Dead Man’s Blues

by Ray Celestin

  For Mum

  ‘Jazz has come to stay because it is an expression of the times, of the breathless, energetic, superactive times in which we are living.’

  LEOPOLD STOKOWSKI, 1924

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE: CADENZA

  PART ONE: FIRST CHORUS

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  PART TWO: DUET

  9

  10

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  PART THREE: BRIDGE

  17

  18

  PART FOUR: SOLO

  19

  20

  21

  22

  23

  PART FIVE: SECOND CHORUS

  24

  25

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  PART SIX: THIRD CHORUS

  35

  36

  37

  38

  39

  40

  41

  42

  43

  44

  45

  46

  47

  PART SEVEN: IMPROVISATION

  48

  49

  PART EIGHT: FINAL CHORUS

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  CONCLUSION: CODA

  58

  59

  60

  AFTERWORD

  Acknowledgments

  PROLOGUE

  CADENZA

  New Orleans, August 1922

  Louis Armstrong ran down the platform as the Panama Limited was departing, his cardboard suitcase in one hand, his cornet case and tickets in the other. He waved the last of these at the platform attendant who didn’t even look on account of him being too busy laughing at the boy, chubby and sweating and overloaded with luggage, trying to run along the train, trying to overtake the whites-only carriages, get to the ones he could jump on without fear of catching a beating.

  The train blew its whistle and Louis redoubled his efforts, dodged past a stack of luggage, past a bemused-looking porter, reached the first carriage marked Colored, threw his suitcase on board, put the tickets in his mouth, grabbed the handrail and swung himself onto the train as the driver increased the heat and the train soared out of the station and blasted into the burning southern skies.

  He collapsed into a heap on the floor and stayed there a moment, trying to get his breath back, lungs burning from too little exercise and too many cigarettes. He rummaged around in his pockets for his handkerchief, wiped the sweat from his face, tried to make himself look presentable, and made his way to his compartment. When he found it, he saw it was cramped and close and occupied by a large woman and a brood of young children, all of them sitting on the two bare wooden planks that passed for seats. Louis smiled at the woman and she screamed at the children to make room for him and he swung his suitcase onto the flax netting above the seats.

  ‘What’s your name, boy?’ the woman asked when Louis had squeezed himself into a corner.

  ‘Louis Armstrong, ma’am.’

  ‘You Mayann’s son?’

  ‘Yes, I am.’

  ‘I’ve known your mother years,’ she said, her tone suggesting she was for some reason proud of the fact. ‘Where you headin’?’

  ‘Chicago.’

  ‘Us too. You got work that way?’

  ‘Yes, ma’am. Playing with Joe Oliver’s band. Second cornet.’

  ‘Joe Oliver?’ repeated the woman, rolling the name round her memories for a few seconds, trying to see if it would stick. Then she shrugged. ‘Well, good luck to ya’. You eaten?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  ‘You brought food?’

  ‘No, ma’am.’

  In his rush to get to the station he hadn’t had time to stop off at a grocery and now the woman was looking at him slant-eyed. The train contained three dining cars, one serving French food à la carte, one serving cafeteria food, and one serving lounge snacks, but black people were allowed in none of them. The woman tutted, then shouted at the eldest of the children to get the basket, and when the child had retrieved it from the netting and placed it on the floor in the center of the compartment, she took the gingham off it and passed out pieces of fried chicken and catfish, corn on the cob, breaded okra, johnnycake, and bottles of lemonade, and Louis felt, five minutes out of New Orleans, that he’d already found a new family.

  After they’d eaten they collected the leftovers in the basket and Louis played with the children, stared out of the window, chatted, smoked, fell asleep, and the day turned to night and at some point he awoke to see a galaxy of city lights streaking past the window, daubs of neon against the blackness, the sense of a great hustling on the streets below, and then the sodium buzz of Chicago’s 12th Street station.

  Louis helped the woman down and they walked along the platform and into the center of the station. He looked around at the people there, and saw how quickly they were walking, how they rushed, how sharply they were dressed, how streamlined, sleek and modern everything seemed. He wondered if it was just his eyes, and he turned back to look at the train, at all the Southerners collecting their bags, and the difference leapt out at him: the ragged, unfashionable clothes, the battered baggage, all of it caked in poverty and the dust of the southern plains.

  Compared to the Chicagoans, Louis’ people looked like refugees from some far-away, famished country, and in that instant he realized that his notion of home would be tested in these new surroundings, that it would be a struggle to not let himself be influenced by the contrast. Getting out of the South was battle enough; black folks had been lynched just for being seen at a counter buying train tickets North, mothers poured pepper into the shoes of their children making the journey, in the mistaken belief that it threw hunting dogs off their scent. But now Louis sensed there was another battle looming for all these people, a battle to fit in, to not be taken advantage of, to not lose who they were in the attempt.

  ‘You sure you got somewhere to go?’ the woman asked.

  ‘Sure, ma’am. Joe Oliver’s sending someone to pick me up,’ Louis said.

