Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  These trains, real and symbolic, redefined the American landscape and the American place, each town or city’s identity at least partially the result of how close or how far it was from an important railroad stop. The trains, and the laying of the track, brought a steady influx of the Asian workers known everywhere as coolies, who may well have been linked to the American Indians through a bloodline broken by the Stone Age migration over the Bering Strait, from the Eskimos all the way down to those Darwin encountered off of Tierra del Fuego. Those workers could only dimly have understood how their hard labor under the command of white men would help to connect the boundaries of the country with a brace of railroad steel; their presence would be felt decades later even in Kansas City, where Charlie Parker learned to love the Chinese food their descendants prepared.

  The railroad and railroad men also inspired the legend of Casey Jones, the engineer whose unwillingness to stop his hurtling mass of steel and boxcars reworked the sentimentalized gallantry of the Light Brigade into a folk American celebration of the meaningless destruction generated by a man too stubborn to brake his locomotive, rushing full face into death as his whistle steamed all the way. That colossal wreck took its place beside the mythic six-gun and the steel-driving hammers of big, black John Henry, who died in futile rebellion against automation. The suicidal arrogance of a Casey Jones, hypnotized by the power he controlled with his hand, is but one railroad spike rising sharp amid the bed of nails every technological civilization lays its mattress of customs and good behavior across, hoping never to be awakened by the pressure of too much weight on too many dangerous points.

  In time, of course, those fears were put to rest. The train became more and more a vehicle and a dream source. Its sound, and the stories it inspired, became a signal aspect of the national excitement of modern life. Railroad life would add an industrial lyricism to the music of the earliest blues musicians, who celebrated the big cities that terrified so many European artists. The hard, unsentimental sound of the blues, evolving from the rural guitar and the rural voice, mimicking the shuffle of the train in a rhythm that pulled together the march and the waltz—that blues sound took a stand for the human heart in the factory-made American world.

  Blues musicians sang of the trains as ways of getting out from under burdens of woe; they sang of them as the Yellow Dog and Empire State vehicles so cruelly responsible for taking that man or that woman so, so many miles away from the head-over-heels lover. Forever gone, forever gone.

  The Underground Railroad had clearly evolved into a system of very real trains that solved problems of distance with speed—much as Charlie Parker would do years later, pulling into his horn an industrial edge of breathless rhythm and attack that gave as much flight and fancy to urban life as the metal taps on dancers’ shoes, remaking the drag of gravity into an engine of rhythm ever ready to send out signals of elegance. On those real trains, Negroes like Charlie Parker’s father showed off their stuff as waiters, filling glasses almost to the top and moving from car to car without spilling a drop. They served with so much style that their deportment and skill were part of the definition of luxurious travel.

  When they came home, they brought clothes they’d found on sale in slicker towns, carried records not yet released in their own part of the country, introduced fresh slang, talked blue streaks in the barbershops about the way people cooked food from state to state, county to county, city to city, and gave the word on exactly how red necks faded to pink and almost to pure white from town to town. The trains allowed a colored man such a wide berth he sometimes almost felt as free as those whose only privilege was white skin, not money or class. The Negro railroad men smoked cigars as often as cigarettes; they wore their clothes mercilessly pressed, wore shoes so well-shined that the gleam told onlookers that they were men who knew of faraway places and felt comfortable all over the country—that same gleam that told Rebecca Parker that Charlie Sr. was a porter on the railroad as soon as she first saw him and saw it. Every one of them attending the reception at Addie Parker’s house knew that Charlie’s father was somebody, in the way only accomplishment makes possible.

  What took Charlie Parker hoboing out of Kansas City on those trains was just that: his blues to be somebody. When he left everything behind and headed for Chicago, he was shadowing the migration of Mississippi Negroes who had done likewise—and made the blues a basic part of the spiritual background of the city’s South Side.

