Kansas City Lightning (9 page)

That was how law and lawlessness, convention and opportunism, mass media and manufactured reality worked together in ways that shaped the world in which Charlie Parker and everyone else in America lived, during and after the Great Depression.

IN 1934, THE
year when both Lazia and Floyd bit the dust, when Dillinger was done to death, when Bonnie and Clyde got theirs and Baby Face Nelson ended up on a slab, the good times for Charlie Parker and Rebecca Ruffin had nothing to do with gangsters or Pendergast corruption. They hadn't yet been touched by the nightlife, its attractions, inspirations, and dangers. Though the air was full of talk about who got shot and where and why, it was all very remote to them, not nearly as real as what the two of them were feeling toward each other.

The adolescent lovers were floating in a cloud of their own, trying to pursue their relationship in terms that would avoid unnerving their parents. By
day they snuck kisses at the bottom of the stairs; if no one was in the house, or everyone was upstairs, Charlie might take Rebecca past Snow, the growling dog, and rummage around, showing his sweetheart Addie Parker's collection of gold coins. In the evenings they sat rocking in the porch swing, holding hands when Birdy Ruffin wasn't around or close enough to see what was going on.

As they spent more time together, Rebecca started noticing the things that piqued Charlie's curiosity. Lincoln High was just a few blocks away from the strip where the action was taking place in jazz music, and the couple, now holding hands as he carried their books, often ended up on Vine Street between Eighteenth and Nineteenth. “Wait a minute,” Charlie would say, and stop in front of the Cherry Blossom, a legendary club across the street from the Booker T. Washington Hotel, where the Negro musicians stayed when in Kansas City. With its Japanese décor and the huge Buddha on the bandstand, the Cherry Blossom was an unmistakable local attraction. But it was the music that captured the young man's attention.

“We would stand there and Charlie would look in that Cherry Blossom, just him and I,” Rebecca remembered. “I would ask him who he was looking for, and he was just interested in the guys who was practicing in the club. He'd be looking at the drummer or at the saxophone player. They fascinated him. I could tell by the way he was looking at them in there rehearsing their music. It didn't mean anything to me, and Charlie wasn't playing his saxophone yet, but right then something was starting to come into his mind, and now I know it had to have something to do with that music. He wouldn't miss a day looking in there if they were practicing. Charlie Parker was thinking about what they were doing.”

The Cherry Blossom was like a magnet to Charlie, but to Fanny Ruffin it represented something else: danger. “We should have never been on Eighteenth Street,” Rebecca recalled. “Never. Mama would have killed me. You see, she was always watching everything. Mama was concerned. She wanted her daughters to come out good. Her eye was always on you.”

Mama Ruffin may have been protective of her daughter, but Charlie's mother was another story. Addie Parker was happy to slip Charlie a little money to take
Rebecca to the movies, and the teenaged lovers often went to the Gem Theater, downstairs from Dominion Hall, on Eighteenth Street between Holland and Vine. They shared popcorn, and Charlie drank red soda water, which was his preference. The Lincoln Theater was where they usually showed love stories, but Charlie and Rebecca found them boring, too much talk and too little action. Could those people do anything more than swank around in beautiful clothes and say stuff nobody really understood? One grew tired of their top hats, their big ballrooms and nightclubs, their dancing now and then but mostly walking around in gowns, talking to barely masculine guys in tuxedos, flapping their lips about nothing anyone wanted to hear.

The young Kansas City couple were never bored with each other, though, and Rebecca loved to be with Charlie when he was all dressed up. “All his suits were made by J. B. Simpson,” she recalled years later. “Mrs. Parker had them made. This was the Depression—do you hear me? The Depression!—and Charlie is getting tailor-made suits. It was something! But he looked good. He was handsome and clean.” True, he was lazy: “Lazy as they make them. All he wore was gaiters, those shoes you didn't have to tie, just slip on. Charlie was spoiled rotten. But he was sweet, too. I don't know. I just loved him.”

