Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  A few nights later, on June the 4th, I came home from my office and found Tommy getting ready to go to a party some chicks were giving upstairs in our building. He was going with the super of the place, Harold, who was very friendly with us. I asked him to come over to the Savoy Ballroom with me to see Benny Carter, but he said he’d wait around for Harold and maybe turn in early because he felt kind of beat. Well, we sat around for a while playing records (he was crazy about some blues I had by Bumble Bee Slim and Big Bill), and then I cut out for the Savoy. I saw Benny Carter and got my business straight with him, but he insisted that I stay until two o’clock because he was trying out some trumpet players and wanted me to help him pick one. I hung around against my will. All the time something kept telling me to go home. It kept pulling at my mind.

  Well, I kept trying to run out and Benny kept grabbing me by the sleeve, and it wasn’t till near five in the morning before I finally dashed for a bus. Soon as I got in the house I found Tommy stretched out on the couch, window wide open and wind blowing in on him, billowing the curtains way up. “Hey Tommy,” I said, “get up from there, you’ll catch cold.” He didn’t budge. Oh, oh, I thought, Tommy’s gone and got drunk again, up at that party. I walked over and picked up his arm and shook him. “Hey guy,” I said, “get up off of there and get in the bed.” Still not a peep out of him. I looked down at him and a funny feeling came over me. Hell, he didn’t seem to be breathing. The idea flashed into my mind to get a mirror and hold it up to his lips, but then I thought of Doc McKinney, and I jumped in the elevator to go down to his apartment. I told myself I must be crazy, Tommy was all right, just drunk, and I’d be waking the doctor up for nothing. So instead I went on down to the basement, to the apartment of our friend Harold, the super.

  Harold’s wife opened the door, and I said, “Do you know whether Tommy went to a party with Harold last night and got drunk?”

  “Why, no,” she said, “Harold hasn’t been out of the house all evening.”

  I almost fell to the floor. By this time Harold had come out of the bedroom, and he helped me over to a chair. “I don’t know,” I kept repeating, “I don’t know, but I think Tommy’s laying up there on the couch dead.” Then I started to sob. “Give him some whisky!” Harold yelled to his wife, and flew out the door. Forty years later the door burst open, and through my tears I could see Doc McKinney in his shirtsleeves. “Mezz,” he screamed at me, “why didn’t you call me? Tommy’s still warm, maybe we could have saved him.” I was no more good for a long time after that.

  Then began a nightmare: cops, detectives, coroners all milling around, asking questions, accusing, grilling, threatening. Sitting there around Tommy’s body, they wrangled and whispered among themselves, and kept shooting questions at me. You can imagine what ran in their minds—a white man living alone with this colored man up in Harlem, and the white man doesn’t know where the colored man was born or any of his people or even whether he was married. All the white man knows is that the colored man was the greatest trumpet player in the world, excusing Louis Armstrong. The grilling went on for hours. All through the ordeal Doc McKinney and his wife stood right in back of my chair, soothing and comforting me. Finally the doc said, “Gentlemen, this man is my patient and I think he’s had enough, unless you want him to have a nervous breakdown.” Just as he said that a colored policeman walked in, the first one I’d seen, and as soon as I looked at him I knew he would understand. I got some RCA-Victor pamphlets that had pictures of Hugues and Tommy and me in them, and the moment the colored cop saw that he said O.K., and the questioning let up.

  Hours later I got some relief when Buck came in and saw us sitting with the police. He walked over to where Tommy’s body was stretched out and said, “Come, on slot, get up from there, I got some good gauge you can pick up on. . . . Oh, you don’t want none? Well, I’ll just light up with Mezz,” and he pulled out a cigarette and puffed on it, imitating a cat pulling on some hemp. What a guy Buck was. He wasn’t happy over Tommy’s death, understand; just making the best of it, trying to keep on going and give me courage. . . . Finally the coroner was satisfied that I was telling the truth, and he had the body removed to the morgue for autopsy. Tommy was wrapped in a dirty canvas cover and stood up in a wicker basket with bloodstains all over it. “What’d I tell you Mezz,” Buck said, “everybody goes when the wagon comes.”

