Really the Blues

by Mezz Mezzrow

  Gang of WPA workers running sewer pipe from City Island through Hart’s; among them some Spanish boys with some fine bush. We buy enough sticks from them to stay high a week, light up in rehearsal hall and the music begins to sound wonderful to us, Travis playing passages that Louis once taught him, real soulful, the whole band rocking. Evenings we sprawl out in the dormitory, hazy and mellow, sipping our tea, and the keeper sniffs the smoke and thinks somebody’s blanket is burning. . . . Danny Leary dogging us colored musicians around, in spite of ridicule from other white inmates in his gang. He gets a tipple ukelele, one of the colored boys gets a guitar, and in the evenings we hold jam sessions, crowding in a corner of the dormitory with most all the inmates ganged around us. Corner used to be monopolized by Danny’s group of bigshot ofays who ran the division; whole dormitory was divided into two parts, whites on one side and colored boys, including me, segregated on the other. But now we all sit on Danny’s bed, colored and white, and his friends get used to the idea and accept us. Pretty soon we’re moving colored boys in between white ones in the rows of cots, scrambling them up, and the dividing line gets more and more blurred, finally disappears. Jim Crow scrambles out of the window, drowns himself in the East River. . . .

  Big John tickled about how the band’s doing; decides to branch out with more musical activities, starts a choir in the Catholic church on the Island, with Danny Leary directing. Along come the Jewish holidays and with them a weird situation. The Jewish boys, not to be outdone by the Catholics, organize their own choir and ask me, a colored guy, wouldn’t I care to lead it. I find out once more how music of different oppressed peoples blends together. Jewish or Hebrew religious music mostly minor, in a simple form, full of wailing and lament. When I add Negro inflections to it they fit so perfect, it thrills me. I add dominant sevenths to minor chords, sometimes the ninth too; effect colorful and stirring as a bellychord. I just sing “Oh, oh, oh,” over and over with the choir because I don’t know the Hebrew chants, but I give it a weepy blues inflection and the guys are all happy about it. They can’t understand how come a colored guy digs the spirit of their music so good. . . .

  Cemetery squad gives the guys the willies. Regular shipments of bodies from the city morgues, guys have to unload the crates at the pier and cart them up to Potters Field and dump them in the holes, fifteen or twenty corpses piled up in one big grave. Those big rough wooden boxes keep arriving, some of them packed solid with nothing but legs, or arms, or torsos, or heads, or sometimes just fingers, nothing but fingers, like they were scraps from some slaughterhouse. Once Travis gets stuck on the graveyard squad, has to help unload a shipment of bodies. While he’s struggling with a big pine box the end falls out and a stiff slides halfway out, conking him on the skull. In nothing flat he’s down to the end of the pier and in the East River, clothes and all, scrubbing himself like mad, never once stopping to think that there’s a strict rule against inmates going swimming. . . . Sometimes people show up a year after the burial to claim some body long since lost in the shuffle. Then the gang has to go and dig up the whole works, sorting through the pile of rotted corpses to find the one whose relatives suddenly discovered a great family affection for him. The stink that hung over the Island on those grave-robbing days was terrific. We dreaded those scavenger hunts. . . . Guys who handle the stiffs aren’t licked at all, come out way ahead because they strike gold in those graves. All you need is a pair of pliers and a hammer, and you’re a prospector—all the 24-carat crowns and silver bridge-work in Potters Field are yours for the asking, or anyhow the digging. Many a Bull Durham sack bulging out of a con’s hip pocket, filled with this loot, literally worth its weight in gold. . . .

  Often on Sunday afternoons, after our band concerts, I would wander by myself across the old cemetery and get to thinking of all those thousands of society’s cast-offs, the despised paupers who were expelled from life; there was civilization’s dung-heap, the guys who had worshipped at the altar of the almighty handout, laying there under my feet flat on their backs, staring up vacantly at me. I got a funny feeling, sometimes, that they all had their right hands stretched out to me, and that they were all chanting, in a whining sing-song, “Buddy, can you spare a nickel. . . .” It made me uneasy, like I was guilty of something. I wondered how many Bow Gistensohns and Mitter Foleys, and other guys like my friends of earlier days, were sandwiched in there, hugging the sod. There, I told myself, there, but for the grace of Bessie Smith, lay I. Sweet dreams, all you flophouse grads, I said to myself. R.I.P., you stumblebums. At least they’ll never charge you another quarter for a night’s lodging in a flea-bag; you’ll never toss and turn again in a Bowery scratchpad, digging the lice and chinches out of your hide. Rest easy, boys, the scuffle’s over. Relax, laugh ten times every eon or so. Plant you now, dig you later. . . .

