Tiger Rag (18 page)

On the bandstand the patients’ brass band was setting up to play. They played the same stuff every month, note for note, including the wrong notes. Quadrilles. Marching songs. Old downtown Creole music that had no bite. And one or two numbers they called jazz
. Jazz.
What was that? It was like what he used to play, but without the blues. Where was the blues? Eleven patients playing music, and none of them blue? When he couldn’t listen anymore, he would wander back across the lawn and around the big house
.

None of the patients knew who he was. One of the doctors did, but he had gone away. He himself knew, but not in the way he used to
. I was Charles Bolden,
he once told a startled orderly, accustomed to his silence
. I was born two hundred years ago on Howard Street and Erato and I died many times since.

The band started in, playing “Moon Glow.” Terrible, he thought. Too slow. Like it was being dragged by a chain. Clarinet flat, bass out of sync. But there was a new trumpeter, recently arrived. Just a kid, from Plaquemine. Quiet, didn’t look crazy, but they said he tried to shoot his own father, so here he was. Playing hard, he pulled away from the others, their dead weight. But he could only go so far before they yanked him back. Dragged him by that chain
.

He knew the kid had something, and he wanted to hear more
.

They played “Rocking Chair,” which sounded awful, and
“Coming Home,” which was worse. He was thinking maybe he ought to leave. Then that kid stood up and played a riff to open “Get Out of Here”—a song
he
had written, that his band used to play at the end of dances at the rougher joints, in Algiers and in Arabi by the slaughterhouse. The kid almost hit it, but stopped, and the others got that one wrong, too. Played it too slow and too long. You’re supposed to play it fast and loud and then get out, just like the song says. They followed that with “Lord, Take Me,” and then, finally, laid down their instruments and filed off the bandstand
.

There was clapping. Everyone stood up and drifted toward the lawn. He didn’t follow them. Instead, he did something he had never done before and would never do again. Maybe it was that kid. Remembering how he himself used to play in Plaquemine. The prettiest girls came from there. There was a big loading platform by the railroad station where bands played in the open air. All afternoon, drinking beer from buckets, while hundreds of people danced, kicking up a world of dust. And every so often a train steamed in and passengers leaned out the windows clapping and shouting
.

He walked past everyone, not looking at any of them, straight to the bandstand, up the steps, keeping steady. The cedar planks creaked. He touched the railing with his left hand and his right, so that he could know this was happening now, outside of him. He touched each musician’s chair until he reached the kid’s chair, with the trumpet. He looked at the trumpet, catching reflections, his own face elongated, his hand—huge—reaching for it. It was a cheap instrument, tarnished and dented, the valves worn. He had not touched a cornet or trumpet in twenty-five years. He picked it up. It was heavy—nothing like his old Conn cornets, so perfectly balanced
.
He turned to the rows of chairs. A few people stood watching him, most were still shuffling away
.

He drew in his breath and pressed the mouthpiece to his lips and blew. That first note nearly split him in half. He blew it again, and the next note came, and the next, and then the notes were flying away from him. Up and out over the trees, the wall, the big house. The riff emerged smooth and clear, as if he had been playing it every day—those opening bars he had snatched out of the air at the Hotel Balfour one hundred twenty years ago. Climbing, peaking, exploding
.

Now everyone turned to look. After twenty-four years of isolation, Patient Number 7742, who had never listened to a radio or seen a vinyl disk, never heard of Louis Armstrong or Joe Oliver, was playing jazz that sounded contemporary to the doctors and orderlies who left the grounds at the end of the day, went to nightclubs, and heard the latest music on their radios. One orderly asked a nurse
, How the hell can he play like that?
The piece of music he played had become a staple of bands from New Orleans to Chicago, but no one on the lawn of the state asylum that afternoon had ever heard anyone play it like this. In 1931 Charles Bolden picked up where he had left off in 1906, just that once stepping back into real time by way of his music, which had thrived in the outside world while he himself was wasting away. It was as if, for a few minutes, without being remotely aware of it, much less imagining the possibility in such grand terms, he had been allowed to participate in his own immortality
.

The piece was “Tiger Rag.”

He stopped playing at the reprise, and before he opened his eyes felt all those eyes on him, the last notes still reverberating. Many of the patients, and nearly all the caretakers, were
stunned, ready to applaud, but he avoided that, placing the trumpet back on the chair and hurrying down the steps, not even touching the railing and never looking back as he crossed the lawn
.

In his room he lay still on his bed. He pulled the woolen blanket over him despite the heat. His hands were shaking. A moth was ticking against the overhead light. A fan was whirring in the corridor. His headache had returned, those red-hot splinters swarming the base of his skull. And he was thinking it was true about the starlings. They didn’t sing like birds, they sang with children’s voices, insisting nobody was going to leave this place alive if they couldn’t fly
.

If you can’t fly, you’re gonna die.

That was their song. A song he wished he had written himself a long time ago
.

If you can’t fly, you’re gonna die.

