Coming Through Slaughter
Read Coming Through Slaughter Online
Authors: Michael Ondaatje
Praise for
Coming Through Slaughter
“A beautifully detailed story, perhaps the finest jazz novel ever written.”
The Sunday Times
“A remarkable piece of writing.… Brilliantly wrought.” Ken Adachi,
The Toronto Star
“Coming Through Slaughter
is told so well—so stuffed full of the dolour and lust that both buoys and blemishes a life—it reads like a story dying to be told.… A classic psychological novel.… Because we enter the process, guided by Ondaatje’s shadowy narrator, we, like Bolden, come through something. We get at the bones of the thing.…
Coming Through Slaughter
displays a knowingness of the unspeakable and how we are each freighted with the dark particulars of history, with the obscene, terrible consequences of time and place goose-stepping us from birth to death.”
Books in Canada
“[
Coming Through Slaughter
] represents an imaginative feat of a high order: a transcending of cultural and racial and historical barriers.… The texture of the book itself has that fertile, driving, improvisational quality, rich with its own pleasure in language and human complexity.… A fictional work of uncompromising existential power.”
Canadian Literature
“The book moves very much like a dream; its complexity is in the way in which the dream is sometimes Bolden’s, sometimes his wife Nora’s, sometimes that of Bolden’s friends, sometimes Ondaatje’s, sometimes the reader’s. Always, when pure mood threatens to submerge the tale, Ondaatje counters with fact, historical incident, a verbatim fragment of an old jazzman’s recollection, and the novel never loses its balance.”
Rolling Stone
“The writing is so skilful that unlikely similes seem inevitable; whole sensations of a hot, ramshackle river town live in small phrases. There is a heartstopping description of Canal Street’s prostitutes; this is no clumsily romantic memoir of a ‘jazz age’ but something much harder.… Ondaatje describes the bizarre flashes of rage, an almost poetic tenderness and the inarticulate fire of music in a way that makes Bolden at once human and mythic.”
New Musical Express
“Ondaatje is surely one of our best writers.” Robertson Davies
“Ondaatje packs an amazing amount into very few pages.… But he also gets down to the grit, giving us the smells and the textures, the atmosphere of brothels, the rasp of alcohol, the sweat of lovers, among which the imagined thought processes of the musician are slipped like concrete facts.… The cumulative effect is one of mesmeric rhythm somewhere between prose and poetry, a musical effect, with twists and turns and bursts of momentum.”
Topical Books
“The vignettes are precise and memorable.… The book combines the precision of Raymond Chandler with the intensity of a suicide note.… Marvellous.”
Books in Canada
“The downtown world of bars, whores, streetlife bursting with music is evoked so vividly, so pungently, you seem to breathe in the atmosphere.… I haven’t been so excited by a writer for a long time.”
Time Out
“A spectacular breakthrough into a new prose form.” Peter C. Newman,
The Globe and Mail
“Marvellously embroidered … vivid and arresting. Ondaatje’s oblique approach to Bolden’s mind is as resonant as it is ingenious.”
Canadian Fiction Magazine
“[Ondaatje] can make a phrase sing.”
Guardian
“Quick … vivid … sharply written. Ondaatje’s prose is detailed and exact, and at its finest each vignette, like a musical phrase, is intense and biting, unpredictable but appropriate.… Ondaatje fulfils his artistic obligations splendidly.”
Malahat Review
“Michael Ondaatje is a novelist with the heart of a poet.”
Chicago Tribune
MICHAEL ONDAATJE
Michael Ondaatje is a novelist and poet who lives in Toronto, Canada. He is the author of
The English Patient, In the Skin of a Lion, Coming Through Slaughter
, and
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid;
four collections of poems,
Handwriting, The Cinnamon Peeler, Secular Love
, and
There’s a Trick with a Knife I’m Learning to Do;
and a memoir,
Running in the Family.
He received the Booker Prize for
The English Patient.
BOOKS BY MICHAEL ONDAATJE
PROSE
The English Patient
1992
In the Skin of a Lion
1987
Running in the Family
(memoir) 1982
Coming Through Slaughter
1976
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid
1970
POETRY
Handwriting
1998
The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems
1991
Secular Love
1984
There’s a Trick with a Knife
I’m Learning to Do: Poems
1963–1978 1979
First Vintage International Edition, March 1996
Copyright © 1976 by Michael Ondaatje
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York.
Vintage Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ondaatje, Michael, 1943–
Coming through slaughter / Michael Ondaatje.
—1st Vintage International ed.
p.cm.
1. Bolden, Buddy, 1877–1931—Fiction.
2. Jazz musicians—Louisiana—New Orleans—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.05C65 1996
813′.54—dc20 95-46416
This page
constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77661-7
v3.1
For Quintin and Griffin. For Stephen, Skyler, Tory and North. And in memory of John Thompson.
