Harlem Nocturne

by Farah Jasmine Griffin

  Following the whirlwind surrounding The Zodiac Suite, Williams took a much-needed break. The rush of writing, the anxiety and excitement about the performance, the nightly gigs at Café Society, the benefits, and all the recording sessions had contributed to her emotional and physical exhaustion. She requested a leave from the club; Josephson agreed, gave her a beautiful watch as a token of his gratitude and admiration, and let her go. Ordinarily, she would have gone home to Pittsburgh; seen her nieces, nephews, and sisters; enjoyed homemade cooking; and maybe sat in with local musicians. Unable to muster the energy this time, she stayed in New York. More specifically, she stayed in Harlem. She’d been so busy, she hadn’t really gotten to know her neighborhood; it had been a place to eat and sleep, meet with other musicians, and workshop her music. At most, she would go to Minton’s on 118th Street. The newspapers claimed that 118th Street was the most dangerous street in the city because of the crime, but Williams hadn’t found that to be true. The people who hung out there got to know her, loved her, and treated her with courtesy and respect. The food at Minton’s was good—a man named Lindsay Steele used to cook wonderful meals and then come out and sing during intermission.

  Because of these experiences, Williams greatly looked forward to knowing the neighborhood more intimately. Like most musicians, she was a night person. She walked the streets of Harlem after the sun went down, when good, hardworking people were at home with their families. Ever the generous one, always wanting to help, and believing she could save people’s lives, she became an easy mark. “I must have gone all over Harlem in about 4 weeks from Lenox to 7th and 8th Avenues [and]from Hamilton Heights to 135th and below.”38

  Postwar Harlem was a transformed place. It lacked the optimism that had characterized it during the war, and the neighborhood never recovered from the riots. Rows of abandoned, boarded-up buildings invited criminal activity. As the defense industry began to shut down and men returned from the war, many people who had found work in the defense industry and other forms of manufacturing now found themselves without work. The garment factories that had lined East Harlem in earlier times had closed and moved outside the city, leaving in their wake high rates of unemployment. Gangs and heroin had begun to dominate street life.

  Williams found Harlem at night both fascinating and frightening: fascinating because it was frightening. “I had never in my life been in such a terrible environment with people who roamed the streets looking for someone to devour. . . . It was fascinating watching one race of people live off of the other. I wondered why with all their shrewd brains, they never ventured downtown.”39 By different races, she meant those who preyed and those who were preyed upon. Malcolm Little, then serving time in federal prison in Massachusetts, would later concur. Only months before, he, too, had walked these same streets, and he had been part of that “race of people” who preyed upon others.

  Like an anthropologist or sociologist, an observer but not an objective one, Williams walked. “The new experiences began to mean a great deal to me,” she later wrote. “I considered myself a guinea pig in finding out answers to certain downtown gossip concerning Harlem. I had read several books on the subject and thought the authors ridiculous or biased. Yet I can say it can be quite a hell hole if one is weak enough to go for all that happens here.” This was the Harlem of Ann Petry’s novel The Street and her article “Harlem.” For both Petry and Williams, Harlem had become a ghetto. Williams had an extensive library and informed herself through reading and observation. She had lost any romantic sense of Harlem and had become aware of its underside. At the same time, her world was expanding significantly beyond the small, close-knit circle of musicians who constituted her family.40

  Without the protection of her musician brothers, and distancing herself from her girlfriends, Williams let her naive curiosity get the best of her. She had successfully avoided the substances that plagued her friends, yet another habit, just as expensive, if not more so, awaited her: gambling. On the road between sets and gigs, she had always enjoyed the occasional card game with other musicians as a way to pass the time. The soirees at 63 Hamilton Terrace often included an occasional game of poker or tonk, but she had never been involved in any serious game where the stakes were high.

