The Axeman’s Jazz

by Ray Celestin

  ‘Didn’t Pops tell you?’ said Baby. ‘Axeman night. Twenty-five bucks a piece. Plus tips.’

  Lewis woke up a little and frowned at Baby.

  ‘No fooling?’ he asked.

  ‘No fooling, Lil’ Louey. Cats are worried ’bout not getting a jazz band in. Ain’t that truth, Fate?’ Baby shouted at Fate Marable, who was on the other side of the room, in deep conversation with Pops Foster, the band’s bassist. Fate and Pops swung their gazes across the room at Baby.

  ‘Axeman night,’ repeated Baby. ‘Twenty-five bucks a piece.’

  ‘Yeah, that’s the truth,’ said Marable in his honey-soaked voice. ‘Gonna have to learn the new score, too. Damn manuscript cost me two dollars.’

  Lewis peered at Marable blankly and the band leader shuffled over to a canvas satchel resting on top of a broken bass drum. He opened the buckles, took a manuscript from it and passed it over to Lewis. Lewis examined the front cover. ‘The Mysterious Axeman’s Jazz (Don’t Scare me Papa)’ was written in large copperplate print across the top, and underneath it, in smaller point, ‘by Joe Davilla, author of the noted Coon Novelty Song “Give Me Back My Husband, You’ve Had Him Long Enough”’.

  Below the title was a cartoon that Lewis recognized from the Picayune – an ink drawing of a white family trying to play a jazz song on the home piano. Clouds of wavy black lines rose up from their hands, implying, Lewis guessed, that they were shaking with fright. In the background another member of the family stood watch at the front door with a shotgun. Lewis turned over the front cover and looked at the musical notations inside – lines and dots dancing across the pages like worms on a grill.

  Lewis had begun learning to read music with Kid Ory, and his lessons were continuing with Marable, but he hadn’t reached the point yet where he could sight-read a manuscript. Marable knew as much when he hired Lewis – reading music was a Creole skill that the Negro musicians from uptown rarely shared. Lewis was halfway between the two worlds – although he could read a little, he found it easier to listen to an arrangement a couple of times, memorize the piece, then play it by ear. Lewis’s memory and his talent for picking up new pieces at speed led many of the musicians he played with to think he could sight-read, a misconception he did nothing to correct.

  ‘We’ll practice a little tomorrow,’ said Marable, staring at Lewis with a smile that said he understood his concern. Lewis smiled back at Marable and returned the manuscript to him.

  ‘I need to talk to you after we finished tonight,’ said Marable in a hushed tone. ‘Meet me in here after we’ve packed up.’ Marable stuffed the manuscript back into the satchel, and Lewis felt like he’d been summoned to the principal’s office.

  When the Dixie Belle had returned to its mooring off Canal Street, and the few customers they had that night had left, Lewis made his way to the storage room, where Marable and Pops Foster were waiting for him. Lewis guessed he must have had an apprehensive look on his face, because when he walked in Marable and Pops peered at him and burst out laughing.

  ‘Ain’t nothin’ to worry about, Lewis,’ said Pops, chuckling along with Marable, and Lewis smiled back at him, still a little unsure. Pops motioned towards one of the half-broken chairs opposite them and Lewis sat. Then Marable approached and grinned at him, and Lewis saw the sparkle in his eye.

  ‘We want to offer you a job on the Sidney this summer,’ said Marable, ‘running the cruises outside New Orleans.’

  Lewis smiled at them and breathed a sigh of relief; he was being promoted.

  ‘You’ll be away for four months,’ Pops explained. ‘Boat goes all the way up the Mississippi – St Louis right up to Minnesota.’

  ‘The pay’s real good,’ said Marable. ‘Thirty-seven fifty a week, room and board, and a weekly bonus of five dollars paid at the end of the trip.’

  The money was twice what Lewis was making with Ory’s band, and that was before the bonus.

  ‘And as an extra piece o’ sugar,’ continued Marable, ‘Captain Joe said he’d buy you your own cornet, so you can give that one you’re playing now back to Ory.’

  Lewis grinned at them and nodded.

  ‘That’s a mighty fine offer, Mr Marable,’ he said. ‘I greatly appreciate it.’

