Mama Ruffin watched her daughters like a hawk—as, for instance, when Rebecca asked Charlie for help with her lessons. “Charlie would look at me hard and say, ‘Come on downstairs and we’ll get our lesson together.’ So I was down there sitting on his bed at one end with my books, and he would be at the other end with his books. Now, see, Mama knew that wasn’t the place to be sitting, and she would call me right upstairs to get me off that bed.” Rebecca might not have told her mother everything, but there were ways of knowing. “It wasn’t that hard back then. We didn’t have sanitary napkins. Years ago, you would see sheets cut up and hanging on the clothesline. That’s what we used. So you were watched, and in those days, your mother knew if your period was regular or not. If something was wrong, your mother could look for those cut up sheets and say, ‘I haven’t seen anything . . .’
“So there was two things I knew not to do. One was get caught on Eighteenth Street, and the other was to mess up and miss my time of the month. Mama would have killed me for either one. Yes, she would have killed me.”
3
The kind of killing Rebecca had in mind was no more than one of Fanny Ruffin’s extreme whippings. But murder was a real possibility in Kansas City, where corruption, gangster arrogance, and a national soap opera of criminals versus lawmen formed a backdrop of graft and blood in the town where Charlie Parker and Rebecca Ruffin were falling for each other. And the soundtrack to that historical force was the music known as Kansas City jazz—a music that benefited from a regime that believed all money was good money, no matter how it was obtained.
Between the turn of the century and the ascent of Tom Pendergast as boss of the town in the mid-1920s, Kansas City became the hub of what were known as “the territories”—Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Missouri, Iowa, Indiana, Michigan, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Great musicians developed in Kansas City, and bands from all over the country passed through, playing jobs there and learning why “Tom’s Town” was the central city of the territories. In the years that followed, a wide array of acts from Kansas City and the surrounding area—the Count Basie Orchestra, Andy Kirk’s Clouds of Joy, Pete Johnson, Joe Turner, Hot Lips Page, Buster Smith, Harlan Leonard’s Rockets, the Jay McShann Orchestra—would alter the sound of jazz collectively, spreading the propulsive gospel of riff-based swing, and individually, by heralding solo styles they had developed in years of playing dance halls and jam sessions.
“In Kansas City,” recalled John Tumino, manager of the Jay McShann Orchestra, “the joints didn’t have locks on the doors. Threw them away! Didn’t need them. They were never closed anyway. Whatever you wanted, you could get it whenever you wanted it—girls, liquor, gambling, freak shows. If you had the money, they had it for you. Of course, it was crooked, with the mayor in on it, the police in on it, and the public in on it. It was as wide open as you could get. No limits whatsoever. . . .
“All this meant you could have a good time morning, noon, and night. That stimulated God knows how much music—music of all kinds—and the musicians playing so much they got better than just about anybody in the country. That’s where that Kansas City swing came from. These guys were playing all the time, long hours, and then they went out jamming and might not get home until the next afternoon. A few bucks, a little taste, and they were ready for anything and anybody! It was a good-time town, all right.”
Clarinetist Garvin Bushell, who heard the city’s earliest bands in the 1920s, noted certain stylistic differences between these earliest Kansas City ensembles and their counterparts in New Orleans, Chicago, and New York. “The bands in the Midwest then had a more flexible style than the eastern ones. They were built on blues bands. . . . They just played the blues, one after another, in different tempos.” Bushell wasn’t sure the Southwest bands were playing at the same advanced level as those he knew from Chicago. But he “heard blues singers in Kansas City, just like Joe Turner sings, and they did impress me.”
As a reedman, Bushell observed—almost in passing—one other element that would transform jazz’s second generation: “They had also done more with saxophones in Kansas City.” The primacy of the saxophone, paired with the local players’ feeling for the blues, was central to the sound and character of Kansas City jazz. This penchant for saxophones would not only give rise to powerful reed sections that swung, shouted, and crooned the blues, but would also prepare the way for local giants of the instrument, men destined either to blow themselves into the pantheon or to arrive in Kansas City on the whirlwind of legend. After the trumpet, the trombone, and the clarinet, the saxophone was the next horn to contribute to the aesthetic evolution of Negro feeling on wind instruments.