  That would change when, one night, an acquaintance took her to a card game in one of Harlem’s after-hours spots. Williams lost $150, but she was having a ball. On her nightly strolls, she encountered the elite and the denizens of the night, all of whom were hooked on gambling. “I was introduced to the cream of the crop . . . nice teachers, apartment owners, housewives who’d come to the game with $5.00, others who if they lost, would pull out $200–300 more. The first game I played there were more than ‘a few doctors’ as well.” At the gambling table she met the full cross-section of Harlem. “I remember the first big game I went to I was a nervous wreck for days, after hearing all the loud mouth jive and big talk. Everyone talking at the same time. It took some time to get used to this.” Williams, the sensitive artist, was both stimulated and overwhelmed by her surroundings.41

  Harlem supplied her with plenty of opportunities to pursue her new interest. “My name was ringing all over Harlem as the poker chump,” she later wrote. Although Williams lost more and more money, she justified it by telling herself that her opponents needed the money more than she did, “to keep their rent going and other necessities.” Soon her friends and her two half-brothers, Jerry and Howard (who were living with her following stints in the army), expressed concern and alarm. But she paid no heed to them, later saying, “I continued to stay up working nights and gambling, never getting any rest until I had a breakdown [and] went to a doctor.”42

  She kept playing; she kept losing. The more she lost, the more she withdrew from her savings account. She withdrew so regularly, in fact, that federal authorities thought she was being blackmailed. “I must have stopped counting at $7,000,” she wrote.43 Some games would last as long as four days nonstop. There was constant stimulation. She emerged from them into the rose-colored dawn, dazed, but thrilled nonetheless. She also became involved with a new man, Lindsay Steele from Minton’s. Steele was the first of Williams’s lovers who was not an artist; he was a numbers banker. He also seemed to have offered her some protection in her new environment, though he didn’t help her stop gambling.

  After weeks of roaming the streets, hitting the after-hours spots, and sitting in on card games the way she used to sit in with musicians, Williams came to a conclusion about the city. “New York is a town [where] if one takes a vacation or relaxes and tries to be normal and nice something happens. To explore New York means certain death. One has to be tough and on the alert.”44 Williams began to experience New York as a place that was unsafe and unwelcoming to those who lacked the toughness required by life in the city. Suddenly, the city she loved, the city that had been a source of inspiration, became a place of “certain death,” both literal and spiritual.

  And yet, she didn’t retreat. She pulled back from the gambling, but unlike many of her friends and other members of the middle class, she refused to leave Harlem, and she continued to be observant of and sensitive to her surroundings. After the riots, many of the upper middle class left as surrounding neighborhoods opened up to them. St. Albans, Queens, became the preferred dwelling place of the jazz elite. A middle-class community located just a few miles from JFK Airport, it is now the center of Queens’s African American community. Jazz musicians began to move to large homes, especially those located in the Addisleigh Park neighborhood. Lena, Pops, Duke, and even Lady Day moved there. Williams’s beloved Dizzy found his way to the outer borough. Count Basie moved there in 1946, and shortly afterward, Ella followed. Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Williams wouldn’t leave. Even during its lowest points, Harlem maintained a middle-class presence, and these three were part of it.

  One day, a young boy who lived on Williams’s floor was shot and killed in a gang war. Young boys between the ages of eight and fifteen were particularly
vulnerable to gang membership and gang violence. In 1946, the nine-year-old Claude Brown, who would go on to write the memoir Manchild in the Promised Land, was recruited into a Harlem gang. On the other side of town, in Spanish Harlem, where a growing population of Puerto Rican immigrants and their children lived, nineteen-year-old Piri Thomas, who later became the author of Down These Mean Streets, also a memoir, was already a veteran of street battles. So prominent would gang life become that in 1948 Life magazine ran a photo essay about a young gang leader named Red Jackson. The photographer, Gordon Parks, followed Jackson for months, befriending him, gaining his trust, and photographing him in ways that showed both his toughness and his vulnerability. Through the Life story, people across America got a glimpse of the violence that black urban dwellers already knew by experience. It was during this period that a growing discourse on juvenile delinquents emerged.

