MEMPHIS—Summer 1951—
4
In 1951 Memphis, on hot summer days on Beale Street, big-bellied, white-shirted black police officers walked in twos. They were like Abbott and Costello—with big guns high on their hips—sweat dripping. Customers came out of the shops with brown paper bags containing their food or ate at the tables inside. But the officers came out with fat sandwiches, having walked in, stepped behind the counter, and made their own food, leaving without paying. Not so much as a look at the black proprietor.
My dad taught some of these officers in his ninth-grade algebra class at B. T. Washington High School. They were respectful of Mr. Jones, who turned out impeccably dressed in white shirt and tie and addressed the young men and women as Mr. or Miss.
SAN FRANCISCO—1972—5
He was so respected that the memory of him lasted in his students’ minds for years. In 1972, some twenty years later, I was on my way from Seattle to San Francisco, and the flight had stopped in Portland, Oregon. A young black man about my age took the empty seat next to me. Without introduction, he started to talk to me, opened his briefcase to show, to my dismay, that it was filled with tightly wrapped bills.
He smiled at my reaction and continued to talk as if he knew me. I responded nervously, knowing his type was not one to be standoffish with.
Landing in San Francisco, I put on the speed and, with a brief goodbye, walked swiftly ahead of him toward baggage claim. As I walked, a dark-suited man appeared on my left and seemed to be pacing me. Another suited man appeared on my right. Within seconds a man moved in front, slowing down a bit. I didn’t bother looking behind.
I was funneled through a doorway, down a stairway, through a corridor, and into an interrogation room underneath the airport. A detective was waiting near a large conference table. The men stood around as he asked about my “friend” on the plane. How well did I know him?
“Who’s your pal with the briefcase?”
“I don’t know him.”
“What’s your name?
“Booker T. Jones.”
He frowned. “No, what’s your name?”
Another detective stood close. “The man asked you a question—best you tell the truth.”
“Like I said, Booker T. Jones!” I said, breathing faster.
Taking my ID, the detective at the desk said, “You Booker T. Jones? You Mr. Jones’s son?”
“Yes, yes!” I answered.
“Get outta here, boy! Your father was my homeroom teacher at Booker Washington! No way you’re involved in this thing!”
The officers stepped aside, and I bounded up the steps and out of the airport very relieved! I don’t know if the money was real or who the guy was, but I’m sure he’s still in jail now.
MEMPHIS—1951—2
When I was a young boy, my dad and I were always physically close to one another—going places, playing ball, or listening to the radio. Both my parents were loving people, and our home was filled with warmth and happiness. I was protected, looked after, and cared for. When we weren’t working, we were having fun with cards or checkers. We relaxed together with long drives in the car. Dad was a huge baseball fan, and we listened to the Dodgers games on the front porch.
I also loved baseball. I played every day. My first glove, which I oiled and cleaned regularly, was my prized possession, save my B-flat clarinet. I slapped my fist into it to shape it up. I kept it wrapped in a curled position with a large rubber band to make it supple and easy to use. When it was ready, Dad threw a ball out to me in the yard. I caught it with my fielder’s glove. My pitcher’s mitt was my other most prized possession. As far as I knew, I was the only kid on our block to have one.
When we weren’t tossing the ball around, we would sit together on the porch and listen to every Dodgers game in the summertime. We didn’t speak, just paid close attention to every word from the announcer—it was a bonding experience. When Jackie Robinson hit a home run, we and the rest of the world erupted.
In the unbearable heat of midsummer, in his uniform of tennis shoes, shorts, T-shirt, and a baseball cap, my dad would take his position on the side porch, along with a large pitcher of iced lemonade, away from the sun. I was never far away, most usually sitting on his lap with his hands on both my knees, a position so comforting and serene to me I have never been able to replace it. I knew when to jump down by the pitch of the game…just in time to let him jump up for his holler, “Did you hear that, Leanie?” He had played baseball on a local black team in Holly Springs for years, and in the country baseball was more revered than church.
Of course, Leanie heard that. All of Memphis, the entire nation heard that. There was no professional football or soccer or hockey or basketball; there was only baseball, and besides the occasional boxing match, it was all that was necessary. Even when Arthur Ashe commanded professional tennis, baseball kept its place. Baseball. “Whoo, whoo!” you could hear Mama laughing in the kitchen, and next-door neighbor Mrs. Pritchard rolled her eyes from her chair, perched on the side of her porch where she could hear the goings-on in and around our house.
Daddy would holler, jump up and down, and run back and forth out into the street, and his glass of lemonade just sat, unattended, with frost from the ice dripping, on the edge of the porch. His noise drowned out the radio, and Mama and I assumed the celebration was because Jackie Robinson had hit one of his 137 home runs. We went to the screen door to watch. “Whoo! Whoo!” resonated up and down the street in a ritual that had repeated itself more times than I can name. When the Dodgers scored, everyone in my neighborhood for two streets on either side knew because my daddy hollered so loud. Other men in the neighborhood had their radios tuned in to the game and had the same reaction.
