by Mezz Mezzrow
After lunch another bringdown: I was transferred to a white cell because I looked too “conspicuous” in the mess hall. Mr. Harrison was furious and told me not to worry, he’d have me back real quick. I was led to Block Five, just across the way, and began to feel like an alien right away. There I could hardly listen to the talk of my cell-mates, their language and mannerisms and gestures were so coarse and brutal, they spoke with their lips all twisted up, in harsh accents that jarred on my nerves. I realized again how well off I’d been these last few years, being able to live far away from all this grimy, grating white underworld, up in Harlem where people were real and earthy. My cell stunk and had dust all over it, and the tough clerk with his brutish ofay prison vernacular made me sick to my stomach. I started to clean up the cell, trying to console myself by thinking about the band I was going to lead. I couldn’t wait to get my hands on a horn.
This place was better than The Band House in one way, anyhow: the cells at least had brand-new stools, and the walls were of steel, painted a sort of battleship gray—in fact, the whole block reminded you of a big ship. There was a washbowl with ice-cold running water that was sure to wake you up in the morning, and the bed was a killer. It was a solid sheet of steel, with a little molding running all around it, and it had been designed to hold a rubber mattress, the kind that’s blown up with air. Those rubber mattresses somehow never arrived, so they gave us some ordinary ones stuffed with cotton batting, about two inches thick, which was just enough padding to keep your vertebrae from cracking.
Just as I finished making up my bed, the clerk called out my name. “Get your things together,” he said, “you’re going back to Block Six.” It looked like I was becoming quite a football in the little Jim-Crow skirmishes that they had out on this island, but this time, at least, we could chalk up one for our side. What a welcome I got from Mr. Harrison and all the cats. When I left them, they’d all congregated around in front of the block, with long faces that told me, What a drag Mezz, but carry on, you’ll make it. Now they were all beaming. I was sure glad to be home again, and they were glad to have me back.
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There was a sort of feud going on in this joint, under the surface. One faction was made up of the keepers and their henchmen, and on the other side were most of the civilian employees on the prison staff. Now the civilians, being more or less interested in educating the inmates and rehabilitating them, treated us sometimes like halfway human beings, but the keeper faction had never even heard of the word rehabilitation and thought those civilians were too soft and sentimental with us, “coddling” instead of waving a club. Mr. Costello, the civilian band master, a very old and pleasant gentleman who’d once been a symphony clarinetist, was one of the “soft” guys, but he knew nothing about jazz and didn’t much care for it. He gave me some saxophones and clarinets that were from the Year of One, and they leaked so bad you couldn’t get a sound out of them with a high-pressure air pump. I took several days out and patched up some of them. . . .
One thing I’ll grant those scowling mugs of the keeper faction: they were sick of Mr. Costello’s corny music, and they all seemed glad to see me take over the popular-music activities of the band. Life in the prison wasn’t any picnic for them either, having to stand around looking nasty all day long, afraid to relax and going more neurotic by the minute. . . . Well, for two weeks we sweated and slaved, getting ready for our first concert, and even though we had some very poor musicians to work with, the band came on just the same. For the second time in my life I had a mixed band, and this time I didn’t have to worry about Tommy Dorsey or Benny Goodman or Artie Shaw stealing any of my men. . . .
One of the musicians was a real old colored man named Pop Baxter, who played solid tailgate trombone. He’d worked in the old minstrel shows and barnstormed around the country with circus bands, and all the young kids were ridiculing his old antique style when I first arrived, but I soon cured them of that. Here was a gem hidden away behind the walls of Riker’s Island, and I promised myself that when I got out of jail I was going to use Pop on the first recording date I could arrange, maybe even to record Gone Away Blues with Sidney Bechet and me. I’ll never forget how that fine old man made his mellow glissandos, greasing the way so all the younger guys could just slip into the groove and go gliding along after him. Pop left the Island before I did, after doing thirty months, and he got killed some way the second week out. They brought his body back to the Island to be dumped out in Potters Field. We all mourned for him, and when the cemetery gang dropped his body into a big hole with a lot of other unclaimed paupers’ corpses, I asked them to make a little mound over the spot, so his grave would have some kind of mark.
