Tiger Rag

by Nicholas Christopher

  Devon realized the bearded man in the photograph must be President Garfield.

  “Do you know anything about James Garfield?” Browne asked.

  Ruby just stared at him, but Devon replied, “I know he was assassinated.”

  “In 1881. He was the twentieth president, the only one ever elected straight from the House of Representatives. A war hero, an inspired mathematician, he had unusual talents outside of politics. Most interesting to me is the fact he was the only ambidextrous president. When posed a question in English, he could simultaneously write his answer in Latin with one hand and Greek with the other. And the year he died was palindromic, which happens only once a century. Just four months after his inauguration, a madman named Charles Guiteau shot him in a railroad station. Afterward, surgeons couldn’t locate the bullet, which was lodged in his spine. They scanned his torso with a metal detector specially invented by Alexander Graham Bell. When it failed, the surgeons probed the wound with unsterilized instruments, causing a fatal infection.”

  Ruby was thinking, Why are you telling us this?

  “He was my great-grandfather,” Browne said. “On my mother’s side. Her father was Abram Garfield, the president’s sixth child. He was a violinist, as was my mother. She attended the Boston Conservatory. Then she eloped with my father, a sailor named Julian Browne. Her family disowned her. A friend took my father into his business, importing European wines. He began collecting wine himself and started his own business. My mother introduced me to music. I had no musical talent myself. But I knew something about collecting. What you see all around you: that’s been my life. I never married, I have no children.”

  Devon was enthralled with the artifacts and fascinated by Browne himself. But Ruby was growing impatient, and he sensed it.

  “Now, let’s get to Valentine Owen,” he said, “and my long-standing unfinished business with him. Messy business, I’m sorry to say. What do you know about your father’s musical career, Dr. Cardillo?”

  “Not much. I’m here because my daughter’s interested. You should tell her.”

  “Do you know about his life in New York?”

  “I know he was born here,” Ruby said.

  “No, his later life.”

  “Look, I know very little about his life, period.”

  “I thought that might be so.”

  “How do you know anything about us? How did you know I was a physician?”

  If he was taken aback, he didn’t show it. “Research is a crucial part of my business.”

  “You mean, you check people out?”

  “Sometimes. Objects, rare and otherwise, belong to people. And it’s people who determine what happens to them: they change hands, they’re lost, and sometimes,” he paused for emphasis, “they’re stolen. I’m not a voyeur. And rest assured, I did not invite you here to mystify you. Quite the opposite.”

  Ruby wasn’t satisfied. “Meaning?”

  Devon was surprised. Her mother was seldom rude. “Why don’t we hear what Mr. Browne has to say,” she said gently, “and take it from there.”

  Ruby sat back with a sigh. “Fine.”

  Browne nodded. “Please bear with me. Devon—may I call you Devon?—you’ve heard of Buddy Bolden?”

  “Of course.”

  “Who?” Ruby asked.

  “In 1900 Charles Bolden was the greatest cornet player alive. He was the father of all jazz trumpeters, including your father, and he changed the course of American music. I’ll tell you some things about Bolden that only a few people know. And some things about your father, Dr. Cardillo, that nobody knows. Fallon!”

  Fallon reappeared, laid a trumpet and a cornet on Browne’s desk, and left the room again.

