The Jazz Palace (6 page)

Honey Boy Bailey crossed the room, his buttocks shaking like Jell-O. “Hey, Honey,” one of the girls called. “You gonna let that doughboy sit in with you?”

“He's not white.” Honey Boy held up Benny's tanned arm. “Look at him. He's almost black as us. Besides this boy likes our rhythms. And you can see he's got the heebie-jeebies, so why don't you go outside and get us some business, Velvet?”

The man pulled up a chair beside the piano. “Okay, you just sit here and watch.” He stretched out his long black fingers that moved like termites in a house on fire. He took up the whole keyboard as his pink nails flitted up and down. His hands went in different directions while his feet danced on the floor. His elbows jabbed the air as he kept the melody moving with his right hand. Benny kept his eye on the left hand as he tried to figure out the chords.

Honey Boy played his rags and the blues, but then the tunes took off on their own, and Benny had no way of following. His right hand crossed over his left and Benny couldn't keep up. Honey Boy seemed to be using the instrument more like a drum than a piano.

His hands glided for an hour, a day; Benny had no idea how long. All he knew was that he couldn't follow the tune by just sitting there. And that this man wasn't called Honey Boy because of the golden brown color of his skin. He was Honey Boy because when he played, what came out of him was sweet and smooth.

When Honey Boy was finished, he looked at Benny, who was concentrating very hard. “What are you thinking?”

Benny shook his head. “I'm thinking about how you do that.”

Honey Boy laughed. “Well, when you solve it, you come back and show me.” Reaching into a jar, he swallowed a handful of poppy seeds. “Jelly Roll Morton, he thinks he invented jazz. But let me tell you, I taught him a thing or two before you were born. Now you go work on that, then come back for your next lesson.” Honey Boy laughed, giving Benny a pat on the back. “And eat poppy seeds,” he said, holding up the jar. “It's good luck. It'll make a success out of you.”

As Benny stepped into the warm air, he was surprised at how dark it was. He tried to ignore the laughter trailing after him. They were making fun of him, but he was too busy, trying to figure out what he'd just heard. He ran the music over in his head. There were two or three chords he could make sense of. The rest was a cloudy river with no bottom in sight. As he walked, his fingers worked, laying out a melody on top. He didn't even notice that he was heading the wrong way home.

I
t was called the Stroll, that part of South State Street where the music lived. The Dahomey Stroll to some. A strip of flashing bulbs, all blue, red, and yellow, where midnight was like noon. The music was coming from there twenty-four hours a day. From the Elite and the Vendome. From the Grand and the Deluxe. It was said that if you held a trumpet in the air, it would play all by itself. They called it the Bohemia of the Colored Folks. Rome, Athens, Jerusalem, and South State Street, those were the epicenters of the world.

Postal workers and delivery boys, hotel maids who cleaned toilets, and men who hosed down the stockyard floor, they went home, took a shower, dressed to the nines, then headed out again. They put on their fur coats and sharkskin suits, their felt fedoras, their boas and flapper dresses, and moved to the music, dancing until dawn. They paused at the dance halls and the cabarets, the thousand bars that filled one square mile, dining on hot chili, chop suey, and ice cream. Then at five in the morning they went to the public baths, took a long steam, went home, slept for an hour, put on their uniforms, and went back to work.

Benny ambled on. Blacks in their shiny green and purple suits, women in long white gloves and cigarette holders, sauntered by. He paused at the Dreamland Ballroom. Beneath the flashing lights bouncers in red capes swung open doors. From inside the sounds of horns and laughter rose. At the Firefly Senator Sam's Rhythm Band from New Orleans was featured. Even from the street the fast dance tempo made him move his feet, but it was almost too fast. He wanted something slower that suited his mood. He walked around
the corner at Thirty-Fifth until he stood beneath the flickering red light of a cock's comb.

The Rooster wasn't much of a spot. Nothing fancy like Dreamland or the Firefly. It was more of a sawdust joint that served ribs, but the music caught Benny's ear as he gazed down the corridor into a smoky room with a few bare bulbs. On the door a scribbled note read “Napoleon Hill on Trumpet,” and from the street he heard the melody the piano set, the rhythm of the drums, and the soft smooth rise of the trumpet, quiet as a secret, and Benny had to lean in to listen. He went around into the urine-soaked alleyway where a window was ajar, and he rested his back against the brick wall. There were no barroom distractions. No drinks being poured or voices shouting. No scraping of chairs, toilets flushing. No din he had to strain to hear above.

