Kansas City Lightning (6 page)

The consequence was that all-American heritage of Charlie's: the Asian and European blood running beneath his reddish-brown skin. Yet the forming of the Wild West in which he grew up had a much earlier start and one that was given the glory and the gore of its beginnings and shapings by the same three sources that constituted his genetic line.

Charlie Parker's mother, Addie, was from Oklahoma, the region once called Indian Territory. Like Jay McShann, she claimed Muskogee as her hometown. She was part Choctaw, her Indian blood probably the result of President Andrew Jackson's policies, which had pushed the tribe northwest from Mississippi. About five feet five, she had high cheekbones, a pointed nose, thin lips, a big bosom, and an ascendant rump. Mrs. Parker wore her hair long, in what was known as a cat-and-mouse style, with a bun on either side of her head and one on top.

The Parker family, two adults and two children, lived in a five-room frame house on Washington Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Streets. Before he married Addie, the light-skinned Charles Sr. had coupled with an Italian woman named Edith; she gave birth to John Parker, a jolly, big-eared boy named after his peg-legged uncle, another resident of Kansas City, Kansas. Three years later came Charles Jr., and he soon became the favorite. Charlie was Addie's only child, and he became her obsession—especially when Charles Sr. made it obvious that he had no intention of giving up the firewater that made him cut the fool. When she scolded him for his behavior, he stood his ground: “I'll stop drinking,” he told her, “ten years from
today
.”

When he first answered her that way, it was almost funny. Charles Sr. was the kind of handsome man who got used to being funny. But he did not know when he had ground her patience and belief in him down nearly all the way. She began
to lose faith in her husband as a responsible man. Over time, Addie Parker started to believe it would take a hundred years for this man to stop his drunkenness, and as she did, her eyes became hard as cherry pits. An acidic bitterness had scalded her skin. But she willed herself to do what would protect what was important. That was a sorrowful but sure thing that had its own brightness.

Edward Reeves, who lived across the street, played often with Charlie and John Parker. He remembered the neighborhood as one where everybody knew everybody else and a child seen misbehaving had to face whippings in triplicate: the first from the neighbor who saw the act; the second from Mother when he got home, or after she got home from work; and the third when Daddy arrived and found out what had happened.

“The neighborhood was together,” Reeves said. “There was a close feeling. You might not like it if one of those people put a strap on you for being way in the wrong, but you could count on them when you had troubles. If you got sick, everybody was trying to help you. They got together and exchanged remedies. . . . Goose grease on your chest and a flannel over it. If you got a cut on your leg, jimsonweed salve. It was yellow and it would damn near fight off gangrene.”

Reeves didn't recall ever seeing the Parker boys' father, but he remembered Addie as sweet and friendly. The two sons were opposites: “I first met Charlie on Ninth and Washington Avenue. He must have been about eight. I was always butting around somewhere and I met John first, who was kind of a straggler, you know, looking for fun. . . . John was talkative and laughing. Charlie was different. He was a loner. Mostly to himself. John talked a lot but Charlie was quiet. Charlie didn't bother much whether he got with you or not. If he was digging a hole and you was climbing trees, he kept on digging that hole. If he was climbing a tree and you were digging a hole, he wasn't thinking about coming out of those branches. But when he wanted to, Charlie could get with us and we would do all the things that boys did back then. Just fun, but plenty of mischief, too.”

They played mumblety-peg; they rolled hoops removed from the wheels of old wagons; they shot marbles; they rode sleds in the winter. There were railroad tracks, a box factory, and coal yards in walking distance, which allowed for playing in boxcars, climbing in the box factory's bins, and getting filthy with coal
dust. But their bib overalls were strong enough to stand up to the pressure of boys out for squealing joy.

One of the things they liked to do was individually beg up on a few cents from a parent and go “crawdadding.” “We'd get a nickel's worth of liver and those crawdaddies would cover it. They was good eating, too.” On Saturdays and Sundays, the kids could buy crawdads from the crawdad man, who dressed in white from head to foot. They could hear him as he came up Washington Avenue, turning on Eighth, coming up Ninth, calling out “Craaawww-pappies! Red! They're
hot
!” “A dime's worth of red, pretty crawdads was plenty,” Reeves recalled. As it got cooler, the crawdad baskets on each arm were replaced by a tamale cart, with two big wheels in the front and a small one in the back. “Hot 'males! Red! They're
hot
!” the man sang, selling three for a nickel. The ice cream man came in the spring and summer, selling cones for three cents a pop.

