Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  Stale smells of beer and urine. Shutters creaked as faces peered out, yawning. Keo took out his trumpet, screwed in the mouthpiece, and cautiously began to play. This was what he came for. This was what he knew. He did scales at first, then simple tunes. Then he blew his journey crossing the Pacific.

  A man with patent leather hair and pink spats dropped a coin in his horn case. “Tha’s right, son. Tell it slow.”

  Then he blew louder, telling of his own town, his origins, the colors of dawn coming up over the Ko‘olaus, neighbors snoring down Kalihi Lane. He told of taro fields, and groves of singing-jade bamboo. Of arcane seas, and ancient skylines of coral reef. Deep in reverie, he forgot the hour, the place. By noon the sun made everything look bleached. Maybe he hadn’t sounded too bad; a small crowd lingered—delivery boy, a postman, a butcher in an apron who threw him a dime.

  Keo stood and cased his horn. “I’m looking for someone on Perdido Street. Dew Baptiste—”

  The postman laughed. “Oww! That one. Runs whores. He owe you money?”

  “I’m here to join his band. Came all the way from Honolulu.”

  “Ho-no-loo-loo? What kind of voodoo place is that? You say you was a horn man—or a hex man?”

  They laughed, pointing him up the street to a decrepit building. “Dew don’t come alive till afternoon. You wake him now, he’ll kill ya.”

  He bought a sandwich, sat across the street and dozed. When he woke, Dew was thumping his back, jumping up and down.

  “Hula Man! I knew you’d come. I knew.” Then he stepped back. “Who laid that purple joke on you? We got to get you off the street.”

  Up two flights of creaky stairs, smell of vomit, stale perfume. “You stay with me for now. We’ll take turns sleeping in the bed.”

  He was still dashing and immaculate, pin-striped suit, Dubonnet tie, but Keo wondered how he could afford a band, living in this tiny room. Single bed, single chair, a plywood chest of drawers.

  He sat Keo down and studied him, an edge, a calculating.

  “Listen. Just you getting here tells me a lot. It proves you got it. Least, I hope you still do. ‘It’ is what will not be slicked down, or jived up. You dig?”

  Keo thought he did, he wasn’t sure.

  “Too many guys with talent jumping on the ‘big ride’—name bands, singing strings, all that college-swing shit. I want jazz. I want to make sounds that don’t repeat, stuff that will vanish. Have crowds ripping their throats out for more. To get to that place, we gonna have to sacrifice a little.”

  Keo leaned close, following Dew’s every word.

  “What I’m saying is, forget where you sleep, or when you eat. All you got to know is your horn. I got plans, Hula Man. How much money do you have?”

  “. . . Around fourteen dollars.”

  Dew bent over laughing. “Anyway, let’s burn that clown suit.” He threw him a robe. “Then, I want to hear you blow.”

  They jammed all afternoon, Earl Hines playing background on the Victrola. When Keo blew too loud, started striding out, Dew lowered his sax and was on him.

  “Boy, forget those screaming visions. When your turn comes, just cloud my mood a little—darken my tangible.”

  Keo hesitated. “You mean, you want restraint.”

  Dew smiled. “I want . . . poetry. Take the teeth out of your horn. Pretend the thing is your woman’s cunt.”

  He grew depressed, fearing Dew had overestimated him.

  “No, no,” Dew said. “You just need oiling, more practise.”

  During a break, he explained who he’d gathered for his band. Honey Boy Lafitte, half blind but a maniac on piano. Slow Drag Madeira, making a comeback on bass after kicking heroin. Slamming Sonny Dunlow, who was tearing up drums all over Storyville. Dew on sax. And Keo. Maybe later a trombone or tuba.

  “Thought I’d call us Dew Baptiste’s Persuasion Jazz Band. Got a real nice flow.”

  Warming up again, they played round the opening bars of “Honeysuckle Rose,” kicking the chorus back and forth. After ten minutes Keo tapered off, letting Dew slide in. Watching his African/Spanish/ Creole blood step forth in high cheekbones, in sharp, dilating nostrils, he began to glimpse the real Dew Baptiste.

  Dew had played big bands in Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City. He could blow towns off the map with his saxophone, but he wasn’t meant for that. His tone was deeply personal, his intonations subtle, too full of shadings to blend with other sax men. He quit every band because he didn’t like the rules they set.