There was something sad in that trumpet he'd only heard in the winter wind. It was lonely as a boy who comes home to an empty house. A boy who's lost his rabbit's foot or a China-blue marble. Maybe he dropped it on the street, and someone picked it up and didn't know it was his. Or maybe they just wanted to keep it for themselves. Sad as an orphan boy, searching for his true father. But that sound wasn't only sad. It was something else he couldn't name. It went through him so that he didn't know where the music stopped and his body began. As the tune picked up and grew warmer, it radiated through his bones.

Someone tapped him on the arm. “Past your bedtime, isn't it, son?”

Benny shook his head as if awakening and stared at the policeman. Why did everyone treat him as if he were a boy? He was almost sixteen, old enough to be out on his own. “What time is it, officer?”

“Time for a fellow like you to be tucked in, don't you think?” The officer tapped his billy club against the side of the building, then pointed toward the street.

“Yes, sir.” Without bothering to ask again, because he couldn't bear to have his father come and fish him out, Benny caught the “el” north. It was an almost-empty train with two or three other people on it—night workers heading back, sleepy people who had to be at
their jobs in a few hours. He collapsed into a seat as the train rumbled along. He hoped his parents were asleep and that they hadn't noticed he was gone. If he had to, he'd come up with a good lie.

The “el” clanged as it moved on its tracks. The stifling air smelled of leather and tired bodies. Benny rocked back and forth. He shut his eyes. He went to that place by the window where he'd stood listening to the lilt of a trumpet he couldn't see. “Let me play,” Benny said, making his pact with no one in particular. “I'll do anything if you'll let me play.”

The French brought perfume to New Orleans and, with it, the scent known as oil of jasmine. In the brothels the whores dabbed oil of jasmine behind their ears, on the backs of their knees and wrists. “Hey, baby,” their customers chanted, “give me some of that jass.” In Storyville where Napoleon Hill once went to look for his mother, he'd heard the music they were starting to call jass. Once he heard it, he was done with ragtime. With jass he could make it up, and he didn't have to write it down. Nothing with jass was set in stone. One change led to the next. And change was what Napoleon Hill was good at, like a chameleon, he thought as he stood admiring himself in front of the mirror.

His trumpet lay polished and shiny in its case. He was getting ready to go where he'd never been, and he wanted to be sure he looked right. A large man, he was squeezed between the narrow bed and the dresser, straightening his tie and talking to himself. He shared this room with Maddy Winslow, though he never actually slept with her. It had been their arrangement for years that he was crawling into bed as she was getting out.

He wished Maddy was home so he could ask her if he was doing the right thing. She was good for that. Telling him if something was right or not. She'd weigh it carefully, then shake her head or nod, and over all the years they'd lived together he'd listened to whatever
she said. But today was her double shift and she wouldn't get home until late. Napoleon played trumpet at the Red Rooster six nights a week, but he could do whatever he wanted on the seventh, and that was Monday night.

So Napoleon was going to cross the river and play his horn at a white establishment on the North Side. He'd take Jonah up on his offer and stop by Chimbrova's saloon. All summer, until that ship toppled over in the river, the boy with the black eyes and hair like coal had been coming by the Shoestring Diner for his morning coffee, which he drank just as black. Jonah didn't sleep well and he was often late for work at Western Electric where he assembled telephones.

To make ends meet Napoleon did an early morning shift at the Shoestring, busing tables and pouring coffee, a few days a week. Those mornings he didn't even bother going back to Maddy's to sleep. He just went straight from his gig. By nine he was done. One morning as he was pouring steaming cups of coffee, Napoleon noticed the dark circles under the boy's eyes. When he asked if he had trouble sleeping, Jonah told him about his drowning dreams. “I keep seeing water, coming over my head.”

“Maybe it's your name,” Napoleon said.

