Kansas City Lightning (7 page)

FANNY RUFFIN, WHOM
her estranged husband called Birdy, did
not
like Charlie Parker. First of all, he didn't go to school unless he wanted to; he'd apparently been dawdling around the house for a year. Second, he was allowed to be too mischievous for her taste. He sarcastically called his mother “Ma.” He was always playing rough jokes on the Ruffin children, hiding behind the staircase and jumping out to scare them, throwing firecrackers at them, teasing, pinching, and hurling snowballs at them when winter came—or just pushing scoops of snow down the backs of their clothes. Addie Parker insisted he was just a boy having fun, that he wasn't really hurting anybody. Birdy Ruffin could put up with that to a degree. What she had a harder time with was how close Charlie and Rebecca were becoming. Knowing better than to hold hands when Birdy Ruffin was around, he and Beckerie (as the family called her) just stared at each other with the amazement of two moo cows watching choo-choo trains. But everyone could see what was happening. Rebecca had never had a boyfriend before, though she
had always been very pretty.

As far as Birdy Ruffin was concerned, if her daughter was to have a steady boy, he would have to be someone better than lazy Charlie Parker, whom she considered an “alley rat.” As Birdy Ruffin and her daughter watched Charlie from a second-floor window shooting marbles in the alley behind the house with his buddy Sterling Bryant, Birdy told Beckerie that that Parker boy had no foreseeable future—unless it was living off his gullible mother and doing nothing worth anything, which was apparently his specialty.

“Mama was very strict,” recalled Ophelia Ruffin. “Nobody was good enough for
her
daughters.”

Birdy Ruffin's attitude may have been influenced by the nature of Kansas City itself. It was a city where corruption sprawled in comfort and a child could get the idea that right was wrong and wrong was right: the mayor was a pawn, the city boss was a crook, the police were corrupt, the gangsters had more privileges than honest businessmen, and the town was as wild with vice as you could encounter short of a convention of the best devils in hell.
Her
daughters were going to be polite, well-groomed, respectful, and arrow-straight. If they weren't, they would have to face her wrath, which could be considerable.

Ophelia remembered it clearly. “Once I went up on Twelfth Street—which was pretty wild, you know—with my friend Ruby because she was getting her lunch money from her uncle. My daddy saw me up there and asked if Mama knew where I was. I couldn't lie. He went right over to Miss Parker's and asked Mama if she knew where I was, and Mama said I was at school. He said she wasn't raising us right and told her where I was. Mama met me at Fifteenth and Olive. She whipped me from that corner all the way up to Miss Parker's, all the way up the stairs. . . . I must have bit her because she tied me to the bed,
still
switching me. She said, ‘I'll teach you to go up on Twelfth Street!' That's why I hate Twelfth Street
now
. I don't have no time for it.”

But even such wrath didn't sway Rebecca, whose feeling for Charlie thickened and deepened. He was different from other boys. For all his mischief, Charlie had very good manners. He wasn't always pushing himself on her or trying to fumble his hands under her clothes. Rebecca knew the things boys
would try to get girls to do. But Charlie was different. With him, she felt safe. “He was old-fashioned,” she mused decades later. “He wasn't aggressive like some of the young guys.” And there was something more: when she looked at him very closely, young Charlie seemed hurt. “I don't know what he was. He wasn't loved, he was just given. Addie Parker wasn't that type of woman. She always let him have his way, but she didn't show him what I call affection. It was strange. She was proud of him and everything. Worked herself for him and all, but, somehow, I never saw her heart touch him. It was odd. It seemed like to me he
needed
. He just had this need. It really touched me to my soul. He seemed like he needed someone to love him and to understand him.”

With the Ruffins in the house, however, Charlie started to shed some of his melancholy. He was growing into a bigger and more attractive young man, almost as though the weight of his previous loneliness had stunted him. Charlie took to the Ruffin children and they to him. Birdy Ruffin's disdain rolled off the children's backs, though they all knew better than to argue with her. Winfrey Ruffin kept to himself, a bookworm, but Charlie had plenty of fun with the girls. Octavia, the oldest after Winfrey, had started working after graduating from Lincoln High School in 1933. She found Charlie as lovable as the rest of her sisters did, and she supported his budding romance with Rebecca.

