Kansas City Lightning (33 page)

According to Eckstine, Goon Gardner was so impressed by Parker that he invited him to come live at his place—though that ended soon enough, with Gardner short some of his belongings and Charlie gone off to God knew where. But Ramey was proud of what Charlie had done, bringing the Kansas City message to Chicago and letting those men up there know that swing hadn't died when Basie left for New York. He didn't know where Charlie had gone to, but he was getting used to the fact that mystery was part of his young buddy's story.

N
ineteen thirty-nine, while a very good year for jazz and for Charlie Parker, was also the year that Adolf Hitler finally pushed the globe into another world war. Negroes were well aware of what Hitler represented; they had welcomed, with whatever misgivings, the sight of Jesse Owens and Joe Louis triumphing literally and symbolically against European fascism and the junk science of eugenics. Trumpeter Jacques Butler, who was from Washington, DC, and had played with Jelly Roll Morton in New York, remembered how Negro jazz musicians in Harlem made a joke of Third Reich philosophy by calling any light-skinned person with autocratic tendencies “Master Race.”

The odd position of black people in America was made quite clear in January 1939, when the Daughters of the American Revolution refused to allow the world-renowned contralto Marian Anderson to sing at Constitution Hall in Washington because she was Negro. First lady Eleanor Roosevelt—who had invited Anderson to sing at the White House three years earlier and was the hot force for Negro rights in the presidential circle, constantly urging her husband to use his authority to enforce a greater degree of racial justice—found the DAR's decision not only racist but also a personal insult, resigning from the organization in protest.

The Constitution Hall concert was eventually supplanted by an event that took
on far more importance than the recital it replaced. It made the movie house newsreels, so we can assume that anyone who wasn't dead or buried must have seen it. On a cold Easter Sunday, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, Anderson was introduced by the secretary of the interior, Harold Ickes, with these words: “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free.” Then, brown and dignified in a mink coat, Anderson thrushed forth her gifts before an integrated audience of 75,000, not a ragtag type visible in the photographs. As she often did on the other side of the Atlantic, Anderson sang both European concert selections and Negro spirituals, the music of the Old World and the New. The Philadelphia contralto resurrected the dream of the country by kicking off her twenty-minute recital with “America” and encoring with “Nobody Knows the Trouble I've Seen.” It was one of those great American days.

And yet this was also the year when
Gone with the Wind
premiered in Atlanta, just before Christmas, and swiftly became the highest grossing movie of its time. Starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh, this paean to the plantation South offered a sentimentalized vision of its destruction in the Civil War—the second instance, after Griffith's racism-mottled
The Birth of a Nation
, in which Hollywood busted the bank wide-open with a period tale in which the rapacious Negro, foaming at the mouth, was central to the narrative. Though Hattie McDaniel would win an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress the following year—the first for a Negro—
Gone with the Wind
was proof, in many ways, that the nation had not yet been reborn.

BY THE TIME
Charlie Parker arrived in New York that winter, he'd been wearing his shoes so long that his feet and legs were swollen out of shape. He had come the hard way, freezing in boxcars between towns, getting a roof over his head and breakfast from the Salvation Army, then taking to the rails again. But he took the bumps, scrapes, and pricks of his journey in stride, because he'd finally gotten to the place at the far end of the country where he wanted to be. Slight or acute, pain was a traveling partner by now. He'd learned the weight that hypocrisy and chaos brought
to his sense of life; how it felt to be alone and the target of contempt; how to bear the soreness that came with mastering his instrument. He'd discovered the almost intolerable excruciation that went with his drug habit, with loving Rebecca but losing her and little Leon to the saxophone and the magnetic demons that so easily drew him in, chewed him up, and shat him out, drained, remorseful, and filthy.

He knew he had to be willing to suffer for what he wanted, and it was starting to look as though he were earmarked to suffer, whether he was willing or not. All the exaltation of Kansas City was far behind him now. In that Manhattan winter, walking the streets on those very sore legs and feet, he went in search of new adventure as a form of illumination that simultaneously muted his hurts and neutralized his anxiety.

