by Mezz Mezzrow
The band was mixed. I liked two of the colored boys especially, one named Yellow who played cornet and another, King, who played the alto horn. They were the boys who started our jam sessions at Pontiac, the first ones I ever played in. Man, it was wonderful to see the look in Murph’s eye when Yellow was blowing up a breeze on the cornet. It hit me just as hard. He played from the side of his mouth, with his left cheek puffed out like a balloon, and when he played the blues he really knocked us out. After we got friendly he told me about the bands he had played with in circuses all through the South, even though he couldn’t read a note of music.
After band rehearsal Murph, Yellow and I would get in a corner with a bass player and King on the alto horn and start to jam, forgetting all the written music, just letting our instincts take over. The blues came so natural to Murph and me, and we began to play them so good, that the Professor couldn’t stay in his office when he heard us. Pretty soon he was giving us special attention.
Bow never got to make the band; he was stuck in the yard gang on account of his size and strength. Just across the railroad tracks that ran alongside the band room was the powerhouse, and here the coal cars would pull up to be unloaded. It would really send you to watch the yard gang unload those cars. The best unloading team was made up of three guys who commanded a lot of respect in the prison, a colored boy named Georgia, a white boy named Joe Kelly, and the great Bow himself. They held the record for getting a car cleaned out, and they liked for us to play the blues in a medium tempo to keep time with their shovels. We accompanied them for hours at a time, playing the blues slow and easy while they kept heaving and chanting out loud. Their shovels slid into the coal pile with a long sssshhhh sound, and every time the boys pulled them out they grunted “Ho.” All day long they went on like that: “Sssshhhh. . . . Ho. . . . Sssshhhh. . . . Ho. . . .”
Many a time, when we were blowing away on the blues, Professor Scott would break out his trombone and join in. What a beautiful tone that cat had. Listening to Murph trying to imitate Yellow’s half-valve inflections and slurs, he got an idea. One day he showed up in the band room with a slide cornet, something that amazed us all because we’d never seen anything like it before. Murph couldn’t catch on to Yellow’s technique, and the Professor thought he might get those slurs and inflections better if he used the slide, because it gives you quarter tones and certain notes a little sharp, just the way you need them in the blues. The Professor could see how our eyes gleamed when Yellow played those beautiful phrases of his, and his paternal instinct began to jump. Yellow would make up a phrase and then give us some notes to play like an organ background, calling out “Hey, you make this.” That boy was really a bitch, even though he was never taught to play music. He had more music in him than Heinz has pickles.
One morning, all excited, the Professor called us into his private office, where he had a victrola standing in the corner. “Where you git that, Professor?” Yellow said, his face all lit up. The Professor put his finger to his lips to shut us up and put a record on. The music we heard like to outed all of us. It was the Livery Stable Blues by the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, now a real collectors’ item. Man, what a thrill I got out of Larry Shield’s clarinet weaving through the music, and the subtle trumpet that sounded just a little like Yellow’s. It gave us the courage of our convictions to hear that kind of playing from a record—if you’re on a record, we figured, you must be great, and here was a guy who didn’t even play as much horn as Yellow, right there on the wax. We spent a gang of mornings after that trying to learn the number, with Professor Scott jotting down the parts for the different instruments, but we never did get it straight.
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Night after night we’d lie on the corn-husk mattresses in our cells, listening to the blues drifting over from the Negro side of the block. I would be reading or just lying in my bunk, eyeballing the white-washed ceiling, when somebody would start chanting a weary melody over and over until the whole block was drugg. The blues would hit some colored boy and out of a clear sky he’d begin to sing them:
Ooooohhhhh, ain’t gonna do it no mo-o,
Ooooohhhhh, ain’t gonna do it no mo-o,
If I hadn’t drunk so much whisky
Wouldn’t be layin’ here on this hard flo’.
This would get to one of the other cats, and he’d yell, “Sing ’em, brother, sing ’em,” trying to take some weight off himself. Then the first one, relieved of his burden because somebody has heard him, as though the Lord had heeded his prayer, answers back with a kind of playful resentment—he’d been admitting he had the blues but he’s coming out of it now and can smile a little. So he comes back with, “You may make it, brother, but you’ll never be the same.” And now some third guy, who’d been listening to this half-sad, half-playful talking back and forth, would feel the same urge and chime in, “You might get better, poppa, but you’ll never get well.”
