Song of the Exile

by Kiana Davenport

  Keo grew wary. Homesick, disenchanted, some nights he walked Jane Alley where Satchmo was born. He sat on the curb in front of his house. The great Louis Armstrong, whose mother had cooked him meals from things in garbage cans. Made him shoes from used rubber tires. A man with more soul and genius than any jazz musician alive, yet he was still called “nigger” in the South. His image fired Keo, made him more determined to press on.

  He adopted Dew’s style—tight-waisted suits, spectator shoes, stickpins in his ties—looking debonair, even handsome, when they played Lulu White’s brothel, and Mahogany Hall on Basin Street. Each night he carefully dressed himself like a priest for High Mass, knife-pleating his pants, shooting his cuffs. Then he went onstage and tore himself to pieces, ending a shambles, shoes off, shirts ripped, suits soaking wet, his once conked hair standing up electrified. He spent his early paychecks on his wardrobe.

  A scout from a record company up north arranged a recording session, standing Keo fifteen feet back from the mike. Still, his trumpet overwhelmed them. On “Body and Soul” he went into a trance, playing twenty choruses before Dew snapped him out of it.

  The scout complained, “Guy’s too wild. Can’t tone him down, he doesn’t blend.” Record companies passed them by.

  Feeling a failure, Keo walked the streets again and found himself in Chinatown. Tiny shops hung with skinned ducks, old men with peonies tattooed on their feet playing fan-tan and mah-jongg. He sat in a tea shop where a girl served him oolong. Smelling salt fish and jook, he closed his eyes, strolling down Kalihi Lane. Mama flirting with the poi man hugging bags of purple paste. Palama boys across the way singing in falsetto. Snores of Mr. Kimuro on the left answering Mr. Silva’s on the right.

  And out beyond the lane, Kalihi district. Lee Su’s Bakery offering pink and green mochi, Kalana’s Take-out selling fresh laulau and limu rice. Eels dancing in tanks at Yokio’s Fish Place. And then beyond Kalihi, Honolulu’s Chinatown—sewing machines chattering in doorways, barber clippers snip-snipping in the streets. In butcher stalls, necklaces of offal, bowls of pig’s cheeks. Tripe singed pink.

  And somewhere in the Heights was Sunny. He dropped his head, asleep in the dark lakes of her eyes. Taste of guava on her lips, her rope of body he had climbed. Sunny, pushing him out into the world. Charging him with her fierce ecstatic hum. Yet she was a terrible correspondent. He wrote her every week explaining how, moneywise, things were moving slow. He received maybe one letter a month, and in between, he tortured himself—she had changed her mind. Met someone rich and light-skinned.

  When her letters did arrive, they gave him new momentum, he felt gears shift in the suave machinery of his neck and shoulders, he moved with urgency. She was boning up on French. She was selling her jewelry, saving every dime. Her letters made him want to touch someone, made solitude almost unbearable. Dew brought him girls of every hue, but he turned away.

  Still, women loved how Keo blew his horn. They’d come into honky-tonks, stockings full of dollars, and listen all night. His name, Hula Man, his strange Pacific origins, the fact he seemed to desire no one, went with neither male nor female, intrigued them. Women turned when he passed, stared at his horn after his hands and mouth had been all over it. During a break, a woman walked up to the bandstand and bent down, smelling every inch of his trumpet. Another stole his mouthpiece.

  The band pressed on, always hustling, always hungry. If record companies didn’t want them, Dew said, Damn! they’d make their own recording. They rented a mike, recording machine, and acetates, and set up in an empty room. When they played back the record, everything was raw and brassy. They set up a second session, using two mikes.

  With no record scouts yelling, no one in earphones waving at them like trained monkeys, Keo relaxed. He still wasn’t that good at reading sheet music, not all his notes were right. But his lead was perfect in its supple variations on “Am I Blue,” his attack direct and urgent. By the flick of an eye, a signal from Dew, he knew when to tone down, when to gracefully slide out of a chorus for the next man’s solo. Each song came out so effortlessly, they ran straight through nine titles. When they finished, they knew they had a record. The First of Persuasion.