He couldn't have arrived at a better time. The New York World's Fair was to open in April, with its theme, “Building the World of Tomorrow,” and word of the event was everywhere: on posters, on broadcasts, in newspapers, in magazines, filling the newsreel screens of the movie houses. The country's insatiable appetite for innovation and sophistication—the flip side of the American love for the pastoral, the down-home, and the steel-wool cocoon of the conventional—was about to be given its head. Thousands upon thousands would soon be driving their cars, grabbing buses, or zooming in the subway out to the exhibition fairgrounds in Queens, where the newly completed Triborough Bridge connected the borough to Manhattan and the Bronx.

Come springtime, pavilion after pavilion would be swarmed with visitors, stunned or thrilled by the grand industrial promises of a sterling tomorrow. It was the era of bigger, better, and faster—the perfect moment for a young musician entranced by things mechanical and the mathematical laws behind them, which had nothing to do with race, class, religion, or the various bugaboos that made life dangerous and unnecessarily irritating, if not humiliating. As a boy in Catholic school, before he moved across the river to Missouri, Charlie was drawn to the purity of modern machinery. He was fascinated by the physics, electronics, and technological secrets behind modern life in the late 1930s: radios, automobiles, skyscrapers, elevators, bridges, dams, airplanes, traf
fic lights, rapid transit—all the inventions that were pushed at Americans by competing manufacturers. He even foresaw what we know today as
sampling
: In 1952, he told pianist Walter Davis Jr. and some fellow musicians, “Someday in the future, they'll be able to put your music in a can. Then, whenever they want to, they'll do it just like they were using a spoon to take out as much of you, or as little of you, as they need. After they have done whatever they want to do with you, with your sound, they put you back. Your future, my dear fellow, is in a can.”

When Charlie Parker got to New York, however, he had a much more immediate concern than divining the future: finding his mentor, Buster Smith. We know that Smith had finally written Charlie, which must be how the younger man knew to turn up at Smith's apartment on 135th Street and Seventh Avenue. Answering the front door, the older man knew something immediately: the boy had obviously been whipped down by his travels. This wasn't the spoiled young man Smith had known, who had almost always taken care to be neat and alert when he sat next to Smith on the bandstand at the Antlers Club in the West Bottoms, awed and warmly affectionate. His looks brought back to Smith the hard, dark memory of those Blue Devil days in Virginia, which left the band worn out, covered with dirt and coal dust, and fearful of the Eastern Seaboard.

Charlie needed a meal, a bath, and two or three days of sleep—that much was obvious—but he wasn't at all fearful. Being in Smith's company again enlivened him at the same time that it calmed him down. Charlie's legs may have hurt and his shoes may have cut into his swollen insteps, but sitting there with Buster Smith was as soothing as a hot bath and a good meal. After finally arriving in this notorious city of endless strangers, he was glad to feel the human presence of one of the best parts of home.

Then there was the town itself. Like everyone else who listened to the radio, went to the movies, or thumbed through a magazine, Charlie knew about New York's harbors, lined with big cargo ships and ocean liners; its huge parks; the bright glare of its nightlife; and its spunky little mayor, Fiorello LaGuardia, famous as a cartoon character for everything from accompanying the police on raids to smashing slot machines to reading the funny papers, eventually and endearingly, to young and old over the radio.

The Negroes in Harlem had another level of style, Charlie saw, and the concrete forest of buildings in lower Manhattan, even more impressive than in Chicago, almost took his breath away. There was a look in the eyes and faces of New Yorkers, a pace and syncopation to their walk, that seemed to rise with urbane fire during the business day, then stretch into the gathering places of the evening, the deep points after dark when the sheer presence of so much humanity adds an electric hum to the air. The city's feeling was at once elegant and smart-alecky, as sharp as stainless steel and jagged rust.

This hard-boiled urbane sensibility transcended all the superficial categories of prejudice and privilege, even as it recognized a harsh human fact: that no amount of fine form and style, sophistication and gallows wit, optimism and good Samaritan ways, could forever hold the blues at bay.

