Friday, July 7, 1933
God, I’ve prayed all night. Did you hear me, God? How can this be happening to me? I know I didn’t go to church. I know I lived like You weren’t there, like I wouldn’t have to pay my bill to You. Maybe You don’t want to hear from me because of what I am. I didn’t choose to be this way, Lord, You know I didn’t. And anyway, aren’t we all Your children? Isn’t Your Kingdom of Heaven for all of us? Forgive me for what I am. If I could stop right now, I would, but it’s not left just to me anymore, Lord. Would it please You if I killed myself? Isn’t life Yours to give and Yours to take? Please, God, if You didn’t hear me, just read this. Yes, I used to play music on Sunday so people could dance and have a good time, and I drank and took dope, but not out of meanness; for money, yes, to live on or just to have fun sometimes, but not to be mean, Lord. You know I’ve been more afraid than mean. I’ve turned the other cheek a thousand times. I’ve not hurt anyone, because I can’t. Doesn’t Your word say “Blessed are the meek for they shall see God?” Lord Jesus God, Holiest of Spirits, help this poor Negro so far from home and in the deserts with Satan and the serpents. Don’t forsake me, Lord. Hear me, Oh God! I’ll do anything You want, anything, that I can do. Just give me a sign. Let me know You’re listening or reading, Lord. Or, Lord, is this Your will, visiting trial and tribulation upon Your obedient servant? If it is, Lord, give me the strength to bear this heavy, heavy cross. Thy will be done, Almighty Lord, but why me?
Fri., July 28, 1933
I have written to everyone I could think of, including Malcolm. From America, from France, even Spain, no answer. Of course, Dieter Lange takes my letters and mails them. He says. But I have no way of knowing whether he has or not. Camp regulations allow us to write. A few prisoners have been released, but the parole conditions are severe. One prisoner named Nefzger, Dieter Lange told me, was found dead. The prosecutor from Munich claims he was murdered by the SS guards. Dieter Lange says that’s nonsense. The prosecutor, Winterberger, also claims that three other prisoners—Hausman, Schloss, and Strauss—in spite of what the camp doctor says, may have died from “external causes.” I think about running away. That wouldn’t be easy. Black skin in pink Germany. Yet Switzerland is only a few hour’s hard driving away, I think. I’d have to walk, I think. So near, so far. Like a blues. Mr. Wooding used to say that was the blues, what white folk called a “lament,” because what you were lamenting or feeling blue about was what you knew but couldn’t do anything about. So you sang or played, and that helped to make things a little better. That was African, Mr. Wooding said, because you were at least saying things were out of your control. I liked Mr. Wooding, but it was coming to Berlin that was like moving up from darkness into the light. (It pleasures me to think back like this, instead of thinking of right now.) James Europe’s army band certainly brought jazz music to Europe. I wonder where he got that name. Maybe his folks way, way back, after slavery, just made it up, thinking Europe was the farthest place from Jim Crow they could get. He made this place stomp and jazz.
In New York you could say you were a musician, but they weren’t so keen on putting black folks in the limelight, so to speak. They liked all those white mammy singers with burnt cork on their faces. The white companies—Cameo, Paramount, Okeh, Black Swan, Columbia—did record a few colored entertainers, but didn’t pay them much, not even Ma Rainey or Miss Bessie Smith, King Oliver or Louis Armstrong, Kid Orey, Fletcher Henderson, or Duke Ellington. Mr. Wooding’s band was recorded only by European companies, like Parlophone, Pathe France, and the other French company, Polydor. No, didn’t pay as much as they paid white entertainers. There were a few clubs where you could work, but you had to toe the line or those gangsters would put your butt in the street—maybe with holes in it. Sometimes we had to play behind great big palm plants so the customers couldn’t see us.
Most of the clubs were uptown, and unless you were an entertainer of some kind, the most you could do in those places was cook, maybe wait tables, shine shoes, or clean up. But in the end, it didn’t matter if you could shout some blues or boot a rag. You were just a jigaboo, and that’s all there was to it, and all those white swells from downtown couldn’t change things much. Mr. Wooding told me that a lot of times.
Mr. Wooding came out of Philadelphia and got his first band in 1920. Everybody up North had heard of Storyville, but they wanted you to prove you knew what you were doing. I proved it. Mr. Wooding sometimes thought it was more important for him to stand up there with a baton like Paul Whiteman than play the piano. His left hand wasn’t a bear, anyway.
