Kansas City Lightning (37 page)

There was no derision to Charlie's nickname, however. Charlie was the high
est-ranking combatant in Banjo Burney's orchestra, and when things got especially hot in a jam session, someone would say, “Go get Indian.” Then it was off to find him, practicing somewhere but always ready to step into the tempo, the key, and the harmony, and to put something down so rough that victory had to come his way.

Joe Wilder remembers “Indian” Parker's first appearance at those jam sessions in Annapolis: “Most of us were somewhat awestruck by him, you know. He was something. . . . I mean, he did things and played with such clarity and freedom that it was sort of unheard of. We had guys who could play. There were fellows in the band that I was in who played extremely well. But even they were amazed by what Charlie Parker played. He just had it. . . . His development of ideas was different than what most of us had heard or even attempted, because he was doing a lot with an approach to harmony that most of us had never even thought about.
It wasn't bebop. He was just swinging. But his interpretation was completely different
.”

The two bands, the Harlem Dictators and Banjo Burney's organization, stayed in Annapolis for three weeks, and during that time Wilder noticed something remarkable about how Charlie practiced. Charlie was “a very likable person and a very intelligent guy,” he recalled, but he was always working on that saxophone. In those days, most musicians focused their practice on certain areas of the music, sticking to a limited number of keys. Charlie was different.

“He was practicing every day,” Wilder said, “and he would practice diligently. Whatever he played in one key, he would play in all the other keys. No matter how difficult the figure he was playing, he would practice it in every key. And that's where, apparently . . . not apparently—that's how he developed that dexterity that he had, where keys meant nothing at all to him.” In those long practice sessions, Wilder says, he heard some foreshadowing of the harmonic devices that later distinguished bebop.

There was another young alto saxophone player who was turning heads in those Annapolis jam sessions. His name was Oswald Gibson—the musicians called him “Little Gib”— and he was working with a seven-piece group down from Philadelphia under the leadership of pianist Jimmy Golden. Frank Wess, who lived in Washington, DC, and had yet to start playing professionally, came
to Annapolis after school to hang around the musicians and hear the fireworks at the jam sessions. Of the encounters between Indian and Little Gib, Wess says, “They both sounded very much alike. Yeah, very much alike. . . . You know, the music progresses, wherever it is, at about the same rate, and you have the same thing going on in a lot of different towns. Some towns get together faster than others.”

Charlie and Little Gib had never met before. “It was just coincidence that they played so much alike,” Joe Wilder says. But his assessment of the two saxophonists, contrasted with Wess's, shows how differently two musicians can hear the same events.

“Some of the guys felt that it came out kind of even, because this little guy Gib was quick, too,” Wilder remembered. “He was fast, you know. He didn't have the musical knowledge that Charlie Parker had, but he had some of the same facility. On that basis, he was sort of able to keep up with Charlie, where the rest of us, I mean, we were dragging our feet. We had never heard things that fast, although I knew some guys like John Brown in Philadelphia, who later played with Dizzy's big band . . . who could play like that. But still, they weren't Charlie Parker. Charlie was an exception.”

The trumpeter Idrees Sulieman, then known as Leonard Graham, was there as well. He recalled musicians saying to Little Gib that he played everything that Indian played, to which Gib answered, “Yeah, but he played it
first
.”

How could Charlie Parker have felt about Oswald Gibson? Had he ever expected to find himself blowing against another young player, someone he'd never heard of, from a town he'd never been in, who was working toward the same kind of instrumental command? If we believe Joe Wilder's account, Charlie may well have discerned the difference between his own musical knowledge and Gibson's. Yet Gibson's presence may have inspired Charlie to work even harder, given his pride and competitive nature. Charlie loved having buddies to practice with, but no one remembers him practicing with Little Gib. They battled in the jam sessions and went their separate ways.

CHARLIE KEPT IN
touch with his mother—as he always would—letting her know how he was faring, now and then charming her out of a small loan to get him from one day to the next. So Addie Parker must either have known where he was living in New York or had heard from him when he was down in Annapolis with Banjo Burney. However it happened, his mother contacted him in May with bracing news: his hard-drinking, freely wandering, nightlife-living father had been murdered at the hands of some street woman. Her angel child, her favorite son, had better pack right up and come on home for the funeral.

