Empire of Sin (28 page)

Another Lala—John T. Lala—ran the Big 25 on Franklin just west of Iberville, which also became a noted hangout for musicians and gamblers. (It was where, according to Louis Armstrong, “
all the big-time pimps and hustlers would congregate and play ‘cotch.’ ”) The Frenchman’s, a bit farther afield at the corner of Villere and Bienville, was a particular favorite of the District’s piano professors. According to Jelly Roll Morton (who by this time was spending most of his time away from New Orleans), the Frenchman’s was “
the most famous nightspot after everything [else] was closed. It was only a back room, but it was where all the greatest pianists frequented after they got off from work in the sporting houses. About four
A.M.
… they would go to the Frenchman’s and there would be everything in the line of hilarity there.”

Storyville’s reputation as the birthplace of jazz has often been exaggerated—Black Storyville across Canal Street actually has a better claim—but the District can definitely take credit for nurturing the new music’s childhood and adolescence. Keppard, Baquet, Ory, Bunk Johnson, and other members of the post-Bolden generation were now making music history nightly in the dance halls and clubs of Storyville, though few people at the time—including the musicians themselves—realized this, given the character of the venues they played in. “
My first job was in Billy Phillips’ place,” trumpeter Mutt Carey would later recall. “We played anything we pleased in that joint; you see, there was no class in those places. All they wanted was continuous music. Man, they had some rough places in Storyville in those days. A guy would see everything in those joints, and it was all dirty. It was really a hell of a place to work.”

Meanwhile, the music was changing as new star soloists rose to take up the mantle left behind by Buddy Bolden. For some years after Bolden’s institutionalization, Creole trumpeter Freddie Keppard was widely regarded as his principal heir. “
After Buddy died,” Sidney Bechet would later write (forgetting that Bolden didn’t actually
die
until much later), “Freddie Keppard was King. Freddie kind of took Buddy’s way some; he played practically the same way as Buddy, but he
played
, he
really
played.”

In the intensely competitive environment of New Orleans music, however, there was always someone new coming up, eager to snatch the coveted title for himself.
Cornetist Joe Oliver—an Uptown African American who, like Bolden, lacked some of the downtown polish of his Creole peers—rose to prominence in these years. Though several years older than Keppard, he came to music somewhat later; he began his career around 1910 with the Eagle Brass Band, the new name for Bolden’s old outfit. Soon he was also playing the better clubs of the District—102 Ranch, Pete Lala’s—and wowing audiences with his driving “freak” style, using various mutes to make his horn sound like everything from a rooster to a baby. (“
How he could make it talk!” one fellow player marveled.) One famous night at Aberdeen’s in the District, Oliver decided to stake his claim. To hear one version of the story:

Something got into Joe one night as he sat quietly in the corner and listened to the musicians who were praising [Freddie] Keppard and [Manuel] Perez. He was infuriated by their tiresome adulation; didn’t they know that Joe Oliver could play a cornet, too? So he came forth from his silence, strode to the piano, and said, “Jones, beat it out in B flat.” Jones began to beat, and Joe began to blow. The notes tore out clear as a bell, crisp and clean. He played as he never had before, filling the little dance hall with low, throbbing blues. Jones backed him with a slow, steady beat. With this rhythm behind him, Joe walked straight through the hall, out onto the sidewalk. There was no mistaking what he meant when he pointed his cornet, first towards Pete Lala’s, where Keppard played, then directly across the street, to where Perez was working. A few hot blasts brought crowds out of both joints; they saw Joe Oliver on the sidewalk, playing as if he would blow down every house on the street. Soon every rathole and crib down the line was deserted by its patrons, who came running up to Joe, bewitched by his cornet. When the last joint had poured out its crew, he turned around and led the crowd into Aberdeen’s, where he walked to the stand, breathless, excited, and opened his mouth wide to let out the big, important words that were boiling in his head. But all he could say was, “There! That’ll show ’em!” After that night, they never called him anything but “King” Oliver
.