  “The differences between the two instruments are often blurred,” Browne said. “You see that the trumpet is larger. By 1930, jazz musicians preferred it to the cornet. The cornet possesses a mellower tone, but the trumpet has greater range, a crisper timbre, more subtlety.” He tapped the stem of the trumpet. “The key is here, in the vibrating tube. In the trumpet the tube is cylindrical. In the cornet it’s partly conical and much thicker. The cornet also has a deeper mouthpiece. It’s pitched in B-flat, with a practical range of three octaves—four for virtuosos like Bolden. At twenty-nine, Bolden was declared insane and institutionalized. Today they would say he was schizophrenic and treat him with drugs. Back then, they just locked him away. While many early jazzmen cut wax cylinders, for decades it was an accepted fact that Bolden had left behind no recordings. Rumors sprang up occasionally—a New Orleans gangster owned a cylinder, or a collector in Chicago, or a distant relative in Florida—but they were always debunked. However, the truth is often embedded in rumors, in small details that overlap. There were enough of these to convince me that Bolden and his band had produced a recording. At least two musicians who played with Bolden attested to it: Alphonse Picou, the clarinetist, and more significantly, Willie Cornish, Bolden’s trombonist and also his closest friend and confidant. And there was Picou’s brother, Cyrus, who claimed to know the engineer who had made the recording.” Browne leaned forward. “If it existed, I had to have it. It would be rarer and more important than anything in this room. So I started looking for answers. I’m a patient man. I followed dozens of false leads. I came up against a lot of walls. But I got lucky, too, and discovered that in 1904 the Bolden Band produced three Edison cylinders. Actually laying my hands on them would be more difficult. I gained access to the National Phonograph Company archives in a warehouse in Orange, New Jersey, but the earliest files had turned to dust. I paid researchers in New Orleans to scour public records and newspaper morgues. I tracked down the widows and children of various musicians. I interviewed archivists. I pored over memorabilia collections and searched the stacks at LSU and Tulane. I paid bribes, put out feelers, you name it, and I came up empty. What evidence I uncovered indicated that the three cylinders had only been in the same place together once—the day they were recorded—and afterward were each apparently destroyed in different ways. I couldn’t be sure, because when it comes to Bolden, basic facts are in short supply, distortions are plentiful. For example, of more than sixty musicians who claimed to have played with Bolden, at least forty never even met him. Such ‘witnesses’ spun a lot of tales. A whole mythology grew up around Bolden. Everything was a mystery. It felt as if the more you knew, the less you understood. After coming very close to finding one of the cylinders in 1981, only to learn it had been destroyed, I gave up. I just couldn’t go any further. Then, in 1983, I met your father, Dr. Cardillo, and though he lied to me more than anyone else, it was through Valentine Owen that I learned the truth.”

  JACKSON, LOUISIANA—JUNE 4, 1931

  He walked along the colonnade, touching the columns one by one. Starlings swooped by. A chicken hawk was cutting circles in the sky. A patient named Mister Henry, who had fat hands, told him starlings sound like children because they were humans in another life. He wanted to reply that if there was another life there wouldn’t be people in it. But he couldn’t speak. He stopped trying after he realized that another patient, Deaf Al, was teaching him sign language from afar. That must be how you learn it best, he thought, so he never allowed himself to get close enough to Deaf Al to discover that he wasn’t deaf at all and that his name wasn’t Al, it was Ray.

  He crossed the lawn toward the bandstand. The black trees behind it turned bright green as he approached. The air was humming with bees and flies. Mosquitoes that he waved away. If the grass was allowed to grow another inch, it would catch fire. The fire would spread. The buildings would empty. Some patients would drop to their knees, others would try to scale the wall. To run where? Often his vision was blurred, but not today. And for the first time in weeks his head didn’t hurt—a crackling pain so constant it took him a while to realize it had lifted.

  One of the nurses wore a canary-colored smock. White stockings. Gloves. She had long legs. Her brown hair was knotted in a bun. She was carrying a pitcher of ice w
ater to a table beneath the trees. Some guards were sitting, smoking. Only guards and doctors were allowed to smoke. Wooden chairs had been set in rows before the bandstand. Seven rows, sixteen to a row. Who had known there would be someone for each chair and no one left standing?

  There were men like him, but not like him, waiting to sit. They all wore baggy blue pants and blue shirts. Five buttons on the shirts. No pockets. The women from the women’s building over the hill wore yellow gowns. He didn’t like to look at those women. It was bad luck. Once he talked to the doctors about girls he’d known: They betrayed me by letting me lie to them. But that was maybe one hundred twenty years ago and now some of those girls were looking down on him from heaven and most were looking up from hell. He wouldn’t know them anymore because in hell they take away your name and give you a new face. Like this place. No names. And somebody else’s face in the mirror. Ella was in heaven, eighteen years old, wrapped in a yellow sheet. He would know her face. One hundred eighteen years ago he lay beside her in a silent room. Her breathing soft. Her perfume a cloud of spices.