  ‘You’re a good player, boy,’ said Marable. ‘You still need a little bit o’ work, need to fix your embouchure, need to learn sight-reading, work on your divisions and your phrases. But we’ll teach you all that. It’ll be like going to university.’

  Marable turned to look at Pops and Pops nodded.

  ‘I couldn’t read for shit till I started working with Marable,’ said Pops, nodding at the band leader. ‘Neither could St Cyr or Dots. We’ll help you, kid. Get you to that next level.’ Pops spoke in a slow, drawn-out way, his voice deep and warm.

  Lewis looked at the two of them with a smile, but slowly a change came over him that Marable and Pops both noticed.

  ‘It’s a great offer, thank you both,’ said Lewis. ‘Can I have a bit o’ time to think about it?’

  Marable and Pops exchanged looks again, surprised that the boy even had to consider the offer, then Pops turned to Lewis and spoke.

  ‘I remember the first time I heard you play, Lil’ Louey. You was playing the clarinet solo on “High Society”. Those arpeggios are hard enough to play on a clarinet, how the hell you played ’em on a cornet I got no idea. At seventeen years old, too.’ Pops looked to Marable as he said the last, and Marable nodded in agreement. Then Pops returned his gaze to Lewis and spoke in a soft, fatherly tone. ‘What I’m saying is, it’d be a shame to waste all that talent, just cause you a lil’ worried ’bout leaving town. If you wanna be everything you can be, you gotta leave New Orleans.’

  The gang-plank onto the quayside was slick with rainwater, and as Lewis padded down it he thought about Marable’s offer and everything it entailed. The money was far beyond anything he could earn in the city. Over forty dollars a week for four months, when the average New Orleans carpenter, a skilled profession for a Negro, never made more than about fifteen. But leaving New Orleans was a scary prospect.

  He’d heard the stories of musicians being promised big money outside the city, then being left stranded by unscrupulous promoters or shady record producers in the middle of nowhere, with no way of getting back home. He saw the musicians returning to New Orleans broken and in rags, swearing never to leave the city again. Even when record-company men came calling, ready to hand out big-money contracts, all the best players turned them down, and not just because putting your solos on record meant other people could steal them. Freddie Keppard even played with a handkerchief over his hand at gigs, so people couldn’t see his fingering and steal his solos. Such was the level of distrust. And all these people were older than Lewis, and wiser, so they must have a reason for being so suspicious.

  But then he thought of his old mentor, King Oliver, who was making it big in Chicago, and of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band, who’d gone to New York and cut the first ever jazz record. And Jelly Roll Morton and Bill Johnson who’d moved out to Hollywood.

  But the riverboat wouldn’t be going to New York or Chicago or LA, it’d be going up through the Midwestern states, playing to white folks mostly. People who still thought jazz was some kind of devil music. New Orleans might have been segregated and prejudiced, but Negroes had a good deal of personal safety there. And in that respect, it was an oasis compared to the rest of Louisiana, and the hell-hole of a state next door that was Mississippi.

  Wasn’t that why thousands of Negroes from all over the South kept pouring into New Orleans? Because it was a damn sight better than anywhere else? Could a handful of black men on a boat in the middle of the wilderness really be safe? Then he thought about Mayann and Clarence, and it was only after all this that he wondered what his estranged wife’s reaction would be.

  He descended onto the quayside and was about to head towards the tram stop when he noticed someone waiting for him at the end of the quay – a half-soaked, frozen-lo
oking Ida, pale and distraught. Lewis ran over to her and grabbed her by the elbows.

  ‘They killed her, Lewis,’ she said between sobs, holding out a newspaper the rain had turned into a pulpy mess.

  ‘Morval killed Leeta. It’s in the paper,’ she said, her voice breaking. ‘What if he killed her because of us?’

  Ten minutes later they were sitting in an empty harbor-side diner nursing hot coffees. It was a diner in the loosest sense of the word, more a shack with a gas stove and a few scavenged tables. The place had been set up to service the Negroes who worked on the docks, who weren’t allowed into the other diners dotted along the quayside. The owner, an old, silent man, emaciated and stooped, brought them over a complimentary plate of biscuits and molasses to have with their café brûlots.