Mischief surfaced on days like the Fourth of July, when the boys would go to the park on the corner of Tenth and Washington to shoot cap pistols—“Man, if you didn't have a cap pistol, you wasn't nothing!” They were free to wave sparklers, but were warned to stay away from firecrackers. Which they didn't. “They had these little things called bombs about the size of rum balls,” said Reeves, “and if one of those bombs hit you on the leg, it would hurt.”

The week before Halloween, Reeves set out with John and Charlie Parker and five or six other boys to celebrate Cabbage Night. They raided cabbage patches and hurled the biggest heads they could find onto porches or against front doors before running for the hills. Halloween was a bad night for outhouses, too: the giggling conspiracy of young boys would pull on masks, go up alleys, and turn over as many as they could, squawling with delight as they made their hotfooted getaway. A block away was a white neighborhood; the people there weren't rich, but they were doing much better than the Negroes. The pranksters stayed away from them.

“You could go to anybody's house and eat on Thanksgiving,” Reeves remembered. “They either had a lot of chicken or a goose—greasy. Didn't have too many turkeys. They raised a lot of geese. Regularly, around the year, there was always rabbit and chicken. Rabbits cost you fifteen cents then, two big rabbits for a quarter. The children always got to clean the rabbit after it
was skinned, and eventually you could do it all, skin it and clean it.”

On Christmas, the white people up the way gave their children's toys from the previous year to the colored families. If the toy was a wagon, it had been repainted and supplied with new wheels. Candy canes, cap pistols, miniature ten-gallon cowboy hats, and affordable necessities were the order of the day within the Negro families. If there had been a good snow, it was scooped up and thrown in fights, sleds were dragged into sliding positions, and rolls of expended caps rose as the hammers of toy pistols came back before striking the next dot of powder in the neighborhood western of winter warfare. Bang: you're dead. Negro cowboys.

Photographs of the young Charlie Parker taken during these years show mirth, concentration, pride. In one, he stands next to a wooden car that might have been a secondhand toy from the peckerwoods. A little girl sits in it, and he seems an almost haughty little prince. In another, Parker holds a cane and is attempting to summon a raffish expression. Twenty years later, when the saxophonist saw the second picture, he declared his younger self “a clean little Bird”—a moment of melancholy nostalgia. There were no drugs in his life then—nor, for that matter, any apparent signs of musical promise. Yet even in these early pictures Bird appears removed, almost aloof.

Young Charlie Parker was a sensitive boy, tightly bonded with his mother. Before he went to bed, she recalled to club owner Robert Reisner, he would tell her, “I love you, I love you, Mama.” Little Bird also didn't suffer insult easily: Addie told Reisner that Charlie punched out a boy at school for making fun of some pimples on his face.

The school in question was a local Catholic institution—an unusual choice, since Addie, like most Negroes, was Protestant. That Catholic experience separated young Charlie from his surroundings, and he recognized early that there were ways to do things that were different from standard practice. His mother recalled him telling her that “we” didn't do things a certain way—identifying with the way Catholics taught, thought, and lived. It was probably during this period that Parker wore the Little Lord Fauntleroy suit he often recalled when selecting details from his childhood. “Had a wide collar,” said Edward Reeves, “a silk tie that you tied like a bow tie, but it came almost down to
your stomach. The coat and the pants were velvet, the pants had two buttons down on the side. You wore stockings then and buttoned shoes. Some fellows had buckled shoes. You were in there when you wore that kind of stuff.”

Charlie Parker was in there. Whenever he asked permission to get a pocket-money job, his mother refused, preferring to give him what he needed herself. Addie Parker reared her son as a homebred aristocrat, a young lord, and the expressions we see in his childhood photographs are probably the results of his being treated as royalty. But no one knew how heavy a crown the young prince was destined to wear.

