The Jazz Palace (7 page)

N
apoleon had never been to the North Side. He'd never been much above Twelfth Street before. He stayed close to that straight line of cottages along the railroad tracks that people were starting to call the black belt. He even stayed clear of the Loop. He'd been to that five-and-dime where he drank Coca-Cola from the red-bottom cups so that whites wouldn't have to touch their lips to the same glass. He confined his travels to the Shoestring on the West Side and the clubs he played on the Stroll. Since coming to the city and moving in with Maddy, Napoleon had never crossed the river. He'd had no reason to until now.

As the streetcar clanged, the coloreds got off, and white people got on. Soon he was the only black person on the tram. He stared out the window, surprised when he came to the river. It was a dirty, green trickle. Napoleon laughed to himself. He wasn't sure what he'd expected, but this river was not like the one on whose banks he'd grown up. His big muddy river thought nothing of bursting its levees and drowning the cotton fields and its inhabitants for miles.

The ride across was brief, but once he was on the other side, everything looked bigger, brighter. Whiter. The cars, the buildings, the people. He thought about turning back, but he was enjoying the movement of the tram as he rode, humming along, his horn resting in his lap. Then he got off at Broadway and walked until he stood in front of the sign for Chimbrova's Saloon and Sweets.

The corner tavern was a long two-story brick building, painted a rusty red. In the front were canisters filled with lemon drops and sassafras balls. Napoleon could see through into the back where the bar was. He looked for the side entrance. There was a family door where wives snuck into the taverns, but not a black man. He walked into the alleyway where the stables were, but he could not find a service entrance. In the fancy establishments he had to go in the delivery entrance or the kitchen. He never just walked in the front as if he owned the place.

And he was troubled by the tattered black ribbon that hung across the lintel. They had lost someone recently and he was worried
for the boy named Jonah who had nightmares of water. He was worried for himself, too. For half an hour he stood, watching men coming and going, hoping he'd see a black man. But there were none. Still he'd come this far, he reasoned, not that it was really that far, though it seemed like as long a journey as he'd ever been on, and he stepped inside.

A dozen or so men leaned across the bar. They wore dark jackets and hats and were drinking mugs of foamy beer with their backs to the door. The regulars had been coming in a steady stream for weeks now. With a somber face, Jonah poured Lev Walenski, the butcher, a double whiskey as he slumped at the bar. Bert Winkler still wore a black armband, and Bud Hansen's bouquet of baby's breath and roses lay withering across the bar. Mrs. Baum's dead husband was there as well. Though Mrs. Baum had him declared dead a decade ago so she could collect her annual death benefit of seventy-nine dollars, he still lived nearby. When he came to see his children, he stopped in to sip a few at Chimbrova's.

Balaban and Katz sat at a table in the corner. When they were bedraggled boys, they came to Anna's candy shop after school where she sold two hot dogs with a soda for a nickel. They never had more than a penny apiece, but Anna couldn't stand their hungry eyes. She always gave them a hot dog and a soda, adding a gumdrop or a root-beer ball, and told them to save their pennies, which they did. “That's why you don't make any money,” Chimbrova had scolded her. Now they were in their twenties, plumper but still inseparable, scraggily boys who could pass for brothers. They had saved their pennies—a lot of them. Soon they'd be opening a theater they'd bought on the North Side. Every night since the
Eastland
they'd come to pay their respects. “Tanta Chimbrova,” they said when they arrived, “is there anything we can do?”

Anna shook her head. “Please remember my children.”

Each night before they left, they put a two-dollar tip on the bar. They were starting to refurbish their theater, where they planned to show movies and have vaudeville acts. They were looking to find colored entertainers, and their eyes settled on a black man as he hesitated at the saloon door. In his silk suit, horn in his hand, Napoleon
stood in the entrance of the smoky-blue dive with the sawdust on the floor, not so different from the Rooster, except that here the clientele was white. Lev Walenski, with his bloody hands and distended belly, leaned over and whispered something to Mr. Scheffield. Mrs. Baum's dead husband turned as well. Outside of the voices it was quiet at the bar. There was no music at all.

Napoleon's eyes scanned the room. He was terrified of letting his gaze lock with a white man's. Long ago his grandmother taught him that they can cast a spell with their blue eyes. He looked sideways, but not straight on. He thought he should get on the streetcar and go back the way he'd come. He was about to turn around and walk away when Jonah spotted him from the bar. “You made it,” Jonah said, waving him in.

“Yes,” Napoleon replied, patting his gris-gris bags, “I did.” He breathed a big sigh. “I guess you did, too. I haven't seen you at the Shoestring in a while so I was worried…”

“I'm not working there anymore…” Jonah shrugged. After the
Eastland
Jonah refused to return to Western Electric. He could not bear to think of his brothers who were gone. He and Moss promised Anna they'd run the saloon and make it work. “I couldn't go back,” Jonah said.

“But you're all right.”

“Yes,” Jonah said, “I am.” He pointed to the black cloth that covered the mirror. “But my brothers weren't so lucky.”

