The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  To Captain Alex and my godparents

  This story is based on real events. Between 1918 and 1919 the Axeman of New Orleans killed six people.

  The reprint of the Axeman’s letter on this page and here is a transcription of the original and is not the work of the author.

  ‘When I blow I think of times and things from outta the past that gives me an image of the tune. Like moving pictures passing in front of my eyes. A town, a chick somewhere back down the line, an old man you seen once in a place you don’t remember.’

  LOUIS ARMSTRONG

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  PART ONE

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  10

  PART TWO

  The Times–Picayune: Saturday 12th April, 1919

  11

  12

  13

  14

  15

  16

  17

  18

  19

  20

  REPORT OF HOMICIDE: Department of Police

  21

  22

  23

  24

  25

  PART THREE

  26

  27

  28

  29

  30

  31

  32

  33

  34

  35

  36

  PART FOUR

  The Times–Picayune: Thursday 8th May, 1919

  37

  38

  39

  40

  REPORT OF HOMICIDE: Department of Police

  41

  The Times–Picayune: Tuesday 13th May, 1919

  42

  43

  44

  45

  PART FIVE

  The Times–Picayune

  46

  47

  48

  REPORT OF HOMICIDE: Thibodaux Police Department

  49

  50

  51

  52

  53

  54

  55

  56

  57

  58

  PART SIX

  The Times–Picayune: Wednesday 21st May, 1919

  STATEMENT

  59

  60

  REPORT OF HOMICIDE: Department of Police

  EPILOGUE

  Acknowledgments

  Author biography

  PROLOGUE

  New Orleans, May 1919

  John Riley stumbled into the offices of the New Orleans Times–Picayune an hour and a half after he was supposed to have started work. He sat at his desk, took a long slow breath, and raised his eyes to peer about the room. Even in his befuddled state he could see his colleagues stealing glances at him and he wondered exactly how unkempt he must look. He had been out the night before, at his usual spot on Elysian Fields Avenue, and he raised a hand to his face to make sure he wasn’t still perspiring. When his fingers rubbed against a stubble at least two days old, he felt a pang of regret for not having sought out a mirror before his arrival.

  He looked at his desk and his gaze landed on his typewriter. Its black metal frame, its crescent of type-bars, its levers and keys, all made the thing seem daunting somehow, cold and hard and otherworldly, and he realized he wasn’t in a fit enough state to start writing just yet. He’d need a few coffees and a packet of cigarettes, and maybe a lunchtime brandy before he was ready to tackle anything requiring a fully functioning brain, so he decided to kill what was left of the morning with something that approximated work. He rose and stumbled over to the in-tray where the letters to the editor were kept. He grabbed as many as he could, cradling them against his chest, and returned to his seat.

  There was the usual correspondence from irate residents, people with complaints, know-it-alls, and those who used the letters page as a forum for arguing with one another. He selected a few of the longer diatribes to print as they filled up the page more easily, then he sifted through the letters from people who claimed to have seen the Axeman. Since the killings had started a few months ago, the office had been inundated with letters from concerned residents who swore they had seen him on his way to some murder or other. Riley sighed and wondered why these people sent these things to the newspaper and not the Police Department. He lit a cigarette and picked up the last letter in the pile. It was an unusual-looking envelope, rice-paper thin, with no sender details, and the newspaper’s address written on it in a spidery scrawl of badly splattered, rust-colored liquid he hoped was ink. He took a drag on his cigarette and opened it up with a fingernail.

  Hell, May 6th, 1919

  Esteemed Mortal:

  They have never caught me and they never will. They have never seen me, for I am invisible, even as the ether that surrounds your earth. I am not a human being, but a spirit and a demon from the hottest hell. I am what you Orleanians and your foolish police call the Axeman.

  When I see fit, I shall come and claim other victims. I alone know whom they shall be. I shall leave no clue except my bloody axe, besmeared with blood and brains of he whom I have sent below to keep me company.

  If you wish you may tell the police to be careful not to rile me. Of course, I am a reasonable spirit. I take no offense at the way they have conducted their investigations in the past. In fact, they have been so utterly stupid as to not only amuse me, but His Satanic Majesty, Francis Josef, etc. But tell them to beware. Let them not try to discover what I am, for it were better that they were never born than to incur the wrath of the Axeman. I don’t think there is any need of such a warning, for I feel sure the police will always dodge me, as they have in the past. They are wise and know how to keep away from all harm.

  Undoubtedly, you Orleanians think of me as a most horrible murderer, which I am, but I could be much worse if I wanted to. If I wished, I could pay a visit to your city every night. At will I could slay thousands of your best citizens, for I am in close relationship with the Angel of Death.

  Now, to be exact, at 12:15 (earthly time) on next Tuesday night, I am going to pass over New Orleans. In my infinite mercy, I am going to make a little proposition to you people. Here it is:

  I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions that every person shall be spared in whose home a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, then, so much the better for you people. One thing is certain and that is that some of your people who do not jazz it on Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the axe.

