by Gary Krist
The final break with his family, though, came in 1913, when Sidney was sixteen or seventeen. Whether he was kicked out or just decided to move himself out, he left the Bechet residence for good and relocated Uptown. And that’s when he really started to get into trouble. “One night we ended up in jail together,” the bassist Pops Foster recalled. “[Sidney] was fooling around with a chick at a dance out at the lake. She pulled a knife and stabbed him. I grabbed a stick and started after her. When the cops came, we told them we were [just] playing. They took us to jail and then let us go. When we got back to the dance, she thanked us for not getting her in trouble. Sidney was always wanting to fight, but they [the fights] never came off.”
But it was certainly not difficult for a young black man to find trouble for himself in New Orleans at this time. The perception among white New Orleanians was that the city’s black residents, in the decade after the Robert Charles riot and the rise of Jim Crow, had become defiant and “more assertive than ever before.” This was especially true at Mardi Gras time, when blacks who formerly celebrated in their own neighborhoods began to “invade” white residential areas in their revels. Sometimes the results were violent, as during the 1908 Carnival, when a group of Mardi Gras Indians (young members of a black krewe masking as Indians) engaged in a melee on Burgundy Street with a group of white youths. The next year, the Times-Democrat complained about black spectators at a parade in the central business district. “The objectionable feature was the manner in which the Negroes elbowed and shoved their way through the crowds to get in the front row,” the paper observed. “Complaints were many, especially from women and children, who were powerless to hold their places.… The change in demeanor of the Negro crowds was strongly remarked by nearly everyone.”
By 1911, the alleged problem had reached the notice of even J. Benjamin Lawrence, the Baptist preacher who had targeted Tom Anderson the year before. Speaking to his congregation on the Sunday after Mardi Gras, he took special note of the aggressiveness of the black revelers: “I went carefully up one side and down the other of Canal Street,” he told his flock, “and from St. Charles Street up I found Negroes occupying the front places almost wholly. I also noticed two or three Negroes to every white person. Big, black Negro men were pushing themselves through the crowd and pressing in upon white women in a manner to make a white man’s blood boil.…”
Police efforts to maintain order at parades and other public events often amounted to arresting many of the black males present. And the arrests often included those who were busy providing the entertainment. Rare was the New Orleans jazzman who hadn’t spent at least one night sitting up in some precinct lockup after a gig that had somehow gotten out of hand.
Louis Armstrong, still a young boy at this time, was no stranger to the volatile racial atmosphere of New Orleans in the early teens. Born on August 4, 1901, to a fifteen-year-old mother in a tough area of the city known as the Battlefield, he grew up among the “pimps, thieves, [and] prostitutes” of a neighborhood frequently targeted by police in their peacekeeping efforts. “I seen everything from a child, growing up,” Armstrong would later remark. “Nothin’ happen I ain’t never seen before.”
His was anything but a sheltered childhood. His parents separated when he was still very young. His father, Willie, had run off with another woman, leaving Louis’s mother, Mayann, to fend for herself and her baby alone. Overwhelmed, Mayann, who was little more than a child herself, turned Louis over to his paternal grandmother, Josephine. Mayann then moved into the area known as Black Storyville, where quite likely she worked as a prostitute to make ends meet. Josephine, meanwhile, tried her best to keep Louis away from the criminal elements in the Battlefield, making sure he went to church and Sunday school every week. When necessary, she would discipline him with switches that she made him cut himself from a china ball tree growing in their front yard. This kind of living arrangement was not particularly unusual in the black New Orleans of the day, where grandparents often played the role of surrogate parents to young children. And Louis would later recall this part of his childhood in mostly positive terms. But an elderly widow could presumably do only so much to nurture an energetic young boy in such an environment.
