Outlaw Style: Poems

Plantation of the Mad

Plantation of the Mad BLUES FOR BUDDY BOLDEN First photograph I ever saw of the East Louisiana State Asylum was a postcard sent from Jackson in September ’09 by a guard, like it was a holiday resort, an idea with all the charm of a cottonmouth in the kiddie park. He was already there, you see, after a third arrest for insanity. His wife and sister said they couldn’t stand his rage, and yeah, I came to know Buddy right well. Lost my gig slabbing plaster, so I got my cousin Bone to call in a favor. I hired on as a ward watcher. By the end I’d seen every inch of that sorrow farm. In the picture mailed back to the Crescent City the antebellum façade and Georgia columns said Big Master, the cupola said Money, and sometimes he would climb up and play on that nickel-flaking cornet they kept locked away—“Make Me a Pallet,”“The House Got Ready,”“Didn’t He Ramble”—like the yard was full of dancers thick as fleas. Me, I’m black as a spike on the graveyard fence and ugly with some scars, but Buddy was a beauty, a creamed coffee man, dapper even in a crazy house homespun smock, 81 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 81 and when I’d come whispering to haul him down, he’d say“Sebe”—that’s my name, Sebe Brabham— “don’t you want to slow drag to‘Funky Butt Blues’?” His signature. Dementia praecox, the chief doctor wrote down, but Buddy could be plain straight, and he blew that horn clear as death.You know he was Kid Bolden before they crowned him King, and he smoldered on the circuit, parks, and halls like down on Perdido Street, the Flying Horses, Mystic Babies, crewes like Ladies of Providence, Knights of Pleasure. On day off, I’d slip down to barrel houses in the swamp and get the skinny, though even his running mates had half the stories wrong. He smoked up a legend. Listen, he never kept that scandal sheet The Cricket, and even his dear sister was convinced he’d once been a barber. Now, I have seen him eye a razor on shaving day, but that look never meant to trim any man’s hair. Tending him in the asylum—you wouldn’t buy what I could tell you about inmates throwing shit or ripping at their own eyes, gnashing teeth like a junkyard bitch—well, I came to savvy no soul truly knew Buddy Bolden at the center where the demons hatched. But plaaay! And he turned 82 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 82 pure in the gazebo, riffing a solo—he would not work with the madhouse band. Called them that, he did—“Madhouse Band”—and laaaugh. Jesus! I came later to hear Bechet, Armstrong, Kid Ory, and they had finesse, embellishments like pastries bought hot on the levee, but couldn’t a one Gabriel out like Buddy. Folks called him High Note Man for a reason. He blew Judgment, and I’ve seen him while ragging a hymn blast the tuning slide across the room like a rocket. Some say women did him in, a whole harem struck hard by his star—that chippie Leda Chapman, Hattie Oliver, some Emma, some Ella—and even being sort of hitched to Nora didn’t slow his note. He liked their sashay, their candy voices, and flesh, I reckon, but his breath was born for rowdy music, smoke, cutting contests, and the Delta wildcat scream. The ladies toted his bowler, his watch, his satchel, but Big Whistle, who was his bank man, swore no gal ever touched that brass horn. He carried it like some will tote a baby or others hold a pistol, the treasure. Red cigarettes and a taste for chicory marked him as eccentric, a dog fox, and a dandy. Outside, he loved funerals and cockfights equal, 83 1SMITH_pages.qxd 8/13/07 10:44 AM Page 83 and the wags say he was all piss and whiskey. One night my first year—moon full, air musky— he freed a trumpet from the band’s locker. Buddy was meant to be locked in, sure: I turned the key, but strange things pass for normal in such a place. Buddy slipped to the garden—June, the...