Clifford's Blues (19 page)

Sunday, March 20, 1938

Gitzig didn't go any fucking place. Saw him this afternoon carrying lumber into Bernhardt's house. Sneaked over and peeked into the cellar window. Bernhardt's got him building the same kind of compartments Dieter Lange's got in our cellar—except that instead of wire screening, Bernhardt's got wooden walls. Looks like some of the loot from Austria will wind up down there, and I guess he doesn't want anybody to see what's behind the partitions. I rapped on the window and when Gitzig turned around, I grabbed my dick and shook it at him and left. Gitzig may not have gone to Austria, but I'd bet a dime to a dollar Bernhardt did, because he hasn't been around The Nest in a couple of weeks. I let Werner know that. I was feeling pretty goddamn put out this afternoon, too, because I was walking toward the gatehouse, on my way home, when I saw Ulrich. He was coming toward me, right toward me. I stopped, took off my cap, the way you're supposed to, and he went right on by without even so much as a “Kiss my ass,” and I wondered where did he get off with shit like that, after always wanting to play with us, hanging around, waiting, until we knew that we were the best thing that'd happened to him in a long time. We knew he enjoyed playing. This was the thanks. Well, I thought, I will put this motherfucker through some changes the next time; he'll think he was wallowing lip-deep in shit. Fix his ninety wagon.

The guards are all talking about “new guests,” and I suppose they mean Austrians. This place is now so big that you can't know what's going on from one end to the other, from one side to the other, from one day to the next. People come and people go; some walk out, and some don't, and the more prisoners come, the more guards come. Before I left camp, I ran into Hohenberg from the Labor Office. There are a lot more prisoners working there now. All tailors, he told me, have been detailed to make Jewish stars until further notice. He drew his finger across his throat and whispered, “Hitler wasn't kidding.”

Wednesday, April 6, 1938

I still can't believe it. At noon today Karlsohn comes into the canteen. I'm wanted at the gatehouse.
Schnell!
I want to ask him why, but that's dangerous, and of course, he doesn't tell me why. Just to get my ass over there quick. The last time I was in that place was to see Count von Hausberger, almost four years ago. That wasn't during regular visiting hours and neither is this. I start thinking, Oh, shit. The letters. What else could it be? I'm walking fast across the 'Platz, thinking it might be my last walk. Spring's on the way, the time when you start to feel like a human being again. I'm hoping it's not my last spring.

I get to the gatehouse and the guards are smiling at me the way people smile when you're the butt of a joke, or like you're some kind of clown, or a joker with two heads. “Your mother's here,” Reckse whispers. He's a sergeant of the guards. He's okay. I think to myself,
Mother!
He points up the same stairs where I saw Hausberger, and up I climb. At least it's not about the letters or Reckse would not have been so nice. I was trembling.
Mother?
I smelled perfume that wasn't gardenia before I got into the room, and then I saw in the great light that sweeps from the sky across the 'Platz, a small round figure in black, packages on the floor beside her.

The woman seemed to be weeping softly. “Oh, Lord Jesus, thank you. Oh, sweet Jesus, Amen,” she was mumbling between sobs. Behind the desk stood the duty officer of the gatehouse, a captain.

I came to attention again when I crossed the threshold. “Captain—” I said, but before I finished, the woman was on her feet rushing toward me, crying, boo-hoo-hooing, and shouting, the fat on her jiggling like jelly.

“Clifford! Oh, Clifford! Great God Awmighty! My son, my son. Thank you cap'n. Thank you boss,” and as she closed to embrace me, she winked and wrapped her arms about me, still sobbing, still thanking Jesus.

The captain cleared his throat. He was watching a minstrel show and it pleased him. He could afford to be kind, because he was being amused. “Prisoner Pepperidge, number 3003,” he said. “I have been ordered to allow this woman, your mother, just from America, this special visit because of her age and illness.” The woman and I backed off just enough to study each other. Behind her tears she winked again and—Damn! Ruby Mae Richards! “You have one-half hour, and you may keep the packages.”

I stepped back from Ruby to attention as the captain went out. As he did, I said, “Mother, I didn't know you were sick, what's wrong?”