Around 1930, Addie Parker faced what she was up against: her husband was an incorrigible whiskeyhead. Marriage had dealt her a bad hand, and she decided to throw it in. Leaving half-white John with his father in Kansas, Addie took Charlie, her only blood child, and moved across the river into Missouri. After short stints at a series of addresses, she bought a large two-story house at 1516 Olive Street. She made ends meet by doing domestic work and taking in cleaning. She rented out rooms on the second floor—there was more than enough space for her and Charlie downstairs, where there was a big parlor, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. Her young and largely silent son was enrolled for a time at Crispus Attucks School, named after the Negro who was the first person shot down by the British in the Boston Massacre, his blood a liquid finger pointing toward the American Revolution. Charlie did well there, and got his diploma from the Charles Summer School in 1933.

When he wasn't in school, Charlie was playing with his friend Sterling Bryant, who lived up the block. The Depression was on, yet somehow Addie managed to find knickers for her son, though no others in the neighborhood could afford them. If she wanted him to stay home and be happy—unlike his father—Addie resolved that she would give him everything she could. She would make 1516 Olive Street his personal paradise.

Charlie was a little bigger than Sterling Bryant during those years, and Bryant remembers him as a buddy and a bodyguard. “We just did boy things, nothing serious, nothing really dangerous. But it was rough when we left the neighborhood and stepped into somebody's territory. Charlie used to escort me to see my girlfriend and walk me back. She lived a few blocks away, and they didn't want
us around there, the other boys. They were in a gang, and they were ready to jump you and make sure you didn't get used to coming over there. Charlie wasn't scared, though. He could run, but he wasn't scared to fight. We got in a few scraps over there, and Charlie stood by me. We either won or lost together. He was a real nice boy, liked to have fun. Charlie had a good sense of humor, and he loved to prank. He just loved it, but he didn't try to hurt anyone.”

Holidays were much the same as they'd been over in Kansas—except for Halloween. On that night, people would go to Eighteenth and Vine to watch the parade of homosexuals. “It was the only time they could wear dresses,“ Bryant chuckled, “and they put it on that night. They got on their dresses and their falsies, their lipstick. They had on their hats and their high heels, and they would strut it. That was such a good show it became a family thing. It was the highlight of Halloween.”

IN APRIL 1934
, trouble in a neighboring family brought change into Addie Parker's home.

The Ruffins, a Negro couple, had come from Memphis, Tennessee, to a house at 2507 Howard Street. The father, known to all as Daddy, had Madagascar Afro-Indian blood in his family; his wife, Fanny, had Cherokee and English. Their first five children—Winfrey, Octavia, Rebecca, Ophelia, and Naomi—were born in Memphis; Dorothy, the last, was delivered in Kansas City, Missouri. At that time, Edward Reeves remembered, “all the Negroes lived north. The farthest they got out to was Twenty-Fourth Street. All the big dogs lived on Twenty-Fourth Street, the ones with money and some kind of prestige.” Daddy Ruffin was an insurance salesman, which was a middle-income job for a Negro at that time, a step up from manual labor, semiliteracy, and illiteracy.

For reasons no one quite remembers, Fanny Ruffin stopped sleeping in the same room as her husband and stopped cooking for him. Daddy stayed upstairs, and the rest of the family was on the first floor. The children didn't understand, but the tension between the couple was obvious, and Fanny assigned ten-year-old Ophelia to take over one of her roles. “Small as I was, I was cooking Daddy's breakfast. Mama had quit cooking for him and she would tell me and I
would try to do it. Mama decided to move because she didn't want to stay there with Daddy. I think she knew a friend that knew Miss Parker, and that's how we got down to Olive Street.”

On April 10, 1934, when Charlie was thirteen years old, Fanny Ruffin and her children moved into Addie Parker's house, taking the entire second floor. As the family moved their belongings up the stairs, Addie and Charlie stood at the banister, watching with fascination as the girls, the one boy, and the mother marched up and down the stairs with their belongings.

One who noticed Charlie was the Ruffins' middle child, Rebecca. To her, Charlie looked a little old for his knickers, as if he were a little spoiled. It also wasn't lost on her that he never lifted a finger to help the Ruffins. But there was something strong about him, she thought, something in his presence and in his capacity for attention. He also exuded a loneliness, a need. At least Rebecca thought so. Rebecca was golden, thin, about Charlie's age, and her hair dropped thick and brown below her shoulders. Charlie stared at her most intently. “My eye fell on him,” Rebecca said, “and I knew there was gonna be trouble. I knew I was in love with him.”