Coming Through Slaughter (10 page)

CHARLES ‘BUDDY’ BOLDEN

Born 1876? A Baptist. Name is not French or Spanish.

He was never legally married.

Nora Bass had a daughter, Bernadine, by Bolden.

Hattie ____________ had a son, Charles Bolden jnr, by him.

Hattie lived near Louis Jones’ neighbourhood. (Jones born Sept 12, 1872, a close friend of Bolden.
)

Manuel Hall lived with Boldens mum and taught him cornet. Hall played by note.

Other teachers were possibly Happy Galloway, Bud Scott, and Mutt Carey.

Mother lived on 2328 Phillip Street.

Bolden worked at Joseph’s Shaving Parlor.

He played at Masonic Hall on Perdido and Rampart, at the Globe downtown on St Peter and Claude, and Jackson Hall.

April 1907 Bolden (thirty-one years old) goes mad while playing with Henry Allen’s Brass Band.

He lived at 2527 First Street.

Taken to House of Detention, ‘House of D’, near Chinatown. Broken blood vessels in neck operated on.

June 1, 1907 Judge T.C.W. Ellis of the Civil District Court issued a writ of interdiction to Civil Sheriffs H.B. McMurray and T. Jones to bring Bolden to the insane asylum, just north of Baton Rouge. A 100 mile train ride on the edge of the Mississippi.

Taken to pre-Civil War asylum buildings by horse and wagon for the last fifteen miles.

Admitted to asylum June 5, 1907. ‘Dementia Praecox. Paranoid Type.’

East Louisiana State Hospital, Jackson, Louisiana 70748.

Died 1931.

The sunlight comes down flat and white on Gravier, on Phillip Street, on Liberty. The paint on the wood walls has crumpled under the heat, you can brush it off with your hand. This is where he lived seventy years ago, where his mind on the pinnacle of something collapsed, was arrested, put in the House of D, shipped by train to Baton Rouge, then taken north by cart to a hospital for the insane. The career beginning in this street of the paintless wood to where he gave his brains away. The place of his music is totally silent. There is so little noise that I easily hear the click of my camera as I take fast bad photographs into the sun aiming at the barber shop he probably worked in.

The street is fifteen yards wide. I walk around watched by three men farther up the street under a Coca Cola sign. They have not heard of him here. Though one has for a man came a year ago with a tape recorder and offered him money for information, saying Bolden was a ‘famous musician’. The sun has bleached everything. The Coke signs almost pink. The paint that remains the colour of old grass. 2 pm daylight. There is the complete absence of him—even his skeleton has softened, disintegrated, and been lost in the water under the earth of Holtz Cemetery. When he went mad he was the same age as I am now.

The photograph moves and becomes a mirror. When I read he stood in front of mirrors and attacked himself, there was the shock of memory. For I had done that. Stood, and with a razor-blade cut into cheeks and forehead, shaved hair. Defiling people we did not wish to be. He comes into the room, kneels in front of the mirror and sits on his heels. Begins to talk. Holds a blade between his first two fingers and cuts high onto the cheek. At first not having the nerve to cut deeper than scratches. When they eventually go deeper they look innocent because of the thinness of the blade. This way he brings his enemy to the surface of the skin. The slow trace of the razor almost painless because the brain’s hate is so much. And then turning to his hair which he removes in lumps.

The thin sheaf of information. Why did my senses stop at you? There was the sentence, ‘Buddy Bolden who became a legend when he went berserk in a parade …’ What was there in that, before I knew your nation your colour your age, that made me push my arm forward and spill it through the front of your mirror and clutch myself? Did not want to pose in your accent but think in your brain and body, and you like a weatherbird arcing round in the middle of your life to exact opposites and burning your brains out so that from June 5, 1907, till 1931 you were dropped into amber in the East Louisiana State Hospital. Some saying you went mad trying to play the devil’s music and hymns at the same time, and Armstrong telling historians that you went mad by playing too hard and too often drunk too wild too crazy. The excesses cloud up the page. There was the climax of the parade and then you removed yourself from the 20th century game of fame, the rest of your life a desert of facts. Cut them open and spread them out like garbage.

They used to bury dogs on First Street. Holes in the road made that easy. While in Holtz Cemetery the high water table conveniently takes the flesh away in six months and others may be buried in the same place within a year. So for us you are here, not in Holtz with the plastic flowers in Maxwell House coffee tins or four inch plastic Christs stuck in cement or crosses so full of names they seem like ledgers of a whole generation.