  “Who says time always has to be the same?” he asked. “Who says if jazz starts slow, it has to stay slow? Or if it starts fast, it has to fly? Who says chords always have to jibe?”

  Keo now saw him as a true jazzman who made his own rules, his own rhythms. Even if it meant playing alone in a tiny room, blowing notes so pure they were like needles driven into the skin.

  Suddenly Dew moved to another mode, with slow excitement. He advanced on that theme, building a terrible anxiety, as if he’d never find his way back. But always he found an outlet in his improv and, almost by sleight of hand, came home, his notes still immaculate and pure. “. . . you’re confection, goodness knows, Honeysuckle Rose . . .”

  Later, in a tailored suit—a little long, for Dew was taller—shoes polished to mirrors, his curly hair slicked straight with Conkolene, Keo strode out into Storyville. So many wondrous shades of skin: yellows, tea colors, rich mahoganies, reddish auburns, mink browns. Smooth blacks with bluish highlights, and then a true, majestic ebony—this one coming at them in white suit, white spats. Honey-colored women smiled, rocking their hips. Dew seemed to know them all. He guided Keo through tides of heat and musk, still pep-talking like a father.

  “This town is seductive and sly. Some folks will try to get their hooks in you. Rule one: Heroin will kill you. A little reefer is okay. Rule two: Whores will disease you. Take the ones I bring.”

  “Dew . . . they said you were a pimp.”

  He stepped back, laughing. “Hell, even Satchmo started out cutting in on chicks.”

  Long past midnight, he took Keo to a club with a tiny stage, a shambling, ragtag band.

  “They call the trumpet ‘Buddha.’ ”

  He was high yellow and bald, with penetrating, slanted eyes. Lips soft and depraved like injured petals, immense fatigue in his droopy cheeks. His body was enormous, the trumpet tiny in his hands. Before he even put it to his lips, Keo was afraid of him. The Buddha smiled, stuck out a rough, magenta tongue, flicked it obscenely at the crowd.

  They were five—trumpet, tenor sax, guitar, bass, piano. An “ear band,” no music sheets, no memorized arrangements. One of them called out a song, and they’d take off, sliding in and out of chorus, taking turns at improvisation, no one rushing the other. The Buddha ignored them, not joining in the first three songs. Then midst “Sweet and Lovely” he stepped forward, snapping his fingers, waiting his turn. Almost painfully, he dragged the trumpet to his lips, then blew nervous, jagged sounds making Keo’s fillings hurt.

  He watched him coming, watched him going, approaching the chorus, darting off. Keo understood the man wasn’t playing the chorus, or the song. He was playing the ambush to the song, playing the colors of the camouflage he hid in while he plotted his ambush. Then he was playing the Mississippi River, couples dancing, riverboat sex, a young whore drowning, a girl whose face was sweet and lovely. There! The chorus again. But playing it tragic, blowing like he was the river. He was that girl.

  “Tell it, Buddha! Tell!”

  In that tiny room, people hammered tables, they stood and shouted. The huge man kept on blowing, igniting the place with accusatory madness, his horn almost disappearing in his huge, doughy gut. He darted and feinted, playing soft now, intimate, his sounds skimming the levees of the river, skimming white shoulders of magnolia, parting delta mist. Sweet and lovely, yes. When the crowd thought they were with him, that they’d caught up, could anticipate, he suddenly blew them ragtime—old, stiff, dotted eighth and sixteenth notes
—then slid into “swing” smooth, linear rhythms.

  He did it so brilliantly, they forgave him, drunk with his long extended solo. Then he tore the horn from his lips, weaving like a mountain collapsing, the band blowing round him, giving him rest. Someone pushed a chair under his backside. The Buddha ignored it, wiped his going-purple face, lifted massive arms, dragged in shredded nets of air, and blew again. His eyes flashing bright red as if his heart were exploding. He still had tremendous control, still had integrity in his rhythm. They still heard dregs of “Sweet and Lovely” hanging in his lungs. He was still telling a story, many stories, still building to a climax.

  Keo sat paralyzed. Here was a jazzman of the first order, a physical miracle like a great athlete, one of almost superhuman control and range, a man of almost freakish shape who could soar and swing like an angel. Here was a musician who night after night risked killing himself because he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, stop. One day they would drag his lungs out of his trumpet. Finally the Buddha heaved himself from the stage, steaming, his body throwing off wild perfumes. Keo dropped his head, completely stunned.

