Nine days before Christmas in 1941, a card addressed to Thelonious Sphere Monk arrived in the mail. He had only recently adopted his maternal grandfather’s name as his own middle name. Uncle Sam knew it, and wanted him. The return address, 155 West 65th Street, was his local draft board. He was classified 1A, available for unrestricted military service.1
Monk half-expected the news since registering for selective service in October 1940, and receiving a questionnaire just two months before Pearl Harbor.2 Little over a week had passed since the attack. The United States and Britain had declared war on Japan the next day, and on December 11, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States. Hitler’s troops already occupied France, Poland, Greece, Czechoslovakia, and major parts of the Soviet Union, and fighting between Allied and Axis powers spilled into North Africa. As far as Uncle Sam was concerned, Monk was an ideal candidate for service: twenty-four years old, five feet, ten and a half inches, 168 pounds, good physical condition, and unemployed.3 Of course, there was the matter of color: The military was segregated and black troops were largely relegated to noncombat service roles.4 But neither patriotism nor a paycheck could persuade Thelonious to don a uniform and serve his country in this fashion. He wanted to play music and take care of his mother; toting water, building bridges, and digging trenches for his fellow white troops in a Jim Crow Army simply did not appeal to him.
The letter did not include his induction papers, and Monk was able to push the draft to the back of his mind. The more immediate problem was finding work. Having lost his gig as house pianist at Minton’s, Monk no longer enjoyed a steady income. Thanks to his mother, he did have a roof over his head, plenty to eat, and a decent piano at home. If it weren’t for Barbara’s continued support he might have had to join the world of wage work. Instead, Monk wrote music, practiced, and took whatever gigs he could find. He played in a band led by Kenny Clarke at Kelly’s Stable on 52nd Street for a couple of weeks, but didn’t work much more. Meanwhile, trumpeter Cootie Williams—who had formed his own orchestra late in 1941 after leaving Benny Goodman—had adopted Monk and Clarke’s “Epistrophy” as the opening and closing theme for his performances. Williams’s band appeared regularly at the popular Savoy Ballroom, introducing the song to a larger audience. Williams recorded “Epistrophy” under the title “Fly Right,” in Chicago on April 1, 1942, although two decades passed before it would be released. One of Monk’s collaborators from Minton’s, Joe Guy, was in Williams’s band and participated in the recording session. The pianist was another Minton’s regular—Ken Kersey. Had Monk heard Williams’s version, he would have recognized the melody but not much else. The arrangement is classic Cootie—danceable and typical of the style popular at the Savoy Ballroom.5
Monk would have jumped at a chance to join Cootie Williams’s Orchestra, or any name band at the time, but few bandleaders knew what to do with such an adventurous pianist. Ideally, Monk would have preferred to lead his own band and record his own songs, if only he could find a record label interested in his music. But even that prospect was cut short on August 1, 1942, when the American Federation of Musicians, under president James Petrillo, declared a strike against the record industry. All union musicians were banned from engaging in any recording activities. The AFM wanted the record labels to pay artists royalties every time their records were played on jukeboxes or similar devices in restaurants, clubs, bars, and anywhere else live music might be played. The union argued that “canned music” took away the musicians’ livelihood. For Decca, Capitol, and many small record labels, the strike lasted a little over a year, but major labels such as RCA Victor and Columbia did not settle the dispute until November of 1944, losing quite a bit of money in the process.6
Things seemed to be looking up for Monk when Lucius “Lucky” Millinder hired him to replace pianist Bill Doggett during an engagement at the Savoy Ballroom in early August.7 Dizzy Gillespie was playing with Millinder at the time and he lobbied his boss to hire Thelonious. (Monk, however, always believed Dizzy had ulterior motives: “He got me hired on piano so’s he could be around me” and therefore pick up more of his ideas.8) Monk’s old pal Nick Fenton was also in the band.9 It was a huge gig for Monk; Millinder’s orchestra was one of the hottest black dance bands in the country. Featuring Sister Rosetta Tharpe singing “spirituals in swing,” the band was known for its excellent arrangements and talented players, who were expected to cut a few choreographed dance steps on the bandstand.10 Despite the potential for long-term employment, however, the gig seemed doomed from the beginning. According to the band’s drummer, Panama Francis, Millinder simply detested Monk’s playing. “Monk came one night,” he recalled, “and played three or four pieces with us, after which Lucky told him to shove off and never come back.”11 In truth, Monk worked for a week at the Savoy before Millinder fired Monk, without notice and without pay.