When he wasn't playing with little Dorothy in the swing on the front porch, Charlie was doing something in the parlor to the left of the stairs—something to do with music.

Besides its large potbellied stove and the huge table where everybody gathered for dinner, Addie Parker's parlor harbored an old-fashioned Victrola in the right corner and a mahogany player piano nearby. (Behind a pair of sliding doors was Addie's bedroom, where her possessions were guarded by Snow, her white and savage Alaskan spitz.) Charlie and the girls often got together around the Wurlitzer piano; when they weren't banging out noise, Charlie was already teaching Ophelia the boogie-woogie songs that were in the Kansas City air at the time. He still didn't talk much, but Addie's only child seemed to blossom under the influence of the Ruffin daughters, as though he had suddenly been blessed with a frolicking gaggle of sisters.

Rebecca recognized that Charlie was beginning to mature. He was an attentive boyfriend: “Whatever you talked about, Charlie Parker listened.” And, under their influence, he was finally going back to school on a regular basis. The younger Ruffin children went to Crispus Attucks, Rebecca to Lincoln High; Charlie walked with them, and he started attending classes again in the fall of 1934. “He was becoming a man then, once he started going back to school,” Rebecca remembered. “Of course, he didn't say why he went back. Charlie didn't talk. He talked with his eyes. . . . He was accustomed to being by himself.”

Lincoln was on Nineteenth Street and Tracy Avenue. “It wasn't integrated,” Rebecca recalled. “We didn't have any trouble. There was no white folks there. Negroes went to the Negro school. Lincoln was deep redbrick and took up about two blocks. My class, 1935, was the last one to graduate from there before they built another Lincoln School up on Twenty-Second and Brooklyn. Every morning Mama got all of us up. We dressed and got our lunches in pails or what have you and left, cleaned up straight and dressed. You had to be clean in those days. Your parents took pride in how you looked and how you carried yourself.”

Charlie and Rebecca walked to school together. “You can believe he didn't carry his lunch to school. Oh, no. He carried my books.” But times were hard, and Rebecca was aware that her family was under more straitened circumstances than Addie Parker's. “Charlie Parker was given money because Addie Parker had money,” she said. “Daddy had lost everything in the Depression, and we was on relief, doing the best we could. Not Charlie. He was taken care of—money in the pocket.” She asked Charlie about his father, but “he said he didn't know anything about him. Charlie never even talked about his father. Charlie mentioned that he had a brother named Ikey [John's nickname]. He didn't talk much about his family or anything. All I felt was that he was so glad to have somebody come closer to him and try to get to know him.”

Rebecca worked in the library three days a week, and Charlie waited for her until her job was over at five o'clock. Every day, while she did her two hours of work, Charlie would come to the library, collect a handful of books, and sit outside on the building's top step, reading and searching out information. He loved books about alternate universes and foreign places, some of them by Asian au
thors. Before he and Rebecca left for Olive Street, Charlie would put the book he read that afternoon back on the shelf.

On their walks home together, they started venturing into greater Kansas City. “We had to do something a little exciting, something [that] had a little thrill to it. So we'd come down through Nineteenth and Vine and kind of look over into the block where the Cherry Blossom and all the nightclubs were, you know. We would be holding hands and talking boy-and-girl talk.”

Sometimes, the wilder side of the city came to them. In the evening, Rebecca recalled, neighbors would come visit the two of them as they sat on the front porch talking. “For instance, [our] next-door neighbor was what you call a homosexual today, but we called them sissies in those days. His name was Julius. He was tall; he was handsome, light-skinned, looked like he could have been mixed, had almost Indian color, and he smelled good and he wore tailored clothes. Julius had a twist in his walk.” As Charlie and Rebecca sat on the front porch swing, “Julius would tell us about how he was going to go to this sissy ball that they would have on Eighteenth and Vine where there was a tent and the men would wear women's clothes. Yes, they did! They wore big hats and big beautiful dresses. They wanted to be something like girls. I
guess
that's what they wanted. Anyway, that's what they
did
and everybody knew it and that's all there was to it!” He seemed unabashed about his sexuality: “Julius didn't hide what he was. He didn't have to. Kansas City wasn't like that. If you knew how to handle yourself, if you was a nice person, you had your business and I had mine. Everything was clear way back then.”

