Clifford's Blues (17 page)

All my life white women had been like bad voodoo; you simply didn't have anything to do with them, not even if you worked at a hotel where they were hooking and asked you to bring a bottle of hooch into a room where they were with a “client.” You didn't look, or if you did, you made sure nobody was watching you. It was different with white men; you were a man and so were they, and so it didn't seem to matter if both of you were freaks. But this business with Anna and Ursula was like all of us shuffling toward the end of the world, and since we were on our way, nothing mattered. I didn't understand why they felt like that more than I did. Maybe it was the camp, where so many things went on that nobody gave a damn about, and if nobody cared who was missing, who drowned in shit, whose arms got pulled out of their sockets on the pole, whose head got smashed in the quarry, why would anybody care what a couple of
SS
wives were doing with each other? But they
would
care if they knew I was with them, jooging them as they tongue-whipped each other. I wasn't shuffling toward the end of the world; I was being dragged there. I knew that because I was scared about the fix I was in, so scared that I was shaking. I hated them and myself. Them because they had the absolute power to do anything they wanted; myself because I couldn't do anything about it. I threw up again and got ready for the truck that was coming for the afternoon and night at The Nest.

Thursday, July 29, 1937

Everybody wondered about that new building put up behind the
Wirtschaftsgebaude
, at the south end of the camp. It's the place for the civilian “Prominents,” the “Honored,” and so they call it the “Honor Bunker.” It's where they put Niemoeller, according to Hohenberg, and it will be the “Ritz Dachau” for other big shots who are yet to come, Werner says. (Werner has started taking trips down to the Puff, and so has Dr. Nyassa, who is popular with the farm girls who sneak in to work there. A colored doctor of anything must be pretty exotic, and besides, he can get the medicine to cure whatever ails them.)

Baum gave me a letter from Willy Lewis yesterday, and how good that felt! After all this time! That goddamn Dieter Lange! This'll show up his little red wagon. In my letter I had explained how I got here and how I was the houseboy for that German drunk who first told him about me. I also told Willy about the band, and asked if he'd ever heard of this Eric Ulrich. As I imagined, the question of the money is absolutely out. Willy said he would write to the union in New York, but that probably wouldn't help since he wasn't a member and neither was I. He does not have an address for Mr. Wooding but is trying to get the address for the Moe Gale Agency because they might know how to get in touch with him. He was surprised that I got picked up for “funny business,” since people in Europe don't seem to get excited about that kind of thing. He hadn't heard that Germany was getting snotty about it, because lots of Germans who come to Holland are quite open about the way they are. Maybe, he wrote, they come because things have changed in Germany. No, he hadn't heard of Ulrich, but he'd been away a long time, too. Being a houseboy and leading a band didn't sound as bad as it could be. But prison is prison and he understood my wanting to get out. Couldn't he visit and bring something, even if he wasn't a relative? Couldn't something be worked out? In the meantime, he would write to anyone he thought might help get me out. He was also sending letters to the
Chicago Defender
, the
Pittsburgh Courier
, and the
Afro-American
. There was a 100-mark note in the letter.

Reading Willy's letter was like opening a door on the first warm spring day to air out a house that had been closed tight all winter. I cried when I finished reading it, not because of the hole I was in, but because I'd managed to reach through almost five years and get someone to respond. Remembering Willy and his alto sax, he seemed more like Gabriel with his trumpet, not on Judgment Day but Jubilee Day. I prayed there in the back room of the canteen. Hadn't done that in a long time because there didn't seem to be Anybody or Anything to explain my situation to. I asked the Lord to forgive me. He knew the things I'd done I had to do. And some of the people I did them with were supposed to be real Christians. Christians, yeah, but as far as I knew, it was Christians who were running this part of the world. I prayed anyway, including to a Loa for good measure, and I gave thanks for reaching Willy.

Werner's “people”—they were teachers, doctors, lawyers, clerks, scientists, reporters, plumbers, carpenters, toolmakers, masons, bricklayers, labor leaders, officeholders, writers, students, musicians, painters, and the like—are worried about what's going on in Austria. Some of their friends have been killed by Austrian fascists. Over four years ago 1,000 were killed and 3,000 wounded when the workers' buildings in Vienna were shelled. That was during my first year here, and my thoughts were mostly about myself. Being with Werner is like being with a teacher.

