For a woman traveling alone with three young children and their life’s possessions, a twelve-hour train ride can be exhausting. For the children, however, it was exhilarating. Four-year-old Thelonious spent much of the time with his nose pressed against the window, watching the familiar flat countryside fade into modern steel bridges and bustling cityscapes dotted with skyscrapers. When the train pulled into New York’s Penn Station around 7:00 on that fateful June evening, it was still light out and the summer’s heat hadn’t quite subsided.
North Carolina summers were nothing like the thick, humid, dirty, congested heat of New York City. Barbara Monk was giving up fresh country air, her house on Green Street with the porch and backyard, her familiar surroundings, and her friends and family for a tiny tenement apartment in the summer heat. It was worth it for the schools, and for the future jobs for her children. But it wasn’t easy.
With bags in tow, Barbara, Marion, Thelonious, and Thomas hopped on a streetcar traveling along Amsterdam Avenue. As Marion remembered, “All of us fell down when the trolley car started. The three of us, you know, we was two, four and six. And everyone was laughing and it was such a big thing. That’s why I remember that. That was our first entrance into New York.”1 Barbara’s cousin from North Carolina, Louise Bryant, met them after they disembarked from the trolley. Bryant, who was then fifty-one years old and unmarried, had been living in the San Juan Hill neighborhood of Manhattan for a few years and had encouraged Barbara to move north after her mother died.2
The Monks first moved in with Bryant, who had been living at 235 West 63rd Street, between Amsterdam and West End Avenues, for at least three years.3 Bryant’s building was not like the dilapidated, overcrowded tenement apartments that dominated the West 60s. Situated on the north side of West 63rd, closer to West End than to Amsterdam, 235 was one of the relatively new buildings funded by industrialist Henry Phipps to provide quality housing for the working poor. After he had built the first Phipps Houses on East 31st Street in 1906 for white working class families, a group calling itself The Citizens’ Committee for the Betterment of Tenements for the Negro People appealed to him to build similar housing for African-Americans on the West Side.4 Phipps purchased sixteen lots on West 63rd and West 64th Streets and constructed six brand new buildings to house black residents. When the final structures were completed in 1911, the Phipps Houses provided 348 units of comparatively luxurious yet low-cost apartments. Designed by the noted architectural firm Whitfield and King, the Phipps Houses were one of the first model housing developments in New York City exclusively for black families. Unlike older tenements, each apartment was equipped with toilet and bath facilities, fairly spacious rooms, good ventilation, and a small courtyard in the back. Because the Phipps Houses were the most desirable housing in the neighborhood, the management selected their tenants carefully, choosing only the most “respectable” working-class families to reside there.5
The Monks stayed with Louise Bryant a few months, and they would eventually return to the Phipps Houses for an apartment of their own a few years later. Meanwhile, Barbara got a job working in the kitchen at the Henrietta Industrial School, right across the street at 224 West 63rd. Founded in 1892 by the Children’s Aid Society exclusively for black children, the Henrietta School was referred to by residents as the “soup school” because it ran a soup kitchen for poor neighborhood kids. The pay wasn’t great, but the job was convenient for a single parent. Marion recalled, “My mother got that job because she could cook. And that was good for her, because the three of us went to the nursery and we had our lunch there and everything, which made it nice.”6
Barbara moved her family to an apartment in one of the old tenements on the same block, at 234 West 63rd, probably in the winter of 1922–23. 234 was more typical of the San Juan Hill neighborhood.7 Activist and social worker Mary White Ovington described the tenements there as “human hives, honeycombed with little rooms thick with human beings. Bedrooms open into air shafts that admit no fresh breezes, only foul air carrying too often the germs of disease.”8 Conditions were so bad that the New York City Health Department and the Vanderbilt Clinic put out a newsletter to provide public health education to the community. Launched in 1915, the short-lived Columbus Hill Chronicle ran stories about tuberculosis, flies, the high infant mortality rate among blacks, and alcoholism.9 In 1919, three years before the Monks arrived, the Woman’s Municipal League of New York, along with several other civic organizations, formed