Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  AFTER THEY TOOK the Savoy, as Basie had, the Jay McShann band started taking in the other musicians in New York. True, they sounded good, but they didn’t have that fire, they didn’t have that swing, and they didn’t have Yardbird. Oh, they knew better than to try and tangle with Basie or the undisputed boss of the jazz orchestra, Duke Ellington, but they didn’t feel they had to take a backseat to anybody else.

  “We had to get all of them out of there at the Savoy,” said McShann. “We had to go in there with Erskine Hawkins’s band. We had to do them in. We had to go in there with Cootie Williams’s band. We had to get them out of there. We had to take care of the Savoy Sultans. At that time, Lionel Hampton was organizing his band. Down at Moe Gale’s office, they said, ‘Well, put Hamp in there with them at the Savoy.’ ‘Hell, no, don’t put them in there—them sumbitches will kill him!’ We woulda killed him. We didn’t allow nobody to light in there, baby. Noooo-body.”

  After the various musical confrontations and the string of victories, they became so indifferent, even contemptuous, toward their New York competition that they captured their swagger in a new song, “Hometown Blues,” with Walter Brown out in front of the band:

  I’m thinking ’bout my hometown,

  a little place way out in the West

  I’m thinking ’bout my hometown,

  a little place way out in the West

  Some folks call it a hick town,

  but I rate it with the best

  I left home for the big town,

  it ain’t been so long ago

  I left home for the big town,

  it ain’t been so long ago

  But there’s nothing in the big town

  my small-town friends don’t know

  We have sessions in my hometown

  that will make you jump and shout

  We have sessions in my hometown

  that will make you jump and shout

  Well, the Bird is the boss cat—

  do you dig what I’m talking about?

  Of course, he hadn’t always been. Many things happened to Charlie Parker on the road to becoming the boss cat. And that is where our story begins.

  2

  In the nineteenth century, when Americans thought of the Wild West, they didn’t mean California, for all the color that galloping desperadoes like Joaquin Murrieta, or the prospectors panning for gold at Sutter’s Mill, gave the coast. They were thinking of towns just west of the Missouri River, towns in Kansas like Dodge, Abilene, Wichita, Ellsworth. If a drunk got on a train and asked to be taken to hell, it was said, the conductor would put him off in Dodge City. That was where the cowboys brought the cattle up from Texas, then partied with whiskey, women, cards, and pistols, daring the law to break in on their fun.

  Or Americans thought of the broad center of the country, which italicized its difference from the East when three events took place in 1876: when Custer and the Seventh Cavalry got their ashes hauled at Montana’s Little Bighorn; when Jack McCall blew Wild Bill Hickok’s brains out in Deadwood, South Dakota, as the lawman held a hand of aces and eights; and when the Jesse James–Cole Younger gang was fed an afternoon meal of lead in an abortive raid in Northfield, Minnesota. Cowboys. Indians. Gunfighters. Bank and train robbers.

  Like all jazz musicians, Charlie Parker embodied many things: three hundred years of black American dance and music, everything from slave cabin steps and field hollers to the melodic-rhythmic revolution of improvised phrases spun out by Louis Armstrong and the arpeggiated harmonic dazzle of Art Tatum. That long march to improvised sophistication began in Jamestown, Virginia, in 1619, when African slaves were first brought to North America. But this particular western dog and innovator had his roots in that forgotten American West of Kansas and Missouri—that world of explorers, horses, wars, and settlers. His bloodline was both cosmopolitan and all-American, mingling African, Indian (which is also to say Asian), and European stock. And the Wild West in which he grew up was shaped by the same three sources that constituted his genetic line.

  IN THE 1530s, colonists in the territory known as New Spain, south of the Rio Grande, were entranced by rumors that great riches had been found in a city called Cíbola, somewhere to the north. The itch for wealth raised sufficient curiosity in the local governor, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado, to persuade him to organize an exploratory team under the leadership of a Franciscan friar named Marcos de Niza. As an advance scout for the mission, they enlisted an African slave named Estevan, who had mastered the Indian sign language. Estevan is described as “an Arab negro from Azamor,” a chattel Othello who had survived a Spanish expedition into Florida led by Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca that cost the lives of nearly four hundred men, sparing only Estevan, Cabeza de Vaca, and two others. So Estevan knew something about Indians.

