Coming Through Slaughter Read online

  Yes or no, whatever it is, I’m not walking those stairs again.

  I’ll carry you up then. So decide. Shouting as he ran down.

  Bugger you fuck you shit those voices carry you know.

  I know. But it’s ok. Nora will do it. He stood on the first stair looking at Bellocq, at Bellocq’s sweating face. It’s alright, she said she’s gonna do it ok? She’ll pose.

  I heard them Buddy I heard them.

  They didn’t understand man, it’s ok now come on. Come on.

  Then he lifted the thin body of his friend and carried him up the three flights of stairs. Going slowly for he did not want to damage the camera or hurt the thin bones in the light body he was carrying. Still, he was tired and shaking and exhausted when he put him down on the top step.

  She didn’t speak to him about Bellocq. Not till this last night. He asked her about Bellocq and she told him what Webb had said, that Bellocq was dead. Died in a fire.

  This was about an hour after she found him sleeping in his red shirt with the children.

  I only did that for you cos you know why?

  No. Why?

  Because you didn’t know what to say, you didn’t know how to argue me into it.

  She threw in a taunt.

  Tom Pickett could have hustled anyone to do what you asked in a minute.

  No shit.

  The last remark had flowed under him, he was thinking about Bellocq, crushed and scurrying to the front door that morning while the others had watched from the windows.

  You didn’t feel sorry for him?

  I hated him Buddy.

  But why? He was so harmless. He was just a lonely man. You know he even talked to his photographs he was that lonely. Why do you hate him? You never even saw his pictures, they were beautiful. They were gentle. Why do you hate him?

  She turned to face him.

  Look at you. Look at what he did to you. Look at you. Look at you. Goddamit. Look at you.

  The next morning his daughter saying, I had this awful dream. Mum made some food for us out of onions and hair and orange peels and we hated it and she said eat up it’s good for you.

  Parade (5th Morning)

  Coming down Iberville, warm past Marais Street, then she moves free of the crowd and travels at our speed between us and the crowd. My new red undershirt and my new white shiny shirt bright under the cornet. New shoes. Back in town.

  Warning slide over to her and hug and squawk over her and shoulder her into the crowd. Roar. Between Marais and Liberty I just hit notes every 15 seconds or so Henry Allen worrying me eyeing me about keeping the number going and every now and then my note like a bird flying out of the shit and hanging loud and long. Roar. Crisscross Iberville like a spaniel strutting in front of the band and as I hit each boundary of crowd—roar. Parade of ego, cakewalk, strut, every fucking dance and walk I remember working up through the air to get it ready for the note sharp as a rat mouth under Allen’s soft march tune.

  But where the bitch came from I don’t know. She moves out to us again, moving along with us, gravy bones. Thin body and long hair and joined by someone half bald and a beautiful dancer too so I turn from the bank of people and aim at them and pull them on a string to me, the roar at the back of my ears. Watch them through the sun balancing off the horn till they see what is happening and I speed Henry Allen’s number till most of them drop off and just march behind, the notes more often now, every five seconds. Eyes going dark in the hot bleached street. Get there before it ends, but it’s nearly over nearly over, approach Liberty. She and he keeping up like storm weeds crashing against each other. Squawk beats going descant high the hair spinning against his face and back to the whip of her head. She’s Robin, Nora, Crawley’s girl’s tongue.