  11

  Chicago was as famous for the formidable stench of its stockyards as for the cold wind that came in like a razor off Lake Michigan, the wind Negroes called “Mr. Hawkins.” The smell of all those animals would have reminded Charlie Parker of the vile odors wafting from the much smaller stockyard in Kansas City, near where he’d sat on Buster Smith’s bandstand at the Antlers Club, night after night, learning tune by tune under his mentor’s paternal watch.

  There was no Buster Smith here in Chicago. There was no one here he knew. As Charlie came off that last freight train, Chicago’s fall was stalking toward winter. All those K.C. haunts tainted or maintained by the Pendergast machine, places he’d known so well, would have seemed a world away.

  This Chicago was a really big town, second only to New York, the train tracks themselves suggesting an intricacy beyond what it was like back home. Here was where merchant families had long since floated into palaces on the blood of slaughtered hogs, cattle, and sheep. Here was where Roy Eldridge had broadcasted from the Three Deuces as Charlie sat hunched over a radio with Clarence Davis in the Ozarks, listening to him bristle through those tunes. Here was where Eldridge had ridden around in a convertible with a blonde—one of the things that proved how very, very different things were outside of Kansas City. Here a Negro had a wider range of motion; he could stretch out his habits a little more. Roy Eldridge may have been gone by now, but the Three Deuces was out there somewhere. Probably.

  That wasn’t all. Charlie had heard the Kansas City musicians talk about Chicago, and the traveling musicians who came through had their stories, too. There was a lot of hot and bloody folklore about gangsters, about Chicago and the nearby town of Cicero, where you walked down a long corridor in one place to hear Louis Armstrong and when you looked up there were gangsters lined up in gray hats above you, machine guns and shotguns in their laps.

  Charlie had heard the talk about all the modern things they had up there: about the elevated train called the El and the section known as the Loop, about the fine clothes and shoes in places like Marshall Field’s. It was a city of big, tall buildings, standing high in the distance, calm and magisterial above the city, visual introductions to the skyscraper modernity of the day. Traffic was thick as freckles on the face of a redheaded cracker.

  No matter how different the city looked, though, Charlie knew that Chicago would have its day life and its night life, the code of honest men and the slick, crude games of the devotedly crooked. He was no hick, not exactly. He was quick to pick up information about places he knew he would see someday when his career as a professional led him there.

  The Chicago wind sure lived up to its goddamn reputation. Still, Charlie was happy to have ended the first leg of his journey. By the time he turned up in Chicago, he had learned how to hobo, how to get along with guys who were down, though far from out. There is no record of exactly what route he took, or where he stopped; there was no schedule for those who got around by hopping trains, tramping along illegally in a dangerous environment. When you were hoboing your way out of town, you didn’t necessarily know the path or destination of any train you took; it wasn’t hard to get lost or have to change direction when left on a sidetrack, or an unexpected spur where goods were packed or unpacked onto the boxcars—or to be run off by railroad men with clubs and saps.

  Charlie never said where he stayed between trains, either—whether he found a place to flop in town, or how attractive a hobo camp might have been to this young musician, a place where he could get some food and java in exchange for
helping out however he could. He later told his third wife, Doris, how impressed he was by the men he’d met riding the rails: men who’d been out there since the end of the World War; or who’d lost everything in 1929 and said the hell with it, leaving their families following the big crash in search of a fresh start; or who’d gone out on the lam for some intentional or unintentional crime; men who had chosen to live in motion, to make it by working, begging, or stealing.

  Charlie’s personal skills—his charm and his curiosity, his ability to learn by asking good-natured but meticulous questions—could only have helped him in that side world of train-hopping and hobo jungles. Nobody knew who he was and nobody cared; neither his past life nor his present intentions meant as much as whether he could be trusted, whether he would lend a helping hand in another man’s interest. Once he was in there, riding the rails with the veterans, Charlie learned all kinds of new tricks: how to hop a train properly and avoid being pulled under to dismemberment or death; how to leap off one if you had to; how to peep the intentions of rough homosexuals who might be out to force their appetites on inexperienced young tramps; how to sleep comfortably on top of your possessions, just in case somebody deficient in respect wanted to steal from you; how to end your thirst by licking the accumulated “branch water” from leaves early in the morning.