  Leading a group, including the Arab Negro and some hand-picked Indians, Niza moved north, into what would later be the southwestern United States. The leader returned in 1539 with the story. Estevan had died up there, he said, for some foolish and arrogant act; the promotion from slave to scout had yeasted his head to self-destructive proportions. You know, give them an inch. But the discovery had been incredible: there were seven cities of Cíbola, not one. They dwarfed Mexico City, their buildings draped with gold, their doorways bedecked with turquoise. Estevan, the advance scout, was the only one who actually entered the cities; Niza claimed the slave was startled by the endless sheen of precious metal. Niza himself had seen it from a great distance as a glow, a golden glow.

  Hoping to equal the prestige of the explorers who preceded him, in February 1540 Coronado led an experienced and tough group of men in search of Niza’s seven cities of Cíbola. Yet the mission was ill-fated: two-thirds of his conquistadors were lost along the way, and when the survivors arrived at their destination, the golden vision of Cíbola was nothing more than a landscape of stone and mud houses, Niza’s promise of glowing riches no more than snake oil. Armored, battle-ready, and disappointed, the Spaniards made short work of the city’s Zuni inhabitants.

  In 1541, on the northernmost leg of the expedition, Coronado passed through what is now the state of Kansas. Like many thereafter, he found the land oppressively flat. But he also observed that it was a very effective place to get lost, or to cover one’s tracks: though he drove a thousand horses, five hundred cattle, and five hundred rams before him over the Great Plains, the grass sprang right back up in their wake, leaving no trace of their passage. It was no wonder that so many men had disappeared in the region.

  Some of those horses would become Coronado’s greatest gift to the region. As Walter Prescott Webb notes in The Great Plains, the horses were the product of

  a long heritage of breeding and training that fitted them in a remarkable way to serve their masters. The horses of Spain were the horses of Arabia, of northern Africa, of the Moors; in short, they were the horses of the desert. This meant that they were hardy and tough, could live on scant food, on forage and grass, and did not depend entirely on grain. This Asiatic, Arabian, African-bred horse (and cattle of equal hardihood) flourished in semi-arid America. Had the north-European breed of grain-fed stock first struck the Plains, history might have been very different. The Spanish mustang, the Indian pony, became the cow horse of the cattle kingdom, and the longhorn of Spanish descent traveled from the valley of the Rio Grande to Milk River, gaining flesh on the road.

  Somewhere during that expedition, as Coronado passed through the plains, he lost—or let loose—some of those sturdy Spanish horses, a move that helped give rise to a nomadic horse culture that would make the Plains Wars so fierce three centuries later.

  In a spectacular loop of history, the “Indians” who confronted and tamed Coronado’s lost Spanish mustangs were actually descendants of the Asians who had come across the Bering Strait millennia before—the very same people who first broke and rode horses on the steppes. The ancient Asian horsemen had brought their domesticated beasts to North Africa—and when the Moors conquered
Spain, the horses went with them. From there they would travel with the conquistadors across the Atlantic to Mexico. Within two hundred years the Plains Indians were mounted, and by the middle of the nineteenth century the Comanche were the greatest equestrians in America. The awesome horse culture that evolved under the Plains Indians would affect the lives of every race of people who came across the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers.

  THE AMERICAN CIVIL War is often characterized as a conflict of “brother versus brother.” Given that nearly 180,000 Negro troops fought in blue against the gray, however, that familiar description is more a romantic exaggeration than a military fact. And the black soldiers left standing at the end of the War of the Rebellion played an important role in the shaping of the Southwest.