  People took their seats. Doctors in front. Then patients. In the back row: orderlies, nurses, groundskeepers, cooks. The cooks had sawdust on their shoes, like Manny. The sun was beating down. The air green with pollen. Clouds sailing overhead, like ships. He sat in the sixth row, on the end. So he could leave when he liked. The fellow next to him was wringing his hands, wheezing, front teeth gone. He himself still had all his teeth. Every night he rubbed his gums with salt.

  On the bandstand the patients’ brass band was setting up to play. They played the same stuff every month, note for note, including the wrong notes. Quadrilles. Marching songs. Old downtown Creole music that had no bite. And one or two numbers they called jazz. Jazz. What was that? It was like what he used to play, but without the blues. Where was the blues? Eleven patients playing music, and none of them blue? When he couldn’t listen anymore, he would wander back across the lawn and around the big house.

  None of the patients knew who he was. One of the doctors did, but he had gone away. He himself knew, but not in the way he used to. I was Charles Bolden, he once told a startled orderly, accustomed to his silence. I was born two hundred years ago on Howard Street and Erato and I died many times since.

  The band started in, playing “Moon Glow.” Terrible, he thought. Too slow. Like it was being dragged by a chain. Clarinet flat, bass out of sync. But there was a new trumpeter, recently arrived. Just a kid, from Plaquemine. Quiet, didn’t look crazy, but they said he tried to shoot his own father, so here he was. Playing hard, he pulled away from the others, their dead weight. But he could only go so far before they yanked him back. Dragged him by that chain.

  He knew the kid had something, and he wanted to hear more.

  They played “Rocking Chair,” which sounded awful, and “Coming Home,” which was worse. He was thinking maybe he ought to leave. Then that kid stood up and played a riff to open “Get Out of Here”—a song he had written, that his band used to play at the end of dances at the rougher joints, in Algiers and in Arabi by the slaughterhouse. The kid almost hit it, but stopped, and the others got that one wrong, too. Played it too slow and too long. You’re supposed to play it fast and loud and then get out, just like the song says. They followed that with “Lord, Take Me,” and then, finally, laid down their instruments and filed off the bandstand.

  There was clapping. Everyone stood up and drifted toward the lawn. He didn’t follow them. Instead, he did something he had never done before and would never do again. Maybe it was that kid. Remembering how he himself used to play in Plaquemine. The prettiest girls came from there. There was a big loading platform by the railroad station where bands played in the open air. All afternoon, drinking beer from buckets, while hundreds of people danced, kicking up a world of dust. And every so often a train steamed in and passengers leaned out the windows clapping and shouting.

  He walked past everyone, not looking at any of them, straight to the bandstand, up the steps, keeping steady. The cedar planks creaked. He touched the railing with his left hand and his right, so that he could know this was happening now, outside of him. He touched each musician’s chair until he reached the kid’s chair, with the trumpet. He looked at the trumpet, catching reflections, his own face elongated, his hand—huge—reaching for it. It was a cheap instrument, tarnished and dented, the valves worn. He had not touched a cornet or trumpet in twenty-five years. He picked it up. It was heavy—nothing like his old Conn cornets, so perfectly balanced. He turned to the rows of chairs. A few people stood watching him, most were still shuffling away.

  He drew in his breath and pressed the mouthpiece to his lips and blew. That first note nearly split him in half. He blew it again, and the next note came, and the next, and then the notes were flying away from him. Up and out over the trees, the wall, the big house. The riff emerged smooth and clear, as if he had been playing it every day—those opening bars he had snatched out of the air at the Hotel Balfour one hundred twenty years ago. Climbing, peaking, exploding.

