Empire of Sin (31 page)

From the beginning of his sentence, Louis had yearned to join the home’s brass band. Unfortunately, this meant convincing the band’s leader, Peter Davis, that he was worthy of belonging. “
Davis didn’t like me too much [at first],” Armstrong later admitted. But the boy was conscientious and eager to please, and eventually the bandleader softened toward him.
First, Davis allowed Louis to play the tambourine with the group; from there, the boy graduated to the snare drum. Eventually, he was entrusted with an old bugle—to wake the other boys with a reveille every morning. Finally, Davis gave the boy a cornet and taught him to play “Home, Sweet Home.”

Under Davis’s careful tutelage, Louis picked up the cornet with amazing facility. By the summer of 1913, he was already leading the band, which frequently was hired for gigs “on the outside”—at parades, private parties, and picnics at Spanish Fort and the other lake resorts. Here Armstrong heard, and was heard by, some of the best musicians in the city. The ubiquity of music in the Crescent City began to work its magic on the boy, who would later recall lying on his bunk on Sunday evenings, smelling the honeysuckles outside and listening to a jazz band playing for “
some rich white folks” about half a mile away. “
Me and music got married at the home,” he would later say. “
I do believe that my whole success goes back to that time I was arrested as a wayward boy.”

Sometime in the summer of 1914, Armstrong’s father persuaded the juvenile court to release Louis into his custody. The boy didn’t want to leave the Waif’s Home, especially not to go live with his unloved and unloving father. And when it turned out that Willie Armstrong wanted his son around only as long as he worked more than he ate, Louis moved out. The boy took up residence again with his mother, Mayann, and sister, Mama Lucy, on Perdido Street—in “
that great big room,” as he later put it, “where the three of us were so happy.”

Faced with the necessity of helping support the household, Louis immediately found
work hauling coal on a mule-drawn coal cart for fifteen cents a load. But what he really wanted to do was play his horn. After performing for so long with “
simple, pimply-faced boys” at the home, he was eager to learn something from the real pros. His first day back at Mayann’s, he ran into an old friend, Cocaine Buddy, who tipped him off to a job at Henry Ponce’s honky-tonk in the neighborhood. “
All you have to do,” Buddy explained, “is to put on your long pants and play the blues for the whores that hustle all night.… They will call you sweet names and buy you drinks and give you tips.” Louis was hired immediately, and soon he was bringing in as much money with his cornet as he was with his coal shovel.

Early on, he found a musical mentor in the person of Joe Oliver. To Louis’s mind, Oliver was the best horn player in New Orleans—“
better than Bolden, better than Bunk Johnson.” Louis began shadowing his idol all over, second-lining behind him in parades and sometimes holding his cornet between numbers. When delivering stone coal to a crib prostitute in the District, Louis would become entranced by the sound of Oliver’s horn coming from Pete Lala’s next door. “
I’d just stand there in that lady’s crib listening to King Oliver,” he later wrote. “All of a sudden it would dawn on that lady that I was still in her crib, very silent, while she hustled those tricks, and she’d say, ‘What’s the matter with you, boy?… This is no place to daydream … I’ve got work to do!’ ” But Louis didn’t mind the scolding. “
As long as [Oliver] was blowing,” he said, “that was who I wanted to hear at any chance I got.”

Oliver started taking a special interest in his young disciple and began to give him cornet lessons. He also frequently invited the boy over to his house, where Mrs. Oliver would stuff him with that New Orleans staple, red beans and rice (
“which I
loved
,” said Armstrong). Oliver even gave Louis one of his old horns—a beat-up York cornet that the boy accepted with unctuous gratitude. “
I always knew, if I’m going to get a little break in this game,” he later recalled, “it was going to be through Papa Joe, nobody else.”