  Now came a real headache: how to bury Tommy? I was broke as a fish, and when I went down to the union I found out the guy had never paid up his initiation fee so there was no insurance to collect. I finally took up a collection among the musicians, and I want to mention right here and now that one record collector, a fellow named Frank Tack, contributed $35 towards the fund. On June 9th we buried Tommy in the Frederick Douglass Memorial Cemetery out on Staten Island, and I still owe the undertaker forty bucks which he refused to take because he thought some of the bigtime orchestra leaders should have come through for Tommy.

  The police located a wife of Tommy’s in Jackson, Michigan, and she wired me to call her collect. I did. The first and only thing she asked about Tommy was what had happened to his estate. “Tommy’s estate is at the police station,” I told her. “It consists of one pair of soiled socks, one torn shirt, and a set of raggedy underwear.” That was the list of Tommy’s worldly goods. He was one of the more prosperous New Orleans musicians.

  1. For further discussion of these records, see Appendix 3.

  17. OUT OF THE GALLION

  GAY NEW ORLEANS! AND NOT A LEVEE, CRIB, RED LIGHT, barrelhouse or honky-tonk in sight. Oh, not the Gay New Orleans on the Mississippi delta. The streamlined one out on Flushing Meadows, Long Island, that Mike Todd opened up at the World’s Fair for the summer tourists. That’s where the law nabbed me again. . . . Mike Durso, a guy I knew, had the band out there. Being the sociable sort, and having bushels of time on my hands, I used to drop out there to gumbeat with the musicians and chorus girls. This evilest of evil days, little Frankie Walker scared up sixty cents from his landlady, so I’d have carfare and the price of admission to the fair grounds, and off I trotted.

  It was August, 1940; a mellow, smiling, sun-drenched day. I headed straight for the backstage entrance at the Gay New Orleans, and all of a sudden a burly guy in shirtsleeves was frisking me, running his expert fingers over all my pockets. He was the law, prowling around after some dope peddler who’d been working in the neighborhood, but all he could find was me with my pockets full of reefer. He had to make some kind of pinch to keep his batting average up; it was a dull day. He run me in.

  Down to the station house we went, and then he and another detective piled me into a cab and rode me up to Harlem, to check on where I was living. It floored them to find Johnnie Mae there, and little Milton, Jr., and on our way back they began to pop questions at me. Was I colored? No, Russian Jew, American-born. How in hell did I come to be living with a “spade”? Well, I had this screwy idea that when you loved a girl you married her, without consulting a color chart. What in Christ’s name did my poor mother and father think about this cross they had to bear? “What in hell should they think?” I shouted, plenty worked up. “They’re funny people—it makes them feel good to see their son married and happy.” Those two representatives of New York’s finest stared at me as though I had two heads. “Listen to this son-of-a-bitch,” one said, in a voice full of wonder. “The jerk’s a nigger-lover. Let’s send him to the Island.” He meant the city jail, out on Riker’s Island; he knew where the enemies of society belonged. If they let him write the laws of the land, you’d get the electric chair for color-blindness.

  Back in the Long Island City precinct house. They thumb through the books, digging hard, and find that possession of marihuana is a misdemeanor, violating some city ordinance. A pleasant gray-haired lieutenant books me, examining the pile of reefers they took off me and putting me down as a “suspected vendor.” “That’s interesting stuff,” he says. “I’ve been hearing about it for the longest time.” A lot of people on t
he city payroll must have thought it was interesting stuff: I had way over sixty cigarettes on me when I was picked up, and when my trial came up over four months later, less than forty were introduced for evidence. Too bad the trial wasn’t postponed a little longer; all the evidence would have gone up in smoke. . . . “Watch out for this jerk,” my pal the detective warns the lieutenant. “He lies every time he opens his trap.” The lieutenant, soft-spoken and polite, looks at him. “I can see he’s a low character and you’re a very distinguished high-class gentleman,” he says. “You know, I’ve noticed a strange coincidence here—officer and prisoner are wearing the same identical shirts.” We looked, and it was true—our silk shirts must have come out of the same box at Sulka’s. I busted out laughing. The gumshoe turned purple.