  Well, as I am cold and crave the warmth of my native Tartarus, and it is about time I leave your earthly home, I will cease my discourse. Hoping that thou wilt publish this, that it may go well with thee, I have been, am and will be the worst spirit that ever existed either in fact or realm of fancy.

  The Axeman

  Riley took a drag on his cigarette, put the letter down and wondered if its author really was the Axeman, and if not, who the hell else would send something like that to the paper. Authentic or not, it’d be a sin not to print it. Riley grinned and rose, and his colleagues turned to look at him as he marched towards the editor’s office. He didn’t care to wonder if he should tell the authorities before going to press – in instances like this, it was better to ask for forgiveness than for permission. They’d print it, and the city would read it, and a chaos would descend, and New Orleans might well spiral into the greatest night it had ever seen.

  PART ONE

  1

  One Month Earlier

  To the west of the French Quarter, in the uptown slum the Orleanais referred to as the Battlef
ield, a Negro funeral procession lumbered through the granite sheen of a dawn fog. The mourners, dressed in dark suits and veils, their heads bowed, were reduced to shadows as they moved in and out of the mist, an effect which gave the procession a spectral feel, as if the parade in its entirety had somehow managed to wander into Hades.

  The funeral had commenced just after dawn, when the coffin had been carried out of the vigil house and placed on the hearse and the mourners had assembled on the street. Once all was set, the Marshall had blown a shrill, lingering whistle, and the five brass bands employed for the day struck up a slow, haunting version of ‘Nearer My God to Thee’.

  The marshal, a somber-faced, regal old man dressed in a top hat, frock coat and bright-yellow gloves, turned on his heel and led the cortege through the grass-cracked streets. He was immediately followed by the hearse, horse-drawn and draped in satin, black feather plumes fluttering in the breeze. Then came the bereaved family, wailing into handkerchiefs, and after them the five brass bands, each musician top-hatted and tailed, their coats bedecked with epaulets and tassels. At the very rear, the cortege ended in a press of well-wishers, mourners, and ragged street-children known as the second line, urchins who had nothing better to do than follow parades across town all day, even if it meant being led as though by a Siren to one of the city’s many graveyards.

  The man being buried was a member of a number of Negro men’s associations – the Zulu Aid and Pleasure Club; the Odd Fellows; the Diamond Swells; the Young Men Twenties; the Merry-go-Rounds – and on its way to the graveyard the procession had stopped at each of the association’s assembly halls so the club’s members could bid farewell to their brethren. Only then did the cortege move on to the cemetery, the songs becoming ever more melancholic as it made its way. When the hearse entered the graveyard all the instruments died down except for the snare drum, which rattled out a desolate, lonely rhythm, the drumsticks muffled with a handkerchief to imitate the timbre of military kettledrums. And when the procession finally reached the tomb, the drum died out too, and for a brief moment, there was silence.

  Then the preacher began the service, intoning against the sibilant wind, and when he had finished, the family threw soil onto the grave, one by one, a process that contained its own rhythm and beat. And after the last mourner had thrown his handful of earth, and the sods had thumped onto the coffin and trickled down its sides, the crowd turned expectantly to the marshal, who stood a few yards back from them, shivering on a stretch of uneven earth, the breeze flapping the cuffs of his trousers.

  The old man greeted their stares with wide, milky eyes and after a few long seconds of wind-rustled silence, he nodded, lifted his hand to his chest, and turned over his sash to its parade-day side, a side of dazzlingly bright colors, an African scheme of checkered red, gold and green that shimmered through the fog. And almost in an instant, as if a spirit had taken control of the crowd, the funeral transformed. Club members flipped over their membership buttons, the band turned their jackets inside out, smiles broke, the marshal blew his whistle and before they knew it the band was playing dance music – a raunchy, loud and ironic selection: ‘Oh Didn’t He Ramble’. The horn players blared, the second line danced among the tombs, and the club members opened bottles of bourbon and beer to toast the deceased. A carnival atmosphere swept through the parade and carried it along as it snaked through the cemetery and back onto the streets, where more people joined the celebrations and the ever-increasing mass of revelers made its way back to the wake.

  As the funeral procession had lumbered through the city, performing its well-rehearsed rite of music and movement, it was watched keenly by a 19-year-old slip of a girl in a red pimiento dress, who went by the name of Ida Davis. She hadn’t had much difficulty finding the funeral – sound travelled without much obstruction in New Orleans, a flat, wooden city of low-lying buildings, open ground, rivers and lakes. Her father, himself a musician, had often remarked on the phenomenon, saying it was almost as if the city had been constructed as an instrument for the dispersal of music. When a band played – and New Orleans bands were especially loud – it could be heard all the way across town.

  And so she had followed her ears and found the cortege, and now she watched it with a disapproving frown. It wasn’t that she looked down on the drunken mourners, or the free-loaders, or even the ratty street-children in the second line. Rather, it was the irony of it all that she lamented. Louisiana was a place where Negroes were seldom allowed to express their culture openly, and a funeral provided a rare opportunity for public display, for the downtrodden to be treated with pomp, and it was this that made her frown, that the only time a Negro was allowed to be treated with grandeur was when he or she wasn’t even alive to appreciate it.

