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| ISBN-13: | 9780306809804 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Hachette Books |
| Publication date: | 09/07/2000 |
| Pages: | 216 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d) |
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Chapter One
THE TREMÉ JUMPED NEW ORLEANS CHILDHOOD, 1924-1942
Human beings may give high-octane performances on low-octane fuel. ... After all, a human being can always wish and dream, and he can never be reduced to zero. —Albert Murray, "The Storyteller as Blues Singer"
This is the Tremé, the Sixth Ward. This particular corner, Dumaine and Claiborne, is one of the most famous corners in New Orleans. Dumaine and Claiborne, Dumaine and Robertson: these were swinging corners. You can see that lady over there swinging today, and this is some fifty years after it all happened. She's still swinging. She got the vibrations and she feels the spirit. —Danny Barker, New Orleans musician, 1978
Earl Palmer, 7 years old, should be a "whip" when he grows into a youth. Already he has 12 different dance steps in his routine ... and an eye for the ladies. —Louisiana Weekly, March 12, 1932
Most musical histories of New Orleans still ride heavily on the distinction between "uptown" and "downtown," the former the home of dark-skinned, blues-playing American blacks, the latter of French-speaking black Creoles and their politer music. As useful as this time-honored schema has been, it doesn't do justice to the city's motley nature. For New Orleans is a city of neighborhoods, each with its own character and history. Tighten your focus, and the old Creole downtown resolves into several very different communities, the largest of which are the Seventh Wardand the Tremé.
In the years of Earl Palmer's childhood, the Seventh Ward was the stronghold of the descendants of the old gens de couleur libre, antebellum New Orleans's French-speaking, Catholic Creoles of color. The Seventh was staid and genteel, its residents fighting a rearguard battle for their ebbing prestige. "In the Seventh Ward," says restaurateur Leah Chase, who grew up there, "everyone thought they were the Pope."
The Tremé was older—in fact, it is North America's oldest black urban neighborhood—but livelier. Whereas the Seventh Ward is tucked away downriver, the Tremé is near the heart of the city, wedged between Canal and Esplanade Streets, just behind the French Quarter. This is where Earl Palmer was born, on October 25, 1924, and raised. It was a neighborhood at once insular and cosmopolitan, with a big-city bustle and a Southern country town's tangled bloodlines and down-home conviviality. As Earl says, "The Tremé was the party action."
Nightspots abounded here, from the 2,000-seat Coliseum on Derbigny and Conti to smaller halls like the San Jacinto, where top local bands held cutting contests and the Sunday matinee was nine hours long; from well-appointed nightclubs like the Gypsy Tea Room to corner dives where rough barrelhouse pianists rambled till the butcher cut them down. "'Little Willie,' a well-known piano plunker, died last Sunday from a heart attack after playing his instrument around St. Philip and Dumaine Streets all day," the Louisiana Weekly reported on February 6, 1937. "[T]hey picked up money to bury him."
Neighborhood sports loitered on the corner of Claiborne and Dumaine, the Tremé's hub, laying bets and ogling girls and talking trash. Claiborne Avenue was black New Orleans's main artery and among the busiest black thoroughfares in the South. Its wide, grassy median—"neutral ground" in New Orleans parlance—graced by azaleas and a double row of live oaks, was the Tremé's backyard, a haven for kids, ballplayers, trysting couples. At Mardi Gras the city's black community massed at Claiborne and Dumaine to view the parade. "Everybody came in under the oaks," says longtime resident Norman Smith, "and we'd all picnic and watch the activities. If you saw the Zulus [the black Mardi Gras krewe, whose outrageous costumes and pageantry lampooned white Mardi Gras], you were fortunate."
New Orleans's two oldest cemeteries, St. Louis I and II, bordered the Tremé. At least once or twice a month funeral bands came marching down Claiborne, somber before the burial, raucous after. "I grew up on the fringes of the Tremé, real near the cemetery," Earl Palmer's lifelong friend, the late Red Tyler, recalled. "You'd hear somebody shout, 'Second line at the cemetery!' and you ran to see the band and join the second line": the impromptu procession that invariably accompanies a New Orleans marching band. "We had more second lines in the Tremé," says Norman Smith, "than any place on earth."
Nor was a parade necessary to get people dancing in the street. "Musicians would form a band and go from joint to joint on a horse and wagon," says Earl's contemporary Walter Pichon Jr. "Put a drummer on there, put a trombone on there, and the people come out and danced in the mud—none of them streets were paved. After the musicians got a drink, they moved two blocks down to another bar, and a new bunch came out and danced." Music undergirded everything here; even the draymen's cries were soulful: "Hey watermeluhhn...."
Tremé people were nourished by a deep fund of lore (it wasn't seen as lore, of course; it was the social air you breathed). There were neighborhood heroes like the pimp Louis Henry, real as day but touched by myth. Money wasn't really a token of status; nobody had any. What mattered were flair, good looks, athletic and musical prowess—style, not in the sense of veneer or superfice but the ability to spin the raw, often mean stuff of daily life into something pleasing and memorable.