Five months later to the day, November 4, 1931, Charles Bolden died in the asylum’s general hospital, age fifty-four. His death certificate listed the cause as “cerebral arterial sclerosis,” which explained the vicious headaches and blurred vision. A Baton Rouge undertaker picked up his body and transported it to New Orleans in his truck. Bolden was embalmed and laid out for viewing for a single day at the Geddes-Moss Undertaking Company on Jackson Avenue. His mother and sister attended with a few of their cousins. Bankrupted by Charley’s incarceration, living in a cramped two-room house at 2338 Philip Street, Alice and Cora Bolden would both be dead within a few months. There was no notice of Bolden’s death in the newspapers, no formal wake, no church service, no pallbearers
.
A musician of his stature was customarily given a large, boisterous wake, after which a band of his peers performed at the funeral. The great clarinetist Alphonse Picou, who played with Bolden in his youth, lived into his eighties and was accompanied to his grave by three brass bands and twenty-five thousand people. But Charles Bolden had been forgotten. The only musician to show up for the viewing was Willie Cornish. The other surviving member of the Bolden Band, Jimmy Johnson, no longer rode a bicycle with his bass strapped to his back; stricken with tuberculosis, he was touring for the last time, with a pickup band, in Alabama
.

Willie and Bella Cornish didn’t recognize Bolden’s body. Shriveled, greenish-brown, bald, he looked a hundred years old
. As if he was just dug up,
Willie remarked
, rather than about to be buried.
The undertaker had dressed Bolden in the brown suit his sister Cora brought. The jacket was tight, and he had to tear open the seam down the back. The previous night, Cora had patched a hole on the sleeve and sewn on two buttons. Bolden had bought the suit for twenty-five dollars in a haberdashery on Dauphine Street on a spring day in 1905. After he was sent away, Cora kept it in a trunk with his other clothes. Cora was a laundress, like her mother, earning three dollars a week. When it became clear Charley would not be released anytime soon, if ever, she sold his silk vests and English derbies and velvet gloves to a secondhand shop. She gave his shoes and shirts to relatives even poorer than her. That was in 1917. She saved two articles of clothing for Buddy’s funeral, whenever that might be: the brown suit and his favorite yellow shirt. Time had bleached the shirt white, so she bought a bright yellow tie for twenty cents, and they put that on him, too
.

He would have liked that,
Cornish said
. That is, if that’s really him.

It’s him, all right,
Bella replied
, and tomorrow for the funeral you bring your horn and play something, ’cause there ain’t gonna be no band or nothin’ else, from the looks of it.

And he did. Bolden was buried in a potter’s field called Holt Cemetery, beside an abandoned railroad depot. Before the undertaker lowered the pine box, Cornish took up his trombone and played “Ride On, King,” a spiritual Bolden was partial to. Then, after Alice and Cora left, and it was just him and Bella and the two boys filling in the grave, Cornish let loose and played “Careless Love,” the low slow blues Bolden wrote for that girl Ella who ended up working at Mrs. Vance’s sporting house after he was sent away
.

He near lost his mind for her,
Cornish said to Bella as they walked home along the river
.

Lost it before that, honey, all by himself.

The following night, in Rayne, Louisiana, one hundred fifty miles west of New Orleans and halfway to Texas, the Black Eagles threw themselves a party at Durand’s Saloon to celebrate an upcoming tour of Mexico. They were a successful band. Their leader was the cornetist Evan Thomas. He had risen fast in hard times. His father was a white man he never knew, his mother a black prostitute on Lafayette Street. He was handsome, something of a dandy. That night he was feeling especially ebullient. He had the band play an extended set for a packed house. He had just hired a new cornetist, Bunk Johnson, who at forty-two was an old-time New Orleans musician
.
Bunk had led bands of his own, and made good money, but those days were behind him. Flat broke, he felt lucky to be joining the Black Eagles. Most of their jobs were in western Louisiana and Texas, never in New Orleans. Bunk was still lying about having played with Buddy Bolden in 1896 (when he was eleven years old) and tutored Louis Armstrong in 1903 (when Armstrong was three). Bad-tempered and fast-talking, as a bandleader Bunk had become notorious for reneging on engagements and shortchanging musicians. Blackballed by the best clubs, he had been reckless enough to double-cross a Mardi Gras krewe, who promptly put out a contract on him, and he had to flee New Orleans altogether. Evan Thomas didn’t care about any of this: like King Oliver before him, he wanted to expand his band with a second cornet—a bigger sound—and he knew Bunk could still blow his horn
.

It was a lively crowd and the band put on a good show. Whiskey was flowing, and at ten o’clock the barkeepers broke out six kegs of Jax beer
. Drinks on me,
Thomas shouted, and a cheer went up. Getting off work, girls drifted in from the sporting houses, followed by a wave of crashers. These included the members of a rival band, the Pyramid Brass, and the Black Eagles’ former manager, Mickey Vincent. There was a double dose of bad blood between Mickey Vincent and Evan Thomas: Thomas had caught Vincent skimming, and Vincent had learned that Thomas was sleeping with his wife
.

Among the few white men in the crowd was a bearded stranger wearing a brown duster, a Stetson, and cowboy boots. He entered flanked by a pair of large black men in raincoats. He was darkly tanned, with deep crow’s-feet and dusty gray hair. He walked with a limp. Plenty of Texans passed through Rayne, but this man was from Provo, Utah. He had arrived
there penniless from St. Louis over twenty years before, ragged and badly beaten, his left leg fractured, his jaw broken. For the next fifteen years, nursing his resentments, he scratched out a living as a field hand and truck driver. At the age of forty, he gambled his meager savings on a prospecting stake in the Uinta Mountains, and for the first time in his life caught some luck, sharing in a massive silver lode with ten other miners. Even divided that many times, the spoils were huge. In addition to his share of the mine, he bought a hotel and a cannery. He built himself a big house on a nine-hundred-acre ranch. For a while, he enjoyed his prosperity. But rather than cooling those old resentments, each passing year fueled his desire to settle scores. He was in Rayne that night to settle the biggest of them
.