Millinder’s actions prompted Monk to go to the union and file his first complaint against an employer. At a Local 802 trial board hearing on September 8, 1942, Monk testified, “I was working at the Savoy Ballroom and the defendant [Millinder] let me go. He worked at the Howard Theater. He didn’t pay me for the last week at the Savoy. Sunday night another man play; he just told me I was through. The scale was $38 for six days and I worked 7 days, and they had three more days to go at the Ballroom.”12 Millinder never showed up to the hearing to testify on his own behalf, although he was in town for an engagement at the Apollo.13 Unsurprisingly, the board sided with Monk, ruling that he was entitled to $63.33 in back wages for ten days of employment at the Savoy.14
During the weeks that followed, Monk was back to playing at dingy watering holes, house parties, and restaurants, though he still hung out at Minton’s on Monday nights. Toward the end of September, an obscure saxophonist named John Harley hired Monk to play at a Chinese restaurant in Harlem for five dollars a night, six nights a week. Nothing about their engagement went well. After about a month of miscommunication and mutual recrimination, Harley fired Monk, initiating a series of claims and counterclaims they both brought to the union. According to Harley, Monk was habitually late and often deliberately so. He recounted one story in which Monk brought his girlfriend—Rubie Richardson—and the owner refused to give the couple a half-price discount on food. Monk stormed out of the place and did not return until 11:00, an hour after the first set was scheduled to begin. “I was looking all over for a piano player and I had to play piano until he came in,” Harley testified. “I was ordered to get rid of him.” Another night, Monk didn’t show up at all and Harley had to hire “a blind pianist” to replace him. Harley paid the blind pianist out of Monk’s measly wages. What annoyed Harley most, however, was when Monk came to work drunk or high on reefer and fell asleep at the piano. He even claimed he saw Monk smoke marijuana on the bandstand. Fed up, Harley gave Monk two weeks’ notice, but as his erratic behavior only worsened the owner told Harley to let him go before the two weeks were up.15
Monk responded with humor, accusing Harley of being “a better liar than I am.” The real issue, he claimed, was the working conditions. “The reason he got mad,” Monk explained, “is because he works the musicians to death. He plays an hour and a half without stopping. I have to play every minute[.] I said we are playing too hard for this little bit of money. He was working me to death while he stood up there with his horn. The reason he fired me is because I said we were working too hard and should rest some of the time. He said to me I hope you do get off the stand so I can fire you at the end of the night and then he said you are fired and it was in the middle of the week.”16 The case was held over until November 4, at which time Harley produced two witnesses, Shadrack Dobson and Charles Lee, to attest to Monk’s character and undependability. Lee, a tenor player who hung out at Monroe’s and would go on to make a couple of rhythm and blues recordings with Al Tinney,17 was openly hostile to Monk, stating, “I wouldn’t want Monk on the job.” Dobson, a bassist who sat in with Monk at Minton’s on Monday nights, was a bit more charitable, though he agreed that Thelonious frequently fell asleep on the job. In the end, both witnesses concluded that had it not been for the owner of the restaurant, Harley probably would not have fired Monk.18 The trial board took no action, and both parties agreed to go their separate ways. Monk was out several days’ pay, and his confidence in the union began to wane. But Monk would forever be sensitive to the exploitation of musicians, especially at the hands of club owners and record labels.
Monk’s inability to keep a steady job continued to dog his already suffering relationship with Rubie Richardson. She was now twenty-five years old and had established a career as a dietician. When a position opened up in Washington, D.C., toward the end of 1942, she accepted and left New York.19 It was the end of her relationship with Thelonious, and a very difficult experience for him. “When they broke up, man, that was one of the saddest days in my uncle’s life,” recalled Thomas Monk, Jr., who was five at the time. “He came up to the house and talked to my mother. And he said, ‘I don’t know what to do. I ain’t got Rubie.’ ”20
As always, Monk found some solace at Sonny’s place. Sonny, Geraldine, and the children had left Harlem for the Bronx in 1942, eventually settling into a large three-bedroom apartment on Lyman Place.21 They needed the space: on May 18, 1942, Geraldine gave birth to their third child and first son, Clifton. Thelonious now had more children to dote on and a model of family life he admired and sometimes longed for.
