Half-Blood Blues (7 page)

‘And it’s pure genius. Which would seem impossible – I mean, it’s just
four
men, barely half a band, the piece extremely pared down because of it. Minimalist. But Falk’s so gifted he can single-handedly make their four instruments sound like eight. His complexity is unbe
liev
able… the piece is brilliant. Even with Falk yelling halfway through – what does he say again? – “just a damn braid of mistakes”, something like that? Even his screaming doesn’t ruin it. If anything, the line’s now legendary. Just a damn braid of mistakes.’

That son of a bitch, I thought to myself. What did
he
know about us? He cut out on the first boat, day after Hitler was sworn in. Left poor Ernst to take his place, become our clarinetist and manager both.

More quick images. I closed my old eyes a minute. Then a scholar come on, some dry old owl I ain’t seen before, looking fit for the coffin in his suit and blue bow tie. ‘Life for black people under the Third Reich,’ he said through his nose, ‘was extremely contradictory. This is because there were so many different
types
of black people, and their treatment depended on what group they belonged to. For instance, you had the children of the African diplomats who’d come to the country during its colonial period. You had African–American performers, the opera singer Marian Anderson and jazzmen like Charles Jones and Sidney Griffiths, who, like their counterparts in Paris – Josephine Baker, Arthur Briggs, Bill Coleman and the like – all came to Europe to get away from the overwhelming racism prevalent in the southern United States in that era. The Jim Crow laws, in effect from the late 1800s right into the 1950s, barred blacks from active participation in society. In the twenties Europe was still a place black entertainers could come to earn a good living. Especially in Germany, whose borders were kept open to foreigners due to the Versailles Treaty. Also, the loss of the First World War had brought about a whole new artistic movement. The market for jazz had grown tremendously, and there was a decent following.’

Hell, it burned me up to see it. How the sweet jesus could
he
know what drove us there? He ain’t known nothing of my childhood, my thoughts, of that last-minute shrug brought me to Berlin back then. I been a hair’s-breadth from staying put in London, a whole other life.

‘Hieronymus Falk,’ he went on, ‘now, he belonged to a rarer group. He was what back then was called a Rhineland Bastard. See, after the First World War, part of the conditions levied against Germany were that France was given control of the Rhineland, which of course borders their country.’

He leaned forward, as though getting to the meat of his story. ‘Now, instead of sending French soldiers to occupy it, they sent men from their African colonies. As you can imagine, this didn’t sit well with some of the German populace. They dubbed the soldiers the Black Shame, the Black Scourge, the Black Infamy. Women who bore children with these men, like Falk’s mother Marieanne, they were assumed to be either prostitutes or rape victims. So even after the soldiers were sent home, and Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland, these children were seen as part of a significant insult to Germany. A cultural stain.’

New images come onscreen: black-and-white footage of soil-dark soldiers standing in a loose file, their uniforms muddy. ‘Is this what France calls a man?’ said the German voice-over.

The scholar’s voice drifted over the imagery. ‘Different types of black people were being treated in different and often contradictory ways under the Reich. This was in large part due to the fact that there were at most four thousand Germans of African descent in the whole country. And with a number that small, it was hard to effect cohesive legislation against them. Even so, many had their papers confiscated, making them effectively stateless.’

I hadn’t known most of what he was saying. You don’t stop to look around when you running, and back then we was all running. I sat sceptical, and pained by it.

‘In the end, Falk’s fate was outlandish in that he was one of a minority of Afro–Germans who were sent to concentration camps. Now if he’d been African–American, they would probably have held him indefinitely at Saint-Denis, like they did with other black musicians arrested in Paris. But Falk was German – or by their measure, ‘stateless’ – and so he was transferred to Mauthausen. Of course, it’s hard to get a sense of how many blacks actually went to the camps, because so many records were destroyed.

‘Remember, there was no on-paper legislation against blacks, so they were often admitted to work camps on trumped-up charges and under various crimes. Some were interned as Communists, or as Immigrants, who wore the blue badge. Or as Homosexuals, who wore the pink badge, or as Repeat Criminals, who wore the green badge, or Asocials, who wore the black badge. Even more obscuring is that the Asocial group included the homeless, pimps, pickpockets, murderers, homosexuals, and race defilers, so that it’s even more difficult to figure out who among them was black. These people are lost in the dark maw of history.’

