Clifford's Blues (2 page)

We started up five steps. I concentrated on them to keep from shaking so much. My legs were like rubber. The
SS
were shouting and pushing. I felt a shoulder lean into my own to lend support. The man had gray eyes and a big square face; his eyes were the saddest I'd ever looked into, sad but not afraid. The crush of the group and that shoulder carried me up the steps and inside a room that had as many
SA
and
SS
men as there were prisoners. I wanted to holler “I'm an American! You've made a mistake! You have no right to hold me here!”

I didn't say anything, though. I'd said all this in Berlin, said it in Tegel-Berlin. Didn't help. Not with these jokers. Every official eye found my face. I shook more. I couldn't stop. The mass of black uniforms and the swastika armbands simply scared the pure-dee shit out of me.

Then I saw him. I think he saw me first and willed me to find him. It was Dieter Lange, and he had more reason to be here, in a gray suit, than me. He'd been a
Raffke
in Berlin—a hustler, pimp, profiteer, a regular MacHeath, but his lovers were all men. He was a chicken-plucker who'd always wanted to pluck a black chicken because they were so rare in Germany, and those he saw were already being plucked by someone else. But I was with Malcolm then. Besides, I never went out with men like Dieter Lange.

The officer in charge called us to attention and then read from a paper in his hands. All of us had been charged and convicted as dangers to the state, for hostility and immorality to the state, and would be held here in Protective Custody under Article 14 until further notice. We would be notified when we were considered to be rehabilitated and then released.
Achtung!
The thing about Germans is, give them a uniform, give them a little power, and they think they're gods. Yet it was Germans, people like Bert Brecht and Paul Graetz and Joe Ringelnatz, who said I was an artist. I'd never been called that at home, only in Europe. I guess I was so swelled up that I didn't notice other artists going to jail, being fined, or leaving the country. Hitler said the new art was degenerate. Especially jazz music.
Entartete Musik
. But I was an American. How could they do this to me?

When the officer called attention, all the
SS
and
SA
in the room began shouting and cursing again, turning us, shoving us out of the door, down those five steps, into the hot sunlight. Then we were marched into a smaller building where we had to squat while soldiers sheared our heads. They laughed at my hair, threw it up in the air, examined it. They were so busy having fun that they didn't notice how much I continued to tremble. Once I saw the man with the sad gray eyes and the great square face. Without hair his head looked like a rock. The floor was inches thick with hair—black, brown, gray, blond, white, straight, curly. In another room, where it was impossibly crowded and everything smelled like vinegar and sweat and stale cigarettes, we filled out forms and listed our belongings and signed papers without having time to read them. In the next room, as we were given uniforms, someone told the soldiers to give me one with a green triangle. It was Dieter Lange.

The
SS
screamed, called us pigs, bastards, freaks, Communists, crooks, pricks. We peeled off our clothes as best we could and shoved them into boxes and gave them to the guards who gave us the uniforms. Dieter Lange said green again. He gave the man in charge of this business a piece of paper and turned to me. He told me to come with him. The uniform smelled and did not fit, and the
SA
were kicking me. They told me to go with the captain.

There was a pause like there is just before your fingers come down on the keys, like just before you sing your first note, and it seemed that everyone in the room, prisoners and
SA
and
SS
alike, for just a second, looked at me, looked at Dieter Lange. Then I was out in the sun again, Dieter Lange, hands on his hips, looming in front of me. He said I had been detailed to him. He smiled and said,
“Kind Schokolade,”
said it softly. Told me not to worry.

Until I was arrested in Berlin and double-crossed by Malcolm, I thought I was an independent person. I learned my music without benefit of formal teaching. Singing came natural to me; it was a way of saying something with tone and word that expressed more than just plain talking. Older musicians, sometimes when they were trying to conceal techniques, or more often tricks, taught me without knowing they were. I could make my way, find a job, find a stoker, if one didn't find me first. I made mistakes. Malcolm was the biggest. Living in Europe, being considered a strange, exotic creature, gave me, I'm afraid, a sense of being important, and that made me stumble and fall into this snakepit. Maybe it was because of the people I knew and traveled with. Most of them were well-off and didn't seem to notice that I was a Negro. It seemed that way.

