Kansas City Lightning (30 page)

There was no place like Harlem, not that Buster Smith knew about. Even people who could pass for white when they worked downtown were anxious to get back uptown, where there was high style and know-how everywhere. They were white for their money, and they were Negro for their good times. There was a code to all of it, as there always was.

CHARLIE MISSED BUSTER
Smith. Nothing floated back from the East: no letters, no telegrams. Smith's young protégé was still attached to the older man; he had felt secure in his presence and missed having a more experienced figure around to inspire him the way Prof had. Lester Young was gone. He didn't get along with Tommy Douglas. He was playing with Harlan Leonard, who was starting to promote him as a “saxophonist supreme,” but in private the bandleader hated him. Jay McShann was great, but Charlie had run himself out of that band, falling down on his discipline, giving his position the aspect of a suspense serial:
Would he appear or wouldn't he
? Finally, McShann let him go.

As Charlie Parker began to see what might be available to him in the world of music, Kansas City itself increasingly felt like a closed town. He was far beyond what he had been, but still a long distance from what his ambitions were. Even so, the command he was developing over the saxophone was raising his sense of himself. Charlie Parker could be one of those people with his picture in a magazine, with his records in the shop, with fine clothes, cars, and crowds waiting for him to arrive in town. He could have them lined up begging for his autograph. Above all, he could sound great. The desire to get there went past every other thing—above and beyond the public, above and beyond the gig. It was a drive shared by musicians everywhere, a feeling that came whether they were alone or surrounded by listeners snapping their fingers, patting leather on the floor, dancing, or just sitting there happy to be getting in on something special. He could be one of the cats, up there with Lester and Chu Berry, Johnny Hodges and Benny Carter. It was all within his reach.

The saxophone told him so, every time he picked it up. The horn no longer treated him like a stepchild; it had begun to submit to him. That alto gave him things. When he had it in his mouth now, the reed and the mouthpiece seemed more natural. His fingers fell into place almost automatically. His embouchure was just like the one in the book, a dimple on either side of his mouth. The weight of the horn was no longer heavy. The keys and his fingers were getting along better and better. Sometimes something would jump out of the instrument and almost scare him: it seemed so much like a revelation. This music was his life when he was living exactly the way he wanted to live. It was on him all the time. Passages and rhythms went through his mind. He was hearing something different now, though it was still foggy, the notes and the tone indistinct. That was his style, still hiding from him, flitting up and disappearing. Every now and then he snatched a piece of it and held on until it was settled in his saxophone, locked in his soul, committed to a life sentence in his memory.

Somewhere along the way, he had taken to kissing his alto saxophone, to calling it his “baby.” It was surely his true love, for he had no other honest relationships. The saxophone was the only thing that gave him exactly what he wanted and he gave in return.

IT WAS LATE
one morning in early 1939, maybe ten o'clock. Charlie came in with his horn and set it down on the piano bench. He called up to Rebecca, who was with Leon, now just a year old.

“Rebeck, come on down.”

She had been lying in bed, but she rose at the sound of his voice, wondering what Charlie wanted from her. You could never tell. His moods were mysterious. It also depended on how much of that stuff he'd been using. She walked down the stairs, and there he was, heartbreaking because he was still getting more handsome, looking a little weary, but his eyes very intense—that stare she knew so well was upon her, but there was softness too and a sort of sadness. She came down the stairs expecting nothing, but ready for anything.

“I want to tell you something,” he said, taking her hand as he always did when he wanted to speak with her.

She looked him in his eyes.

“Rebecca, you are a good person, and I want you to take good care of our son. I love you. But I believe I could become a great musician if I were free. Rebecca, please free me. Please free me, Rebecca. I have to have my freedom.”

She didn't say anything. She just looked at him. Rebecca wasn't raised to ask questions. She just took it in.

“Ma,” Charlie called out. “Ma, come in here.”

Rebecca still looked at him.

Charlie grew impatient.
“Ma!”

