Kansas City Lightning

by Stanley Crouch

  “You could go to anybody’s house and eat on Thanksgiving,” Reeves remembered. “They either had a lot of chicken or a goose—greasy. Didn’t have too many turkeys. They raised a lot of geese. Regularly, around the year, there was always rabbit and chicken. Rabbits cost you fifteen cents then, two big rabbits for a quarter. The children always got to clean the rabbit after it was skinned, and eventually you could do it all, skin it and clean it.”

  On Christmas, the white people up the way gave their children’s toys from the previous year to the colored families. If the toy was a wagon, it had been repainted and supplied with new wheels. Candy canes, cap pistols, miniature ten-gallon cowboy hats, and affordable necessities were the order of the day within the Negro families. If there had been a good snow, it was scooped up and thrown in fights, sleds were dragged into sliding positions, and rolls of expended caps rose as the hammers of toy pistols came back before striking the next dot of powder in the neighborhood western of winter warfare. Bang: you’re dead. Negro cowboys.

  Photographs of the young Charlie Parker taken during these years show mirth, concentration, pride. In one, he stands next to a wooden car that might have been a secondhand toy from the peckerwoods. A little girl sits in it, and he seems an almost haughty little prince. In another, Parker holds a cane and is attempting to summon a raffish expression. Twenty years later, when the saxophonist saw the second picture, he declared his younger self “a clean little Bird”—a moment of melancholy nostalgia. There were no drugs in his life then—nor, for that matter, any apparent signs of musical promise. Yet even in these early pictures Bird appears removed, almost aloof.

  Young Charlie Parker was a sensitive boy, tightly bonded with his mother. Before he went to bed, she recalled to club owner Robert Reisner, he would tell her, “I love you, I love you, Mama.” Little Bird also didn’t suffer insult easily: Addie told Reisner that Charlie punched out a boy at school for making fun of some pimples on his face.

  The school in question was a local Catholic institution—an unusual choice, since Addie, like most Negroes, was Protestant. That Catholic experience separated young Charlie from his surroundings, and he recognized early that there were ways to do things that were different from standard practice. His mother recalled him telling her that “we” didn’t do things a certain way—identifying with the way Catholics taught, thought, and lived. It was probably during this period that Parker wore the Little Lord Fauntleroy suit he often recalled when selecting details from his childhood. “Had a wide collar,” said Edward Reeves, “a silk tie that you tied like a bow tie, but it came almost down to your stomach. The coat and the pants were velvet, the pants had two buttons down on the side. You wore stockings then and buttoned shoes. Some fellows had buckled shoes. You were in there when you wore that kind of stuff.”

  Charlie Parker was in there. Whenever he asked permission to get a pocket-money job, his mother refused, preferring to give him what he needed herself. Addie Parker reared her son as a homebred aristocrat, a young lord, and the expressions we see in his childhood photographs are probably the results of his being treated as royalty. But no one knew how heavy a crown the young prince was destined to wear.

  Around 1930, Addie Parker faced what she was up against: her husband was an incorrigible whiskeyhead. Marriage had dealt her a bad hand, and she decided to throw it in. Leaving half-white John with his father in Kansas, Addie took Charlie, her only blood child, and moved across the river into Missouri. After short stints at a series of addresses, she bought a large two-story house at 1516 Olive Street. She made ends meet by doing domestic work and taking in cleaning. She rented out rooms on the second floor—there was more than enough space for her and Charlie downstairs, where there was a big parlor, two bedrooms, and a kitchen. Her young and largely silent son was enrolled for a time at Crispus Attucks School, named after the Negro who was the first person shot down by the British in the Boston Massacre, his blood a liquid finger pointing toward the American Revolution. Charlie did well there, and got his diploma from the Charles Summer School in 1933.

  When he wasn’t in school, Charlie was playing with his friend Sterling Bryant, who lived up the block. The Depression was on, yet somehow Addie managed to find knickers for her son, though no others in the neighborhood could afford them. If she wanted him to stay home and be happy—unlike his father—Addie resolved that she would give him everything she could. She would make 1516 Olive Street his personal paradise.