One night I was listening to the radio in our cell block, and a recording of Count Basie’s One O’Clock Jump started to rock over the air. A fit of depression grabbed me and tears began to roll from my eyes. What a difference there was between those full booming tones that vibrated out of the loudspeaker and the music our amateur musicians played; it hit me hard. Then I remembered that I knew Jack Bregman, of Bregman, Vocco and Conn, publishers of Count Basic’s numbers, so right quick I sat down and wrote him a letter, asking him to save my life by sending me the arrangements of One O’Clock Jump, Jumping at the Woodside, and everything else in the Basie series. Next day they called me into the recreation department and told me the city wasn’t allowed to accept charity, but they’d spend thirty dollars a month to buy music for the band if only I’d order some of the popular tunes on the Hit Parade too. I settled for sandwiching Frénesie and a couple other pop tunes into our repertoire, and got all the Basie arrangements I wanted.
That first concert was really something. The colored boys were sitting in their section of the auditorium, up front and to the right of the band pit, looking all tense and keyed-up, as though their reputation was at stake and they didn’t know whether we were going to let them down or not. Old Mr. Costello took the stick first and directed us through some light overture, and then I stepped up and we swung into the first few bars of One O’Clock Jump and the house came down. A ripple of shock and joy went through the colored section like a high wind through a wheat field, and you could see that all the boys wanted to shout out loud but they just sat there patting their feet and bouncing up and down, with glee written all over their faces. Finally, when one of the trumpet players got up to take a solo, the guys couldn’t hold back any longer. “Ooooowwwww!” one of them screamed, and the house rocked. I got scared to death, but when I shot a quick look at the deputy he just smiled approvingly, encouraging me to keep going. What a change swept over all the keepers; it was like somebody unlocked the frozen machinery of their faces and let them go into some human action again. When the number was finished, all the keepers, deputies and captains joined the twenty-five hundred inmates in the clapping and stomping and howling, making the walls shake, and was Block Six proud. I felt as great as if I’d just played a smash-hit concert in Carnegie Hall. Mr. Harrison stood there chesty as a peacock, and from then on the relationship between keepers and inmates became a little more human.
I sat up nights in my cell, making arrangements of Swingin’ with Mezz and Gone Away Blues, and doing little paste jobs on some parts of the published orchestrations that were too hard for our boys. The work became such an obsession with me, I could hardly sleep a wink; I’d sit up humming chords to myself and writing like mad, till there were spots before my eyes and all of them were blue notes. This was the first time I ever tried arranging without a piano, and it gave me a terrific lift to find out I could do it all in my head. . . . We got a surprise at our next concert. Word was all over the Island about our band, and when we trooped in this Sunday who should be sitting on the aisle but the warden himself, Mr. Ashworth, with his wife and a party of about fifteen special guests. We romped again that afternoon, and the weight was off the Island. Things began to take on a more human aspect all around, and inmates and keepers both looked forward to those Sunday afternoons of ours, an
d once in a while we’d even run across a keeper who was so confused that he forgot his professional dignity and, glory be, actually smiled at us. Yes, we rehabilitated a keeper so much, we made him smile.
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Sitting in Roy’s cell one night after dinner, playing Chinese checkers, I began to cough, and when I spit in the bowl I saw a big lump of blood. I sucked on all of my teeth to see if maybe one of them had gone bad and was bleeding, but all I got was saliva. Oh, oh, I thought, this is it, I really got the con; for once I won’t have to fake TB. I reported at the hospital for a TB work-up, and the report was negative but they made me lay around there for six weeks, doing the kind of easy bit a jailbird always dreams about.