  Like Buster Smith and Lester Young when they hoboed out of that last Blue Devil gig in Virginia, he was given a lot of help along the way. He fondly remembered to Junior Williams the exotic feeling of sitting around a pot of hobo stew, eating with men of different colors, and hearing their different tales from an America that was in its last years of Depression. What Charlie liked most about that itinerant life, he told Doris, was the insignificance of race. To the hobos, color meant nothing. Men were only men; they helped one another or grumbled away from those they distrusted. In this cold, they wore pants over pants, shirts over shirts, and coats over coats. A hot cup of anything was a splash of heaven.

  NOW, IN THIS city second only to New York, it was another world. Winter separated those who had to go outside from those who didn’t. When the chill was seriously down in Chicago, snow in the streets and Mr. Hawkins furiously flapping out more cold, people found every excuse possible to stay home: drinking hot milk, coffee, and spirits; holding card parties; doing crossword puzzles, listening to radio broadcasts; huddling around radiators, fireplaces, and open ovens to talk. Those who left the oven on sometimes blew up, but it was god-awful cold enough to take the risk.

  Charlie already knew how to shrug off such difficulties and focus on what he wanted. He started to make his way to the city’s South Side: the Negro section, the black belt. But a serious chill was getting there, and he could definitely feel it. He was starting to miss his pawned horn; he was anxious to rekindle his burgeoning mastery as soon as he could. Once he got to the South Side, something would work out. Somehow he would get a mouthpiece between his lips and get his fingers on that alto saxophone, and there would be musicians there, and they would understand him.

  Charlie was searching for music in a town already made famous by the desperadoes who died there and the gangsters who ruled. The Indiana Kid, John Dillinger, had pulled off all kinds of nonsense running around the Midwest, robbing banks, escaping jail, shooting his way out of police traps. But when he came to Chicago in the summer of 1934—his fingertips healing from the acid he used to try to destroy his prints, his face lumped up and scarred from a botched plastic surgery job—he got his comeuppance outside the air-conditioned Biograph Theater, where his ghost left through FBI bullet holes.

  In the city of the big shoulders, another outlaw was the flip side of the immigrant dream. As biographer Laurence Bergreen has documented, Italian émigrés had come north, fleeing a wave of lynchings in New Orleans—and a broader, almost hysterical contempt down south—that paralleled the treatment of Negroes at its worst. But those refugees from an old country of arias and honest labor would find themselves lampooned in a stereotype of Italian lawlessness held in place by one pudgy ex-bouncer from New York named Al Capone, who embodied the complex of ruthless ambition, upward mobility, sensual appetite, and desire for public approval that often drives the ruthless and charismatic into seats of crooked empire.

  Capone made his mark on the Second City by stoking its tendency toward corruption. By the time he arrived, the spirit of Chicago was already covered with the coal dust of dishonesty and a cynicism born of overcrowding. It was ready to be bullied, bought, and sectioned off into racketeer turfs, and Capone was happy to oblige. Much spilled blood put him in silk underwear, which he enjoyed laying out for the admiration of reporters eager to shed ink, like hot sauce, on this latest iteration of the urban bad boy. Capone was an irresistible character, a jovial Neapolitan who smoked Cuban cigars and loved the Chicago sun at a baseball game, but also had a stare so filled with rage that it could burn the paint off a tank. Even after the Feds got him for income tax evasion, his appetites—his love for opera, jazz, the best food and drink, the best clothes and watches, the best cars, the best tobacco—cast a long, complicating shadow over America’s rags-to-riches mythos.