The sun has swallowed the colour of the street. It is a black and white photograph, part of a history book.

House of Detention. Three needles lost in me. Move me over and in the fat of my hip they slip in the killer of the pain. And open my eyes and the nurse is there, her smiling rope face and rope neck. Awake Bolden? Nod. Look at each other and then she is off. No conversation. I can’t sing through my neck. Every three hours I walk to the door for then she will come in carrying the needle in her sweet palm like an egg. Roll and dip and lose it in the bum. Go to sleep now. Nod. 7 am. I am given a bath. I sit up and she comes over unbuttons me at the back, pulls it over my shoulders. You see I can’t use my arms. She pours the cold soap onto my chest and rubs hard across the nipple and hair. Smiling. Good? Nod. And then pulling my white dress farther down and more cold soap in the circle of my crotch. As she leans against me there is the red morning on her face. Everyone who touches me must be beautiful.

Bolden’s hand going up into the air in agony.

His brain driving it up into the path of the circling fan.

This last movement happens forever and ever in his memory

Interview with Lionel Gremillion at East Louisiana State Hospital.

Bolden’s mother, Alice Bolden, wrote twice a month. Called him ‘Charles’.

He died November 4, 1931, at the hospital.

His sister Cora Bolden Reed was notified when he died.

Geddes and Moss, Undertaking and Embalming Co. of New Orleans, took care of the body. Nov. 4, his sister sent telegram
—‘PLEASE DELIVER REMAINS OF CHARLES BOLDEN TO J.D. GILBERT UNDERTAKING CO. BATON ROUGE TO BE PREPARED FOR BURIAL’.

Burial in unmarked grave at Holtz Cemetery after being brought from the Asylum through Slaughter, Vachery, Sunshine, back to New Orleans.

Reverend Sede Bradham, Protestant Chaplain at the Hospital, worked at the hospital in his youth. He had seen Bolden play in N.O. ‘Hyperactive individual. When he blew his horn he kept walking around on the bandstand … had tendency to go to a window to play to outside world.’

Dr Robard: ‘He acted as a patient barber. Didn’t publicly proclaim himself as a jazz originator.’

Wasn’t much communication between whites and blacks and so much information is difficult to find out. No black employees here.

Gremillion theorizing: ‘He was a big frog, he had a following. Had a strong ego, his behaviour was eventually too erratic. Extroverted and then a pendulum swing to withdrawal. Suspiciousness. Paranoia. Possibly “an endocrine problem”.’

Patients sometimes brought up by boat along Mississippi to St Francisville.

Typical Day:

Rose early. Summer 4.30 am. Winter 5 am.

If a person was in a closed ward he was returned there after breakfast. Bolden was probably in open and closed wards. If open ward he was given duties. His assigned duty was to cut hair. Lunch 11.30.

Recreational facilities: volleyball, softball. Dances twice a week.

Cold packs for the overactive. Place was noisy.

4.30 – 5 pm. Supper.

In bed by 8 pm.

Some isolation blocks. ‘Untidy Wards’ for old patients who couldn’t control bowels. ‘Closed Wards’ for escapees, deteriorated psychopaths. Violent Wards’ for unmanageables.

Am walked out of the House of D and put on a north train by H.B. McMurray and Jones. Outside a river can’t get out of the rain. Passing wet chicory that lies in the field like the sky. The trees rocks brown ditches falling off the side as we go past. The train in a wet coat. Blue necklace holding my hands together. Going to a pound. My beautiful snout is hit by McMurray for laughing at the rain. My neck is warm is wet and it feels like a shoe stuck in there. T. Jones next to me, the window next to me, McMurray in front of me. His hand came up like magic and got me for laughing as loud as the train. Strangers sitting next to the horizon. Wet in my neck. Teasel in my neck. You see I had an operation on my throat. You see I had a salvation on my throat. A goat put his horn in me and pulled. Let me tell ya, it went winter in there and then it fell apart like mud and they stuck it together with needles and they held me together with clothes.

Am going to the pound. McMurray and Jones holding my hands. Breastless woman in blue pyjamas will be there. Muscles in the arms will be there. Tie. Belt. Boots.

