . . . A hard right might wake him up and let him see the error of his ways.” One day, they were in a Detroit bus station men's room. “I sat in a chair to get a shine. I got comfortable. It was a nice high stand. The next thing I know is, a white motherfucker done jumped up and snatched me by my tie talking about he was next. I told him I was sorry and if he just would back up an inch or two I would get up for him. He did, and then I hit him with a right and he fell into the urinal, out cold.

“Charlie Parker went over to the man and said, ‘Now this is a shame right here, mister. You called this man a nigger and didn't know a thing about him. Not a thing. You messed up then. Now you got to go home to your wife and explain to her how you broke your glasses and why your face is red and puffy and your lip is all cut up. I bet you feel like a fool right now. Perhaps I can say it better. You probably feel like an elephantine anus. You sure look like one.'”