I stepped back from Ruby to attention as the captain went out. As he did, I said, “Mother, I didn’t know you were sick, what’s wrong?”
She opened her mouth to talk, but I put my hand over it and led her back to the seat. I pulled up a chair beside her. “Whisper,” I whispered. “If I talk out loud then you talk out loud.” She nodded. Ruby Mae Richards was a fat little woman some people called “Little Bessie” or “Princess of the Blues,” since Bessie Smith was “Queen of the Blues” and Clara Smith was “Moaner of the Blues.” She had sung with Louis Armstrong, James P. Johnson, and Fletcher Henderson, last I heard, back home. Sang “Nobody Knows the Way I Feel Dis Mornin’,” “Broken Busted Blues,” did a couple of duets with Bessie, and so on. She was bad, too, could punch out your average man, and that made people wonder just what she carried between her legs. Right then I was so glad to see another colored musician from outside that I didn’t care if she had cannonballs under her dress. Didn’t know her well, but our paths had crossed, like they always do with musicians.
“I’m so happy you could come,” I said aloud and then whispered quickly, “How’d you get here?”
“Oh, son (boo-hoo) it’s so good to see you,” she said, then whispered, “Willy asked me to come and see what the hell’s going on here.”
“Can’t the doctors do anything?” I hope I sounded mournful. “But how’d you manage to get in here?” I whispered.
“They tryin’, son, they tryin’,” she boomed, and then whispered, “I just laid some of that old ignorant mammy shit on them, a little Jesus-Christ-will-bless-you business, you know. It worked all the way from the French border and right into this slammer. You know how that goes. Just play the nigger. Niggers can’t hurt you. They’re funny. I also got some phony statements from doctors and a joker works in the embassy in Paris.” She paused to let loose a moan and some more boo-hoos. Then in kind of a half-scream she said, “Clifford, what did you do to get in this place? Didn’t I raise you better?” She put her arms around my neck and I put mine around hers and we rocked and whispered. “Willy came down to Paris and told me the letters he sent you through that German woman were coming back stamped ‘Unknown.’ We figured an old black woman doin’ your mammy could do better than a black man trying to get in here to find out if you were dead or alive. Are you in here forever? How much time you draw? What you done?”
Last time I saw her she didn’t have any gray in her hair, but that was a long time ago. I suppose I looked a helluva lot older than she remembered, too. I told her what had happened and what was going on now. This was between a lot of boo-hoos and moaning and groaning and sometimes we even laughed. I cried, too, because here was some home-folks, after all this time. But what she finally had to say wasn’t very funny. Whenever anyone made an inquiry, and Ruby Mae said Willy had said there weren’t too many of those, the response from Germany was that no record had been found of a Clifford Pepperidge. Everyone, she said, was afraid of the Germans, even the Americans, and nobody’s about to lay their bottom dollar or play their hole card on a nigger faggot, she whispered, any more than they would for a bull dyke. She smiled and I knew that what people had gossiped about for years was true. “I don’t know what we can do,” she said. Nearly everybody who’s colored had left Germany, and some are leaving Europe. Had she run into this German joker, tenor man, who’d sat in with Duke, Chick, and Jimmy?—Ulrich? I asked. But lately I’d been thinking, There’s a big difference between playing with someone, as the rumor went with Ulrich, and sitting in. She said, no, but that name sounded familiar—a big blond German supposed to be a friend—maybe the only one around in this part of Germany. Then she asked if I’d heard anything of Valaida Snow, who used to sing with Fatha Hines and was now running around Europe somewhere?
I said, “What can I hear about anything in here?” But I was thinking, If Ulrich’s a friend, he sure got a funny way of showing it.
