Cotillions and Mrs. B. found them and drug a few selected (mostly brown) ghetto kids outta the hopeless muck of their lives and shot them off upward and onward (fake style) into the bull's-eye of yellow enterprise. Now that was banana yellow. In tuck-see-dose and evening gowns, we lidda brown and yellow chilruns were readied for our entrance into the waiting warren of slaughter. Where our brains would be took out and placed in a safety deposit box for Mister Big Guy, one day, to make use of.
The cotillion, which I approached as a high school youth, was designed so that brown and yellow ladies could be presented to society. (There was also the Debutantes' Ball, which surfaced at the same time but had less note.) And we practiced our bows and turns and went to practice week nights, walking home in groups afterwards. Chubby brown Betty was my partner and we went together for three or four years on and off.
I was awarded scholarships, and the four of us, mother, father, sister and I, sat downtown at the Terrace Ballroom and watched the proceedings. There was a real effort to include the brown folks in this. But somehow we sat just outside of the connected up “human” thrust of that (was there any?) and the animating stream of yellow life made that run like an escalator to nowhere.
And see there was one group of “friends,” acquaintances, from rehearsal that you took up with on one level. You want to know the complexity of my young life? Well, I still knew the Cavaliers but by late high school we'd drifted in a real sense. I'd see S. and R., they were even in the cotillion and they lived on The Hill and were fairly tight. But the others, the boys I'd known earlier, had mostly faded except at odd times around odd occasions. Games we played in together were getting fewer and fewer and by the time I got out of high school and started going to the Newark branch of Rutgers I did not see them at all nor play any ball with them.
At the same time, for several years I'd taken up with some brothers around the corner on Hillside Place. The Cavaliers were brown compared to the Hillside Place brothers, who were definitely black. And for most of my high school years, after white school, black Hillside Place was who I ran with. (Though I had a brown band I put together, R. on alto, D. on drums, me on trumpet, and we played upstairs in my house on Belmont Avenue, “Tenderly,” “September in the Rain” [the same song], “Perdido,” etc.) Yellow church shit and Y stuff and Jones Street Y stuff, which was much browner, were all shot in there.
But the black was the constant. The people, the life, the rules, the mores, the on-the-street definitions of what was beautiful or hip. The constant
background of our breathing, the blues, was always everywhere. And Saturdays raised up like a great space mural (blues as) companionship of thought and feeling; it was feeling. The real good-looking girls and tough dudes, who you wanted to make laugh and impress, the style you had to perfect was black â black and blue.
And though I came striding out of a brown house with plenty of bullshit packed between my eyes. There was nowhere to go but the black streets and the people who ran those streets and set the standards of our being were black. And no matter where we would go and what we would get into, when we were true to ourselves, when we were actually pleasing our deepest selves, being the thing we most admired and loved, we were black (and blue).
I've said that one constant for me from the time of any consciousness in helping to define the world has been music. The various kinds of music, of course, gave dimension to the world. There was/is not just one music. There are many. (Though when I talk with black jazz musicians we say, sometimes,
The Music
, meaning African American improvised music. What we've called, in our deeper moments, Jazz. Directly from the African,
jassm, orgasm
, i.e., “come music.” I guess that stuck because that's where white folks first heard the music, in New Orleans whorehouses, and that's what they were doing when they heard it, jassing, or trying to jass. The word first means sexual intercourse.)
Music
is the term for this chapter because I want to lay out an entirety of my feelings about The Music and Music and connect them precisely to the growth of my perception and its history. Because music is both an emotional experience and a philosophical one. It is also an aesthetic experience and the history of my moving from one music to another, the history of being drawn most directly to one music or another, is another kind of path and direction in my life. Part of the answer to the question How did you get to be you?
In our brown house was spirituals and gospels and blues and jazz and white and brown and yellow “popular” songs. We was not heavy (thank goodness) into “classical” (meaning European concert) music. So I did not have to do too much shedding of that from the inside when I thought I needed to shed that. I picked up that stuff much later.