Those chants and rhythmic calls always struck a gong in me. The tonal inflections and the story they told, always blending together like the colors in an artist’s picture, the way the syllables were always placed right, the changes in the words to fit the music—this all hit me like a millennium would hit a philosopher. Those few simple riffs opened my eyes to the Negro’s philosophy more than any fat sociology textbook ever could. They cheered me up right away and made me feel wonderful towards those guys. Many a time I was laid out there with the blues heavy on my chest, when somebody would begin to sing ’em and the weight would be lifted. Those were a people who really knew what to do about the blues.
The white man is a spoiled child, and when he gets the blues he goes neurotic. But the Negro never had anything before and never expects anything after, so when the blues get him he comes out smiling and without any evil feeling. “Oh, well,” he says, “Lord, I’m satisfied. All I wants to do is to grow collard greens in my back yard and eat ’em.” The white man can’t feel that way, usually. When he’s brought down he gets ugly, works himself up into a fighting mood and comes out nasty. He’s got the idea that because he feels bad somebody’s done him wrong, and he means to take it out on somebody. The colored man, like as not, can toss it off with a laugh and a mournful, but not too mournful, song about it. It’s easy to say he’s shiftless and happy-go-lucky and just doesn’t give a damn. That’s how a lot of white people explain away this quality in the Negro, but that’s not the real story. The colored man doesn’t often get sullen and tight-lipped and evil because his philosophy goes deeper and he thinks straight. Maybe he hasn’t got all the hyped-up words and theories to explain how he thinks. That’s all right. He knows. He tells about it in his music. You’ll find the answer there, if you know what to look for.
In Pontiac I learned something important—that there aren’t many people in the world with as much sensitivity and plain human respect for a guy as the Negroes. I’d be stepping along in the line, feeling low and lonesome, and all of a sudden one of the boys in the colored line, Yellow or King or maybe somebody I didn’t even know, would call out, “Hey, boy, whatcha know,” and smile, and I’d feel good all over. I never found many white men with that kind of right instinct and plain friendly feeling that hits you at the psychological moment like a tonic. The message you get from just a couple of ordinary words and the smile in a man’s eyes—that’s what saved me many a time from going to the shady side of the street in that jail-house. I had plenty to thank those colored boys for. They not only taught me their fine music; they made me feel good.
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Jim Crow made himself plenty scarce around the band room and the work gang, but he was standing close by, biding his time. When he finally showed himself he came on like a funky rat.
On Saturday afternoons and Sundays we were allowed in the yard for some ball playing and a much needed breath of air. The yard was divided into two factions—the colored and white boys who hung out together, and the Southern white boys who were always throwing sneers at us when we passed. Mitter Foley, Joe Kelly, Johnny Fredricks, Georgia
, Big Six, Yellow and Bow were the leaders on our side. The other gang was led by some mean, stringy guys who always looked hard and never cracked a friendly smile. They all had names like Texas and Tennessee, as though they were clippings from some geography-book map instead of flesh-and-blood human beings.
The real trouble between the two gangs was caused by the fact that Big Six, a colored boy, had a white “punk.” A punk, if you want it in plain English, is a boy with smooth skin who takes the place of a woman in a jailbird’s love life. I’m not going to apologize for Big Six; I’m just saying that the Southern boys had their punks too, plenty of them, but they resented a Negro doing the same things they did with a white boy. It was the same evil that white Southerners have about a Negro man and a white woman. Those Southern boys meant to draw the color line around their punks too.
One afternoon, when Big Six was walking around the yard with his punk by his side, the Southern boys ganged up on him and began to cuss him out. That’s how it started. At first it was just another fist fight, but in a couple of minutes every cat in the yard was at it in a free-for-all race riot. The guards began to blow whistles, shoot their revolvers in the air; a lot of knives came into sight before it was over, and they were put to use. When the riot was finally put down a lot of cats were cut up like stuck hogs and others had broken arms, bloody noses and gimpy legs. Our privileges were taken away for a long time and the silent system took over. The ringleaders were put in solitary.
