Rage in Paris Page 2

  Barnet Robinson was staring at me expectantly, all traces of fatigue and moonshine calvados gone from his eyes. “Ah you going to help me, Mr. Brown?”

  “It won’t come cheap. I hope you didn’t get caught up in that Wall Street crash stuff.”

  “I’ve never dabbled in stocks and bonds, Mr. Brown. Too risky. I’m a metals man, gold mostly. Don’t worry about the money. Matter of fact, I’ll double your fee. I need your utmost discretion.”

  He took a wallet out of his jacket pocket, fanned out some banknotes, and handed me five strange-looking, gold-tinged twenty dollar bills. He grinned as I scrutinized them.

  “Seen banknotes like those? Gold certificates, as good as gold. You won’t go bankrupt with them. They’ll buy you a lot of francs on the black mahket.”

  I knew all about that market. I folded the bills, slipped them into my pocket, and then asked Barnet Robinson straight out: “It was the drummer, wasn’t it? The one your daughter ran off with?” He looked really surprised and nodded.

  “Photograph of your daughter?” I asked.

  He stared at me as if I had offended him.

  “I’m not the drummer, Mr. Robinson. I’m your detective. I have to know what she looks like.”

  He cooled right down. “Of course you do.” Pulling the photograph from an envelope in his jacket, he smiled at it. He was a man who loved his daughter; there was nothing phony about that. He handed the photo to me and then studied my reaction.

  The photographer had taken a great photo of Daphne Robinson, but he had a lot to work with. Blonde and beautiful, she seemed to shine from the black and white image as if lit by klieg lights.

  “She looks familiar,” I said.

  “Everyone says she looks like Greta Gahbo, only a lot more beautiful.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “That’s about the size of it.” It was not my place to comment on her beauty to him, but I was awestruck by the photo. I held onto it a bit too long, and he held out his hand. I was about to hand it back to him as he searched my face, an icy look in his eyes, but I had my poker face on. When he seemed satisfied that I knew my place, I pulled the photo back and said, “Sorry, Mr. Robinson, I’m going to have to keep this for a while. I have to show it around to find out if anyone’s seen her.” I could see that he did not like the idea of my holding onto the photo of his daughter and “showing it around,” but finally he nodded his assent.

  “Be careful with it. I only have two more photographs of her with me.”

  “You know the drummer’s name?” I asked.

  He wiped his brow, as if searching for a name. But I sensed he already knew everything there was to know about the man, except where he had gone with his daughter.

  “Thigpen . . . something Thigpen,” he said uncertainly.

  “You mean Buster Thigpen?” I asked, surprised.

  He snapped his fingers. “That’s right. You know the man?”

  “Sure do. Me and Buster go way back to New Orleans as young sprouts, and then we played jazz music together in Harlem.”

  Barnet Robinson only nodded, not at all surprised, I thought. He must have learned a lot about me from Tex O’Toole.

  Damn it, I said to myself, the heavenly Daphne Robinson must like her men rough and roving if she’s hooked up with Buster T. He was one of the best drummers who ever came out of New Orleans and the best I ever played with—when he was sober. He grew up rough in the Battlefield, the most dangerous neighborhood in New Orleans, maybe the whole world, with a straight-edge razor and a switchblade as his saviors.

  But his true savior was Father Gohegan, the head of St. Vincent’s Colored Waifs’ Home, who convinced the police to release Buster into his custody instead of bundling him off to the Louisiana State Penitentiary, nicknamed “Angola,” to raise cash crops for the politicians until another inmate raped or killed him within a few days, weeks, or months.

  Under Father Gohegan’s musical guidance, Buster turned into a great drummer. He told me all about it on a rare good day for him, when he was clearheaded and sober and could string more than three words together. There weren’t many days like that for Buster before or after he left St. Vincent’s.

  We didn’t get along there. He was two years older and a lot bigger than me until my growth caught up to his. He was the newcomer, but he had decided to make my life a living hell because he thought I was “too white” to be at St. Vincent’s. That was rich coming from him; he was a light-skinned, straight-haired, yellow–green-eyed quadroon who could have “passed” as a Spaniard, Italian, or another Latin-race person.