the Housing Committee of the New York State Reconstruction Commission and conducted a thorough investigation of housing conditions in the West 60s. They visited the homes of 1,600 families, concluding that “in general they were old, dark, dirty and not fit for human habitation.” Efforts at keeping them clean were impossible; the cellars were “full of rats,” and the halls were not lighted; “the plumbing was old and often out of repair so that the air was unbreathable.” Airshafts were littered with trash. There were many cases of illness attributed to the unhealthy living conditions.10 Another survey conducted a couple of years later classified at least sixty-three percent of the housing in the neighborhood as “absolutely undesirable,” and only twenty-one percent as “passable.”11
San Juan Hill was so named in part because several black veterans of the Spanish-American War settled in the area. (San Juan Hill, near Santiago, Cuba, was the site where the legendary black cavalry known as the Buffalo Soldiers, alongside Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, waged their most ferocious battle.) But the name stuck to the neighborhood for another reason: its reputation for violence. Legend has it that the name was first used by “an on-looker who saw the policemen charging up during one of the once common race fights.”12 Between 1900 and 1917, the place was famous for its race riots. In 1905, a reporter noted that the police in the vicinity “expect at least one small riot on the Hill or in The Gut [the West End side of San Juan Hill] each week.” In July of that year, what could only be described as race war overtook the entire neighborhood. Police officers from six different precincts were called in to quell the violence, but many of the officers made matters worse by ignoring white mobs and arresting and beating African-Americans. The rioting started when a group of young white men hanging out on Amsterdam attacked a black man for protecting a poor white rag peddler from physical and verbal abuse. Several black residents retaliated from the tenement rooftops, where they had stored piles of bottles and bricks ripped from dilapidated chimneys.13
Twelve years later, the black folks on the Hill found themselves embroiled in a series of riots. The first occurred at the end of May 1917, when a black man argued over the price of a glass of lemon and soda in a predominantly white bar on 65th and Amsterdam. The white patrons followed the man out of the bar and proceeded to jeer and slap him. He then sought refuge in a black saloon, but when the Home Defense League, a wartime outfit created to supplement the police, intervened, some members assumed the black man was the criminal rather than the victim. Men armed with guns, knives, bricks, and bottles began to stream into the streets. Over 2,000 people took part in indiscriminate fighting. When the smoke finally cleared, one black man lay dead and a thirteen-year-old black girl suffered a gunshot wound to her thigh.14
A little over a month later, a day after the Fourth of July, San Juan Hill erupted once again when a group of black National Guardsmen, all members of the Fifteenth Infantry of New York, ignored police orders to disperse. They had committed no crime, but apparently the sight of twenty-five black men in uniform gathered on the corner of West 61st Street was enough to arouse suspicion. Fighting began when one of the white police officers arrested Lawrence Joaquin, a black Puerto Rican guardsman who, coincidentally, had been arrested in the racial disturbances a month earlier. His comrades fought back in order to free Joaquin. As soon as whites on Amsterdam heard or saw what was happening, they came pouring out of their homes, initiating another massive melee. Several residents were injured, property was destroyed, and some of the guardsmen were arrested and jailed on Blackwells Island. African-American leaders sharply criticized the way the police handled the incident, and the commander of the Fifteenth Infantry defended his men and launched an investigation into the incident.15 A few months later, the Fifteenth Infantry was dispatched to the war front, where they were reorganized as the 369th Infantry Regiment under French command. Earning the nickname “Harlem Hellfighters” for their combat record, the regiment’s astounding band, led by Lieutenant James Reese Europe, introduced ragtime and early jazz to Europeans.16
