Really the Blues

by Joseph Koenig

  “We were slaves too,” she said. “Slaves in Africa. Perhaps your ancestors owned mine. We didn’t have relations with them, but we never forgot what it’s like being under another people’s thumb.”

  “Your people didn’t hang around Africa. Cleared out the first chance you had.”

  “The first chance God gave us, yes.”

  “We had no place to go. We continued to live among those people who bred us and worked us like animals. As we look fairly much like them, once you get past the color, they gave us their names. That’s how it is in the best families in New Orleans, white but also black, the whites resenting us for not disappearing like history never happened.”

  “I see.”

  “Not in your worst nightmares,” he said. “Your people lit out for their own country where they could live with nobody over them. As Africa was no longer our country, we stayed with those people that had owned us. They still owned us, only now they called it something else. In New Orleans, things were better than in most places in the South because we are all blood-related. But there’s just so much you can get away with before they pull your horns in.”

  “Of course, we—everybody has heard what it’s like there for you.”

  “Not for me,” he said. “I made my way as I saw fit, not trying to pass, mind you—”

  “Pass? I’m unfamiliar with this expression.”

  “To fool people into thinking I was white. Till I was thirteen, fourteen years old, it was like I was white. All my friends were. I never gave being colored a thought.”

  “What happened then?”

  “I started noticing girls is what happened. Young colored boy is expected to act like a capon around white females. That’s the rule, you see. I had no argument with it. My argument was that I didn’t believe it applied to me.”

  “It made you angry?”

  “Angry at white folks? It would’ve, if they looked down their nose at me, and me as fair as them. That day never came. They were blind to what I was, those that didn’t know me. It’d’ve been different if I was one of those uptown niggers. How white folks treat them is a crime, but it isn’t my problem. Never was.”

  He stopped to look at her again. Though it was a gentle look, he held it until she lowered her eyes. He needed her to hear his confession, this girl who’d never visited the South, or been to the United States for that matter, who was raised among her own kind, and went to help them build a country of their own, who’d never known anyone before him who wasn’t white, and on whom it had fallen to hear his story, and to make sense of it for him.

  “What is an uptown nigger?” she asked.

  He dismissed it with a wave of his hand. “I had a brother. You wouldn’t think we were related, that’s how dark he was. Funny thing. White folks who knew what I was didn’t have a bad opinion of me for being colored, but sometimes my brother did because I look white. These things come up in Creole families. Come up all the time.”

  “You don’t have to tell—”

  “Listen,” he said over her. “We didn’t look at all alike. Not alike in any way. The most important thing for me was my music. Sit me down with my horn someplace where I can practice, even as a child I didn’t want for anything. My brother was the opposite. He couldn’t help but look for trouble. Nothing criminal, mind you, just general hell-raising, making a ruckus.”

  “Where you come from, a black boy can’t do those things?”

  “He’ll do it till he can’t any more, provided he’s prepared to pay a heavy price,” Eddie said, “something I could get around on account of how I look. Tom, my brother, he was out to provoke white folks. It was his hobby—no, his business, you could say, his jazz.”

  “Regarding white women?” Anne said.

  “They are the crème de la crème of trouble,” Eddie said. “Trouble that will get you killed. Tom knew better than to look for that kind of trouble, except when he was drinking. Or when there was no other trouble to be had.

  “Around the time he turned sixteen, Tom began seeing a pretty little Creole girl, name of Carmen, a kitchen maid for a rich white family in the Garden District. To look at her, you wouldn’t think she wasn’t pure white. Light as me, but with blue eyes, and dirty blond hair. But under the one-drop theory that they have there, she was colored.”

  “One drop of what? What is that?”

  “Blood,” Eddie said. “Somebody with a single drop of Negro blood is colored as far as the State of Louisiana is concerned. There isn’t any appeal from that law.”

  “Your brother thought Carmen was white?”

  Eddie shook his head. “Tom wasn’t suicidal. It was plenty that she looked white. Being with her was eating his cake, you might say, and having it too. It drove white folks crazy to see him on Canal Street with the most beautiful blonde in New Orleans, and there wasn’t anything they could do about it. It even drove his brother crazy. That might’ve been the best part.”

  “I think I see,” the girl said, “where this story will end.”

  “Everybody could,” Eddie said, “aside from my brother. All that was lacking was how it would get there. Carmen liked to tell people she was an Italian girl from a family on Bienville Street that had fallen on hard times. It was a bad joke that became dangerous when people fell for it. White boys seeing her on the street with Tom, they fell for it.”

  “They were outraged?”

  “Murderous would be a better word. Not just the rednecks. Consider Tom sporting Carmen on his arm past a new cop name of Reed Jackman, who’d come to New Orleans from the Mobile, Alabama, police. Each time he spied my brother with his sweet blond girlfriend, Jackman’s blood would percolate, you know, he couldn’t abide them being together. New Years Eve I went down to the French Quarter with Tom and Carmen to hear the marching bands and watch the fireworks on the river. I had just ducked inside a store on Royal Street to pick up a pack of Juicy Fruit when Jackman called my brother over and asked him what he was doing with this young white girl.