  They locked me in a ratty shoebox of a cell, small enough to give a chinch claustrophobia, and not a wink did I sleep because the Long Island Railroad tracks were right outside my window and the freight trains switched back and forth all night long. I paced up and down, up and down, two steps each way, fidgety as a tiger in a thimble. I was one drugg cat. . . . In a way, I was almost glad the law caught up with me. For a long time now, my wife had been after me to get another band together, but I just couldn’t round up the musicians, and bookings were not to be had, and economic conditions put the pinch on me so hard I was forced back to pushing the grass. For years I’d been bosom pals with oblivion. Now, at least, I was out of the racket for good. For two or three years solid I’d be able to practise—no rent to pay, no meal-ticket to scuffle for. When I came out I’d be ready. In some way I couldn’t understand exactly, I had a vague feeling that I was guilty of something, not of what they booked me for because that was no crime in my eyes, but of something that went way deeper—of being untrue to myself, a traitor to the spirit in me, running out on my real vocation and destiny. It didn’t make any difference that obstacles outside of my control, that I didn’t build myself, had shunted me off; I was still guilty. My guilt came from the fact that I had given up fighting, quit cold, thrown in the sponge. My crime was to lose hope. It would be a kind of relief, almost, to pay for my sins, the sins that weren’t on the books, the ones the city never passed any ordinances about. I would make up for everything by perfecting myself as a musician, and when I came out I would never stray away from my real calling again, never go tangent.

  But three years in a hole like this would make me blow my top. I kept pacing, trying to quiet my nerves, and the chugging of the freight trains began to drill into my head, and then my fingers began to twitch. A tune, a weary aching gutbucket blues of a tune, crawling on all fours from one lament to the next, was beginning to percolate through my brain, and just automatically my hands started to pick it out on an imaginary clarinet. Oh, it was a low-down blues, and it had the woe of the jailbird in it, the lead-heavy steps of the con shuffling back and forth in his cubicle, the loneliness of those nostalgic train whistles, the deadweight uneasy darkness of the cell I was locked in, the jangling misery of a man who forgot to do what he had to do with himself to justify his being alive. I felt like I was deserted, forgotten, abandoned. I had abandoned myself. Everything had gone away from me. Walking up and down, I began to moan those blues to myself, just the way the colored boys used to chant their heartache out long ago in the Pontiac reform school. Suddenly a name for those blues popped into my head: Gone Away Blues.

  Yeah, sure; that was what I would call them. Right away I felt better. Some day, I told myself, I would have to record that tune, to get it out of my system—sure, with Sidney Bechet, playing those haunting moaning duets like we did on Really the Blues. I could work on it while I was in jail, getting ready to record it as soon as I was sprung. It was something to aim at. It cheered me up a lot.

  Clark Monroe, a dancer who used to hang out with me at the Barbeque, had himself a cabaret in Harlem now called the Uptown House, and he put the joint up to stand bail for me. Soon as I hit Harlem again, I got a royal reception—everywhere I went the girls and fellows, many I didn’t even know, would run up and hug and kiss me, going out of their way to show their affection and how they stood behind me. “Don’t worry Mezz,” they all told me, “everything’s going to be all right, you got good friends everywhere and they won’t ever forget you.” It was an unplanned surge of solidarity, that sprang up the moment one of their boys was in trouble. It was heartfelt and sincere, and it was meant to show me that what was mine was theirs—not only the good things but the evil ones too. How fine they made me feel. . . .

  The following January I came up for trial in Special Sessions Court, and a lieutenant from the narcotics squad turned up and tried every way he could to make me stool on other guys who peddled reefer in Harlem. I told him to prove to me that marihuana was a narcotic, or did anything bad to people, and then maybe I’d talk to him. When I was called in for sentence, this lieutenant asked for permission to address the court, and he stood up there and said, “I want the court to know that, according to my informers, this man was responsible for introducing marihuana to Harlem twelve years ago.” My lawyer jumped up and bellowed, “You must be a most remarkable detective, and your narcotics squad must be the pride of the force. Here you’ve been on duty in Harlem for twelve years, knowing all about this fiend and monster, and never once were you able to so much as arrest him for his nefarious activities.” All the bickering flew over my head; I was bored, and wished they’d get this foolishness over quick, so I could get settled in jail and go to work on my clarinet. The judge sentenced me to Riker’s Island for an indefinite sentence of one to three years. My card was stamped “D.A.,” which is short for dope addict. They were a little late with that one.