The combination of anti-black violence, police inaction during the 1905 riots, and deteriorating housing conditions spurred a mass exodus out of San Juan Hill into the next up-and-coming black neighborhood: Harlem. In 1910, San Juan Hill was still the largest black community in Manhattan. A few years later, it would be surpassed by Harlem, although when the Monks arrived in 1922 it was still mostly black—at least off the avenues.17 Only whites, mostly Irish, Germans, and Italians, lived along the avenues—Amsterdam (Tenth) and West End (Eleventh)—and on certain streets. West 61st, 62nd, and 63rd Streets were all-black. Most of San Juan Hill’s blacks hailed from the South or the Caribbean. On Monk’s block in 1930, for example, about forty percent of the residents were Southern-born (primarily from Virginia, North and South Carolina, and Georgia), and about twenty percent came from the British West Indies and, to a lesser extent, Cuba and Puerto Rico. About thirty-five percent were born in New York City, a figure that also reflects the fairly large youth population in the neighborhood. San Juan Hill had its share of black professionals, but this was a community of porters, domestic servants, laundresses, longshoremen, cooks, chauffeurs, delivery men, truck drivers, a surprising number of musicians, and too many “general laborers” to count.18
With a diversity of people came a diversity of cultures. On West 63rd Street alone, the aroma of Southern-style collard greens cooked with ham hocks mixed with the distinct smell of Jamaican rice and peas and fried ripe plantain. English was the main language in the community, but it came in a Carolina twang and a West Indian singsong lilt, in addition to a distinctive New York accent. Spanish and French were also spoken on those streets, with German and Yiddish along the white-dominated avenues. Many of the local merchants were Italian. Alberta Saunders, a long-time resident of the neighborhood, recalled: “The coal man was always Italian. Had a fish man at 62nd and Twelfth, also Italian. And they were all named ‘Joe.’ You had Ice Joe to get your ice, Fish Joe to get your fish, and so on and so forth.”19
It is easy to romanticize this diversity—easy, and false. Ms. Mavis Swire (née Wilson), born and raised in the neighborhood and just three years younger than Thelonious, vividly remembered the tensions. “The Southern blacks called West Indians ‘monkey chasers,’ and we often referred to Southern blacks as ‘possum eaters.’ ”20 Thelonious was an odd exception: he reported, “They used to call me ‘Monkey,’ and you know what a drag that was.”21 Occasional fights broke out, and more than a few well-educated Caribbean men were known to treat their American-born counterparts with an air of superiority. But generally speaking, these communities got along—especially their New York–born offspring. “Our main fights,” Ms. Swire recalled, “were with the Irish and Italians on the Avenue. . . . You have to go to the stores on the Avenue. [The whites] would not let you go by on the sidewalk. You had to walk in the street around them. So when you go up to get what you’re getting, you get an empty wooden box. They’re always glad to give you a box because they know you have a coal stove and you need the wood to start the fire. Once you get the box, you break up the box and everybody gets a stick. You hit anybody you can and run like mad down the street! They’re not going to chase you.”22
The daily violence young people endured in San Juan Hill haunted Thelonious for many years to come. In a 1969 interview with drummer Arthur Taylor, Monk himself responded to a question about “Black Power” with vivid memories of the kind of interracial and intraracial violence that permeated his neighborhood. “I did all that fighting with ofays [whites23] when I was a kid. We had to fight to make it so we could walk the streets. There’s no reason why I should go through that Black Power shit now. I guess everybody in New York had to do that, right? Because every block is a different town. It was mean all over New York, all the boroughs. Then, besides fighting the ofays, you had to fight each other. You go in the next block and you’re in another country. Don’t look at a chick living in the next block and expect to be taking her home and all that; you might not make it.”24 And the police didn’t help matters, as far as Monk was concerned. They epitomized racism in the city. “It looked like the order of the day was for the cops to go out and call all the kids black bastards. Anything you did, if you ran or something, they called you black bastards.”25
Battles were not only limited to black and white, or between Caribbean and Southern blacks. African-American residents bitterly remember a Chinese restaurant on 59th and Columbus called Far East. It was notorious for not allowing African-Americans to dine inside—black customers had to come to the side or the back of the place to get takeout. Alberta Saunders remembers how she and her childhood friends would retaliate by standing outside the door and chanting, “Chinaman, Chinaman, eat dead rats.” Occasionally, an employee or the owner would come out and chase them down the street with a big knife.26