"You came up hard in the Tremé," says Earl. Yet as a source of expressive culture, of style, this place held riches. "The housing in the Tremé was not the best in the world," says Norman Smith, "but these were very proud people; they were very, very enlightened into the cultural aesthetics of living." When Walter Pichon Jr. recalls some of the men of his childhood, you get a sense of the elegance with which these members of a "deprived" community carried themselves. "Ratty Cady, Jim Conan, Leon DeLisle, Paul Gross—these were all good-looking men. They were better looking than their women! Paul Gross—one of the best-looking men you'd ever want to see! They were dressers, you know. They wore three-piece suits and suspenders with gold chains. You don't see people walking around the Tremé like that today—oh, no indeed!" Pichon himself is in this number, one of the last, debonair at seventy-five in windbreaker and fedora, a career maître d' in some of the city's best restaurants and nightclubs.
Twenty years ago a West Coast friend of Earl's took a trip down South. She found herself driving through the Tremé. Shocked by its blight, she realized, she says, how far Earl had come from such humble beginnings, against such odds. Admittedly, the place this woman saw had deteriorated from the Tremé of Earl's childhood. But she probably would have been almost as appalled by the old Tremé; she probably would have seen only the poverty. She did not understand that this neighborhood hadn't handicapped Earl—it had given him a head start. On these blocks the boy grew into a man of humor, curiosity, and resilience: very, very enlightened indeed in the aesthetics of living.
You know one of the reasons New Orleans got the nickname "Big Easy"? Why, because you could feed a family of seven on twenty-five cents!
In my neighborhood, the Tremé, you'd go to a store and buy what they called half portions. That's a nickel a portion. You'd get a half of red beans, half rice, half loaf of bread, and a hunk of smoke sausage, big as that. Our luxury was pickle meat. A bottle of jumbo sarsaparilla soda for a nickel and you got you a meal; feed a family of seven, man, off a quarter.
It's not that my mother didn't make no money—she sent money home. But you see, we were such that a whole unit within our family might not be working. If my Uncle Freddy was out of work, his family moved in and we all bunked together. One time there must have been five different branches of the family staying together: my aunts and uncles and their children and my grandparents and my mama and me. My mama raised three children that wasn't even related to us! We always took people in, man, it didn't matter, it was so cheap to live. You got used to living cheap like that, where you always wanted something. It was a part of life.
That's pretty poor when you're getting half rice, half bread, and half beans, but I was never hungry. In New Orleans your mama could always go to a family down the street and say, "Listen, we ain't got nothing now, take care of my baby, feed my baby." You'd go over there and eat and didn't feel anything wrong with it. Their child might do the same next week. They themselves might do the same next week!
I never knew my father, never saw a photograph of him, don't know what he looked like, his age, nothing. This is all I was told: he was a cook on a whaling vessel and he sailed out of Newfoundland and had an accident and got killed on the ship.
My mother met him when she went to New York to get some singing jobs. As far as my Aunt Josephine, who was kind of the family historian, said, Edward Palmer's family came from Virginia. He had a brother and a nephew in White Plains, New York. Aside from that I don't know a thing about his family. As for the name of Walter Fats Pichon and whether anybody by that name had anything to do with me being born, I guess I'll never know the answer. But we'll get to that.
My mother's father, George Theophile Sr., was a porter for the L & N Railroad, that's Louisville and Nashville. Exactly how my mother got interested in show business is something only my Aunt Nita would have known, and Nita passed last year. I'm the oldest in the family now.
My grandfather looked to be a tall white Greek man. I have a picture of the family, my mother, my aunts, my grandmother, everybody: all different colors. My Uncle Freddy looked like a perfect little Greek, blue eyes and curly, curly black hair, white as white. You see, as far as I could understand from my Aunt Josephine, my grandfather was mixed with Greek and French. His name was pronounced the French way, "tay-o-feel." His sister Ernestine, we called her Aunt Teen, lived in St. Louis and was very, very white and a redhead. My grandfather could easily have been considered white. But he stayed with us, he stayed among black people. He didn't have some black woman he was having children by and then he went home to St. Charles Avenue. He didn't have any family but us.
The races here were so mixed up! My own theory why there wasn't a hell of a lot of lynching round New Orleans is that a sumbitch would never really know who he was lynching. Could be his own cousin!
"Hey, who's that hanging from the tree? Aw, it's Cousin Louis! Why y'all did that?"
"Man, we didn't know it was a relative! He was black, wasn't he?"
There was white families in our neighborhood that got along fine with us. I'd fall asleep at their house listening to Amos 'n' Andy or Inner Sanctum, get up in the morning, get a big old hunk of bread with red gravy and go to the black school; they'd get up and go to the white school. If they fell asleep at our house they'd get a hunk of bread loaded with condensed milk, just as sweet and as filling and as fattening.