  ●

  I noticed something funny—a lot of guys on Hart’s Island were quietly disappearing, sometimes for weeks at a time, only to turn up again with a big grin on their faces, looking smug and mighty pleased with themselves. I tuned in on the grapevine, and learned that inmates from both Hart’s and Riker’s were being shipped over to King’s County Hospital, where they were used as guinea-pigs by some city doctors to find out what the score was with marihuana. They stayed over in that hospital smoking all the reefer they wanted at the city’s expense, playing records, eating good, and talking up a breeze, while the doctors made all kinds of tests. As the guys came drifting back they told me those doctors had gone over them from stem to stern, not missing a square inch, and hadn’t been able to find one harmful effect, or prove that reefer was in any way habit-forming. I began to feel plenty sore, doing a twenty-month stretch (that’s the bit the parole board finally dished out to me) for being in possession of some stuff the city’s own doctors couldn’t prove was any more harmful than some cornsilk cigarettes.

  Just about then I spied an interesting story in the papers. A certain Justice in the Bronx Supreme Court had spoken up in protest over the city’s system for punishing misdemeanors, and his whole attack was quoted. This guy said the law was in a strange condition, when on one side of the street in Westchester County you’d get one year for a certain misdemeanor, and on the other side you might get three years for the exact same thing. He went on to criticize the whole rehabilitation program, because rehabilitation was supposed to take from one to three years, but the guys sent to Riker’s and Hart’s, supposedly for rehabilitation, might get two or three consecutive bits for the same misdemeanor, so sometimes they’d serve as much as nine years in one stretch.

  Goddamn, I thought, here’s one judge who makes a lot of sense. The other cons thought so too; right quick there was a wild rush for writs of habeas corpus, so they could come up on appeal before this Justice. I saw this mad scramble and figured I might as well join it. I got myself a writ, and appeared before this same Justice.

  “Your Honor,” I said, “I don’t know much about pleading a case in legal language, but I think it’s sure funny that I should be doing all this time for possessing marihuana when the city’s doctors themselves can’t find out anything bad about the stuff.”

  “How about its effect on children?” the Judge asked. “Do you advocate its use by everyone, even minors?”

  “I never advocated anything, Your Honor,” I said. “I just smoked the stuff and liked it, and so did my friends, and the only thing you’d ever have to watch about it is its effect as an aphrodisiac. Naturally, kids shouldn’t have that kind of stimulus handy, any more’n they should have liquor. But you take a guy thirty, forty, fifty years old, if he needs some Nature he sure can get it from marihuana, and no harm done.”

  “You know, don’t you,” said the Judge, “that the state has the right to put you away and take care of you? Are you aware of that?”

  “Sure, Judge,” I said. “But I been put away for something your best scientists can’t prove is bad, no matter how many ‘D.A.’s’ they stamp on my record. And if the state really wants to take car
e of somebody, how about taking care of my wife and child while I’m stuck away in Hart’s Island and can’t earn a living for them?”

  When he heard me mention my family, the Judge looked over the papers on my case, studying them real carefully. And then he must have come to the line about the prisoner’s race, because he looked like somebody suddenly hit him in the face. When he raised his eyes again there was an entirely different expression in them. “Young man,” he said, “the only trouble is, if I let you go you’ll get right out with all the rest of your people and re-elect Roosevelt.” He may have been joking, but it was getting on to election time, the Summer of 1942. The whole court kyaw-kyawed, and back to the Island I went. And to think that I never voted in my life.

  ●

  One afternoon things came to a head for me; in ten frantic minutes the formless mush of my life bubbled and seethed and then jelled, in a shape I could finally recognize. Fireworks busted loose in my skull with a great woosh and crackle, and all of a sudden the tangled threads of my past life were pulled together and wove into a pattern that made sense, and it was the climax of all my born days—I was a man who was finally knit together in one piece again, a little tattered on the edges, maybe, with a couple of the patches still showing, but still in one piece. It happened in a matter of minutes. It may not sound like much, frozen in cold type, but it’s been with me every day of my life since then, and it’ll stay locked in my conkhouse till the day I die. . . .

  Powerful forces had been working away inside of me, ever since the day of my arrest: that was the turning-point. I was alert and keyed-up, my mind like a muddy pool that’s slowly clearing up as the scum settles to the bottom, flooding out wider all the time, sucking up new things, lapping into new places. Sitting in rehearsals with the band, I’d get the strange feeling that I was on the brink of some great new discovery—my soggy brain would begin to churn and foam, wild thoughts burbling through it, and I’d go dizzy and limp. The music did that to me, mostly. Don’t forget, this was the first time in twelve years, the first time since I left Chicago, that I was free to concentrate on the music with all my being. I was getting born again, going through violent growing-pains, but I kind of felt something great would burst over me one of these days and then in a flash I’d be grown-up, come to full size, a complete and functioning man, one tight seal-like unit from head to foot. The music was giving my spirit back to me. Sitting there playing, I’d feel that my life was taking on some purpose again—I was heading in the right direction, straight and true. It wasn’t just by accident that I had crossed the color line; that I was holed up with my boys Travis and Frankie Ward; that I had a mixed band again, and could write my own kind of music for it. Most all the things I’d been scrambling after for so many years were coming my way now, out in the Hart’s Island jail. It couldn’t be an accident. There was some deep design to it. It had to lead somewhere.