  “‘Season’s greetin’s, and a happy 1929 to you, Officer Reed,’ Tom said to him. It left Jackman’s jaw hanging slack. In his thirty-five years on earth, I don’t believe he had ever heard a colored boy speak to him like that, like they were born of the same kind. Tom wasn’t being his uppity self. It was New Years, he was out with his girl, having fun, and all he meant was for Jackman to be happy, too, wasn’t it great being alive. I came out of the store with my gum in time to see Jackman trying to make up his mind what to do. That’s when Carmen put one of those streamer horns in her lips and tooted it. It made the buzzing sound that they do as it unfurled, and the end of it, it hit Jackman on the tip of his nose. Snapped him out of his trance, you could say.”

  Eddie stopped for the girl’s questions. She had said that she knew where the story was headed, and now she wanted details. He would let her have all she could stand with his take on them.

  “He arrested your brother?”

  “Cops don’t arrest a Negro without humiliating him first, making him feel he isn’t worth what you scrape off your heel on the curbstone. He asked again where he was going with this blond young lady.”

  “None of you told him she wasn’t white?”

  “Tom had exhausted his good cheer,” Eddie said. “He said, ‘Ain’t no law against it.’”

  “What about Carmen?”

  “He wouldn’t let her say anything.”

  “Why didn’t you?”

  “There is no law against it.”

  “You’re as stubborn as he—”

  “From time to time in the South, you will come across a white girl out to scandalize polite society by having the thrill of getting too close to a genuine Negro. Encouraging disaster is what it is. Not for the girl, of course, but for the fellow who is accomplice to such foolishness.”

  “You aren’t allowed even to do that?”

  “To my knowledge, no one has actually been charged and convicted of walking on the public street in New Orleans in the company of a
white woman. You have to sleep with her, which is a violation of the miscegenation law, which they also have there. It means—”

  “I know what it means. There are laws like it now in Germany.”

  “How is anybody going to know, unless they are peeping through a window, or one of the parties blabs, or it results in a baby? Cops like Reed Jackman are the guardians of morality and racial purity, bound and determined to stamp out miscegenation and its evils before, after, and while it is taking place. They go about it by separating colored men from white women at every step of the way. ‘Stop where you’re at,’ he said to Tom. ‘I’m taking you in.’”

  “You’re the older brother, you should have told him the truth about Carmen.”

  “Tom asked him, he said, ‘What for? I haven’t done anything.’

  “‘Gonna let a technicality get in our way?’ Jackman said. ‘You’ll help me come up with something.’

  “‘What you want to spoil New Years Eve for, Officer Jackman?’ Tom said. ‘Why you want 1929 to get off on the wrong foot?’” Eddie broke off, looking at river traffic.

  “Then what happened?” Anne asked.

  “I could see Jackman’s lips working,” Eddie said, “but the best he could do was ‘Wrong foot for you is the right one for me.’ Tom wasn’t listening. He took Carmen by the arm and started down the street, which is when Jackman removed his billy club from his belt loop and whipped it across Tom’s ear.”

  Eddie saw Anne nod. Assuming she wasn’t telling him that Jackman had acted properly, this was a part of the story she’d foreseen.

  “He was ready to swing it again,” Eddie said, “when Carmen yelled. It distracted him, and my brother lunged for his service revolver. I don’t think Tom had strength left to pull it out of the holster. Jackman sidestepped him and split open his head like a watermelon, blood pouring into the street. He had raised the club above his shoulder again when—”

  “When you rushed him,” the girl said.

  “How did you know?”

  “Your brother’s not the only Piron who isn’t hard to understand.”

  “Want to take it from here?” Eddie asked, not sarcastic, curious about what she thought of him and what she figured had happened next.

  She pursed her lips.

  “I came up on him from behind and snatched the billy out of his hand. It was that easy, but, like having a tiger by the tail, too dangerous to let go or back off from what I had taken on. He threw a punch below the belt that made me see stars. I brought the stick up into his face and knocked his upper plate half-way to Bourbon Street.

  “He didn’t go down. He had a hand inside my shirt, clawing at my heart, it felt like, going for his gun with the other. I pounded him I don’t know how many more times till he was at my feet, and Carmen grabbing my arm, saying, ‘You better get out of here, Eddie, cause you surely have murdered this white cop.’”

  Anne bit her lip.

  “I hadn’t, thank God. Busted open his skull, and cracked his elbow so it won’t ever bend, but he was still breathing, although I didn’t find out till I picked up a Times-Picayune at the out-of-town newsstand in Central Station in Chicago, where I had arrived on the first train headed north, the Panama Limited, traveling on the Illinois Central line. I haven’t been back to New Orleans since.”

  “And your brother?”

  “You know.”

  “That police officer didn’t kill him.”

  “Not through any fault of his own,” Eddie said. “I should say both of theirs.”

  “Who did?”

  “It was a trusty at the Angola prison where they sentenced Tom to fifteen years at hard labor for assaulting an officer in the performance of his duties with the intent to kill him. He lasted three weeks less two days.”

  “How did he . . . did it happen?”