And there was people like the Spadonis—that family was white, man, they were white people, but they were born and raised right there on St. Ann between Galvez and Johnson and they were part of our neighborhood. They was a little mixed but they were mostly white. Everybody knew it, nobody cared. Because they didn't act white, they didn't want to be white, they were uncomfortable in the white culture. Johnny Spadoni would work a white job to take care of his family, but he'd never go to Bourbon Street and drink. He drank at the bar across the street. The Spadonis didn't even go to a white school; they put down on the paper that they were black and went to black schools like Joseph A. Craig and Albert Wicker. In those days in New Orleans, if you were white and decided to be black, they let you.
Of course, they also had a lot of light-complected blacks that didn't want to be around blacker blacks; call you nigger fast as any white man. There was a little animosity there all the time. You didn't find it so much in my neighborhood, because we had a mixture of the passe a blancs, the real light-complected blacks you saw in the Seventh Ward, and the darker ones you saw uptown. The Tremé was a mixture.
My grandfather was a quiet strong man who used to pick me up on his lap and kiss me. He died of cancer of the throat when I was five years old. I ran three blocks to call Miss Marie Andrews, the family's midwife. "Miss Marie, my grandpa dying, my grandpa dying?"
I was my grandparents' boy, spoiled rotten. When my grandpa came in from work, I took all his tips out of his coat and put them on the table. Twenty-four cents—fourteen cents for carfare, ten cents for two cups of coffee—that's all I let him keep. I brought the rest straight to my grandma, never kept any for myself. I considered this my responsibility and a very big one, man—as far as I knew, this was the money we was living on!
My grandma took me everywhere. "Cissy's boy." Seems I don't remember going anywhere in that part of my life with any other woman but my grandma. Sometimes we walked all the way down Canal Street to bring my grandfather his lunch. The L & N station was by the river, right next to where the aquarium is today: big old-fashioned railroad station with a glass ceiling. The engineers were old white men. They let me up into the cab, and the nicest one let me blow the whistle. He never called me Earl, always "boy," but I felt a kindness in him.
The French Market was further down the waterfront. My Uncle Rene worked there, at J. Tedesco's Fruit and Vegetable, hauling fruit, stacking vegetables, loading trucks. Uncle Rene was much more important than a stevedore. He didn't make as much, but because there was so many stevedores scrambling for jobs, we considered them lesser than somebody with a special job in the Market. My uncle worked at the Market!
We lived on Bienville Street when I was born, that's two blocks north of Canal. What we really call the Tremé, the Tremé proper, starts three blocks north of Bienville, at Lafitte, and runs over to Esplanade. The Tremé is in the Sixth Ward. If you came from the Sixth Ward and went down to the Ninth, you could easily have trouble. They'd stop you on the street. "Where you from? Man, you Sixth Ward niggers ..." Happened to me plenty.
The further you got into the Ninth Ward the more rural it was. Just below the Ninth is an area they call Chalmette. Until I began to look into the history of New Orleans, I didn't know there's a whole big battlefield in Chalmette. In the War of 1812 the American forces, which were the Cajuns and the Creoles and them, picked that site. The British thought, "Oh, okay, this'd be good. We'll back them sumbitches right into the river. Drown em." But they did not contend on Jean Lafitte the pirate coming in from the river, and we kicked the British's ass right there in the Battle of New Orleans.
We lived in a block of little row houses and knew everybody on the whole block. To one side of us was the Taylors: Miss Gussie and her sons Gabe and Alvin and her daughter Rosemary, my first girlfriend, and Rosemary's sisters Gloria and Dunnie. A few years later Andrew Young, who became the mayor of Atlanta, lived around the corner on Prieur Street in what we called the big house because it was nicer than the rest.
They had an old policeman in the neighborhood, Big Aleck, a walking beat policeman. Big Aleck was the first cop I remember, because he had been on that beat for years and years and years. He was a big red-faced dude and a drunk, and in that heat, with them regulation-issue hot black shoes—man, Aleck had bad feet all the time. Couldn't catch us when we ran.
"Aaahh Big Aleck you big red neck!"
My family moved around a lot, but always in that same neighborhood—I never lived outside the Tremé until I left New Orleans for good. From Bienville we moved to 823 Claiborne, between Dumaine and St. Ann, then Dumaine between Claiborne and Derbigny and then St. Philip between Claiborne and Robertson. After that came St. Philip and Robertson, on the corner; then 1526 St. Philip, between Robertson and Villere, and the last place we lived before I went into the service was 918 Claiborne, between Dumaine and St. Philip. We didn't own any of those houses, landlords did. Joubert was the name of the big real estate people we paid rent to; I don't know if we ever even knew who owned the damn houses. They were all pretty much tenements, one was never any nicer than the other. Bigger, maybe.