Actually, there’s no evidence that anyone called him King until he went to Chicago some years later, but Oliver’s importance to New Orleans music in the teens would be difficult to exaggerate. He was especially influential among the younger generation of players just coming into their own. In this time of musical ferment, bands shuffled personnel frequently, so neophytes would eventually get the chance to play with many of the older players they admired. Sidney Bechet, for instance, was now playing with a number of different ensembles all over town, despite the fact that he was still in his mid-teens.
Hoping to discipline their wild child, his conservative Creole parents would sometimes lock up his clarinet in a cabinet. But Sidney would just go to his gig anyway, asking his bandleader to get him any old pawnshop clarinet. Often, when he was supposed to be playing with his brother’s somewhat staid Silver Bells Band, Sidney would gig instead with his own band, formed with his friend Buddy Petit, called the Young Olympians. “
I’d always catch hell from my brother when he’d find I was playing in [the Olympians],” Bechet would later recall. “Many a time he’d come to catch me at it and drag me off … I didn’t care to have trouble with my brother, but it was like I couldn’t help myself. There was so much more of what I was looking for in other bands, so much more of what I was needing.”

Even Bechet’s most admired mentors had trouble keeping the young clarinetist under control. “
We could never keep our hands on that Sidney,” remembered Louis Nelson, who played with his former protégé in several venues around town. “Regular little devil, always running off down the alley after them little women.” So eager was Bechet to be perceived as a ladies’ man that he once pretended to have VD (by
pouring Musterol ointment over his crotch and then wrapping it up in a bandage). Sometime later he tried to take credit for impregnating a neighborhood girl. “
I’m sure I can support a wife,” he told the girl’s father one night. “I earn 75 cents [or] a dollar a night in the District.” The two of them drank wine and talked it over all night, until the father (who knew exactly who it was who’d made his daughter pregnant) carried the sleeping boy back to his family’s house and put him to bed.

The final break with his family, though, came in 1913, when Sidney was sixteen or seventeen. Whether he was kicked out or just decided to move himself out, he left the Bechet residence for good and relocated Uptown. And that’s when he really started to get into trouble. “
One night we ended up in jail together,” the bassist Pops Foster recalled. “[Sidney] was fooling around with a chick at a dance out at the lake. She pulled a knife and stabbed him. I grabbed a stick and started after her. When the cops came, we told them we were [just] playing. They took us to jail and then let us go. When we got back to the dance, she thanked us for not getting her in trouble. Sidney was always wanting to fight, but they [the fights] never came off.”

But it was certainly not difficult for a young black man to find trouble for himself in New Orleans at this time. The perception among white New Orleanians was that the city’s black residents, in the decade after the Robert Charles riot and the rise of Jim Crow, had become defiant and “
more assertive than ever before.” This was especially true at Mardi Gras time, when blacks who formerly celebrated in their own neighborhoods began to “invade” white residential areas in their revels. Sometimes the results were violent, as during the 1908 Carnival, when a group of Mardi Gras Indians (young members of a black krewe masking as Indians) engaged in
a melee on Burgundy Street with a group of white youths. The next year, the
Times-Democrat
complained about black spectators at a parade in the central business district. “
The objectionable feature was the manner in which the Negroes elbowed and shoved their way through the crowds to get in the front row,” the paper observed. “Complaints were many, especially from women and children, who were powerless to hold their places.… The change in demeanor of the Negro crowds was strongly remarked by nearly everyone.”

By 1911, the alleged problem had reached the notice of even J. Benjamin Lawrence, the Baptist preacher who had targeted Tom Anderson the year before. Speaking to his congregation on the Sunday after Mardi Gras, he took special note of the aggressiveness of the black revelers: “
I went carefully up one side and down the other of Canal Street,” he told his flock, “and from St. Charles Street up I found Negroes occupying the front places almost wholly. I also noticed two or three Negroes to every white person. Big, black Negro men were pushing themselves through the crowd and pressing in upon white women in a manner to make a white man’s blood boil.…”

Police efforts to maintain order at parades and other public events often amounted to arresting many of the black males present. And the arrests often included those who were busy providing the entertainment. Rare was the New Orleans jazzman who hadn’t spent at least one night sitting up in some precinct lockup after a gig that had somehow gotten out of hand.