“I am sorry for your loss…” Napoleon nodded, dropping his gaze. He did this not only out of respect but because he saw the impenetrable sadness in the boy's eyes, which he was able to recognize because it mimicked his own. He knew that Jonah would grow into a solitary man, rarely leaving these four walls.

“I slept through. I was so tired I missed the boat.” Jonah paused, shaking his head. “Now I'm tired all the time.”

“Missed the boat…Well, there must be a reason,” Napoleon said.

“What reason could there be for my brothers to drown?” Jonah shook his head, and there was nothing Napoleon could say. “What'll you have?” Jonah asked.

Napoleon slid his horn at his feet. “I'll take a whiskey.” He barely spoke in a whisper, then leaned against the bar, nursing his drink, wondering what he was doing in a North Side dive that was in mourning and had probably never seen a black man inside its four walls. He was unsure of where to put his hands, where to look as his eyes scanned the room. They came to rest on the piano.

It was sitting neglected in a corner, an old Vose & Sons upright, shiny as ebony. He'd hardly ever seen a piano naked like that with no one at the keys. It was lonely, Napoleon decided, as lonely as the people in this place, and he felt badly for it. Putting his drink down, he strolled over and struck a few chords. It was in perfect tune and the keys were smooth and loose. Most joints don't keep a piano this nicely. “Does that piano just sit there all night?” he asked Jonah. “Or does somebody come and play it?”

“Mostly it just sits,” Jonah replied. He didn't want to explain that Vlado Slovik, the piano tuner, kept it tuned in exchange for shots of gin. “Sometimes people pound on it, but not very well.” In truth, no one played much more than patriotic war tunes like “Keep the Home Fires Burning” which were sung fervently by tearful drunks, remembering the boys overseas. Or romantic ballads like “Gypsy Love Song,” which brought another set of tears.

“Well, that's a shame,” Napoleon said, fondling the white and shiny keys. He played a few bars and was aware of people shuffling behind him, turning to listen. “It's a good instrument.”

“Yes,” Jonah said with a pensive nod.

Napoleon could see that someone took the time to take care of that piano, even if nobody played it. He thought about this for a while. He tucked his horn under his arm. He wasn't going to play tonight in this tired saloon. He needed a rhythm section for that. “Mind if I come back sometime?”

“No.” Jonah shook his head. “I wouldn't mind at all.”

A
few weeks later on a warm fall evening Napoleon Hill returned with his horn and a piano player with onyx skin and watery eyes
named Earl “the Judge” Winston, who could play the blues all night. “I brought my friend along. Is that all right?”

“That's fine with me,” Jonah said.

The Judge roughed out a few chords while Napoleon checked his mouthpiece, thrust a bore-brush through his bell. The Judge looked up at him with a nod. “It's good,” he said, a smile on his face. At the Rooster where the piano was out of tune, the Judge played in a different key than Napoleon in order for them to stay in tune. Here they'd play in the same key.

“This is a little thing I wrote,” Napoleon said. “It's called ‘Rags 'n' Bones.' ” He drummed his valves and noodled with a warm-up. The Judge riffed on a melody, playing the opening run until Napoleon picked up his horn and was blasting away. He held the brass hard against his wide, red lips. He wanted them puffy, just the way they were. He never took any time off from playing because they would go down. He kept them oiled with a salve made from ground eucalyptus and pig fat. He knew horn players whose lips had split during a performance, blood flowing down their shirts. Some never played again.

Halfway through the first chorus, Napoleon was dripping. His shiny suit was mottled with sweat, but he never saw the spots. They dried before he was done. He dabbed his face with a small towel he kept draped across his shoulder. He began with a haunting refrain that grew from his early mornings on the New Orleans streets when he collected old clothes and bottles. Even when his tunes were loose and funky, they were always a little sad. His rags and bones.

Using a tiny pillow as a mute, he let that quiet sound start deep, then grow. He switched to the open horn, then reached for the different objects he'd placed on the piano lid—a drinking glass, a child's sand pail. The audience laughed when he put a plumber's plunger to his horn. “Hey,” Napoleon said to the crowd, seeing they were with him, “you shoulda seen the look on the guy's face in the hardware store when I told him I didn't need the stick.” But they grew still when he produced a deep sound that was almost an echo as if he were blowing at one end of a tunnel.

He puffed up his jowls and found notes no one had ever heard
on the North Side before. Or almost anywhere else for that matter. For his low notes he bent down as if he were going to pray, and for the high ones he raised his trumpet toward the ceiling as if he could make the walls tumble down. The music seeped up through the floorboards. The sound of a high-pitched trumpet and a stride piano made its way up the stairs, down a corridor. It moved like a fog, filling a room, taking up all the crevices and corners. It enveloped sleeping children as it drowned out the night sounds that made them restless and afraid. Its melody drifted until it came upon a dark-eyed girl who was sitting up in bed.

Pearl was wide-awake, listening. The music had a rhythm to it that made her think of that boy, the one who was drumming his fingers on the railing just before the
Eastland
sank. Pearl could still see his hands, moving, and the sound that rose from below coaxed her out of bed. She tiptoed to the landing, pausing there.