Not all the streets in the Tremé were paved, by any means. North Claiborne was—it was the main drag. St. Philip was, but Robertson was dirt, Villere was dirt, Marais was dirt. In those days Claiborne Avenue had a great big what we called a neutral ground, big wide grassy area where we played football and baseball and the Mardi Gras clubs paraded.
The main congregating point was the corner of Claiborne and Dumaine, where the Chattard brothers, Robert, Noel, Lowell, and Shack, had their barbershop. A half-Chinese, half-black guy, Wong, worked for them, who later opened his own place between St. Philip and Ursulines. Out front of the barbershop was Big Al Dennis's shoeshine stand. Al Dennis sent his kids through Grambling off that stand.
Big Lo, Lowell Chattard, was kind of a fight manager, so the barbershop is where everyone gathered on Sundays to talk boxing. Big Lo had one of these big loud mouths and knew more than anyone about boxing. According to him, anyway.
Around the corner on Dumaine was Joe Sheep's sandwich place, no bigger than somebody's little kitchen. Joe Sheep had the best hot sausage sandwiches in town for a dime, but he was the meanest old sumbitch you ever met. You'd come up there to get a sandwich.
"What you want, little nigger?"
"I wanna hot sausage sandwich."
You going through your pockets, pulling pennies out.
"Hurry up, you little motherfucker you." Oh, he was a terrible old man, but them sandwiches was delicious!
Across Dumaine was a bar they used to call the Keno, had a racehorse book gave you the results from the fairgrounds. I'd go in and get buckets of beer for my uncles, Coca-Cola for my grandmother. Behind the bar was a gambling joint where my Uncle Son dealt monte, cotch, and twenty-one. Vernel Fournier's daddy George was one of the dealers in there for years.
Joseph A. Craig Elementary, where I went to school, was on St. Philip between Villere and Marais. Still is. Benny Powell grew up across the street on Marais and he'd play hooky, hang out his window making faces at us in the geography room.
"Miz Gait, Miz Gair, Benny's not sick, look at him!"
Teacher turned around and Benny ducked. Soon as she faced us again he'd pop up, stick his tongue out.
I enjoyed masking at Mardi Gras with the other kids, putting on a costume and dancing up and down the street, following the bands, doing the second line. Everybody's door was wide open; you could walk right in, have some red beans and gumbo, and go right back out again, masking and dancing. Mardi Gras afforded you to do things you couldn't any other time. I'd go in houses I wasn't supposed to; go in Miss Olga Manuel's looking to see the prostitutes, though they was all out masking.
The Baby Dolls were women that masqueraded as little baby girls. It just started as a comedic gesture, these great big fat women in baby doll outfits, bonnets tied under their chins, and little socks, and sometimes they wear a diaper. Thighs this big sticking out of their tiny bloomers. Some of them got a little nasty sometimes. But we're talking about the days when they wasn't allowed to do anything real nasty, as opposed to now when they show their pussies on Bourbon Street. The Baby Dolls wouldn't dare do that!
When you're little, some of the maskers' costumes are really scary. The scariest were the skeletons, where these guys took a pair of long johns, dyed them black, and painted skeletons on. They made big papier-mâché heads that looked like a skull and carried bones from a slaughterhouse and rattled the bones as they walked and went "Grrrgggghhhh!" and I mean this scared you to death, scared us kids to death, right out there in the bright sunlight.
When I got big enough to know these weren't real skeletons, I got interested in the Indians. The main tribes were about four: the Golden Eagles and the others from uptown, and the one tribe that was indigenous to the Seventh Ward, the Yellow Pocahontas. The police didn't let the Indians in the Quarter; mostly they went up and down Claiborne. They're still not allowed down Canal. They were known as belligerent and violent maskers, get drunk and loaded off weed and cut each other up. Many times people got killed.
But oh, you'd be waiting for them! If they'd vowed they was going to fight, that's what they did. Right in front of the crowd—hell yeah! These were bloodbaths, man. They actually thought they was Indians. One tribe run into another they considered not friendly, or the tribes was jealous, or one tribe's costumes were prettier—any kind of stupid, illiterate idea.
The groups that have the funeral parades—"plantings," that's my joking terminology for them—is the social and pleasure clubs. Social is from your dues, you do some good, donate money to the poor, make up Christmas baskets; pleasure is having parades and throwing affairs for your members' fun. Going to the cemetery, you went slow and the band played the normal sad songs—"Nearer My God to Thee," "A Closer Walk with Thee"—and they'd cut the coffin loose. As soon as they got out of the cemetery, the band starts to play snappier music. The band played a tune, then the snare drum played for a block or two, then they all struck up another tune and the second line started dancing behind the band and that's when they'd really get to second-lining and shaking it down all the way back to the neighborhood. Every bar in the Tremé filled up. "To Louie!" "That little motherfucker!" Lot of crying going on.
I was in the second line a lot. We lived right between two of the main funeral parlors, that's Llopis on Dumaine and Labat on St. Philip, so I was right there when the parades formed.
