Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch Page B

children moved into Addie Parker’s house, taking the entire second floor. As the family moved their belongings up the stairs, Addie and Charlie stood at the banister, watching with fascination as the girls, the one boy, and the mother marched up and down the stairs with their belongings.
    One who noticed Charlie was the Ruffins’ middle child, Rebecca. To her, Charlie looked a little old for his knickers, as if he were a little spoiled. It also wasn’t lost on her that he never lifted a finger to help the Ruffins. But there was something strong about him, she thought, something in his presence and in his capacity for attention. He also exuded a loneliness, a need. At least Rebecca thought so. Rebecca was golden, thin, about Charlie’s age, and her hair dropped thick and brown below her shoulders. Charlie stared at her most intently. “My eye fell on him,” Rebecca said, “and I knew there was gonna be trouble. I knew I was in love with him.”
    FANNY RUFFIN, WHOM her estranged husband called Birdy, did not like Charlie Parker. First of all, he didn’t go to school unless he wanted to; he’d apparently been dawdling around the house for a year. Second, he was allowed to be too mischievous for her taste. He sarcastically called his mother “Ma.” He was always playing rough jokes on the Ruffin children, hiding behind the staircase and jumping out to scare them, throwing firecrackers at them, teasing, pinching, and hurling snowballs at them when winter came—or just pushing scoops of snow down the backs of their clothes. Addie Parker insisted he was just a boy having fun, that he wasn’t really hurting anybody. Birdy Ruffin could put up with that to a degree. What she had a harder time with was how close Charlie and Rebecca were becoming. Knowing better than to hold hands when Birdy Ruffin was around, he and Beckerie (as the family called her) just stared at each other with the amazement of two moo cows watching choo-choo trains. But everyone could see what was happening. Rebecca had never had a boyfriend before, though shehad always been very pretty.
    As far as Birdy Ruffin was concerned, if her daughter was to have a steady boy, he would have to be someone better than lazy Charlie Parker, whom she considered an “alley rat.” As Birdy Ruffin and her daughter watched Charlie from a second-floor window shooting marbles in the alley behind the house with his buddy Sterling Bryant, Birdy told Beckerie that that Parker boy had no foreseeable future—unless it was living off his gullible mother and doing nothing worth anything, which was apparently his specialty.
    â€œMama was very strict,” recalled Ophelia Ruffin. “Nobody was good enough for her daughters.”
    Birdy Ruffin’s attitude may have been influenced by the nature of Kansas City itself. It was a city where corruption sprawled in comfort and a child could get the idea that right was wrong and wrong was right: the mayor was a pawn, the city boss was a crook, the police were corrupt, the gangsters had more privileges than honest businessmen, and the town was as wild with vice as you could encounter short of a convention of the best devils in hell. Her daughters were going to be polite, well-groomed, respectful, and arrow-straight. If they weren’t, they would have to face her wrath, which could be considerable.
    Ophelia remembered it clearly. “Once I went up on Twelfth Street—which was pretty wild, you know—with my friend Ruby because she was getting her lunch money from her uncle. My daddy saw me up there and asked if Mama knew where I was. I couldn’t lie. He went right over to Miss Parker’s and asked Mama if she knew where I was, and Mama said I was at school. He said she wasn’t raising us right and told her where I was. Mama met me at Fifteenth and Olive. She whipped me from that corner all the way up to Miss Parker’s, all the way up the stairs. . .