The only one missing was Sonny’s sister Nellie. Early in the year, she had taken a job at Bridgeport Brass—an established brass works plant that was now alloying cartridge cases and manufacturing aluminum rods, nonferrous condenser tubes, and fire extinguishers for the military.22 For several months, Nellie made the long commute to Connecticut, until she lost part of her finger in a terrible accident on the job. She was forced to take time off to recover. It was then, during the summer of 1942, that Nellie made the decision to leave New York and move back to Jacksonville, Florida, her birthplace.23
Elisha Smith had not seen his daughter in nearly two decades. Suddenly the sixty-six-year-old bachelor had to share his tiny house at 1304 Fairfax Street with a young woman about whom he knew next to nothing. For Nellie, who had lost her mother at a young age, reuniting with her father turned out to be a bittersweet experience. She was able to learn more about her family, and why her parents had split up. But she also found herself in the position of caregiver—“E.B.” had begun to show signs of dementia.24
Her uncle, James Clifton Smith, a prominent educator living in nearby St. Augustine, encouraged Nellie to enroll in school rather than waste away in a low-wage job. His own daughter, Anna Lou Smith, was to begin classes that fall at Florida Normal and Industrial Memorial Institute, conveniently located in St. Augustine. An historically black college, Florida Normal had been formed the previous year, through a merger between two older schools, Florida Baptist Institute for Negroes (founded in 1879 in Live Oak) and Florida Baptist Academy (founded in Jacksonville in 1892).25 James persuaded Nellie to move in with them and attend school with Anna Lou in the fall. Although the Smiths were raising eight children on two schoolteachers’ salaries, Anna Lou had just graduated from high school at fourteen. Nellie was twenty years old and could watch out for her younger cousin.26
• • •
Meanwhile, Monk’s own circle of friends and musical compatriots continued to grow. In 1942, he met a couple of young, talented pianists from Harlem who not only possessed facility and imagination but were open to new ideas. Earl “Bud” Powell and St. Elmo Sylvester Hope were already friends when they met Monk. And they were young: seventeen and eighteen, respectively.27 The middle son of William and Pearl Powell, Bud grew up in one of Harlem’s many extraordinary musical families. William Powell was a stride pianist and band leader, though he made ends meet as a superintendent of apartment buildings on 140th Street and St. Nicholas and as a freelance house painter.28 Bud’s big brother, William, Jr. (Skeets), was a violinist and trumpet player, and his baby brother Richie followed their dad and Bud to the keyboards. Richie was good—good enough to one day join the Clifford Brown–Max Roach quintet. But Bud was the prodigy of the family. “By the time he was ten he could play everything he’d heard by Fats Waller and Art Tatum,” his father recalled.29 And Chopin, Debussy, Mozart, Schumann, Bach, and virtually any music his strict piano teacher placed in front of him. Like Monk, Powell attended one of the city’s most distinguished public schools, DeWitt Clinton High School in the Bronx (Powell’s classmates included literary giant James Baldwin), but dropped out at fifteen to play professionally. He played in his brother Skeets’s band and gigged as a solo pianist around Harlem and the Village, yet one of his first regular jobs was with trumpeter Valaida Snow and her Sunset Royal Entertainers in Coney Island in 1940.30
Elmo Hope also had a strong classical foundation. By the time he was fourteen years old, Hope had already achieved distinction as one of Harlem’s outstanding young concert pianists. Born to Caribbean immigrants Simon and Ida Gertrude Hope, Elmo attended Benjamin Franklin High School in East Harlem—renowned for its excellent music program.31 After school, he and Powell would practice and listen to music together, though each developed his own distinctive style.32
Some say Hope was as talented and promising as Powell. He was fleet, inventive, possessed an exhaustive knowledge of harmony, and had aspirations to become a composer. At sixteen, he had already composed several jazz pieces, as well as modern concert works. But in the wee hours of Sunday morning, November 24, 1940, Hope suffered a tragic setback when a police officer’s bullet almost ended his life. Hope and a friend had just gotten off the subway at 110th Street and were walking toward Eighth Avenue. On the way, they encountered a crowd of young men who began to scramble when someone yelled, “The cops are coming, you better run!” Elmo tried to duck into a nearby hallway on Eighth Avenue, but the officer shot him in the back. He was rushed to Sydenham Hospital in critical condition. The police charged Hope with felonious assault while he was in the hospital fighting for his life, but faced with no evidence and the threat of a lawsuit, they had to drop all charges.33
After a long, slow recovery, Elmo returned to music, though he wasn’t the same. He did not return to school to complete his diploma or pursue a career as a concert pianist, choosing instead to follow Bud into the New York jazz labor market—taking gigs at taxi dance halls on 14th Street and various small dives throughout the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Coney Island.34 But he never stopped composing. Indeed, in Monk he found a kindred spirit, a fellow composer committed to creating a new architecture for improvisational music.