We were playing the Club Alabam one night. At the end of the second set, a white man came up and started kissing everybody (and everybody was watching me when it was my turn to be kissed, because they knew I was a fairy). Turned out he was a Russian looking to bring a colored band to Moscow. Couldn’t hardly talk English. Can’t think of his name now. But that’s how I came to Europe, through that Russian and Mr. Wooding’s band. We left New York in 1924 when I was 24, and we stopped in Berlin to open a revue called “The Chocolate Kiddies.” We may not have been the toast of the town in New York, but we sure were in Berlin. I was slick and sassy and there were more people like me than I could have imagined, and they were plain with it, right out in the open like I’d seen nowhere else. Ber-lin. For me it was champagne and caviar. For most Germans it was starving and people getting shot by the law every day. There were parades and demonstrations. Communists—I didn’t know much about them then and still don’t—were very busy. There’d been a revolution in Russia and it seemed to spill over into parts of Germany. Their leaders and other people were getting killed, people like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht or those Spartacus people. Myself, I couldn’t see why it was such a bad thing for everyone to share equally in everything. My friends who had money were angry with the Communists, but in the poor neighborhoods it was a different story. I guess people with money, or who hope to get money, or to keep what they already have, will always be hot with Communists.
I didn’t let all this bother me. I was having a good time. (The band even finally got to Moscow and to France, Spain, Turkey, and Tunisia.) It didn’t matter to me that it took a wheelbarrow full of money to buy half a loaf of bread. I was colored and I laughed because for once whatever was bad wasn’t happening to colored people.
A colored lady who’d been in Paris tried to open a club in Berlin. They called her Bricktop, a light-skinned lady, whose real name was Ada Smith. But her club didn’t last long because her musicians weren’t any good. She just barely got out of Berlin with the clothes on her back. I mean she left town about the same time Florence Mills was playing Hamburg.
You had to be a nightbird in Berlin. Mostly I saw things that made the District back home look like Sunday school. Dope fiends everywhere. You could get cocaine anywhere. They sold it on the street in perfume bottles, whores and pimps like Dieter Lange. The more queer you were, the better they liked you. At the new Eldorado in the Motzstrasse, you couldn’t tell who was a man and who was a woman, but that didn’t make any difference to us or to the high-class Germans who went there. It really seemed to me that there was that thing they called the German Disease, and I guess that was what brought so many pretties from England. But two things couldn’t none of them do was the Charleston and the breakaway.
Admirals-Palast was doing what they did back home with the Ziegfeld Follies and the Folies-Bergère in Paris, with the pussy shows, playing the Tillers, the Admirals, and the Paris Mannequins. Good thing they didn’t pull the bloomers off a few of those dancers. Josephine Baker turned up on a trip from Paris and set Berlin on its behind. There were as many gangs in Berlin—they called them clubs—as there were bands in New Orleans. They were yeggs, footpads, and cutthroats. One of my dearest friends was killed by a gang outside a dive in the Muntzstrasse.
An interruption. It’s the same day. Reading this over, I realized that I’ve said nothing about Frau Lange. She is young and just the other side of thin. I m
ean, she could get fat. She has blue eyes and blond hair, like a Kewpie. Dieter Lange was right: she’d never seen a Negro except in photographs. She treats me like a pet monkey. I wonder how the world still manages to produce people as dumb as she is. According to Dieter Lange, she thinks it’s perfectly normal for them to fuck every month or two. He doesn’t tell her otherwise.
She touches me often, as though to reassure herself that I am a human being. Twice she has found me crying and she sat with me, not knowing what to do, clucking and saying “Shhh! Shhh!” She asked about my father, who was killed in a fight in a turpentine camp; asked about my mother, who, when I was eight, disappeared the same time Preacher Pollard did. My aunt Jordie raised me until she died of the TBs, and then the District took over. It seems to me that Annaliese takes a pleasure I can’t describe in watching me. She is very proud of Dieter Lange. Why not? As purchasing agent for the camps in Bavaria and part of the Palatine, he can get everything she wants and maybe never had before—food, liquors, clothing, cigarettes, French wine and perfume, furniture—the cellar is filled with it. The kitchen shelves are packed tightly with cans of everything. This bitch has probably never seen so much in one place in her life. But Dieter Lange travels a lot. When he’s gone I have to stay in a rear room of the canteen and go to his house in the morning and return to camp at night. I think Frau Lange is not happy with that, judging from the exuberant greetings she gives me when I report in the mornings. She does not seem to like being alone.