Being born into a vaudeville family, I was a dancer by the time I was five. In fact, my first memories are learning to dance at home with my mama and my Aunt Nita. I remember being pulled onstage at the Lyric Theater when I was four or five, maybe less. Didn't take a lot of coaxing either, I just went out there and tap-danced along like I was part of the show. Even earlier, I've been told, my mother would come off, nurse me between numbers, and run back on. I was in a milk crate instead of a cradle. We were poor people, and cradles wasn't important long as you had somewhere to lay.
When my mama and Aunt Nita left town there was a little tap dancer friend of the family that taught me, Joe Toy. I learned from other dancers as I came along, like my Uncle Benny Williams, Benny Rubberlegs Williams we called him, because he did a real limber-leg dance like somebody that's got rubber legs. Benny did what we called eccentric dancing, which is when you do a routine that's not just straight-out tap dancing, you're combining contortionist movements and backflips and all kind of stuff.
Everybody around New Orleans knew my mama and my Aunt Nita. They did regular vaudeville shows in town and then they went on the road, back and forth. My mama did pretty much whatever she wanted to, because she ran the show a lot at the Lyric; she made extra money doing that, she and a guy named Eddie Lemons, who had a heck of a reputation for having been big.
My mama was a wonderful woman at organizing things. Once when she was home for a while, she stuck together a troupe of kids and called us the Rinky Dink Revue. We had a girl named Doris Francis who was a good little singer, and Doris's cousin Erna Ferrand—Erna was a chick who could dance, man—and another little girl, Irene Andrews. Ernest Phillips was the only other boy, Love, we called him. We also called him Tee-Bat. My mama worked out routines for us and put us onstage at the Lincoln, the Palace, and the Harlequin.
By the time I was a growing young man, it had become pretty much knowledge to me that my mother'd had some gay relationships with people. I'm telling you, a lot of these so-called aunts of mine! My Aunt Nita, my real aunt, that is, never married, because she was also involved with a few relationships. I had a lot of aunts, man. I was probably the only feminine thing my mother ever did!
My mother was very argumentative around the house. She had a hell of a mouth on her, too. I'll tell you the kind of thing she said. When I went to Los Angeles in 1950 with Dave Bartholomew's band, my Uncle George, who lived there, had just had a prostate operation. I got home and my mama said, "How's your bighead parran?"—your godfather.
"Well, he just had an operation on his gogo," his ass.
"Nigger had to go all the way to California to get a new asshole?"
She loved to play the dozens with Big Ike, who lived next door. She'd be sitting at the table playing pitty-pat and say, "Ike—"
"Don't start with me now, Thelma."
"I just wanted to say I don't see how Ophelia"—that was Ike's wife—"how Ophelia can stand your big funky ass laying all over her."
"Her big ass is as big and funky as mine!"
"Lord have mercy!" my mama would say.
She'd get on my Uncle Rene about his mother, Grandma Sally: "Rene, I just saw your mama down on the longshoremen's line!"
Uncle Rene was always kind of sheepish and guilty because he was fooling around with a woman on Burgundy and Orleans. One night the family was playing pitty-pat and Rene comes in drunk, wants to hug on my Aunt Leonora, his wife, and kiss her.
"Oh, Leonora, my little—"
"Get away you pain in the ass, I'm trying to watch my cards!"
All of a sudden Rene goes on a crying jag. Reaches in his pocket for a handkerchief and pulls out a pair of women's drawers! Blows his nose, dabs his eyes, and don't even notice what he's using. We all do a double take and crack up laughing.
"You son of a bitch!" yells Aunt Leonora. "What are these?"
"Why, it's just my handkerchief, Leonora!" He finally looks at what's in his hand. He left the room and I didn't see him for another couple of days. To tell you the truth, I always knew about Uncle Rene and his girlfriend. My buddy Jimmy Narcisse lived next door to her, and Jimmy and I saw Rene over there plenty times. We always hit him for money—we knew he was thinking, "or else...." We set poor Rene up, man. He always was kind of weak-willed, but he was good to me. When all the kids in the neighborhood were getting bikes, my mother was off on the road and hadn't sent no money, and this man bought me a beautiful gray-and-red Western Flyer bicycle.
Grandma Sally lived down in Oakville toward the Gulf, and Rene took us kids there by the weekend. The main thing we went for was the food. Grandma Sally had chickens in the yard and pigs and pecan trees with big, big pecans, and Grandma Sal could cook. The one thing we didn't like was that old Baptist church with those big sweaty ladies and you're scared one of them's going to fall on you, jumping around the way they did. We didn't jump like that at St. Peter Claver. We stood quietly and made the sign of the cross and nobody sang but the priest because he was the only one knew the words. Down here everybody sang and tried to show off how much they could faint.