Louis Armstrong, still a young boy at this time, was no stranger to the volatile racial atmosphere of New Orleans in the early teens.
Born on August 4, 1901, to a fifteen-year-old mother in a tough area of the city known as the Battlefield, he grew up among the “
pimps, thieves, [and] prostitutes” of a neighborhood frequently targeted by police in their peacekeeping efforts. “
I seen everything from a child, growing up,” Armstrong would later remark. “
Nothin’
happen I ain’t never seen before.”

His was anything but a sheltered childhood. His parents separated when he was still very young. His father, Willie, had run off with another woman, leaving Louis’s mother, Mayann, to fend for herself and her baby alone. Overwhelmed, Mayann, who was little more than a child herself, turned Louis over to his paternal grandmother, Josephine. Mayann then moved into the area known as Black Storyville, where
quite likely she worked as a prostitute to make ends meet. Josephine, meanwhile, tried her best to keep Louis away from the criminal elements in the Battlefield, making sure he went to church and Sunday school every week. When necessary, she would discipline him with switches that she made him cut himself from a china ball tree growing in their front yard. This kind of living arrangement was not particularly unusual in the black New Orleans of the day, where grandparents often played the role of surrogate parents to young children. And Louis would later recall this part of his childhood in mostly positive terms. But an elderly widow could presumably do only so much to nurture an energetic young boy in such an environment.

When he was about five, Louis learned that his parents had reunited—at least long enough to give birth to another child. But by the time he got to meet his baby sister, his father had again abandoned his family (“
busy chasing chippies,” as Armstrong would bitterly recall). Sometime in 1906, a friend of his mother’s appeared at Josephine Armstrong’s house and told the old woman that Mayann was sick and needed Louis back to care for her. Josephine packed up the boy’s things and tearfully sent him off to Black Storyville with the friend. To get there, they had to ride the Tulane Avenue streetcar. That ride gave Louis his first and most vivid taste of the segregated place New Orleans had become. As he would later write:

It was my first experience with Jim Crow. I was just five, and I had never ridden on a streetcar before. Since I was the first to get on, I walked right up to the front of the car without noticing the signs on the backs of the seats on both sides, which read: FOR COLORED PASSENGERS ONLY. Thinking the woman was following me, I sat down in one of the front seats. However, she did not join me, and when I turned to see what had happened, I saw her waving to me frantically. “Come here, boy,” she cried. “Sit where you belong.”

Over the next years, young Louis would learn just how “
disgustingly segregated and prejudiced” his hometown truly was. But for the moment, he was just happy to be reunited with his mother and new baby sister. Mayann, still only twenty years old, tried to make amends: “
I realize I have not done what I should by you,” she told him when he first returned. “But son, mama will make it up to you.” And she did—to the best of her ability, given the circumstances. She enrolled Louis in the nearby Fisk School, kept him and his sister fed on red beans and rice, and doctored them with the
natural laxatives that Armstrong would swear by as a cure-all for the rest of his life. Louis and Mama Lucy (as his young sister came to be called) had to deal with a series of “stepfathers” who shared their mother’s bed—sometimes noisily—in the small one-room house on Perdido. Some of these men were pleasanter than others; a few of them fought bitterly with Mayann, and
one even struck her in the face one day and knocked her into the old Basin Canal. But even the kinder ones were no substitute for a loving father.

Left largely to his own devices, young Louis tried to help out by
selling newspapers, running errands, and selling overripe produce he found on the streets. He was no angel, certainly, and before long he was also bringing home his winnings from street games of craps, “coon can,” and blackjack. (“
I got to be a pretty slick player,” he once admitted.) But for all of his rough edges, he was a good-hearted, likable boy. Soon even the neighborhood bullies—whom he handled with a canny mixture of
fearlessness, generosity, and respect—were looking out for the boy rather than beating him up.

There was, of course, no money in the household for anything like music lessons. (“
In those days,” he would later quip, “I did not know a horn from a comb.”) But he was soon learning the basics, as Bolden and many others had, from the street peddlers, advertising wagons, and parade bands that abounded in the city in those days. Working on a junk wagon for a Jewish family who lived in the neighborhood (the Karnofskys, who would eventually become
like a second family to the boy), he got a chance to blow a little tin horn for himself, summoning children to bring their old rags and bottles for purchase. And when he got a little older,
he formed a vocal quartet with some friends and began singing for coins on the streets of Storyville.