San Juan Hill’s reputation as a violent community was as strong as ever by the time the Monks settled there. About a year and a half after they arrived, San Juan Hill earned the dubious distinction of being one of the “busiest crime areas in New York City.”27 Not long after they moved into 234 West 63rd, one of their neighbors in the building, John Rose, was standing near the stoop, and suddenly drew a pistol and began shooting indiscriminately. It was a summer evening, the streets were filled with adults and children, and it is quite possible that Thelonious, Marion, and Thomas were among them. Rose managed to injure two people before police arrived. He fled into the building and barricaded himself in his apartment. After a brief standoff, the officers finally broke down the door and found him with a loaded gun and hypodermic needles.28
Stories of crime and violence dominated newspaper accounts of San Juan Hill. The neighborhood made great copy for voyeuristic whites fascinated by popular images of razor-toting, dice-tossing, happy-go-lucky Negroes. What the papers rarely covered was San Juan Hill’s rich musical culture. Perhaps the best-known event in the neighborhood’s history was the opening of the wildly successful all-black music revue “Shuffle Along” at the 63rd Street Music Hall near Broadway. Written by Flournoy Miller and Aubrey L. Lyles, with music and lyrics by Eubie Blake and Noble Sissle, “Shuffle Along” is often described as the production that launched the Harlem Renaissance in musical theater. It opened on May 23, 1921, and ran through July 15, 1922—closing just around the time the Monks moved to the neighborhood.29
Before the Harlem Renaissance pushed the black musical center of gravity up above 125th Street, the West Side, from the Tenderloin—also known as “Black Bohemia”—to San Juan Hill boasted the largest concentration of black musicians in the city.30 During Mary White Ovington’s six-month residence at one of the Phipps Houses in 1908, she discovered that music was a major source of income for African-Americans, even if it wasn’t always their main vocation. She recalled hearing music constantly in the hallways and in the streets. Every household had an instrument, she wrote, “a banjo perhaps, or a guitar, a mandolin or zither, or it may be the highly prized piano. Visiting an evening in the Phipps model tenement, one hears a variety of gay tinkling sounds.”31
The black residents of San Juan Hill also established a strong sense of community. As Thelonious’s future sister-in-law, Geraldine Smith, remembers about the neighborhood, “It was like a little village. Everybody knew everybody.”32 It had a rich associational life, with well over a dozen black churches in close vicinity. The more prominent included St. Cyprian’s Colored Episcopal Chapel at 171 West 63rd (the largest black Episcopalian congregation in the city) and St. Benedict the Moor Roman Catholic Church. Baptists dominated, though most of their churches were tiny storefronts. One exception was Union Baptist Church, a mainstay at 204 West 63rd until about 1930, when its pastor, the Reverend George H. Sims, decided to relocate to 145th Street in Harlem. Barbara Monk was a member of Union Baptist when she first arrived, although once it became clear the church planned to move (Sims had purchased the plot in Harlem during the summer of 1926), she switched to a small storefront Baptist church on West 61st near Amsterdam, pastored by the Reverend W. A. Johnson.33
Sims’s departure proved a great loss to the community. He not only provided leadership on matters of race and poverty on the West Side, but he earned a reputation as a great preacher. Gordon Heath, one of Monk’s childhood acquaintances, attended Union a few times with his mother. He loved the sermons delivered by Reverend Sims, who “shouted, wept, and exhorted God and the congregation to collect enough money to pay for the organ’s repair, the church’s roof, and the uninterrupted maintenance of his personal household. . . . Foot patting and hand clapping and rhythmic response to the minister’s evangelic fervor were the order of the day.”34
The God-fearing Barbara made sure her children went to church, but she was even more concerned about their education. At first, only Marion was old enough to attend the local elementary school, P.S. 141, located on West 58th Street just east of Tenth Avenue. By the time Thelonious turned six in the fall of 1923, he joined his sister on the five-block trek to school—a walk that often meant confronting gangs of white youths prepared to do battle with any black kids passing by. Black children necessarily traveled along Amsterdam in groups, which fostered friendship and kinship. Whites were in the minority at the school; by 1930, of the 1,104 pupils enrolled, 828 were black.35 Although black students outnumbered whites, they were still vulnerable to