The Europe he talks about isn't the same one I knew when I was a free man. He thinks Britain and France should stand up to Hitler and Mussolini—especially Hitler—but bets they won't. In the meantime, he said, you can see for yourself what's going on in Germany: new roads, new air corps, new ships for the navy, adventures (he calls them) in Alsace and Spain, and talks with the Japanese that have to end in a treaty; conscription, concentration camps—these started with the British in the Boer War, he told me, in Africa, but they sure didn't stay there, and when these in Germany are finished, there'll be camps elsewhere, because people are stupid and their leaders lie.

“Give the people other people they can be better than,” he said, “and they'll be happy. Make Communists and Jews ‘bad Germans,' and the people will certainly hate them because it'll be legal to do so.” He said the leaders change the laws so people they don't like will be outside them—the way it is for colored people in America—then they are not only outside the law, they are no longer citizens of the nation that made the law that put them outside it. So they have no citizenship. They are stateless persons, not covered by law, and are
Dreck, Scheiss
.

“You can do whatever you wish with words like ‘citizen' and ‘national' because in Germany they don't have to mean the same thing.” He said the Americans had done it during slavery and after, and the Russians had done pretty much the same thing after their revolution. “The Germans just picked it up, and you can bet your last pfennig the method will be used again. And again.”

Werner's talks always left me feeling blue, like the future was going to be just as bad as it is right now. But I'd get over the feeling after a while; now his words just hung around, like mist from the swamp.

Monday, August 20, 1937

A band can only play well if the musicians come together as one while allowing a single player to take a solo and run. But he must return home, be welcomed back, and then let another take the trip and come home. Sort of like sending a child away to grow up by improvising his way through a life he knows he can always return to—the melody. I'd never played with white musicians before, never wanted to. Training's different and so are the experiences we put into our music. Few white musicians can describe pain or joy in their music, or at least not the kind of pain or joy Negro musicians know. That's the mystery, I guess. They want to know about it, not live it. In Dachau all that changes. Fear gets to be a kind of pain you have to live with—everybody, all the time.

On Fridays and Saturdays it's different for us musicians; we get to do what we love, even with the restrictions on what and how we can play, even with the instruments we're stuck with. Every weekend I thank God for Bernhardt, and also for Dieter Lange, because it was through him that Bernhardt got to know my music. My life here could have been a shit storm like so many other prisoners'. Instead, I've played music, learned to read music (a little), learned to appreciate the violin and what it can do through Moritz (who doesn't seem so moody anymore, maybe because—I think—he's got a friend, another prisoner who works at The Nest). Moritz is almost funny now, sometimes. And Fritz has stopped apologizing for everything. Ernst doesn't look so evil anymore, and he's found that he can do things with both the flute and clarinet he never thought of before. Oskar and Alex have learned when to go and when not to on their instruments. They're blending in very well now and both do sweet little solos, with a French atmosphere that everyone seems to like. They've also both found girlfriends from among the maids that work in the Pussy Palace, and when they don't take the time to eat before rehearsal, I figure they're knocking off a quickie. Teodor is more than confident; sometimes he's so arrogant (that's when he makes lots of mistakes, thinking that French horn can do everything a trumpet can) I have to sit on him. “Little Django,” Danko, has the kind of personality everyone likes. He's only nineteen, and if he ever gets out of here, he's got a great future. About Franz, I don't know; he's more showman than musician, and his set isn't complete. I guess he does the best he can. He just can't seem to learn that there are times when the drums should be seen and just barely heard. There are rhythms still to be explored, but he's not too interested. Timing, phrasing, knowing what the other guy's going to do, have made us a band.

Right now, I don't think anyone even gives a thought anymore to trying to escape on the truck rides to and from The Nest. The jokers in the band even walk different than when we first got together. Compared to the average
Haftling
, they too are “prominent,” even if they are inside the walls. Things seem swell, copasetic. This is a good life by Dachau standards, but it's not a
free
life. Things can change at any moment.