Thelonious, Bud, and Elmo hit it off right away; for a while, they were inseparable. Marion recalls that once they started hanging out together, they were at Monk’s mother’s house “all the time.”35 But in March of 1943, Hope enlisted in the army and disappeared from the scene for several years.36 Hope’s tour of duty and his subsequent stints with R&B bands essentially led to his erasure from bebop’s formative history, not to mention Monk and Powell’s own musical development. Well after the war, Hope would reunite with his two friends, but in the meantime Monk became something of a big brother and mentor to Powell.
In Monk’s view, Bud was a diamond in the rough just ready to be polished. “When I met him, he did not know much on the piano. He had a very distinct style, but he didn’t know much about harmony, I had to teach him about it.”37 When Monk felt his young protégé was ready, he introduced Bud to the Minton’s crowd in 1942. It was hardly an easy sell. Monk told Nat Hentoff later that initially Kenny Clarke opposed letting the kid on the bandstand.38 In Clarke’s version of the story, Teddy Hill was the obstacle. Evidently, the audience preferred Monk to this unknown teenager, and Hill did all he could to persuade Monk to return to the piano bench. Hill’s reaction angered Monk, who threatened to walk out. By Clarke’s account, Monk shouted, “Are you deaf? Don’t you hear what he’s doing? If you don’t listen to him, I won’t play any more!”39 More than once Monk used threats to keep Bud on the bandstand. “When Bud Powell was very young,” Monk recalled in a 1963 interview, “no one wanted to listen to him. When he arrived in a place where I was playing, I would leave the piano and announce ‘Bud is going to play.’ Everyone yelled, ‘We don’t want to hear him.’ I said, ‘Then I am not playing anymore. It’s either Bud or no one.’ And the audience was forced to listen to Bud.”40
Monk was so convincing that soon Bud Powell was working regularly while Monk was still cobbling together a string of low-paying one-night stands. In 1943, Powell became the regular pianist in the Cootie Williams Orchestra.41 Williams had to assume legal guardianship of nineteen-year-old Bud in order to take him on the road. Monk was pleased for Powell and never stopped singing his praises, but he was hurt by the turn of events: “Once again, it happened that I couldn’t find a gig. Bud was getting bigger and bigger and all of a sudden some people started to believe that Bud inspired me. What a joke. When Bud would come to my house, he would ask me to show him the simplest things to teach him the harmonies that I use.”42 Pianist Mary Lou Williams also recognized the huge impact Monk’s mentoring had on Powell: “Monk influenced [Bud] as a kid. He idolises Monk and can interpret Monk’s compositions better than anyone I know. And the two used to be inseparable. At the piano Bud still does a few things the way Monk would do them, though he has more technique.”43
Bud Powell could, indeed, come close to reproducing Monk, but he had his own style as well, one that placed greater emphasis on the right hand. He became famous for playing “horn-like” melodious lines with his right hand, against sparse voicings with his left—an approach he had begun to develop with Elmo Hope. When the branch of modern jazz that has come to be known as bebop took off a couple of years later, Powell’s style of playing seemed more suitable than Monk’s. The beboppers—Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, and their followers—reveled in speed and virtuosity. The piano was no longer essential for rhythmic support; now it joined the chorus of soloists. And Bud Powell’s ability to sustain inventive and vibrant melodic lines at a blistering pace made him the most sought-after pianist of his generation. Powell was modern enough for swing bands such as the Cootie Williams Orchestra without the overwhelming dissonance that repelled so many bandleaders from hiring Monk.