I wasn’t happy; the band couldn’t play those orchestrations without my first-sax part, and I missed the music plenty. And besides, I longed to be back with my buddies in Block Six, where I didn’t come in contact with any white guys unless they were musicians. The doc thought I was nuts—here was a con beefing about being in the TB ward where you got the best of everything, soft bed, bath any time you wanted it, visitors right alongside your bed so you could kiss them instead of eyeballing them through a small glass window. He told me I ought to get myself shifted to another branch of the city prison, further up the East River on Hart’s Island. “You’ll be able to get out in the air,” he told me, “and they have a band up there too.” I finally decided to take the trip, after we figured out that the lousy hot-air ventilation in our cell blocks was what made me cough up that blood. Only one thing worried me: all the junkies were sent up there to Hart’s and I sure didn’t want to be classed as a junkie, no matter how many “D.A.’s” they stamped on my card.
I noticed the difference in the atmosphere as soon as we hit the road to the receiving room. The inmates working on the docks shouted greetings to their buddies among the newcomers, right in front of the keepers, and some of them were even chatting with the keepers, as though they never heard of the silent system. Then I was assigned to the band, and things began to look much brighter for me. Off we marched to our respective divisions (that was what they called the dormitories we bunked in; they didn’t have any private cells here) and luck was really with me. When I met some of the guys from the band who locked in this dormitory, who should turn out to be the first trumpet player but good old Travis Roberts (one of my old pals from The Corner), and of all people, the drummer was Frankie Ward (the guy who introduced me to my hop connection). It was one hell of a reunion we had. They told me all about how the inmates practically ran this Island, sort of self-governing themselves, with their own inmate captains and clerks in each division. We slept on rows of beds with springs in them, and each inmate had a private locker with a key to it, where he could keep his belongings safe. It was more like a military academy than a pen.
Travis fixed it so I got a bed next to his, and as soon as he got me alone he said, “Jim, I don’t dig you, you must want the tough side of life. What’s your story? I heard of many a cat passin’ for white, but this is the first time I ever heard of a white man passin’ for colored, and in jail too. You’ll have to get me straight on that issue.” I tried to explain how I had felt about Block Six on Riker’s, and he understood a little. Then he went over the music situation on Hart’s for me, telling me about the German professor who was in charge of the band. “Marches are that cat’s specialty,” he told me, “and we play Wagner too, and then some more Wagner, and after that a whole gang of Wagner. The weather is gettin’ nice now, and pretty soon he’ll have us marchin’ all over the Island, playin’ Our Director and stuff like that. See if you can’t get him to let us play some swing around here.”
Next day we went into a huddle with Herr Professor Mr. Fritz Frosch, and we told him that swing was the colored man’s music and we didn’t see why we shouldn’t be allowed to play it. We were playing German, French and Italian pieces, and the marches of John Philip Sousa, so why shouldn’t we play the music of Count Basie and Duke Ellington? He agreed to let me take charge of the swing band, and soon I got hold of another set of Basie arrangements and was even allowed to send for my clarinet, which was in the pawnshop. Before long we had the Island really jumping on Sunday afternoons, out on the ball field. Up here they didn’t show any movies, but the band played marches as the divisions paraded onto the field, and then there was a ball game, sometimes with a visiting team from the outside, and while they played we had our jam session. The inmates would crowd around the stand, listening to all the Basie numbers, and some of my own, and then Duke Ellington’s arrangement of Solitude, after Sidney Mills the publisher sent it to me. Lucky Tin Pan Alley didn’t catch wind of the musical craze that shook our little penal colony, or there would have been a stampede of songpluggers on the East River ferry, scrambling to get over to Hart’s Island. Songpluggers go everywhere, like termites and earthworms.
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Seventeen months gandydanced by; months that were like galloping minutes, flashing past before I could draw my breath, like in a muta dream. I was so absorbed in the music, my whole being so wrapped up in sheet music and orchestrations, that I took no notice. Only random little snatches of events, plucked out of the grabbag with my eyes blindfolded, flickered into my attention. Something tremendous, jam-up, was jumping inside of me, all my groggy nerves were sitting up and yawning and then opening their eyes big as saucers and springing to attention, wide awake. Weird meandering canyons, mist-filled caverns, all kinds of crazy gopher-holes began to open up in me, deeper than I ever expected I went, and I began feeling my way into them, exploring, not sure what I would find. I didn’t have much mind for the parade outside my skull. . . .