Their favorites—or his—were cowboy pictures. Rebecca already knew how to go along with Charlie and his enthusiasms. It gave her all the satisfaction she could get just to be there, sharing one of his private interests, getting excited along with him. Charlie and his mother were always so private about their home life; it made Rebecca feel special to be out of the house with her guy at the movies. Though they were always very well-mannered when they left the house, Rebecca could feel Charlie growing more animated and excited as they walked to the theater for another afternoon full of “shoot 'em ups,” as he called them.

Once they were in their seats, they laughed nonstop as Charlie imitated the actors on-screen, keeping up a running line of jokes about their looks, their funny names, the way they carried themselves. Yet he was captivated by every detail: ten-gallon hats, fancy cowboy boots, six-shooters, horses, woolly chaps or leather ones, big spurs they dug into the sides of their horses or that jingled when they walked down those Western streets, as ready for camaraderie as they were for a
fight. Tom Mix, Hoot Gibson, Ken Maynard, Bob Steele, Buck Jones, Harry Carey, William Boyd: he could change his voice to sound like theirs, could transform his face as if it were rubber until he looked like one of them. All of a sudden the cowboy up on the screen was there next to her: no longer white but reddish brown, and still cute, tickling her until she had to laugh out loud in the theater.

To Rebecca, Charlie seemed to come alive at the movies; he was different from how he'd been when they first met, as if he'd needed something to draw him out of his loneliness. And his newfound sense of fun seemed to be aimed directly at her, inspired by his feelings for her, and how she let him love her. She wouldn't have been able to stand his mugging if it hadn't made her feel so good to be with her guy as he read the names of his cowboys off the screen or described them to her in his excited way, as she sat beside him, holding his hand as if it were part of her body.

Like any other kid growing up in the Midwest, Charlie had been fascinated since childhood with cowboys and the West. This was where so much of the drama and the comedy between white men and red nations took place, during so many of the cattle drives. And Charlie identified with something in that world, was able to project himself into it, much as the early Western stars projected themselves into their directors' cowboy fantasies. Some—like Hoot Gibson, who got his start as a stuntman under D. W. Griffith—were former cowboys themselves. Others—like William Boyd, who played Hopalong Cassidy—were pure actors, pretending their way into the roles. One of the greatest pretenders was Griffith himself: an imitation, an actor from common stock whose father was troubled by drink, who was closer to poor white trash than not.

Griffith became big stuff in the true American way: he had irresistible talent, and he used it to drive his emerging art form toward the frontier. Griffith did not invent the close-up, but it was he who divined how to use it, mastering the art of crosscutting from image to image in a way that resembled musical composition. In this he was like Duke Ellington, the great East Coast composer and bandleader who was revolutionizing jazz music during Charlie Parker's adolescence. Though Griffith was a generation older than Ellington, the two were close in sensibility. They shared an ability to evoke the rhythms of American life and American feel
ing, crudely or fancifully, and each remade his medium, inventing a new artistic language that is now recognized as inescapably modern.

Griffith and Ellington mirrored America's democratic dimension by evoking the fundamental tension between the individual and the collective. They both drew broadly from the culture around them: from biblical themes, fairy tales, newspaper stories, the surrealism of cartoons, and so on. They both composed in long, broken lines that had the up-and-down sensation of a roller coaster. Just as Griffith mastered the art of resequencing individual moments of performance into compelling stories, Ellington figured out how to feature his soloists within a complementary context, placing each new improvised solo where the arrangement made it sound better, allowing the improviser to supply the special effect of well-thought-out spontaneity to the written music. They embraced the powers that endlessly rocked in the cradle of the past, whether true or mythic or simply poetic, but never flinched in the face of modern life as it was lived, from the suites to the streets.

And yet, of course, there was a difference. D. W. Griffith's greatest personal stunt was both a technically revolutionary work of art and a misleading piece of extended-form minstrelsy: the 1915 epic
The Birth of a Nation
, truly a black-and-white mess. Based partially on an incendiary redneck pimple of propaganda shaped into a suppurating blackhead of a novel called
The Clansman
, Griffith's 1915 adaptation was the first three-hour epic. That was something in itself: audiences used to much shorter tales of love and war were glued to their seats. (As they would be, nearly a quarter century later, for
Gone with the Wind
. The antebellum South was a profitably hot, soothing, romantic topic.) It was also the very first blockbuster, running almost an unprecedented year in New York—the town where the very first blackface Irish American minstrels appeared to resounding popularity in 1843.

