Still Grazing

by Hugh Masikela

  One evening Dizzy invited me to come down to Birdland, a jazz club named after Charlie Parker. He was playing there for two weeks. The place was jam-packed, and a gang of musicians were standing at the bar. During Dizzy’s break, the Slide Hampton band, featuring Freddie Hubbard, took the stage. Dizzy introduced me to Horace Silver, James Moody, Errol Garner, Melba Liston, Quincy Jones, Sarah Vaughan, Sonny Rollins, Max Roach, Charlie Mingus, Booker Little, Kenny Dorham, Lee Morgan, Donald Byrd, and many other legends and stars who were in the joint. I was semi-hypnotized from being introduced to all these giants. Then we got to Miles, still my idol. He was surrounded by scores of beautiful women and the musicians from his band—Wynton Kelly, Paul Chambers, and Jimmy Cobb. Miles shook my hand with a scowl and barked at me in his raspy sandpaper voice.

  “You from South Africa? You know Jeff?” he asked.

  I was tongue-tied. “Jeff. Who’s Jeff?”

  “Sheeeeet. You don’t know Jeff? Diz,” Miles turned to Dizzy, “this mother-fucka don’t know Jeff. He ain’t from no South Africa, man.” He growled and then, turning back to me again, he said, “You from South Africa an’ don’t know Jeff. You full o’ shit, man. You don’t know Jeff?” His face was almost in mine.

  “Miles, who de fuck is Jeff, man? Where he at an’ what de fuck do he do?” said Dizzy to Miles in an irritated tone.

  “Dis ma’fucker don’t know Jeff. He ain’t from no South Africa, man. Jeff’s in Sweden, baddest bass player from down there, man,” Miles replied.

  I jumped in quickly, “Oooh, you mean Hoojah. Hoojah got me my first job, man. Hoojah is my uncle, too. I’m sure Hoojah told you off when you first met, didn’t he?”

  Miles looked at me quizzically. “Hoojah. Who the fuck is Hoojah?”

  “Hoojah is Jeff,” I said. “Jeff is Hoojah. You don’t know Hoojah?” I shot back. “Hoojah can be really tough, can’t he?”

  Miles smiled. “Hey, you know Jeff? Dat ma’fucker called me a small boy; tol’ me I don’t know shit, dat Dizzy an’ Bird taught me everything. He blew me away. I ain’t never met nobody wid da kinda confidence like Jeff. Jeff’s one bad ma’fucker. Sheeeet. You know Jeff?”

  Miles hugged me and called Paul Chambers over. “Hey, Paul, Hugh here know Jeff in Sweden, say he got him his first gig. Sheeet man, you know Jeff? Jeff a bad ma’fucker.” Miles couldn’t stop smiling. Paul Chambers gave me a limp handshake, said, “Hey,” and then went back to talking with Jimmy Cobb. Dizzy left me standing with Miles and his entourage. He was working the room, greeting friends and laughing his famous “Oooweee” laugh. Miles kept looking at me and shaking his head. “Sheet, you know Jeff? Jeff’s a bad ma’-fucker.”

  On the afternoon of December 12, 1960, I was having a rum and coke with Peter and Bonnie in her apartment. It was cloudy, with a light drizzle. I was looking onto 82nd Street from Bonnie’s first-floor window at the drizzle when I noticed that it was not drizzling anymore. These were snowflakes—small ones at first, and then they grew thicker and thicker, slowly blanketing the block, slightly dusting the tarred surfaces with a white carpet of snow—my very first snow.

  “Let’s go outside and I’ll take a picture of you to send home,” Peter said. “Get your coat and a scarf so you don’t catch a cold.” By the time I came back from downstairs, where I could see the snowfall increasing onto our back porch, kids were already making snowballs, hurling them at each other excitedly as the white stuff came down in bigger and bigger flakes.

  We soon got tired of throwing snowballs and returned to Bonnie’s for a few more hot rum and cinnamon drinks and watched as the snow came down harder and harder, eventually making the street invisible as it got darker outside. Even the streetlights were getting shrouded in the heavy storm. I went back downstairs around nine-thirty and shortly after that passed out while watching the news on television. I woke up around seven that morning and it was still snowing. Mayor Wagner was on the television screen, announcing that all schools would be closed until further notice. Snow removers were being brought out to clear the impenetrable streets. The city had come to a standstill. I was lost in the whiteness.

