Clifford's Blues (3 page)

I didn't let all this bother me. I was having a good time. (The band even finally got to Moscow and to France, Spain, Turkey, and Tunisia.) It didn't matter to me that it took a wheelbarrow full of money to buy half a loaf of bread. I was colored and I laughed because for once whatever was bad wasn't happening to colored people.

A colored lady who'd been in Paris tried to open a club in Berlin. They called her Bricktop, a light-skinned lady, whose real name was Ada Smith. But her club didn't last long because her musicians weren't any good. She just barely got out of Berlin with the clothes on her back. I mean she left town about the same time Florence Mills was playing Hamburg.

You had to be a nightbird in Berlin. Mostly I saw things that made the District back home look like Sunday school. Dope fiends everywhere. You could get cocaine anywhere. They sold it on the street in perfume bottles, whores and pimps like Dieter Lange. The more queer you were, the better they liked you. At the new Eldorado in the Motzstrasse, you couldn't tell who was a man and who was a woman, but that didn't make any difference to us or to the high-class Germans who went there. It really seemed to me that there was that thing they called the German Disease, and I guess that was what brought so many pretties from England. But two things couldn't none of them do was the Charleston and the breakaway.

Admirals-Palast was doing what they did back home with the Ziegfeld Follies and the Folies-Bergère in Paris, with the pussy shows, playing the Tillers, the Admirals, and the Paris Mannequins. Good thing they didn't pull the bloomers off a few of those dancers. Josephine Baker turned up on a trip from Paris and set Berlin on its behind. There were as many gangs in Berlin—they called them clubs—as there were bands in New Orleans. They were yeggs, footpads, and cutthroats. One of my dearest friends was killed by a gang outside a dive in the Muntzstrasse.

An interruption. It's the same day. Reading this over, I realized that I've said nothing about Frau Lange. She is young and just the other side of thin. I mean, she could get fat. She has blue eyes and blond hair, like a Kewpie. Dieter Lange was right: she'd never seen a Negro except in photographs. She treats me like a pet monkey. I wonder how the world still manages to produce people as dumb as she is. According to Dieter Lange, she thinks it's perfectly normal for them to fuck every month or two. He doesn't tell her otherwise.

She touches me often, as though to reassure herself that I am a human being. Twice she has found me crying and she sat with me, not knowing what to do, clucking and saying “Shhh! Shhh!” She asked about my father, who was killed in a fight in a turpentine camp; asked about my mother, who, when I was eight, disappeared the same time Preacher Pollard did. My aunt Jordie raised me until she died of the
TB
s, and then the District took over. It seems to me that Annaliese takes a pleasure I can't describe in watching me. She is very proud of Dieter Lange. Why not? As purchasing agent for the camps in Bavaria and part of the Palatine, he can get everything she wants and maybe never had before—food, liquors, clothing, cigarettes, French wine and perfume, furniture—the cellar is filled with it. The kitchen shelves are packed tightly with cans of everything. This bitch has probably never seen so much in one place in her life. But Dieter Lange travels a lot. When he's gone I have to stay in a rear room of the canteen and go to his house in the morning and return to camp at night. I think Frau Lange is not happy with that, judging from the exuberant greetings she gives me when I report in the mornings. She does not seem to like being alone.

The man with the square face and the sad eyes who lent me his shoulder is a Red, a political prisoner. The red triangle is for Communists and anyone else the government doesn't want running loose. Some are people who just don't like the Nazis—and made the mistake of saying so out loud. The prisoners may shout “Heil Hitler” when the guards are around, but when they aren't, what they whisper is more like “Kiss my ass, Adolph.” Werner, the man with the square face and sad eyes, like most politicals, has an indeterminate sentence. He encourages prisoners to be strong. They are making the place bigger, because prisoners are coming in every day. This means Dieter Lange must purchase more food, clothing, and building materials, plus the luxuries it seems the
SS
must have.