  Charlie was a little bigger than Sterling Bryant during those years, and Bryant remembers him as a buddy and a bodyguard. “We just did boy things, nothing serious, nothing really dangerous. But it was rough when we left the neighborhood and stepped into somebody’s territory. Charlie used to escort me to see my girlfriend and walk me back. She lived a few blocks away, and they didn’t want us around there, the other boys. They were in a gang, and they were ready to jump you and make sure you didn’t get used to coming over there. Charlie wasn’t scared, though. He could run, but he wasn’t scared to fight. We got in a few scraps over there, and Charlie stood by me. We either won or lost together. He was a real nice boy, liked to have fun. Charlie had a good sense of humor, and he loved to prank. He just loved it, but he didn’t try to hurt anyone.”

  Holidays were much the same as they’d been over in Kansas—except for Halloween. On that night, people would go to Eighteenth and Vine to watch the parade of homosexuals. “It was the only time they could wear dresses,“ Bryant chuckled, “and they put it on that night. They got on their dresses and their falsies, their lipstick. They had on their hats and their high heels, and they would strut it. That was such a good show it became a family thing. It was the highlight of Halloween.”

  IN APRIL 1934, trouble in a neighboring family brought change into Addie Parker’s home.

  The Ruffins, a Negro couple, had come from Memphis, Tennessee, to a house at 2507 Howard Street. The father, known to all as Daddy, had Madagascar Afro-Indian blood in his family; his wife, Fanny, had Cherokee and English. Their first five children—Winfrey, Octavia, Rebecca, Ophelia, and Naomi—were born in Memphis; Dorothy, the last, was delivered in Kansas City, Missouri. At that time, Edward Reeves remembered, “all the Negroes lived north. The farthest they got out to was Twenty-Fourth Street. All the big dogs lived on Twenty-Fourth Street, the ones with money and some kind of prestige.” Daddy Ruffin was an insurance salesman, which was a middle-income job for a Negro at that time, a step up from manual labor, semiliteracy, and illiteracy.

  For reasons no one quite remembers, Fanny Ruffin stopped sleeping in the same room as her husband and stopped cooking for him. Daddy stayed upstairs, and the rest of the family was on the first floor. The children didn’t understand, but the tension between the couple was obvious, and Fanny assigned ten-year-old Ophelia to take over one of her roles. “Small as I was, I was cooking Daddy’s breakfast. Mama had quit cooking for him and she would tell me and I would try to do it. Mama decided to move because she didn’t want to stay there with Daddy. I think she knew a friend that knew Miss Parker, and that’s how we got down to Olive Street.”

  On April 10, 1934, when Charlie was thirteen years old, Fanny Ruffin and her children moved into Addie Parker’s house, taking the entire second floor. As the family moved their belongings up the stairs, Addie and Charlie stood at the banister, watching with fascination as the girls, the one boy, and the mother marched up and down the stairs with their belongings.

  One who noticed Charlie was the Ruffins’ middle child, Rebecca. To her, Charlie looked a little old for his knickers, as if he were a little spoiled. It also wasn’t lost on her that he never lifted a finger to help the Ruffins. But there was something strong about him, she thought, something in his presence and in his capacity for attention. He also exuded a loneliness, a need. At least Rebecca thought so. Rebecca was golden, thin, about Charlie’s age, and her hair dropped thick and brown below her shoulders. Charlie stared at her most intently. “My eye fell on him,” Rebecca said, “and I kn
ew there was gonna be trouble. I knew I was in love with him.”

  FANNY RUFFIN, WHOM her estranged husband called Birdy, did not like Charlie Parker. First of all, he didn’t go to school unless he wanted to; he’d apparently been dawdling around the house for a year. Second, he was allowed to be too mischievous for her taste. He sarcastically called his mother “Ma.” He was always playing rough jokes on the Ruffin children, hiding behind the staircase and jumping out to scare them, throwing firecrackers at them, teasing, pinching, and hurling snowballs at them when winter came—or just pushing scoops of snow down the backs of their clothes. Addie Parker insisted he was just a boy having fun, that he wasn’t really hurting anybody. Birdy Ruffin could put up with that to a degree. What she had a harder time with was how close Charlie and Rebecca were becoming. Knowing better than to hold hands when Birdy Ruffin was around, he and Beckerie (as the family called her) just stared at each other with the amazement of two moo cows watching choo-choo trains. But everyone could see what was happening. Rebecca had never had a boyfriend before, though she had always been very pretty.