  I was freezing my ass off in New York City. I spent Christmas day with the Kerinas, wondering just how many people had been killed in South Africa in car accidents, fights, and by the police. I missed my family, but I wasn’t missing my country yet. The weather warmed up a few days after Christmas. I decided to go and catch John Coltrane’s group at the Half Note. The snow was melting so fast that torrents of draining water were cascading down the gutters. By the time I entered the club it had begun to rain. I was wearing my Italian raincoat and trademark eight-piece black cap, certain that the warm weather would hold for a few days. By the time Coltrane’s group went on for their second set, the rain was turning to snow again. I stayed for two more sets while another snowstorm was developing. As it turned colder, the melting water turned to ice. By closing time at four the following morning, the snow had stopped, but the temperature had gone arctic. People were battling for taxis, shoving and cussing each other. When some of us tried to go for the subway train, we found out that public transportation had been suspended once more. There were more and more desperate people the farther uptown I walked. I tried to go across town, thinking that the East Side would be better. It was worse. By the time I got to Grand Central, I could not feel my feet in my shoes. I walked the next forty blocks home alongside hundreds of people who were freezing just like me. When I finally got home, my hands were so iced I could hardly hold my keys. I rang Peter’s bell with tears running down my cheeks. Shocked at the state that I was in, Peter ran a tub of lukewarm water and made me put my hands in it while he made a hot Irish whisky for me. My feet were stiff and my socks were all iced up. By the time I was able to open my apartment door, I had finished my sixth Irish whisky and was still shivering, seven hours after I had left the club. Peter kept reminding me that what I went through was only spring for Eskimos. I didn’t think that was too funny. For the next three days I stayed indoors, terrified to venture out in that cold again.

  On New Year’s Eve, Jane and Mburumba came and yanked me out of the house and took me to their apartment, where we watched on TV hundreds of thousands of people bring in the New Year in Times Square. We stayed up till dawn talking about Kennedy, Nixon, Martin Luther King Jr., the John Birch Society, the Ku Klux Klan, Mayor Rizzo of Philadelphia, Governors Faubus and Wallace, Barry Goldwater, Che Guevera, Castro, Lumumba, Ed Sullivan, Ray Charles, Chubby Checker, Namibia, SWAPO, the ANC, the Congo crisis, Kenyatta, Nkrumah, Miles, Dizzy, Miriam, Belafonte, Mandela, Khrushchev, Hitler, Native Americans, Langston Hughes, Alexandra Township, John Henrik Clarke, Tito, Lenin, Jesse Owens, Joe Louis, Wilma Rudolph, Sugar Ray Robinson, hair-straightening, silly old Louis Lomax, girls, boys, and our parents.

  After some initial struggles in school, I developed a determined routine, which helped me pick up the slack. Every day after fetching Bongi, I would first assist her with homework, then I would practice the trumpet lessons Cecil Collins had given me for the next five hours, with breaks to fix supper for us and walk to the store on the corner for some need or the other. After putting Bongi to bed, I would do my academic and music homework, prepare the next day’s clothes for us, and on certain nights do laundry and ironing. Bongi and I always washed the dishes together, with her doing most of the talking about her new school, her friends, her grandmother, and her cousin Nhlanhla, or singing one of the many songs she had composed in her little head.

  When Miriam was home, the three of us would sing together the songs of Christina Makeba, her mother, a traditional healer. Miriam and Bongi taught me many beautiful songs from this genre, “Bajabula Bonke” (The Healing Song), “Ngi ya Khuyeka” (I Am Suffering), “Ba ya Jabula” (The Ancestors and the Healers Are Rejoicing), “Dzinorabiro” (I Have Treasured My Traditional Heritage from My Forefathers), “Nyankwabe,” “Icala,” and others—singing them was itself a healing. I attended John Mehegan’s jazz improvisation classes regularly, ja
mmed every weekend with Larry Willis and his friends up in Harlem, did as much club-hopping as I could when Leslie or Jean would stay with Bongi, took in a lot of movies and concerts at the Apollo, Carnegie Hall, City Center, the Palladium, Birdland, the Half Note, the Village Vanguard, the Village Gate, the Five Spot, the Jazz Gallery, and Basin Street East, among others.