It’s baseball for breakfast, baseball for lunch, and baseball for dinner. I can’t count the times I broke Mrs. Humes’s back-bedroom window with a line drive meant to be a homer sailing across the roof of her house. But I had my loving dad, then my paper route, to pay for the broken glass. It happened so many times she stopped getting mad. In fact, Mrs. Humes began to enjoy letting us boys use her backyard for our games. It kept us off the street, and her nephew, Skipper, enjoyed being the center of attention. Even though he couldn’t hit a fence with a ball or bat, he was included in every game.
MEMPHIS—Fall 1953—4
There were less wonderful moments growing up too, and my father saved the day for me more times than I can remember, such as the time he ran off some thugs down on Lauderdale Street who had surrounded me to take my paper route money. Since it was early on my route, I was loaded down with two heavy cloth sacks of papers over both my shoulders. I couldn’t move my arms above my elbows—I couldn’t defend myself from boys from south of Lauderdale Street. I was bracing myself next to my bicycle when, out of nowhere, a white ’49 Ford screeched to a halt on the other side of the street. A small man jumped out angrily with his fist balled up…walking fast at the thugs. “How you makin’ it, boy?” Dad greeted me.
The thugs hesitated.
“Boy, I’ll beat the stew out of you!” my dad said to one of them.
They scurried like mice in all directions. He walked to his car, the engine still running, and pulled off. From then on, I was clear to throw papers on Lauderdale.
I was never so glad to see my dad, especially since I didn’t learn to fight back until high school, when one day I hit one of the worst thugs in Memphis. They called him Ba’ Brother, and he cornered me one night in the basement of our church. My dad was his math teacher and had given him an F. He was just kind of toying with me, and before he knew it, I landed a nice one right on his jaw. He looked at me in disbelief.
Ba’ Brother won the fight that followed, but after that, certain thugs became nice and even wanted to hang out with me. A big guy from South Memphis named Levi, who I had been afraid of, even started staying close and being friendly. Word got out that Booker T. hit Ba’ Brother.
MEMPHIS—Fall 1952—2
At a young age, I felt the need to be busy and self-sufficient, though I had no idea how to do that.
I spent more than a few evenings in the Urban League office where my mother worked, waiting for my dad to pick us up. In the hall was a rack where people passing through from other offices in the building would pick up a copy of the Memphis World, a local black weekly newspaper. The World was popular but not as much as the Tri-State Defender, a weekly paper for the black community.
When I was old enough, I stood in line outside of one of the press’s weekly meetings for its carriers and obtained an application for a route. I attended the meetings for months before a route opened up.
There was a two-week apprenticeship with the outgoing paperboy. It was a small route with only thirty-five customers. The only way to get there from my house was down tiny McEwen Street, then left on Mason Street—enemy territory—a gang-infested section one block away from South Fourth Street.
My mentor was a big, streetwise boy who was not intimidated by the gangs. But as soon as he stopped mentoring me, the harassment and attacks started, mainly on Fridays, which were collection days.
Turning left on Mason from McEwen meant passing by Mason Temple. It was on this route that I first heard the Staple Singers through the double-wide church doors, open to the street. I slowed down to see them filling the pulpit in colorful robes. Their father was playing an electric guitar, and their voices were surging. What a sight. What a sound. Guitar in church. What an outrage. God in church.
With only thirty-five customers, my Tri-State Defender route wasn’t very profitable.
I put in a second application to throw the Press Scimitar. I was eleven years old. My new route consisted of seventy customers. I was glad to get it—twice as many customers as my first. The route encompassed a squalid quarter, but it was on the way home from school.
My papers were dropped off at 4:30 p.m. on the lawn of a big church on the corner of Mississippi and Alston. I strapped one bag over each shoulder, folding the papers as I walked. The cloth bags were enormous. I looked like a pregnant boy. When I’d get distracted, I’d stop at the first house on Alston, the home of Memphis jazz pianist Phineas Newborn—I could hear him practicing piano with the screen door open. If I stopped, I would be late delivering the whole route…dallying at Phineas’s front yard to fold my papers and listen to him play. Phineas Newborn was a Memphis jazz institution. I didn’t know that then, of course.
After a few weeks, I started to solicit customers farther up on Lauderdale Street, off my route, on the way home. I started soliciting all the way to Lauderdale and Walker and added customers to my route, to a total of 120 customers.