In late March 1943, Monk received an “Order to Report for Induction” from Uncle Sam. He was to report to the local Army Induction Center on April 12, at 6:00 a.m. It was fifteen months since he had been classified 1A. By now, Monk hated the Nazis and was sympathetic to the French resistance to Fascism. He was even known to show up at Minton’s sporting a beret and announcing “France libre, France libre!”44 Yet he was unwilling to enlist. Very few black musicians were eager to leave the music scene to fight another white man’s war. Many of Monk’s colleagues deliberately set out to change their status from 1A to 4F, or unfit for military service. Some ingested a mixture of benzedrine nasal spray and coke in order to make their “heart sound defective to the draft board’s doctors.”45 Others chose to “perform” for the Army psychiatrist, feigning madness, hostility, or homosexuality. Dizzy Gillespie reportedly secured his 4F status by portraying himself as a potential enemy combatant: “Well, look, at this time, at this stage in my life here in the United States whose foot has been in my ass? The white man’s foot has been in my ass hole buried up to his knee in my ass hole! . . . Now you’re speaking of the enemy. You’re telling me the German is the enemy. At this point, I can never even remember having met a German. So if you put me out there with a gun in my hand and tell me to shoot at the enemy, I’m liable to create a case of ‘mistaken identity,’ of who I might shoot.”46 Jazz vocalist Babs Gonzalez painted his fingernails and toenails fire-engine red, curled his hair, and went to his neighborhood induction center in Newark wearing women’s underwear. As soon as Gonzalez began to strip for his physical, the doctor immediately hustled him to the psychiatrist:
His first question was “you look dazed. Are you drunk?” I said no. I had been smoking Marijuana. He made a notation then asked me where I got it. I told him on any corner in “Harlem” if you had the money. His next question was “did I like girls and did I have a girl friend?” I jumped out of the chair screaming never to mention girls to me. He asked why did I wear female garments. I told him I was a female impersonator on the stage and wore my attire in the street, too.
He was just sitting there talking when I touched his hand saying, “You sure are an understanding man, I wish I could visit and talk with you some place after you’re finished working.” He snatched his hand away and promptly began stamping papers telling me to get out and wait in the next room. In fifteen minutes a guard came up and gave me a card marked “4FH” and told me to go home.47
Black resistance to the draft was pervasive. By late 1943, African-Americans comprised 35 percent of the nation’s delinquent registrants, and between 1941 and 1946 more than two thousand black men were imprisoned for not complying with the provisions of the Selective Service Act.48
Monk was compliant, to a point. He made it to the induction center on time, passed his physical, but at the end of the mandatory fifteen-minute interview with the Army psychiatrist, his file was stamped “psychiatric reject” and reclassified 4F.49 According to family lore, he went down there with Sonny Smith, who launched into a diatribe against racism and slavery in the United States, arguing that he could never be loyal to this country. Monk echoed these sentiments in his interview, and both were classified mentally unfit to serve.50 However, given the Selective Service’s track record with regard to African-American inductees, it is entirely possible that Thelonious was labeled a “psychiatric reject” without any effort on his part. Across the nation, young black men were rejected at a much higher rate than whites based on their physical and mental evaluations. The army’s explanation for the disproportionate rejection rates was that black men had higher incidences of tuberculosis, cardiovascular problems, and mental illness such as “psychopathic personality,” a catch-all phrase that incorporated “constitutional psychopathic inferiority, criminal records, and sexual psychopathy.” The NAACP conducted its own study of local draft boards, finding that the boards were predominantly, if not completely, white, and documenting many examples of outright racial bias. Some psychiatrists on the Selective Service’s Central Examining Board for Neurology and Psychiatry revealed that it was especially difficult to diagnose blacks because certain dysfunctional behaviors are “naturally” part of their character. As one doctor admitted, “The colored men offered me the greatest difficulty in diagnosis. . . . Poor cultural, occupation and educational backgrounds often made it difficult to decide whether they were defective, preschizoid, or just colored.”51