She opened her mouth to talk, but I put my hand over it and led her back to the seat. I pulled up a chair beside her. “Whisper,” I whispered. “If I talk out loud then you talk out loud.” She nodded. Ruby Mae Richards was a fat little woman some people called “Little Bessie” or “Princess of the Blues,” since Bessie Smith was “Queen of the Blues” and Clara Smith was “Moaner of the Blues.” She had sung with Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, and Fletcher Henderson, last I heard, back home. Sang “Nobody Knows the Way I Feel Dis Mornin',” “Broken Busted Blues,” did a couple of duets with Bessie, and so on. She was bad, too, could punch out your average man, and that made people wonder just what she carried between her legs. Right then I was so glad to see another colored musician from outside that I didn't care if she had cannonballs under her dress. Didn't know her well, but our paths had crossed, like they always do with musicians.

“I'm so happy you could come,” I said aloud and then whispered quickly, “How'd you get here?”

“Oh, son (boo-hoo) it's so good to see you,” she said, then whispered, “Willy asked me to come and see what the hell's going on here.”

“Can't the doctors
do
anything?” I hope I sounded mournful. “But how'd you manage to get in
here?
” I whispered.

“They tryin', son, they tryin',” she boomed, and then whispered, “I just laid some of that old ignorant mammy shit on them, a little Jesus-Christ-will-bless-you business, you know. It worked all the way from the French border and right into this slammer. You know how
that
goes. Just play the nigger. Niggers can't hurt you. They're funny. I also got some phony statements from doctors and a joker works in the embassy in Paris.” She paused to let loose a moan and some more boo-hoos. Then in kind of a half-scream she said, “Clifford, what did you do to get in this place? Didn't I raise you better?” She put her arms around my neck and I put mine around hers and we rocked and whispered. “Willy came down to Paris and told me the letters he sent you through that German woman were coming back stamped ‘Unknown.' We figured an old black woman doin' your mammy could do better than a black man trying to get in here to find out if you were dead or alive. Are you in here
forever?
How much time you draw? What you done?”

Last time I saw her she didn't have any gray in her hair, but that was a long time ago. I suppose I looked a helluva lot older than
she
remembered, too. I told her what had happened and what was going on now. This was between a lot of boo-hoos and moaning and groaning and sometimes we even laughed. I cried, too, because here was some home-folks, after all this time. But what she finally had to say wasn't very funny. Whenever anyone made an inquiry, and Ruby Mae said Willy had said there weren't too many of those, the response from Germany was that no record had been found of a Clifford Pepperidge. Everyone, she said, was afraid of the Germans, even the Americans, and nobody's about to lay their bottom dollar or play their hole card on a nigger faggot, she whispered, any more than they would for a bull dyke. She smiled and I knew that what people had gossiped about for years was true. “I don't know what we can do,” she said. Nearly everybody who's colored had left Germany, and some are leaving Europe. Had she run into this German joker, tenor man, who'd sat in with Duke, Chick, and Jimmy?—Ulrich? I asked. But lately I'd been thinking, There's a big difference between
playing
with someone, as the rumor went with Ulrich, and
sitting in
. She said, no, but that name sounded familiar—a big blond German supposed to be a friend—maybe the only one around in this part of Germany. Then she asked if I'd heard anything of Valaida Snow, who used to sing with Fatha Hines and was now running around Europe somewhere?

I said, “What can I hear about anything in here?” But I was thinking, If Ulrich's a friend, he sure got a funny way of showing it.

The captain returned and stood holding the door open, waiting. The minstrel show was over. I hit the floor, ramrod stiff. The half hour had gone by like a minute. Ruby Mae, crying, embraced me again. (Ah-boo-hoo-hoo.) The captain assured me that they'd get her to the station and see she got the right train back to France. Poor old nice little mammy like that, but no additional visits would be permitted. I thanked him. Ruby Mae dropped to her knees like a bag of fertilizer and thanked him, too, and told him God would bless him for being so kind to an old mammy done come all the way from Down South, United States of America. It's wise to thank all the
SS
and even the few
SA
for any break they give you. The captain said my mother had told him this was the only camp she knew about and so she came here. Wasn't it remarkable that she got to the right place the first time? I said yes it was, but my mother had always been lucky that way because she trusted in God. I thanked him again for his kindness. And that was it. I had made some contact. Willy knew I was here and alive, if not well in spirit. I hadn't vanished. A few people thought about me, and one even cut through the shit and visited me, but I was thinking, Oh, that fucking Baum! Oh, Baum's fucking wife!