At the yellow church I told you they would pile Handel and Bach and Mozart on our ass but that was lightweight on the real side except for the Hallelujah Chorus and stuff mashed on you around Xmas. Even in that yellow fortress, spirituals mostly dominated and my grandmother and them tried to ease the gospel number in on them but that was limited.
The school, you know, had some white stiff shit to mash on you when they could. I was in the All-City Chorus and they had us singing something called “The Song of Man,” a mixture of idealism and straight-out metaphysics that identified Humanism. In my music lessons or in the school auditorium we would have snatches of The Classics bounced off us but that was not my main diet.
We also had the radio jugging with you (and later on television in some small way) and movie background music I would use to “sord fight” around and across people's cars parked unsuspectingly on our street, or as the mouthed background music for our playground and vacant-lot shootouts.
The radio carried the
Make Believe Ballroom
, turned on when I was younger by my parents. Somehow I connect it up with my father. Martin Block with that sinuous voice. On the weekends they had the
Hit Parade
, and I remember as an early high school baseballer hanging my portable radio over the handlebars and listening between innings to Ezio Pinza sing songs from
South Pacific
â “Some Enchanted Evening,” “This Nearly Was Mine,” also Mary Martin. Plus songs from
The King and I
or
Wish You Were Here
or
Guys and Dolls
as well as the other crazy stuff like “Rag Mop, R-A-G-G-M-O-P-P” (a black song in whiteface), almost as crazy as the “Mairzy Doats” and “Hut Sut Ralston” of earlier times when I was small before I had my own radio.
Sometimes Nat King Cole would come on, like with “Nature Boy” or once in a while the hip “Straighten Up and Fly Right.” But that
Hit Parade
, though it had some tunes I did like, for the most part I thought of as composed of lace glass lemon peels â some bounce for the ounce but something to be looked at, waved at, as it passed. Though I liked the show tunes.
I liked Bing Crosby better than Frank Sinatra (that was a raging controversy in junior high school, though the Hershey bar receiving teacher told us in his high wisdom that the best voice of all was Perry Como!). And stuff
like Rosemary Clooney and Vaughn Monroe and Johnnie Ray and Frankie Laine (“Mule Train”). Even my father told me he was a “Jew boy singing like a colored fellow.” That was what the
Hit Parade
pumped at us.
But how strange is the human mind that it can receive all kinds of things from all kinds of places. Be put in weird situations (like at the end of the 9 Clifton run), yet retain some connection with its richest sources. Like the African slaves worshiping Catholic saints, yet St. Michael and St. Stephen, when you get up close on the slave converts renderings of them, have tiny cuts etched in their alabaster faces. These cuts speak of another world, another culture and language and life. You could hear some deadbeat in a turned around collar who's been jerking off for thirty-five years scream, “Why these are tribal marks, Father Noel. Tribal marks! These heathen have been deceiving us all along!”
So that I was stretched between two lives and perceptions. (I've told you it was four â Black Brown Yellow White â but actually it's two on the realest side, the two extremes, the black and the white, with the middle two but their boxing gloves.) And when I returned on that bus ride from Barringer and swung down onto Belmont Avenue, blues took me. Black people surrounded me. And that was the element I felt easiest in.
Even inside my brown house, as secure as it was (and that was its most carryable beauty, its security, that I never once had to wonder who and what was going on or where my next anything was coming from. My father and mother and grandmother, Jim, were solid as a rock), there was a certain posture you had to take on, after all, whatever yo mama wanted you to be, you was gon' be that, to some extent, or get yo ass turned into a neon artifact. The casual lectures, casual in that they were constant and could accompany any other activity â combing your hair, washing your face, putting on your clothes, doing your homework (or having not done it), coming in late, wanting to take drawing lessons instead of piano lessons, you could be the recipient of an instant lecture on why you better do something other than you was doing or look or be better than you were, with immediate reference to somebody who was, were constant.
It was the normal guidance of what one assumes is the normal parent-to-child relationship, yet it is turned wherever the parent is turned and its specifics shaped by whatever the parent is and has been shaped by.
