Clifford's Blues (45 page)

Dear Bounce
,

October 18, 1986

It was great talking to you and Justine again! And Liz is in college! Wow! It's been that long since I saw you? Did you pass along my greetings to my man Tank? I'm sure the teams you're putting together will do fine. You worry too much. You're probably secretly glad not having a son who's an athlete, the way college and pro sports are now. I know I am. But you know more about that than I do
.

I've now finished reading the diary you sent—some package! I will try my damndest to get it into the right editorial hands, but do understand that we have a severe generic problem in this business. But I won't quit trying, trust me. I am grateful that you thought to send Clifford's diary to me. Imagine that old soldier keeping it so long and then giving it to you
.
During all these years, there must have been many African Americans passing through, not to mention those in the army. He sure has repaid the brothers who didn't waste him when they could have. He must have seen something in you he had not seen in the others. I can dig that. Strangers trying to pierce the consciences of one another by sight, maybe vibes, in a world stranger than we can begin to imagine
.

The diary is a heavy thing, Bounce. Bet you a sideline ticket on the fifty the next Super Bowl that they'll be celebrating that war from the invasion of Normandy until its end—without looking too hard behind or between the lines. People don't know, and probably don't care, about the black people in those camps, not that there's any honor in having been in one. You wouldn't wish that on your worst enemy. But here it is almost fifty years later and people are just beginning to learn about outfits like the Red Tails, the 2221 Regiment, and dozens of others
.

I got real curious and looked up some of the names Clifford mentions. Freddie Johnson did get camped, but he was freed in an exchange in 1944. Willie Lewis got to Switzerland, where he sat out the war. A guy named Arthur Briggs, trumpeter, who Clifford doesn't mention, played with Johnson and got out of Europe one step ahead of the Germans. He says the International Red Cross may be located in Switzerland, but it was then German from its chitlins out. I heard that Valaida Snow got camped, too. Ruby Mae Richards died in Paris in 1976. Sam Wooding died just last year in New York at ninety. During the Depression, while Clifford was in Dachau, Wooding dropped out of the music scene and went to the University of Pennsylvania. He graduated in 1942 and then taught music. One of his students—you guessed it—was Clifford Brown—“Brownie.” Doc Cheatham is still wailing; he was in Wooding's band, too. His chops gotta be made of titanium. Saw him in New York a few months ago. I think he wears a rug, but there's nothing phoney about his playing
.

I wonder what happened to Clifford. If Cheatham and Wooding lived so long—like so many others who were camped—isn't it possible that The Cliff could have lived long past his diary? Couldn't he right now be playing at some tiny little club in one of a dozen European countries? Or could he have gotten back, given up music, and gone into something else? But surely he would have been rediscovered by all those black musicians who've been going to and from Europe since the end of the war
.
And if he came home, I think he loved his music too much to have ever given it up, especially when he could have teamed up with guys like Eubie Blake and Cheatham and become old royalty
.

Had to run, but I'm back. This guy Joseph Nassy. I've seen some of his paintings in a little synagogue in Philadelphia. He was Jewish, born in Surinam. His father was Dutch. They lived in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and then Brooklyn, then he moved first to England and after that Belgium, where the war caught up with him. He was a naturalized American and a radio engineer who loved to paint. After the war he managed somehow to gather all the paintings he'd done, so they were available after he died and went on a tour across the
U.S.
, Israel, and Europe. He was in an internment camp, where the Germans tried to live up to international standards
.

A friend of mine conducted a search for Ethiopian Jews who were reported to have been in the Bergen-Belsen camp. Some had been taken to Europe for study even before World War I. He checked archives everywhere, including Israel. There he was told by an archivist that the Ethiopians had not become Jews until the 1975 Law of Return, so they wouldn't have been registered as such in the camps or on the Holocaust lists
.