But Louis was already playing well enough to make his own breaks. One evening shortly after his discharge from the Waif’s Home, “Black Benny” Williams, an enormous (and notoriously combative) bass drum player from the neighborhood, took him to hear Kid Ory headlining at National Park. The real star of the night, however, proved to be Armstrong himself. “
Benny asked me if I would let Louis sit in with my band,” Ory recalled years later. “I remembered the kid from the [Labor Day] street parade and I gladly agreed. Louis came up and played ‘Ole Miss’ and the blues, and everyone in the park went wild over this boy in knee trousers who could play so great.” Ory was so impressed that he urged the young horn player to sit in with the band anytime he wanted to. “Louis came several times to different places where I worked and we really got to know each other,” Ory said. “He always came accompanied by Benny, the drummer. In the crowded places, Benny would handcuff Louis to himself with a handkerchief so Louis wouldn’t get lost.”

Black Benny grew so proud of his little protégé that the drummer was soon singing his praises to anyone who’d listen. “
You think you can play,” he told Sidney Bechet when the two met one day. “But I know a little boy right around the corner from my place, he can play ‘High Society’ better than you.” Intrigued (and likely a little put out, accustomed as he was to being regarded as the local wunderkind himself), Bechet said, “Well, I’d like to see that boy.” So they arranged to go hear him play. “It was Louis,” Bechet explained in his autobiography, “and I’ll be doggone if he didn’t play ‘High Society’ on the cornet.…[The tune] was very hard for
clarinet
to do, and really unthinkable for cornet to do at those times. But Louis, he did it.”

Bechet had of course already heard Armstrong sing, but this was the first time he’d listened to the boy play cornet, and he was amazed at the quick progress Louis had made on the instrument. So he hired Armstrong to play with him and a drummer on a little advertising gig he’d set up to promote a show at the Ivory Theatre. The drummer and Louis were paid fifty cents each; Bechet kept a dollar for himself. But there were no hard feelings, apparently. “
We went out [afterward] and bought some beer with the money and got those sandwiches—Poor Boys, they’re called,” Bechet recalled. “We really had good times.” Even so, the two recognized each other as rivals. And as Bechet’s biographer points out, “
For the rest of their lives the two geniuses of early jazz treated each other with the utmost caution.”

That Little Louis had Benny as a protector was fortunate, since New Orleans in the teens had become a very dangerous place, particularly for black musicians playing in low-down dives and on the increasingly perilous streets. Sometimes the problem was just low-level harassment on the parade routes. (“
All the bands wanted Benny to play the bass drum in parades,” Armstrong recalled. “Any time anybody give us kids trouble, Benny’d hit ’em over the head with the drum mallets.”) But often the violence could be life-threatening. Despite the newly beefed-up police presence in the city’s entertainment districts, shootings and knife fights between rival miscreants remained common, and musicians were often caught in the crossfire. “
Our bandstand was right by the door,” Armstrong wrote of one tonk he played at, “and if somebody start shooting, I don’t see how I didn’t get hit.” Sometimes the calls were very close indeed.
One night in 1915 at Pete Lala’s, Bechet and Oliver were enjoying a drink at the bar when a customer was shot dead right in front of their eyes.

Little Louis himself had a harrowing experience on a Sunday morning at Henry Ponce’s. Armstrong was talking with the owner in the doorway of the tonk when he noticed several men—apparently friends of Ponce’s rival, Joe Segretta—gathering in front of the grocery across the street. “
All of a sudden I saw one of them pull out his gun and point it at us,” Armstrong remembered. Their shots missed Ponce, at which point the club owner pulled out his own revolver and started pursuing the shooters, firing as he ran. But Armstrong just stood there in fright. “I had not moved,” he later recalled, “and the flock of bystanders who saw me riveted to the sidewalk rushed up to me. ‘Were you hit?’ they asked. ‘Are you hurt?’ When they asked me what they did, I fainted.… I thought the first shot had hit me.”

The racial atmosphere of the city was also growing more volatile in the mid-teens. Often
police would have to break up parades to prevent violent confrontations between black and white spectators and participants. Sometimes the police themselves were the aggressors. “
Lots of times the both races looked like they were going to get into a scrap, over just nothing much,” Armstrong wrote about those years. “[And] even if the colored are in the right—when the cops arrive, they’ll whip your head, and then ask questions.”