Black men fortunate enough to avoid the draft still faced a kind of war at home. They battled a federal government seemingly indifferent to the fact that Americans were called upon to crush Nazism while white supremacy persisted in the United States. Many African-Americans believed World War II was about racial justice, and that the horrors of war provided an opportunity to demand equal treatment. Black leaders called for a “Double Victory”—a victory against fascism abroad and racism at home. The NAACP enjoyed a ten-fold increase in membership; the Nation of Islam (whose members resisted the draft) suddenly became a force to be reckoned with; and new organizations, such as the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), came into being during the war.52 Activists declared war over a year before Pearl Harbor when a black woman delegate to a civil rights conference proposed a march on Washington led by labor leader A. Philip Randolph. Randolph took up the challenge, warning President Roosevelt that if he did not issue an executive order banning discrimination in hiring, employment training programs, and unions, and desegregate the armed forces, 100,000 African-Americans would march on the nation’s capital. While not all of the demands were met, Roosevelt averted the march by issuing Executive Order 8802 creating the Fair Employment Practice Committee (1941), which ultimately persuaded the National War Labor Board to abolish wage differentials based on race.53
Between black activism and the demands of the war industry, black working people fled the South in large numbers for the sprawling factories of the urban North. About 1 million African-Americans were added to the industrial labor force. Sixty percent were women who, for the most part, took the opportunity to leave domestic service for factory jobs. War-time industry proved to be a crucial battleground in the fight for racial justice. In places like Mobile, Alabama, and Philadelphia, white workers waged “hate strikes” to protest the promotion of black men and women workers, and African-Americans frequently retaliated with their own wildcat strikes to resist racism. These battles often spilled out into the city streets. Dramatic incidents of racial violence occurred in cities across the country, sometimes prompted by an act of police brutality, a shopfloor rumble, or a scuffle on a bus or a streetcar. By June of 1943, race riots had erupted in Los Angeles, Detroit, Beaumont, Texas, and Mobile, Alabama, and a black man was lynched in Marianna, Florida. Indeed, it might be said that while U. S. troops invaded Normandy and bombed Okinawa, African-Americans fought their own war at home.54
Although large-scale riots occurred infrequently, many African-Americans experienced small, daily skirmishes with local police. Of course, neither police harassment nor race riots were new to Thelonious. Indeed, most young black men raised in America’s metropolitan areas had grown accustomed to these kinds of incidents. What was different, so it seemed, was the defiant posture of the new generation. Young black men adopted the language and sartorial style of the “hep cat,” and combined it with an intellectual fervor and engagement with the world. While few went so far as to don bright-colored zoot suits with wide-brimmed hats and gold chains, they dressed sharply, and resisted not only the dominant culture and its attendant racism and patriotism, but also the rural folkways that still survived in most black urban households. They created a fast-paced, improvisational language style that sharply contrasted with the passive stereotype of the stuttering, tongue-tied Sambo. And in a world where whites commonly addressed them as “boy,” young black males made a fetish of calling each other “man.”55 The police often regarded musicians as particularly defiant, if not outright criminal. Some openly dated white women, spoke back to police officers, and were involved in or associated with the drug culture that permeated the jazz scene. The very thought of able-bodied young men enjoying the stateside nightlife while others just like them were fighting and dying overseas was enough to push some cops over the edge. It was enough to render all jazz musicians suspect.
Thelonious became one of those suspects just five weeks after his induction ordeal. In mid-May, he took a brief trip to Washington, D.C., possibly to visit Rubie. On May 19, the D.C. police arrested him on suspicion of possession and use of narcotics. They held him for several hours, but he was eventually released.56 It turned out to be the first of several arrests Monk would endure during the course of his life, but he never spoke about it publicly.
Monk hustled back to New York, and it seems his luck began to change. Minton’s came calling again, this time for a fairly long-term engagement leading a quartet of some former Playhouse pals, Kermit Scott on tenor sax and drummer Harold “Doc” West. Ironically, Monk was hired to replace Sonny White (Kenny Clarke’s initial choice for the house pianist at Minton’s back in 1941), who had been drafted.57 If Nick Fenton were in the band, it would have been like Minton’s of two years ago, but he had enlisted in the U.S. Army in August.58 On bass, instead, was a twenty-year-old newcomer named Oscar Pettiford. A black Indian from Okmulgee, Oklahoma, Pettiford had only recently arrived in New York with Charlie Barnet’s band. He grew up performing in his family’s band in and around Minneapolis, where he played bass and cello and proved competent on a number of other instruments.59 Just weeks before arriving in the Big Apple, he jammed with Dizzy Gillespie and alto saxophonist Charlie Parker at the Savoy Hotel in Chicago.60 The word “bebop” had yet to be spoken, and Parker had yet to make a name for himself, but Pettiford sensed something was happening in the music. He desperately wanted to be a part of it. At Minton’s, Monk took a liking to him and found yet another student to teach. With the arrival of Pettiford, according to Monk, “We got a different way to play rhythm. Pretty soon everybody followed our example and that’s the kind of rhythm section they play today.”61