  Lewis thanked the man, who with a quick glance at the ragged-looking Ida, made his way back to the counter. Ida was feeling a little better now she had met Lewis and was sitting warm in the diner. Calmer for having someone to share the news with, but still looking a mess, hair matted, dress soaked, make-up smudged.

  ‘What if he killed her because she spoke to us?’ Ida repeated, cupping her hands around the coffee to warm them.

  ‘He didn’t kill her for that,’ said Lewis, shaking his head. ‘Anyway, how you so sure it was Morval?’

  Ida nodded to the newspaper on the table.

  ‘She said he liked knives. You read what he did to her. What if he had someone watching her and they saw her talk to us?’

  ‘That’s a big if,’ said Lewis, his voice a little sharper than he meant it to be. ‘Even if it was him that killed her, don’t mean it had anything to do with us. She’d just left his stable, right? Pimps don’t like that. And she said she got hit by one of his johns recently. Might’ve been she was running his customers on her own and he found out.’

  Ida sighed and looked down at her coffee, not entirely convinced. She took another sip of the brûlot, the mix of caffeine and brandy beginning to take the edge off her shock.

  ‘We gotta wait and see what Buddy comes up with,’ said Lewis. ‘Ain’t no point speculating.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ida, deflated and weary, her voice still quavering. She turned her head to the front door, hanging off its hinges at an angle, and stared at the quayside. Despite the weather and the hour, a couple of ships had arrived at the docks and passengers and freight were being offloaded by a skeleton crew of officials and longshoremen. She couldn’t tell Lewis that it wasn’t just the guilt that was making her upset. She felt like a fool yet again. She had been playing at being a detective and now someone might be dead because of it. Her dream had become painfully real and had made her feel stupid, ashamed and disenchanted.

  She took another sip of the brûlot and peered at Lewis. ‘What you doing for Axeman night?’ she asked, and Lewis frowned at her, surprised at the change in subject.

  ‘Playing at a cabaret,’ he said. ‘Why? You wanna tag along?’

  She smiled and Lewis smiled back and they sat in silence for a little while. Then out of nowhere, she put her hand on his.

  ‘Thanks, Lewis,’ she said. Lewis frowned at her, not quite sure what to make of the gesture, then he shrugged.

  They stayed a little longer and finished their coffees, then they went their separate ways. Lewis caught the streetcar to Back o’ Town, and Ida walked to a taxi stop to catch a cab back to her house. As she approached the stop, she noticed light spilling out of a building on the corner of the road in front of her, a hubbub of movement and the sound of cutlery tapping against plates. She thought it strange that a diner was open in this part of town so late at night, and that it appeared to be doing such a lively trade.

  She approached the building and saw that it had no sign on it, nor anything else to identify its purpose. Its frontage was taken up wholly by two steamed-up sheet-glass windows and a wooden door in the center with an ‘open’ sign hanging from it. Ida padded towards the nearest window and peered through it. Inside was a cramped, shabby space occupied by rows of long tables and benches, at which a few dozen bedraggled men sat, eating bread and soup. At the rear of the space, a handful of workers in aprons tended to some vats that steamed away on a stove, or else they ladled out soup into bowls lined up on trays.

  A silence seemed to pervade the place, no one spoke to their neighbors on the benches, and there was an air of despair to it all. Ida guessed it was a hostel, some kind of breadline eatery, set up by do-gooders to feed vagrants. But she noticed that all the people sitting on the benches were young-looking men, and they had a certain hollowness about their eyes. And then she realized they were destitute veterans, back from the Great War and traumatized by what they had been through, falling on the charity of the people who ran shelters like this one.

  She was about to step away from the steamy window and the yellow electric light that spilled from it when she noticed the sign on the far wall. It took her a few seconds to understand its importance. The Veterans Association of New Orleans, Shelter for Soldiers of the Great War, supported by the kind donations of Samuel Kline Junior. The eatery was being paid for by the Brigadier General who Lefebvre had gone to see in the Louisiana Retreat. And then it clicked in her mind, and she realized why it was that her boss had visited the war hero in the sanatorium.

  The Times–Picayune

  Tuesday 13th May, 1919

  Features Section – Comments by Muzz

  The Axeman Cometh!

