Plague Journal, Day 93: Listening to Jazz: A Window on American Racism

Sunday: Another gorgeous late spring day in Brooklyn, sunny, breezy, no humidity. I’m trying to work, but saxophone strains drift through my open apartment windows. Not just one sax —two tenors and an alto, I think, plus bass, drum, electric guitar. I recognize “Bye Bye Blackbird,” then something from Coltrane’s “Giant Steps.” These guys are good. A recording? It sounds too vivid. I hear applause smatterings. Where is this coming from? 

Inevitably I think of my late father, whose records provided much of my youth’s soundtrack. He grew up in the jazz heyday, loved Jelly Roll Morton, Louie Armstrong, Django Reinhardt, big bands, swing, bop, the West Coast sound. He and Mom went to the Monterey Jazz Festival every Labor Day weekend for decades, where they shared a box with friends. Dad was untrained but had a good ear; he required drive, disliked showiness (Jo Jones more than Buddy Rich, say), discipline, not schmaltz (yes to Dave Brubeck, the Modern Jazz Quartet; hard pass on Al Hirt, Maynard Ferguson).

Dad grew up in Oakland, Calif., where he and two of his six siblings — his older brother, Bernie, and his younger brother John — must have been hooked by jazz radio shows. By the early 1940s, in their teens, before being drafted into the Army to fight in Europe, they wanted to see live shows at Sweet’s Ballroom, a dance hall at 1933 Broadway in Oakland founded by William Sweet and his brother, which hosted big bands, other jazz performers. 

Here’s the story he told us kids: Bernie, Paul, and John tried to convince their mother to let them see Jimmie Lunceford and his orchestra. (This could have been Friday, July 19, 1942, when Dad was 17 — Billboard listings show Lunceford was scheduled to play Sweet’s that night.) Tickets couldn’t have been expensive; money was tight — in my dad’s telling, every penny of the boys’ magazine subscription sales went to their mother for the household budget. Their mother expressed skepticism. 

How much of her hesitation was born of racism? Born in Worcester, Mass., my grandmother, though her family had little (only her husband’s salary as a Bank Of America teller), was a thoroughgoing snob: “lace-curtain Irish” as opposed to “shanty Irish.” She was whip-smart, educated — a teacher before her marriage, who regularly substitute taught all grades for ailing nuns in the local parish schools. A deeply religious woman (twice the parish’s “mother of the year”), she disdained Catholics of different nationalities (Poles were “Pole-acks,” Italians “Eye-tees”); don’t get her started on people of different skin tones. Jazz was an African-American art form; Benny Goodman might have been the King of Swing, but the bands my dad and his brother liked were led primarily by blacks, including Jimmie Lunceford. Safe to bet she wouldn’t have been persuaded by anything she heard on the radio.

In the end, she agreed to let them go (probably on a bus down Foothill Boulevard) if accompanied by their father, whose mind was more open. In the event, Dad said, Lunceford’s show was nothing but class. He dressed his orchestra in matching suits; players would stand for solos, then sit back down; they were tight; they swung like crazy. 1942 would have been past the band’s prime; Lunceford didn’t sell enough records, his best players leaving for more prominent bandleaders. But he picked players with taste, and he had a great catalogue. The crowd ate it up; my grandfather was, Dad said, “knocked out.” After that, the boys could go to Sweet’s anytime they could scrape up the ticket money.

They went on Fridays, when bands played to white spectators. Oakland wasn’t officially a segregated city, but touring bands at Sweet’s played Fridays for whites, Saturdays for blacks. (Some Saturday shows were apparently not publicized, but Dad knew about them.) Before World War II and the Second Great Migration, fewer than 10,000 of Oakland’s 300,000 residents were black; but Sweet’s would attract jazz fans from San Francisco, the entire East Bay. 

Listening to bands like Lunceford’s helped convince my father and his siblings to ignore their mother’s racism. Also pivotal, in Dad’s telling: the nuns at St. Elizabeth’s School, who told him that God loved all His children, including people from Africa and Latin America and Asia, even the non-Catholics. The sisters shut down racist schoolyard speech; “they wouldn’t tolerate that nonsense,” Dad said. 