My best little neighborhood friend was Butsy. We didn't become buddies until we had to fight. He was a bully, bullied me and everybody else too, until one day I beat him and then we was friends. Butsy had a sister Marguerite, and many people didn't know if she was a guy or a chick, because Marguerite always had chicks, man. She was a pimp around there. Then there was Andrew Martin, we called him Porkchops, and Alton Harris, whose nickname was Tee-not, but there was another nickname for him called Uncle Ford. New Orleans is funny for nicknames. My cousin Arthur Landry is Bo Weevil, damned if I know why they call him that. My mother's nickname was Sal, and I never knew why they called her that either. Sal? Sal? What does that have to do with Thelma? I know why my nickname was Slack—I always had loose pants in the back, never had no big old ass like some dudes. Used to have a flat butt, man, all the time. My friend Steve Angrum called me Slack until the day he died. Red Tyler almost never called me Earl. He exclusively called me Gus. I called him Gus. I don't know why we picked Gus. We didn't think anything of it, we done it so long. Steve got to calling us Gus, too, he got in on it. But we never called him Gus.
Everyone had a lot of sayings, too. People think "Where yat?" is new, but I said it as a kid. If you asked somebody, "Where yat?" and they didn't feel good? "I'm fucked." Another was "How you percolating?" That's real old, grownups said it when I was a kid. "Is you sticking?" meant "Got any money?" A guy talking about his chick called her his quiff. If you wanted a girl's pussy, you'd say, "I want some of that trim," but a woman's private parts was also her coosy. If you were going to work, you said, "I'm going on my slave." You also called it your yoke. When someone got in a fight, that was a humbug. Doorpopping was eavesdropping. My ex-mother-in-law was a doorpopper: "There's Odile—do'popping again!" Marijuana was muggles and we also called it mootah. A boy and a girl messing round were doing nasty. Thelma Milton's stepfather caught Thelma and me doing nasty. Neither of us knew what it was, we just doing it because it was nasty. I heard her stepdaddy coming down in the basement and I got up and ran out the back, down the alley and up the street and I was gone! But he must have seen my shirttail flapping because when I got home my mother kicked my butt, spanked me, and called me a couple nasty little names.
When we lived on Dumaine, there was a dog on the next block that came charging all the way from the back of the yard every time someone passed by. His owners put up a picket fence, but you could see him coming. Mean. He had a little extra animosity toward me—I'll admit I teased the hell out of him. I'd stop and yell at him, spit at him. He'd go rrrggghhh.... One day I came passing by and he cleared the fence. I caught him, and even though he scratched me all over, I never turned him loose. I choked him to death. And I might have done the same if it had been Butsy back before I knew him, or anybody coming at me.
Round there it was protect yourself. You came up hard. The Tremé is the ghetto; the gangbangers and the drug dealers will rob you there. It's not a safe place to be! Back then it wasn't like it is now, but it was always tough. They had this chick named Ruth, she was known to be a tough chick around there. Stand straight up like a man and fight you with her fists. On Robertson between St. Philip and Ursulines, Ruth and another woman fought with knives to the death. Women were crying. I was crying, because I knew Ruth. People begged them, "Please stop, y'all, please don't, y'all gonna kill each other. Somebody please stop them!" Al Dennis tried to break it up, and Big Red, big light-complected guy. These were guys you'd expect could just walk in there and stop it—couldn't get close. I saw the other woman fall down for good, and Ruth kept on stabbing her. She was dead by the time the ambulance came. Ruth was on her knees, groggy, looked like she didn't have the strength to fall over. Blood running everywhere in the dirt. We later heard Ruth died in the hospital; she may have died on the way there. The ambulance driver probably took his time, didn't give a shit how long it took two niggers to kill each other.
Nobody gave too much of a damn what blacks did as long as they didn't hurt no white people. If blacks killed other blacks, nobody cared. Hell, no. Shit, no. My mother could get anybody out of jail if they hadn't hurt no white man, stole nothing from no white man. Eddie Grochell that owned the Dog House where my mama worked, he had an in with the police. Any blacks got in trouble, they came right to my mother.
The first trouble I had with a white man was getting my ass kicked, literally, in the Donze brothers' store on Dumaine and Robertson. Ol' Donze was loaded and didn't give me my right change.
"Mr. Don, you didn't gimme all my money."
"You little black motherfucker you, get the—" and he kicked me right in my ass. Not to excuse him, but this was the day he and his brother found out their sister Rosie was taking their money and their drugs—they sold drugs, too—and was fucking Burnell Santiago, a black piano player.
When I was little, Louis Henry was about my biggest hero. Louis Henry was a top pimp and he looked the part. He wore silk pongee shirts with a garter on the sleeve, tailor-made slacks with suspenders, diamonds everywhere, gold all across his mouth. The first time I was ever on top of a woman it was Louis's main woman Effie. I was five or six and she was laying up in bed and Louis said, "Go ahead on, get some of that!" and he puts me on her and starts pushing me up and down.