  The woman stared at him, unconvinced, then she nodded and gathered up her children and wished him good luck, and the moment she had disappeared into the ever-shifting crowd, Louis regretted having lied to her. He turned around and took in the immensity of the station and the city beyond and he remembered the stories of jazz musicians leaving New Orleans and ending up stranded in strange places, fleeced by promoters and record-company men, left without a friend or a cent, begging on the streets for enough to buy a train ticket home.

  He tried to shake the thought, looked for a restroom to go and freshen up in, so he could continue the journey feeling vaguely clean. He saw a sign and followed the arrow to a set of marble steps leading down to a pair of doors, the usual symbols for men and women over each. But he couldn’t see any signs for whether the restrooms were for white people or colored, and so he stood there a minute, hesitant.

  ‘Boy, you look loster than a snowflake in hell,’ said a voice behind him, and Louis turned to see an old Negro dressed in a Red Cap’s uniform standing behind him, grinning. Something about the man’s manner and approach suggested he’d done this before, that working in the station often involved helping out newly arrived Southerners looking dazed by their own situation.

  ‘Where yo
u from now?’

  ‘N’awlins.’

  ‘N’awlins?’ repeated the man with a sour look on his face. ‘I ain’t got much time for N’awlins. Can’t stand the smell of beer.’

  Louis frowned, unsure what to make of the comment.

  ‘Where you need to go?’ asked the man.

  ‘Southside.’

  ‘Every darkie getting off every one of those goddamn trains is going to the Southside, boy. Whereabouts in the Southside’s the question.’

  ‘The Lincoln Gardens. I’m here to join Joe Oliver’s band.’

  ‘King Oliver?’ said the man, suddenly animated. ‘You the new cornet player everyone’s talking about?’

  Louis frowned, guessing there’d been some mix-up, wondering since when was Papa Joe called King?

  ‘Come on, boy. Let’s get you a car.’

  The Red Cap led him outside and put him in a taxi and told the driver to take him straight to the Lincoln Gardens and Louis sat on the edge of the seat and watched the city whistle by. They drove out of the station, down State Street, past what looked like a red-light district, and in no time at all Louis got the feeling they were in the heart of the Southside, in Bronzeville, the Black Belt, the new home of jazz. It was gone ten on a work night, and the streets were as packed and alive as a Saturday on Bourbon Street. The cab passed jazz clubs and blues bars and chop-suey joints and pool halls and cinemas and vaudevilles, all lit up with every shade of neon shining bright and lurid in the darkness.

  They passed under elevated railroads, and alongside streetcars; and in the distance, row upon row of skyscrapers gleamed in the night, giving Louis a sense of a whole city riding a spark, shining with electricity, chrome and speed. From the black people rushing down the streets in sharp suits and dresses, to the traffic and trains zooming past, to the flashing of the neon signs, all of it pulsed with new realms of possibility.

  The cab swung a left onto 31st Street and dropped him off outside the Gardens and Louis looked up at the building and caught sight of the sign above the doors: KING OLIVER AND HIS CREOLE JAZZ BAND.

  And then he heard the unmistakable sound of his old mentor’s cornet cutting through the walls of the building and soaring out onto the street. It was the same, lowdown blues from back home, but different somehow. It took a moment to figure it out: the speed. It was much, much faster, just like the people he’d seen rushing through the streets; it had a more frenetic tempo, made breakneck to suit its new home.

  ‘It’s the King’s new boy,’ shouted the cabdriver over the noise to one of the bouncers at the door, swinging a thumb in Louis’ direction. The bouncer was huge, and despite the heat he was dressed in a wool overcoat, with velvet lapels and a fur collar. Louis stepped out of the cab and the bouncer eyed him, and he felt conscious once more of his clothes and his battered cardboard suitcase.

  He paid the driver and as the cab screeched off Louis took in the men walking up and down the sidewalk, hawking pints of gin or wraps of marijuana or heroin or cocaine. And in the queue outside the club, he saw something that made him stop: white people. A group of awkward young men, studious-looking, skittish, listening to the music like they were listening to some kind of god.

  The bouncer stared at Louis and inclined his head a whole eighth of an inch toward the entrance; Louis walked to the front of the queue and the bouncer swung the door open and that’s when the music really hit him, like a freight train, ear-splittingly loud and unrelenting.

  They stepped through the foyer and onto the dance floor and Louis saw it was packed with hundreds of young slickers, dancing to the sound of Papa Joe’s freak music, his horn growling and moaning and bending its timbre and pitch. The place was thumping with jazz, swirling in a current of optimism and hedonism, crazed by the here and now. And in that moment, a realization flared through Louis’ mind – despite the difference in tempo, all these sophisticated Northerners were flocking there to listen to Southern music, to New Orleans music, to his music. And he thought of that ragged-looking army of refugees getting off the train at the 12th Street station. They might have been impoverished, but they were giving the city something it craved, something it worshipped.

  And a smile cracked his lips. He wasn’t sure what was going on, some exchange between people from different ends of the country, between fast and slow, black and white, old and modern, some forging of something new and important. Something was happening in Chicago, and he grinned from ear to ear at the beautiful bizarreness of it all.