Dr. Nyassa's buddy, Ernest Just, had a best friend, a German, Dr. Max Hartmann. In 1949, with a couple more good guys, Hartmann compiled a rap sheet on his colleagues who'd worked with the Nazis on all kinds of experiments. What I don't know is what happened when he turned that list in. (Probably not much.) I'm not sure, but from what I've read, it seems that Just was doing work—some of which involved changing the sex of worms, without the
DNA
charts that Crick, Watson, and Wilkins later came up with. You probably already know that Just's forebears were German immigrants to the
U.S.

I've met a lot of guys who were in the army in Germany during the war, and they all say that the Germans they met wanted them to kill and capture Russians, not them. Hey, if I'd been a German then, I'd probably have said the same thing, given what they did to the Russians
.

Getting back to Clifford, I can't imagine, though I've tried to, how I could have survived in that place. He was lucky he had his music, his German, and his body. I thought the Germans would have done things to black people that they would not have done to others. Maybe they did and that's why there's no record, so far. It is hard not to think of James Howard Jones's
Bad Blood: The Tuskeegee Syphilis Experiments,
while reading sections of the diary. There wasn't a lot of fuss when that book came out. How different are we, then, from the Germans from whom we got so much? As you know, one of the German defenses at Nuremburg was that a lot of their crazy experiments were conducted here first
.

It's time for me to quit this letter before I
really
let loose. I'll be checking in with you regularly. You and Justine have to settle in for the long haul, because you
know
no one is going to be eager to hear Clifford play
these
blues
.

—Jayson Jones

BIBLIOGRAPHY

BOOKS

Bar-Zohar, Michael.
Arrows of the Almighty
. New York: Macmillan, 1984.

Bricktop and James Haskins.
Bricktop: The Exuberant Story of a Fabulous Life
. New York: Atheneum, 1983.

Chorover, Stephan L.
From Genesis to Genocide: The Meaning of Human Behavior
. Cambridge:
MIT
Press, 1979.

Davis, B., and P. Turner.
German Uniforms of the Third Reich, 1933–1945
. Sydney: Blandford Press, 1986.

Dawidowicz, Lucy S.
The War Against the Jews, 1933–1945
. New York: Holt, Reinhart & Winston, 1975.

Delauney, Charles.
New Hot Discography: The Standard Dictionary of Recorded Jazz
. Edited by Walter Schaap and George Avikian. New York: Criterion, 1948.

Des Pres, Terrence.
The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Döblin, Alfred.
Berlin Alexanderplatz
. New York: Fredrick Ungar, 1961.

Eckardt, Wolf Von, and Sander L. Gilman.
Bertolt Brecht's Berlin: A Scrapbook of the Twenties
. New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1975.

Engelmann, Bernt.
In Hitler's Germany: Life in the Third Reich
. New York: Pantheon, 1986.

Gold, Robert S.
A Jazz Lexicon
. New York: Knopf, 1964.

Gun, Nerin E.
The Day of the Americans
. New York: Fleet, 1966.

Hilberg, Raul.
The Destruction of the European Jews
. Chicago: Holmes & Meier, 1961.

Kogon, Eugen.
The Theory and Practice of Hell
. New York: Berkley, 1980.

Lee, Ulysses.
U.S.
Army in World War II: The Employment of Negro Troops
. Washington,
DC
: Office of the Chief of Military History, 1961.

Levi, Primo.
Survival in Auschwitz
. New York: Collier, 1961.

Levi, Primo.
Moments of Reprieve: A Memoir of Auschwitz
. New York: Penguin, 1986.

Lifton, Robert J.
The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killings and the Psychology of Genocide
. New York: Basic Books, 1986.

Major, Clarence.
Dictionary of Afro-American Slang
. New York: International Publishers, 1970.

Manning, Kenneth R.
Black Apollo of Science: The Life of Ernest Everett Just
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Müller-Hill, Benno.
Murderous Science: Elimination by Scientific Selection of Jews, Gypsies, and Others in Germany, 1933–1945
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Myers, Gustavus.
History of Bigotry in the United States
. New York: Random House, 1943.