  She stepped off the sidewalk and made her way up the line of mourners, scanning the faces of the musicians, looking for her closest friend, possibly her only friend – a chubby-faced young horn-player on second cornet, who had not yet changed the pronunciation of his name to the French form Louey, and was still known to Ida and everyone else in the Battlefield as Lil’ Lewis Armstrong.

  She spotted him soon enough, at the head of the procession, playing along to an up-tempo rendition of ‘High Society’. Lewis noticed her and raised his eyebrows; then, without breaking rhythm or key, he blew out a complicated flourish on the horn by way of a greeting. Some of the crowd nearby cheered drunkenly and Lewis handed his cornet to one of the second-liners, a gangly barefoot child in a frayed white shirt.

  Lewis stepped out of the line and approached, his walk stymied by the too-small tuxedo trousers he was wearing. Lewis was almost nineteen, chubby and dark-skinned, with a round face that was a perfect cradle for a distinctive grin. Ida was his opposite in almost every respect – slender and deliberate, with skin just a touch darker than milk, and an almond-shaped face that made people turn. She was also a little introverted – a shyness born of being light-skinned enough to pass for white, a trait which made her few friends in the Battlefield.

  Lewis tipped his hat and smiled. ‘Hey, Ida,’ he said, ‘you good?’

  His voice was fleecy and deep, rasped by tobacco and liquor, and she was surprised to hear that it betrayed no hint of awkwardness or curiosity. She hadn’t been down to see him in months, and now she had turned up in the Battlefield of all places, unannounced and feeling embarrassed.

  ‘I’m good,’ she said, smiling weakly. She had come to him for a favor, to ask for help with an investigation. But now she was with him, she didn’t quite know how to make her request. It had been so long since she had seen him, and it was difficult to talk over the noise of the bands, who were reaching a raucous crescendo to their increasingly off-kilter rendition of ‘High Society’.

  Lewis peered at her with a puzzled look and she could tell he had guessed something was up.

  ‘If you wanna talk,’ he said, ‘I can meet you back at the wake.’

  Ida had been hoping to avoid the wake.

  ‘Sure,’ she replied, enunciating over the music. ‘Where is it?’

  Lewis grinned at her, a gleam in his eye. ‘Just follow the band,’ he said with a shrug, and before Ida knew it they were both chuckling. He tipped his hat at her and trotted back to the parade. The band struck up the opening to ‘The Beer Barrel Polka’ and Ida watched as the second-liner returned Lewis’s cornet. Then her friend stepped back into position, merging into the dark-suited parade rolling drunkenly up the street, its blaze of music and noise fading once more into the mist.

  2

  A black landaulet police car flew through the fog-bound streets of Little Italy, the driver blaring the horn wildly in an attempt to avoid accidents. He swerved past market stalls and farm wagons and startled pedestrians and occasionally clipped the curbs and banquettes of the narrower roads. At the intersection of Upperline and Magnolia Streets, he veered the car through a sharp corner and screeched to a halt a half-block from a grocery store. In the rear of the vehicle, Detective Lieutenant Michael Talbot dro
pped back into his seat and breathed a sigh of relief.

  ‘Nice driving, ’Rez,’ he said.

  ‘Thanks,’ the driver replied, failing to notice the sarcasm. Through the glass partition that separated the two men, Michael saw the driver flip open a pocket watch and check the time.

  ‘Seven minutes and twenty-five seconds,’ said the driver, a round, swarthy man called Perez. ‘That’s gotta be a record,’ he added, flashing a smile at Michael through the rearview mirror. Michael smiled back weakly, still feeling faintly nauseous.

  Perez scrabbled around the dashboard for a notebook and with the stub of a pencil wrote down the time. The New Orleans Police Department had taken receipt of its first ever fleet of motorcars only a few months previously, and the drivers in the various precincts had, as far as Michael could tell, set up some kind of betting league on how fast they could drive their various routes. Three of the new cars had already been wrecked, one of them by Perez.

  Michael let his stomach settle for a moment and arched his back to look out of the car’s rear window. His eyes settled on the cheap corner-store grocery a little further down the street. It was typical of the stores Italian migrants were setting up all over the city – single-storied, a shop in the front, living quarters in the back, a yard for deliveries at the rear, and a sheet-metal sign teetering above the whole jerry-built mess, proudly displaying the owner’s name. Michael sighed and rubbed his face, running his fingers along the scars that pitted his cheeks.

  Outside the store, among the carriages from the Police Department and the Coroner’s Office, a mob had gathered – Italian locals that a cordon of patrolmen was half-heartedly holding back. Michael could tell it wasn’t the usual kind of crowd that always seemed to materialize at grisly crime scenes – the passers-by, the neighbors, the reporters, the street-corner habitués with nothing better to do. This crowd hadn’t gathered out of macabre curiosity. It was there because it was scared, and Michael’s heart tightened at the sight of it. From what he knew about human nature, it didn’t take much for fearful mobs to turn violent.