  Weeks later, after begging, passing the hat, Dew set up another recording session in a wood-paneled dance hall ideal for sound. The first night was rehearsal, the second the real recording. But they blew with such control—“Tiger Rag,” “I Should Care,” “St. James Infirmary,” “That’s My Home,” “Mahogany Hall Stomp,” “Nobody’s Sweetheart”—they didn’t need a second night. Dew haunted radio stations, but local DJs were white, and when they played “colored jazz” they only wanted Louis Armstrong. He sent records to stations in New York, Chicago, Kansas City. After a few months, he stopped calling them.

  Sometimes Dew saw sax men in the audience stealing his compositions, jotting down notes on their shirt cuffs. He started playing with a handkerchief over his valves so no one could follow his fingering. One night, Honey Boy aped him, playing with a white sheet over himself and the keyboard. Horn men began stalking Keo and Dew, jumping onstage, challenging them in “cutting” contests, trumpet against trumpet, sax against sax. Dew held his own; no tenor sax in New Orleans could match his beauty and inventiveness.

  As for Keo, there were better players with more control, but his raw sounds, his searing altissimos, fantastic high notes, defeated challengers. He listened to a man’s control, his lyricism, and grew angry. He would blow that anger through his horn. Sometimes he achieved high F, holding it so long word went out that here was a man with lungs like Satchmo, but without the control or patience to read music.

  Dew defended him. “Well, yes, he’s lousy at sight-reading, but his ear is perfect. Man can identify the pitch of a fart.”

  In fact, there were men Keo feared. Hearing the music of giants up north—“Red” Allen, Buck Clayton, Roy Eldridge—he knew he would never achieve such genius. Still, he possessed the ability to incorporate into his playing every sound he’d ever heard—Beethoven, Wagner, the growl and rasp of Bessie Smith, cereal jingles, ads for beer, the praying and cursing of Negroes squatting at their gambling games—cooncan, pitty-pat. He began to see where he was limited, where he borrowed from the genius of others. This knowledge became his dark secret, the careful note he never blew.

  A PARTY OF TOUGH-LOOKING WHITES IN EVENING CLOTHES SAT close to the bandstand. After soloing twelve choruses, Keo slid out, giving Slamming Dunlow his turn on drums. One of the whites caught Keo’s eye and rubbed his nose repeatedly. Keo looked away. Later the man’s bodyguard nudged him at the bar.

  “When Bateau Creole does this”—he rubbed his nose—“it means more. He wants more horn.”

  During the second set the man rubbed his nose again. The band ignored him. When Keo looked down, Bateau Creole had placed a revolver on the table before him. Dew flew into a solo, dancing his horn high over his head. When the man rubbed his nose again, Keo followed with eight choruses of “Just a Gigolo,” blowing so hard his brass mute blew off his trumpet and flew across the room. The gun man loved it. At 3 A.M. when Dew and Keo left the club, his toughies guided them into the backseat of his Cadillac.

  “To show my appreciation.” Bateau Creole shook their hands, stuffed hundred-dollar bills in their pockets.

  He was small and pale, his face all frontal like a rat. A ruby glittered in his tooth.

  His drawl was slightly cultured. “You boys are verrry good. I love good jazz. I once studied violin, oh yes.”

  He said he would like to manage them.

  “What does that mean?” Dew asked.

  “Well, it will never mean I will tell you where, or what, to play. It might mean I will bring you crowds. I can make you famous.”

  “What do we have to do?”

  “Just play. I will come and listen. Now and then”—he rubbed his nose—“you might play special solos just for me.”

  Dew leaned forward. “Do you know DJs?”

  “Why, yes.” He smiled.
“Have you boys cut a record?”

  “Cut two. DJs won’t play them. The only ‘colored’ they want is Satchmo.”

  He smiled; his ruby twinkled. “Send me your records. Leave it to me.”

  After that, wherever he got them dates he always appeared, bringing men in tuxedos and beautiful mulatta girls, sending champagne up to the stage for “his boys.” Sometimes they started to close down a set and Bateau rubbed his nose. They inhaled and started swinging again, playing until they passed out. One night he kept them playing for thirty hours, straight into the next night. Each time they collapsed, he sent up food and liquor. When it was over, he rushed the stage, stuffing bills in their pockets, in their sleeves, even their socks.