For the city’s black jazzmen, the situation in New Orleans—despite the growing popularity of their music among young whites—was becoming untenable, and the possibilities elsewhere ever more tempting. More and more of them were seriously considering the offers of jobs outside of New Orleans. “
People were hearing a lot of excitement about what was happening up North,” Bechet said of this time, “and I had this idea in my head that I was to see other places.… We’d heard all about how the North was freer, and we were wanting to go real bad.”

U
P
on Esplanade Avenue—far from the ongoing turmoil in Black and White Storyville—retired madam Josie Arlington had fallen gravely ill. Sometime in early 1913, right around the time of the Tuxedo shootings, she had taken to her bed and had been declining ever since. By autumn, she was experiencing periods of delirium and had lost control of her bladder and her bowels. Whether this was a case of late-stage syphilis or some other disease is unknown. She was only forty-nine years old, but Josie Arlington had led a difficult and presumably unhygienic existence for much of her life, despite the luxury and ease she had more recently enjoyed as Mrs. Mary Deubler Brady.

Anna Deubler, now twenty-nine, was her aunt’s principal caregiver. According to the testimony of family friends, the two were still absolutely devoted to each other. And while there were others in the house to help—Anna’s mother, her aunt’s cousin Margaret, a nurse named Mrs. Jackson, and a family friend named Mrs. Walker—it was Anna who was mainly responsible for looking after the invalid. Once she even injured herself while trying to lift her now rather stout aunt from her bed. It was hard work for the slender young woman, but apparently Anna felt it was the least she could do for the person solely responsible for giving her the comfortable, respectable life she had enjoyed since birth.

Sometime in November of 1913, her aunt Mary became more forthcoming about her past.
“Little girl,” she said one day when the two were alone, “how I have been fooling you.” She explained that she wanted Anna to help her write a book about her life—“a book for the protection of young women.” Anna was confused at first, but then, in a rush of confession, her aunt revealed everything. She told her all about her former life as a prostitute and then as Josie Arlington, queen of the demimonde, the famous madam of Basin Street. She also revealed that she and “Uncle Tom” had never been married, that even cousin Margaret had once been a prostitute, and that Margaret’s son—Anna’s own cousin Thomas—was a bastard, born in Josie’s first brothel on Customhouse Street.

Anna, understandably, was appalled. She ran out of the bedroom, found her uncle Tom, and asked him whether any of this was really true. “Child,” Brady said, “go back to Auntie and pay no attention. You know she is delirious.” But then Anna asked Mrs. Walker, who reluctantly confirmed everything. “My God,” the older woman lamented, “how much would Auntie not have given to spare you this.” Frantic, Anna went back to Brady and asked again if the story was true. Brady felt he could lie no longer. “Yes,” he said finally. “I’m sorry to say, it’s true.”

This sudden revelation was “simply horrible,” Anna would later say. She seemed especially upset by the fact that the whole family had been aware of the truth and hadn’t told her. “My father knew it; my brothers and my mother knew of the existing circumstances, and they countenanced it,” she said. “But I didn’t.” In a state of high dudgeon now, she demanded that Brady turn over all of her jewelry—“because I didn’t intend to live under the roof where such things existed.” The irony was stark. Having taken great pains over the years to turn this day laborer’s daughter into a refined young woman, the Bradys were now going to have to suffer the consequences of her impeccable middle-class scruples.

Eventually, however, the impressionable and pliable young woman was mollified. Perhaps realizing that she had absolutely nowhere else to go, she gradually allowed herself to be talked out of leaving. Her beloved aunt needed her—no matter what her history or current living situation. And all of her immediate family lived in that capacious house on Esplanade, a place where she had felt happy and cared-for. So she did not run away after all. She decided simply to continue going on as she had before, nursing her lifelong benefactor amid the comforts and luxuries she had long ago become accustomed to.