They make me love them. They are the arms looking after me. On the second day they came into my room and took off all my clothes and bent me over a table and broke my anus. They gave me a white dress. They know I am a barber and I didn’t tell them I’m a barber. Won’t. Can’t. Boot in my throat, the food has to climb over it and then go down and meet with all their pals in the stomach. Hi sausage. Hi cabbage. Did yuh see that fuckin boot. Yeah I nearly turned round ’n went back on the plate. Who is this guy we’re in anyway?

The sun comes every day. Save the string. I put it in lines across the room. I watched him creep his body through the grilled windows. When the sun touches the first string wham it is 10 o clock. It is 2 o clock when he touches the second. When the shadow of the first string is under the second string it is 4 o clock. When it reaches the door it will soon be dark.

Laughing in my room. As you try to explain me I will spit you, yellow, out of my mouth.

In the summer they were up each day at 4.30. They washed and moved among themselves for an hour and then by 6 they filed in and took forks off the table, ate. At 7 they held the forks above their heads so they could be collected. Meals silent in the mornings and noisy at lunch. That was their only character.

On Monday mornings he cut hair for them. He was never much of a barber but the forms said he was one. So he shaved and cut in a corner of the dining room with an old man who was better than him but who died two years after Bolden arrived. He was asked to train someone new, he didn’t react, but a couple of them learned by watching him. One of the patients, Bertram Lord, came every week and tried to get the scissors off him and each day as the shift ended Bolden held up his arm with the scissors and razor and they were collected and locked away.

Lord, who knew of Bolden’s reputation, was always trying to persuade him to escape. The noise of Lord so constant it was like wallpaper and Bolden could blot himself against it without even having to turn away the meaning of the words, using the noise as a bark around himself.

Till the day of the escape he had never seen Lord do anything more than talk, so that when Lord saw his chance and without hesitation jumped, Bolden was for the first time impressed. Though not having listened to the shadow who had been using his silence as an oracle, he had no idea what Bertram Lord was up to.

Everyone was jumping on the tables to look. It had begun with Antrim who was getting his weekly needle so he would detour his fits, forget to express them. He had begun to argue with Dr Vernon, some ridiculous reason. The doctors had alternated arms with Antrim who was certain that this week it was supposed to be his left arm and Vernon had begun rolling up the right sleeve. Vernon had put down the needle to calm the furious patient when Lord passing the open room had leapt in scooped up the needle and thrown his other arm around the doctor’s neck.

He dragged the doctor down the hall with the needle held inches from the eye, he forced the guards to open the doors. The two guards hesitated and Lord, nervous, tightened his fist round the glass syringe so much the glass tubing was crushed. Still he held onto the needle, gently now, like a dart, and the guard seeing it not even waver from the doctor’s eye, opened the doors. Lord then called out for others to follow, he called out Bolden’s name again and again but his friend was now sitting on the barber chair watching it all, waiting for the next customer who was somewhere on a table leaping up and down. So Lord went out. He was away for two days loose in the town of Jackson and then was brought back and beaten. He had a limp, said he almost broke his ankle going over a fence. But that wasn’t the cause. In his time out he had separated precisely the bottom circle from a bottle of Coca-Cola. He had ground it into a sharp disc and he kept it hidden under the instep of his left foot. He had it there in his tight shoe. He had his weapon and he’d come back for Bolden.

Selections from
A Brief History of East Louisiana State Hospital
by Lionel Gremillion

Hospital was opened in the year 1848. 87 patients transferred from the Charity Hospital in New Orleans.

1853. A minority report from a special committee stated patients in direst poverty and lacked sufficient food. Dinner consisted of a tin cupful of soup, meat about the size of a hen’s egg, and a small piece of bread. Breakfast was bread and coffee. Supper was bread and tea. Women patients not properly clothed. Cells had no heat.

1857. J.D. Barkdull made Superintendent. First time the institution was under the control of a medical man.

1861. Hospital included thirty-six girls, mostly under twelve years of age.

1855. Dysentery swept crowded wards and it was stated that ‘the diseased patients fell like grass before the scythe.’

1859. Some of the causes of insanity were listed as: ill health, loss of property, excessive use of tobacco, dissipation, domestic affliction, epilepsy, masturbation, home-sickness, injury of the head. The largest category was ‘unknown’.

1864. Supt. Barkdull was shot and killed in the streets of Jackson by a yankee soldier.

During the Civil War it was almost impossible to get food or water supplies to the hospital.

1882. Introduction of occupational therapy. Patients assigned to make moss mattresses.