Right after the fight I landed in the hospital with dysentery and I almost checked out. It wasn’t just the germs that made me so sick—my nervous system was so upset that for a while they thought I wouldn’t come out of it. All the time I was stretched out on the infirmary cot I kept looking at the blank walls and seeing the mean, murdering faces of those Southern peckerwoods when they went after Big Six and the others with their knives. It couldn’t have been worse if they’d come after me. I felt so close to those Negroes, it was just like I’d seen a gang attack on my own family.
I began to realize right there what the Civil War really meant. I’d been in plenty of tough fights back in Chicago, but never anything as bad as this one. The Tennessees and Texases wanted to kill every Negro they could lay their mitts on—you could see it in their faces. I’d never seen such murdering hate before.
When I got better I began to talk with Yellow and King in the band room. After what they told me I have never wanted to cross the Mason-Dixon line and almost never have, except for one date in Baltimore that I played with my eyes shut.
“Man,” Yellow said, “they’d cut your nuts out for lookin’, where those motherferyers come from.” King was a more dignified and scholarly kind of guy. All he said was, “Milton, in my home town I couldn’t even walk down the street less’n I got off in the gutter to let some white man pass.” When I told him about my buddy Sullivan back in Chicago, the colored boy who hung out with us all the time and played catch on our ball team, his eyes opened wide and a wonderful happy expression spread over his face. He gave me the kind of look an artist might give you when he never dreams you’ll understand his painting and then you dig everything in it, down to the last brush-stroke. King and I understood each other.
While I was in the hospital my mother came to visit me. She was crying when she came in with Judge Graves, the warden.
“Don’t cry, Ma,” I said. “You must not understand or you wouldn’t be crying like that. This is a wonderful place and I’m learning to play the flute and piccolo and saxophone and I like it here. They treat us swell, and besides, Murph, Bow and Emil are here, so I’m not lonesome. I only spoiled my stomach and I’ll be all right.” She left feeling a lot better.
I had an indeterminate sentence of one to ten years. When I came up before the parole board to have my time set they made it one year. Judge Graves said, “Milton, do you know why you got such a light sentence? It’s because of the way you acted toward your mother when she visited you.”
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On a cold February day in 1918 they gave me a prison-made suit (it cost me ten sacks of Bull Durham to keep the tailors from making one leg twice as long as the other), put a railroad coach ticket in my hand, and told me to go down to the Pontiac station and take a train to Chicago. That was one of the first coach tickets I ever owned. It almost seems as if I had to graduate from The School to stop riding rods, tops, blinds and boxcars.
Riding the cushions on my way home made me think of another train ride I once took with Murph and Bow. It was right after the sinking of the big excursion boat, The Eastland, when over eight hundred people were drowned off a downtown pier in the Chicago River. We bought up a stack of photos of the disaster and hopped a freight to St. Louis for a little adventure, fixing to pay our way by selling the pictures as we bummed around. When we hit Cape Girardeau, Mo., dirty from riding the rails and dark-complexioned to begin with, we fell into a lunch-counter to knock out some vittles. For a long time the waiter igged us, while all the other customers kept gunning us with their eyes. Finally the owner came over to us and said, “Where the hell did you come from? We don’t serve niggers in here.” We were given the bum’s rush to the sidewalk, our breadbaskets empty and our nerves jumping. In small towns we hit after that, whenever we saw a sign saying “Nigger don’t let the sun shine on your head” we knew it meant us too, although we didn’t know why.
That experience began to mean a lot to me when I thought it over on my way home from Pontiac. We were Jews, but in Cape Girardeau they had told us we were Negroes. Now, all of a sudden, I realized that I agreed with them. That’s what I learned in Pontiac. The Southerners had called me a “nigger-lover” there. Solid. I not only loved those colored boys, but I was one of them—I felt closer to them than I felt to the whites, and I even got the same treatment they got. I remembered that when Sullivan visited our synagogue back in Chicago, the rabbi told him that Moses, King Solomon, and the Queen of Sheba were all colored, and maybe the whole world was once colored. This made me feel good because Sullivan was such a wonderful ball player. They were right for kicking me out of that beanery in Cape Girardeau. I belonged on the other side of the track.