  He was a good actor, too. Despite being the worst bully in the Waifs’ Home, he had convinced Father Gohegan that he was pious and upright. He had become Father Gohegan’s right-hand boy for enforcing discipline, and he directed most of his efforts at me.

  When I caught up with Buster in Harlem a few years later, I thought, at first, that a miracle had happened and that he had become one of the best and nicest musicianers I had ever worked with. He was funny as hell, great company, and the ladies couldn’t keep their mitts off him.

  But Buster had a giant-sized problem. When he got moody, he would turn into a whole different person, becoming again the boy who had stayed alive in the Battlefield, by dint of his fast feet and his skills at wielding a cutthroat razor and a switchblade.

  He would try to get out of his “black moods” by snorting Happy Dust cocaine and smoking muggles reefers. Then he would turn as wild as a mustang with a catamount on its back. Once he got going, he would throw any kind of drug, liquor, or pill he could buy, beg, borrow, or steal down his chops to keep flying higher and higher.

  When he was like that, Buster turned into a monster from Ripley’s Believe it or Not! and played the drums worse than your great-grandmother. The man couldn’t keep a steady job when I left Harlem because he was out of his mind more often than not.

  Finding him in Paris was not going to be easy because he looked like a “Mediterranean type,” and there were plenty of such men in Paris.

  I knew, though, that, sooner or later, Buster was going to need to feed that monkey jockey on his back, and my network of informants would tell me where he went to feed the beast.

  Suddenly, I felt more at ease about the job. I was pretty sure that I could track Buster and Daphne down quickly, take lots more of Barnet Robinson’s pretty-looking money and, as a clincher, settle my debt to Tex O’Toole.

  Things were looking up for me. Thanks to the Boston Yankee, the threat of my electricity, water, and heat being cut off and, more importantly, of my receiving a deportation notice, was beginning to recede. His money would make things right.

  I clinked my glass against his and said with confidence, “I’ll find her for you, Mr. Robinson.”

  “I want you to bring Thigpen to me personally, Mr. Brown.”

  “What do you plan to do with the man? Give him some money to get him to stop seeing your daughter?”

  A flicker of irritation iced over his eyes before he answered. “I won the Ivy-league heavyweight boxing championship as a senior at Princeton. I intend to teach Mr. Thigpen some civilized conduct.”

  I didn’t want to be around to see that. Buster didn’t box to the Marquess of Queensberry rules. He was a peerless knife-fighter who protected his drummer’s hands by not using them to slug people. Any attempt to engage Buster in fisticuffs was likely to prove fatal . . . for Robinson.

  I walked Robinson to the metro station for his return to the Ritz Hotel because the taxis were on strike. Then I spent a few hours wandering around in the bitter cold, checking out my Montmartre sources, starting at Chez Red Tops with Redtop herself. She had left Harlem to come to Paris with Josephine Baker and her Revue Nègre as a pretty 23-year-old singer and dancer in 1925; she had not returned to America with the others. She had not seen Buster in a long time, and she did not miss him at all, she said.

  I showed her Daphne’s photo. The effect on her was immediate: she smoothed down her unruly red hair with her chew
ed-up lavender fingernails and fanned her face with her beige-colored hand.

  “Oooooo,” Redtop moaned. “That’s the most beautiful creature I ever seen on this here earth, and I done seen a lot of loveliness walk through these doors. Still, if she be with Buster, he be makin’ her run like Man o’ War to keep up with him ‘cause that man attract womenfolk like honey attract bears.”

  I made the rounds of the dwindling number of colored-owned American bars and jazz clubs and liquor shops and drug dens in Harlem-Montmartre. I drew a blank each time I showed somebody the photograph of Daphne and explained her connection to Buster. Nobody was glad to hear that Buster Thigpen was in town. But they all wanted to see Daphne in the flesh and as soon as possible, please.