  As far as Birdy Ruffin was concerned, if her daughter was to have a steady boy, he would have to be someone better than lazy Charlie Parker, whom she considered an “alley rat.” As Birdy Ruffin and her daughter watched Charlie from a second-floor window shooting marbles in the alley behind the house with his buddy Sterling Bryant, Birdy told Beckerie that that Parker boy had no foreseeable future—unless it was living off his gullible mother and doing nothing worth anything, which was apparently his specialty.

  “Mama was very strict,” recalled Ophelia Ruffin. “Nobody was good enough for her daughters.”

  Birdy Ruffin’s attitude may have been influenced by the nature of Kansas City itself. It was a city where corruption sprawled in comfort and a child could get the idea that right was wrong and wrong was right: the mayor was a pawn, the city boss was a crook, the police were corrupt, the gangsters had more privileges than honest businessmen, and the town was as wild with vice as you could encounter short of a convention of the best devils in hell. Her daughters were going to be polite, well-groomed, respectful, and arrow-straight. If they weren’t, they would have to face her wrath, which could be considerable.

  Ophelia remembered it clearly. “Once I went up on Twelfth Street—which was pretty wild, you know—with my friend Ruby because she was getting her lunch money from her uncle. My daddy saw me up there and asked if Mama knew where I was. I couldn’t lie. He went right over to Miss Parker’s and asked Mama if she knew where I was, and Mama said I was at school. He said she wasn’t raising us right and told her where I was. Mama met me at Fifteenth and Olive. She whipped me from that corner all the way up to Miss Parker’s, all the way up the stairs. . . . I must have bit her because she tied me to the bed, still switching me. She said, ‘I’ll teach you to go up on Twelfth Street!’ That’s why I hate Twelfth Street now. I don’t have no time for it.”

  But even such wrath didn’t sway Rebecca, whose feeling for Charlie thickened and deepened. He was different from other boys. For all his mischief, Charlie had very good manners. He wasn’t always pushing himself on her or trying to fumble his hands under her clothes. Rebecca knew the things boys would try to get girls to do. But Charlie was different. With him, she felt safe. “He was old-fashioned,” she mused decades later. “He wasn’t aggressive like some of the young guys.” And there was something more: when she looked at him very closely, young Charlie seemed hurt. “I don’t know what he was. He wasn’t loved, he was just given. Addie Parker wasn’t that type of woman. She always let him have his way, but she didn’t show him what I call affection. It was strange. She was proud of him and everything. Worked herself for him and all, but, somehow, I never saw her heart touch him. It was odd. It seemed like to me he needed. He just had this need. It really touched me to my soul. He seemed like he needed someone to love him and to understand him.”

  With the Ruffins in the house, however, Charlie started to shed some of his melancholy. He was growing into a bigger and more attractive young man, almost as though the weight of his previous loneliness had stunted him. Charlie took to the Ruffin children and they to him. Birdy Ruffin’s disdain rolled off the children’s backs, though they all knew better than to argue with her. Winfrey Ruffin kept to himself, a bookworm, but Charlie had plenty of fun with the girls. Octavia, the oldest after Winfrey, had started working after graduating from Lincoln High School in 1933. She found Charlie as lovable as the rest of her sisters did, and she supported his budding romance with Rebecca.

  When he wasn’t playing with little Dorothy in the swing on the front porch, Charlie was doing something in the parlor to the left of the stairs—something to do with music.

  Besides its large potbellied stove and the huge table where everybody gathered for dinner, Addie Parker’s parlor harbored an old-fashioned Victrola in the right corner and a mahogany player piano nearby. (Behind a pair of sliding doors was Addie’s bedroom, where her possessions were guarded by Snow, her white and savage Alaskan spitz.) Charlie and the girls often got together around the Wurlitzer piano; when they weren’t banging out noise, Charlie was already teaching Ophelia the boogie-woogie songs that were in the Kansas City air at the time. He still didn’t talk much, but Addie’s only child seemed to blossom under the influence of the Ruffin daughters, as though he had suddenly been blessed with a frolicking gaggle of sisters.

  Rebecca recognized that Charlie was beginning to mature. He was an attentive boyfriend: “Whatever you talked about, Charlie Parker listened.” And, under their influence, he was finally going back to school on a regular basis. The younger Ruffin children went to Crispus Attucks, Rebecca to Lincoln High; Charlie walked with them, and he started attending classes again in the fall of 1934. “He was becoming a man then, once he started going back to school,” Rebecca remembered. “Of course, he didn’t say why he went back. Charlie didn’t talk. He talked with his eyes. . . . He was accustomed to being by himself.”