  “Jackman’s friends on the police took up a collection and gave this other prisoner’s uncle two hundred dollars cash, and a Smith and Wesson revolver, new suit of clothes, and a Borsalino hat taken from the body of a suicide off the Walnut Street ferry as payment for him stabbing Tom.”

  “I knew it would end like that,” Anne said. “Didn’t I tell you I could see what was coming?”

  “Yeah, you did,” Eddie said. “Remember what I told you?”

  “That everyone could? Everyone but your brother?”

  “Even him.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Boyishly handsome Albert Speer, builder of the Reich chancellery and the Führer’s private residence in Berlin, thirty-six years old, with an IQ of 128 and the breeze in his fine blond hair, told his driver to stop beside the fountain in the Place des Vosges. Sighting through the viewfinder of the bellows camera strapped around his neck, he fired off several pictures of the cobbled plaza and the old buildings surrounding it.

  “Seventy-five years ago, all of Paris looked like this,” he said as he advanced the film to the next shot, “a medieval anachronism. Napoleon III instructed Baron Haussmann, his favorite architect, to make the capital what you have today, an airy metropolis of broad boulevards. The City of Light. Monsieur de Villiers is well acquainted with this morsel of history, but you,” he said to the two of the three men in the open back seat wearing leather topcoats with the collar turned up against the wind, “you would not be.

  “The Marais,” he went on, “is built over a swamp. Due to a problem with drainage that stumped engineers of the last century, this part of the city wasn’t incorporated into Haussmann’s design. Frenchmen with nostalgic feelings for the area do not recognize that it is a remnant of the primitivism of the middle ages. The narrow streets don’t charm me. I see them as the old cowpaths that they were, winding in circles among structures of no distinction. Real Parisians have long shunned the area, leaving it to foreigners and Jews. No one will miss it.”

  “Won’t the Jews?” de Villiers said.

  “Who will miss the Jews?” Speer answered. “If we were to empty the Marais of its population without rebuilding it, we would be doing France an invaluable service.” He swung around in his seat. “You appear somewhat reserved, Monsieur. You have second thoughts?”

  “Certainly not. But I don’t want to vex anyone. I have no love for Jews, but to turn out tens of thousands of them into the streets—”

  “German industry needs labor,” Speer said. “With so many of her sons on the battlefield, replacements are in short supply. Foreign Jews who have invaded French soil will find employment in our mines and factories. As an officer of the SS myself, let me assure you that we have plans for every Jew in France. It is why Major Weiler sought my involvement in your project. I can move the bureaucracy to expedite the removal of all foreign and French Jews as soon as you have obtained the building sites from their owners.”

  “What do you have in mind for the Marais, Herr Speer?” asked Weiler.

  “I envision a modern Cité du Führer, stretching back from the Seine a good half-kilometer. Medievalism will be replaced with sound fascist architecture. Like the people they inspire, fascist structures disdain soft edges and ornamentation. Buildings on such a massive scale are out of place on cobblestone lanes. The streets will be widened as in the rest of Paris.”

  “Wide arteries permit the easy movement of armies and artillery pieces so the lower classes may be controlled and the masses made to feel impotent in the face of authority,” de Villiers said. “Isn’t that so?”

  “You are a student of architecture yourself?”

  “Of history.”

  “I am a student of the future,” Speer said. “The Cité du Führer will be built to endure for millennia. When do you think you will have obtained sufficient property rights for demolition to get under way?”

  “The process is not moving ahead in a timely manner. Many landlords are reluctant to sell.”

  “You see, Herr Speer,” Weiler interrupted, “the influx of foreign Jews, while a tragedy for Paris as a whole, has created something of a boom in the Marais. The landlords cram additional
residents into every apartment, and still there are more Jews clamoring for space. The landlords refuse to sell because they are making greater profit.”

  “What do you propose to do?”

  “The landlords will be ordered to evict the Jews. The increased vacancy rate will be an incentive to divest themselves of their properties. With more Jews joining the thousands already sleeping on the sidewalks, the stench and the noise, the assault on public hygiene will heighten pressure for their immediate removal. Not only the Jews, but also other social undesirables, impecunious artists, Gypsy fortune tellers, street performers.”

  “You might want to retain a few of those,” said Speer. “A city without mimes, who would want to live here?”

  “Perhaps a smattering.”

  “You are to be congratulated for forging relationships unique in Europe under the new order. It sets a splendid example when French businessmen and the SS join in a partnership. Germans will be in France for a long time, perhaps until the new buildings turn to dust. There should be cooperation in every field.”

  “The redevelopment of the Marais is not our first venture,” de Villiers said.

  “What is?”

  “As an experiment, I put up the financing for the purchase of a nightspot on Place Pigalle. A jazz club called La Caverne Negre.”

  “I am a partisan of the music myself,” said Speer. “It is not impossible to be a good Nazi and to appreciate jazz, although it is easier here than in Berlin. Your club has the potential to do well?”

  “I can’t say that I have high regard for the music, or the musicians, if that’s what you wish to call those who make it,” said de Villiers. “For me it is the noise of the jungle, but I am not averse to profiting from it. The club will be enlarged, modernized, and with proper management will be the first success in our partnership.”

  Speer instructed his driver to continue around the plaza.