  None of the drug dealers had sold Buster T. any dope in any way, shape, or form. With nothing coming down the Right Bank grapevine, I decided to do some investigating on the Left Bank in a few Latin Quarter bars that catered to musicians and the artistic set.

  As I was going into the Nord-Sud Metro Station at Pigalle heading for the Saint-Germain-des-Près stop, I saw a stout, black-skinned war veteran busking on the sidewalk near the station entrance. Wearing the tattered remains of his US Army uniform, he sang in a bottom-of-the-well voice “Old Man River” from that musical Showboat that came out a few years ago. He was surrounded by a group of drunken American rednecks shouting at him to sing “Dixie” and “Old Black Joe.” Instead, the big fellow kept on singing “Old Man River” so soulfully that a crowd of Frenchmen gathered around to listen and dropped coins into his begging beret. The Americans bayed at him more loudly, dangling big franc notes in front of him and snatching them away from his trembling black fingers. I walked down the steps into the metro station, remembering the Mississippi River and New Orleans and what brought me to Paris in the first place.

  CHAPTER 2

  It all started on July 4,1895, on the front steps of St. Vincent’s Colored Waifs’ Home for Boys in Gentilly, New Orleans. The head of the school, an Irish-American priest, Father Gohegan, later told me that my mother, a quadroon Storyville whore named Josephine Dubois, had left me there. He found me at daybreak and took me in.

  He was about to turn me over to a home for white foundlings, when he saw my mother pass by the Waifs’ Home a few days later and peep through the window. He thought that she was a genteel white lady and, puzzled by her presence in the mostly colored neighborhood, invited her in for a chat. Then she told him her story and asked him to confess her.

  During her confession, she told him that she worked in a bordello in Storyville and that I had been fathered by a rich Frenchman who had promised to take her back to Paris with him but had left her when she fell pregnant. She had another child, by a quadroon pimp, but the baby was being raised by the pimp’s mother in the Battlefield, a neighborhood so violent that she was afraid to visit the child there.

  Josephine Dubois pleaded with Father Gohegan to write to my French father right away and tell him to come for me and take me to France. Father Gohegan stubbornly refused her pleas. He told her that it would be a sin and blot on his conscience to let me “pass” as white, even in France, now that he had learned that I had “drops” of colored blood in me. A week after Father Gohegan heard Josephine Dubois’s confession and refused for a final time to make the one dream keeping her alive come true, she hanged herself.

  Father Gohegan also told me that, conscience-stricken by her suicide, he decided to protect me from the deadly world outside St. Vincent’s walls for as long as he could. It was he who named me after my father, although “Brown” never sounded like a French moniker to me. Father Gohegan told me all of this on my eighteenth birthday, my next to last day at St. Vincent’s. On that day, he begged me to leave New Orleans to save myself, the white girl I was in love with, and the Waifs’ Home. In the end, nothing survived the hatred raging in the world outside St. Vincent’s.

  After Father Gohegan took me in that first day, he didn’t know what to do with me. I was a blue-eyed, blonde baby, but the knowledge that I had some colored bloodlines in me trapped him—an “Upper South” Marylander assigned to pastoral duties in the Deep South—in a moral dilemma, and his conscience forbade him from placing me in an orphanage for white children. He decided instead to take personal charge of my education.

  He would not teach me the catechism and the Catholic faith, though. They would be of little use to me in the world outside the Waifs’ Home, where other teachings and prejudices would contend for my soul. He decided, he said, to “arm my mind” to enable me to withstand whatever harshness and hurt life threw my way. He resolved to hold me to an even higher learning standard than he would if I were a white student in the best schools New Orleans had to offer at the time.

  What he was planning for my education could put me, the Colored Waifs’ Home, and himself in physical jeopardy, but Josephine Dubois’s suicide weighed on him more and more. He felt he caused the despair that made her take her life. He was also determined to help her other child living with her former pimp’s mother in the Battlefield, but he did not have the time on that next to last day of his life to tell me whether he had found the child.