Thursday, April 7, 1938

Dieter Lange called me right up to his office the first thing in the morning. Before I could fix breakfast. Anna wasn't even up. I took the invoices with me. He couldn't talk too loud, because he didn't want Anna to hear. He wanted to know who the woman was who'd come yesterday; he knew I didn't know if my real mother was dead or alive. He was mad and he was nervous. I told him some of the truth, that she'd been sent by Willy Lewis to see if I was all right. It was all his fault, after all, because, if he hadn't been running his mouth in Amsterdam to Willy, none of this would have happened. Not even Anna would have known about us (except that, knowing her the way I do now, she would have come to know). And who was the woman? It turned out he once had a couple of records by Ruby Mae. We went downstairs and I started breakfast while he worried. “No more visitors,” he kept saying, “no more visitors. Too risky.” I said what was I supposed to do if,
if
I ever got another visitor, and he wasn't around? Was I supposed to tell the guards to kiss my ass? That brought the worry lines back to his forehead. He wondered what they knew at the camp commandant's office. He was glad that Eichmann had gone; too snoopy, too quiet. Better off working on the “Jewish Question.” The more he talked, the more confident he became that nothing would come of Ruby Mae's visit. The “mammy visit,” he called it, after I'd described to him how she'd behaved, and how she'd looked. “She'd be great with the Gestapo,” he said, and the worried look came into his eyes again. Once he seemed calmer, I went after Baum.

“Baum's a crook,” I said. “Look here. See?” I placed the invoices on the table where he was having the breakfast I'd fancied up. He glanced at me, and then the sheets, but he didn't miss a beat shoveling the food into his mouth. “This goes back a little while,” he finally said. I told him I wasn't sure at first, what with Karlsohn and the others who always take what they want. “But see,” I said, pointing, “what they take isn't anything like what Baum takes, and besides, what can I do if the guards steal the goods?” Baum was another story, I said.

“All right! All right!” Dieter Lange said. “Let me go over these invoices.” I saw that he was checking the imported cigarettes. “That fat little fucker,” he said. “That two-bit crook—”

Anna's cry from upstairs startled us both: “What're you two faggots doing down there, huh?” Dieter Lange rolled his eyes at me. I started Anna's breakfast in a light-hearted mood. Baum's ass was mine.

Wednesday, April 13, 1938

Last Friday at The Nest I was fooling around on the piano, not really playing anything that could be recognized for more than three or four notes. Ulrich came into the hall. He always comes at the same time, and I recognized his footsteps. They stopped. I had a feeling that he was trying to guess what kind of mood I was in from the way I was playing. He started walking again, but it wasn't his usual walk. The rest of the band was in the kitchen, of course, finishing up the meal. Ulrich climbed up, sat down, and opened his case. He strapped on his horn and waited for me to lead him into something. But I didn't stop what I was doing; I just acted like he wasn't there. Through the open windows I heard the babies crying in the nursery, and I damned them to death right then, not when they would become part of Hitler's 600 new regiments, but then and there. Didn't need any more Germans like those already grown.

If there'd been music for hate, I'd have played it because of that meeting in the 'Platz that had been more pass-by than meeting. I was still salty about that. Ruby Mae and Willy Lewis were wrong. This wasn't the joker who was a friend. This was a Nazi, a superman, who was supposed to just appear and the machinery would be turned on right away for him. Oh, no, not anymore. I didn't turn an inch. It was just me and him, with everyone in the kitchen or somewhere nearby, fucking, trying to fuck, or getting fucked, as they always did, until the beat and swing of a melody reached them. Ulrich waited. I gave him nothing, just like last week and the week before that. He shuffled his feet. I didn't hear them, or pretended not to. He tapped them. I gave him shit. The only music I know about that's got mad in it is the classical stuff. The music I was brought up with and played didn't have it. I was looking for something that would tell Eric Ulrich to kiss my ass, but it wasn't in our music. Our music signified, it was sassy, it was joyful, and it was blue. There was no hate in it. There should have been a lot in it. Maybe one day there would be, if not hate or anger, then the low-down gospel truth, the I-am-tired-of-taking-your-shit truth. Couldn't call that hate music or mad music, just getting-ready-to-get-even music. I hit a chord that had so many angles in it, Ulrich stopped moving his feet, trying to figure out what it said. I kept creeping up and down the keyboard, thinking about our music and how this Nazi thought he could lay hold of it and still be the sonofabitch he was.