Being a pimp was lucrative and acceptable. A top pimp wasn't an outcast, he was a big shot. People loved you. The pimps were the Robin Hoods of the community. "Coach," Miss Olga Manuel, sweetest woman in the world, man—ran prostitutes. That's the way New Orleans was. Here's a woman ran a house of prostitution, but everybody loved her. However she made that money, she was always giving it to someone. I'll tell you someone that had aspirations to be a pimp, because he hung with Louis Henry sometimes, and that's Louis Armstrong. He had a lot of women, man, he loved women and they loved him. He wanted to be a pimp.
Every big shot pimp had what we called mascots and I was Louis Henry's. The mascot dressed exactly like the pimp. Louis had my little outfit made up by Harry Hyman, a Rampart Street tailor known for fine custom clothes. Nobody bought clothes ready-made; a number of tailors along Rampart Street did custom tailoring, and some of them did it very cheap. You'd pay down on a pair of tailored pants or a suit, five dollars a week, until you'd paid your twenty-five dollars and got your suit.
They had another pimp by the name of Pete Robertson, who quit pimping and became a master baker. Many times Louie and Pete took me to Heinemann Park to see Satchel Paige. They had the Negro leagues then and got eleven thousand people in Heinemann. They had the white Southern League, too: the New Orleans Pelicans, the Atlanta Crackers, the Birmingham Barons. But none of them drew any bigger than the black teams: the Homestead Grays, the Pittsburgh Crawfords, the Black Yankees.
Satch would come over to Lou's box, and Lou would say, "How many you going to strike out today?"
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Olivette West, a pretty dancer friend of my mother's who quit Octave because he was an obnoxious, rude son of a bitch. He wanted my mother to put in a good word for him but my mama said, "I ain't got nothing to do with that."
He cussed my mother out and Aunt Nita, too.
"You bitches won't say nothing to her for me."
I was standing there and went, "Teeheehee"—you know how a kid can laugh at somebody that's been embarrassed. Well, Octave came for me later and slapped me. When my mama found out, she had a big humbug. She went right after his ass. So did Hats, who was known to be a tush hog.
"I ever hear about you laying a hand on this kid, I'll break your neck."
"I didn't touch him, Hats!"
"If you even say that again, I'll break your neck!" Hats was bad, Hats was a hog.
Guys like Hats and Coats protected me since I didn't have a father. They were picking my pocket, but that's for drugs—they'd steal for that from anybody, that had nothing to do with their relationship with me. But it wasn't often they did that. They were very shy about stealing from me. They weren't going to lose the goose that's laying the golden egg, the little kid dancer.
Before long, I joined my mama and Nita, the Theophile Sisters. We danced at the Dog House on Rampart and Bienville; at the Silver Slipper on Bourbon; at the Entertainers on Franklin near Customhouse; at the Plantation Club, run by Pete Herman, the famous ex-bantamweight champion from years ago; and at the Big 25, an entertainers' and pimps' hangout on Franklin. The Pentagon Ballroom was downtown on Galvez and St. Bernard, across the street from another little bar called Little Ferd's.
There was the Budweiser on Iberville and the Kingfish, which they also called the Pig Pen, on Decatur and Ursulines. And there was the Gypsy Tea Room on St. Ann and Villere, Ethel Grant was a waitress there because what I recall, my Uncle Benny was going with her. God, she was pretty. Goddamn, she was pretty. Buddy Tureaud was the emcee and spoke the worst English in the world. "Y'all get ready, we going bring y'all so-and-so, boy shit can she sing!" A couple that played the Gypsy Tea Room used to fight all the time, Billie and De De, you pronounced it dee dee. Big Billie was the woman, De De was a trumpet player. I mean really fight. She'd be punching him like she was another man. They were good musicians, good entertainers. Everybody that played trumpet did a Louis Armstrong imitation, and De De was kind of known for that—he had one of these gravel voices anyhow. Billie sang all kind of risqué songs and played the piano. If she played the wrong note, De De said, "You ain't playing the right goddamn notes!"
"Fuck you, play your damn horn, don't tell me how to play!" Fistfight right there.
We played the Palace Theater, too, on Iberville and Dauphin. The Lyric was before the Palace. It used to be on the very next corner, at 20l Burgundy Street—Burgundy and Iberville, downtown back-of-town side. The Lyric closed when I was practically a baby; there's been a parking lot there for years.
Because of dancing I learned the structure of songs; which was a boon to me as a drummer. I learned how to improvise. That's all tap dancing is, improvising. They have set steps, but you make up plenty of your own. Any time dancers find themselves together, it becomes a jam session. "See this? Can you do this one?"
You need stamina as a dancer, and that's what drove me to play an instrument that takes stamina. I always liked the drums, even as a little kid. First drums I owned I was four years old, a cheap little toy-type set my grandfather bought at Morris Music Store on Claiborne Avenue. I played snare drum in the Craig School marching band, had a hole knocked right through the drumhead when we went marching down St. Philip Street and somebody threw money. I was furious! I never played in a funeral band. I always wanted to, but that was relegated to the old dudes, it was the highest of prestige.