To handle this additional volume, I went home after school and got my Western Flyer bicycle with its rack over the back tire. I folded the papers, stuffing them into bags hung on the sides of the rack before I left the pick-up point, and stood up while riding to throw the papers on the run. This system worked well—except my aim was not as good as it was when I was walking. I tried to land the papers just above the front step—right in front of the door.
It wasn’t unusual for me to walk up the steps to a porch on my routine Friday collection trip and find a little girl answering the door, saying, “My mama say she not here.”
It was typical for my customers to avoid paying me for a week or two, whether they had the money or not. I would continue throwing to them for a few weeks, trying to collect every week, until too many weeks of nonpayment accumulated for me to keep the customer.
There were numerous challenges. Some houses were up on hills…some had hedges to throw over. Some had fences or dogs to bark at you while you tried to perfectly place those papers on the porch. There were mishaps. I broke windows, overturned statues, threw papers in bushes and puddles.
Parts of my paper route were so poor and squalid that the city would have kept them secret if it could have. (As if there were anyone to keep the secret from.) One gangly old man huddled in a single-room shack by a woodstove and waited for his evening paper. All he had in the hovel was the stove and a bed, as far as I could make out. It was dark in there save the dim light of a kerosene lamp. Built on stilts, the lean-to was higher than others on the alley and reeked of burned kerosene and body odor. The smell was so bad, I could never bear to go in.
But I could not avoid going up the rickety steps to the shanty because the old man could barely walk. He was pleasant and greeted me with, “Hello, paperboy!” He had little money and paid me in pennies and nickels from an old worn-out change purse. Never knew his name and never forgot him, even if the welfare system did. (My customers existed only as house numbers on streets in my journals.) I had to go between houses and through mud to get to his back-alley shack. I gave him every extra paper I had, and it hurt to collect from him.
Others were sex workers, people with disabilities, addicts, homeless people, and church faithful. One afternoon I stood on the front porch, knocking at the door of a woman who had a few men lined up waiting in her living room on chairs and a couch. Through the screen door, I could see and hear her telling a man, “Wait a minute,” as he tugged impatiently at her skirt. It was a lesson in life and survival…without hope.
Another such case was the man who never spoke—who, from the days I was a very young boy, sat at the corner of McLemore and Mississippi. He was missing some fingers, and he wore no expression on his face. His pullover cap and clothes were dirty. He never moved. He just sat there on the corner as if it were the only home he knew. If you looked at him, he turned his head away. If you stood near, he left. You would look around, and he would just have disappeared.
Years later, I saw this man. He looked at me briefly. He acted as if he had been caught being alive. I know he remembered me because he knew me as a child. He had seen me thousands of times.
Thirty years on, he looked the same. He was sorry I had seen him. He was sorry anybody had. He looked away again. Just like before. I turned the car around to try and find him, but he was gone. Disappeared, just like thirty years ago. Only this time I was sad he had left. I had more compassion than before.
He was the only thing in Memphis that was the same as it was when I was a child. I wish I knew his name. He had not aged a minute, like he was in a time machine. I loved him more than felt sorry for him. I think about his mother. He must have had a mother, and she must have loved him.
No Name, that’s what I’ll call him.
MEMPHIS—Spring 1954—11
In time I grew stronger, developed a good arm and decent aim, and made enough money to buy school clothes and pay for clarinet lessons and piano lessons at Mrs. Cole’s.
In addition to the Press Scimitar in the afternoons, I started throwing the Commercial Appeal in the mornings. I found myself getting up at 3:30 a.m. on Sunday and completing my route with the help of my dad and his car to transport the heavy Sunday paper.
With the extra funds, I could now afford organ lessons in addition to the piano and clarinet lessons I was already taking. I returned to Mrs. Cole. Best thing I ever did in my entire life.
My Lord! She had a Hammond B-3 organ in her dining room! It was a handsome piece of furniture, as were all her dining room pieces. She explained that the organ was reserved for a few special students and that the lessons were expensive.
The first time I saw it, a powerful, irresistible urge to sit at that Hammond organ overtook me. Looking back over my shoulder as I was led to the living room for my piano lesson, I was transported by the sight of the instrument. I played my piano lesson that day rapt with desire and fascination for that entity in the next room.
This was before I heard Ray Charles playing “One Mint Julep”; before I heard Brother Jack McDuff at the Flamingo Room, with only three pieces and playing bass with his left hand; before I heard Jimmy Smith doing “The Sermon” or Bill Doggett doing “Honky Tonk”; or any of the other Hammond B-3 organ masterpieces of the time.
Mrs. Cole and her husband—who would often stand next to the table to watch the students, as if he were standing guard—probably paid more for the Hammond B-3 organ and Leslie speaker in their dining room than they did for their house. In 1955, Hammonds retailed for around $4,000. In 1954, my father paid $6,000 for our modest two-bedroom home.