  There was a terrific new drive and striving in my music. Travis’ melodious Armstrong runs on his horn roused something way deep inside me, Frankie’s rollicking rolls and rumbles on the drums set my skin to tingling—I got the feeling that they were talking to me, saying something that would change my whole life, and I had to talk back, give them the right answers or the great thing wouldn’t happen. I blew harder and harder into my clarinet, as though my life depended on it. I was on edge, taut, expectant all the time. After each rehearsal I was so worked up that my knees would buckle and I was sweating all over and there was a hollow feeling in the pit of my stomach. It was all leading up to something, something that would crack wide open with one hell of an explosion. We got frantic during those rehearsals, straining and stretching, trying to grab hold of that promising thing that dangled just out of reach. Frankie and Travis felt it too. Those rehearsals left them screwed up to a fever pitch of excitement. We could hardly talk to each other afterwards, our tongues wagged so fast and furious. Something big was in the air.

  And then, on one sunny afternoon, the blow-up came. It won’t sound like anything much—we were just marching along in the band, playing the same old corny Our Director, and the professor stopped to talk with the warden but we continued on across the Island. I was captain of the band by this time, so I took over. Then we drew close to the powerhouse, where the all-colored Ninth Division was working, and all the guys came running out to hear us, like they always did.

  It always gave us more incentive to see our buddies there; we played louder and brighter for them, trying to hype up the music with a touch of the lively rhythm, and spirit that they liked. It made me feel sort of foolish to be parading past all these big husky sweaty guys with nothing but a little bit of a clarinet in my hand—these boys were all holding shovels and were soaked through from using them, and I had a lot of respect for them. Just the thought of marching around all afternoon while they sweated their asses off made me feel sort of inferior, a gold-bricking weakling, and I had to justify myself somehow, so I watched every step I took, making sure it was as rhythmic and graceful as I could make it but never pretentious or flashy. I thought that if I could at least strut by them graceful and smooth in my movements, feeling every beat of the drum and showing that I felt it, it would get across something to these powerhouse guys, because they were always so sensitive to a person handling his body with ease, no matter where they saw it. That would excuse my being in this silly goddamned parade just a little.

  Well, as I stepped along, the rhythm of the march made me feel exhilarated and lightheaded, and when we got near to the powerhouse and I saw all our friends there, I decided to break all the chains off me and let myself go. I was so excited and tense, all of a sudden, you would of thought I was about to rob a bank. I started to improvise the march on my clarinet, forgetting all the written music we’d rehearsed with the professor. And then, Jesus, I fell into a queer dreamy state, a kind of trance, where it seemed like I wasn’t in control of myself any more, my body was running through its easy relaxed motions and my fingers were flying over the keys without any push or effort from me—somebody else had taken over and was directing all my moves, with me just drifting right along with it, feeling it was all fitting and good and proper. I got that serene, crazy kind of exaltation that you hear religious people sometimes talking about and think they’re cracked. And it was exactly, down to a T, the same serene exaltation I’d sensed in New Orleans music as a kid, and that had haunted me all my life, that I’d always wanted to recapture for myself and couldn’t. Frankie Ward was just behind me, and the spirit caught hold of him too and he fell right in, playing drums that suddenly weren’t talking the beat-up language of Sousa but the ageless language of New Orleans, thumping it out loud and forceful. Right away the whole band stiffened up and began to sparkle, like they’d all got a heavy shot of thyroid extract. Travis, who was playing the lead on his horn, got carried away in the flood too and he began to swing out with a sudden husky vibrant tone, taking his breath at the natural intervals just where he felt them, and the whole band was suddenly marching and swaying to a new rhythm. And every beat Frankie pounded on his drums was in perfect time with every variation somebody picked out on my clarinet, and my clarinet and the trumpet melted together in one gigantic harmonic orgasm, and my fingers ran every whichaway, and the fellows in the Ninth Division began to grin and stomp and shout. “Blow it Mezz!” they yelled. “Yeah, I hear you!” “Get away, poppa!” “Put me in the alley!”

  And all of a sudden, you know who I was? I was Jimmy Noone and Johnny Dodds and Sidney Bechet, swinging down Rampart Street and Basin Street and Perdido Street, down through Storyville, stepping high and handsome, blowing all the joy and bounce of life through my clarinet. While the guy on those powerful drums behind me was Tubby Hall and Baby Dodds and Zutty Singleton, all rolled up in one, and the boy on the trumpet that was playing melodious hide-and-seek with my clarinet was King Oliver and Tommy Ladnier, and yes, Louis too, the one and only Pops, the greatest of them all. And it was Mardi Gras time, and we were strutting on down at the head of
the gay parade, blowing High Society and Didn’t He Ramble and Moose March and Dusty Rag and Muskrat Ramble and Milneburg Joys and When the Saints Go Marching In and We Shall Walk Through the Streets of the City, back in the great days when jazz was born, back at the throbbing root and source of all jazz, making it all fresh and new. All of a sudden we were right smack in Gay New Orleans. Not the one out on Flushing Meadows, Long Island, the mecca of the summer tourists—the one down on the Mississippi delta, full of levees and cribs and red lights and barrelhouse joints and honkytonks, where the greatest music in the world first trembled and soared into being. I had been wandering for twenty years, looking for this fine fabled place, and suddenly I made it, I was home. I was solid home.