  Out on the street he wiped his face. “I’ll never play like him.”

  “You don’t want to play like him,” Dew said. “He’s fucking Lady Needle, dig? Besides, you got your own brand of wild. You just got to ease up—hypnotize yourself into stupidity.”

  “Oh man, talk straight, so I can understand you.”

  They sat down in another bar, Dew sipping pink gins like a dandy, his elegant fingers tipped with blue nails. His drawl was soft and smooth, extra slow so Keo could follow.

  “Look, imagine you’re an old man who spent his life reading books. Now you need to gather all those books and read them backwards until you reproduce your mind at the time of your birth.

  Empty. Clean. What we want to deal with is your pre-mind.”

  Keo leaned forward, trying to absorb it.

  “Hula Man, you still think jazz is music. It’s anything but music. Jazz is jazz, dig? When you’re playing, lost in your own landscape, blowing sounds you never heard before, maybe sounds you won’t ever duplicate, what’s at issue is not whether those sounds are good jazz or bad jazz, but whether they should be heard at all. You got to start thinking of yourself as a sort of—sound warden.”

  He sipped his drink, thoughtful. “You mean . . . I have to ask myself, Are these sounds fit to be heard? Not fit to be heard? Are they just fit to be . . .”

  “Surmised. Right. Split-second decisions.” Dew slowed for emphasis. “Now—what if you’re goofing off, experimenting, and you blow a sound that might lead to something maybe even brilliant? But it’s something that could undermine your self-esteem, because you’ll probably never be able to match it. What do you do then?”

  Keo shook his head.

  “See. That’s what you got to figure out when you’re playing. The moral dilemma. And you got to figure it out in advance. With jazz, what is, is under constant threat of extinction. You can’t be sentimental. Can’t repeat. Always got to be cold, distant, even from yourself.”

  Keo stared at him. “Man, how’d you get to be so smart?”

  Dew thought a while, then answered softly. “My daddy and mama gave their lungs to cotton. Sharecropping. Before she died, Mama said, ‘Don’t never scrape. Don’t never yield. Don’t be the bottom of the pile.’ So I went north and found some heroes who taught me how to think.”

  Keo looked so new and scared, Dew tried to comfort him.

  “I’m not so smart. I make mistakes. There’ll be nights you think you hate me. You’ll want to kill me. And there’ll be nights when I cream you with my sax. Or the drummer will, or the bass. But, there’ll be nights you’ll crap all over us. Nights when you’ll drag music up from your balls. You got ‘it,’ Hula Man, just remember that.”

  Back on the street, Dew offered him a girl, a mustard-colored beauty. He declined and Dew went off with two of them. Keo tossed in bed, dreaming of a sea eerily still; now it was the land that surged beneath him. At noon Dew shook him, got him to his feet.

  “OK. Let’s blow some dogma at the walls.”

  IN THE LATE 1920S MOST AMBITIOUS JAZZMEN HAD LEFT NEW Orleans for Chicago, St. Louis, Kansas City. Now the late 1930s had brought a resurgence of interest in original, seminal New Orleans jazz, without the seductive smoothness of the big bands. It was the jazz of raw and ruthless men huffing, making mistakes, urged on by hunger, sometimes genius.

  Dew Baptiste’s Persuasion Jazz Band had that authentic sound. They caught on slowly, playing for drinks and meals in small bars on Perdido. Whores who knew him brought their johns. Fans of Slow Drag Madeira came. Some came out of curiosity, hearing the trumpet was a “hex man” from some place called Ho-no-loo-loo.

  When they grew popular enough, they took a percentage of the door. Between engagements, they practised all day and then split up for night jobs. By the time they got a weekend gig at Moulin Rouge across the river in Algiers, crowds stood in line for them.

  Sometimes dancers shimmying across a floor would stop, mesmerized by Honey Boy Lafitte, half blind but going wild on keyboard. Or they were lulled by the way Slow Drag enfolded his bass, picking out ripe, full-bodied chords shimmering like rubies. Dew and Keo played intricate ensembles, moving in and out of improvised counterpoint. Then Dew took off with his sax, his sounds elegant, profound, always leveling off, diminishing to a final moan.

