Kansas City Lightning

Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch

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Authors: Stanley Crouch
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them.
    â€œYou could go to anybody’s house and eat on Thanksgiving,” Reeves remembered. “They either had a lot of chicken or a goose—greasy. Didn’t have too many turkeys. They raised a lot of geese. Regularly, around the year, there was always rabbit and chicken. Rabbits cost you fifteen cents then, two big rabbits for a quarter. The children always got to clean the rabbit after itwas skinned, and eventually you could do it all, skin it and clean it.”
    On Christmas, the white people up the way gave their children’s toys from the previous year to the colored families. If the toy was a wagon, it had been repainted and supplied with new wheels. Candy canes, cap pistols, miniature ten-gallon cowboy hats, and affordable necessities were the order of the day within the Negro families. If there had been a good snow, it was scooped up and thrown in fights, sleds were dragged into sliding positions, and rolls of expended caps rose as the hammers of toy pistols came back before striking the next dot of powder in the neighborhood western of winter warfare. Bang: you’re dead. Negro cowboys.
    Photographs of the young Charlie Parker taken during these years show mirth, concentration, pride. In one, he stands next to a wooden car that might have been a secondhand toy from the peckerwoods. A little girl sits in it, and he seems an almost haughty little prince. In another, Parker holds a cane and is attempting to summon a raffish expression. Twenty years later, when the saxophonist saw the second picture, he declared his younger self “a clean little Bird”—a moment of melancholy nostalgia. There were no drugs in his life then—nor, for that matter, any apparent signs of musical promise. Yet even in these early pictures Bird appears removed, almost aloof.
    Young Charlie Parker was a sensitive boy, tightly bonded with his mother. Before he went to bed, she recalled to club owner Robert Reisner, he would tell her, “I love you, I love you, Mama.” Little Bird also didn’t suffer insult easily: Addie told Reisner that Charlie punched out a boy at school for making fun of some pimples on his face.
    The school in question was a local Catholic institution—an unusual choice, since Addie, like most Negroes, was Protestant. That Catholic experience separated young Charlie from his surroundings, and he recognized early that there were ways to do things that were different from standard practice. His mother recalled him telling her that “we” didn’t do things a certain way—identifying with the way Catholics taught, thought, and lived. It was probably during this period that Parker wore the Little Lord Fauntleroy suit he often recalled when selecting details from his childhood. “Had a wide collar,” said Edward Reeves, “a silk tie that you tied like a bow tie, but it came almost down toyour stomach. The coat and the pants were velvet, the pants had two buttons down on the side. You wore stockings then and buttoned shoes. Some fellows had buckled shoes. You were in there when you wore that kind of stuff.”
    Charlie Parker was in there. Whenever he asked permission to get a pocket-money job, his mother refused, preferring to give him what he needed herself. Addie Parker reared her son as a homebred aristocrat, a young lord, and the expressions we see in his childhood photographs are probably the results of his being treated as royalty. But no one knew how heavy a crown the young prince was destined to wear.
    Around 1930, Addie Parker faced what she was up against: her husband was an incorrigible whiskeyhead. Marriage had dealt her a bad hand, and she decided to throw it in. Leaving half-white John with his father in Kansas, Addie took Charlie, her only blood child, and moved across the river into Missouri. After short stints at a series of addresses, she bought a large two-story house at 1516 Olive Street. She made ends meet by doing domestic

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