The man with the square face and the sad eyes who lent me his shoulder is a Red, a political prisoner. The red triangle is for Communists and anyone else the government doesn’t want running loose. Some are people who just don’t like the Nazis—and made the mistake of saying so out loud. The prisoners may shout “Heil Hitler” when the guards are around, but when they aren’t, what they whisper is more like “Kiss my ass, Adolph.” Werner, the man with the square face and sad eyes, like most politicals, has an indeterminate sentence. He encourages prisoners to be strong. They are making the place bigger, because prisoners are coming in every day. This means Dieter Lange must purchase more food, clothing, and building materials, plus the luxuries it seems the SS must have.
Sun., August 13, 1933
It seems that I am a luxury in more ways than one to Dieter Lange. He has plans for me. I will help him advance his career. He will have parties and invite his friends and superiors. In spite of what Hitler and Goebbels say about jazz music, Dieter Lange says, nearly everyone who has ever heard it likes it. Of course, he would only invite those who did. They will be wonderful parties, he says, with me playing and singing, just like in a cabaret. What else can I do? Looks like he can find all kinds of ways to use me, and I can’t do a damned thing about it. Nothing. That made me think to ask him, again, if by chance there was any mail for me or if there had been any word about how long my sentence was. There was no mail, he said, and nothing about my sentence, of course, because he’d be the first to tell me about that. I don’t believe him, but what can I do? Who can I complain to? Werner said he would try to get some word out, but that I shouldn’t be too hopeful. Bert Brecht, he told me, had left Berlin and was probably on his way out of Germany. I asked how he knew, how he managed outside contacts, and he said prisons were just like other societies; some things continued to function in spite of restrictions.
Once he said that, I could see it. Of course! Doesn’t life go on for colored people back home, North and South, in spite of Jim Crow and prejudice? When I am in the camp late in the afternoon, and when roll call and the evening meal are over, I see the men sitting on benches outside the barracks talking softly, their washed clothes hung on lines behind them to catch the last sunlight. The intellectuals are together. Werner is among them. There are even prisoners who are Nazis; they cling together. They must have broken some party rule. And there are some army officers, too. In all, there are ten companies of prisoners, each of about 250 men. Number 7 company is the real bad one, for prisoners who need disciplining. These men always look bumped and bruised, with dried blood on their faces. Werner says they are flogged and beaten. Lumped together in 7 are prisoners with all colors of triangles. The members of Number 1 company, the one Werner belongs to, also receive heavy punishment for being Communists, intellectuals, social democrats, teachers, people who made movies, writers, newspaper reporters, and so on. In the whole camp there are fourteen other foreigners besides me. Number 2 company has Jews in it. They are German, just like everyone else here except me and those fourteen other foreigners. Werner says that Hitler has it in for the Jews; that the Nazi party is against Jews and nearly everything and everyone else except “real” Germans and German tradition. Werner whispered to me that the number of prisoners killed in camp is not three or four, but closer to fifty. How can it not get worse? While this place is being enlarged, ten other camps have opened, Werner said: Brandenburg, Papenburg, Konigstein, Lichtenburg, Colditz, Sachsenburg, Moringen, Hohnstein, Reichenbach, and Sonnenburg. Germany has become a dreadful, murderous place, he said, mostly because of the Treaty of Versailles. I don’t know anything about that, but he told me the terms of the German surrender were so harsh that the only reaction to it had to be somewhere, sometime, revenge. That time is fast approaching, especially with someone like Hitler in charge, who cries for living space, says Germany must have it.
Werner asked me if I was a Tappete. I told him yes because he must have already guessed. He said I was better off than those in the camp, but I already knew that. The thing to do, he said, is to outlast them, no matter how, no matter how long it took, and the prisoners had to work together, did I understand? I said I did, but I didn’t know what I could do. Information, he said, is power. Then he said, if each of the prisoners brought just one handful of dirt and dumped it in the Appellplatz (which everyone calls the Dancing Ground), we would have a small hill. That’s what information was, when it was all brought together and sorted out.