Charlie returned to Kansas City by rail. This time he had a ticket, but his heart was no lighter than on the gloomy night he'd left, around eighteen months ago, nearly a year before Coleman Hawkins had his Negro community hit with “Body and Soul.” The town was far different now. He could hardly recognize it.

A year ago, on May 22, 1939, Tom Pendergast had been sentenced to fifteen months in prison after pleading guilty to income tax evasion, the same charge that brought down the mighty Capone. The many thousands of wide-open Kansas City days and nights were gone, victim of an overdose of the brand of honesty that made it hard for musicians who depended on the nightlife to survive. What a moment: just as Charlie was getting with the New York groove, his erstwhile dissipation behind him, mastering his horn and earning some respect for it, bloody murder pulled him back into the K.C. blues. Luck was hard to come by—and, when you got it, it never lasted long enough to get a goddam thing done all the way right.

REBECCA HAD BEEN
through a whole heap of homemade hell since Charlie took it upon himself to disappear from town:
poof.
She and Addie Parker were at odds most of the time. It was ugly and it was strange. Rebecca thought her mother-in-law was “in the arts,” a hoodoo woman, especially after Parkey took little baby Leon and walked him around the house in a circle, saying, “Now he won't ever leave home.” The satisfaction in Addie's voice and eyes gave Rebecca an ominous chill.

Rebecca kept silent, but she watched every little thing Addie Parker did with a
growing combination of fear and resentment. She could see that Addie was gradually trying to reduce Leon's affection for his own mother. She wanted that boy all to herself—as if, having failed to hang on to Charlie Sr. and then to her own son, she could start all over again with the next generation. Her ways always revealed her mind.

Addie Parker wasn't a naturally warm person—Rebecca had known that for a while now—but she was so warm with Leon, so sweet, paying so much attention, cooing to him all the time, making him laugh and giggle. Oh, she put a light in that child's eyes. Yes, she did. If she could get that boy, baby Leon, he would replace Charlie the father and Charlie the son. And if Charlie the son came back after this long, long time away—and stayed back—her world would be perfect, son and grandson under her control. That son of hers and that baby would have everything they wanted; they would need for nothing that was within her power to bring home. Addie Parker knew how to spoil people and command them at the same time.

All this business with Parkey, and Rebecca's other feelings about the father of her child, kept her in an emotional and psychological whirl. She still loved Charlie; she could remember how he looked, his strong body and its reddish-brown tone, the way it felt when they were together and everything was going along right, the sound of his voice, that lost look he could have, or that happy look, or that look that showed how much he cared for her. She remembered how he would pull himself together, little by little, and take her out riding in Parkey's old Ford. Of course, she also remembered the many ways he had broken her heart, first into big pieces, and then into smaller and smaller ones. There was no way to forget the surprises that came from the inky world he lived in and couldn't cut loose from, the sudden violence—even the way the two of them silently communicated their mutual fear and unhappiness. It was a lot for a young girl to carry around.

By and by, Rebecca began missing her own mother and the atmosphere of the home she'd once known, when things had made sense and there was no constant feeling of insecurity darkening the sky. Rebecca didn't know where she was going; she didn't know what was going to happen to her and her child; she had no idea where Charlie was or what he was doing. Now he was gone, giving the crabs
to other girls who didn't know he wasn't clean. Just as easy, he could have picked up some harsher disease from those street women. He could be dead, for all she knew. One thing was sure as death itself: if Addie Parker was in contact with him but didn't feel like telling her, there was no way Rebecca was ever going to find out.

Rebecca's problems with Parkey finally reached their most difficult plateau when her mother-in-law demanded that she divorce Charlie in absentia and make a choice: either prove she had a means of support or turn over baby Leon to his grandmother. Rebecca was dumbstruck. Now Parkey was going to put the white court people in their family business? That was another slap: Rebecca meant nothing to her now that Charlie had left, even though Parkey had promised him that she'd take care of his wife and his baby on the day that her saxophone-playing son had hopped a rattler and disappeared from Kansas City. Well, Addie Parker didn't lay down in love to get pregnant with Leon, and she didn't lay down in labor to let him loose in the living world. Rebecca's will was not gone, not hardly. She might have felt broken inside, but her anger was the equal of everything else she felt. If she had stood up to her own mother for Charlie, she could stand up to Charlie's mother for her own son.