Sun., August 13, 1933

It seems that I am a luxury in more ways than one to Dieter Lange. He has plans for me. I will help him advance his career. He will have parties and invite his friends and superiors. In spite of what Hitler and Goebbels say about jazz music, Dieter Lange says, nearly everyone who has ever heard it likes it. Of course, he would only invite those who did. They will be wonderful parties, he says, with me playing and singing, just like in a cabaret. What else can I do? Looks like he can find all kinds of ways to use me, and I can't do a damned thing about it. Nothing. That made me think to ask him, again, if by chance there was any mail for me or if there had been any word about how long my sentence was. There was no mail, he said, and nothing about my sentence, of course, because he'd be the first to tell me about that. I don't believe him, but what can I do? Who can I complain to? Werner said he would try to get some word out, but that I shouldn't be too hopeful. Bert Brecht, he told me, had left Berlin and was probably on his way out of Germany. I asked how he knew, how he managed outside contacts, and he said prisons were just like other societies; some things continued to function in spite of restrictions.

Once he said that, I could see it. Of course! Doesn't life go on for colored people back home, North and South, in spite of Jim Crow and prejudice? When I am in the camp late in the afternoon, and when roll call and the evening meal are over, I see the men sitting on benches outside the barracks talking softly, their washed clothes hung on lines behind them to catch the last sunlight. The intellectuals are together. Werner is among them. There are even prisoners who are Nazis; they cling together. They must have broken some party rule. And there are some army officers, too. In all, there are ten companies of prisoners, each of about 250 men. Number 7 company is the real bad one, for prisoners who need disciplining. These men always look bumped and bruised, with dried blood on their faces. Werner says they are flogged and beaten. Lumped together in 7 are prisoners with all colors of triangles. The members of Number 1 company, the one Werner belongs to, also receive heavy punishment for being Communists, intellectuals, social democrats, teachers, people who made movies, writers, newspaper reporters, and so on. In the whole camp there are fourteen other foreigners besides me. Number 2 company has Jews in it. They are German, just like everyone else here except me and those fourteen other foreigners. Werner says that Hitler has it in for the Jews; that the Nazi party is against Jews and nearly everything and everyone else except “real” Germans and German tradition. Werner whispered to me that the number of prisoners killed in camp is not three or four, but closer to fifty. How can it not get worse? While this place is being enlarged, ten other camps have opened, Werner said: Brandenburg, Papenburg, Konigstein, Lichtenburg, Colditz, Sachsenburg, Moringen, Hohnstein, Reichenbach, and Sonnenburg. Germany has become a dreadful, murderous place, he said, mostly because of the Treaty of Versailles. I don't know anything about that, but he told me the terms of the German surrender were so harsh that the only reaction to it had to be somewhere, sometime, revenge. That time is fast approaching, especially with someone like Hitler in charge, who cries for living space, says Germany must have it.

Werner asked me if I was a
Tappete
. I told him yes because he must have already guessed. He said I was better off than those in the camp, but I already knew that. The thing to do, he said, is to outlast them, no matter how, no matter how long it took, and the prisoners had to work together, did I understand? I said I did, but I didn't know what I could do. Information, he said, is power. Then he said, if each of the prisoners brought just one handful of dirt and dumped it in the Appellplatz (which everyone calls the Dancing Ground), we would have a small hill. That's what information was, when it was all brought together and sorted out.

Thursday, Aug. 24, 1933

Dieter Lange and his wife, Anna, live in a medium-sized house along one of the main camp roads that leads into Dachau. Between the camp itself and this row of pink and white houses are the buildings where munitions used to be made. Like everything else, these are being renovated and enlarged. Today, I had to spend most of the time helping in the canteen. Then, as usual, I started back to the house, checked in at the guardhouse
(Jourhaus)
at the gate between the camp and the staff quarters, in full view of a tower where an
SS
guard mans a machine gun. The guards know me; there's no problem. I can't escape with my skin. I know it and they know it. My going and coming disturbs nothing. Yet I always feel like the gun is trained on the middle of my back. I wonder, too, if maybe one day a guard, just for the hell of it, will kill me and say it was an accident.

I hadn't seen Dieter Lange all day. Usually, when he's going on a trip, he tells me. So I wondered where he was.

I entered the house through the back door and went down to my room in the cellar. Dieter Lange called from upstairs. I hurried up. You do nothing at a normal pace unless you are out of sight of the
SS
. The stairs opened on a corner of the large room Anna had not yet furnished, though I had to keep the floor spotless. I came through the door and Dieter Lange swept up his arms. He had a great grin on his face. In the opposite corner stood a baby grand piano. It looked new. I'd never seen such a gorgeous instrument. I always played the box piano, because most clubs couldn't afford anything else, and also the box took up less space. He told me to come look. I guess he had “commandeered” the piano, the way the
SS
seems to commandeer everything. He asked me did I like it, and I said yes. He told me to try it, so I played a few notes, and they came out so round and pure that they scared me. Too much piano for such a small place; it needed a concert hall. Dieter Lange nodded encouragement. He told me to practice. This room, he said, would be where people danced, that was why Anna had not furnished it. He winked. He patted the goola. Steinway, he said. Hell, I could see the name on it. From Germany, originally, the Steinways were. Two sons in piano manufacturing. One stayed in New York and the other returned. A very special German instrument, he said. And then he left me.