Invented by the Belgian Adolphe Sax in the 1840s, the brass and woodwind hybrid that is the saxophone spent its early life holding down plebian roles in parade music. But the instrument made a thrilling run to glory around the time of Charlie Parker’s birth in 1920. Like the other wind instruments of jazz, the saxophone was redefined in these years for virtuoso center stage action. The pioneers who used it to work out new developments in phrasing, timbre, and technique eventually elevated it to the same position in American music that the stringed instrument has in European concert work. It became America’s violin and cello, America’s singer of domestic song, as soon as American horn players learned to moan the blues through their mouthpieces.
First the cornet, then the trumpet, had dominated early jazz, taking the strutting, pelvic swing of the black marching bands, the melodic richness of the spirituals, the tumbling jauntiness of ragtime, and the belly-to-belly earthiness of the blues, and pulling them together into a music that purported to soothe the mournful soul, to soak the bloomers of listening girls, and generally to cause everyone to kick up a lot of dust. But the saxophone, with its cane reed, pearl buttons, and curved body, eventually rose to champion position in jazz innovation—for many of the same reasons that the guitar, with its supple versatility, eventually became more important to blues-based Negro music than the banjo of the nineteenth century. As historian Paul Oliver notes, “The flatted thirds, dominant seventh chords, and whining notes achieved by sliding the strings of the guitar allowed blues players to copy the ‘shadings, the bendings, and the flattenings’ that field hands used in their hollers. The moans of their voices were imitated by sliding the strings and by the use of what later became known as ‘blue notes’ ”—the subtly shaded “bent” notes that gave Negro music a particular kind of expressive power.
That same expressiveness, in the hands of a generation of tenor and alto saxophonists—Coleman Hawkins, Johnny Hodges, Benny Carter, Chu Berry, and Don Byas among them—had fueled the rise of the Negro saxophone tradition. In Kansas City, most of the instrument’s practitioners, including Lester Young, Ben Webster, Budd Johnson, Buster Smith, Tommy Douglas, Dick Wilson, Jack Washington, Herschel Evans, and Eddie Barefield, emerged as standouts in a southwestern scene that also included pianists and bandleaders Bennie Moten and Bill Basie, trombonist-arranger-guitarist Eddie Durham, trumpeter Hot Lips Page, singer Jimmy Rushing, and bassist and bandleader Walter Page. They were the terrors of the territories—those same territories that reached back to the Indian and desperado days, to a time that preceded all contemporary danger, when the repeating rifle of the Plains Wars had given rise to bloodletting much as the Thompson submachine gun had after World War I.
BY THE TIME Charlie Parker and Rebecca Ruffin were up to their necks in adolescent romance, celluloid cowboys were clouding the air with the smoke of blanks—even as tales of desperadoes who were all too ruthlessly human dominated the press, magazines, newsreels, and radio broadcasts. Only the deaf, dumb, and blind would not have known of them. Contemporary variations on the James, Younger, and Dalton gangs of the Old West, Depression-era outlaws such as Dillinger, Bonnie and Clyde, Baby Face Nelson, and Oklahoma’s Pretty Boy Floyd were pulling daring robberies and escapes almost weekly, filling the air with the rattle of machine guns in battle with the authorities, and now and then going down in b
loody exclamation points. Unknown to local lawmen and the Bureau of Investigation, the outlaws sometimes hid out in rural Negro communities, where no one thought to search for them, observed local resident Emma Bea Crouch, who recalled seeing Pretty Boy Floyd and Bonnie and Clyde in East Texas when she was an adolescent there. Others found they could hide out easily in Kansas City—even have a good time of it, as a little money here and a little money there would protect their sleep and keep them free of handcuffs. By 1929, as biographer Michael Wallis observes in Pretty Boy, Kansas City “had become the crown jewel on a gaudy necklace of lawless havens—a corridor of crime—ranging from St. Paul and Detroit in the North to Joplin, Missouri, and Hot Springs, Arkansas, in the South. A police reporter of that time compared these cities to the imaginary bases used by children playing tag. Once a criminal with local connections made it safely inside one of these cities, he was home free. He was ‘on base’ and could not be ‘tagged’ by the authorities.”