  Dew began to worry. “This cat don’t care about music. He’s into control.”

  No one listened, they were busy counting hundred-dollar bills. His Conkolened hair pressed down with a head rag, Keo sat on his bed rubber-banding piles of cash. A pile for Mama and Papa. One for Malia and his brothers. A pile for Sunny’s passage to New Orleans. When the knock came, he reached from the bed and opened the door. Dew studied the little money piles, then bent down, sweeping them together.

  “Don’t even think of it, whatever you’re planning. This here’s going in the bank, like mine.”

  He stuffed it all in his pocket and turned to go. Keo threw him against the wall so violently, a mirror cracked.

  “I love you, man, but I ain’t your ‘nigger.’ That money’s mine. I sweated for it since the day I got here.”

  “You’ll blow it. You always do.” Dew got slowly to his feet, drew the piles of money from his pocket. “What is this? You turning into a philanthropist?”

  “I got family. Responsibilities. I got plans for Paris someday, like I told you. Nothing’s happening for us, Dew. Our band’s not going anywhere.”

  “It takes time. Bateau’s got connections.”

  “Bateau’s a gangster.”

  Dew slumped back against the wall. “Yeah, I thought of that. One wrong move, we end up in the river.”

  A year had passed. Keo was still living hand to mouth. And Malia’s letters alarmed him.

  . . . U.S. military building more barracks and runways . . . Sunny’s father real tense, afraid he’ll lose his job to defense workers coming in by the thousands. He takes it out on her mother. Sunny tries to intervene. . . .”

  He felt such guilt, he sent more money home. Then he started waking up at 3 and 4 A.M., his heart pounding, body covered with sweat. He thought of Sunny left defenseless with her father. Imagining the man striking her, he jumped up shouting, blinded by pain in his damaged shoulder. He stood in the dark in his tiny room until his body quit shaking, until his breath no longer came in gasps. He thought of her pale-honey skin, her lovely slanted eyes. Here, they would call her mulatta. Here, too, she would be endangered. He wrote her, explaining how things were not exactly happening in New Orleans. He mentioned racism—“much worse than Honolulu.” He vaguely mentioned gangsters.

  He changed the tone of his letters, hoping to sound like a man certain of what to do next. He already envisioned them in Paris. They would go, he wrote, as soon as they had the fare between them. He would be a waiter or busboy, anything, to find somewhere safe for her. He would blow his trumpet on the side.

  One night he stepped down from the bandstand thinking he was dreaming. “Oogh!” His little Hawai‘ian-Chinese cabin mate from the freighter.

  Oogh smiled up at him, and took his hand. “Mon ami, are you well? You are going to play in Paris, no? Then you must be prepared.”

  Keo bent down, hugging him. “You rascal, you disappeared! We never said goodbye—”

  “And why? We haven’t parted. I come to hear you when I’m in port.”

  “I’ve never seen you.”

  “I listen. That is more important.”

  They sat down and Oogh began talking as if they were still aboard the ship crossing the Pacific, as if their conversation had not been interrupted.

  “Hula Man, your ear is still miraculous. You can play anything. But now you must begin to know what you are playing, so you will know what rules you break. Europe will be different. Prepare. Listen to Bach, Stravinsky. Your friend Dew knows these names. They were revolutionaries, jazzmen of their day.”

  He talked for hours, recognizing Keo’s fears: that he was not original, not a genius.

  “And what is genius? They say it is the idea of a great principle growing into the promise of its logic. Who possesses such logic? Mozart? Beethoven? Sub-Saharan tribes with drums and gourds?”

  Keo sighed. “You know, I’m still scared. Still an island boy. Paris is where brilliant jazzmen gather from round the world. They’ll laugh me out of town.”

  Oogh shook his head. “Listen closely. Europeans don’t play jazz, they play their idea of jazz. What is jazz, anyway, but longing, raging? And what is music but the rearrangement of eight notes on a scale? All that is important is that the next note be indifferent, but inevitable. You have that gift, my friend.”

  The next night, Oogh brought him a recording, a trumpet solo of the “Nessun dorma” aria from Puccini’s Turandot. Keo had only vaguely heard of Puccini, but listening now, the horn—its tragic, haunting tones—astonished him. He wept.