  In the receiving room at Riker’s we had to strip off all our clothes, and I got a real close-up view of New York’s derelicts. Practically all the men with me were white, either lushheads or junkies, and this morning they all had the shakes and rattles real bad, whether from hootch or some kind of white stuff. The stench made my nose curl up. Everywhere I looked I saw running noses, bloodshot rheumy eyes, trembling matchstick legs, clattering teeth, sunken cheeks, faces etched with grime, matted hair, rotted flesh, and dirt-crusted skin. All the faces around me were grooved and stony, hunks of crumbling granite, like tombstones with the epitaphs left off. They were an obscene caricature of the life I’d escaped, the dying whiteman’s world seen in a distorting mirror. . . . We stood around naked, in miserable little clumps, scrofulous skinfuls of human wreckage, while an inmate with a spray gun squirted disinfectant over a man who had louse pockets all over his hide as big as silver dollars. Two other bored inmates twisted his arms behind him to hold him quiet, while he writhed and screamed with pain. I stopped thinking about the music.

  ●

  While I was struggling into the funky clothes they handed me, I whispered to a colored inmate, asking if a pal of mine from Harlem, a guy named Roy, wasn’t doing a bit on the Island. “Yeah,” was the answer, “Roy’s the clerk in Block Six, but that’s for colored only and I doubt if you’ll ever get to see him.” I took one more good look around at the human junk-heaps in the room, at all the walking dead. I knew that colored cons were different; almost any colored guy can land in jail, not just the soulless zombies who have already shriveled up and died inside and are just postponing their date with the undertaker’s icebox. Some of the finest, most high-spirited guys of the race landed in jail because of their conditions of life, not because they were rotted and maggot-eaten inside. I knew all that from past experience. I made up my mind to do something drastic.

  Just as we were having our pictures took for the rogues’ gallery, along came Mr. Slattery the deputy, and I nailed him and began to talk fast. “Mr. Slattery,” I said, “I’m colored, even if I don’t look it, and I don’t think I’d get along in the white blocks, and besides, there might be some friends of mine in Block Six and they’d keep me out of trouble.” Mr. Slattery jumped back, astounded, and studied my features real hard. He seemed a little relieved when he
saw my nappy head. “I guess we can arrange that,” he said. “Well, well, so you’re Mezzrow. I read about you in the papers long ago and I’ve been wondering when you’d get out here. We need a good leader for our band and I think you’re just the man for the job.” He slipped me a card with “Block Six” written on it. I felt like I had gotten a reprieve.

  The new inmates were lined up according to the cell blocks they were assigned to, and I fell in the Block Six line behind three real dark colored boys. They looked a little uncomfortable, shifting from one foot to another and exchanging uneasy glances. The silent system prevailed in the hall, so we couldn’t say a word to each other. Then, as luck would have it, all the colored boys who lined up behind me were dark too, and I must have looked like a ghost standing there between them all. I began to pray for those interviews to be over, so we could get to the block.

  When we hit Block Six the colored guard there, a guy named Harrison, assigned us to our cells, then called me aside. “Mezzrow,” he said, “I heard a lot about you from Roy and you look like an intelligent fellow and I think you’ll make it here. There’s only one thing I insist on in this block and that is cleanliness. We pride ourselves in here for having the cleanest block on the Island, just to show that people can be civilized even if they come from Harlem. We’ve got several of the musicians from the band locking in here, and as soon as there’s a vacant cell near them I’ll put you up on their tier. I hope you do something with this band of ours because it’s really sad.” What a relief—here was a keeper who talked my language. I was ready to scrub that cell with my tongue for a guy as regular as that.

  At lunch in the huge dining hall, all eyes were on me again. The keepers standing in the aisles thought they were seeing things when I marched in, and they kept gunning me, so I made sure to get seated between two of the darkest boys in the block, guys who worked on the coal gang. I sensed the tension in all these fay keepers, but they couldn’t say a word. They struck me so funny the way they stood there, each one trying to look tougher and nastier than the next. That’s the psychology that’s been put down on the Island ever since the Welfare Island scandal (when they found out that Johnny Rao, the gangster, was running the whole jail out there, having porterhouse steaks and fancy liquors and everything sent in, running big card games and bossing the officials around). There’s no talking in the dining room, even among the keepers. Their idea of “rehabilitation” is to make you feel you’re living in a morgue, surrounded by scowling corpses with holsters on their hips. We were served on trays, cafeteria style, and you could hardly pick up your silverware, it was so greasy. When you took a piece of bread and tried to rub some of the grease off your knife and fork, the bread turned black because all the plating was rubbed off the cheap metal.