By the time I reached home, I knew that I was going to spend all my time from then on sticking close to Negroes. They were my kind of people. And I was going to learn their music and play it for the rest of my days. I was going to be a musician, a Negro musician, hipping the world about the blues the way only Negroes can. I didn’t know how the hell I was going to do it, but I was straight on what I had to do.
Most of my skullbusters got solved at The School. I went in there green but I came out chocolate brown.
2. NOT TOO FAR TANGENT
THE FIRST WORLD WAR WAS JUMPING THEN, AND ONE DAY ON Michigan Boulevard I saw a big recruiting parade that would have made Benedict Arnold sign up. There must have been five hundred pieces in the Navy band that led the procession, blasting away on a Sousa march. The blare of the trumpets and the moans of the slide trombones got under my skin, and as soon as I spotted the saxophones I hit on a bright idea. That night I told my parents I was going to join the Navy—they’d teach me to play the sax real good and I’d keep far away from any stray bullets.
I dreamed about it all that night. Man, I could see myself in a sharp uniform, strutting down the main drag blowing my sax while the chicks lined up along the curb, giving me the eye all the way. The enemy was nowhere to be seen.
Bright and early the next morning I shot down to the recruiting station to become a musician at the government’s expense. But when I took my physical the doctor put his stethoscope to my chest and shook his head. I expected the man to show up any minute with his tape measure to outfit me with a wooden kimono. “You’ll have to go home, son,” the doc said. “You’ve got a slight murmur in your heart.”
That was a bringdown. My mother almost fainted when I showed up on the doorstep without even a middy blouse, but she made a quick recovery and cooked up a big pot of borscht for her returning hero. From the rec
eption she gave me you would have thought I’d come home from the wars with the Kaiser in my vest pocket. That night I tore out for The Corner, to take up my old civilian post in the poolroom.
At first I just made myself useful around Emil Glick’s place, helping to rack up the balls and run the chuck-luck game, but before long I was promoted. You see, when prohibition came on every piss-ant and his brother suddenly fell into big money, and a romping crap game took over on our billiard table every night. I was made the lookout man and told to stick around out front with my eyes peeled for any signs of John Law. When a paddy showed himself I would tap on the window with a key, and in five seconds a billiard tournament was going full blast, with spectators lined up around the table digging all the fine points of each player. I got two dollars an hour, plus a bust in the jaw from the law every now and then.
Thousand-dollar bills were passed around like stage money every night at Glick’s place; the bank was known to be made up of no less than $25,000. A lot of the guys who hung around were squares who worked for their gold, more gamblers than gangsters, so there weren’t any shootings or killings around our corner. They were Jewish expressmen, cutters in the garment trade, cab drivers—easygoing guys who spent half their lives playing klabiasch, pinochle, and tarok, a funny game that was played with thick Hungarian pasteboards the size of postcards. Once these guys got hip to themselves and went into the bootlegging game, big money started to show up. In the crowd almost any night you could find such bigtime gamblers as Red Tell, Big Izzy, Nick the Greek, Joe Tuckman, Cincy Norton, Sam Cohen, George Turner, and Bon Bons. One of these guys made the front page when he ran seven bucks up to $43,000 one night and bought the Boulevard Hotel on South Michigan Boulevard. A few weeks later he hit the headlines again, this time after a police raid. That hotel turned out to be a dirty whorehouse under his auspices.
By this time Bow and Emil Burbacher were sprung from The School and showed up on The Corner again. Murph had joined a circus band after his release and was barnstorming around the country some place. One night Bow came up with a story about some barrels of whisky he’d spotted in the cellar of a poolroom, just a block away. His problem was a lock on the basement door he couldn’t force open. I went along with him and Emil just to show off what I’d learned about picking locks from old Schneider in the county jail. I opened the lock with a buttonhook, and Bow carried a fifty-gallon barrel out to a cab all by himself. At the Bucket of Blood, a café on Madison Street, we sold the juice for close to $200.