Minton’s drew pretty good crowds with Monk at the helm, despite the growing competition from clubs in midtown, on 52nd Street, and a sudden clampdown on Harlem nightlife. City, state, and federal authorities were concerned that white servicemen on leave spent too much time uptown. Fears of crime in Harlem were greatly exaggerated, as were concerns that servicemen were contracting syphilis and gonorrhea from black prostitutes, yet these were the official explanations for what turned out to be a generalized fear of too much interracial mingling and potential interracial violence. One of the first salvos in a new war on vice in Harlem was to close down the Savoy Ballroom on 141st and Lenox. Mayor LaGuardia gave the order to padlock the popular dance hall on April 21, 1943. Harlemites were up in arms: If vice were really the issue, the Savoy was the last place to target. It served only ginger ale, despite having a liquor license. It had eliminated its dance hostesses, and only admitted patrons over eighteen, despite the fact that the law allowed customers as young as sixteen. Closing the Savoy not only removed a major leisure outlet for black residents, it eliminated dozens of jobs.62
• • •
Throughout the spring and summer of 1943, it seemed as if police occupied every street corner uptown. They monitored the streets and the clubs looking for evidence of vice, and Minton’s regulars were aware of the plainclothes officers occupying a table or a booth. Ascending from the IRT Station on 116th and Seventh Avenue, on Sunday night, August 1, Monk heard the faint sound of sirens and noticed a little more commotion in the streets than usual. Plumes of smoke were blowing south from 125th Street. Uptown along Seventh Avenue, crowds of Harlem residents were gathered on street corners, fighting with police, breaking windows. A concentration of folks gathered in front of Sydenham Hospital on 125th Street, just east of Seventh. Monk was witnessing one of the worst civil disturbances in Harlem since the riot of 1935.
The spark that ignited the riot involved the police, who had been staking out the Hotel Braddock for illegal activities, including solicitation. Located just around the corner from the Apollo on 126th and Eighth Avenue, the Braddock was once famous for catering to show-business celebrities. It was one of Thelonious’s favorite haunts. A few weeks earlier, fights had broken out in front of the hotel, prompting a permanent police presence in the lobby. The officers assigned to the Braddock barred interracial couples from entering. At about 7:30 in the evening of August 1, the police officer on duty, James Collins, arrested a black woman named Marjorie Polite, after witnessing an argument between Polite and a hotel employee. Collins intervened and charged her with disturbing the peace. When Polite resisted arrest, Collins began dragging her. A black army private, Robert Bandy, was in the lobby with his mother, Florine Roberts, and his girlfriend. Seeing a white officer attacking a black woman, he came to her defense. Bandy tried to persuade Collins to release her, but Collins threatened Bandy with his nightstick. They began fighting, and in the ensuing scuffle Collins shot Bandy in the shoulder. When word of the shooting hit the streets, Harlem blew up. Over the course of twenty-four hours, six people lay dead, nearly 700 were injured, 550 were arrested, and 1,485 stores were damaged or burned to the ground. Over thirty fires had been set, and the monetary damage came to nearly five million dollars.63
The insurrection dealt a severe blow to Harlem businesses, including nightclubs and bars that were already on the decline due to increased police surveillance.64 Minton’s would continue to plod along for a while, but crowds diminished and the golden age appeared more golden than ever in the memories of old-timers. More importantly, Monk was suddenly out of a job.
• • •
Despite losing the gig at Minton’s, Monk spent the remaining weeks of summer in good spirits. Nellie had returned, gorgeous as ever! She still had those naturally high cheekbones and dark, deep-set eyes, and had stayed as thin as a rail—at five feet, seven inches, she barely weighed one hundred pounds. The South Florida sun gave her dark brown skin a vibrant glow, and a year in college endowed her with an air of sophistication neither Monk nor any of her friends and family had seen before. There was no mistaking the fact that she was a fully grown woman.