  After the death of her young neighbor, Williams decided to devote herself to doing something for young people and for her community—that is what Harlem had become for her. Its residents were “her people.” At first her efforts were philanthropic. “I decided to help with the situation,” she explained, “through getting donations from people to build playgrounds, recreation rooms, etc.”

  But as early as the spring of 1946, Williams expressed an interest in doing the work herself. She began to reach out to public schools, seeking to work with young people there. In a letter dated June 8, 1946, she wrote to a school principal, “Unfortunately until now I have been unable to accept these invitations[,] many of which came from the ‘trouble areas’ so understandably in need of guidance. . . . I’ve been most unhappy at not having the time[;] if your office would approve the plan and arrange a schedule, I should be very, very happy to do two concerts weekly from now until the end of the present semester, at no charge naturally.” If her earlier involvement in political and civic activity occurred at the prompting of Barney Josephson, Teddy Wilson, or John Hammond, in 1946, especially after having witnessed the conditions of the black poor firsthand, Williams set out on her own campaign. She did not limit her efforts to Harlem. On June 17, she wrote to the principal of Arts High School in Newark, New Jersey, explaining, “Playing jazz concerts for school audiences is one of the projects closest to my heart and knowing of your interest too, I am taking your suggestions and support in encouraging the board of education to approve and sponsor these programs.”45

  As the seasons changed, Williams continued to be concerned about Harlem and to think of ways to help alleviate the suffering she saw there, but she also turned her attention to the racial situation on a national level. In spite of some courtroom gains, Jim Crow still ruled the day, especially in the South. Her friends Hazel Scott and Katherine Dunham made headlines by refusing to play before segregated audiences. Pearl Primus had gone to the South two years earlier to witness in person the degradation blacks experienced there, and the trip had transformed her art. Inspired, in part, by the political tenor of the times, Williams decided to directly challenge segregation: she came up with a plan to form a racially integrated all-female band that would present a concert in the city of her birth, Atlanta. It is surprising that she chose to form an all-female band, given that she considered them novelties—she had often resisted any efforts to characterize her as a “woman” player. Perhaps she was inspired by the success of great bands like the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. More likely, she didn’t want to risk an interracial co-ed band. Women were less threatening to segregationists.

  Williams wanted to plan the concert for 1947; however, as is to be expected, she met with a great deal of resistance. Such a show would have been illegal in Georgia. Williams certainly knew this, but she persisted. In September 1946 she began corresponding with the Georgia governor, Ellis Arnall. She also enlisted the support of prominent individuals, asking them to send letters and telegrams to the governor in support of her efforts. Writing from Hyde Park on September 12, Eleanor Roosevelt suggested that Williams get in touch with novelist Lillian Smith. “She knows Georgia, she is sympathetic and could give you better advice than I could,” Roosevelt wrote.46 Lillian Smith was the white southern author of the antilynching novel Strange Fruit. Williams wrote to Smith, and to Walter Winchell, Orson Welles, and others as well. Winchell, who by now was assisting J. Edgar Hoover in his efforts to bring down Barney Josephson—and who later would have a terrible run-in with Josephine Baker—nonetheless did write to Governor Arnall at Williams’s request. (In 1951, Baker was refused service at the Stork Club because of her race. On her way out, she yelled at Winchell, a frequent patron and booster of the establishment, because he did not come to her defense. In turn, he began to accuse her, in print, of having both fascist and communist sympathies.) Boxer Joe Louis telegraphed Williams, writing, “I am sending a telegram to Governor Arnall at your request. I hope this meets with success.”47