Peukert, Detlev.
Inside Nazi Germany: Conformity, Opposition, and Racism in Everday Life
. New York: Oxford University Press, 1980.

Plant, Richard.
The Pink Triangle: The Nazi War Against Homosexuals
. New York: Henry Holt, 1986.

Proctor, Robert N.
Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis
. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1988.

Ramati, Alexander.
And the Violins Stopped Playing: A Story of the Gypsy Holocaust
. New York: Franklin Watts, 1986.

Reitlinger, Gerald.
The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe, 1939–1945
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Rothschild-Boros, Monica, C.
In the Shadow of the Tower: The Works of Josef Nassy, 1942–1945
. Irvine,
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: Severin Wundermunn Museum, 1988.

Rubenstein, Richard.
The Cunning of History: The Holocaust and the American Future
. New York Harper Colophon, 1978.

Seghers, Anna.
The Seventh Cross
. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1987.

Shirer, William L.
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Germany
. New York: Crest/Fawcett, 1962.

Zwerin, Mike.
La Tristesse de Saint Louis
. New York: Beech Tree/Morrow, 1985.

OTHER PUBLICATIONS

“Concentration Camp Dachau.” Brussels/Munich: Comité International de Dachau, 1978.

“Concentration Camps Fail to Still Lips Praising God,”
Consolation
, vols. 21–27, excerpted from the Watch Tower Society's files. New York: Watchtower Bible & Tract Society. Sept. 12, 1945–Jan. 16, 1946.

The Holocaust
. Jerusalem: Remembrance Authority, 1977.

“Keeping Integrity in Nazi Germany,”
Awake!
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“The World Since 1914: Part 3:1935–1940,”
Awake!
New York: Watchtower Bible & Tract Society. April 8, 1987.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to thank Leroy Graham, who provided me with materials on Germany and black troops in the post-World War I occupation of Germany, as well as other information, ranging in time from 1903 to 1975; Roscoe C. Brown Jr. and Lee Archer, former pilots in the 33rd Fighter Group (Red Tails), for confirming interviews of the unit's actions over southern Germany during World War II; the Hatch-Billops Collection for making available to me an oral recollection by Jacques Butler; the Institute of Jazz Studies at Rutgers University, Newark Campus, for allowing me to research trumpeter Arthur Briggs in its Oral History Collection; and graduate student Michelle Potter, whose German, and that of her friends, helped mightily.

About the Author

John A. Williams (1925–2015) was born near Jackson, Mississippi, and raised in Syracuse, New York. The author of more than twenty works of fiction and nonfiction, including the groundbreaking and critically acclaimed novels
The Man Who Cried I Am
and
Captain Blackman
, he has been heralded by the critic James L. de Jongh as “arguably the finest Afro-American novelist of his generation.” A contributor to the
Chicago Defender
, the
New York Times
, and the
Los Angeles Times
, among many other publications, Williams edited the periodic anthology
Amistad
and served as the African correspondent for
Newsweek
and the European correspondent for
Ebony
and
Jet
. A longtime professor of English and journalism, Williams retired from Rutgers University as the Paul Robeson Distinguished Professor of English in 1994. His numerous honors include two American Book Awards, the Syracuse University Centennial Medal for Outstanding Achievement, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Award.

All rights reserved, including without limitation the right to reproduce this ebook or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of the publisher.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Portion of this novel have been published in
Another Chicago Magazine
, 1987;
Syracuse University Magazine
, 1988;
Love
, A Babcock & Koontz broadside, 1988;
Black American Literature Forum
, 1989; and
Rutgers Magazine
, 1992

Copyright © 1999 by John A. Williams

Cover design by Andy Ross

ISBN: 978-1-5040-3305-3

This edition published in 2016 by Open Road Integrated Media, Inc.