But what made
The Birth of a Nation
notorious was not its success or Griffith's artistic achievements. Rather, the film marked the beginning of a new way of looking at vengeful white Southerners, not as murderous racists but as radiant rednecks who started the Ku Klux Klan's campaign of murder and terrorism because they had no choice. After all, Griffith's epic argued, they were the under
dogs. What to do? the film asked. What to do during that dark time when the Confederate states suffered tyrannical military occupation? What to do when those states were losing their independence due to the destructive and invasive War of Northern Aggression, commonly misconstrued as the Civil War? That was the question. What were they to do?

Griffith knew what to do—or, at least, how to tell the story, and do it in a fashion that was unique for both its size and its one-dimensional racial message. He filled the screen with images of brave white men disguising themselves in sheets and facing down two challenges. One was the seizure of power by the North; the other was the ominous threat to white women of darkies gone wild. There it was: armed coon Union troops abusing unarmed white men on the sidewalks as a preface to drooling at the sight and the idea of bedding down—by any means necessary—with the pink-cheeked embodiments of Southern charm, gentility, and feminine grace.

Later, Griffith would back away from his huge and appalling influence. One of the most surprising of American racists, he seems, in retrospect, to have been so bothered by his massive influence on self-righteous violence and murder that he went on, one short year later, to derail his own career with another “spectacle to end all spectacles,” the three-and-a-half-hour
Intolerance
. The 1916 film castigated bigotry across the ages, weaving ancient story lines over and under later material, and using counterpoint techniques still rarely attempted. Griffith even included a Negro extra in a scene—no burnt cork, no bucking eyes at all. The extra seems just another person on the street, an actor in a walk-on of less than a few seconds but unburdened by the minstrelsy imposed on Griffith's previous black characters, which would foreshadow the depiction of black people for decades. Three years later, the director would assert his Southern nobility once more, but rebound from it most obviously, in the shockingly resolute
Broken Blossoms
, in which a white woman battered by her brutish and drunken father finds a way out in a mutually reluctant and tender adulterous romance with an Asian man. With its complex visions of race,
Broken Blossoms
showed that even a white man who had made the most racist film of the time was not quite comfortable in his old shoes.

But nothing D. W. Griffith did after
The Birth of a Nation
could put the min
strel back in the bottle. The film sparked a volcanic rebirth of the real-life Klan, America's conspiratorial domestic terrorists. It served as a model for the Third Reich when it learned to use cinema to bolster bigotry, just as that regime seized on the purportedly scientific balderdash of American eugenics to explain why the white foam was supposed to be on the top. In the long run, though, surely the most devastating impact the film had on black Americans was that its enormous financial success led Hollywood to depend, for more than three decades, on variations on one set of racist images as its nearly exclusive cinematic portrait of black America. It was not evil, Hollywood would say, just business; they chose what to put on the silver screen in order to ensure the success of products that had to address the nation as a whole: North, South, East, and West. Until the emergence of Sidney Poitier in 1950's
No Way Out
, Hollywood bent down and genuflected consistently to the redneck insistence that white Southerners, old or young, be depicted as benign or cantankerous or just plain playful types, no harm intended. Black servants must be seen as uncouth clowns, as superstitious, talking work animals, male and female, small, medium, and obese. Bid 'em in, bid 'em out.

SO CHARLIE PARKER
was an heir to all of that, as were all American Negroes.

For the serious jazz musicians of the early 1930s, whose ranks he would soon join as a professional, the dictates of minstrel behavior rarely extended to burnt cork. But they did include a demeaning version of stage behavior in which the Negro entertainer, or performing artist, was expected to reassure his audience that he and his fellow black men were far from the sharpest knives in the drawer. Singing, dancing, and acting the fool were what the Lord intended. That was why darkies were born: to bring pleasure to far better folks, and to enjoy doing just that. Charlie had yet to struggle with that long, long cotton sack. But it was right there waiting for him.