[It’s Valentine’s Day, and who better to celebrate with than Louis Armstrong? First of all, everyone loves Louis and, secondly, “it’s a wonderful world.” I hope you have a furry mate to celebrate with, and don’t forget to watch the video at the end of this post. SB SM]
Today’s selection–from The Jazzmen by Larry Tye. Young Louis Armstrong:
“[Louis Armstrong] told us, ‘jazz and I got born together and grew up side by side when we were poor.’
“Poor he was. New Orleans had informally been carved into quadrants Front o’ Town, Uptown, Downtown, and the Battleground’s Back o’ Town, which was the Blackest, swampiest, and most impoverished. That was where Armstrong’s grandparents put down roots, where his parents were living with Josephine, his father’s mother, and where he was born in a one-story, four-room frame house on an unpaved lane called Jane Alley. One bedroom doubled as a living room, and the toilet was outdoors. The neighborhood was densely packed but relatively quiet, although it got grittier and more treacherous in every telling by biographers and by Louis himself. ‘The toughest characters in town used to live there, and would shoot and fight so much,’ he wrote in his first memoir. ‘There were bars, honky-tonks and saloons, and lots of women walking the streets for tricks to take to their “pads,” as they called their rooms.’
“His second home, a brick tenement in the Black red-light district, was a better fit with the blighted area that Louis remembered. ‘We were All poor. The privies (the toilets) were put into a big yard, one side for the men and one side for the women,’ he said. Then he told a favorite joke that captured his reality: ‘I remember one moonlit night a woman hollared out into the yard to her daughter-she said (real loud), “You, Marandy, you’d better come into this house, laying out there with nothing on top of you but that thin nigger.” Marandy said, “Yassum.”’
“Money wasn’t the only yardstick of deprivation. Before the Civil War, New Orleans was America’s busiest market for buying and selling slaves, but it also was home to more than ten thousand Blacks who were born into, bought, or were granted their freedom. Already a gumbo of French, Spanish, Canadian, Caribbean, African, and British influences, the city continued to welcome outsiders—Irish fleeing the famine, Jewish merchants, more Italians than anywhere outside of New York, along with Creoles, the free offspring of French or Spanish fathers and chattel mothers—and they in turn challenged inbred thinking on everything from politics to race. The result, during Reconstruction, was a blurring of color lines in ways unthinkable in most of the rest of Louisiana. Jim Crow—the system of segregation named after a cowering slave in an 1820s minstrel show—certainly thrived in New Orleans, where even freed slaves had owned slaves, but so did Booker T. Washington’s gospel of Black self-help. Everywhere from businesses to brothels was racially segregated, but that separation was as much by tradition as law, and there was a surprising commingling of colors where Louis lived. As of 1896, an unheard-of 72 percent of the city’s eligible Blacks had registered to vote, and two of them—Oscar Dunn and Pinckney Benton Stewart Pinchback—were the first African Americans to serve as governor in any state.
“Unfortunately for Louis, that laissez-faire mindset had begun fraying by the turn of the century, and it unraveled entirely just as he was coming into the world. Post-Civil War reforms were collapsing, as whites who wielded power in the fallen Confederacy began to tear down Negroes’ new freedoms. The brief postwar honeymoon of racial coexistence lasted longer in New Orleans than in most of the South, but the backlash finally came there, too. Most restaurants and amusement parks barred Blacks, as did schools, cemeteries, and hotels. Literacy and property-ownership requirements along with a poll tax so severely curtailed suffrage that by 1902, fewer than 3 percent of Blacks were able to register in a city where they constituted a quarter of the population. That same year riots engulfed New Orleans, set off when a Negro day laborer named Robert Charles killed several police officers who had confronted him, and ended with thousands of white vigilantes indiscriminately beating, burning, and murdering Blacks in a presaging of the Tulsa race massacre a generation later. The message was clear: New Orleans was a white man’s city.
“Young Louis got his first taste of the new Jim Crow order at the tender age of five, when he took his first ride on a streetcar with an elderly friend of his mother’s. ‘I walked right up to the front of the car without noticing the signs on the backs of the seats on both sides, which read: FOR COL ORED PASSENGERS ONLY.’ he remembered half a century after. ‘Thinking the woman [I was with] was following me, I sat down in one of the front seats … Quick as a flash she dragged me to the back of the car and pushed me into one of the rear seats.’
‘Even within his Colored world, there was a hierarchy. Castes were set partly by skin tone in what one historian called a pigmentocracy. Jet-black shades like Louis’s were a marker of poverty, inferiority, criminality, and illiteracy. So was Armstrong’s ancestry: the boy whose earliest nickname was Little Louis wasn’t from the ennobled classes of Creoles or free people of color, but a grandson of lowly plantation slaves. Likewise the Sanctified or Holiness churches where he spent the most time, and that nurtured his love of music and his African roots, constituted the bottom rung of the social pyramid, below Methodists, Baptists, and AME Zion. And diseases of the day—from yellow fever and smallpox to eventually the Spanish flu—hit hardest then, as now, in precincts whose residents were destitute and dark skinned.
“Such hard knocks played out in his family and life from the first. His father, William or Willie, left home for another woman less than two years after Louis’s birth. The turpentine factory worker was, in his son’s recollection, strapping, handsome, and useless. ‘My father did not have time to teach me anything,’ Louis would recall. ‘He was too busy chasing chippies.’ His mother, Mary Ann-whom he called May Ann, Mary-Ann, and Mayann—tried harder as a parent but with only marginally better early results. She left not long after Willie, moving to the Black tenderloin district. ‘Whether my mother did any hustling, I cannot say,’ But he did say so, repeatedly, calling it ‘selling fish’ and appreciating that ‘she certainly kept it out of my sight.’
“That left grandmother Josephine Armstrong to raise him for his first five years. She did it lovingly, threatening but seldom delivering whippings, ensuring he went as often as was practical to school, church, and Sunday school, ‘teaching [him] right from wron,:’ and making sure he knew about ‘the lynchings and all that crap.’ She exposed the boy to the magic and mystery of voodoo and brought him along when she did housework for wealthy whites, letting him frolic with their kids. ‘Hide-and-go-seek,’ he said, ‘was one of the games we used to play, and every time we played I was It.’ It wasn’t his mother on whom Louis first imprinted, it was ‘Granny,’ who schooled him in resilience with the help of a virtual village of aged Negresses including Mrs. Laura, Mrs. Martin, and ‘Old Lady’ Magg.
“At age five, he reunited with his birth mother in the hovel she shared with cousins in Black Storyville, a smaller, grittier counterpart to the famed whites-only vice district that aimed to contain prostitution by legalizing it in a thirty-eight-block zone. Willie had returned long enough to father with Mayann a child called Beatrice, whom Louis called Mama Lucy and didn’t meet until she was three. The family summoned him back then from Josephine’s because Willie was gone and Mayann was deathly ill. She stopped turning tricks, instead earning her living working for rich whites the way her mother-in-law did, but she still hit the bottle. ‘When Mayann got the urge to go out on the town,’ Satchmo recalled, ‘we might not see her for days and days.’
“Preteen years are supposed to be a time when play matters more than work, and adults shelter you physically and emotionally. Little Louis never had those luxuries, but he seldom felt sorry for himself. He was too busy and didn’t know any different.”
| author: Larry Tye | |
| title: The Jazzmen: How Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie Transformed America | |
| publisher: Mariner Books | |
| date: | |
| page(s): 4-7 |