  March is slowing to a stop and as it floats down slow to a thump I take off and wail long notes jerking the squawk into the end of them to form a new beat, have to trust them all as I close my eyes, know the others are silent, throw the notes off the walls of people, the iron lines, so pure and sure bringing the howl down to the floor and letting in the light and the girl is alone now mirroring my throat in her lonely tired dance, the street silent but for us her tired breath I can hear for she’s near me as I go round and round in the centre of the Liberty-Iberville connect. Then silent. For something’s fallen in my body and I can’t hear the music as I play it. The notes more often now. She hitting each note with her body before it is even out so I know what I do through her. God this is what I wanted to play for, if no one else I always guessed there would be this, this mirror somewhere, she closer to me now and her eyes over mine tough and young and come from god knows where. Never seen her before but testing me taunting me to make it past her, old hero, old ego tested against one as cold and pure as himself, this tall bitch breasts jumping loose under the light shirt she wears that’s wet from energy and me fixing them with the aimed horn tracing up to the throat. Half dead, can’t take more, hardly hit the squawks anymore but when I do my body flicks at them as if I’m the dancer till the music is out there. Roar. It comes back now, so I can hear only in waves now and then, god the heat in the air, she is sliding round and round her thin hands snake up through her hair and do their own dance and she is seven foot tall with them and I aim at them to bring them down to my body and the music gets caught in her hair, this is what I wanted, always, loss of privacy in the playing, leaving the stage, the rectangle of band on the street, this hearer who can throw me in the direction and the speed she wishes like an angry shadow. Fluff and groan in my throat, roll of a bad throat as we begin to slow. Tired. She still covers my eyes with hers and sees it slow and allows the slowness for me her breasts black under the wet light shirt, sound and pain in my heart sure as death. All my body moves to my throat and I speed again and she speeds tired again, a river of sweat to her waist her head and hair back bending back to me, all the desire in me is cramp and hard, cocaine on my cock, eternal, for my heart is at my throat hitting slow pure notes into the shimmy dance of victory, hair toss victory, a local strut, eyes meeting sweat down her chin arms out in final exercise pain, take on the last long squawk and letting it cough and climb to spear her all those watching like a javelin through the brain and down into the stomach, feel the blood that is real move up bringing fresh energy in its suitcase, it comes up flooding past my heart in a mad parade, it is coming through my teeth, it is into the cornet, god can’t stop god can’t stop it can’t stop the air the red force coming up can’t remove it from my mouth, no intake gasp, so deep blooming it up god I can’t choke it the music still pouring in a roughness I’ve never hit, watch it listen it listen it, can’t see I CAN’T SEE. Air floating through the blood to the girl red hitting the blind spot I can feel others turning, the silence of the crowd, can’t see

  Willy Cornish catching him as he fell outward, covering him, seeing the red on the white shirt thinking it is torn and the red undershirt is showing and then lifting the horn sees the blood spill out from it as he finally lifts the metal from the hard kiss of the mouth.

  What I wanted.

  CHARLES ‘BUDDY’ BOLDEN

  Born 1876? A Baptist. Name is not French or Spanish.

  He was never legally married.

  Nora Bass had a daughter, Bernadine, by Bolden.

  Hattie ____________ had a son, Charles Bolden jnr, by him.

  Hattie lived near Louis Jones’ neighbourhood. (Jones born Sept 12, 1872, a close friend of Bolden.)

  Manuel Hall lived with Boldens mum and taught him cornet. Hall played by note.

  Other teachers were possibly Happy Galloway, Bud Scott, and Mutt Carey.

  Mother lived on 2328 Phillip Street.

  Bolden worked at Joseph’s Shaving Parlor.

  He played at Masonic Hall on Perdido and Rampart, at the Globe downtown on St Peter and Claude, and Jackson Hall.

  April 1907 Bolden (thirty-one years old) goes mad while playing with Henry Allen’s Brass Band.

  He lived at 2527 First Street.

&nb
sp; Taken to House of Detention, ‘House of D’, near Chinatown. Broken blood vessels in neck operated on.

  June 1, 1907 Judge T.C.W. Ellis of the Civil District Court issued a writ of interdiction to Civil Sheriffs H.B. McMurray and T. Jones to bring Bolden to the insane asylum, just north of Baton Rouge. A 100 mile train ride on the edge of the Mississippi.

  Taken to pre-Civil War asylum buildings by horse and wagon for the last fifteen miles.

  Admitted to asylum June 5, 1907. ‘Dementia Praecox. Paranoid Type.’

  East Louisiana State Hospital, Jackson, Louisiana 70748.

  Died 1931.

  The sunlight comes down flat and white on Gravier, on Phillip Street, on Liberty. The paint on the wood walls has crumpled under the heat, you can brush it off with your hand. This is where he lived seventy years ago, where his mind on the pinnacle of something collapsed, was arrested, put in the House of D, shipped by train to Baton Rouge, then taken north by cart to a hospital for the insane. The career beginning in this street of the paintless wood to where he gave his brains away. The place of his music is totally silent. There is so little noise that I easily hear the click of my camera as I take fast bad photographs into the sun aiming at the barber shop he probably worked in.

