Kansas City Lightning (13 page)

That was the Ellington effect. “Bird was totally influenced by Duke: he could say things in a classy way and they worked. Duke made everybody want to have more class.”

ON THAT SAME
June evening that Joe Louis was facing Schmeling, and Charlie Parker was sinking pleasurably deeper into the mush of adolescent romance, walking along hand in hand with his first love as they listened to the radios broadcasting the fight through the windows of home after home, Jack Johnson put another kind of hot mess on his own head.

Like Duke Ellington, Jack Johnson was never one to radiate the qualities of minstrelsy in demeanor or appearance. But unlike Ellington, Johnson was neither able nor inclined to charm the bigger sharks of racism until they
moved to protect him from the others. By 1936, he was in retirement after losing his crown and weathering a trumped-up federal case against him for violating the Mann Act, written to protect young women from “white slavery.” (Johnson was married to white women three times; some whispered that he had a kind of “hypnotic power” over white girls.) Though Johnson's alleged crimes had predated the act, he was convicted, but he left Chicago, that toddling town, before authorities could send him to prison.

During that period, the champion fell out of favor with American Negroes. The black press, black educators, and black clergy saw his actions as a shame on the entire ethnic group, a hindrance to its moving on up to greater freedom. Black Jack could have married one of his own ethnic group, but he wouldn't, or didn't. He fell as hard and as far as his appropriately demeaning symbolic twin, King Kong, a big ape losing everything over a white woman, brought so concrete-low by what he thought was beauty but was actually doom. Maybe so, but as far as the fighter was concerned, it was nobody's business what he did and whom he did it with, as long as both were cooperatively enjoying themselves. When Johnson lost the crown in 1915 to a Kansas man—Jess Willard, formerly a working cowboy but nicknamed the Pottawatomie Giant for his punches—some may have chosen to believe that the champ laid out down there in the baking air, faking unconsciousness on the canvas, finally submitting to white men by throwing the fight; but they were understandably wrong. Sometimes the coldest truth cuts in at least two ways. Johnson's day as a national black hero was done, his conduct considered despicable. He no longer represented an acceptable kind of individual freedom.

Twenty years later, however, Joe Louis did. And as Louis prepared for the fight of his life, Jack Johnson—never one to be comfortable in the shadow of any man or any institution—visited his training camp and offered to coach him for the Schmeling fight. He was turned down. Johnson was still considered poison for any Negro about to move to the top, which is exactly what Louis was: the first black man in a generation to be headed for a world heavyweight championship, now one fight away from a title bout. Louis, like Johnson, had moved north to Chicago, but unlike Johnson he had recently
married a colored woman with a fine brown frame. The aspirant champion and his camp chose not to allow the former king of the white man's blues even to stand next to the new colored man who was now such a terror within the square dimensions of the ring. It was not the time to risk maddening the white people with the turbulent memory of that period two decades before, that time when the black thumb was so arrogantly jammed into the white eye. Not this time, not that memory.

Johnson did not take the rejection of his services lightly. Like Schmeling, he had watched Joe Louis, had seen his weakness. And he started predicting, loudly and widely, that Louis would lose. As Geoffrey Ward documents in his highly detailed biography of Johnson,
Unforgivable Blackness
, Johnson even offered his knowledge and insight to Schmeling.

When the German started landing his padded rights in the face of that chosen hero known as the Brown Bomber, neither Louis nor his corner could figure out what that thirty-year-old boxer from Europe was doing, that man who should be losing his skills in the swift decay of professional fighting, but was instead getting stronger and his punches no lighter. When Joe Louis finally fell, so—at least for that evening—did the entire black, brown, beige, and bone ethnic group, knocked cold, dropped to the canvas. That was a sad Friday night. Poet Langston Hughes saw Negroes weeping in the streets throughout Harlem—grown men, grown women, adolescents, and children. The unexpected and shocking knockout affirmed the sense of universal frailty so basic to the blues sensibility, the tragic recognition that made the blues such a perfect tool against sentimentality, if not against pain itself.

But defeat can lead to thoughts of revenge. In the hours that followed, five white men in New York were beaten by Negro mobs uptown in response to Louis's loss. And old black Jack, reaching for a bucket of hot mess like a suicidal Napoleon crowning himself with solid stink, almost instigated an interior ethnic riot, a sort of violent heaving, after he chose to go through Harlem bragging about how much money he'd won by betting on the German.

