"The hell with him," Benny said. "I ain't paying him any attention at all."
Instead of going home to get his pistol as Nicodemus had done Benny went out in a little alley beside the tonk to wait until Nicodemus came back with his big gun. While he was in the alley he stumbled on a piece of lead pipe about four feet long and as wide around as a Bologna sausage. The minute Benny's hand touched this pipe, he was satisfied that this was what he needed to give Nico a big surprise. Nico rushed down the alley and was about to enter the tonk when Benny swung on him with the lead pipe and knocked old Nico out cold.
There is one thing to be said about the fights between the bad men in my days. There was no malice and there was no dirty work. Let the best man win, that was the rule.
The gang loved both Benny and Nico. As soon as Nico had been knocked out the boys in the back room took the gun out of his pocket and hid it so that the cops would not know he had had it on him when he was hit. When the cops arrived they looked high and low for that gun but they could not find it. That's what I call sticking together. We did not want the cops to mix up in our quarrels; we could settle them ourselves.
Nicodemus never could get rid of the awful scar he received from that blasting on the side of his jaw given with all of Black Benny's strength. It was still with him when I saw him years later working in a well-known tavern in Calumet City near Chicago.
Even as a kid I thought Black Benny was the best bass drum beater I ever saw with any of the brass bands that ever set foot on New Orleans soil. I still say that he was one of the best all-around drummers that ever paraded in that city.
The cops knew Benny well, and they liked him so much they never beat him up the way they did the other guys they arrested. When Benny was serving time in jail the captain of the Parish Prison would let him out to play at funerals with our brass band. When the funeral was over he went back to prison just as though nothing had happened. This went on for years, but Benny never served more than thirty days at a stretch. He was never in jail for stealing. It was always for some minor offense such as disturbing the peace, fighting or beating the hell out of his old lady Nelly. When he was not in jail for fighting, he would be in the hospital recovering from a carving she had given him.
Nelly was as tough as they make them. She was a small, good-looking, light-skinned colored girl who was not afraid of anybody, and when she and Benny got mixed up in a fight they were like two buzz saws. One day Benny was playing in the brass band in a street parade. Evidently he and Nelly had had a quarrel before he left home in the morning. The minute the parade swung down our street they spied each other at once and began calling each other names. And what names they were! I don't think they could even spell the words they used. Black Benny stopped immediately and took his bass drum off the strap which held it around his neck. Nelly started to cross the stone slab that served as a bridge across the gutter filled with muddy rain water. As Benny ran toward Nelly to beat her up he saw the stone slab. He picked it up and as Nelly ducked he let it fall in the middle of her back.
No one thought Nelly would ever get up again. They did not know Nelly. She started up at once, pulling her bylow knife out of her stocking and calling Benny all the black so and so's she could think of. He started to run, but he could not get away until she had sliced his ass plenty. They both ended up in the hospital. When they were released they went home together, smiling at each other as though nothing had happened.
It was about that time that Mama Lucy drifted away to some town in Florida. A large saw mill down there was taking on a lot of hands to fill the orders that were piling up. They were short on workers, and they had put an ad in the New Orleans Item, a paper I used to deliver. Workers on ordinary jobs could make a lot more money in Florida than they could in New Orleans, and Mama Lucy was among the hundreds of people who went. She stayed in Florida a long time and I began to think I would never see my dear sister again.
When Mama Lucy left, she and our cousin Flora Miles had become large teen-agers. Since the two of them ran around together most of the time Flora was left pretty much alone. Then she began to go around with another bunch of teen-agers who did not have the experience which Flora and Mama Lucy had had. Both of them had lived in the heart of the honky-tonk quarter; they knew the people who hung around them all the time; they had seen a good deal of fast life; and they were hard to fool. They were a little more jive proof than the average teen-ager, and they did practically everything they wanted to without their parents' knowing anything about it.
While Flora was going around with those strange kids she got into trouble. Through an old white fellow who used to have those colored girls up to an old ramshackle house of his. I do not need to tell you what he was up to.
My cousin Flora Miles became pregnant. I was just a youngster and neither I nor any of the rest of us knew what to do about the problem. All I could do was to watch Flora get larger and larger until a fine little fat baby arrived. Flora named him Clarence. When the girls in Flora's crowd realized what had happened to her as well as to a couple of other kids, they were scared to death and began to stay at home with their parents.
Everybody told old man Ike Miles, Flora's father, to have that old man arrested. But that did not make sense. He was a white man. If we had tried to have him arrested the judge would have had us all thrown out in the street, including baby Clarence. We put that idea out of our minds and did the next best thing. There was only one thing to do and that was a job for me. I had to take care of Clarence myself and, believe me, it was really a struggle.
My whole family had always been poor, and when Clarence was born I was the only one making a pretty decent salary. That was no fortune, but I was doing lots better than the rest of us. I was selling papers and playing a little music on the side. When things got rough I would go out to Front o' Town where there were a lot of produce houses. They sorted lots of po tatoes, onions, cabbage, chickens, turkeys – in fact, all kinds of food to be sold to the big hotels and restaurants. The spoiled products were thrown into big barrels which were left on the sidewalk for the garbage wagons to take away. Before they came I dug into the barrels and pulled out the best things I could find, such as half-spoiled chickens, turkeys, ducks, geese, and so on. At home we would cut out the bad parts, boil the good parts thoroughly, dress them nicely and put them in a basket. They looked very tasty and we sold them to the fine restaurants for whatever the proprietor wanted to pay. Usually we were given a good price with a few sandwiches and a good meal thrown in. We did the same thing with potatoes, cutting out the bad parts and selling the good parts for six-bits a sack. Naturally they paid more for the fowls.
We thought we had cleaned out everything that could possibly be used from those garbage barrels at the produce houses, but when the garbage wagons arrived at the Silver City dump a lot of poor colored people were waiting for them with pokers in their hands to pick out the good garbage from the bad. Sometimes they would find whole pork chops, unspoiled loaves of bread, clothing and other things that were useful. Sometimes I followed the wagons out to the dump myself hoping to find other things worth keeping or selling. This is one of the ways I helped the family raise the new-born baby Clarence.
As the years rolled by, I became very much attached to Clarence. Flora must have felt that she was going to die for just before she passed away she made his name Clarence Armstrong and left him in my care. Clarence became very much attached to me also. He had a very cute smile and I would spend many hours playing with him.