  At midterm, my trumpet, Brass Ensemble, and French grades improved. I continued to draw a blank in psychology despite the efforts of the teachers, schoolmates, and friends like the Kerinas, who all tried their best to explain the concept to me. I just could not get it.

  In the spring of 1961 we moved to Park West Village, a new apartment complex on the West Side. Some of the tenants were Ray Charles, Joe Zawinul, Horace Silver, Lee Morgan, Ray Bryant, and a host of authors, poets, designers, and visual artists. A few weeks later I finally met Harry Belafonte at his offices on 57th Street. He introduced me to his production manager, Bob Bollard, who immediately assumed developmental custody over my life. In the back of the offices was a large library with stacks of tapes, tape recorders, and a large working desk. This would become my workplace for the next three years. It was the library of Harbel and Clara Music, the music-publishing wing of Belafonte Productions. Over the years they had acquired hundreds of calypso tapes and recordings of chain-gang music. Researchers who had visited prison work gangs in the South in the early part of the twentieth century and recorded the music had sold the latter to them. Belafonte already had a sample of this genre on a record titled Swing Dat Hammer, which his company produced. This album captured the poignant beauty of chain-gang prisoner musicianship, the power of its militant cry for fair prisoner treatment, and the painful cries of men whose lives were filled with hopelessness. My job was to transcribe this taped music onto paper so that it could be copyrighted. I would be paid five dollars an hour, working after school. In addition to my salary, Belafonte’s foundation awarded me a stipend of $190 a month to supplement my living expenses.

  Belafonte was far better looking in person than the pictures of him on his countless album covers, or the movies I had seen him in, like Carmen Jones. Tall, athletic, and with golden porcelain skin and pearly white teeth, he also exuded the compassion and humility of the activist and philanthropist he was, with no pretensions of glamour or stardom. When he spoke, he looked you straight in the eye and spoke with simple eloquence. He was very unaffected—and this was at the time when he was among the most famous entertainers in the world. Most of his staff addressed him as “Harry” or “Mr. B.” Even though he joked around with everyone in the office, there was no doubt he was a very focused and serious person. His impeccable taste was evident in the paintings by Charles White and other great African-American painters that hung on the office walls, and his elegant furnishings. Harry came and left in a taxi, rushing to pick up his daughters from school after affectionately speaking with his wife, Julie, on the phone. His simple lifestyle was a pleasant surprise because I had expected a lot of flash, glitter, and fanfare around him. Instead, the people who worked for him were like family. That he was able to keep such a low profile, in spite of his box-office successes, millions of record sales, and sold-out performances all over the world, was amazing. Over the years Harry came to be more than just a benefactor to me. He has been a father to me, the strongest influence on my stage presentation, my community activism, and my commitment to the fight for human rights. Even though it took me a long time to finally come around to it, Harry always tried very hard to teach me self-respect, compassion for others, and, more than anything else, never to forget the people I came from.

  Over the weekends Leslie or Jean looked after Bongi. Although everything was going swimmingly for me, I would get terribly homesick at times, and there was still a dark cloud over my memories of home. I had lost touch with all of my Alexandra and St. Peter’s friends. Monty and Myrtle Berman could not write because they were still under detention and not allowed any correspondence. The only person who was writing to me was my mother. She kept me abreast with as much news as it was permissible to send me.

  I would often go to Central Park across the street from our new flat, find a solitary area, and talk to myself in all the different home languages I could muster. On one such Sunday afternoon I was talking township slang to myself in the park, with all the choreography that comes with the territory, hands waving, torso angling to get the point just right, totally unaware that a group of people who were watching me from a distance thought I had lost my mind. Concerned for my sanity, they had called a black policeman, who startled me out of my township dialogue by tapping me on the shoulder. “Hey, buddy, are you okay?” I was so taken by surprise that my heart was pounding violently against my chest. I was also scared to see a policeman. For a moment I had a flashback of South African police brutality. “Sir, officer, I am quite all right. I’m from South Africa. I’ve been here for six months and have not spoken my language too much. I was talking to myself, pretending to be conversing with some of my buddies back home.”