Napoleon also had dreams of water. “I won't go near the stuff,” he told the boy. And he believed in them. In his dreams he wasn't in the water, he was on it. He was in a big boat, and around him the sea was roaring and waves rising. As he struggled in his sleep, ropes burned his wrists, and irons cut into his ankles. He was hungry deep in his gut and missing what he had to leave behind.

Napoleon recognized it as an ancestor dream, and it had happened to someone he didn't know but who knew him and knew where he was. Someone who wanted to warn him, he told Maddy when she held his trembling body against hers, only for the warmth, never for more. That was the way he was with everything. He had to be free, no matter what. No one—nothing, not even his horn—could hold him down.

Napoleon wasn't his real name. It was Edgar James, but he'd been Napoleon since he could remember. Even as a boy he'd had a
wrinkled brow and looked older than his years. He had small eyes and puffy cheeks like a fish, skin the color of cocoa beans, and stubby fingers with pink crescent nails. Until his first growth spurt, he was a small boy with a stubborn streak. A neighbor dubbed him Napoleon. The nickname suited him and it stuck.

Napoleon liked to hum as he poured coffee on his morning shift, and one day Jonah asked him, “What are those tunes?”

“Oh, it's just little numbers I make up.”

“You make them up?” Jonah asked, and Napoleon said he did.

“All the time,” he replied.

“You write them down?”

“Never write them down. Don't know how.” Napoleon pointed to his head. “I keep them right up here.” It came out that Napoleon played the trumpet. He had a regular gig at the Red Rooster, but Napoleon's playing didn't earn enough to keep him in his double-breasted box suits, his straitlaced shoes and gold watch bands, the brown and gray fedoras with the black bands, and what he called his roast beefs—the tuxedos he wore when he played special gigs. To keep up his expensive clothes habit, Napoleon worked days as a busboy and waiter at the Shoestring Diner where he'd met Jonah, then played all night at the Rooster downtown. “Most of the boys I jam with don't even know ten o'clock happens twice in the same day,” Napoleon told Jonah, “but I've got these expensive tastes I have to support.”

Jonah said that his family ran a small saloon where people came on the North Side and played ragtime and the blues, and Napoleon said if he was welcome, he'd come by sometime. Jonah hesitated for only a moment, trying to recall if a black man had ever walked into Chimbrova's before. But Jonah could not recall, nor did he care much about such things. “You'd be welcome anytime.” For weeks Napoleon had tried to bring himself to go. Now he felt he had to. He kept thinking about that boy with the dark circles and his fear of water who hadn't come back to the Shoestring since the
Eastland
went down. He should have gone sooner, if only to see if Jonah was all right.

It was just past eight on a cool fall evening as he straightened the lapel of his gray silk suit, his rosy pink bow tie. Taking a deep breath,
he adjusted his gray fedora and patted the gris-gris bags he wore around his neck. The first bag his pale-skinned mother—high yellow, they called her—had tied around his neck when he was six years old and left him on his grandmother's porch. In it was a mandrake root for protection and the skin of a turtle to attract a lover when he grew older. His mother knew what he'd need in this world. She tied it solidly at his throat, kissed him on the head, and, without a glance back, drove off in a borrowed cart and mule.

Napoleon had listened to the crunch of her wheels on that dirt road as the cart churned up gravel and dust. After that, his grandmother said, he always seemed to be listening. He listened to the wind blowing through the chinaberry trees, to the chickens clucking in the barnyard. He listened to the track callers joreeing as gandy dancers drove in railroad spikes. He listened to his grandmother, singing as she did the housework. Or he stood on the porch, eyes closed, listening for that cart to come back down the road.

When he wasn't listening, he was banging on pots and pans, whistling through blades of grass. He'd take his grandmother's washboard and thimbles and grind out a tune. He clanged on anything he could find. A neighbor who couldn't stand the banging anymore showed him how to make a diddley-bow out of broom wire. It was quieter than the washboard. He plucked at this all day, little tunes that grew out of the sadness in his head.