IN THE FUNEREAL
atmosphere of that evening, Negro sadness filled the darkness.
Duke Ellington's band played the Loews Theater downtown that night, but the leader may have made it up to the Bronx to see the fight. Back in Kansas City, Charlie Parker walked Rebecca Ruffin past Crispus Attucks School, listening to all those radios blaring in the warm night.

“You know what?” Charlie said. “Miss Ruffin's gonna kill you if she knew we was slipping out. So let's get married.”

He had finally said it. It made absolute sense. And Rebecca agreed. She would pack her things and come to 1516 Olive the next day.

Floating on the force of a romantic attraction that they both thought, deep in their hearts, was invincible—the real thing in a world filled with so many false things, so many masks and so much deceit—Charlie and Rebecca decided they deserved more than getting away with seeing each other secretly. They were through with a life where romance happened only when they were beyond the eyes of the pretty girl's mother. A beautiful and public future was theirs for the asking.

The next afternoon, with her clothes and toiletries in a suitcase, Rebecca told her mother that she was ready to go, that she was going to become Charlie's wife. “Marry Charlie, huh?” she said. “Okay, Beckerie. You'll need me before I'll need you.” It was that abrupt. Addie Parker was more welcoming: when Rebecca arrived at the Parker house, Charlie's mom told her to get her wedding dress together, and instructed Charlie to stay with his friend Sterling across the street until the wedding.

On Saturday morning, July 25, 1936, Addie Parker gave Rebecca a white Bible; put her in a white hat, a yellow blouse, and a white dress; told her son to wear his brown suit; and took them both by trolley to the justice of the peace. When it came time for the ring, Addie Parker took off her two wedding rings and handed them to Rebecca, who slipped the marital symbols on comfortably.

The young couple, newly reinvented as man and wife, returned home to a small reception. Charles Sr. was there, with his brother John and Charlie's half brother, also named John. There were also friends and relatives of the young married man, friends of his wife, and a few others. The groom stuck the end of a napkin in his collar and walked around the parlor eating ice cream and cake, pausing only to wash them down with punch. Everybody was in good spirits, the
family and the rest, including a few female friends of Addie Parker. They all looked a bit like Parkey, as Rebecca called her, and also seemed somewhat out of breath, as if they had run up and down the stairs to relax themselves before the celebration started. That night Rebecca and Charlie moved upstairs.

After the wedding, Charlie settled into a new rhythm, going out to play or listen to music every night and not returning until the next morning. Rebecca, who got a job working half days as a governess, spent a lot of time with Charlie's cousin Hattie Lee Boxley. Rebecca remembered the household vividly: “When Charlie and I got married in July, Hattie Lee was there. Hattie Lee worked ‘out south,' which meant they were working out in the wealthy district—domestic stuff, you know.” Another resident was Marie Goldin, who lived in Winfrey's old room on the second floor.

Rebecca went on, “Marie and Hattie Lee and I played bid whist downstairs. Marie and Hattie drank. They were the only ones Addie Parker let drink. You see, Addie Parker made her rules in her house the way she
wanted
to make them. Before her blood kin come in there, there was no drinking in that house whatsoever! Now that's Addie Parker and that's Charlie Parker: they do things the way they want to do. You don't tell them about contradiction. Oh, no. You don't do that. You just live with it. Hattie Lee and Marie smoked, too, down there puffing on Camels. They had me smoking, too, but I never inhaled. I think Charlie got started on the Camels around then.”

Charlie was still spending a lot of time with his buddy Robert Simpson, the trombone player from Oliver Todd's band, who was dating Hattie Lee Boxley. As Rebecca recalled, “Robert Simpson was fair-skinned and
tall
. He had to be because Hattie Lee was tall as the sky. She didn't have any womanhood on her in any kind of a fine way, she was just tall. Robert came to see Hattie Lee up in her room. Robert Simpson was the
only
man that Mrs. Parker ever let come in the house around us. Charlie himself told others to stay out in the car when they came to get him. Like Clarence Davis—when they was working in the Ozarks, Charlie said, ‘Man, you don't need to meet my wife. Stay out in the car.'