Then there was some ruined old fool up there, his dour mug peering out at us. And then I saw with shock that the fool was me.

Well, hell. Nothing,
nothing
I tell you, can prepare you for the utter wreck of your face onscreen. I looked like one of them worn-out wood houses ain’t been painted in decades. My skin was thick with pores, my cheeks gaunt, my eyes like dim windows, going blond with cataracts and full of uncertainty. When my name flashed onscreen, I got that strange dark feeling welling up in me again. That sense something wasn’t right in me, something bad was coming.

‘Sure I played alongside the kid, Hieronymus I mean – see, we called him “the kid” back then,’ I said in a creaking voice. Then Caspars interrupted me, and when I glanced off-camera to meet his eye, he whispered I should look straight ahead.

The audience laughed at this, not unkindly. I hunkered down in my chair a little. Feeling the minder’s eyes on me.

‘What I recall most about him, besides his playing, was his reading.’ I looked off-camera again, then as if remembering Caspars’ last prompt, stared at the screen like a badger caught in headlights. ‘What I mean by this is, he been obsessed with Herodotus. All them old historical tales. Hieronymus reading Herodotus – that made me laugh. Yeah, he read all them old histories, Egypt stories, Greek stories. Like he didn’t get enough of such things in the crib, you know?’ I cleared my throat, frowning. Looking off-camera again.

Caspars whispered something.

‘Well,’ I said in reply, my voice soft. ‘Well.’ I sat there staring at my lap, not saying nothing for some seconds.

Watching myself freeze up onscreen, my body went real tight, the theatre seat squeaking beneath me. I could hear myself breathing through my mouth.

I gave a taut laugh on camera and said, ‘Well, it been right terrifying. I mean what else could it be? We gone out for a cup of milk, gone out to quell our bellies, and we end up in Café Coup de Foudre with the Nazis. It was right terrible.’ I licked my lips, my eyes flickering. ‘Listen – nothing I could say now would get at just how terrible it was.’ I grown emphatic, using my hands. ‘I mean nothing I could say to you now could
begin
to bring home how harsh, how awful it been.’ I paused like a man who’d made a great point. I remembered then that Caspars hadn’t reacted to what I’d said. ‘Only thing I can say is that being there with him during the ordeal, seeing his courage, it was an honour.’

A long silence fell over the theatre as my face faded out. My heart had inched up my throat till I could hear the blood in my ears. That odd feeling come over me so strong I near couldn’t breathe. Hell, I thought. What is it. The dark felt soft and hot, like an animal crouching on me.

Then Chip come onscreen, and that bad feeling in me just grew. He looked rough, old, holy in his ice-white suit, like a Mississippi Baptist spent his life preaching on the delta. Staring at his burnt-out face, his swollen cheeks and his eyes rusted from horse, I seen him with eyes afresh. He looked wrecked, and what’s worse, wholly blind to his frailty.

‘When Hiero got arrested in that café,’ he was saying, ‘they’d had to make up a reason for it. So they branded him a race-polluter, a stateless race-polluter and an immigrant and a Commie. All sorts of things. Hell, if anyone was a Commie it was Sid. But they held Hiero for two weeks at Saint-Denis, no trial, nothing, before putting him on a transport to Mauthausen.
Mauthausen
. Very name of it give you the shivers. Poor kid was hauled off there, and no amount of money, talk, or pull could get him out. Not that Delilah had any kind of influence no more – she was even on thin ice herself.

‘Sidney Griffiths,’ said Chip, shaking his head. Something in me died at that gesture. It seemed so contemptuous.

‘A shame, the trust we all put in him.’ Chip took a long, deep breath, reflecting. ‘But he’s a lesson, really. A lesson in what jealousy’ll do to a man. To betray such a genius musician, and a
kid
at that, over a woman. Over the kid’s talents, and over a woman. I mean, there he stood, denying his friend, pretending he didn’t even
know
him, while they dragged the poor boy away. I ain’t saying he pre-arranged it. I ain’t saying that. But handing Hiero over to the Boots, to the Gestapo, like that…’ He shook his head. ‘That’s mind-blowing, ain’t it? I don’t have to tell you what a great blow that was to the legacy of jazz. I mean, here we was on the verge of that groundbreaking recording… I know, I know, we still got a pretty good take, but imagine what it
could’ve
been. Hell. It’s a crime. It’s a crime for which Sid ain’t never been held to account.’