  The policeman laughed. “Oh, you’re from South Africa. It’s pretty bad back there. You’re very fortunate to be up here in New York City, my friend. Welcome.” With those words he stuck out his hand to shake mine, told me why he had approached me, and pointed to the group of people who had alerted him to my solo performance. The cop and I walked around the park, talking about New York and South Africa, and two hours later he shook my hand in front of our building and wished me the best of luck. I never saw him again, but his friendliness did remind me how fortunate I really was to be away from South Africa, where my people were being imprisoned every day for activism—and some just for being black and in the wrong place at the wrong time. Members of the liberation movements were leaving the country for Botswana, Swaziland, and Lesotho. From there they went on to Zambia, Tanzania, West and North Africa, Russia, and Eastern Europe, seeking an education and military training. Others were recruited by Cuba and China. Nelson Mandela and many of his comrades were on trial for treason. Word was that the CIA had assisted in nabbing Mandela after he had reentered South Africa from his trips all over the world, including Central Africa, where he and Oliver Tambo had established the military wing of the ANC, Umkhonto we Sizwe. Among those fleeing the country or being imprisoned or murdered by agents of the evil administration were many of my friends, relatives, schoolmates, friends of my family, and people I had looked up to all my life.

  I was in Mrs. McLaughlin’s dictation class one morning when a bespectacled, distinguished man in his early thirties walked into the room and asked to speak to her outside. Mrs. McLaughlin came back inside and said, “Masekela, your services are needed. Please take your trumpet and follow the man, he’s waiting for you outside.”

  “Hello! I’m Al Brown,” the man said shaking my hand and smiling. “Harry sent me to come and get you. He is recording Miriam at RCA’s Webster Hall studios, and wants you to come and play some horn on a few tracks.”

  That afternoon, I played muted trumpet on “Strawberries,” “Umqhokozo” (My Little Red Xhosa Dress), and “Ntyilo-Ntyilo” (The Love Bird) for Miriam Makeba’s album The Many Voices of Miriam Makeba. Harry produced it, and was bursting with creative energy, enthusiasm, and jokes—clearly enjoying what he was doing. He was driving Bill Salter (bass), Archie Lee (percussionist), and Sam Brown (guitarist) to the limit. The album was a huge success and garnered major radio play, especially by Symphony Sid on his WEVD-FM nightly program, Jumping With Symphony Sid. He targeted the three songs I played on, which transformed my rep around the city. Suddenly I was starting to command a little bit of respect, especially around the school. The young ladies were now extra-friendly, and in the cafeteria, people were asking me how it was working with Miriam Makeba and Harry Belafonte. “Do you really know Dizzy?” “Have you been with Miles?” “Do you know Coltrane?” “What is Louis Armstrong like?” The questions never stopped. The people proudest of me were Miriam and Harry. They were more than convinced that they had made the r
ight move by helping me to come to America.

  Ron Carter, Donald Byrd, Richard Davis, David Izenzon, Richard Williams, Herbie Hancock, Mike Abene, and all the other successful musicians who were going to the Manhattan School of Music became friendly. Ron Carter especially took a liking to me.

  Jean Johnson had basically taken over from Leslie Reed, and had more or less moved in with us by now because Miriam was getting busier, going out more on her own tours, and beginning to perform a lot abroad in Europe, the Caribbean, South America, and Asia. With my part-time job at Clara Music, I was finding it harder to spend as much time as I had with Bongi. She was really growing now. Her English was better than ever, and she was doing well in school and was crazy about music. She was blessed with the sweetest singing voice, had natural talent for composition, and always sang new songs for me when I was at the piano. One song, “Nhlanhla,” which Bongi had named after her favorite cousin, I later recorded as an instrumental arrangement with my first band. I knew Bongi was destined to become a great musician.

  Astley had an aunt who lived on Manhattan Avenue in Harlem, between 112th and 113th streets. Some days I would go with him to visit Mrs. Miller. She would lay some serious Jamaican dishes on us: rice and beans, sweet plantains, jerk chicken, fish stews, and homemade ginger beer, with the meanest meat patties this side of Montego Bay. Astley suggested to me one day that I should move out of the Central Park West arrangement and get my own place. “How can you live there with all these women, man? Why don’t you take a room over at my aunt’s place? These women are stifling your shit, man. You oughta move your ass outta there and get some space, ma’fucker.”