When he was about five, Louis learned that his parents had reunited—at least long enough to give birth to another child. But by the time he got to meet his baby sister, his father had again abandoned his family (“busy chasing chippies,” as Armstrong would bitterly recall). Sometime in 1906, a friend of his mother’s appeared at Josephine Armstrong’s house and told the old woman that Mayann was sick and needed Louis back to care for her. Josephine packed up the boy’s things and tearfully sent him off to Black Storyville with the friend. To get there, they had to ride the Tulane Avenue streetcar. That ride gave Louis his first and most vivid taste of the segregated place New Orleans had become. As he would later write:
It was my first experience with Jim Crow. I was just five, and I had never ridden on a streetcar before. Since I was the first to get on, I walked right up to the front of the car without noticing the signs on the backs of the seats on both sides, which read: FOR COLORED PASSENGERS ONLY. Thinking the woman was following me, I sat down in one of the front seats. However, she did not join me, and when I turned to see what had happened, I saw her waving to me frantically. “Come here, boy,” she cried. “Sit where you belong.”
Over the next years, young Louis would learn just how “disgustingly segregated and prejudiced” his hometown truly was. But for the moment, he was just happy to be reunited with his mother and new baby sister. Mayann, still only twenty years old, tried to make amends: “I realize I have not done what I should by you,” she told him when he first returned. “But son, mama will make it up to you.” And she did—to the best of her ability, given the circumstances. She enrolled Louis in the nearby Fisk School, kept him and his sister fed on red beans and rice, and doctored them with the natural laxatives that Armstrong would swear by as a cure-all for the rest of his life. Louis and Mama Lucy (as his young sister came to be called) had to deal with a series of “stepfathers” who shared their mother’s bed—sometimes noisily—in the small one-room house on Perdido. Some of these men were pleasanter than others; a few of them fought bitterly with Mayann, and one even struck her in the face one day and knocked her into the old Basin Canal. But even the kinder ones were no substitute for a loving father.
Left largely to his own devices, young Louis tried to help out by selling newspapers, running errands, and selling overripe produce he found on the streets. He was no angel, certainly, and before long he was also bringing home his winnings from street games of craps, “coon can,” and blackjack. (“I got to be a pretty slick player,” he once admitted.) But for all of his rough edges, he was a good-hearted, likable boy. Soon even the neighborhood bullies—whom he handled with a canny mixture of fearlessness, generosity, and respect—were looking out for the boy rather than beating him up.
There was, of course, no money in the household for anything like music lessons. (“In those days,” he would later quip, “I did not know a horn from a comb.”) But he was soon learning the basics, as Bolden and many others had, from the street peddlers, advertising wagons, and parade bands that abounded in the city in those days. Working on a junk wagon for a Jewish family who lived in the neighborhood (the Karnofskys, who would eventually become like a second family to the boy), he got a chance to blow a little tin horn for himself, summoning children to bring their old rags and bottles for purchase. And when he got a little older, he formed a vocal quartet with some friends and began singing for coins on the streets of Storyville.
“Little Louis” got his first potential break in music at the age of eleven, when Bunk Johnson heard the quartet singing in an amateur contest. The trumpeter liked their sound, and told his bandmate Sidney Bechet about them. Bechet, who was only fifteen himself at the time, went to hear the quartet and was equally impressed. “I got to like Louis a whole lot, he was damn nice,” Bechet
later wrote. “One time, a little after I started going to hear this quartet, I ran into Louis on the street and I asked him home for dinner. I wanted him and the quartet to come around so my family could hear them.” But Louis seemed reluctant to make the long trip downtown. “Look, Sidney,” the boy said, “I don’t have any shoes … these I got, they won’t get me there.” Sidney ended up giving him fifty cents to get his shoes fixed and made him promise to come. Louis took the money, but then never showed up to perform. Forty-eight years later, Bechet was still annoyed: “It’s a little thing,” he confessed in his 1960 autobiography, “[but] there’s big things around it.” Apparently, the common enemy of Jim Crow had not yet eliminated all of the traditional friction between downtown Creoles and uptown blacks. Then again, maybe Little Louis just forgot.