I ain’t saying I seen it coming.

But hearing Chip onscreen, all a sudden that crushing hot feeling in my chest just drain right away. It like I ain’t even there no more. Like something just finished. Just ended. This blood trapped in my head, the slow dim throb of it deep inside.

I closed my eyes.

And then I was waking in some other room, a room cool and alien to me, the windows letting onto an old Baltimore street I don’t barely recognize. Lying on a bed in the damp sheets of a lady who ain’t my wife. The room white as wheat with early sun, a dry smell like cinder coming off her body. I wanted to turn to her, to gather her small limbs into me way I done just hours ago, kissing the joint at her throat where her collarbones meet, her wet dirty curls. But I didn’t. Something was rising up in me like bad digestion. Dust on the bedside table, a half-empty glass of water. Gulls crying outside. I lay beside that woman, thick with unhappiness, thinking of my wife.

Then I was back. The air in that theatre gone rich and hot. It was stingingly quiet. Gripping the arms of my seat, I pushed on out of it, its joints squeaking. The film was still rolling, the theatre soot-black, but even in that dark I could feel everyone’s eyes on me, their gazes weighing me down like a sack of ashes.

Our minder whispered, ‘They’re going to show the documentary first, then afterwards your row will go onstage.’ But I wasn’t listening.

My damned old legs wasn’t moving right. I could feel my heart punching away at my arteries, my whole body shuddering. Don’t you damn well look Chip’s way, I thought. Not one glance, Sid. I stepped hard across the minder’s knees, past the legs of all these folks, past Caspars.

Caspars leaned forward in his seat. ‘Where the hell are you going?’ he hissed.

I stood there, half-dazed, shaking. Feeling suddenly old. Shaking and saying nothing.

You a damn coward, I thought. That’s what you is, Sid.

No, I ain’t said nothing. I just started up the aisle, slow. The silence sharp as needles. Folks watching me leave and not the picture, and me feeling their stares. My face weighed heavy, like some great load I got to haul without dropping.

Ain’t no one said nothing. But then from the darkness some son of a bitch hissed at me in German, ‘Shame on you.’

I tripped a little. Stared at the pale faces in their seats. Then kept on moving.

I broke through the doors, through the foyer, out into the night. The coolness of the city air rushed over me. I stood there in the empty square.

Even at ten years old, Chip was a veteran liar. A real Pinocchio. I recall the Saturday I first met him: the Baltimore weather all sultry, the air stewed and stinking of sewage. Steam belched from the hot manholes, and walking through it, it stuck in your gullet like crumbs. I was sitting in the park where us blacks went, sitting with my sister Hetty – Hetty wearing the Philadelphia hat she wouldn’t take off her head for no one cause our pa give it to her. She was teasing me something awful. Calling me cross-eyed, gimp-legged. So when a kid come up in the distance, sank his tan overalls into the sandbox, I spat on my sister’s shoes and ran off to join him.

He was a small, funny looking git, a real balloon head. Getting near, I reckoned him for a strange one. Those full round cheeks, those prize-fighter biceps that seemed borrowed from an older brother. As I come up, he never even raised his face.

‘You want to play ball or somethin?’ I said, glancing down at his crown. His Afro had odd bald patches in it, grey flakes.

He finally looked up, and his weak sneer turned something inside me. ‘This look like a ball field to you, sucker?’ he said. ‘This be a
sand
box. For makin
sand-
castles.’ Shaking his head, he spat air through his lips. ‘I’m sittin in sand, and he’s talkin ball games.’

I felt like a blue-ribbon idiot, all right. My face gone hot, I turned and started back to Hetty.

‘You live Peabody Heights way, right?’ the boy called out.

I turned. He didn’t look no friendlier, nope, but there was a shrewder look in his face, like his attention been filed down to a single, sharp point. ‘You live down on Maryland Ave.’

That thrown me a little. ‘How you know?’

‘I lives in Peabody Heights too,’ he said, like it was common knowledge. ‘Ain’t you seen me at church?’

Believe me, if I’d seen this melon head at church, I’d have remembered. But I couldn’t risk his sneer again. ‘Maybe. Yeah, I think so.’