“I'm coming, Charlie.”

Breathless, as usual, Addie Parker stood looking at Charlie and Rebecca sitting at the dinner table, her hand in his.

“Ma, Rebeck is going to free me.”

Rebecca was looking at him. She had said nothing.

“I want you to promise something, Ma.”

“I promise.”

“Promise, Ma!”

“I
promise,
Charlie.”

“I want you to do something for me, Ma. For as long as Rebeck and Leon live, I want you to make sure that they have a roof over their heads and food in their mouths.”

Then he rose and was gone.

Emotion replaced the air with invisible gutting knives: Rebecca was in shock, feeling as if she'd been cut open and hung from the ceiling.

AT SOME POINT,
probably at night, Charlie Parker made it to the railroad yard.

As a boy, he'd been good at throwing stones, and he'd go down there with buddies to smack bums with rocks. Now it was a different story. He was going to bum his way to New York. He hadn't convinced anyone else to go with him, though he had tried, telling them it was just another adventure, nothing to be frightened of, nothing at all. Now, though, it was good-bye to Kansas City for real. His horn was in a pawnshop, so all he carried with him of his struggle with
music was inside, out of sight: what he had taught himself, what he had picked up from Lester Young, the things Buster Smith and Tommy Douglas laid on him, the splattering fire and intelligence Roy Eldridge emanated through recordings and his Chicago broadcasts, the brusque harmonic complexities Chu Berry executed so easefully. He wore some old clothes, having sold everything else to provide himself with a grubstake. His pants were far too big, held up by a long piece of cloth; worn workman's shoes protected his feet; a threadbare suitcoat covered a rumpled shirt. Over it all he wore a ragged topcoat, buttoned all the way up to limit the cold pushiness of the wind that had been getting colder since October.

Nothing could reduce the anticipation and the fear of being caught in the railroad yard. Everyone knew that the guys on the lookout for hobos could get brutal, could lay something on your head, have them some fun whipping on you. Charlie had surely heard the train-hopping lore from Buster Smith; he knew to carry a stick that could keep the boxcar door open so he wouldn't get closed up in there and starve to death. For the time being, he held his morphine habit in check, knowing it would be foolish to run the risk of withdrawal on these freight trains. Nothing could be worse than going through that sickness in a boxcar or on some siding—or out in the woods where he would be helpless prey to whatever came his way. Charlie might be mischievous and act a fool, but he wasn't anywhere near crazy.

Soon 1516 Olive would be behind him. Soon he would be riding the rails and moving on out into another dimension of his life. Once he got to New York, Buster Smith would surely take him in, and he would start working his way up the ladder the same way he had done at home. It might be hard, but it couldn't be any harder than it had already been; he couldn't imagine any humiliation more painful than that Kansas City laughter when he made his naive little mistakes. Not long from now, he would be up and out of here. Everything getting smaller and smaller as the train put on the distance. Gone, gone, gone.

Sure, he knew that his mother wanted him to stay home, or at least in Kansas City, forever and forever and forever and forever. Rebecca didn't want to be without him, either. Leon was just getting to know who his father was. He wasn't doing bad locally, not anymore. His reputation was spreading in Kansas City, and he could get up on a bandstand now and demand respect through his playing.
People wanted to hear him blow his saxophone. Of course, he didn't have a saxophone now. He didn't even have an address.

In just a few days, his very first love, lean and golden Rebecca, and his son, Francis Leon, would sit somewhere away from him, not knowing where he was, just as he was unaware of what they were doing. It had been so long since he had first seen her that day the Ruffins moved into 1516 Olive, since Ophelia had caught them upstairs, since he'd waited after school for Rebecca on the steps of the library, whiling away the time with a book. Geraldine would be behind him as well. All the joints on Eighteenth and Twelfth Streets; the Ozarks; the spook breakfasts; the barbecue and chicken gathering places, where chili was slurped early in the morning; the freak shows upstairs at the Antlers, where Charlie's innocence took a longer and longer hike; the barbershops, the shine boys, the clothes the Jews sold in competing stores on Eighteenth and Vine; Lincoln High, where he had been such an incorrigible truant; the alleys where he and Sterling Bryant had shot marbles down on their knees: these were almost no more than memories, connected to a place he was leaving on that railroad, the clatter of the rails a percussive accompaniment to his ambitions, which were so much stronger than his fears.