  PART ONE

  FIRST CHORUS

  ‘We have reached a time when a policeman had better throw a couple of bullets into a man first and ask questions afterward. It’s a war. And in wartime you shoot first and talk second.’

  DETECTIVE WILLIAM SHOEMAKER,

  CHICAGO PD, 1925

  ‘The only effective rule in Chicago is that of violence, imposed by crooks and murderers. The ill fame of Chicago is spreading through the world and bringing shame to Americans who wish they could be proud of that city. They are forced to apologize for America’s second-largest city and to explain that it is a peculiar place.’

  WASHINGTON POST, 1928

  1

  Chicago, June 1928

  Thousands thronged the streets, blocking traffic, locking down whole neighborhoods, pretty much all of the commotion centered on the Sbarbaro & Co. Undertaking Rooms at 708 North Wells Street. People filled the roads and sidewalks around the building, others lined the procession route, others still took up positions at the gates to Mount Carmel, or climbed lampposts or hung from awnings. Families arranged chairs around upper-story windows. In the sky, a black fuzz of mourners sprouted like mold along the rooftops, crowning the proceedings.

  Only a tiny fraction had actually known the deceased, a high-level politico with a history of rumored Mob connections, who wore suits with pockets tailored especially large to accommodate his bankroll, who distributed turkeys and coal to the poor at Christmas, even to Negroes. But a gangster’s funeral provided spectacle: thousands in the streets; celebrities and politicians; a parade of flowers and luxury cars; a casket costing more than most people’s houses; mobsters who would kill each other on any other day, walking side by side, respecting the funeral-day truce. And so the ceremony became an event: Chicago, restless city, dynamo, home of the skyscraper and the twenty-four-hour factory, only ever stopped for the funeral of a gangster.

  Among the crowds thronging the streets that morning, one man was making a particular nuisance of himself, jostling past people as politely as he could . . . Excuse me, ma’am . . . I hate to be a pain . . . Would you mind . . . heading as straight as he could for the center of the spiderweb, the front door of Judge John Sbarbaro’s funeral parlor. The people he slipped past looked at him funny, wondering if he had an invite to the ceremony. He didn’t look like a gangster or a politician, and although he had the good looks of a film star, no one could recall him from the screen of the Uptown, or the Tivoli, or the Norshore. Plus he wasn’t really dressed for a funeral, but rather in a summer suit of buttermilk linen, which, if a little rumpled, was impeccably cut.

  The man, Dante Sanfelippo, was a little into his thirties, of medium height and slender build, with Mediterranean features and striking eyes. He had a leather overnight bag slung over one shoulder, and the tired, muddled look of a traveler, having a few hours earlier gotten off the Twentieth Century Limited – the overnight train from New York – and made his way northwards through the throngs after a brief stop at the Metropole Hotel.

  Back in New York, Dante was a rum-runner, a gambler, a gentleman bootlegger, a needle man, a fixer, and something of an enigma, a man of many acquaintances and very few friends. He had grown up in Chicago, but had fled the city six years earlier and today was his first day back in his hometown; a hometown which Dante had realized, in the few hours since his return, was nothing more to him now than a ghost town.

  After a few more minutes of fighting through the crowd, he finally made it to the cordon that had be
en formed around the block where the Sbarbaro was located. Pressed up against the barriers were hordes of street kids, urchins who’d had all day to stake out a spot from which to peep at the gangster legends whose names travelled the city in whispers and gunshots; kids to whom Capone, Moran, O’Banion, Genna were a royalty of sorts, the grandest, most glamorous men who would ever shine in their neighborhoods.

  Dante studied them a moment, then turned to look over the cordon, and was shocked by what he saw; an ocean of blue flowers laid out on the ground in front of the building in so great a number that not an inch of asphalt was visible anymore. A whole city block covered in wreaths, chaplets and bouquets. The wash of blue broke through the railings between the shopfronts, flowed past fire hydrants, lampposts, garbage cans, lapped against porches and walls. Every blue flower that could be purchased in the state of Illinois, arranged into myriad tributes that must have cost tens of thousands of dollars to order, make up and deliver.

  Dante let out a whistle, impressed, then he looked for some way through the flowers, and after a moment he spotted it: a thin sliver of paving stones, heading to the front steps of the parlor, where three gunmen wearing suits and blank-slate expressions were standing guard. Dante sighed and slipped under the cordon and there was a gasp from the crowd, the people guessing he was a trespasser, unhinged, a man with a suicide twitch.

  He threw his bag over his shoulder and strolled through the field of cornflowers, campanulas, forget-me-nots. As he approached, the gunmen tensed, their slouches dissolving, hands moving steadily into their jackets. When Dante was a few yards from the bottom of the steps he stopped, and smiled, and nodded, and the men glared back at him with practiced looks.

  ‘I’m here to see Mr Capone,’ Dante said, and the closest gunman gave him the twice-over.

  ‘He’s busy,’ the man replied, punching at the words.

  ‘Tell him it’s Dante the Gent.’

  At the mention of the name the gunman frowned, as if a ghost had just introduced himself, then a look of realization was chased across his face by a look of worry. The gunman nodded at one of his colleagues, who nodded back and slipped through the glass door into the funeral parlor.