It ultimately took a brush with the law to propel Armstrong into the mainstream of New Orleans music, though at first the incident seemed like a setback. On December 31, 1912, Louis was preparing to do some New Year’s celebrating. He found one of his “stepfather’s” pistols in a cedar trunk, filled it with blanks, and brought it with him when his quartet set out to perform that night in Storyville. As the boys were making their way up Rampart Street, another kid from the neighborhood began shooting a cap gun at them. Knowing he could top this, Louis pulled the pistol from his belt and started shooting back. The policeman standing nearby was not amused. He grabbed the boy and dragged him to jail, where he spent what must have been the most frightening and unpleasant New Year’s Eve he’d ever experienced. The next day, he was brought before a judge in the juvenile court. The verdict: incarceration in the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys for an indefinite term.
It would prove to be the best piece of luck in Louis Armstrong’s entire life.
WHEN the Parker brothers first ventured into the dance-hall business on Franklin Street, they were not the only outsiders moving in on what had widely been regarded as Tom Anderson’s turf. The city’s Italian underworld had also seen the profit potential of business in and around Storyville, and they did not hesitate to claim a share for themselves. To state that “the Mafia moved in on Storyville” would be inaccurate; most serious crime historians doubt that the Italian crime syndicates in New Orleans at this time were organized enough to justify the Mafia title, no matter what the local newspapers might think. But it is true that many of the nightclubs, saloons, and dance halls of the city’s entertainment districts were being taken over by Italians, and many of their surnames—Matranga, Segretta, Tonti, Ciacco—were well known to police as prominent in the criminal doings of the city. It was as if the nemeses of the city’s reformers were closing ranks. Italian criminals and black musicians were, in a sense, finding refuge in the bastion of the vice lords—that is, in Storyville.
At the same time, the fallout of the Lamana kidnapping of 1907 seemed to have plunged the city’s Italian underworld into disarray. Francesco Genova, regarded by police as the principal figure in the local Mafia, had left town shortly after being released from jail in the Lamana case, never to return. Some believed that his young lieutenant Paul Di Christina was now in charge. But this succession of leadership was apparently not satisfactory to Giuseppe Morello up in New York. Sometime in 1908, the Boss of Bosses traveled to New Orleans for several days of meetings with local criminal leaders. The visit—which ended with Morello parading through the Italian quarter wearing a knotted red handkerchief on his head, a supposed “Mafia death sign”—had several purposes. It did not go unnoticed in the press, for instance, that a prominent Italian hotelier was stabbed to death within hours of Morello’s return to New York. But the meetings also seemed to signal a change in leadership within the local organization. A letter from Morello (under the pseudonym G. LaBella) to New Orleanian Vincenzo Moreci—dated November 15, 1909, and written in the flowery, ambiguous, falsely humble style of such missives—more than hints at the ongoing shake-up:
“Dear Friend,” it began. “Am in possession of your two letters, one that bears date of the 5th, the other on the 10th of November. I understand the contents. In regard to being able to reorganize the family, I advise you all to do it, because it seems it is not right to stay without a king nor country. But I authorize you to convey to all [i.e., to everyone] my humble prayer and my weak opinion, but well understood, that those who are worthy and that wish to [belong] should belong; those that do not wish to belong, let them go.”
The recipient of this letter, Vincenzo Moreci, was a native of Termini Imerese, Sicily. He had emigrated to New Orleans in 1885 and was now an inspector (or “banana-checker”) for United Fruit. Regarded by the Daily Picayune as “an Italian of the better class,” he had actually been a prominent member of the Italian Vigilance Committee that had investigated the Lamana affair. But there was more to Moreci than the Picayune realized at the time, and this was to become obvious over the next several years.
Late one Saturday night in March of 1910, Moreci was walking down Poydras Street when he was approached by two well-dressed men who pulled pistols out of their belts and fired five shots at him. Two bullets struck Moreci in the head, and he fell to the pavement, seriously wounded, as the two men ran away in different directions. Moreci ended up surviving the attack, and when questioned by police he claimed to have no idea who his assailants were. But it was generally understood that one of the shooters was Paul Di Christina, and that the other was a member of his faction named Giuseppe Di Martini.