  CHICAGO BETWEEN THE wars was a strange place. Among other things, it became a seedbed for paranoid conflict between the weirdest Irish American politics and Islamic Negro cults. Irish politicians, exploiting the romantic whiffs of IRA rebellion, ranted their way into office huffing and puffing about British plots against the United States and the Irish in particular. At the same time, leaders in the city’s Negro mosques, convinced that Christianity had pulled the wool over the eyes of black people, waged a strange jihad against fez-wearing Negro factions from Detroit. The city’s Irish, Poles, and Italians were all held together by the religious dictates of Rome, while Negroes were overwhelmingly Protestant; some surely believed, as one black preacher said, that Catholicism was “a beast in the wilderness.”

  Among musicians, Chicago was famous as the town where Louis Armstrong had come up to from New Orleans in 1922 to join his mentor, King Oliver, for a red-hot engagement at the Royal Gardens Café on Thirty-First Street. The King Oliver band played the blues fast, medium, and bunny-hug slow as young Negroes danced—and equally young white jazz musicians came to hear the real thing. Armstrong became a center of attention, and he soon received an offer from Fletcher Henderson that took him to New York, which he shook like a box of loose screws in a buckboard on a bumpy road. But he soon returned to Chicago, recording ever more imposing trumpet improvisations with his own small groups and in duets and ensembles with Earl Hines, the piano revolutionary whose line had much in common with the inventions of his trumpet. Armstrong was long gone by the time Charlie Parker got off his freight train, empty-handed, but Hines was still there—held hostage for ten years by gangsters, broadcasting with his big band from the Grand Terrace Ballroom, unarguably challenging the New York outfits, and making records, but denied mobility under threat of death.

  Charlie’s first stop was at Thirty-Ninth and State Street, where he hung around at the black musicians union, Local 208, trying to get into the scene. There were jitneys everywhere, ready to carry people to clubs farther into the South Side, and the El made stops where the clubs were, at Thirty-First Street, Thirty-Fifth, Forty-Third, Forty-Seventh, Fifty-First, and Fifty-Fifth. The union was only a few blocks from the DuSable and the Morocco, the two hotels on Cottage Grove at Thirty-Ninth Street, where local artists like Hines congregated and traveling Negro entertainers took rooms. But that was the big time; Charlie wasn’t ready for any of that, not yet. He had plenty of nerve, but he also understood protocol. For now, Local 208 was good enough.

  With no horn to blow, looking like any other ragamuffin, he wasn’t exactly shunned at the union, but no one really knew what he could do. Still, it was warmer in there than it was outside, and he could bum a cigarette or watch the guys playing tonk, telling stories, and waiting for jobs to come in over the phone or some bandleader to walk in or send a man down ready to hire. On any given evening, some g
ig might need a bass player, another a drummer, another a piano player, a rhythm guitar, or a small group to do a job. If you didn’t have a job, the union was where you got in line to get what was coming.

  Harry Gray was the head Negro at the 208. He was about five nine and one hundred and sixty pounds, light brown, and always well dressed, his clothes carrying the scent of cigar smoke. When you saw him, even if you didn’t know who he was, you could quickly tell he was in charge of something; Gray had the unmistakable demeanor of one who decided the fates of others from a position of absolute security. His eyes were compassionate, but his temperament had sharp angles; if pushed too far, he might unashamedly become one of those Chicago Negroes who would shoot enough holes in you to guarantee your horizontal position in a funeral parlor. In the teasing atmosphere among Negroes at the time, everyone knew not to bump Harry Gray too hard.

  By his second day at Local 208, Charlie knew the only thing that would get him anywhere was to go out and jam, to borrow someone’s horn and see if he could break into the scene. He had no intention of staying in Chicago; he just wanted to play. Then, when he felt rested up enough, he would make that last hoboing stretch to New York and find Buster Smith. Some of the Chicago musicians remembered Buster from the time he’d spent in town after Basie went east—played a whole lot of good saxophone, they said, could run you crazy on the blues— but there wasn’t much they could find for Charlie until he found a horn and some clothes that prevented him from looking as though he put the big T in tramp.