His grandmother decided he needed all the help he could get. When she taught him about the bag his mother had tied around his neck, she added one of her own. This bag contained John the Conqueror. John was a trickster who crossed the ocean with the slaves. He was always playing jokes on the masters. He made cuff links go astray and ham hocks disappear. He brought rain on days when nobody wanted to work. And sometimes a whip broke in two or a starving shackled man slipped out of his chains. When slavery ended, John thought he'd stick around in case the Africans needed him, so he found a hiding place in the roots of the tormentil plant, which grew throughout the South.

From an early age Napoleon knew that there were forces the eye could not see, things beyond his control. Every morning his grandmother
swept the house, the steps, the yard, and down the walk—not to keep it clean, but to sweep away whatever spells may have been cast against them in the night. She warned him against eating eggs from strangers because a root worker might serve snake eggs. Baby snakes would hatch in your stomach, slither through your veins, and drive you mad.

Just before she died, when she gave him the gris-gris bag with John in it, she told him, “You keep him with you; he'll make you laugh. Everyone needs a trickster in this world.” Though he begged her not to go, he was nine when she left him. No wind shook the leaves of the chinaberry that day. There was no sound of tires and gravel. The cotton fields shimmered like a silver lake.

Napoleon wandered out of Rolling Fork, heading south. That was the way he'd seen his mother go. A few miles down the road they were laying track. Four black men stood on each end of a six-foot railroad tie as the track caller sang. At each beat the men took the nuts out of the old rail, uncoupled it, put in a new one, took the bars, and coupled it back together. One rail, one minute, twenty rails, twenty minutes. They moved in perfect rhythm to the track caller's song. They were done before the train came through.

Napoleon caught the rhythm and clapped along. The foreman saw him, skinny and forlorn by the side of the tracks, and made him a water boy. All through the hot, summer months, he raced to the levee where he hauled a bucket back for the thirsty men as they toiled, lining the rails, bracing them. Driving spikes. Four to a tie, twenty-five hundred ties to a mile. It meant raising a maul sixteen hours a day.

At night they went back to the levee camp where the track caller, named Chance, played the fiddle. He played all kinds of songs—about a runaway boy whose dog showed him the way, about a man who convinced his wife he was blind, but he could see. Napoleon found that he liked to blow. He blew on water jugs as he carried them empty for a refill. As Chance joreed, taunting the men with his calls, telling them to line the bar, now raise it, now swing, Napoleon blew on the jugs in time. He blew on the grass reeds that swayed in the wind during a break when he rested by the side of the road. One
night as Chance fiddled, he handed Napoleon his harmonica. He showed Napoleon how to purse his lips and cup his hands.

One of the men on the line had a bugle, and he let Napoleon blow into that. Napoleon tightened his lips and made a high screech. He widened them and produced a moan. He pressed down hard and deepened the sound. As soon as he heard those blasts, there was no turning back. The owner of the instrument said, “You've been playing that all your life, right?”

“Nope,” Napoleon replied, “that was my first time.”

Napoleon tried to give the instrument back, but the man wouldn't take it. He believed Napoleon was a devourer of antelope horns and elephant tusks. “You keep it, son,” the man said, covering his face with his hands. “You'll be the devil's own bugle boy—of that I feel sure.”

It was the bugle that got him to New Orleans, where the music came at him from every direction. It came from the brothels and bars. He raced to find it on the docks where stevedores sang Negro songs. He chased after it in the cemeteries where he slept, but whenever he got close, it eluded him and came from somewhere else. He stood on street corners, dressed in rags. He blew so well that people dropped coins into his cup. When his cup was full, he pawned the bugle and bought a trumpet. He practiced using the valves, and then went back to the street corners where people kept giving him their change. One man gave him a toilet plunger and told him to try it as a mute. Napoleon gorged on what he found in the trash, ate what he was given. If he ever made money, he told himself, he'd wear silk shirts and gold rings and eat steak all day long.

He took a job in Storyville, thinking he might find his mother there. He accompanied a piano player behind a Japanese screen so they could not see the creamy-skinned women press their nipples into the faces of white men, the girls kneeling at their feet. Though he knew the whores were white, Napoleon couldn't help wondering if there weren't any high yellows passing for white. Or maybe not even bothering to pass. In every woman's face, in her voice, he searched for the smooth-skinned woman who'd tied a bag around his neck and left him on a delta porch.