racist attacks. Black children at P.S. 141, as well as P.S. 69 (the neighborhood junior high school), complained regularly of the hostility they faced from both students and teachers. (During the 1920s, the vast majority of the teachers were whites who commuted from Queens, New Jersey, or the Bronx.36) The word “nigger” flowed easily from the lips of many teachers, who were also quick to side with white children whenever fights broke out.37 Saxophonist and bandleader Benny Carter, who also grew up on West 63rd Street, had vivid memories of racial discrimination during his years at P.S. 141 and P.S. 69. One incident, in particular, led to his expulsion from eighth grade during the year the Monks moved to his block. As he recalled, “We lived in a rough neighborhood and it was a rough school . . . I had a fight with a kid. A teacher intervened to help him. He kicked me from behind as I was going down the staircase, calling me a dirty nigger. I turned and punched him. I was expelled on the spot.”38
Thelonious’s formative experiences with other children did not take place at school but at summer camp. Barbara took advantage of the Fresh Air Fund, which ran a camp in Batavia, New York, a sleepy upstate town situated between Buffalo and Rochester.39 The Fresh Air Fund goal of giving working-class city kids from all ethnic backgrounds an opportunity to spend time in the country appealed to Barbara, whose memories of rural North Carolina contrasted sharply with the claustrophobia of West Manhattan. On the stifling hot day of August 2, 1923, Barbara put her eldest son on a New York Central Railway train along with forty-six other boys, heading off on a two-week adventure. When the train arrived the next morning, the boys were given a heroes’ welcome. They marched from the station to the courthouse park on Main Street, where each child was weighed, fed, and distributed to the various families to whom they were assigned. The local paper described the campers as “a motley collection of thin and cheaply-clad children. Some were pitiably pale, some had dark complexions that bespoke Italian and [H]ebrew parentage, but all aroused the sympathy and motherly instinct of the many women who watched them detrain.”40
The same journalist took note of one kid in particular. So did the Batavia fire chief. “If any boy in the Fresh Air bunch is assured of a good time, it is Phelonius [sic] Monk, a five-year-old colored youngster, who will spend two weeks doing what every normal boy would give a gallon of ice cream and a thousand marbles to do. Little Phelonious, who may have had some hard luck when his name was picked out, was lucky enough to become the guest of the firemen stationed at fire headquarters. They have decided to make a mascot out of him and equip him with a uniform. Phelonious, who is a cunning-looking chap, was on a fire truck ringing a bell five minutes after his arrival at the station, his pearly teeth uncovered by a grin that threatened to reach his ears.”41
The firemen were drawn to Monk on first sight. By the time he left two weeks later, he had thoroughly charmed the entire company, and he was reluctant to leave, despite bouts of homesickness. “A letter just received from his mother,” reported the Batavia Daily News, “made him a little homesick, but he said he would like to come back and be a fireman, after he had seen his folks. He nearly cried at the station when he heard the fire trucks going to a fire this morning without him.” He vowed that if he couldn’t stay longer, “he will be a fireman as soon as he is old enough.” He led the parade back to the train station, following the ritual weighing to see how much they gained as a result of wholesome country living. Thelonious was “strutting at the head of the line and banging away on a toy drum, his little chest proudly swelling inside his red fireman’s shirt. . . .”42
Stretching back to the late nineteenth century, there was an established tradition of white institutions choosing “colored boys” to serve as mascots, essentially pets. Fire stations, police stations, athletic teams, did it with good humor and implicit condescension. This was the age when images of “pickaninnies” and elderly black people were used to sell products and create an atmosphere of frivolity and innocence. When Thelonious returned to camp the following year, the entire department was there to greet him at the station, despite the pouring rain. This time the local paper got his name almost right: “Before the procession started moving a member of the Batavia fire department swooped down into the crowd, singled out a tiny colored lad and hoisted him into the air. Thelonius [sic] Monk, who for two weeks last summer lived the life of Reilly as the guest of the firemen, was back again this year. Thelonius, conducting himself as becomes a veteran fresh air child, gravely