A trumpeter had a horn to his mouth. His thick lips were pressed against the mouthpiece as rivulets of sweat poured down his face. He was blasting out a tune until his eyes floated upward and all she could see were the whites. When he brought his trumpet down, he glanced at the girl in her pink nightgown. She froze on the landing. “Well, what have we got here?” he said, a smile breaking across his face. “Looks like a little night owl, don't she?” Hearing the deep rumble of his laughter, Pearl scurried back up the stairs.

The Potawatomi, before they were driven west of the Mississippi, had a saying. The first white person to settle in Chicago was a Negro. Pearl learned this in Illinois history class. Jean Baptiste Point DuSable was a handsome well-educated Negro who settled in Chicagoua. Some say he'd come from Santo Domingo and planned a settlement for free Negroes on the shores of Lake Michigan. Others said he was the descendant of a slave and a French fur trader. For sixteen years he lived with his Potawatomi wife and two children at the site of the evil smell.

Outside of the picture of DuSable in her history book, Pearl had never seen many black men. The ones who came north settled near Twelfth Street Station where the train let them off. Few ventured to the North Side. Pearl imagined they would speak French, be tall and lean, with onyx skin. She hadn't envisioned the stout trumpeter with the coffee-colored skin, thick lips, and an accent that came from the depths of the delta. But week after week, as the music found her upstairs, awake in her bed, she made her way more boldly down to the saloon.

There was a space under the stairs and she tucked herself inside, thinking that if she curled into a ball, small enough, no one would know she was there. Of course everyone knew, but they pretended not to. It was dusty and cobwebbed, but Pearl was more comfortable
in that space than she was in her own bed. Many nights after the bar closed Jonah carried her back upstairs, asleep, gently laying her in the middle, between her sisters, and pulling the covers up to her chin.

Napoleon took a liking to the girl with the dark eyes and hair to match who looked mysterious, shadowy, to him. She was plain, it was true, not like the fiery sisters she was sandwiched between, but there was something about her Napoleon couldn't quite put his finger on. He'd see her crouched under the bar, her legs tucked beneath her nightie, gazing out as if she couldn't be seen. She had something the others seemed to be lacking. If he had to give it a word, he'd say that she was curious. She seemed to take everything around her in. Each night he waited for her to answer when he called, “Hey, girl, what's your name?”

Pearl crouched down, as if she could make herself into her namesake, a smooth rounded gem. But he could still see her. He called out and taunted her until finally, after seeing him week after week for months, in a whisper she told him. “I'm Pearl.”

Napoleon was struck by her deep, throaty voice. “Pearl.” He rolled her name around on his tongue like a marble. At any moment he knew she'd dart up the stairs. “I'm going to write a lullaby for you. The next time I see you, we'll have…” He hesitated, and then chuckled, “We'll have an oyster for Pearl.” Then he picked up his trumpet as she stayed hidden under the stairs.

Pearl was growing used to the black man who laughed so loudly, but she feared he was saying these things to tease her. When Napoleon came to play on Monday nights, she remained in her bed, pretending to read or sew. Even Anna noticed that her insomniac daughter was no longer slipping downstairs when the music was playing. Her siblings were concerned that she was unwell, but after a visit to Dr. Rosen proved her to be sound, the family ignored her stubborn refusal to slip back down to the bar. But she was listening for what she hoped would be a song written for just her. All through the long winter and into the next spring she didn't hear it and thought he'd forgotten, but Napoleon wanted to make it right. When he played the
first version for Maddy, she said, “Why are you writing a song for a white girl?”

Napoleon shrugged, “Because I want to.” And then he added as an afterthought, “Because I think she's afraid.”

“What's she got to be afraid of?” Maddy asked, hands planted on her wide hips.

“I don't know,” Napoleon replied. “She just is.”

Then Maddy softened, “Well, you don't want to make her cry, do you? Write a happy tune.” She was right about that, the way she was right about most things. Napoleon changed the tempo until it was light and airy as angel-food cake. He put in a little laughing sound with a few barnyard animals, including a neighing horse, thrown in. But still he wasn't satisfied. He worked with the Judge who moved the melody to the upper registers, lightened the tone, and played the chords an octave higher as well.

When it was ready, Napoleon went back to Chimbrova's to play for Pearl. It had been weeks since he'd seen her, sneaking down to the landing, and he wondered if she was all right. He said to the crowd, “We're going to play a song for the little girl. It's a blues lullaby I wrote to help her go to sleep. It's called ‘An Oyster for Pearl.' ”

Pearl was lying in bed, her eyes open, with Ruby and Opal slumped against her, when the simple chords rose through the floorboards. She heard a pig oink and a car honk, the sharp awakening of the trumpet before it settled in to a lullaby. When she heard the sweet melody, she knew this song was for her. It lured her out of bed and down the stairs, first to the landing, and then under the steps where she hid with her knees to her chin. The tune was soft and lilting, a hush, but with a little swing laid under the melody. She listened as he played it through.

When he saw her, Napoleon shifted his melody and improvised on his tune. She listened as if she'd waited her whole life for someone to play this song for her. This was no hand-me-down. Nobody else had this first. It was all hers and she wrapped herself in it like a blanket where she'd find her rest.