Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  REBECCA HAD BEEN through a whole heap of homemade hell since Charlie took it upon himself to disappear from town: poof. She and Addie Parker were at odds most of the time. It was ugly and it was strange. Rebecca thought her mother-in-law was “in the arts,” a hoodoo woman, especially after Parkey took little baby Leon and walked him around the house in a circle, saying, “Now he won’t ever leave home.” The satisfaction in Addie’s voice and eyes gave Rebecca an ominous chill.

  Rebecca kept silent, but she watched every little thing Addie Parker did with a growing combination of fear and resentment. She could see that Addie was gradually trying to reduce Leon’s affection for his own mother. She wanted that boy all to herself—as if, having failed to hang on to Charlie Sr. and then to her own son, she could start all over again with the next generation. Her ways always revealed her mind.

  Addie Parker wasn’t a naturally warm person—Rebecca had known that for a while now—but she was so warm with Leon, so sweet, paying so much attention, cooing to him all the time, making him laugh and giggle. Oh, she put a light in that child’s eyes. Yes, she did. If she could get that boy, baby Leon, he would replace Charlie the father and Charlie the son. And if Charlie the son came back after this long, long time away—and stayed back—her world would be perfect, son and grandson under her control. That son of hers and that baby would have everything they wanted; they would need for nothing that was within her power to bring home. Addie Parker knew how to spoil people and command them at the same time.

  All this business with Parkey, and Rebecca’s other feelings about the father of her child, kept her in an emotional and psychological whirl. She still loved Charlie; she could remember how he looked, his strong body and its reddish-brown tone, the way it felt when they were together and everything was going along right, the sound of his voice, that lost look he could have, or that happy look, or that look that showed how much he cared for her. She remembered how he would pull himself together, little by little, and take her out riding in Parkey’s old Ford. Of course, she also remembered the many ways he had broken her heart, first into big pieces, and then into smaller and smaller ones. There was no way to forget the surprises that came from the inky world he lived in and couldn’t cut loose from, the sudden violence—even the way the two of them silently communicated their mutual fear and unhappiness. It was a lot for a young girl to carry around.

  By and by, Rebecca began missing her own mother and the atmosphere of the home she’d once known, when things had made sense and there was no constant feeling of insecurity darkening the sky. Rebecca didn’t know where she was going; she didn’t know what was going to happen to her and her child; she had no idea where Charlie was or what he was doing. Now he was gone, giving the crabs to other girls who didn’t know he wasn’t clean. Just as easy, he could have picked up some harsher disease from those street women. He could be dead, for all she knew. One thing was sure as death itself: if Addie Parker was in contact with him but didn’t feel like telling her, there was no way Rebecca was ever going to find out.

  Rebecca’s problems with Parkey finally reached their most difficult plateau when her mother-in-law demanded that she divorce Charlie in absentia and make a choice: either prove she had a means of support or turn over baby Leon to his grandmother. Rebecca was dumbstruck. Now Parkey was going to put the white court people in their family business? That was another slap: Rebecca meant nothing to her now that Charlie had left, even though Parkey had promised him that she’d take care of his wife and his baby on the day that her saxophone-playing son had hopped a rattler and disappeared from Kansas City. Well, Addie Parker didn’t lay down in love to get pregnant with Leon, and she didn’t lay down in labor to let him loose in the living world. Rebecca’s will was not gone, not hardly. She might have felt broken inside, but her anger was the equal of everything else she felt. If she had stood up to her own mother for Charlie, she could stand up to Charlie’s mother for her own son.

  When Addie forced the matter into court, that simplified everything; her betrayal scraped away all of Rebecca’s hesitation. She would have to get away from Addie Parker, to get her son out of that cold hoodoo woman’s shadow. Rebecca acquiesced to the divorce—and she was overwhelmed, almost humiliated, with gratitude when her own mother offered herself as guaranteed support for Leon.

  All the rancor in 1516 Olive cooled off then, replaced by a low-grade resentment on both sides. One part of her life was closing down. When the day finally came, her brother, Winfrey, drove up and said, “Come on, Rebecca, I’m taking you home.”