shook hands with the fireman, reached for his bundle and started at once for the scene of last year’s thrilling experiences.” Monk was such a sensation that the Batavia Daily News recorded his whereabouts and adventures on a fairly regular basis. They even interviewed Fire Chief George Benedict about their favorite mascot. Noting wrongly that Thelonious hails from the “roaring 40s,” known to upstate New Yorkers as the center of the Manhattan’s night life, the Chief expressed admiration for his good manners and gentlemanly comportment. “He’s the nicest little gentleman you’d every [sic] care to see. His mother certainly brought him up right. He played here all day long last year and got excited in the games, running around, but I never heard any bad language come from his lips. Another thing, Thelonius always says his prayers. Yes, he’s brought up right.”43
Barbara had indeed raised her children with very strong morals, but she was not a strict disciplinarian. She kept her children in line by relying on reason, faith, example, and her quiet, dignified strength. Unlike her husband, she did not believe in corporal punishment and she encouraged her children to be free-spirited, vocal, and opinionated, albeit respectful. As a child of the post-Reconstruction generation, Barbara also talked about politics. Around the time of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s bid for the presidency in 1932, she joined a local chapter of the New York Democratic Clubs, and, when she had time and her health permitted, attended a few of their forums.44 She wanted her children to be vocal, aware, and active in the world around them. Many children in those days were expected to be seen and not heard, and dinner-table chatter was not tolerated, but Barbara Monk encouraged her children to talk, laugh, and think of dinner time as family time. “We would talk about everything that happened during the day and what was going to happen,” Marion recalled. “I’d ask my mother this and that and we’d have a good conversation.”45
Barbara did what she could to introduce her children to the city’s rich cultural life. She frequently took them to Central Park in the summer to hear Edwin Franko Goldman’s sixty-piece orchestra perform classic works by European and American composers. During the summer of 1923, the inaugural year of the Central Park series, Goldman’s band gave sixty concerts, attracting as many as 15,000 people. Five years old, Thelonious spent many warm summer nights listening to such works as Schubert’s “Serenade,” Tchaikovsky’s “Slavic March,” Wagner’s “Tannhäuser Overture,” Rossini’s “William Tell Overture,” Strauss’s “New Vienna Waltz,” and plenty of Chopin and Liszt. Goldman’s band continued the tradition throughout the decade, and Barbara’s children frequently attended.46 Nor did Barbara miss opportunities to make music at home, especially sacred music. As Marion recalls, “We even used to have a quartet, you know, be singing, the four of us. We used to have a good time. That was our good time at dinner time because everyone was there.”47
Some time around late 1924 or early 1925, the quartet became a quintet when Thelonious, Sr., finally joined the family at 234 West 63rd St.48 He still suffered from chronic bronchial problems, and the horrible conditions of the tenement houses undoubtedly aggravated his illness. Nevertheless, he managed to find work, first as an unskilled laborer on the docks, then in the boiler room of a local theater. He took a variety of odd jobs performing manual labor until he was able to secure a more permanent position as a super/maintenance man in one of the tenements. Meanwhile, Barbara left her job at the Henrietta Industrial School and found a better position as a cleaner for Children’s Court located on East 22nd Street. She would remain in this job until she was forced to retire due to illness.49
Not long after Thelonious, Sr. arrived in New York, the family successfully applied for an apartment in one of the Phipps Houses. They moved there around 1926. Their still-new building’s thirty-four units were populated with working-class families from either the South or the Caribbean—families like the Brumbertachs, the Branches, and the Ortelys from the British West Indies, or the Caldwells from North Carolina and the Atkinsons from South Carolina. They made their living by cooking, cleaning, driving, or serving mostly white folks in restaurants, cruise boats, and private homes. Some made dresses and worked in factories, and nearly one-fourth of the households supplemented their income by taking in boarders. The rent was about three dollars a week. There were many two-parent families, but there were also plenty of widowers, divorcees, single mothers, and a few single residents with no children. Everyone worked hard to make ends meet, but all were considered respectable by the Phipps management. The Monks were welcomed largely because of Barbara’s kind demeanor and generosity. (The arrival of her husband probably helped her application as well.) The Southerners embraced them because they were from home, although many of the West Indians believed they had to be one of them with a name like Monk.50