  In 1866, the year after the war’s end, the Ninth and Tenth Cavalry, two all-black regiments, were formed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. They would soon come to be known as the Buffalo Soldiers. The soldiers in these regiments were poorly paid; the discrimination against them was obvious to the point of disdain. But the Buffalo Soldiers, who rode their horses proudly and sometimes posed for photographs wearing plumed helmets, were instrumental in the settling of the area. The Negro troops knew, through the crucibles of danger, loss, inclement weather, inferior horses, outmoded weaponry, and the injuries of racism, that they were bad medicine. Their units had the lowest desertion rate in the US Army. They fought in the Indian Wars of the late nineteenth century, arrested rum- and gun-runners, guarded the construction of the railroads, and contributed to the accurate mapping of the Great Plains. And their legacy includes the cities where Western jazz evolved.

  The Buffalo Soldiers were not the only black people who contributed to the growth of the Southwest. Negro cowboys drove cattle from Texas to the cities in Kansas where the markets existed. Some who owned land tried to bilk herders out of money or demanded tribute if the cattle were to cross their property; others became desperadoes, even con men. And the fall of Reconstruction in 1877 brought a great migration of black people to Kansas, men and women who worked hard to carve out a rough civilization that was punctuated by gunfire, lynch mobs, and jail.

  The Old West was rife with such violence—a streak that would reappear with the bloody exploits of men like John Dillinger during Charlie Parker’s adolescence in the mid-1930s. But it was also enlivened by the provocative tension between the thrust of individual liberty and the desire for order and safety. Out there in the West, that tension made for an improvised world. The skills that Charlie Parker brought to such visceral prominence on those nights at the Savoy were the result of a tenacious ambition that first took shape in that latter-day Wild West known as Kansas City.

  EAST KANSAS, AT the Kaw River, is incipient timberland. In the nineteenth century, before the development of barbed wire, farms were surrounded by hedges that freshened what was often described as a monotonous landscape, a kind of visual drone.

  On August 29, 1920, a brown baby, with a red undertone to his skin, came yowling from the womb. He was born not on the Missouri side, where the political machine of Tom Pendergast kept contempt for the law alive, twentieth-century Packard style, but across the river in Kansas City, Kansas. His name was Charles Parker Jr., though no one remembers him ever being referred to as a junior. His father, Charles Parker Sr., was, by his own account, born in Mississippi to Peter Christopher Parker—a second-marriage baby for Peter, who would eventually have four wives, according to Fanny Blake, his half sister by the fourth wife. Part Negro, part Indian, with some white genes from an overcast point in the family history, Charles Sr. was light-skinned and attractive, a cook on the railroad, a well-groomed man who wore a part in his hair and combed it neatly across his head, not forward or backward. His shoes had the powerful gloss of those who earned their money on the passenger trains, his dancer’s legs long acclimated to the swaying and rattling of the Pullman cars as their metal wheels turned on the tracks. He was a man of charm and wit, but his exuberance and his ability to learn quickly were tainted by an excessive attraction to nightlife and dissipation.

  The consequence was that all-American heritage of Charlie’s: the Asian and European blood running beneath his reddish-brown skin. Yet the forming of the Wild West in which he grew up had a much earlier start and one that was given the glory and the gore of its beginnings and shapings by the same three sources that constituted his genetic line.

  Charlie Parker’s mother, Addie, was from Oklahoma, the region once called Indian Territory. Like Jay McShann, she claimed Muskogee as her hometown. She was part Choctaw, her Indian blood probably the result of President Andrew Jackson’s policies, which had pushed the tribe northwest from Mississippi. About five feet five, she had high cheekbones, a pointed nose, thin lips, a big bosom, and an ascendant rump. Mrs. Parker wore her hair long, in what was known as a cat-and-mouse style, with a bun on either side of her head and one on top.

  The Parker family, two adults and two children, lived in a five-room frame house on Washington Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Streets. Before he married Addie, the light-skinned Charles Sr. had coupled with an Italian woman named Edith; she gave birth to John Parker, a jolly, big-eared boy named after his peg-legged uncle, another resident of Kansas City, Kansas. Three years later came Charles Jr., and he soon became the favorite. Charlie was Addie’s only child, and he became her obsession—especially when Charles Sr. made it obvious that he had no intention of giving up the firewater that made him cut the fool. When she scolded him for his behavior, he stood his ground: “I’ll stop drinking,” he told her, “ten years from today.”