I let myself fold down onto the stool; it fit like it had been made for me. I ran up and down the keys. This was the best piano I'd ever played. I laid on the soft pedal and somehow found myself playing The Duke's “Mood Indigo.” That was one of his standards, but it seemed to work for everybody. I had all his records, and hundreds more of everybody who was anybody, when I was in Berlin. I played them right down through the shellac. “In My Solitude”: I low-sung that because it was for me, and while I was playing it, I thought how every other slow number I could think of was about love, man-woman love. Only person I think I ever loved was that strange fellow, a writer, from Rocky Mountain country. Never could figure out how his family wound up there in New York. He was sensitive about how black he was, but I always told him “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice,” and God it was. Called him my cowboy. He didn't love me, though. They never did. “Ain't He Sweet” came to mind and I ran it through kind of bouncy. When I started, my fingers were tight, bunched up at the knuckles, but the more I played, the looser they got. I played some back beat stuff, took it up-tempo, swung through some
K.C.
stride, and cranked my uptown hand with some bucket-bottom blues. When I looked up, it was dark outside and Annaliese was standing in the dining room doorway behind me. I felt like I'd been ten thousand miles away. Later, after I'd cleaned up, I sat on the floor in my room and thought of the band, thought of the way I'd tell it to a radio announcer or somebody else important: Well, on trumpet we had Doc Cheatham and Bobby Martin. Hank Cooper took over for Doc when we came to Europe. On the 'bones there was Albert Wynn and Billy Burns. Jerry Blake on the stick. Willy Lewis played the alto sax and Gene Sedric was on tenor. Me on piano (when Mr. Wooding and Freddy Johnson were not) and John Mitchell on the git. June Cole on the bass and Ted Fields on drums. I did the vocals. That was the band when we recorded in Paris and Madrid three years ago. When we first got to Berlin, we had three trumpets: Bobby, Maceo Edwards, and Tommy Ladnier, and one trombone, Herb Flemming. Garvin Bushnell was on clarinet. The saxes were the same, Willy and Gene, like John Mitchell, who was guitar. Georgie Howe played drums then, not Ted Fields, and John Warren played a walking bass. I thought about all of them, smoking muggles, playing the dozens, fooling around with the beat so that everybody would have to catch up, and then someone would run on out ahead and you'd have to do another 32 bars, which was all right. I cried in the darkness, missing it so much and wondering did any of them miss me, if they were asking about me. Then I heard Dieter Lange at the top of the stairs calling me in that tone because Anna had gone out to play Chinese checkers with some of the
SS
wives.…

Saturday, September 16, 1933

Dieter Lange's first party. Oh, I was so nervous. Playing in a club is one thing; the atmosphere is different. If the owner is nasty or the customers mean and you don't need the money, or even if you do, you can always leave. No chance of that here! Dieter Lange got me some black pants, a white shirt, and a tie. He also got me some decent shoes. When I told him how nervous I was, he gave me some schnapps. But, damn, I was nervous. First thing I noticed was how all the
SA
people stuck together; the
SS
people did, too. Come to think of it, Dieter Lange was more the
SA
than the
SS
type. Wonder how he managed that. I thought I could make things mellow by doodling around with “Falling in Love Again,” because the Germans loved to hear Dietrich sing that song. Then I picked it up a bit with “Walkin' My Baby Back Home.” You have to play your audience as well as the music, and the second number was bright with a good tempo. I thought that somewhere down the line I'd lean into “I Gotta Right to Sing the Blues.” When you're playing, you also listen to the way voices out there start to rise, from a hum to just plain loud. I went into some low-down blues, “Sweet Cat,” “Black Cat,” and “Weary,” and seeing that everyone was now feeling good, joking and calling out, introducing their wives and girlfriends to each other, I did “Tiger Rag” and that got them onto the floor, so I gave them “Bullfoot Stomp” so they could bang their feet, and eased into that neat little “Button Up Your Overcoat.”