Although she never completed her business degree, she gained quite a lot during her year at Florida Normal and Industrial Institute. She took a range of business and liberal-arts courses with mixed results,65 and she grew quite close to her cousin Anna Lou Smith. “Nellie was extremely generous,” recalls Anna Lou, “and had a wonderful sense of humor and a wonderful way with people. I was much more introverted because I had been socially out of sync. That was a very good year for me because she kind of helped me come out of my shell.”66 Florida Normal was a strict Baptist college. Freshmen were prohibited from face-to-face dancing; daily chapel, Wednesday night prayer meetings, and vespers on Sunday were all mandatory; and three absences from any of these sacred events meant being placed on the “blue jay” list—better known as laundry duty.67 A Baptist college just wasn’t Nellie’s cup of tea. And as much as she appreciated the time with her Florida family, she felt an enormous financial strain. She used to tell Anna Lou jokingly, “You know, I like living here but we’re so poor. It takes ten cents to go to the movies, but to try to get that ten cents is so hard!”68 After a year there, Nellie had had enough of Florida.
Nellie’s only regret was leaving her father behind in Jacksonville. His condition worsened to the point where he could no longer live alone. He moved in with his sister, Rosa Bell Williams, and when she could no longer handle him, he moved in with James Clifton and his family in St. Augustine. There he became a somewhat notorious character, wandering into town in search of a piano to play. He would try to break into homes or knock on the doors of strangers in his quest to play the one song he knew. At first it was charming, then an outright nuisance. His wanderings came to an abrupt end one day in 1949 when he broke into the mayor’s house. He was committed to Florida State Hospital in Chattahoochee—a former correctional facility turned state mental institution notorious for mistreating patients. Fifteen days after he was admitted, he died of pneumonia. E.B. was seventy-three years old.69
Back in New York, Thelonious began spending more and more time at Sonny’s house on Lyman Place. As devoted as he was to San Juan Hill, living there after 1942 became somewhat intolerable, because the city had begun razing all of the old tenement apartments to replace them with high-rise projects known as the Amsterdam Houses. Everything was leveled except for the Phipps Houses.70 But escaping the noise and the dust was just part of his motivation for hanging out in the Bronx. He wanted to see Nellie. He took her out a few times for drinks, mostly to such local Bronx joints as the Band Box or a bar called Kenny’s, within walking distance of Lyman Place. But Nellie soon began seeing another man known simply as “Brother Roscoe.” Geraldine Smith remembered Roscoe as “a very dapper young man. He knew all the things to do and to say. He was something else.” Brother Roscoe started taking Nellie out to more upscale spots, as well as museums, galleries, and occasional concerts. Monk continued to spend more time at the Smiths’ place than at his own house, and one day, Brother Roscoe arrived to take Nellie boating, wearing matching shorts and shirt, cap, and carrying a large picnic basket for the trip. Roscoe was invited to sit in the living room with Monk and Sonny while Nellie finished getting ready. Thelonious broke the awkward silence. Glaring at the basket, Monk asked Brother Roscoe, “Hey, whaddya got there? What’s that? We’re really hungry, you think maybe you might spare some extra food?” Nervously, Roscoe relented and timidly handed over the basket. Sonny and Thelonious dug in. They didn’t stop until they polished off every morsel in the basket. Roscoe was speechless and angry. When Nellie finally emerged, Brother Roscoe hustled her out of the house with his empty picnic basket. After Nellie returned from the afternoon excursion, Monk pulled her aside and said, “If you want to go out places, I can take you out. That’s nothing; I can do that.”71 It was the last time Brother Roscoe came calling.
Thelonious was in love . . . again. And in Nellie he found his muse. By the end of the summer of 1943, Monk had finally completed a ballad in C minor he had been noodling around with for at least a year. He asked a friend of his, a young woman from the neighborhood named Thelma Elizabeth Murray, to pen lyrics to accompany the song’s haunting melody.72 The daughter of a Baptist minister, Murray was both a fine singer and a piano player steeped in the sacred music tradition, with a passion for popular song.73 Like Thelonious, she wanted a “hit.” Titled “I Need You So,” the words could have easily referred to Monk’s longing for Nellie during her year in Florida:
Since you went away I missed you,
Ev’ry hour I’ve wished to kiss you.
You are in my dreams, always
I need you so.
Life is incomplete without you
Don’t know what it is about you
Makes my heart believe you care
I need you so!
You are my own
Still, I am all alone
Longing, waiting
I love you so darling
This is why I’ll go on believing
You’ll be standing by my side
Sooner than I realize
I need you so.74
Monk registered the composition with the U.S. Copyright Office on September 24, 1943, granting Murray full credit for her contribution. It was the first composition registered under Monk’s name as the lead composer. The lyrics were never recorded, but the melody lingered on. A few months later, it was resurrected in a different key with minor alterations. He began calling it “ ’Round Midnight.”