The captain returned and stood holding the door open, waiting. The minstrel show was over. I hit the floor, ramrod stiff. The half hour had gone by like a minute. Ruby Mae, crying, embraced me again. (Ah-boo-hoo-hoo.) The captain assured me that they’d get her to the station and see she got the right train back to France. Poor old nice little mammy like that, but no additional visits would be permitted. I thanked him. Ruby Mae dropped to her knees like a bag of fertilizer and thanked him, too, and told him God would bless him for being so kind to an old mammy done come all the way from Down South, United States of America. It’s wise to thank all the SS and even the few SA for any break they give you. The captain said my mother had told him this was the only camp she knew about and so she came here. Wasn’t it remarkable that she got to the right place the first time? I said yes it was, but my mother had always been lucky that way because she trusted in God. I thanked him again for his kindness. And that was it. I had made some contact. Willy knew I was here and alive, if not well in spirit. I hadn’t vanished. A few people thought about me, and one even cut through the shit and visited me, but I was thinking, Oh, that fucking Baum! Oh, Baum’s fucking wife!
Thursday, April 7, 1938
Dieter Lange called me right up to his office the first thing in the morning. Before I could fix breakfast. Anna wasn’t even up. I took the invoices with me. He couldn’t talk too loud, because he didn’t want Anna to hear. He wanted to know who the woman was who’d come yesterday; he knew I didn’t know if my real mother was dead or alive. He was mad and he was nervous. I told him some of the truth, that she’d been sent by Willy Lewis to see if I was all right. It was all his fault, after all, because, if he hadn’t been running his mouth in Amsterdam to Willy, none of this would have happened. Not even Anna would have known about us (except that, knowing her the way I do now, she would have come to know). And who was the woman? It turned out he once had a couple of records by Ruby Mae. We went downstairs and I started breakfast while he worried. “No more visitors,” he kept saying, “no more visitors. Too risky.” I said what was I supposed to do if, if I ever got another visitor, and he wasn’t around? Was I supposed to tell the guards to kiss my ass? That brought the worry lines back to his forehead. He wondered what they knew at the camp commandant’s office. He was glad that Eichmann had gone; too snoopy, too quiet. Better off working on the “Jewish Question.” The more he talked, the more confident he became that nothing would come of Ruby Mae’s visit. The “mammy visit,” he called it, after I’d described to him how she’d behaved, and how she’d looked. “She’d be great with the Gestapo,” he said, and the worried look came into his eyes again. Once he seemed calmer, I went after Baum.
“Baum’s a crook,” I said. “Look here. See?” I placed the invoices on the table where he was having the breakfast I’d fancied up. He glanced at me, and then the sheets, but he didn’t miss a beat shoveling the food into his mouth. “This goes back a little while,” he finally said. I told him I wasn’t sure at first, what with Karlsohn and the others who always take what they want. “But see,” I said, pointing, “what they take isn’t anything like what Baum takes, and besides, what can I do if the guards steal the goods?” Baum was another story, I said.
“All right! All right!” Dieter Lange said. “Let me go over these invoices.” I saw that he was checking the imported cigarettes. “That fat little fucker,” he said. “That two-bit crook—”
Anna’s cry from upstairs startled us both: “What’re you two faggots doing down there, huh?” Dieter Lange rolled his eyes at me. I started Anna’s breakfast in a light-hearted mood. Baum’s ass was mine.
Wednesday, April 13, 1938
Last Friday at The Nest I was fooling around on the piano, not really playing anything that could be recognized for more than three or four notes. Ulrich came into the hall. He always comes at the same time, and I recognized his footsteps. They stopped. I had a feeling that he was trying to guess what kind of mood I was in from the way I was playing. He started walking again, but it wasn’t his usual walk. The rest of the band was in the kitchen, of course,
finishing up the meal. Ulrich climbed up, sat down, and opened his case. He strapped on his horn and waited for me to lead him into something. But I didn’t stop what I was doing; I just acted like he wasn’t there. Through the open windows I heard the babies crying in the nursery, and I damned them to death right then, not when they would become part of Hitler’s 600 new regiments, but then and there. Didn’t need any more Germans like those already grown.