Moving in the blue/black streets there was a freedom, a possibility of becoming anything I could imagine. I was completely on my own (and even more so once I realized it), and everything in that world began and was defined by me, in me, by music. The blues heaviest and most
constant. The quartets like the Orioles and the Ravens are Belmont Avenue near Spruce Street. I could look out my back window Saturday mornings and watch a young black girl hanging up clothes singing “The Glory of Love.” And she was just accompanying the jukebox or record player from somewhere. (In those days black radio was not as widespread, so most of the sounds were on 78s or jukeboxes or out of people's mouths.)
And as I got older I could move in those streets with more ease and direction and go to hear specifically what I wanted to hear. In the house, from the beginning Amos Milburn might be playing “Bad Bad Whiskey” or “Let Me Go Home, Whiskey” or “One Scotch, One Bourbon, One Beer.” Louis Jordan, our main man, and His Tympany Five had me steppin' from before I could even read. “Knock Me a Kiss,” “Don't Worry about That Mule,” “Caledonia, Caledonia, What Makes Your Big Head So Hard? Mop!” The drama of “Saturday Night Fish Fry.” We was rocking till the break of dawn. And even later when he went calypso with Ella Fitzgerald and did “Run, Joe” and “Stone Cold Dead in de Market,” he was our man. He was cookin' in our language. That's what “jive” was. And why jive was jive? Well, it had to be for us to stay alive.
The lyrics of the blues instructed me. Explained what the world was and even how men and women related to each other, and the problems inherent in that. Even later so basic a communication as “Work with Me, Annie,” then “Annie Had a Baby (Annie Can't Work No More),” could just about sum up some aspects of life in the black ghetto part of the western hemisphere.
But the blues singers were oldest and most basic. My grandfather even dug Lonnie Johnson, Amos Milburn, and Louis Jordan singing “Don't Worry about That Mule.” The blues was old and basic, and everywhere, for us. There was people sitting on the fender of somebody's car singing something. And you might stop or laugh as you went by. But it spilled out of windows and soon even out of car windows. It was the party and the party goers. It was old people and young slick-haired dudes.
Duke and Count and Jimmie Lunceford I associated with my parents. Those songs like “Don't Get Around Much Anymore” (Hibbler sang it “enty-moooore”) or “Move to the Outskirts of Town” or “One o'Clock Jump” or “Jumping at the Woodside,” I heard from them or with them or at their social events. That was more sophisticated to me, like highballs and the wartime upsweeps my mother wore. But we all liked Louis Jordan, everybody. It made me think of all of us, laughing at his jive.
Erskine Hawkins and Lucky Millinder were on the posters of the public dances where my folks would go with Ritz crackers, chicken, and whiskey on the table. Down at the Terrace or Wideway Hall or wherever they went in those early days.
When I first came back into the Central Ward I went to the frozen custard bar and two guys came up and checked me out. One a big barrel-chested guy who looked like he had a two-by-four shoved up his ass that also resulted in a grin approaching cretinous proportions. The other a dark squat husky dude with a homburg pushed back on his head. He looked absolutely serious but in the long run he had the most humor. “What's your name?” the grinning one said, in a way that suggested he thought there was a leer on his face. Maybe he thought he looked terrifying. “Leroy,” I said, without saying much.
“You live around here?” the same one said.
“Yeh, up the street.” I was looking for the woman to get my order, talking tight-lipped with real tension.
“You gonna give us your money?” the barrel-chested guy said.
“No,” I said, so direct it frightened me. “Not a chance.” And stuck out my chest. Dinah Washington was playing in the background and her wide arching penetrating notes musta gave me something. Maybe I knew with Dinah in the background I couldn't turn to stone and I couldn't melt anyway. I stuck out my chest and ordered my hot dog. Not frightened but frozen.
“This guy thinks he's tough,” the stiff one kept on. Now the bass-voiced singer with the Ravens was talking and singing “Ol' Man River” and I wondered what they'd do next.