  Oogh patted his arm. “Yes, weep. That is genius. It captures the solitary longing, the triumph of the human heart.”

  He played it over and over, then jumped up on a chair, beating his little chest theatrically, translating from the aria.

  “ ‘Vincirà!—I shall win.’ You will never compose such as this. Few do. But one day you will learn to play this aria just so. I believe it.”

  Keo drew closer. “Oogh, how should I prepare?”

  He sat down, put his hands together. “You must digest everything you have seen and heard here, even the ugliness. It will enrich your playing. Later, when you throw away what you don’t need, you’ll be doing it from strength, not ignorance. And try to learn to carry conversation. Europeans value talk. You must understand even the word ‘jazz,’ many people have no knowledge of its genesis.”

  He continued talking softly, trancelike.

  . . . Some hold that “jazz” has its roots in the jasmine scent of Storyville, its prostitutes. You see, Frenchmen brought the perfume industry with them to New Orleans. Oil of jasmine was a popular local ingredient. When perfumers added it to a scent, that was known as “jassing it up.” And, also, there is the French word jaser, to chatter. . . .

  Often, jasmine-scented women asked potential customers if “jass” was on their mind, meaning more of course than chatter! Oh, yes. Since slang terms for semen were gism and jasm, “jass” came to mean—well, l’amour. It became a common word, also describing music played by little bands in honky-tonks and brothels. . . .

  It may be, in the languid Southern pronunciation, the word “jass” was dragged out, sounding more suggestive and erotic—jazzzzz. As New Orleans musicians worked the riverboats, migrating north to big cities, the sounds of jazz went with them. And with them went memories of family, genealogy, the pounding of ancestral drums in Congo Square. . . .

  And too, went Voodoo, gris-gris ceremonies. Nightmares of slavery, and running. And maybe too went love for Choctaw. Indians living in the swamps who hid slaves. So there is always a poignancy in jazz, a homesickness for what we leave behind. That is the real definition, mon ami. Jazz is the sound of loneliness, human need. Jazz is the tongue of the exile. . . .

  They listened again to the trumpet solo of the “Nessun dorma” aria. When Keo looked up, Oogh was gone.

  OVERNIGHT, IT SEEMED, THE BAND’S TWO RECORDS WERE AIRED by local DJs. Calls came in, clubs wanted to book “Bateau Creole’s Persuasion Band.” He had changed their name, signifying he owned them. Dew tracked him down, took a sledgehammer to his Cadillac, crunching each fender, smashing the windshield to glittering beads.

  While the others fled to Chicago, he and Keo grabbed their savings and caught the first train
out for New York City. As the landscape flew past, Dew sat cracking his knuckles.

  “No one’s gonna own me. Least of all white gangsters.”

  All Keo would know of New York City was a room in Harlem where they hid for weeks, waiting for passports and berths on a ship to France.

  One day Dew came running, waving documents. “We got passage! We got bookings!”

  In fact, what they had was a job at a circus in Paris, playing with a broken-down band. A clerk in the passport office had warned Dew that, with Europe on the brink of war, most Americans were headed home.

  Nonetheless, one July dawn in 1939, traveling in inverse direction to the rest of the world, Keo and Dew sailed third-class into days of unremitting seasickness. Days where they moved crablike across their cabin floor. They docked at Le Havre filthy and exhausted. There Dew spoke enough Creole French to find the boat train to Paris. A circus representative was waiting, and within a week they were playing in the band at Cirque Medrano.

  France was miserably damp and gray. The band was ghastly, mostly amateurs and students. At night, smelling sawdust and manure, hellish roar of lions in the background, Keo fell asleep remembering Oogh’s words.

  Jazz is the sound of loneliness. It is the tongue of the exile.

  KA WEHE ‘ANA O KE KAUA

  Prelude to War

  STEAMING PACHYDERMS. SIBERIAN WILDCATS SOARING THROUGH rings of fire. Aerialists like spangled moths traversing the heights in dazzling fugues. At first they viewed Paris through the warped prism of the Big Top. Then they began metroing in to the heart of the city, standing on boulevards mystified. So little of what they knew seemed to count here.