One day some of the boys in the neighborhood thought up the fantastic idea to run away from home and hobo out to get a job on a sugar cane plantation. We rode a freight train as far as Harrihan, not over thirty miles from New Orleans. I began to get real hungry, and the hungrier I got the more I thought about those good meat balls and spaghetti Mayann was cooking the morning we left. I decided to give the whole thing up.
"Look here, fellows," I said. "I'm sorry, but this don't make sense. Why leave a good home and all that good cooking to roam around the country without money? I am going back to my mother on the next freight that passes."
And believe me, I did. When I got home Mayann did not even know that I had lit out for the cane fields.
"Son," she said, "you are just in time for supper."
I gave a big sigh of relief. Then I resolved again never to leave home unless Papa Joe Oliver sent for me. And I didn't either.
I don't want anyone to feel I'm posing as a plaster saint. Like everyone I have my faults, but I always have believed in making an honest living. I was determined to play my horn against all odds, and I had to sacrifice a whole lot of pleasure to do so. Many a night the boys in my neighborhood would go uptown to Mrs. Cole's lawn, where Kid Ory used to hold sway. The other boys were sharp as tacks in their fine suits of clothes. I did not have the money they had and I could not dress as they did, so I put Kid Ory out of my mind. And Mayann, Mama Lucy and I would go to some nickel show and have a grand time.
chapter 7
I took a lot of odd jobs to keep my head above water and to help out Mayann and Mama Lucy. For instance, I worked on a junk wagon with a fellow named Lorenzo. He was a very funny fellow and he did not pay me much, but the fun we used to have going all over the city to collect rags, bones and bottles from the rich as well as the poor!
Lorenzo had an old tin horn which he used to blow without the mouthpiece, and he could actually play a tune on it, and with feeling too. It was one of those long tin horns with a wooden mouthpiece which people used to buy to celebrate Christmas and New Years. It used to knock me out to hear him play a real tune to call people out of their houses and back yards. In the junk people discarded there were sometimes nice things such as suits or clothes which occasionally fitted me like a glove. Once he bought a complete suit of clothes from some white people on Charles Street which he let me have for what he had paid for it. That wasn't very much and oh, was I sharp!
Satisfied that I had learned the business well, he would occasionally let me take the day's collection to the junk yard for the weigh-up. I liked that job. There was one thing I could not figure out about Lorenzo. With all the money he made he never got his teeth fixed. Every other tooth was missing, and he looked just like he was laughing twice as hard as anyone else when something funny was said. But I did not dare put him wise to this because I did not want older folks to think me a sassy child. I thought a lot of Lorenzo, and I would gladly live over those days with him again. When I was with him I was in my element. The things he said about music held me spellbound, and he blew that old, beat-up tin horn with such warmth that I felt as though I was sitting with a good cornet player.
A pie man named Santiago blew a bugle to attract customers as he walked down the street with his big basket of pies on his arm. He could swing it too, and so could the waffle man who drove around town in a big wagon fitted out with a kitchen. When he blew his mess call the customers came running, and when those hustling guys met him as they came home from gambling all night, they'd all but chain his wheels to keep him from leaving.
There were many different kinds of people and instruments to inspire me to carry on with my music when I was a boy. I always loved music, and it did not matter what the instrument was or who played it so long as the playing was good. I used to hear some of the finest music in the world listening to the barroom quartets who hung around the saloons with a cold can of beer in their hands, singing up a breeze while they passed the can around. I thought I was really somebody when I got so I could hang around with those fellows – sing and drink out of the can with them. When I was a teen-ager those old-timers let me sing with them and carry the lead, bless their hearts. Even in those days they thought I had something on the ball as a ragtime singer, which is what hot swing singing is today.
Black Benny used to be there on that street corner or the saloon when he wasn't busy gambling, playing music, or playing the girls. You should have heard his good old barroom tenor sing Sweet Adeline or Mr. Jefferson Lord – Play that Barber-Shop Chord. But you had to keep an eye on Benny when a can of beer was passed around. When a bunch of fellows got to gether the chances were that there wasn't more than a dime in the crowd. Naturally that dime went for a big tin bucket filled with ice cold beer. It was so cold that no one could take more than three swallows at most. Except Black Benny. If anyone made the mistake of passing that growler to him first he would put it to his chops and all we could see was his Adam's apple moving up and down like a perpetual motion machine. We heard a regular google, google, google. Then he would take the can from his mouth with a sigh, wipe the foam off his mouth with his shirt sleeve and pass the can politely to the guy next to him as though it still had plenty of beer in it. Nay, nay, Black Benny with his asbestos throat had drunk every drop of that beer.
Black Benny had such a cute way about him that he could get away with nearly everything he did. Benny seldom had any money because the better gamblers kept him broke and in pawn. When he was lucky he would get his good clothes out of pawn and buy everyone in sight a drink. Then he would really rush the can. But everyone else drank first. We weren't taking any chances even if Benny had bought the beer. We figured Benny might act like the guy who brought a bag of oranges to a sick friend in the hospital and ate them all himself while he sat by the bedside.
When I came back from Houma things were much tougher. The Kaiser's monkey business was getting worse, and, what is more, a serious flu epidemic had hit New Orleans. Everybody was down with it, except me. That was because I was physic-minded. I never missed a week without a physic, and that kept all kinds of sickness out of me.
Just when the government was about tp let crowds of people congregate again so that we could play our horns once more the lid was clamped down tighter than ever. That forced me to take any odd jobs I could get. With everybody suffering from the flu, I had to work and play the doctor to everyone in my family as well as all my friends in the neighborhood. If I do say so, I did a good job curing them.
Finally I got work playing in a honky-tonk run by a white Italian guy named Henry Matranga. The law had not shut him down, as it had the places in Storyville, because his joint was third rate. There I could play a lot of blues for cheap prostitutes and hust lers. At least for a time, for eventually Matranga had to close down too.
Henry Matranga was as sharp as a tack and a playboy in his own right. He treated everybody fine, and the colored people who patronized his tonk loved him very much. My mother used to work at his home, just a few blocks away from his saloon, and I used to go to see her there. If I came at mealtime they would make me sit down in the kitchen to eat a plate of their good Italian spaghetti. That family always enjoyed seeing me eat.
Matranga did not bother much with his customers. Knowing how sensitive my people are when white folks shout orders at them and try to boss them around, he left it to Slippers, the bouncer, to keep order.