  Since this newspaper exclusively published the Axeman’s ghoulish letter to New Orleans last week, the city has been plunged into feverish preparation for tonight and everything it may bring. Despite all but proclaiming the letter a hoax, Mayor Behrman has been making sure his administration will not be left with egg on its face – all police leave has been cancelled, supernumeraries have been brought in, back-up forces from surrounding parishes (one shudders to think) have been called up and all New Orleans’s finest are working overtime (at double rate, our friends in the force inform us). And just think, it was the mayor that insinuated that the Picayune had a penchant for profiteering from the macabre!

  But perhaps of more interest to our readers are the plans the citizenry are making. The entrepreneurial spirit shown by our night-spot owners in turning the situation to their advantage has led to rumors that every cabaret, bar and restaurant in the Tango Belt is fully booked for the night. Will Axeman Night be the biggest party in the history of the Crescent? Quite possibly, by all accounts.

  Exactly what has fuelled the excitement surrounding this grisly situation, apart from entrepreneurship of course, is a matter of debate. I’d like to think it’s the Big Easy’s natural inclination for a good time. Generally this spirit finds its outlet in Mardi Gras every Spring, but since our world-famous parade has been cancelled these last two years thanks to the Hun over in Europe, there might be a little extra joie de vivre in reserve, suppressed and bursting to see the light of day.

  Of course, it’s not just night-spot owners cashing in. The chosen anthem for the night (apart from ‘Nearer My God to Thee’) is local composer Joseph John Davilla’s ‘The Axeman’s Jazz’. The manuscript hit the shops a few days ago and has been so popular the publishers had to hastily organize a second printing. Your ever selfless correspondent caught up with the melody-smith over drinks at the Ringside Café and was surprised to learn that the ditty was inspired by a cartoon the composer saw in the Picayune.

  Davilla, a native Orleanais and resident of Elysian Fields Avenue, said: ‘This is my tenth musical composition in the last three years, all coon songs. And while I’ve had some successes in the past, this has eclipsed them all. I’d like to dedicate the song to the New Orleans Police Band.’

  Despite the wealth of choice out there for entertainment-lovers tonight, I will be having a little soiree of my own. And I’d like to cordially invite the Axeman to come along. It will be a small, select affair and I’m sincerely hoping the self-proclaimed worst spirit that ever existed does not have his social secretary send sa
d regrets. The stag do will be at 552 Lowerline Street, and all doors will be left open.

  Axeman, you are as welcome as the flowers in May.

  Yours, as always, Muzz

  42

  Luca got out of bed late the next morning. He’d bought an envelope and paper the previous night, and after waking had propped himself up in bed and tried to compose a letter to the manager of the Belle Terre estate. But he wasn’t a writer, and the intricacies of tone and information he had to weave into the letter resulted in half the pad being used, ripped out and thrown onto the floor in a crumple before he finally arrived at something he was happy with.

  He rose, threw the discarded sheets into the wastebasket, washed in the cold water of the basin and changed. He took the letter and the trash bag with him and descended the stairs to the hotel lobby. The concierge was in his usual place behind the counter, filling in an order book. He looked up when he heard Luca’s steps echoing towards him and smiled.

  ‘Morning, signore,’ he said.

  ‘Good morning, Paolo. I was wondering if I could ask you a favor. I’d like to post this letter but I don’t want the policemen outside to see.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the concierge, nodding like a doctor who had just heard a patient tell him of some intimate affliction. He stroked his chin and thought for a moment, and then his face lit up.

  ‘I have to go out to buy some things,’ he said, smiling. ‘If you look after the counter while I am gone?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Luca.

  ‘Good, good. Give me . . .’ the old man checked his pocket-watch, ‘five minutes?’

  Luca bowed his head, and the old man nodded and returned his attention to the order book in front of him, writing something in a slow, confused hand.

  ‘Paolo, how do I get to the boiler?’ asked Luca.

  ‘Eh?’ said the old man, peering at him.

  Luca held up the bag of wastepaper, and the concierge smiled and pointed to a staircase on the far side of the room. Luca turned and headed down the stairs. He made his way along a dark corridor, saw the boiler room halfway down and stepped inside. In the center of the room was the boiler, twisting brass tubes disappearing into the darkness above.