Charlie's circle of friends was limited, but Rebecca found him insatiably curious. “He had to ask people questions. How else could he learn? Miss Parker didn't talk to him about nothing. She wasn't there for him in that way. . . . Charlie had to do it all by himself.”

One subject of his curiosity was a neighborhood girl Rebecca remembered quite well. “This girl named Zephyr was crazy about Charlie, and she told me that he wanted to know how to do things. She lived right up the street on the corner of Sixteenth and Olive. Zephyr went to school with us and she had a big, big bust. . . . We were still girls, and she was looking like a woman—and acting like one, too! Zephyr was kind of wild, almost like the girls on the street, the
working girls, you know. Well, maybe she wasn't that bad, but at the time she
seemed
like it.” Zephyr filled Charlie's ears with details of the goings-on around the neighborhood. “In Kansas City they had basements because of the tornadoes, you know. You could hide down in there and get with somebody in secret. That's what she said. Yes, she
did
. You had to believe her because Zephyr was one of those that did things the rest of us didn't do, and she said Charlie asked her about what she did. He didn't ask me.” It must have been quite an education. “Charlie knew a lot about a lot of things that I didn't teach him. . . . Charlie could have learned some of that from girls like Zephyr.”

Mama Ruffin watched her daughters like a hawk—as, for instance, when Rebecca asked Charlie for help with her lessons. “Charlie would look at me hard and say, ‘Come on downstairs and we'll get our lesson together.' So I was down there sitting on his bed at one end with my books, and he would be at the other end with his books. Now, see, Mama knew that wasn't the place to be sitting, and she would call me right upstairs to get me
off
that bed.” Rebecca might not have told her mother everything, but there were ways of knowing. “It wasn't that hard back then. We didn't have sanitary napkins. Years ago, you would see sheets cut up and hanging on the clothesline. That's what we used. So you were watched, and in those days, your mother knew if your period was regular or not. If something was wrong, your mother could look for those cut up sheets and say, ‘I haven't seen anything . . .'

“So there was two things I knew not to do. One was get caught on Eighteenth Street, and the other was to mess up and miss my time of the month. Mama would have killed me for either one. Yes, she would have killed me.”

T
he kind of killing Rebecca had in mind was no more than one of Fanny Ruffin's extreme whippings. But murder was a real possibility in Kansas City, where corruption, gangster arrogance, and a national soap opera of criminals versus lawmen formed a backdrop of graft and blood in the town where Charlie Parker and Rebecca Ruffin were falling for each other. And the soundtrack to that historical force was the music known as Kansas City jazz—a music that benefited from a regime that believed
all
money was good money, no matter how it was obtained.

Between the turn of the century and the ascent of Tom Pendergast as boss of the town in the mid-1920s, Kansas City became the hub of what were known as “the territories”—Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Great musicians developed in Kansas City, and bands from all over the country passed through, playing jobs there and learning why “Tom's Town” was the central city of the territories. In the years that followed, a wide array of acts from Kansas City and the surrounding area—the Count Basie Orchestra, Andy Kirk's Clouds of Joy, Pete Johnson, Joe Turner, Hot Lips Page, Buster Smith, Harlan Leonard's Rockets, the Jay McShann Orchestra—would alter the sound of jazz collectively, spreading the propulsive gospel of riff-based swing, and individually, by heralding solo styles they had
developed in years of playing dance halls and jam sessions.

“In Kansas City,” recalled John Tumino, manager of the Jay McShann Orchestra, “the joints didn't have locks on the doors. Threw them away! Didn't need them. They were never closed anyway. Whatever you wanted, you could get it whenever you wanted it—girls, liquor, gambling, freak shows. If you had the money, they had it for you. Of course, it was crooked, with the mayor in on it, the police in on it, and the public in on it. It was as wide open as you could get. No limits whatsoever. . . .