  “Home,” she recalled decades later. “It felt like, to me, like the most beautiful word I ever heard anyone say.”

  REBECCA MOVED TO her family’s new home in Leeds, Missouri, about a ten-minute drive from Kansas City. In May 1940, her mother came to Rebecca and said, “Becky, Charlie’s at the door.”

  She went to the door and talked with Charlie on the porch. This young man looked good, very good. He was still lean, but he had a new coating of seriousness in his eyes. There was more man than boy standing there. There was also a kind of sadness to him, another cut of pain, something like the way he’d looked the day he carried their miscarried second baby to the bathroom, in a pan given to them by Dr. Thompson, and flushed it away. Yes, she still knew him, God help her. She knew that young man who was rising out of the skin of the boy she had fallen in love with. Still, she could tell something was wrong with Charlie that day—wrong as a backward seven. She was right: his father had been stabbed to death with a pair of scissors, and Charlie had come back home for the funeral. Poor Charlie: his father, always an invisible ghost to him, was finally gone for good.

  He visited with Rebecca for a while, trying to piece their marriage back together. He tried to explain himself to her: everything he had done, he said, he had done either because he didn’t understand the meaning of his actions or because he had to take a chance on his talent. He had suffered out there, hopping trains, starving, wearing his shoes until his feet swelled up so big they almost busted out of the leather. It wasn’t easy, but Charlie was getting much closer to his own way of playing, and even some of the guys back east, who’d never heard of him, were beginning to respect him. He had put the drugs and the liquor behind him. Now all he wanted was to have his wife and son back. Rebecca had to know that he loved her, and that he loved Leon, and it must be absolutely clear that the three of them were supposed to be together under one roof.

  Well, many things were clear, all right, but her moving back in with him into that woman’s house on Olive Street was not one of them. She still loved Charlie: she could feel it just looking at him, and more so because of the new power and confidence that had replaced his old, unearned, childish arrogance. Rebecca could see he wasn’t high, and he looked rested, so she believed him when he said he’d conquered the needle and the bottle. But up under all of the rioting emotions of attraction, and the seductive attraction of his voice, she still felt in her heart an absolute lack of confidence that the two of them could work out their troubles. As good as he looked, as sweet as he spoke, as serious as he obviously was, she could still feel the turmoil within Charlie.

  As she sat and talked with him, Rebecca heard herself saying, “No, Charlie,” over and over again.

  After realizing he couldn’t convince her himself, Charlie said to her mother, “Mrs. Ruffin, please make Rebecca come back to me.”

  “Charlie,” she said, “I didn’t put you together, and I didn’t take you apart. That’s between you and Becky.”

  “All right, Mrs. Ruffin.” It went no further. Charlie left.

  What happened after that was remembered quite differently by Rebecca and her sister Ophelia in interviews conducted decades later. Ophelia claimed that, even though things were hard between Charlie and Rebecca, and despite the animosity between her sister and Mrs. Parker, Becky was always trying to get back with Charlie. Rebecca claimed that she broke off things with Charlie for good in East Saint Louis in 1939, when he was
with Billy Eckstine’s big band and a young, enthralled Miles Davis was there listening. Though Rebecca insisted on the story, her timing was impossible: Davis didn’t intersect with the Eckstine band until 1944, when he was just graduating from high school. All Ophelia remembered about those later years was that Rebecca was so crazy about Charlie that she tried over and over to get him to do right, to take care of her and Leon.

  What Charlie did with himself after Rebecca refused to leave her mother’s home is very clear. He went right back into Addie Parker’s house, no longer a boy but a young man who had traveled and had an even stronger sense of what he wanted to do. Perhaps seduced by the comfort of 1516 Olive, Charlie didn’t go back to New York, not right away. There in his mother’s house he didn’t have to worry about clothes, food, paying to get his saxophone fixed, cab fare—anything. All he had to do was walk through that door and he was the crown prince of the kingdom.