  The street is fifteen yards wide. I walk around watched by three men farther up the street under a Coca Cola sign. They have not heard of him here. Though one has for a man came a year ago with a tape recorder and offered him money for information, saying Bolden was a ‘famous musician’. The sun has bleached everything. The Coke signs almost pink. The paint that remains the colour of old grass. 2 pm daylight. There is the complete absence of him—even his skeleton has softened, disintegrated, and been lost in the water under the earth of Holtz Cemetery. When he went mad he was the same age as I am now.

  The photograph moves and becomes a mirror. When I read he stood in front of mirrors and attacked himself, there was the shock of memory. For I had done that. Stood, and with a razor-blade cut into cheeks and forehead, shaved hair. Defiling people we did not wish to be. He comes into the room, kneels in front of the mirror and sits on his heels. Begins to talk. Holds a blade between his first two fingers and cuts high onto the cheek. At first not having the nerve to cut deeper than scratches. When they eventually go deeper they look innocent because of the thinness of the blade. This way he brings his enemy to the surface of the skin. The slow trace of the razor almost painless because the brain’s hate is so much. And then turning to his hair which he removes in lumps.

  The thin sheaf of information. Why did my senses stop at you? There was the sentence, ‘Buddy Bolden who became a legend when he went berserk in a parade …’ What was there in that, before I knew your nation your colour your age, that made me push my arm forward and spill it through the front of your mirror and clutch myself? Did not want to pose in your accent but think in your brain and body, and you like a weatherbird arcing round in the middle of your life to exact opposites and burning your brains out so that from June 5, 1907, till 1931 you were dropped into amber in the East Louisiana State Hospital. Some saying you went mad trying to play the devil’s music and hymns at the same time, and Armstrong telling historians that you went mad by playing too hard and too often drunk too wild too crazy. The excesses cloud up the page. There was the climax of the parade and then you removed yourself from the 20th century game of fame, the rest of your life a desert of facts. Cut them open and spread them out like garbage.

  They used to bury dogs on First Street. Holes in the road made that easy. While in Holtz Cemetery the high water table conveniently takes the flesh away in six months and others may be buried in the same place within a year. So for us you are here, not in Holtz with the plastic flowers in Maxwell House coffee tins or four inch plastic Christs stuck in cement or crosses so full of names they seem like ledgers of a whole generation.

  The sun has swallowed the colour of the street. It is a black and white photograph, part of a history book.

  House of Detention. Three needles lost in me. Move me over and in the fat of my hip they slip in the killer of the pain. And open my eyes and the nurse is there, her smiling rope face and rope neck. Awake Bolden? Nod. Look at each other and then she is off. No conversation. I can’t sing through my neck. Every three hours I walk to the door for then she will come in carrying the needle in her sweet palm like an egg. Roll and dip and lose it in the bum. Go to sleep now. Nod. 7 am. I am given a bath. I sit up and she comes over unbuttons me at the back, pulls it over my shoulders. You see I can’t use my arms. She pours the cold soap onto my chest and rubs hard across the nipple and hair. Smiling. Good? Nod. And then pulling my white dress farther down and more cold soap in the circle of my crotch. As she leans against me there is the red morning on her face. Everyone who touches me must be beautiful.

  Bolden’s hand going up into the air in agony.

  His brain driving it up into the path of the circling fan.

  This last movement happens forever and ever in his memory

  Interview with Lionel Gremillion at East Louisiana State Hospital.

  Bolden’s mother, Alice Bolden, wrote twice a month. Called him ‘Charles’.

  He died November 4, 1931, at the hospital.

  His sister Cora Bolden Reed was notified when he died.

  Geddes and Moss, Undertaking and Embalming Co. of New Orleans, took care of the body. Nov. 4, his sister sent telegram —‘PLEASE DELIVER REMAINS OF CHARLES BOLDEN TO J.D. GILBERT UNDERTAKING CO. BATON ROUGE TO BE PREPARED FOR BURIAL’.