  Keo learned to be frugal on horn, but deep within was still that need to scream, and sometimes Dew allowed him. Some nights he brought the horn to his mouth and paused, filling the dance hall with anticipation akin to dread. Throwing back his head, trumpet riding over his face, he played half a dozen choruses, each with searing intensity. Sometimes what he blew wasn’t sound, but just outside the realm of sound, maybe a new way of controlling his breathing. And sometimes what he blew was tragic and coherent.

  Most folks had never heard of Honolulu. They only knew Keo was from an island far away. But when he played like that, he blew Negroes the bitter rapture of their history, their present, still bowing to the white man, still shuffling in his eyes. He blew them truth: “back o’town” brothels, and street prostitutes, and Storyville cribs where twelve-year-old girls lay, and good-time mansions of octoroons where only rich men were allowed—because how else could a Negro girl make a living?

  He blew them echoes of street parades, Dixieland bands, strutting marching bands, sounds of other eras—hurting tunes, and dirty tunes, the blues. And the “hot blues,” the genesis of jazzing. He blew them wah-wah gutbucket sounds of King Oliver with his film-covered walleye. Mentor of Louis Armstrong, founding father of jazz, he had died toothless, a janitor in a pool hall. Keo blew and screamed to them of rampant pride, of the fact they had survived their history and given the world this unique and genius thing called jazz.

  One night in the last sobbing notes of a solo, he staggered, blinded by sweat, his shirt and pants pouring water, shoes squishing like galoshes. He went out with a great soaring wail that climbed and climbed, so folks raised their arms as if surrendering. Then he finally took his dive, freezing them in attitudes of disbelief. When he was finished, head bowed, horn hanging at his side, the applause was deafening.

  Exhausted, Keo stood there thinking, It was not as good as the Buddha.

  MAKA KILO,

  MAKA KIHI

  To Observe Closely, Out of the Corner of the Eyes

  ONE WEEKEND DEW BORROWED A CAR AND THE BAND DROVE to Gulfport, Mississippi, playing at the Great Southern Hotel. They drew standing ovations from all-white crowds, but were forced to eat sitting on the roadside, forced to sleep squeezed together in the car. Hotels and restaurants did not allow “coloreds.”

  It was the same in Biloxi. Practically living in the car, washing in streams, tracking down “coloreds” who would press their clothes. In Mobile, Alabama, playing the Tick Tock Dance Hall, they rented an empty room in the Negro section. It was winter and they slept on the floor, five shivering men side
by side, in overcoats and shoes and hats. For two nights Keo lay freezing, in shock.

  The same whites who applauded them at night taunted them in daylight, walking the streets three abreast, forcing them into the gutter. Their last morning in Mobile, Keo entered a luncheonette, Karl’s Kozy Korner. Exhausted, he slid onto a stool and smiled at the blonde behind the counter.

  “Black coffee, jelly doughnut, please.”

  She leaned across the counter, flirting. “You sure are brave, boy. My daddy catch you here, he’ll skin you alive.”

  Four white customers sat frozen on their stools. Then something moved behind the girl. Later Keo realized it was a reflection in the mirror behind her, of a large man coming at him, swinging something heavy. Stunning pain across his shoulders. Blackness, shouts. He woke in the street, his mouth full of gravel, the white man kicking him viciously.

  “Dirty nigger . . . Walked right in, in broad daylight! Messing with my daughter.”

  Crowds gathered, the baseball bat swung again. Someone grabbed it in midair. “Not here, Jake. He’s one of them niggers at the Tick Tock. Wait till they finish playing tonight.”

  A boot cracked his chest, he inhaled dirt and bits of glass. Dew pulled up in the car and, in the seething, shifting crowd, stood apologizing, “Yes suh, yes suh.”

  Lifting Keo, he slowly, carefully, drove away. “. . . out of your damned mind! I been saying watch out, watch out, since we left New Orleans. Are you deaf? Are you insane?”

  Keo doubled up with pain. “I thought segregated . . . meant buses and hotels.”

  “It means everything. Karl’s Kozy Korner. KKK! Don’t you get it?”

  He wheeled left and right, driving like a madman. In ten minutes the band had packed up the car. Quietly, they slid out of town, and out of Alabama. They stopped for gas in Mississippi, urinated in the woods, then drove straight through to New Orleans. Broken ribs, fractured shoulder. Dew told him he was lucky, told him what they would have done, had they caught him after dark.