Speaking of escape, Werner was right. Niemoeller wasn't held very long. He's out. Maybe there is power enough out there to make the Nazis think twice.

The Winkelmanns have moved into a new house on a street where other new houses have been built for the
SS
who are married and have families. Ursula has been so busy getting settled that she hasn't been over; instead, Anna visits her. It's nice and quiet around the house when she and Dieter Lange are gone. The
SS
has been expanded again, I guess because the increase in prisoners means more guards. In place of the rickety wooden watchtowers, new concrete ones have been built into the walls. There are six: two at the south end, two on the east side, one on the north wall, and one on the west wall. The top of the
Jourhaus
, also on the west, serves as still another watchtower. There are armed guards in these all day and all night.

Just inside the wall is the electrified fence, and inside it, a few feet of earth with grass. Then the moat they're finishing up; that will be about four feet deep and eight feet wide. On this side of it there is more earth. Nobody is supposed to be on that. Inside the second strip is where the camp streets begin. Thirty-four barracks, seventeen on each side of the Lagerstrasse, the main street, and spread across the front of them is the roll-call square, the Appellplatz.

To the west of the camp, where the little Amper River forms another moat, are the restored factory buildings and, beyond them, the married
SS
compound where I live with Dieter Lange and Anna. Inside the walls at the north end are gardens and a greenhouse and the disinfection hut. Northwest, outside the walls, is the crematorium. The
SS
rifle range, the swamps, and the quarry are all outside the north walls, and beyond the walls, north and east, are the farmlands that many prisoners work for the neighboring farmers. I never heard of a southern plantation during slavery that was run more efficiently.

Annaliese has found a place in
SS
society, I think. She impressed Ursula with her English, but that done, thank God, she doesn't seem to have much interest in it anymore. In fact, the bitch surprises me when she comes up with some English. Now, that's a burden, knowing about her and Ursula, but they carry it off okay. I don't think Dieter Lange would care if he knew. I don't know Captain Winkelmann that well. Maybe he'd care and maybe he wouldn't. But
I
know something Dieter Lange doesn't, and that's like having lead in the bank, because I can't cash it anywhere.

Wed., January 5, 1938

I have been busy and lazy, and it's already the New Year. I guess I have to catch up—except there's nothing much to catch up on. I've written three letters to Willy and got three answers. Baum's wife seems to be getting used to the arrangement. Whenever Baum gives me a letter, I slip him a few packs of cigarettes so he can carry on trades, get those little extras they don't allow you to have. But I invoice them as “missing,” so there's a big chunk of inventory in cigarettes unaccounted for. Baum doesn't know that if he messes up, I'll just hand the list over to Dieter Lange, tell him Baum (and the guards) took them, and it'll be Baum's plump round behind. Of course, I'll say nothing about my own nest egg under the floorboards—cigarettes, candy, canned fruits, and meat. For a rainy day.

Willy once suggested that he write directly to the camp commandant requesting my release. When I wrote back, I told him it would be better if someone representing an organization did that, but through offices in Berlin, otherwise these brutes could make me vanish. (A prisoner name of Kurt Schumacher had the woman he's engaged to, an American from Chicago, write directly to Hitler. Schumacher's a Red, a newspaperman, and was a Social Democrat
M.P.
They liked to have beat his ass to death and put it under Dachau!) Willy has already written to
Downbeat
and the
NAACP
and the colored papers, but hasn't heard anything from them yet. It's so frustrating! He could get things we need for the band, but if he sent them to Frau Baum … So, I mostly tell him what life is like here, my routine, the band. He writes about Amsterdam or Paris or London or Copenhagen where he goes to play, and how most people don't even know about camps like Dachau. Willy says there's a lot of war talk, but it doesn't bother him. As far as he's concerned, it's white folks' business and they could all do each other in and he wouldn't lose any sleep. Sure, he wrote, it's better than home, but don't peel the banana back too far. It's only their fascination with Negroes that's kept the Europeans from treating them the way Americans do—so far. Had I heard anything about how the Nazis took the kids of the German women and colored American soldiers who'd been stationed in the Rhineland right after the war and made them so they couldn't have children? They hadn't done anything like that to me, had they? What's all this stuff about blood and honor and Nuremberg laws?