When Addie forced the matter into court, that simplified everything; her betrayal scraped away all of Rebecca's hesitation. She would have to get away from Addie Parker, to get her son out of that cold hoodoo woman's shadow. Rebecca acquiesced to the divorce—and she was overwhelmed, almost humiliated, with gratitude when her own mother offered herself as guaranteed support for Leon.

All the rancor in 1516 Olive cooled off then, replaced by a low-grade resentment on both sides. One part of her life was closing down. When the day finally came, her brother, Winfrey, drove up and said, “Come on, Rebecca, I'm taking you home.”

“Home,” she recalled decades later. “It felt like, to me, like the most beautiful word I ever heard anyone say.”

REBECCA MOVED TO
her family's new home in Leeds, Missouri, about a ten-minute drive from Kansas City. In May 1940, her mother came to Rebecca and
said, “Becky, Charlie's at the door.”

She went to the door and talked with Charlie on the porch. This young man looked good, very good. He was still lean, but he had a new coating of seriousness in his eyes. There was more man than boy standing there. There was also a kind of sadness to him, another cut of pain, something like the way he'd looked the day he carried their miscarried second baby to the bathroom, in a pan given to them by Dr. Thompson, and flushed it away. Yes, she still knew him, God help her. She knew that young man who was rising out of the skin of the boy she had fallen in love with. Still, she could tell something was wrong with Charlie that day—wrong as a backward seven. She was right: his father had been stabbed to death with a pair of scissors, and Charlie had come back home for the funeral. Poor Charlie: his father, always an invisible ghost to him, was finally gone for good.

He visited with Rebecca for a while, trying to piece their marriage back together. He tried to explain himself to her: everything he had done, he said, he had done either because he didn't understand the meaning of his actions or because he had to take a chance on his talent. He had suffered out there, hopping trains, starving, wearing his shoes until his feet swelled up so big they almost busted out of the leather. It wasn't easy, but Charlie was getting much closer to his own way of playing, and even some of the guys back east, who'd never heard of him, were beginning to respect him. He had put the drugs and the liquor behind him. Now all he wanted was to have his wife and son back. Rebecca had to know that he loved her, and that he loved Leon, and it must be absolutely clear that the three of them were supposed to be together under one roof.

Well, many things were clear, all right, but her moving back in with him into that woman's house on Olive Street was not one of them. She still loved Charlie: she could feel it just looking at him, and more so because of the new power and confidence that had replaced his old, unearned, childish arrogance. Rebecca could see he wasn't high, and he looked rested, so she believed him when he said he'd conquered the needle and the bottle. But up under all of the rioting emotions of attraction, and the seductive attraction of his voice, she still felt in her heart an absolute lack of confidence that the two of them could work out their troubles. As good as he looked, as sweet as he spoke, as serious as he obviously was, she
could still feel the turmoil within Charlie.

As she sat and talked with him, Rebecca heard herself saying, “No, Charlie,” over and over again.

After realizing he couldn't convince her himself, Charlie said to her mother, “Mrs. Ruffin, please make Rebecca come back to me.”

“Charlie,” she said, “I didn't put you together, and I didn't take you apart. That's between you and Becky.”

“All right, Mrs. Ruffin.” It went no further. Charlie left.

What happened after that was remembered quite differently by Rebecca and her sister Ophelia in interviews conducted decades later. Ophelia claimed that, even though things were hard between Charlie and Rebecca, and despite the animosity between her sister and Mrs. Parker, Becky was always trying to get back with Charlie. Rebecca claimed that she broke off things with Charlie for good in East Saint Louis in 1939, when he was with Billy Eckstine's big band and a young, enthralled Miles Davis was there listening. Though Rebecca insisted on the story, her timing was impossible: Davis didn't intersect with the Eckstine band until 1944, when he was just graduating from high school. All Ophelia remembered about those later years was that Rebecca was so crazy about Charlie that she tried over and over to get him to do right, to take care of her and Leon.