This apparent act of rebellion against Moreci was not to go unpunished. One month later, Di Christina was shot and killed on the street as he was entering his grocery-saloon on the corner of Calliope and Howard Streets. His neighbor, another Italian grocer named Pietro Pipitone, admitted that he had fired the shot, claiming that Di Christina owed him two months’ rent. But given the victim—and the fact that the grocery trade was a favorite cover for Italian criminals—police thought there was more behind the killing. And when, two months later, Giuseppe Di Martini was also fatally shot—on Bourbon Street, by a man seen moments before in the company of Vincenzo Moreci—it was clear that this back-and-forth series of assassinations and assassination attempts bore all the earmarks of a Mafia power struggle.
Moreci was eventually acquitted of involvement in the Di Martini murder, but the killings went on, most of them involving Italian grocers who had allegedly been threatened by the Black Hand. In July of 1910, grocer Joseph Manzella, who had received several Black Hand extortion letters, was shot to death in his store by a man named Giuseppe Spannazio. In this case, there was a witness—Manzella’s seventeen-year-old daughter, Josephine, who grabbed a small revolver and chased the assailant into the street, where she shot him dead on the banquette. “I’m glad I killed him,” the unrepentant girl told police. “If he had been arrested, he probably would have been set free within a few months.”
But then came a series of more mysterious murders that seemed fundamentally unlike those that had come before. They took place in the dead of night, for one thing, and in the privacy of the victims’ bedrooms rather than on the street or in their stores. In August of 1910, grocer John Crutti was brutally beaten with a meat cleaver as he lay sleeping with his wife and children in the residence behind their Royal Street store. Some months later, another grocer, Joseph Davi, was also butchered—again with a cleaver, and again while in bed with his wife (who was injured but survived). In both cases, police had no leads and were able to make no arrests.
Then, at two A.M. on the morning of May 16, 1912, an attack left yet another Italian grocer dead. Antonio Schiambra and his pregnant wife were asleep beside their young son in the bedroom of their home on a lonely stretch of Galvez Street. An assailant climbed through an unlocked kitchen window, made his way down the hallway, and entered the bedroom. As the victims slept, he lifted the mosquito netting over their bed, pressed the barrel of a pistol against the grocer’s torso, and fired five shots. Schiambra died almost instantly, and his wife, who was struck by a bullet that had passed through her husband
’s body, was mortally wounded. She was able to crawl to a window and scream for help, but by the time a neighbor arrived, the shooter had escaped.
Police were again baffled, but this time they at least had some clues. While moving two boxes to help him reach the kitchen window, the killer had left a clear footprint in the soft mud around the house’s water cistern. The imprint was of a new shoe, and one “of the latest and most stylish shape.” Perhaps more important, a neighbor told police about an incident she had witnessed in the Schiambra grocery two weeks earlier. Two Italian men, one of them tall and well dressed, had walked into the establishment. “Good morning, Mrs. Tony,” the tall man said to Mrs. Schiambra (a form of address that police would later recall when the mysterious “Mrs. Toney” chalk message was found in the Maggio ax murder investigation). Mr. Schiambra asked his wife to leave, and then argued with the two men in Italian for some time. The men finally left, according to the witness, “with scowls on their faces.” But when the district attorney tried to follow up on this suspicious incident, Mrs. Schiambra (who survived for some ten days before succumbing to her bullet wound) was strangely uncooperative.
“The Italians of New Orleans,” the Daily Item reported in some dismay, “awed by the power of the Black Hand … fear the murderers will become more desperate. They ask, ‘Who will be next?’ ” Assassinations of known mobsters on the street were one thing; but Schiambra, like Crutti and Davi, was apparently a legitimate businessperson, slaughtered in his bed as he lay beside his wife and child. Few in New Orleans had any hope that their police would get to the bottom of these crimes. As the Daily States observed a few days after the killing, “Many theories have been advanced, [but] the Schiambra outrage promises to be listed among the many mysterious cases which have never been solved.”