The nuns didn’t shut down parish racism, by any stretch. A cousin (one of 35 on my father’s side — my parents’ embrace of birth control was the family exception, contributing to their ultimate departure from the Church) recently posted on social media about his father, who grew up across 42nd Street from the McCormicks, married their eldest child; the two then raised 10 children, including nine boys. 

“My dad owned and operated a cabinet shop in Oakland,” my cousin wrote. “His foreman was a black man named Parnell Thrower. Parnell's brother, Cordell, worked in the shop, too. I remember as a child feeling proud that my dad hired black men for important jobs in his shop, and yet I remember only one time that Parnell actually came to our house. He needed to tell my dad something. My dad did not invite Parnell into the house, but spoke to him standing out in the front yard. 

“More vivid to me are memories of hearing my dad (and my older brothers) use the N-word frequently and casually. My parents also hired a black woman, Adelaide Hawkins, whom we called 'the cleaning lady.' I remember most vividly seeing Adelaide down on her hands and knees in our kitchen scrubbing and waxing the floor as I would come home from school. I never knew a thing about Adelaide other than that she cleaned and scrubbed our house; she was our 'cleaning lady.' I have many other similar memories from my childhood that are fraught with such racism. Where to start to undo the unforgivable crimes we all so casually committed and that we are all so guilty of?” 

My family preached a (culturally Catholic but, to us kids, non-religious) gospel of inclusion and tolerance. That said, growing up in California’s Central Valley, we had very few African-Americans in our home. My mom often told stories of a black graduate-school friend she remained close to, but I don’t recall meeting her. Our friendship circles were not racially diverse. The only blacks I recall regularly visiting our home were cleaning ladies: Mrs. Herndon and, later, Mrs. McCoy, elderly women (at least in my view) who moved slowly, cleaned thoroughly, spoke rarely and with unfailing politeness. I knew nothing of their lives, never asked. 

I look with shame upon a family joke we told over the course of years: Whenever anything was missing (keys, a magazine, a deck of cards), we’d say, “Mrs. Herndon [or Mrs. McCoy] must have taken it.” We knew this was silly; Mrs. Herndon and Mrs. McCoy were images of rectitude; the joke was mostly on our own forgetfulness or sloppiness in misplacing something. Still, the inherent racial and power imbalances today make me queasy. 

In his social media post my cousin added, “I suspect that my dad's employment of Parnell was based largely on financial considerations — a black man would work far more cheaply than a white man in the same job. That's only speculation, but it would be consistent with my dad's attitudes about money. 

“One thing I do know is that he sold the house in Oakland and moved up to the mountains primarily because homes in our neighborhood were more and more being purchased by black families. I remember at least one very ugly encounter between a neighbor who was angry that another neighbor was selling his house to a black family — a loud and nasty screaming match across the street, with an abundant use of the N-word. My father was not involved in that argument (thank God), but I think he must have been largely sympathetic to the point of the argument. You know, I've always wondered why it was only my three oldest brothers (and one of them, in particular) who reflected these attitudes and not the rest of us. I think it must have been because they spent a lot more time with my father, working in the cabinet shop; they heard and saw the racism in action while the rest of us did not. I don't know. There's a lot more I remember and wonder about.” 

I’m still wondering about the music drifting through my windows. I head outside, drop off laundry, follow my ears. Turns out that a sextet (drum kit, stand-up bass, electric guitar, three saxes) is playing in the courtyard of an apartment building a half block south on Clinton Avenue. I glimpse them over a wrought-iron gate, partially hidden by shrubbery. They’re playing 6 feet apart, masks around their necks. A few apartment dwellers watch, physically distant, sitting on patio chairs; three of us listen from the sidewalk. The bass player is white, drummer and sax players black; I can’t see the guitarist; all look to be at least in their 60s. They take turns soloing, listen intently when not playing, nod and grunt with the musicians’ empathy I admire to a point of envy. Their playing would be right at home on the records I grew up with (some of which I inherited, still play); the solos are smooth, suit the song, inventive but not flying to fits of self-indulgence; even the drummer, his hands zipping around the kit with propulsive ease, takes less than a minute before handing it back to the combo. I stand and listen for a while, until they take a break; later they kick back into gear, to the appreciation of, from what I can gather a dozen stories off the street, a larger crowd. 

Dad would have loved it.