If there’d been music for hate, I’d have played it because of that meeting in the ’Platz that had been more pass-by than meeting. I was still salty about that. Ruby Mae and Willy Lewis were wrong. This wasn’t the joker who was a friend. This was a Nazi, a superman, who was supposed to just appear and the machinery would be turned on right away for him. Oh, no, not anymore. I didn’t turn an inch. It was just me and him, with everyone in the kitchen or somewhere nearby, fucking, trying to fuck, or getting fucked, as they always did, until the beat and swing of a melody reached them. Ulrich waited. I gave him nothing, just like last week and the week before that. He shuffled his feet. I didn’t hear them, or pretended not to. He tapped them. I gave him shit. The only music I know about that’s got mad in it is the classical stuff. The music I was brought up with and played didn’t have it. I was looking for something that would tell Eric Ulrich to kiss my ass, but it wasn’t in our music. Our music signified, it was sassy, it was joyful, and it was blue. There was no hate in it. There should have been a lot in it. Maybe one day there would be, if not hate or anger, then the low-down gospel truth, the I-am-tired-of-taking-your-shit truth. Couldn’t call that hate music or mad music, just getting-ready-to-get-even music. I hit a chord that had so many angles in it, Ulrich stopped moving his feet, trying to figure out what it said. I kept creeping up and down the keyboard, thinking about our music and how this Nazi thought he could lay hold of it and still be the sonofabitch he was.
I heard doors squeaking open, felt eyes boring through the dim. This was the third week of this, and the guys in the band thought he must be good and mad by now. Maybe they heard something strange in the dissonant sounds Ulrich was now tootling. I was throwing out notes and smothering or snatching them back in favor of other ones. Our music never celebrated death the way white folks’ music did, I was thinking; our music rose above it or at least didn’t take you to Valhalla where you killed all day and ate all night and didn’t even have time to make love. James Reese Europe took all the fighting songs and built joy into them; the Europeans sensed that. For us, death was a Rambler, an Easy Rider; when the music took you through the St. James Infirmary, it remembered what love had been like. So I noodled and Ulrich tootled. We could have been a hundred miles apart. The bark and bite of the red, white, and black never came. Ulrich packed his horn and left without a word, once more, and the band came on for rehearsal.
Moritz eased up to me and whispered, “Is this wise, Pepperidge?”
I said, “Look. Fuck wise. Let’s work on ‘Lady Be Good.’ Give you a chance to work off some of that bitchiness.” Some of my anger was catching; rehearsal was a mess until Teodor just went off the scales with some bleedily-blee shit and I had to holler at him. They were mad at me because they didn’t know what Ulrich would do to us, but I knew he had to be Double C, calm and collected, because of Bernhardt. That’s exactly why I showed my ass the way I did. I ain’t no fool. I don’t have to let these jokers know everything I know. But we did the sets as we always did, a little weak now and again, and more sweet than swing, and I was wishing for the biggest brass section in the world to cover up the faking. But, however bad we are, if I cut the fool now and again, got down over the keyboard like it wouldn’t let me go, or sang with my eyes closed like the shit is even good to me, why, we got by.
The day after Dieter Lange and I had that little talk about Baum, Baum was gone. Baum was on the Baum, the “Tree,” hanging up there with his hands behind him. I didn’t see him; Dieter Lange told me. When they cut him down, he couldn’t use his arms, but they took him to the shower anyway so the prisoners who keep the place clean could help him wash. Unfortunately, poor Baum couldn’t use his arms to break his fall when he slipped, hit his head on the concrete floor, and died. Dieter Lange told me this after we’d made love. Anna was at a meeting to plan larger flower gardens throughout the SS quarters. I don’t know why I use that term, “made love.” I don’t love Dieter Lange and never did. He doesn’t love me or anybody else. What we do is fuck, that’s all. We are different men in strange times—but I never thought so strange that people would be killed to protect us, or that I would have to play along with his wife and her friend also to protect us. It had often crossed my mind and Dieter Lange’s that if Anna wasn’t around we’d be safer. But it was too late for that. So we didn’t make love, we fucked, sometimes with all the passion of men trapped by what and where we were. He had to save me to save himself.
I said to him, “A Badeaktion.”
He said, “Yes. It had to be that way. To protect us. You heard then?”