The cultures of the West Indians and Southerners blended despite the tensions. With the music, cuisine, dialects, and manners of the Caribbean and the American South everywhere in the West 60s, virtually every kid became a kind of cultural hybrid. Thelonious absorbed Caribbean music. Through the radio and the sounds of the Victrola pouring out of his neighbors’ apartments, he heard the likes of Atilla the Hun, Lord Invader, the Roaring Lion, and other prominent calypsonians of that era, and he probably heard music from the Spanish Caribbean—rumba, son, habañera, tango. Block parties on West 63rd Street became another source of cultural exchange. In the early 1930s, a philanthropist known affectionately as “Uncle Robert” used to sponsor outdoor dances on West 63rd, with live bands and free lollipops for the kids.51 Monk was also familiar with many of the neighborhood musicians who played in local calypso or salsa bands. One can certainly hear explicit Caribbean rhythms in some of Monk’s original compositions, most notably “Bye-ya” and “Bemsha Swing,” which he wrote with his good friend, Barbadian-born drummer Denzil Best. The original copyrighted title was “Bimsha Swing,” Bimsha (or Bim or Bimshire) being a nickname for Barbados.52
After a very brief stay in a small apartment one flight up, the Monks moved downstairs to apartment 20, a slightly larger ground-floor, two-bedroom flat in the rear of the building.53 The apartment was designed around the kitchen. The front door opened into the kitchen; one bedroom was situated off to the right of it, and the living room could only be reached by walking through it. Off to the right of the living room was the other bedroom, and to the left was a tiny bathroom. The kitchen also included a hideaway bathtub. Although space was still limited, especially for a family of five, and not much sunlight found its way into their ground-floor windows, their new apartment was a giant step up from the tiny, dilapidated tenement across the street.
Once they arrived, Barbara and Thelonious, Sr. made a major acquisition that would change their middle child’s life forever: “A lady gave us a piano,” Thelonious recalled. “The player-piano kind. I saw how the rolls made the keys move. Very interesting. Sounded pretty good to me. I felt I did not want to waste this person’s gift, so I learned to use it.”54 He wasn’t the only one. His mother sat down on occasion and played the few hymns she had learned by ear. She knew just enough to earn a position as a principal pianist for the tiny storefront Baptist church she attended on West 61st Street.55 Thelonious, Sr. tickled the ivories a bit more frequently, and if the spirit hit him he’d bang late into the night, improvising on one of the two or three songs he knew. The neighbors weren’t pleased. One night some kids in the building placed a picture of a skull and crossbones on the Monks’ door while he was playing. The warning worked; after that he played his music at a decent hour and a bit more pianissimo.56
Not long after moving into the Phipps Houses, Thelonious, Sr. was compelled, once again by health reasons, to return to North Carolina. The polluted air and cold winters had aggravated what had become a severe case of asthma. After he was hospitalized for a major asthma attack, his doctor insisted that he leave New York immediately. Marion has no recollection of her father coming back to the house to say goodbye. There might be more to the story, however: During his brief stay in New York, Thelonious also suffered a near-fatal head injury in a fight with a man wielding a baseball bat. He began experiencing bouts of memory loss that would persist for the rest of his life.57
After just three or four years together, Barbara and Thelonious, Sr., split once again. This time it was for good. He made at least one more trip to New York in a failed effort to convince her and the children to return to Rocky Mount, but New York was now Barbara’s home. She had been doing a fine job on her own before he made the trek north, and she was determined to stay. Thelonious, Sr. moved in with his sisters, Eulah and Hettie, who still lived in the house on Dunn Street their brother Theodore (“Babe”) owned, and fell right back into the life of a common laborer, securing a job at a wrecking company.58
Thelonious, Jr., age eleven, had lived with his father for a total of seven years, some of which were before his earliest memories. From now on, he would be raised by his mother, and by New York City.