Along with every form of kickback he could work out, from construction scams to slot machine concessions, Tom Pendergast had cut a deal with gangster Johnny Lazia that gave vice a high and free rein. Between the two there existed a double bureaucracy of public posture and the dark world of graft, threat, and occasional violence. Never ones to scoff at new potential sources of income, Pendergast and Lazia ran something of an equal opportunity outfit for corruption. They recruited across the ethnic stretch: Irish, Italian, Jews, and Negroes alike functioned within the sector that jibed best with their expertise, their scruples (or lack thereof), their guile (or lack thereof)—or their willingness to accept that working in the underground world of clubs, music, and booze came at a cost. Felix Payne and Piney Brown were the two Pendergast Negroes best known by musicians, the liaisons who befriended them and made the Sunset Club hospitable to their efforts to master blues and swing.
Edward Reeves, Charlie Parker’s childhood buddy from the old neighborhood in Kansas, collected a little coin himself in these years chauffeuring for the mob and serving at their parties. “The poor people loved Pendergast,” he recalled. “He wouldn’t let you starve. You could go right up there on Market Street and get what you needed. Cornmeal, beans, slab of bacon.” In those Depression days, that Pendergast money made the machine a virtual godsend. The Pendergast machine fueled Kansas City’s nightlife in countless ways—right down to its monopoly on liquor distribution. “When you opened a liquor store,” Reeves recalled, “they gave you sixty or ninety days, usually ninety days, to get all the name brands off your shelf, to sell them. Then you had to start ordering Mistletoe beers, wines, and liquors. Everything in Kansas City was Mistletoe, which was Pendergast. If you tried to be bullheaded, you wouldn’t have a business very long.”
Behind the benevolence and the looseness, there was cold steel and hot lead. And as the profits swelled, the competition for sections of this independent underworld economy resulted in precautions that led Reeves to understand the dangers of working as a mob chauffeur:
They didn’t drive Cadillacs then: the sixteen-cylinder Packard couldn’t be beat. Engine four or five feet long. I went to pick up a Packard once and they had glass so thick the man had a little crane to put it in, bulletproof. When I looked at that glass as he was putting it in the door, I started to thinking. I realized what it was all about and knew that there was plenty of danger in there. Then was when it got clear I had better find myself another way to make a living. I didn’t need to get shot down driving gangsters around.
The most famous shooting in the kingdom of Tom Pendergast became known as the Kansas City Massacre.
In June 1933, as Charlie Parker was nearing thirteen and one of his favorite comic strips, Dick Tracy, was in its second year, federal agents captured a fugitive named Frank “Jelly” Nash in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The agents whisked him out of a cigar store and into a car that they drove away as fast as possible. The lawmen didn’t intend to become casualties of the hoodlums who ran free and easy in Hot Springs and just might miss the company of their chum. They took Nash to Fort Smith, Arkansas, and boarded a Missouri Pacific train. The next morning they would be met at Kansas City’s Union Station by local police, who were to assist in whisking Nash off to the federal prison at Leavenworth, a short drive away.