  Burial in unmarked grave at Holtz Cemetery after being brought from the Asylum through Slaughter, Vachery, Sunshine, back to New Orleans.

  Reverend Sede Bradham, Protestant Chaplain at the Hospital, worked at the hospital in his youth. He had seen Bolden play in N.O. ‘Hyperactive individual. When he blew his horn he kept walking around on the bandstand … had tendency to go to a window to play to outside world.’

  Dr Robard: ‘He acted as a patient barber. Didn’t publicly proclaim himself as a jazz originator.’

  Wasn’t much communication between whites and blacks and so much information is difficult to find out. No black employees here.

  Gremillion theorizing: ‘He was a big frog, he had a following. Had a strong ego, his behaviour was eventually too erratic. Extroverted and then a pendulum swing to withdrawal. Suspiciousness. Paranoia. Possibly “an endocrine problem”.’

  Patients sometimes brought up by boat along Mississippi to St Francisville.

  Typical Day:

  Rose early. Summer 4.30 am. Winter 5 am.

  If a person was in a closed ward he was returned there after breakfast. Bolden was probably in open and closed wards. If open ward he was given duties. His assigned duty was to cut hair. Lunch 11.30.

  Recreational facilities: volleyball, softball. Dances twice a week.

  Cold packs for the overactive. Place was noisy.

  4.30 – 5 pm. Supper.

  In bed by 8 pm.

  Some isolation blocks. ‘Untidy Wards’ for old patients who couldn’t control bowels. ‘Closed Wards’ for escapees, deteriorated psychopaths. Violent Wards’ for unmanageables.

  Am walked out of the House of D and put on a north train by H.B. McMurray and Jones. Outside a river can’t get out of the rain. Passing wet chicory that lies in the field like the sky. The trees rocks brown ditches falling off the side as we go past. The train in a wet coat. Blue necklace holding my hands together. Going to a pound. My beautiful snout is hit by McMurray for laughing at the rain. My neck is warm is wet and it feels like a shoe stuck in there. T. Jones next to me, the window next to me, McMurray in front of me. His hand came up like magic and got me for laughing as loud as the train. Strangers sitting next to the horizon. Wet in my neck. Teasel in my neck. You see I had an operation on my throat. You see I had a salvation on my throat. A goat put his horn in me and pulled. Let me tell ya, it went winter in there and then it fell apart like mud and they stuck it together with needles and they held me together with
clothes.

  Am going to the pound. McMurray and Jones holding my hands. Breastless woman in blue pyjamas will be there. Muscles in the arms will be there. Tie. Belt. Boots.

  They make me love them. They are the arms looking after me. On the second day they came into my room and took off all my clothes and bent me over a table and broke my anus. They gave me a white dress. They know I am a barber and I didn’t tell them I’m a barber. Won’t. Can’t. Boot in my throat, the food has to climb over it and then go down and meet with all their pals in the stomach. Hi sausage. Hi cabbage. Did yuh see that fuckin boot. Yeah I nearly turned round ’n went back on the plate. Who is this guy we’re in anyway?

  The sun comes every day. Save the string. I put it in lines across the room. I watched him creep his body through the grilled windows. When the sun touches the first string wham it is 10 o clock. It is 2 o clock when he touches the second. When the shadow of the first string is under the second string it is 4 o clock. When it reaches the door it will soon be dark.

  Laughing in my room. As you try to explain me I will spit you, yellow, out of my mouth.

  In the summer they were up each day at 4.30. They washed and moved among themselves for an hour and then by 6 they filed in and took forks off the table, ate. At 7 they held the forks above their heads so they could be collected. Meals silent in the mornings and noisy at lunch. That was their only character.

  On Monday mornings he cut hair for them. He was never much of a barber but the forms said he was one. So he shaved and cut in a corner of the dining room with an old man who was better than him but who died two years after Bolden arrived. He was asked to train someone new, he didn’t react, but a couple of them learned by watching him. One of the patients, Bertram Lord, came every week and tried to get the scissors off him and each day as the shift ended Bolden held up his arm with the scissors and razor and they were collected and locked away.