  Now everyone turned to look. After twenty-four years of isolation, Patient Number 7742, who had never listened to a radio or seen a vinyl disk, never heard of Louis Armstrong or Joe Oliver, was playing jazz that sounded contemporary to the doctors and orderlies who left the grounds at the end of the day, went to nightclubs, and heard the latest music on their radios. One orderly asked a nurse, How the hell can he play like that? The piece of music he played had become a staple of bands from New Orleans to Chicago, but no one on the lawn of the state asylum that afternoon had ever heard anyone play it like this. In 1931 Charles Bolden picked up where he had left off in 1906, just that once stepping back into real time by way of his music, which had thrived in the outside world while he himself was wasting away. It was as if, for a few minutes, without being remotely aware of it, much less imagining the possibility in such grand terms, he had been allowed to participate in his own immortality.

  The piece was “Tiger Rag.”

  He stopped playing at the reprise, and before he opened his eyes felt all those eyes on him, the last notes still reverberating. Many of the patients, and nearly all the caretakers, were stunned, ready to applaud, but he avoided that, placing the trumpet back on the chair and hurrying down the steps, not even touching the railing and never looking back as he crossed the lawn.

  In his room he lay still on his bed. He pulled the woolen blanket over him despite the heat. His hands were shaking. A moth was ticking against the overhead light. A fan was whirring in the corridor. His headache had returned, those red-hot splinters swarming the base of his skull. And he was thinking it was true about the starlings. They didn’t sing like birds, they sang with children’s voices, insisting nobody was going to leave this place alive if they couldn’t fly.

  If you can’t fly, you’re gonna die.

  That was their song. A song he wished he had written himself a long time ago.

  If you can’t fly, you’re gonna die.

  Five months later to the day, November 4, 1931, Charles Bolden died in the asylum’s general hospital, age fifty-four. His death certificate listed the cause as “cerebral arterial sclerosis,” which explained the vicious headaches and blurred vision. A Baton Rouge undertaker picked up his body and transported it to New Orleans in his truck. Bolden was embalmed and laid out for viewing for a single day at the Geddes-Moss Undertaking Company on Jackson Avenue. His mother and sister attended with a few of their cousins. Bankrupted by Charley’s incarceration, living in a cramped two-room house at 2338 Philip Street, Alice and Cora Bolden would both be dead within a few months. There was no notice of Bolden’s death in the newspapers, no formal wake, no church service, no pallbearers. A musician of his stature was customarily given a large, boisterous wake, after which a band of his peers performed at the funeral. The great clarinetist Alphonse Picou, who played with Bolden in his youth, lived into his eighties and was accompanied to his grave by three brass bands and twenty-five thousand peo
ple. But Charles Bolden had been forgotten. The only musician to show up for the viewing was Willie Cornish. The other surviving member of the Bolden Band, Jimmy Johnson, no longer rode a bicycle with his bass strapped to his back; stricken with tuberculosis, he was touring for the last time, with a pickup band, in Alabama.

  Willie and Bella Cornish didn’t recognize Bolden’s body. Shriveled, greenish-brown, bald, he looked a hundred years old. As if he was just dug up, Willie remarked, rather than about to be buried. The undertaker had dressed Bolden in the brown suit his sister Cora brought. The jacket was tight, and he had to tear open the seam down the back. The previous night, Cora had patched a hole on the sleeve and sewn on two buttons. Bolden had bought the suit for twenty-five dollars in a haberdashery on Dauphine Street on a spring day in 1905. After he was sent away, Cora kept it in a trunk with his other clothes. Cora was a laundress, like her mother, earning three dollars a week. When it became clear Charley would not be released anytime soon, if ever, she sold his silk vests and English derbies and velvet gloves to a secondhand shop. She gave his shoes and shirts to relatives even poorer than her. That was in 1917. She saved two articles of clothing for Buddy’s funeral, whenever that might be: the brown suit and his favorite yellow shirt. Time had bleached the shirt white, so she bought a bright yellow tie for twenty cents, and they put that on him, too.

  He would have liked that, Cornish said. That is, if that’s really him.

  It’s him, all right, Bella replied, and tomorrow for the funeral you bring your horn and play something, ’cause there ain’t gonna be no band or nothin’ else, from the looks of it.