But walking behind Dieter Lange, the dust and the shouts merging somewhere near a point in my head that kept lifting toward a faint, I felt alone as I'd never felt before. That sense of independence—it must have come from what I thought was the kindness of people, or from people who wanted something from me, or from people who didn't give a damn about me, really—vanished. I was no longer trembling; I was crying. There was Dieter Lange, now a captain in the
SS
. But then I remembered, back in 1929, the year Paul Robeson heard us play in the Berlin Zoo Roof Garden, Dieter Lange came into the Troika with his swastika armband half sticking out of his pocket, like he was trying to hide his membership in the Nazis. I never laugh at people. I have never been mean to anyone, so I didn't join in the laughter and the shoving and the teasing. But here he was, now, getting into a car and telling me to hurry because he wanted to fuck me good. I was crying, but I was listening, too.

When he saw me, Dieter Lange said, he'd got one of his friends to give me a uniform with a green instead of a pink triangle because it went hard for queers in Dachau. They were sometimes, if lucky, placed with the political prisoners, the Reds, cutting turf and draining the swamp or working in the quarry, which was worst of all. This way, I was his personal calfactor, his private servant. And he could hold grand parties with me playing and singing and this would get him in good with his superiors. He was the camp purchasing agent—a job with all sorts of possibilities, and he was soon to be in charge of purchasing for other camps that would be opening in a matter of months.

He thought all this was not bad for a better-than-average hustler. He joined the party in 1928 and was accepted into the
SS
in 1931, about the time he vanished from Berlin. He did it to be on the safe side, and it turned out to be the right move. Dieter Lange was very proud of himself.

(I have just found some extra paper, so now I can finish writing about my first day in Dachau.) The Nazis were growing in power, he said, and there was not a city, town, or hamlet in Germany, and quite possibly Europe, that would not feel that power sooner or later. He said he would make some inquiries for me, see what he could do. I asked how long my sentence was. He said he didn't know. No one knew. He would have to be careful. It would be wise for me to make the best of a bad situation that could have been worse if not for him. If I was nice to him, he'd be nice to me. He'd always liked jazz music and my singing and playing. He would do his best to look after me. But if I became troublesome, he'd have me back in the camp in a prisoner barracks in a flash. As it was, I could work around his home and help him in the office canteen in the camp. These were good jobs. It had been prudent, Dieter Lange told me, for him to marry. Her name was Annaliese. She went to Munich often, he said, to shop and go to the theater, the things women do, for there wasn't much going on in the
SS
quarters and hardly anything in the town of Dachau. She was not demanding of his time or person. She was the daughter of a farmer and considered herself fortunate to have made such a good marriage. She would not be troublesome, for she knew nothing of life, having left the farm only a year ago, which is when Dieter Lange met her in Munich at a rally. He was sure, he said, she had never even seen a real Negro.

Friday, July 7, 1933

God, I've prayed all night. Did you hear me, God? How can this be happening to me? I know I didn't go to church. I know I lived like You weren't there, like I wouldn't have to pay my bill to You. Maybe You don't want to hear from me because of what I am. I didn't choose to be this way, Lord, You know I didn't. And anyway, aren't we all Your children? Isn't Your Kingdom of Heaven for all of us? Forgive me for what I am. If I could stop right now, I would, but it's not left just to me anymore, Lord. Would it please You if I killed myself? Isn't life Yours to give and Yours to take? Please, God, if You didn't hear me, just read this. Yes, I used to play music on Sunday so people could dance and have a good time, and I drank and took dope, but not out of meanness; for money, yes, to live on or just to have fun sometimes, but not to be mean, Lord. You know I've been more afraid than mean. I've turned the other cheek a thousand times. I've not hurt anyone, because I can't. Doesn't Your word say “Blessed are the meek for they shall see God?” Lord Jesus God, Holiest of Spirits, help this poor Negro so far from home and in the deserts with Satan and the serpents. Don't forsake me, Lord. Hear me, Oh God! I'll do anything You want, anything, that I can do. Just give me a sign. Let me know You're listening or reading, Lord. Or, Lord, is this Your will, visiting trial and tribulation upon Your obedient servant? If it is, Lord, give me the strength to bear this heavy, heavy cross. Thy will be done, Almighty Lord, but why me?

