Lovely War(16)

Then Aubrey sees sweat shining on Jim Europe’s face. He’s not the only one nervous. Europe’s peculiar eyes bulge behind his thin-rimmed glasses. It always makes his glare intense. Tonight it’s ferocious.

Europe raises his baton. The entire room takes one deep breath.

Music explodes that night in New York.

Nothing, nothing like this has ever echoed off an elite concert hall’s carved walls.

The audience includes critics, reviewers, professors, performers. The city’s musical elite. They’re swept up in the flood like everyone else. They’ll talk of this night for years.

Here is a new musical phenomenon. Not songs written for black musicians by white composers. Not humiliating parodies that grope for a laugh, joking at the black singers’ expense. Black composers and lyricists, black musicians, excellent in their own right. Not merely excellent, but daring and vibrant and wholly original. J. Rosamond Johnson and Paul Laurence Dunbar. Harry T. Burleigh and Will Marion Cook. Paul C. Bohlen, and of course, James Reese Europe himself.

From the moment the music takes off, Aubrey Edwards never stops grinning. All his jitters peel away. His wrists are limber, his elbows loose. He’s fueled by the crowd’s excitement.

Attitudes explode, though the evidence would yet be long and slow in coming. Black music would begin to command not only popularity but respect for its originality and power.

For James Reese Europe and his Clef Club Orchestra, the night is a triumph. The orchestra gave and the audience received, and their rapport swelled to a crescendo of its own.

Aubrey Edwards fell in love that night. Not with piano; he’d always loved that. With performing. With audiences. If he could have his wish, he’d play for crowds every night for the rest of his life.

I heard his wish, and I blessed it.

Aubrey Edwards would have his wish at a price, following Jim Europe around the world, performing all the way to the gates of hell, in the killing fields of France.





APOLLO


     Spartanburg—October 13, 1917





COME WITH ME now to Spartanburg, South Carolina, five years later. It’s October 13, 1917, a hot autumn night. The people of Spartanburg are gathered to hear an outdoor concert. White soldiers from the training camp come in uniform. White civilians come in plaid shirts and flowered skirts, clutching cold beers and glasses of sweet tea to keep cool while they listen to “colored music.”

“Colored,” of course, isn’t the word they use.

The Clef Club Orchestra is no more. In its place is the Army Band of the Army National Guard, 15th New York Infantry Regiment, with Lieutenant James R. Europe conducting a goodwill concert for the people of Spartanburg, home to the army training base Camp Wadsworth. Goodwill indeed.

Moths flutter at streetlights. Silhouetted against a purpling sky, the band tunes their instruments in squawks and scales and riffs. The sound is a discordant mess, but pregnant with anticipation: from this chaos, order and excitement will come.

Aubrey Edwards twiddles drumsticks between his long fingers. He is tense, apprehensive about surviving this concert. The 15th New York goes to bed at night wondering if they’ll wake up to morning reveille, or to a midnight lynch mob.

The 15th New York Infantry, an all-black regiment, came to Camp Wadsworth for combat and weapons training after basic training at Camp Dix in New Jersey, where Southern soldiers hung NO COLOREDS ALLOWED and WHITES ONLY signs on buildings.

When Spartanburg learned a black regiment would be stationed at Camp Wadsworth, the governor of South Carolina went to Washington to lobby the government not to send black soldiers into their state. Spartanburg’s mayor, the son of a Confederate soldier, told a New York Times reporter, “With their Northern ideas about race equality, they will probably expect to be treated like white men. I can say right here that they will not be treated as anything except Negroes. We shall treat them exactly as we treat our resident Negroes. This thing is like waving a red flag in the face of a bull. . . . You remember the trouble a couple of weeks ago in Houston.”

I know you remember Houston, Ares. It was practically a one-night war. A white police officer had entered a black woman’s home without a warrant, searching for a suspect. When she protested, he beat and arrested her, dragging her from her home though she wasn’t fully dressed. When a black soldier saw this and tried to intervene to defend the woman, the white policeman pistol-whipped the black soldier, seriously injuring him. The men of the beaten soldier’s regiment, learning no consequences would befall the white policeman, felt abandoned by white police and army officials. They saw the abuse as a last straw in a long string of injustices. So they marched into the city. Soldiers and civilians died in the shooting that followed.

This concert is trying to prevent another Houston. To prove that black soldiers aren’t all mutineers or murderers. Aubrey Edwards and his fellow musicians feel they’d better smile and play like their lives depend upon it.

Private Aubrey Edwards, now twenty, is a few inches taller, a good deal broader, and substantially nimbler on the piano. He wants to take the ragtime world by storm and leave his mark on the new world of American jazz. He already sees his name in lights.

His rhythmic sense is mature for his age as a musician, and his improvisation is crazy-wild. Sometimes too wild, thinks Lieutenant Europe, who became his piano tutor once Aubrey surpassed his uncle Ames, but Europe can see that this wild kid is going somewhere. He doesn’t mean the trenches of France.