Though Kansas City’s telephone wires were surely humming with speculation on where Nash was and what the arresting officers had in mind for him, legend has it that Johnny Lazia overheard the actual plans through his own private wiretap of the central Kansas City police station. When the lawmen arrived at Union Station with Nash, they were met by two federal agents and two local police officers. Handcuffed and surrounded by seven armed men, two of them carrying shotguns, Nash followed orders to walk through the station’s lobby and out the east entrance, where two cars were parked and ready for the trip to Leavenworth. Suddenly, from behind a car, two men armed with submachine guns stepped forward and commanded the officers and agents to put their hands up. Then someone ordered them to shoot, and the gunmen let it rip. The chattering dose of lead rubbed out the lives of Nash, a federal agent, an Oklahoma police chief, and the two local cops. Blood ran in the gutter; bullet holes were left in the walls of Union Station; two wounded lawmen lay writhing next to the dead.
In all its shock and gore, the Kansas City Massacre was a godsend to J. Edgar Hoover, who was incensed by the romantic images criminals inspired in the public mind at the expense of law enforcement, both in the press and on the silver screen. Hoover was as ruthless as his opposition allowed; he recognized the power of the media and knew how to exploit his opportunities when he saw them. He played the slaughter for all it was worth, charging Pretty Boy Floyd with the murders, making clear that the country could not tolerate such murder in a public place, murder so bold it was done in morning light. The nation was outraged at the idea of professional killers shooting down lawmen in the bustle of a train depot. The shootout stripped the glamour from criminals once seen as Dust Bowl knights at war with the coldhearted system that had left so many homeless and kicked to the curb during the Depression. Even those who’d nearly lost all faith in society began to reconsider the idea of bank robbers as avengers of the downtrodden, people willing to meet the ruthlessness of business on its own terms.
In July 1934, three months after the Ruffin family moved into Addie Parker’s house, Johnny Lazia himself was felled by machine-gun bullets one still morning in front of a hotel. The bullets came from one of the guns used in the Kansas City Massacre. His wake drew seven thousand mourners. A few months later, Pretty Boy Floyd sent letters to friends, and to the Pendergast authorities, protesting the Union Station murder charge against him. But Hoover was already winning his war in the public eye. Soon, federal agents got the right to carry firearms. They were given the freedom to arrest fugitives in any state. Hoover got Hollywood to start investing in anticrime movies like G Men—which featured a fictionalized Kansas City Massacre—as well as newsreels celebrating Hoover’s own bulldog tenacity. He even commended Chester Gould, of Pawnee, Oklahoma, for his contribution to law and order through the creation of the heroic lawman Dick Tracy.
And so, even as Kansas City nightlife was incubating fresh aspects of jazz that would shift the pulse of the national music, the Kansas City Massacre had changed the way the nation fought crime—and viewed its perpetrators.
Everybody was looking for fun, for a vacation from Depression conditions, for a thrill and a laugh. Many went in search of distractions—tranquilizers or stimulants, spiritual or chemical—until the country seemed slowly to become dependent on them. Especially so when faced with unpleasant realities, such as feature films, cartoons, and other entertainments that relied on the century-old tenets of minstrelsy as a way to tell the truth and create laughter at the same time. The good times were more costly to some than others.
In most places, those good times rolled in the evening when the sun went down, when the sobriety and the inhibitions of daylight rarely seemed to hold their ground. In the empire of T
om Pendergast, there was wall-to-wall sin and swing, wall-to-wall exotic entertainment and gambling. People came to guzzle the blues away, to dance the night long, to take the risk of leaving in a barrel as they laid bet after bet; and, as ever, there were those who came to involve themselves in the mercantile eroticism of the high to low courtesans.
That was how law and lawlessness, convention and opportunism, mass media and manufactured reality worked together in ways that shaped the world in which Charlie Parker and everyone else in America lived, during and after the Great Depression.
IN 1934, THE year when both Lazia and Floyd bit the dust, when Dillinger was done to death, when Bonnie and Clyde got theirs and Baby Face Nelson ended up on a slab, the good times for Charlie Parker and Rebecca Ruffin had nothing to do with gangsters or Pendergast corruption. They hadn’t yet been touched by the nightlife, its attractions, inspirations, and dangers. Though the air was full of talk about who got shot and where and why, it was all very remote to them, not nearly as real as what the two of them were feeling toward each other.
Kansas City Lightning Page 6