Contents
Three sonographs—pictures of dolphin sounds made by a machine that is more sensitive than the human ear. The top left sonograph shows a “squawk.” Squawks are common emotional expressions that have many frequencies or pitches, which are vocalized simultaneously. The top right sonograph is a whistle. Note that the number of frequencies is small and this gives a “pure” sound—not a squawk. Whistles are like personal signatures for dolphins and identify each dolphin as well as its location. The middle sonograph shows a dolphin making two kinds of signals simultaneously. The vertical stripes are echolocation clicks (sharp, multi-frequency sounds) and the dark, mountain-like humps are the signature whistles. No one knows how a dolphin makes both whistles and echolocation clicks simultaneously
ONE
His geography.
Float by in a car today and see the corner shops. The signs of the owners obliterated by brand names. Tassin’s Food Store which he lived opposite for a time surrounded by
DRINK COCA COLA IN BOTTLES, BARG’S
, or
LAURA LEE’S TAVERN
, the signs speckled in the sun,
TOM MOORE, YELLOWSTONE, JAX, COCA COLA, COCA COLA
, primary yellows and reds muted now against the white horizontal sheet wood walls. This district, the homes and stores, are a mile or so from the streets made marble by jazz. There are no songs about Gravier Street or Phillips or First or The Mount Ararat Missionary Baptist Church his mother lived next door to, just the names of the streets written vertically on the telephone poles or the letters sunk into pavement that you walk over,
GRAVIER
. A bit too stylish for the wooden houses almost falling down, the signs the porches and the steps broken through where no one sits outside now. It is farther away that you find Rampart Street, then higher up Basin Street, then one block higher Franklin.
But here there is little recorded history, though tales of ‘The Swamp’ and ‘Smoky Row’, both notorious communities where about 100 black prostitutes from pre-puberty to their seventies would line the banquette to hustle, come down to us in fragments. Here the famous whore Bricktop Jackson carried a 15 inch knife and her lover John Miller had no left arm and wore a chain with an iron ball on the end to replace it—killed by Bricktop herself on December 7, 1861, because of his ‘bestial habits and ferocious manners’. ‘And here One-legged Duffy’ (born Mary Rich) was stabbed by her boyfriend and had her head beaten in with her own wooden leg. ‘And gamblers carrying cocaine to a game.’
History was slow here. It was elsewhere in town, in the brothel district of Storyville, that one made and lost money—the black whores and musicians shipped in from the suburbs and the black customers refused. Where the price of a teenage virgin was $800 in 1860, where Dr Miles (who later went into the Alka Seltzer business) offered cures for gonorrhea. The women wore Gloria de Dijon and Marshall Neil roses and the whores sold ‘Goofer Dust’ and ‘Bend-Over Oil’ Money poured in, slid around. By the end of the Nineteenth Century, 2000 prostitutes were working regularly. There were at least 70 professional gamblers. 30 piano players took in several thousand each in weekly tips. Prostitution and its offshoots received a quarter of a million dollars of the public’s money a week.
Tom Anderson, ‘The King of the District’, lived between Rampart and Franklin. Each year he published a Blue Book which listed every whore in New Orleans. This was the guide to the sporting district, listing alphabetically the white and then the black girls, from Martha Alice at 1200 Customhouse to Louisa Walter at 210 North Basin, and then the octoroons. The Blue Book and similar guides listed everything, and at any of the mansions you could go in with money and come out broke. No matter how much you took with you, you would lose it all in paying for extras. Such as watching an Oyster Dance—where a naked woman on a small stage danced alone to piano music. The best was Olivia the Oyster Dancer who would place a raw oyster on her forehead and lean back and shimmy it down all over her body without ever dropping it. The oyster would crisscross and move finally down to her instep. Then she would kick it high into the air and would catch it on her forehead and begin again. Or at 335 Customhouse (later named Iberville), the street he went crazy on, you could try your luck with French Emma’s ‘60 Second Plan’. Whoever could restrain his orgasm with her for a whole minute after penetration was excused the $2 payment. Emma allowed the odd success to encourage others but boasted privately that there was no man she couldn’t win. So no matter how much you took in you came out broke. Grace Hayes even had a pet raccoon she had trained to pick the pockets of her customers.
Anderson was the closest thing to a patron that Bolden had, giving him money for the family and sending him, via runner boys, two bottles of whisky a day. To the left of Canal Street was Dago Tony who, at the height of Bolden’s popularity, sponsored him as well sending him Raleigh Rye and wine. And to the left of Canal are also the various homes of Bolden, still here today, away from the recorded history—the bleak washed out one-storey houses. Phillips, First, Gravier, Tassin’s Food Store, taverns open all day but the doors closed tight to keep out heat and sunlight. Circle and wind back and forth in your car and at First and Liberty is a corner house with an overhang roof above the wooden pavement, barber stripes on the posts that hold up the overhang. This is N. Joseph’s Shaving Parlor, the barber shop where Buddy Bolden worked.
He puts the towel of steam over a face. Leaving holes for the mouth and the nose. Bolden walks off and talks with someone. A minute of hot meditation for the customer. After school, the kids come and watch the men being shaved. Applaud and whistle when each cut is finished. Place bets on whose face might be under the soap.