It was almost time to take off. He was up to the risk, or thought he was. He'd nearly been killed already on the way to the Ozarks; he had flushed down the toilet his aborted second child; he had suffered the damnation of trying again and again to reclaim the thrill of that first high, until he had become addicted; and he had known the good times that came when the music actually worked and the lifting feeling of swing took off, everybody functioning like the miraculous engine of a finely tuned car, but with that extra spark that comes of human emotion. He had known sorrow and terror, sensation and frustration, learning by surprise or mistake how tenuous were the lines between the extremes of life and health. He had seen so much pain, so much disappointment. Now was the time to find out how it felt if dreams could come even a country mile close to the mark.

Charlie Parker was leaving Kansas City, and he was damn sorry he had no one to go with him.

T
hough Charlie Parker would never ride in the luxury compartments of American trains, never stand out on an observation deck in a smoking jacket, martini in hand, he was as familiar with the truth and myth of railroads as any young man his age. It was an era when America still knew the world of trains firsthand, but also when the toy electric train was rising to its high position in the mind of the American boy, a fixture of newspaper and magazine ads full of bright ovals of miniature track, cyclopic eyes of light, quarter-size wheels powerful beyond fatigue, a mesmerizing universe of precision machinery. Model trains captured how the American people had become interwoven with the technological imaginings of its inventors, transforming from two-dimensional engineering drawings into three-dimensional reality in a far-flung support system of mines, lumber camps, foundries, and factories, of gargantuan parts and tiny screws, all of it functioning as a magnificent puzzle, a mighty exemplar of modernity given to unprecedented velocities and metallic percussion.

The train and the stations, the engines and boxcars, the rattling aura of faraway places and the stories told by those who had ridden in the wheeled and coupled lines of coaches out to and over the blue horizon: all these put fresh images—some true, some glowingly embellished—into our pantheon of fancies and reservations. The train made distances seem less real; it also intruded upon the American desire to be left alone, to seek peace and respite and rural seclusion. In its size and its constancy of motion, city to city, its loud whistles and rapid clanking and
clattering, the train was both a machine and an almost breathing monster of transportation, escape, kidnap. The train seemed to go everywhere, and it meant everything.

It pushed us back into the Wild West, where the black-smoke-puffing iron horse had begun as another of the mysteries the white man sprung on the Indian in the wake of the wagon trains, another force that interrupted their already harsh lives from a world so far away it was infinitely mysterious. That same iron horse would eventually carry the brutal and legendary Apache chief Geronimo and his people from the Southwest to Florida. It would become a target for the bloody derring-do of robbers like the James Boys, who came over the hills in their peaked hats, six-guns blasting, tails of their long, dusty store-bought coats rising behind them in the midwestern wind.

The abolition movement, too, was described as a kind of engine-pulled locomotion: the Underground Railroad, that creature of false-bottomed wagons, treks through swamps, and points of seclusion known as safe houses. That train rolled in one direction: north, to the heaven that lay above the lower, hellish quarters of the national map. Its goal was to evade the white men on horses who would return its passengers to the world of chattel depression, full of metal traps set to snap the rails of human bones, lanterns carried in the night chase, black and sometimes Indian trackers galloping behind baying dogs as they hounded the chattel with the gall to risk a long, long, danger-thick breakaway from the plantation. On that virtual railroad, the black smoke was replaced by woolly hair, the chugging by furious human breathing, the promise of luxury by the possibility of freedom, the points of refueling by the homes of those whites who were willing to risk tar and feathers—or worse—to commit a sin of conspiratorial humanism.