  When he first answered her that way, it was almost funny. Charles Sr. was the kind of handsome man who got used to being funny. But he did not know when he had ground her patience and belief in him down nearly all the way. She began to lose faith in her husband as a responsible man. Over time, Addie Parker started to believe it would take a hundred years for this man to stop his drunkenness, and as she did, her eyes became hard as cherry pits. An acidic bitterness had scalded her skin. But she willed herself to do what would protect what was important. That was a sorrowful but sure thing that had its own brightness.

  Edward Reeves, who lived across the street, played often with Charlie and John Parker. He remembered the neighborhood as one where everybody knew everybody else and a child seen misbehaving had to face whippings in triplicate: the first from the neighbor who saw the act; the second from Mother when he got home, or after she got home from work; and the third when Daddy arrived and found out what had happened.

  “The neighborhood was together,” Reeves said. “There was a close feeling. You might not like it if one of those people put a strap on you for being way in the wrong, but you could count on them when you had troubles. If you got sick, everybody was trying to help you. They got together and exchanged remedies. . . . Goose grease on your chest and a flannel over it. If you got a cut on your leg, jimsonweed salve. It was yellow and it would damn near fight off gangrene.”

  Reeves didn’t recall ever seeing the Parker boys’ father, but he remembered Addie as sweet and friendly. The two sons were opposites: “I first met Charlie on Ninth and Washington Avenue. He must have been about eight. I was always butting around somewhere and I met John first, who was kind of a straggler, you know, looking for fun. . . . John was talkative and laughing. Charlie was different. He was a loner. Mostly to himself. John talked a lot but Charlie was quiet. Charlie didn’t bother much whether he got with you or not. If he was digging a hole and you was climbing trees, he kept on digging that hole. If he was climbing a tree and you were digging a hole, he wasn’t thinking about coming out of those branches. But when he wanted to, Charlie could get with us and we would do all the things that boys did back then. Just fun, but plenty of mischief, too.”

  They played mumblety-peg; they rolled hoops removed from the wheels of old wagons; they shot marbles; they rode sleds in the winter. There were railroad tracks, a box factory, and coal yards in walking distance, which allowed f
or playing in boxcars, climbing in the box factory’s bins, and getting filthy with coal dust. But their bib overalls were strong enough to stand up to the pressure of boys out for squealing joy.

  One of the things they liked to do was individually beg up on a few cents from a parent and go “crawdadding.” “We’d get a nickel’s worth of liver and those crawdaddies would cover it. They was good eating, too.” On Saturdays and Sundays, the kids could buy crawdads from the crawdad man, who dressed in white from head to foot. They could hear him as he came up Washington Avenue, turning on Eighth, coming up Ninth, calling out “Craaawww-pappies! Red! They’re hot!” “A dime’s worth of red, pretty crawdads was plenty,” Reeves recalled. As it got cooler, the crawdad baskets on each arm were replaced by a tamale cart, with two big wheels in the front and a small one in the back. “Hot ’males! Red! They’re hot!” the man sang, selling three for a nickel. The ice cream man came in the spring and summer, selling cones for three cents a pop.

  Mischief surfaced on days like the Fourth of July, when the boys would go to the park on the corner of Tenth and Washington to shoot cap pistols—“Man, if you didn’t have a cap pistol, you wasn’t nothing!” They were free to wave sparklers, but were warned to stay away from firecrackers. Which they didn’t. “They had these little things called bombs about the size of rum balls,” said Reeves, “and if one of those bombs hit you on the leg, it would hurt.”

  The week before Halloween, Reeves set out with John and Charlie Parker and five or six other boys to celebrate Cabbage Night. They raided cabbage patches and hurled the biggest heads they could find onto porches or against front doors before running for the hills. Halloween was a bad night for outhouses, too: the giggling conspiracy of young boys would pull on masks, go up alleys, and turn over as many as they could, squawling with delight as they made their hotfooted getaway. A block away was a white neighborhood; the people there weren’t rich, but they were doing much better than the Negroes. The pranksters stayed away from them.