  But that didn’t mean that he had changed his ways. Charlie was now a full-fledged night person. He loved being in the streets, playing until everyone was worn out, pulling a nice new lady next to him, listening to other people’s tales, and spinning his own—about Chicago and New York and how exciting everything was. To hear Charlie tell it, if you hadn’t been to Harlem, you hadn’t been anywhere. And as he lingered in the easy comfort of his hometown, the discipline he had developed in New York went lax. The Charlie Parker who studied diligently with Biddy Fleet was replaced by the wild one who’d preceded him in Kansas City—addiction and all.

  Charlie’s return to drugs was apparently assisted by Tadd Dameron, who was hated by Lawrence Keyes, leader of the Deans of Swing and one of Charlie’s first musical employers in Kansas City. Keyes hated that Negro from Cleveland for pulling his buddy back down into that snake pit from which so few escaped. Dameron, a composer and an arranger as well as a middling pianist, was a curious man looking for new things to do in music. A romantic, he had been thrilled by the hugely orchestrated melodic scores of Hollywood, the music of Duke Ellington, and the songs of Tin Pan Alley’s bigger talents, like George Gershwin and Cole Porter. He also claimed to have studied chemistry, and he knew a lot about the various intoxicants that could derange the senses into a state of euphoria, about potions and powders that were designed to relieve pain but had begun to assume their primary role as a form of illegal recreation.

  Charlie met Dameron in Harlan Leonard’s band, which he rejoined now that he was back in Kansas City. Leonard still disliked him, but Charlie could play even better now—everybody knew it—and Leonard was able to forgive him his shortcomings because of what he brought to the bandstand. When that saxophone was in his mouth, the band lifted up, the men playing beyond their usual level of skill, pulled along by the hot, lean sound of his daredevil inventions. With Charlie Parker standing there, still as a wooden statue, sweat puddling at his feet, the rhythm section swung harder, the brass and reeds kicked out their parts with more edge and fire, and the whole sound coalesced into a Kansas City storm.

  Harlan Leonard could see the boy still wasn’t taking care of himself, or taking care of business. He came to work when he felt like it, and when he did get there he looked like an unmade bed. To Leonard’s point of view, Charlie’s gift was misplaced. It should have gone to a much better man, not this knuckleheaded mama’s boy who seemed to delight in the way his fellow band members sided with him against the leader.

  As Biddy Fleet noted, Charlie preferred being loved to being hated; he was grateful for the support of his fellow musicians. But nothing anyone thought about his quirks and vacillations meant much to him, so long as no one’s conclusions got in the way of his concentration. He was too busy working on his horn and having a good time to be bothered by what some second-level guys had cooking in their brain pans. The world out there was much larger than the provincial minds that surrounded him, and he had already passed some tests in that wider world. His rump was in Kansas City, but his dreams were back in New York.

  There was a high-minded, contemplative side to Charlie, too, a habit of wondering how things would feel if the world were vastly different. As fascinated as he was by innovation and invention, he was more intrigued by the inspiration behind the invention—by how some human mind thought of each new idea. He recognized that thought was a pure thing not impeded by social circumstance. It had independent power. A C scale was a C scale, no matter who played it or why, which gave those notes—any notes—a spiritual quality. That was why the bandstand was such a sacred place, and why it would have been difficult to ascertain much about the social conditions of the 1930s while listening to the Negro musicians of Charlie’s era. They didn’t evade life when they performed, whether in public or private; they entered its condition of freedom through their craft, discipline, and inspiration. In the pure universe of musical tone, they were able to express themselves as exactly who they were, not as the limited icons that others, black or white, might mistake them for.

  Charlie Parker, no matter how highly talented, was not greater than his idiom. But his work helped to lead the art form to its most penetrating achievement. Jazz, as a performing art, is about navigating a landscape in which spontaneous creation whizzes by in layered stacks, and about creating a fresh and continual response to that landscape. The music is about more than merely making something up; as drummer Max Roach often said of playing jazz, it is about creating, maintaining, and developing a design.

  Today we might call this multitasking, but at its most fundamental level, it is about victory over chaos, about achieving and maintaining a groove that meets the demands of melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, and timbral inventions in milliseconds. During his most satisfied bandstand experience, Charlie Parker knew what every talented jazz musician has, before and after: how to listen and hear, instant by instant, and how to respond with aesthetic command to that instant, gone now and never to return.