  On September 23, Williams received the governor’s reply. He wrote, “I do not desire to get involved in the controversy your request would precipitate.” Not to be deterred, Williams persisted, writing to Bill Nunn, managing editor of the Pittsburgh Courier. On October 1, Nunn promised to “get on this thing immediately and do everything in my power to help you out.” He contacted Benjamin Mays, the distinguished president of Morehouse College, who served as mentor and model to generations of Morehouse men, including Martin Luther King Jr. In a November 1946 letter, Mays wrote to Nunn explaining the tense racial situation and the delicate balance of race relations in Atlanta at the time (see Appendix B). According to Mays, “It would be virtually impossible and certainly unwise right now for us to plan in Atlanta the kind of program Miss Williams suggested.”48

  Nunn forwarded this reply to Williams, and she kept it in a file of correspondence regarding her efforts until her death more than thirty years later. Williams must have been disappointed that her efforts were met with such disapproval. Surely, the experience seemed to demonstrate the difference between the progressive interracial circles in which she traveled and the strict limitations of life in the South. Those limitations were evident in both the continued commitment to racial segregation on the part of southern whites and the careful strategy taken by well-respected blacks. Williams’s approach is somewhat telling: she did not first contact southern black leaders and request their assistance in her plan. Instead, she went to northerners in positions of power and influence, perhaps recognizing that the southern black leadership would be less likely to act in such a direct manner.

  In addition to these more organized efforts to use her art to address major social issues of the day—Jim Crow and the growing rate of “juvenile delinquency”—Williams continued her own individual efforts to alleviate suffering. Gray Weingarten recalls going with Williams on expeditions of mercy to care and cook for sick musicians. She would try to set up a rehab clinic in her own apartment, bringing strung-out musicians into her home to help them kick their habits. Convinced of the healing power of music, she played it for these addicts and encouraged them to play through their cravings. “Any body who was sick or broke or out of food, she would say ‘Gray, you gotta come help me,’” Weingarten remembers. According to Weingarten, they visited one musician and did fourteen loads of laundry in an effort to clean and organize his space. “There was no dryer, so she sent me to get rope and we strung it throughout the apartment in order to hang the wet clothing.”49

  During this period, Williams was drawn to a variety of forms of divination practices, many of which could be found in Harlem. Some were pure scams, while others were linked to long-standing spiritual practices, such as Hoo Doo, Voo Doo, and Santeria. “Before she got religion we did all kinds of crazy things,” noted Weingarten, including visiting fortunetellers. This constant seeking hints at Williams’s longing for a sense of spiritual direction and purpose. She visited diviners to seek guidance and solace. She played and composed music as a way of expressing her spiritual striving and to heal those who listened. And she engaged in personal acts of caregi
ving and charity, as well as larger, more political efforts, as a way of bettering her fellow human beings and her nation.

  Six months into her break from Café Society, and having lost or given away a substantial part of her savings, Williams started performing again. The jazz world was beginning to undergo significant changes. As bebop replaced swing, uptown venues that had catered to dancers began to close. The new modern jazz, whose birth Williams had witnessed and nurtured, began to be identified with young men. Because of her age and her gender, she was no longer seen as an innovator by those who booked the clubs. And so she hit the road, leaving New York more and more often for work.

  Williams continued to record and began to take on more students. At times, Julliard students made their way uptown, but Williams was very picky about the classically trained musicians with whom she would work. She did continue to serve as friend and mentor to younger musicians, however, and she began to publish her thoughts on and theories about the role of modern music. In November 1947 she published a short but important essay entitled “Music and Progress” that appeared in the Jazz Record. She explained, “Once a composer or a musician stops being aware of what is going on around him his music also stops.”

  The essay, which appears to be advice to younger musicians, contains a seed of the pedagogical stance she would develop in later years: “If we are to make progress in modern music, or, if you prefer, jazz, we must be willing and able to open our minds to new ideas and developments. If we decide that a new trend is real music we must work with that new trend and develop it to its peak of perfection.” This statement underscores Williams’s own practice. She helped to develop swing, boogie-woogie, and bop. She embraced newer musical innovations as they developed. If those who ran the business side of the music no longer thought of her as an innovator, musicians knew otherwise. Duke Ellington famously noted: “Mary Lou Williams is perpetually contemporary.”50