Thursday, Aug. 24, 1933
Dieter Lange and his wife, Anna, live in a medium-sized house along one of the main camp roads that leads into Dachau. Between the camp itself and this row of pink and white houses are the buildings where munitions used to be made. Like everything else, these are being renovated and enlarged. Today, I had to spend most of the time helping in the canteen. Then, as usual, I started back to the house, checked in at the guardhouse (Jourhaus) at the gate between the camp and the staff quarters, in full view of a tower where an SS guard mans a machine gun. The guards know me; there’s no problem. I can’t escape with my skin. I know it and they know it. My going and coming disturbs nothing. Yet I always feel like the gun is trained on the middle of my back. I wonder, too, if maybe one day a guard, just for the hell of it, will kill me and say it was an accident.
I hadn’t seen Dieter Lange all day. Usually, when he’s going on a trip, he tells me. So I wondered where he was.
I entered the house through the back door and went down to my room in the cellar. Dieter Lange called from upstairs. I hurried up. You do nothing at a normal pace unless you are out of sight of the SS. The stairs opened on a corner of the large room Anna had not yet furnished, though I had to keep the floor spotless. I came through the door and Dieter Lange swept up his arms. He had a great grin on his face. In the opposite corner stood a baby grand piano. It looked new. I’d never seen such a gorgeous instrument. I always played the box piano, because most clubs couldn’t afford anything else, and also the box took up less space. He told me to come look. I guess he had “commandeered” the piano, the way the SS seems to commandeer everything. He asked me did I like it, and I said yes. He told me to try it, so I played a few notes, and they came out so round and pure that they scared me. Too much piano for such a small place; it needed a concert hall. Dieter Lange nodded encouragement. He told me to practice. This room, he said, would be where people danced, that was why Anna had not furnished it. He winked. He patted the goola. Steinway, he said. Hell, I could see the name on it. From Germany, origina
lly, the Steinways were. Two sons in piano manufacturing. One stayed in New York and the other returned. A very special German instrument, he said. And then he left me.
I let myself fold down onto the stool; it fit like it had been made for me. I ran up and down the keys. This was the best piano I’d ever played. I laid on the soft pedal and somehow found myself playing The Duke’s “Mood Indigo.” That was one of his standards, but it seemed to work for everybody. I had all his records, and hundreds more of everybody who was anybody, when I was in Berlin. I played them right down through the shellac. “In My Solitude”: I low-sung that because it was for me, and while I was playing it, I thought how every other slow number I could think of was about love, man-woman love. Only person I think I ever loved was that strange fellow, a writer, from Rocky Mountain country. Never could figure out how his family wound up there in New York. He was sensitive about how black he was, but I always told him “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” and God it was. Called him my cowboy. He didn’t love me, though. They never did. “Ain’t He Sweet” came to mind and I ran it through kind of bouncy. When I started, my fingers were tight, bunched up at the knuckles, but the more I played, the looser they got. I played some back beat stuff, took it up-tempo, swung through some K.C. stride, and cranked my uptown hand with some bucket-bottom blues. When I looked up, it was dark outside and Annaliese was standing in the dining room doorway behind me. I felt like I’d been ten thousand miles away. Later, after I’d cleaned up, I sat on the floor in my room and thought of the band, thought of the way I’d tell it to a radio announcer or somebody else important: Well, on trumpet we had Doc Cheatham and Bobby Martin. Hank Cooper took over for Doc when we came to Europe. On the ’bones there was Albert Wynn and Billy Burns. Jerry Blake on the stick. Willy Lewis played the alto sax and Gene Sedric was on tenor. Me on piano (when Mr. Wooding and Freddy Johnson were not) and John Mitchell on the git. June Cole on the bass and Ted Fields on drums. I did the vocals. That was the band when we recorded in Paris and Madrid three years ago. When we first got to Berlin, we had three trumpets: Bobby, Maceo Edwards, and Tommy Ladnier, and one trombone, Herb Flemming. Garvin Bushnell was on clarinet. The saxes were the same, Willy and Gene, like John Mitchell, who was guitar. Georgie Howe played drums then, not Ted Fields, and John Warren played a walking bass. I thought about all of them, smoking muggles, playing the dozens, fooling around with the beat so that everybody would have to catch up, and then someone would run on out ahead and you’d have to do another 32 bars, which was all right. I cried in the darkness, missing it so much and wondering did any of them miss me, if they were asking about me. Then I heard Dieter Lange at the top of the stairs calling me in that tone because Anna had gone out to play Chinese checkers with some of the SS wives.…
Clifford's Blues Page 2