  Father Gohegan discovered early on that I had musical ability and decided to teach me to play the clarinet. That did it for me. I played in the famous Waifs’ Home Brass Band almost as soon as I started wearing knee pants, and the band became my life. Our idols were King Oliver on the cornet and, especially, Stanley Bontemps on the clarinet because he was a St. Vincent’s waif like the rest of us.

  Swearing me to secrecy, Father Gohegan taught me how to read, write, and develop a critical faculty. He was short-tempered with me when my mind wandered or if he thought I was slacking off in my concentration during lessons. Sometimes a sadness came over him, and he would let me lark off for a while. At those times, I had an inkling that he knew in his heart that the world outside his office, where he shaped my intelligence, would not let me use my education to develop my full potential.

  Father Gohegan also discovered in me a love for language and literature, and he encouraged it by giving me books to read in his office for short periods. It was essential, he kept telling me, not to arouse the suspicions of the other colored waifs. These reading sessions began when I was around eight, he said, when he realized I was a quick learner and had a rage for learning akin to his own. He started me on works by Robert Louis Stevenson, such as Treasure Island and Kidnapped, and Rudyard Kipling’s Jungle Book and Kim.

  He also had me read translations of works by foreign authors. I read The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas, The Hunchback of Notre-Dame by Victor Hugo, and The Captain’s Daughter by Alexander Pushkin. Father Gohegan told me that Dumas and Pushkin would be considered colored by Louisiana standards, just like me, so I should never believe anyone—white or yellow or black—who said that colored people were naturally ignorant and fit only to live a life of bondage and servitude.

  He reminded me after each session not to let on to the other waifs that he was giving me “special lessons.” He warned me always to “hide my light under a bushel” from white and colored alike, for my own safety. I became a skilled dissembler, which had served me well in my work as a private investigator.

  I honed my clarinet skills by sneaking away to play gigs with Creole jazz bands on the Mississippi River and Lake Pontchartrain riverboats. That’s how I met Stanley Bontemps.

  The first time I played with him, he taught me some of his riffs and listened, eyes shut like a blind man’s, as I played them back to him. Years later, he told me he knew right away that I would outdo him on the clarinet, and he took up the soprano saxophone instead.

  I fled New Orleans for New York the day after my eighteenth birthday, after I saw the Waifs’ Home burned to the ground and Father Gohegan die in the flames. It was the work of the police, Klan lovers, and a mysterious foreigner. I thought, at the time, that the Klan supporters and the mystery man had come looking for me and burned the home down because I had fallen in lov
e with a white Jewish girl named Hannah Korngold. Hannah was the daughter of my part-time employer, the rag-and-bone merchant Abe Korngold.

  I thought that by fleeing to New York I would forever escape from the Klan lovers and Jim Crow, my feelings of guilt from the death of Father Gohegan, and the burning of St. Vincent’s. I thought that I would find freedom and become a whole man. It probably would have worked out all right if I could have brought myself to assume a new identity as a white man and live out a life of obscurity in a big city like New York.

  But something kept me from “passing” for white. Maybe it was my memories of Father Gohegan and everything he had done to make me value who I am. Or my friendship with Stanley and my awe of his genius. Or, it might have been my memory of the time I saw a colored man lynched by a mob as I watched, helplessly, nearby, pretending that I was white to save myself from being lynched.

  My refusal to “pass” made for a strange life in New York: my white skin made colored musicians uncomfortable despite my clarinet’s “from back down home” sound. Yet, I played the clarinet “too colored” to fit into the white jazz scene.

  Then I hooked up with Stanley Bontemps again in one of the really hot colored-owned clubs where “blacks and tans” rubbed shoulders, Johnny Sutton’s Blue Heaven Nightclub. Stanley and I fronted Johnny Sutton’s band.

  I learned that there was war brewing in Europe. I was itching to see more of the world, to discover a place where I would find freedom and become a whole man. Knowing that my natural father was a Frenchman, my thoughts turned to France. I booked passage to Le Havre, on the French-liner France in mid-July of 1914, nearly two weeks after I turned nineteen.

  When the big guns opened up in Europe that August, I ditched my touring Creole jazz band in Marseilles and joined the French Foreign Legion.