I laughed. I knew before he did. I said yes, I knew. A Badeaktion is a killing in the shower. You don’t need the SS to do that; there are always Greens or Blacks willing to do a favor to get a favor. Dieter Lange, stupid man, seems to think he is the only person who tells me about what goes on in camp, like my ears are stopped up and I am blind. There is a knowledge and a kind of talk that the prisoners and the guards have that no one else shares or speaks, and Dieter Lange is no guard. He likes jazz music, but playing it and sharing it with other musicians is still another world he can’t get into.
I lay there and considered that Dieter Lange, with the exception of my colonel and Menno, was the only lover I’d had in five years. But, here we were, growing older, old queers who on the outside would have fewer choices anyway, but here on the inside had almost none. We were a bad habit. But … Dieter Lange traveled. He had power. He could take what he wanted. How could I know what he did or who he did it with? My own urges seemed to come slowly, sometimes with blazing heat, most times not. Then I’d have to be warmed up, and we were not in a situation where that could take a lot of time.
Thursday, May 5, 1938
Yesterday I walked from the garden near the north fence up toward the main building where, in the showers, Baum got his brains splattered on the concrete floor. It was a nice day. There was a column of prisoners marching south about a hundred yards ahead of me on one side of the ’Strasse, and two other columns, one in the middle and one on the far side, marching north, facing me. At the head of the column on the far side were about fifteen Negroes or Africans—I couldn’t tell—and I was so surprised my mouth fell open. I know it fell open, because when I closed it, it was filled with dust. The colored men were carrying rocks down to the new wall. I knew they’d just come because not all of them wore the new striped uniforms, and they weren’t marching in step, and the old prisoners knew that whatever they did, they had to do it in step, whether the command was called or not; they had to watch the detail leader and fall in exactly as he did. I had to talk to Dr. Nyassa about the colored men, where they were from, what it was they were supposed to have done. There was another very large bunch of Gypsies brought into camp from Austria, Burgenland, wherever that is. But colored men?
I was still pooting in my pants with the fear that any moment now I could be in one of those columns, marching out to work or marching back in from it, marching down to the main hall to get my bowl of food, standing roll call, fighting to keep whatever I had from being stolen, worrying about lice and typhus and just catching a cold from another prisoner, worrying about bedbugs and time to shit. These days, I am afraid, running scared, even though the other prisoners believe I’m still lucky, still “prominent.” If God lets me through this one, He’s got a deeper believer. There isn’t a moment when I’m not praying or thinking of praying, and I have been since April 23.
We’d had two good sets; rehearsal had gone well, with Eric Ulrich sitting in. Things had gotten a little better between us. You could feel spring get
ting up in the air, and there was a smell of good green things out at the Pussy Palace. I didn’t even pay attention to the babies crying in the nursery. All the Frauleins looked good that night, and of course all the SS were turned out in their dress uniforms. That night made me feel kind of sad and sweet both. Everybody in the band felt it. Alex, Fritz, Oskar, Franz, Ernst, Teodor, Danko, and Moritz; all their solos were like nothing else I’d heard them play before that night, and I know I was the best jazz music piano player in the world. You can feel things like that, that you could cut the piano player at God’s right hand. And when we finished each solo, we came back together better than Germans marching, because that’s the way music is; it fits into where it came from, some place without a name, but some place we know is there. There were numbers we couldn’t ever play at The Nest, of course, and keys we couldn’t play in, but we were as close to the music as we could get, and that made us know we could do better if we had the chance. During some of the numbers I had the distinct feeling that this, being a prisoner of Dachau for all this time, was a mistake that any second would be discovered and made right. I suppose we all had feelings like that, and maybe wearing tuxedos twice a week helped. Maybe some of the way I felt was because Ulrich, before the guys joined us for rehearsal, had spoken to me for the first time in English.
“I understand why you were angry with me,” he said. “But I have to be careful—don’t stop playing.” I played and he apologized out of one corner of his mouth, while his sax rested in the other. Then we got into a groove. Just before the band came out, Ulrich said, “Bernhardt’s given his permission for me to drive you back to camp tonight. We can talk more then. Meet me near the front of the Parkplatz. Black BMW, plate number DAH829. Then he led me into “Sometimes I’m Happy.”
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