  Lincoln was on Nineteenth Street and Tracy Avenue. “It wasn’t integrated,” Rebecca recalled. “We didn’t have any trouble. There was no white folks there. Negroes went to the Negro school. Lincoln was deep redbrick and took up about two blocks. My class, 1935, was the last one to graduate from there before they built another Lincoln School up on Twenty-Second and Brooklyn. Every morning Mama got all of us up. We dressed and got our lunches in pails or what have you and left, cleaned up straight and dressed. You had to be clean in those days. Your parents took pride in how you looked and how you carried yourself.”

  Charlie and Rebecca walked to school together. “You can believe he didn’t carry his lunch to school. Oh, no. He carried my books.” But times were hard, and Rebecca was aware that her family was under more straitened circumstances than Addie Parker’s. “Charlie Parker was given money because Addie Parker had money,” she said. “Daddy had lost everything in the Depression, and we was on relief, doing the best we could. Not Charlie. He was taken care of—money in the pocket.” She asked Charlie about his father, but “he said he didn’t know anything about him. Charlie never even talked about his father. Charlie mentioned that he had a brother named Ikey [John’s nickname]. He didn’t talk much about his family or anything. All I felt was that he was so glad to have somebody come closer to him and try to get to know him.”

  Rebecca worked in the library three days a week, and Charlie waited for her until her job was over at five o’clock. Every day, while she did her two hours of work, Charlie would come to the library, collect a handful of books, and sit outside on the building’s top step, reading and searching out information. He loved books about alternate universes and foreign places, some of them by Asian authors. Before he and Rebecca left for Olive Street, Charlie would put the book he read that afternoon back on the shelf.

  On their walks home together, they started venturing into greater Kansas City. “We had to do something a little exciting, something [that] had a little thrill to it. So we’d co
me down through Nineteenth and Vine and kind of look over into the block where the Cherry Blossom and all the nightclubs were, you know. We would be holding hands and talking boy-and-girl talk.”

  Sometimes, the wilder side of the city came to them. In the evening, Rebecca recalled, neighbors would come visit the two of them as they sat on the front porch talking. “For instance, [our] next-door neighbor was what you call a homosexual today, but we called them sissies in those days. His name was Julius. He was tall; he was handsome, light-skinned, looked like he could have been mixed, had almost Indian color, and he smelled good and he wore tailored clothes. Julius had a twist in his walk.” As Charlie and Rebecca sat on the front porch swing, “Julius would tell us about how he was going to go to this sissy ball that they would have on Eighteenth and Vine where there was a tent and the men would wear women’s clothes. Yes, they did! They wore big hats and big beautiful dresses. They wanted to be something like girls. I guess that’s what they wanted. Anyway, that’s what they did and everybody knew it and that’s all there was to it!” He seemed unabashed about his sexuality: “Julius didn’t hide what he was. He didn’t have to. Kansas City wasn’t like that. If you knew how to handle yourself, if you was a nice person, you had your business and I had mine. Everything was clear way back then.”

  Charlie’s circle of friends was limited, but Rebecca found him insatiably curious. “He had to ask people questions. How else could he learn? Miss Parker didn’t talk to him about nothing. She wasn’t there for him in that way. . . . Charlie had to do it all by himself.”

  One subject of his curiosity was a neighborhood girl Rebecca remembered quite well. “This girl named Zephyr was crazy about Charlie, and she told me that he wanted to know how to do things. She lived right up the street on the corner of Sixteenth and Olive. Zephyr went to school with us and she had a big, big bust. . . . We were still girls, and she was looking like a woman—and acting like one, too! Zephyr was kind of wild, almost like the girls on the street, the working girls, you know. Well, maybe she wasn’t that bad, but at the time she seemed like it.” Zephyr filled Charlie’s ears with details of the goings-on around the neighborhood. “In Kansas City they had basements because of the tornadoes, you know. You could hide down in there and get with somebody in secret. That’s what she said. Yes, she did. You had to believe her because Zephyr was one of those that did things the rest of us didn’t do, and she said Charlie asked her about what she did. He didn’t ask me.” It must have been quite an education. “Charlie knew a lot about a lot of things that I didn’t teach him. . . . Charlie could have learned some of that from girls like Zephyr.”