Celebrating Bird: The Triumph of Charlie Parker

2. Youth

19 2 . yO u T h HARLES PARKER JR. was born August 29, 1920, in Kansas City, Kansas, during a bitterly contested presidential election. In previous weeks, Senator Warren G. Harding of Ohio had emerged as the compromise candidate for the Republicans , with Governor Calvin Coolidge of Massachusetts filling out the ticket. The New York Times, in an extraordinary front-page editorial , accused the convention of “cowardice and imbecility” and argued “we must go back to Franklin Pierce if we would seek a President who measures down to [Harding’s] political stature.” The Democrats settled on Ohio’s Governor James Cox and Secretary of the Navy Franklin D. Roosevelt. The Republican landslide foretokened an era of unexampled corruption, exceeding party affiliations. Within three years the nation learned of the administration’s illicit dealings in oil reserves. Even before that, numerous municipalities had fallen into the hands of venal politicians and their gangster sponsors, for 1920 was also the year the Volstead Act took effect. C Charlie Parker and the King alto he favored when he began playing with an ensemble of strings, c. 1950. YOUTH 20 During its tenure (1920–33), legitimate businessmen were barred from selling, manufacturing, or distributing alcoholic beverages. No other minority group would ever get so generous a boost from Congress as organized crime received from U.S. Representative Volstead; no community would plunge into the trough more extravagantly than Kansas City, Missouri, just across the Kaw River from Charlie Parker’s birthplace. The United States was experiencing birth pangs of various sorts in 1920. The Republican victory repudiated Wilsonian idealism , which was widely blamed for the country’s entanglement in the Great War. Isolationists spurned the League of Nations and deCharlie Parker and his half brother, John, nicknamed Ikey, Kansas City, Kansas. YOUTH 21 manded reparations from Germany , which succeeded only in helping to starve a bellicose nation and ensuring another war. Few noticed, but in 1920 Hitler founded the Nazi party. America was more concerned with domestic bolshevism, unionism , and anarchy—Sacco and Vanzetti were arrested that year. A few new novels—Main Street, The Age of Innocence, This Side of Paradise, Painted Veils (which was banned as obscene )—indicated a growing impatience with provincial values . And a new American music called jazz was successfully touring Europe. Black jazz musicians could not yet record, however, and the hit songs that greeted the infant Charlie Parker included “I Love the Land of Old Black Joe,” “Alabama Moon,” “My Little Bimbo Down on the Bamboo Isle,” and “Whatcha Gonna Do When There Ain’t No Jazz?” Also, curiously, a song called “Cherokee ” debuted, entirely unrelated to the one Parker made his anthem . On the other hand, 1920 was the year women were given the vote and a cultural renaissance took hold in Harlem. Massive demonstrations by black soldiers, the theatrical success of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, and the first convention of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro Improvement Association contributed to renewed awareness of a nation within the nation. The Parkers lived at 852 Freeman Street, an intimate suburban neighborhood quite unlike the glittery city about to burgeon in Missouri. Charles Parker Sr., born in Mississippi and bred in Charlie Parker, Kansas City, Kansas. YOUTH 22 Memphis, drifted to Kansas while touring as a dancer and singer on the T.O.B.A. circuit, a substandard chain of theaters organized in 1911, which maintained a harsh dominion over black vaudeville . (The acronym stood for Theater Owners Booking Association, but performers considered it Tough on Black Asses.) His sallow coloring set off dark brown eyes, and he wore his hair slicked and parted on the side. Parker drank heavily, though rarely at home, as his wife did not tolerate liquor in the house. His alcoholism eventually precipitated their separation, by which time he had gone to work as a chef on the Pullman line, a job that kept him away from home. Charlie’s mother was the former Addie Boxley, a broad-shouldered , deep-bosomed woman, whom many thought beautiful and all found steely and dignified.* Her family came from Muskogee, Oklahoma, and her part-Choctaw ancestry was readily apparent in prominent cheekbones and thin lips. She wore her gray-streaked hair long, plaited atop her head in two big buns; she favored dangling earrings and large glasses that seemed to magnify her obsidian eyes, which her future daughter-in-law Rebecca Ruffin...