I told my mother about my discovery. She reminded me that there was an organ at our church and that I could get her friend Merle Glover, the church organist, to give me a lesson for less money than Mrs. Cole would charge. I wasn’t excited about taking lessons from the persnickety Merle Glover. During church services, she couldn’t make it through an entire service without leaving to go out for a smoke. However proficient at the pipe organ, she was fussy and impatient. I had only one lesson with Mrs. Glover at her home, during which she showed me how to take my shoes off and feel the pedals with my toes and how to push the stops.
One night I went down to the church with my dad when he had a treasury board meeting, and I waited for him at the huge pipe organ in the sanctuary. Staring at the stops in the darkened, scary room, I knew I had to discover where the electric box was in that section of the large church and how to turn the lights on in the huge room as well illuminate the organ riser itself. Where was the key to turn on the behemoth, and was it safe for a small boy to be alone in a room as large as this at night, even with the lights on?
But the sound was different from the instrument at Mrs. Cole’s house. It was a pipe organ, and the notes spoke so slowly because of the time it took for the air to go through the big pipes. For a while, I would practice alone at night in the sanctuary when my dad was downstairs in the finance room. But I had to go back to Mrs. Cole’s organ. It was so much more accessible musically than the big pipes that extended up into the walls of the church, with all their reverberation and majesty.
I devoured every morsel of training Mrs. Cole had to offer during our short half-hour sessions and ran home happy, looking forward to the next lesson in two weeks. I was enamored with the sound of the Hammond and the Leslie speaker; I had been shown my destiny.
Because the organ has the capability of sustaining notes indefinitely and of getting louder or softer with the expression pedal, it’s possible to simulate a singing, melodic effect—and, with the use of the Leslie rotator, a vibrato much like the human voice can be produced. Also, it’s possible to simulate nearly any orchestral sound or combination of instruments with a Hammond B-3.
MEMPHIS—Spring 1956—3
I added organ lessons to my list of chores. It seemed natural, and Mama had retrieved Grandma’s old piano and put it back in the living room, so I was able to at least practice the piano lessons and simulate the organ exercises. I practiced on a real organ wherever I could—at church or anyplace that might have one. Mrs. Cole was a practical, methodical teacher, attentive and old-fashioned. She practiced the technique of tapping a student’s finger with her baton, which was more like a dowel. She was very good and could hit your knuckle anytime she wished, so I practiced very hard.
Mrs. Cole demonstrated technique frequently and emphasized straight posture, chin up, and raising the knuckles high above the keyboard. I still try to emulate her figure at the keyboard.
As I matured musically, I considered Memphis to be the headquarters for southern blues and gospel, since so many influential artists headed there from Mississippi, Louisiana, and Arkansas. But if Memphis was the headquarters, then Chicago was the capital. The great Mahalia Jackson originated there, but I didn’t know her importance on the day I was called on to accompany her.
By twelve, I started to play afternoon teas on Sundays to pick up some extra change. Most often they were Sunday-afternoon affairs attended by church ladies, held in the large dining room at Universal Life Insurance Company on Vance, a few doors down from my church, Mt. Olive. At such occasions, ample-bosomed churchwomen pulled my young head into their chests after I played a song. This particular tea was held at a private home out on South Parkway West. Upper middle-class Memphis African Americans kept meticulous dining rooms and living rooms for church benefits and meetings. Folding chairs surrounded the ornate, flower-filled centerpiece on the dining room table where Mahalia Jackson stood just inches from me at the piano. Beads of sweat poured from her forehead, and I caught a whiff of the familiar combination of perfume, perspiration, and soiled percale.
The song was “Precious Lord,” made famous at Ebenezer Baptist in Chicago and Martin Luther King’s last request in Memphis. Mama dug out her old Gospel Pearls hymnal, showed me the chords, and helped me learn to play it in all keys. I rehearsed it over and over for days without Ms. Jackson, who would be the first church lady I played for professionally. I brought the raggedy old hymnal along with me for emotional support, although I still didn’t read music that well.
It was a beautiful, warm Sunday afternoon, and the home was decorated with flowers. The room was buzzing with intense competition between the hues of all the various rouges and the scents of all the perfumes.
Very soon after the performance began, I realized what a musical giant Ms. Jackson was, due to the immediate onset of emotion and purpose initiated by her commanding, soulful voice and powerful presence. She meant what she was singing. Completely swept into the strong feeling Mahalia created with every phrase, I focused on playing the chords and let her energy guide me through the song. At the end, I wondered what had really happened.
The applause was warm and enthusiastic. Mahalia was gracious, used to that kind of thing. She smiled at me, thanked the women, and moved into the room. I sat motionless at the piano, unsure what to do, like an orphan who had found a home. My hand had been taken.