  Trumpeter Bobby Bradford once said that whenever people heard jazz, and understood how the elements within it were lining up and working in coordination, its emotional and intellectual power was strong enough to convince them that they had been dreaming. Maybe that was what the brain taught us: that a dream team could make its art by dreaming together—mutualizing Apollo and Dionysus—until nothing but the fact of their instruments separated the players from one another.

  Charlie Parker was another dreamer, ready to enter that large and mutual dream.

  Epilogue

  In the 1980s, on a visit to Chicago, I met the saxophonist Joe Daley at Joe Segal’s Jazz Showcase, a venue then in the Empire Hotel, a building where musicians from out of town could take rooms and play the job downstairs. Daley and I stood on the rug outside the club shortly before it opened for business and talked about what he had seen there in the late forties, when Parker came to Chicago. Daley was struck by the effect Charlie’s music had on local musicians and listeners alike, who sometimes reacted as though they were at a revival.

  At one point in our conversation, we were joined by another saxophonist. He was a stranger to me, but he joked easily with Daley, who clearly respected him as a friend, and as one who knew the lore of jazz through his own eyes. He said his name, but I did not write it down and don’t remember it today. He surprised me: I thought I was aware of all the respected alto and tenor players in town, but he said enough about music—including some insightful things about Lester Young’s fingering—that I was convinced he knew what he was talking about.

  A few minutes later, the saxophonist made a comment that surprised me even more. He claimed he had seen Charlie Parker in a “soundie”—a kind of proto–music video, five or ten minutes long, that was popularized in the early 1940s. In the film, he said, Charlie was playing not a saxophone, but a clarinet, as a section player in a big band. At first he said the band was Harlan Leonard’s—and Charlie is known to have played with Leonard’s band in 1939 and 1940—but I questioned what he told me, because he said the soundie was a film nobody else he knew had ever seen. Daley hadn’t seen i
t either, but he knew the man well enough that he took the story seriously.

  Like Gene Ramey, anyone who spends time investigating the life of Charlie Parker must come to terms with the mysteries that decorate his story. What we know of Charlie’s life during the months between his departure from Kansas City in early 1939 and his return from New York in 1940 remains fragmentary despite the work of many scholars. His itinerant lifestyle can make him seem more a movie character—a figure caught in glimpses, in jump cuts and slow dissolves—than a flesh-and-blood human being. He was leading a busy and productive life, full of adventure, arrogance, and humbling discipline, including the discovery and conquest of himself. The fact that he’d managed to break his drug habit, for a while at least, seems to have given him a strength that must have helped his optimism, though it could not have extinguished his despair.

  His chameleon ability—not to change color, but to fit in very quickly through mimicry—allowed him to be as comfortable in the backwoods, with its rustic flavors and ways, as he was in the city, amid that middle-class-to-upper-crust milieu his father, Charlie Sr., had evoked when speaking to his son about the people he and his fellow porters treated to fancy service on the trains. And we know he learned to emulate skills with an intensity that made his personality as rubbery as his facial features.

  Charles the younger seemed able to remember voice patterns, accents, and dialects as accurately as he did pitches. He could summon the notes of the human landscape and reproduce them as clearly and accurately as he could the notes and phrases of songs and the way they were harmonized. None of this made him superhuman, but it prepared him to handle unexpected emergency, to retain an ingratiating resourcefulness that complemented what he was learning in his trade as a bandstand improviser. We do know that Charlie surfaced in Chicago before Jay McShann arrived in January 1939, and then again in the spring of 1940. Could he have appeared in a soundie on that second trip? Perhaps he held on to Goon Gardner’s clarinet along with his clothes; perhaps some other musician got him the clarinet job and lent him the instrument. We know he learned the licorice stick back in his hometown days, from his school band instructors. Certainly by then his digital memory was so swift and strong that this young guy, both timid and brazen, was capable of getting prepared to play a dance band book in a couple of hours.