Fri., July 28, 1933

I have written to everyone I could think of, including Malcolm. From America, from France, even Spain, no answer. Of course, Dieter Lange takes my letters and mails them. He says. But I have no way of knowing whether he has or not. Camp regulations allow us to write. A few prisoners have been released, but the parole conditions are severe. One prisoner named Nefzger, Dieter Lange told me, was found dead. The prosecutor from Munich claims he was murdered by the
SS
guards. Dieter Lange says that's nonsense. The prosecutor, Winterberger, also claims that three other prisoners—Hausman, Schloss, and Strauss—in spite of what the camp doctor says, may have died from “external causes.” I think about running away. That wouldn't be easy. Black skin in pink Germany. Yet Switzerland is only a few hour's hard driving away, I think. I'd have to walk, I think. So near, so far. Like a blues. Mr. Wooding used to say that was the blues, what white folk called a “lament,” because what you were lamenting or feeling blue about was what you knew but couldn't do anything about. So you sang or played, and that helped to make things a little better. That was African, Mr. Wooding said, because you were at least saying things were out of your control. I liked Mr. Wooding, but it was coming to Berlin that was like moving up from darkness into the light. (It pleasures me to think back like this, instead of thinking of right now.) James Europe's army band certainly brought jazz music to Europe. I wonder where he got that name. Maybe his folks way, way back, after slavery, just made it up, thinking Europe was the farthest place from Jim Crow they could get. He made this place stomp and jazz.

In New York you could say you were a musician, but they weren't so keen on putting black folks in the limelight, so to speak. They liked all those white mammy singers with burnt cork on their faces. The white companies—Cameo, Paramount, Okeh, Black Swan, Columbia—did record a few colored entertainers, but didn't pay them much, not even Ma Rainey or Miss Bessie Smith, King Oliver or Louis Armstrong, Kid Orey, Fletcher Henderson, or Duke Ellington. Mr. Wooding's band was recorded only by European companies, like Parlophone, Pathe France, and the other French company, Polydor. No, didn't pay as much as they paid white entertainers. There were a few clubs where you could work, but you had to toe the line or those gangsters would put your butt in the street—maybe with holes in it. Sometimes we had to play behind great big palm plants so the customers couldn't see us.

Most of the clubs were uptown, and unless you were an entertainer of some kind, the most you could do in those places was cook, maybe wait tables, shine shoes, or clean up. But in the end, it didn't matter if you could shout some blues or boot a rag. You were just a jigaboo, and that's all there was to it, and all those white swells from downtown couldn't change things much. Mr. Wooding told me that a lot of times.

Mr. Wooding came out of Philadelphia and got his first band in 1920. Everybody up North had heard of Storyville, but they wanted you to prove you knew what you were doing. I proved it. Mr. Wooding sometimes thought it was more important for him to stand up there with a baton like Paul Whiteman than play the piano. His left hand wasn't a bear, anyway.

We were playing the Club Alabam one night. At the end of the second set, a white man came up and started kissing everybody (and everybody was watching me when it was my turn to be kissed, because they knew I was a fairy). Turned out he was a Russian looking to bring a colored band to Moscow. Couldn't hardly talk English. Can't think of his name now. But that's how I came to Europe, through that Russian and Mr. Wooding's band. We left New York in 1924 when I was 24, and we stopped in Berlin to open a revue called “The Chocolate Kiddies.” We may not have been the toast of the town in New York, but we sure were in Berlin. I was slick and sassy and there were more people like me than I could have imagined, and they were plain with it, right out in the open like I'd seen nowhere else. Ber-lin. For me it was champagne and caviar. For most Germans it was starving and people getting shot by the law every day. There were parades and demonstrations. Communists—I didn't know much about them then and still don't—were very busy. There'd been a revolution in Russia and it seemed to spill over into parts of Germany. Their leaders and other people were getting killed, people like Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht or those Spartacus people. Myself, I couldn't see why it was such a bad thing for everyone to share equally in everything. My friends who had money were angry with the Communists, but in the poor neighborhoods it was a different story. I guess people with money, or who hope to get money, or to keep what they already have, will always be hot with Communists.