I wanted to play tenor sax at one time and took clarinet lessons from Professor Tureaud, who was eighty-something years old and the only teacher my mother would let me go to. But he wouldn't take me on tenor, not until I learned clarinet, and my cousin stole my clarinet.
The first music I knew was the songs I danced by, like "Rose Room," or the songs my mother sang, like "Am I Blue?" "My Buddy" is another song I remember from early. "... the nights are long since you went away/I dream about you all through the day, my buddy...." Kids didn't have no money to buy records, black kids anyhow, and there weren't any black radio shows or black disc jockeys. We listened to what the white stations played: Amos 'n' Andy, Inner Sanctum. You don't know how many years it took black people to realize it wasn't black guys doing Amos 'n' Andy! The sound of their voices was so typically black. Those guys did a hell of a job. They must have lived in black culture and really observed.
One year of high school is as far as I went. How could I learn about tap dancing in school? I'd known all my life what I wanted to be: something in show business. I went to Joseph A. Craig Elementary, Albert Wicker Junior High, and St. Peter Claver's Catholic school. I wasn't valedictorian or none of that shit, but if I didn't do well I wouldn't get to be in concerts or on the basketball team. So I did pretty well, except in subjects pertaining to numbers.
By the time I was seventeen I had been intimate with maybe fifteen, twenty girls, not counting casual acquaintances I met in other parts of town. Altogether I'd say I had maybe thirty, forty girls. That ain't a lot, not when you living where pussy's as free as the wind.
Blanche Thomas was the first chick I had anything to do with. I was about twelve, she was three or four years older and lived on Dumaine Street, between Claiborne and Robertson. It was the kind of thing where the grownups are gone and you're in the house. Blanche was a very forward girl. She dared me.
"You don't know how to do nothing."
Being a young, feisty dude, I said, "Yes I do!" You know, that kind of braggadocio attitude.
"I bet you never had no girl."
"Sure I did!"
"Aw, you don't know what to do."
"Yes I do, I'll show you!" I had sensed this was going to be the time. But I still wouldn't have been surprised if she'd slapped me and said, "Get the hell away from here!" I was kissing on her and feeling on her and I told her I was going to put it in her.
"Yeah, you keep saying that."
Next thing you know, that's just what I did. I remember thinking, "Jesus, I really don't know how to do this!" All I could think afterwards was, "I should have done this earlier!"
That's when I started looking for girls; before, I'd always let them take the initiative. You never took your clothes off, you had to be ready to run out the back door—we were kids, man! Those houses all had back doors and little alleyways and you'd go running out the alley.
It wasn't long after, I had a little finagling with a cousin of Blanche's, Angelina Ferrand, a pretty, pretty girl whose nickname was Sailor Mouth. Motherfuck this, motherfuck that. And pretty as a little speckled pup! It went on between me and Angelina for years, man. With a certain few people, you'd do it almost any time. Me and Angelina were friends, but we were fucking friends.
Actually, it wasn't that unusual for a girl in my neighborhood to maintain her virginity. The large percentage, you see, were Catholics and was afraid of the priests and the sisters—and them priests found out every time. I'm Catholic born and raised, I was even an altar boy at St. Peter Claver. I think they were short of them. That's where I learned to drink. The father turned me on to wine, man, the wine they made the blessed sacrament with. He drunk it like a fish when he wasn't drinking Irish whiskey. Do you realize there was a time they didn't allow no blacks in Immaculate Conception? A Catholic church! I was put out of Our Lady of Guadeloupe on St. Louis and Rampart when I was eleven or twelve. I went in there for Ash Wednesday, and the priest said, "You can't come in, go to St. Peter Claver." I was shocked! After a while I wasn't shocked anymore, and that's the reason I never had much faith in the Catholic Church.
Table of Contents
| Foreword | ix | |
| Acknowledgments | xi | |
| Introduction | xiii | |
| 1 | The Treme Jumped: New Orleans Childhood, 1924-1942 | 1 |
| 2 | The Darktown Scandals: Across the USA, 1930-1942 | 22 |
| 3 | No Kind of Hero: California and Europe, 1942-1945 | 46 |
| 4 | Runnin' Wild in this Big Old Town: New Orleans, 1945-1957 | 62 |
| 5 | The Power and the Groove: Los Angeles, 1957- | 101 |
| Notes | 153 | |
| Appendix | Selected Singles, Albums, and Film and Television Soundtracks Featuring Earl Palmer | 170 |
| Index | 189 |
What People are Saying About This
Earl Palmer was the drummer who first made me want to play in a band. Sympathy, wit, soul and a back beat.
From his childhood years as a vaudevile tap dancer ro his ascendance as the rock drummer of choice and first-call Los Angeles studio musician, Earl feels and understands life in the ironic, syncopated way of jazz.