“But Robert Simpson was different. Charlie really liked him. He was like a
brother to Charlie. Charlie looked up to him. Hattie Lee was close to Charlie. Charlie would talk with her in the parlor or he would get up out of our room and go in her room and talk with her and Robert after he got up to go to work in the evening, about nine o'clock. The three of them were very close. Robert Simpson helped Charlie grow up some more. He had somebody to learn from in the way of being a man.”

ONE DAY IN
the middle of August, Rebecca came home. When she climbed the stairs and opened the bedroom door, she found Charlie lying in bed, butt naked and asleep, with his penis standing straight up and wrapped in a handkerchief held in place by a small knot.

Rebecca ran down to find Charlie's mother. “Parkey, come upstairs,” she said. “Charlie's in bed with his worm all tied up.”

Addie Parker rushed into the room, closing the door behind her. Rebecca remained in the parlor. After a while, Charlie came down for dinner, then left for the evening.

When Rebecca returned from work the next afternoon, Charlie wasn't in their room. She went to the kitchen, where she could hear Addie Parker humming.

“Parkey, where's Charlie?”

“Dearie, I had to take him to get a cure.”

“What kind of cure?”

Addie Parker said nothing, merely went back to humming and fiddling around the kitchen. After a bit of silence, Rebecca left the kitchen.

Charlie had been gone for about two weeks when Rebecca came home one afternoon and found him sitting on the couch in the parlor. He looked as though he had been extremely ill; his dark skin had an ashen cast, his eyes were weak, and he was so thin that he seemed much taller. When Charlie saw her, he leaped up and ran behind the large potbellied stove that was in the middle of the room. He stood there staring at her, his clothes hanging loosely on him and fear in his eyes. When Rebecca moved toward him, he went to the other side of the room.

“Charlie, what's the matter?” she asked, trying to get close to him. There was
no answer, only a frightened stare. Puzzled, Rebecca went up to their room.

Charlie remained downstairs for nearly a month, never sleeping upstairs, never going out to play music, never speaking to Rebecca, only staring at her in silence. Then, in the middle of September, Rebecca heard a saxophone as she lay on the bed in their room.

“I ran down those steps, eased open the door, and he was blowing himself to death. Charlie was standing there next to the piano. Oh, he was blowing. I have never heard him blow like that. And I've been to the dance halls where he'd blow, you know, but I had never heard this kind of music before.”

Rebecca sat on the couch for about seven minutes and listened as he played. At first, he was playing along with what she thought was Fats Waller's “Stealin' Apples” as it spun on the Victrola, answering phrases as they came through the speaker. But he continued after the record was over, exhibiting an authority and intensity that were new to him, the sound alternately strident and tender, the rhythms bubbling or disruptive. When he finished, Charlie opened his eyes and saw Rebecca.

“Hi, Suggie,” he said.

“Charlie, why do you blow so long and hard? Why don't you rest a while?”

Charlie smiled at her and sat down to the piano, fingering something that sounded like what he'd been playing after the record stopped spinning. Rebecca was shocked at how well he executed the phrases. This wasn't boogie-woogie, but he was rolling his long, pretty fingers over the keys as though he'd been doing it for a very long time. At one point, Charlie seemed to hit upon something and played it a few times, straightening out the melody and the chords until it was complete. Then he turned to her and said, “I think I'll call that ‘Rebecca.' ”

They then spoke pleasantly for a bit, as though nothing had happened. That night, however, Charlie still slept downstairs. He wouldn't return to his room with Rebecca until the evening of Thanksgiving, after some startlingly bad luck took place.

It is practically the only question of the age, this question of primitivism and how it can be sustained in the face of sophistication.

JEAN RENOIR      

You could look at Bird's life and see just how much his music was connected to the way he lived. . . . You just stood there with your mouth open and listened to him discuss books with somebody or philosophy or religion or science, things like that. Thorough. A little while later, you might see him over in a corner somewhere drinking wine out of a paper sack with some juicehead. Now that's what you hear when you listen to him play: he can reach the most intellectual and difficult levels of music, then he can turn around—now watch this—and play the most lowdown, funky blues you ever want to hear. That's a long road for somebody else, from that high intelligence all the way over to those blues, but for Charlie Parker it wasn't half a block; it was right next door.