Ever ready, this was a place of boundless appetites, a city that demanded eight newspapers to keep up with its story, three major league baseball teams to thrill it, and rapid transit above the ground, on the ground, and under the ground to get it where it was going.

The Big Apple was always in need of something new in order to realize itself, another set of cultural release valves to manage its ever-looming pressures. And the artistic fecundity that manifested itself in New York in these years grew partly from inspiration, partly from desperation. Like every professional musician who played dance halls, Charlie knew that New York's Broadway shows provided the songs that got people humming across the nation and around the globe. Anyone who went to the movies saw how often the era's romantic comedies, its tales of high society and down-low gangsters, and its ethnic melodramas were set in the metropolis on the Hudson.

The city had the best dance halls in America, the biggest movie theater in the world, and the longest chorus line anyone had ever seen, not to mention the best restaurants and clothing shops. And just a few subway stops away was Wall Street, where fortunes were made and broken.

It was simple. If you wanted to become a movie star, you went west to Hollywood. If you had any other kind of serious career in mind, you went to New York. Starring roles weren't available to Negroes in those years, but there was plenty of room in show business for those who had the playing and composing
skills, or who were tall, tan, and terrific enough to find work and make careers for themselves on bandstands, in Tin Pan Alley, or on the stages, which welcomed as much dancing and singing glamour from Negroes as the conventions of the time could bear.

Now Charlie Parker was here, with a roof over his head and Buster Smith standing by him in full support. He knew nothing about how the New York music scene functioned, other than what he'd heard by word of mouth, or dreamed as he listened to broadcasts or studied recordings. But he had no doubt that he was in the right place. Addie Parker's son would take Manhattan if given the shot.

AS CHARLIE WAS
surprised to discover, Buster Smith wasn't exactly feeling the same way about New York. He was doing a little writing for Basie, working around a bit, but the Professor of Kansas City still hadn't managed to create the kind of impact in this town as he had back home. New York was full of so many good musicians, and there was so much going on, that it was easy to get passed over. A talented player could find little gigs here and there, but if you wanted to break out, you needed to get with a successful band, or put your own group together.

The Professor seemed as though he was waiting for something to happen—something that wasn't arriving as quickly as he expected. He'd never been much for jamming all night and running the streets, and that kept him from rising in the uptown or downtown pecking order. But neither was he a beggar or a complainer. He was solid as ever, as a player and as a friend. He encouraged Charlie to get out there on the town and find out what he could do. He invited him to sleep at the apartment during the day, when Mrs. Smith was at work, and even let him use his alto for gigs whenever it was available—which was plenty these days. Since the Professor spent his time hanging out with old Basie over at the Woodside, or talking with some of the other Kansas City guys, that gave Charlie the run of the place.

Seeing how Buster Smith was faring, Charlie realized that he'd have to make some changes to his own plans. It was obvious that good things didn't come to
you automatically in New York City. He wasn't thinking about starting a group of his own, not yet; his hope was that Smith would start a band and ask Charlie to join, giving him his toehold in New York and a steady living. In truth, Charlie wasn't even thinking that hard about earning a living—all he really wanted was to play—but he knew he'd have to find some kind of money somewhere, which put a splash of dread in the game. There it was. So what? Nothing in New York could be any worse than the hunger, the cold, and the anxiety of that long, rattling railroad trip east.

And there was more: here in New York, Charlie was surrounded by a quality of Negro life and excitement that he'd never witnessed before. In all of this man's Harlem, and all of this Manhattan, there had to be something for him. All he needed was a chance to prove himself, to let everyone know that he was serious now, that the lazy boy was gone. Not that many people in New York knew who he'd been, of course. But it was still true: the guy who walked the streets with Junior Williams back in Kansas City, talking about what he wanted to do, was in the country's fastest game now. He had shown them in Kansas City. He'd gotten his respect in Chicago. New York couldn't be all that different.