I remember Dan Leary, though; tough thin-lipped Danny, ring-leader of the white faction in the band, in it only for a soft touch. Danny’s a two-fisted con from way back, his record’s as long as a Modern Library Giant. Then one day he hears some of us colored boys running over some new Basie orchestrations—sticks his nose in the door, says sort of shyly, “Hey, don’t you need a bass for this music?” We tell him yes, sure, to get his bass and join in. The walking-bass part knocks him out. “Jesus,” he says over and over, with little-kid delight, “this here’s what you call a real bass, it’s like I sing in the quarter, hell, I can read the goddamned thing at sight. Bum-bum-bum-bum, oh man, the way it goes up and down the chords.” Asks if maybe he couldn’t learn this music from us and get a job playing bass in some dance band, so he’d have something to occupy his mind and keep him from landing in jail again. We beg the professor to buy a string bass for Danny to practise on; seventeen months go by but no bass fiddle do we ever see. . . . Fashion note: colored kids working in the tailor shop tired of corny prison outfits, go to work on their dungarees, pegging the legs till they’re real sharp and zooty. Warden spots them parading through the halls, begins to roar, makes them all take off their pants and continue on in their underwear. . . . December 7th, 1941: we’re listening to some hot records over the radio, news flash comes through telling about Pearl Harbor. Frenzy runs all through the division, white guys put their heads together down at their end, begin to buzz, all agitated; us colored guys slump together at opposite end, quiet, tense, worried. White guys around Danny Leary agitating about how maybe they’ll get out of here now, all join up in the Air Corps and become heroes and bump off fifty, a hundred, a thousand Japs, come back famous and chests loaded with decorations. Nobody in our group talks much about becoming a hero. Terrible deep worry on all the faces at our end—one big unspoken question between us, the Japanese are a colored race, that old color issue is right smack in our face again. . . . Letter from Madeleine Gautier, Panassié’s secretary, dated December 7th. “Dear Milton, we finally succeeded in having your address, and I hurry up writing to you, for you must feel very sad with your worries. You don’t know how much we have been upset, Hugues and I with those rotten news concerning you. We do hope that you are not too low down, and you must be sure that in the bad as in the good, we are still your friends. . . . They all kno
w you in Switzerland, and now that Hugues and I spent a month in Zurich last September, they like you still more, for you know how Hugues is clever to make love the things and people he loves himself. We feel very sad to think that you are in troubles, you who gave so much joy to so many with your beautiful music. . . . You know how much our heart is near yours. Where is the great time when we all lived together! . . . How long will you stay in that funny place? We both love you very much. . . .” I’m a lucky guy, I think, to have friends like that. . . .
Great lumbering Big John McDonnell, the warden, an overgrown good-natured hulk of an Irishman. Some mean hack of a keeper nabs a colored boy on the coal gang for snitching a loaf of bread. Big John screams at him, “Huh, some cop you arre, pinchin’ a man with a loaf of bread, and what in the hell did you think he was goin’ to do with it but eat it, and what arre you going to do with it now, surre and you won’t eat it since he’s had his hands on it. If ever I catch yez throwin’ one slice of bread in the garrbage can and wastin’ the city’s money, surre and I’ll suspend you for thirrty days. This boy wasn’t sittin’ on his arse all day like you, he’s been shovelin’ coal all day and he’s hungry, now git out beforre I lose me temper and pinch yez for disturrbin’ the peace.” After that two extra loaves of bread go every day to the Seventh Division, where the colored coal gang is housed. . . . Mrs. McDonnell one day passes the bing (cramped little cell where guys are stuck in solitary confinement, as punishment), finds somebody locked up there and runs to Big John screaming: “Now you go and turn that poor child loose! How would you like to have your son locked up in an old dungeon like that for fightin’ with some boy in school! You go and let him out this very minute!” Bing’s closed from then on, guys get switched to the cemetery gang for punishment. . . . Big John wandering through mess hall, peering at the portions in our plates, snorting “Uh huh, I thought so.” Flies through the kitchen door, comes back with big bucket full of food and walks up and down the aisles ladling out second helpings and mumbling, “That dirrty bastard in there must want to make somebody’s hogs fat. . . .”