Three Days Before the Shooting ... (140 page)

It seems that Sippy ran into the young man when working at a certain exclusive club. It was during a big champagne party at which the young man got crying drunk, wandered into the kitchen, and made a nuisance of himself by sitting on its range and beating a saucepan with a wooden spoon. Naturally this caused a crisis in the kitchen, because such unusual conduct was disgraceful. And especially from a young man who was usually quite gentlemanly. Therefore the kitchen’s orderly routine was brought to a halt, with no one—cooks, chefs, tuxedoed headwaiter, white-jacketed waiters, or astonished busboys—knowing what to do about it.

Drunk as a coot and mad as a sorehead bear, the young man was calling everybody names that made some of the churchgoing older waiters want to break his neck. Then, from beating on the pan he turned to cursing and striking at anyone who came within range, but out of respect for his wealthy family no one was willing to lay a hand on him—until, that is, Sippy wandered into the kitchen from a party which he had just finished serving on an upper floor. Then, hearing the commotion and seeing everybody crowding around and doing nothing, Sippy recognized the young man and took charge.

“Mister So-and-So,” Sippy said, “what the hell do you think you’re doing, sitting on top of that range like a goddamn clown on a throne? Who do you think you’re kidding, perched up there like all of a sudden you’re some kind of iron-assed devil? I want to know, and I mean right this minute! Because by now even the dumbest stud in this kitchen knows that if that range was fired up your butt would be blistered—which it ought to be—and burned ten shades blacker than mine!

“And just look at what you’re doing to that fine tuxedo! Good Lord almighty, man, what’s come over you, the son of a son of a
Virginian
, that you can’t handle your liquor any better than that! Do you know what your daddy will do when he hears about this? Hell, I’ll
tell
you what he’ll do, he’ll bust a gut and then go upside your head, that’s what he’ll do! So now you come down off that dam’ range and let me bring you back to your senses!”

Well, with that (and to everyone’s surprise and relief) the young man broke into tears and allowed his newfound friend to guide him out of the kitchen and into an unused dining room, where Sippy forced him to drink a concoction which left him pale, watery eyed, limp-legged, and sober. This incident, which has long since become local barbershop legend, was the start of the young man’s relationship with Sippy. And from there he went on to psych the poor man out of his mind and beyond all rational belief. Sippy worked more changes on that poor rich boy than those African masks worked on Picasso! What’s more, he seems to have worked a major change in the young man’s life and values. And what a backflip of a change that had to be!

For I was told that after attending an expensive prep school, Sippy’s boss had graduated from Harvard, where he played football, and that at the time of the incident he was enrolled in a divinity school where he was said to have been a top student and an excellent classical pianist; a gift which Sippy, a self-taught piano man, embellished by teaching him ragtime and stride. Then, by way of making him more aggressive, Sippy taught him boxing. Because, thanks to a pious but domineering father and despite having a pile of money inherited from his mother’s father, the young millionaire was somewhat depressed and inhibited. During your jazz experience you must have encountered hundreds of the type; who for all their whiteness remind me of nothing so much as those Negroes who wear their hair defiantly long and bushy but then walk around with hangdog expressions. But be that as it may, in Sippy’s eyes his young employer’s timidity was the result of a misdirected upbringing and sexual immaturity, so he seized these as an opportunity for taking his boss in charge and improving his character.

This feat Sippy accomplished with the enthusiastic cooperation of a couple of his women friends, a teasing brown and towhead blonde respectively, who were paid far above the going price for initiating the millionaire into the subtleties of bedroom mechanics that turned out to have some of the liberating effects of a lengthy psychoanalysis. After that he became what Sippy termed his “main man.” And with the shredding of one inhibition leading to the loss of another, the wealthy divinity student got rid of his shyness, broke with his father, and lost his religion.

More important, he was so thankful for his liberation that he regarded Sippy as more of a companion than a servant. And since Sippy was of light complexion and indeterminate racial features (unless of course one was from the South and familiar with types produced by its after-dark activities), he was often the millionaire’s companion at sports events, stags, poker games, and interracial carousels. But remember, this was during the so-called Jazz Age, when things were hanging loose, at least among the rich flappers and jelly beans. So while members of the millionaire’s social set were aware of the companionship, few objected. And of course its Negro observers just laughed and got a kick out of watching Sippy give the man a freewheeling Ph.D.’s instruction in subjects whose basics Uncle Remus had taught the one little white boy who absorbed his wisdom. Besides, the white man was so rich that under Sippy’s influence he discovered that he could do anything he wanted and dare anybody to try to stop him. It was as though he enjoyed flaunting social conventions and was using his wealth to rise above them. And naturally Sippy was right in there with him!

That Negro even had that white man kissing women’s hands and bowing Continental style, and taught him to dance, swing, strut, and jive! I tell you, that Sippy was
slippy—
which should have been his name! And then, having taken the millionaire over with such success, the rascal went to work on your boy—providing, of course, that he
was
your boy.

Nevertheless, from what I could glean the young man took to Sippy’s instructions like a duck to water. And as you’d expect of somebody who, as I gather, had been well prepared by his early association with you, the boy was a quick and willing student. By which I mean to say that he was already something of a natural-born actor and potentially a man-of-all-situations, and therefore made to order for Sippy’s ultimately subversive plan.

Hickman, before long this butler had shaped the boy into his idea of a white American gentleman! Bought him clothes and taught him to wear them, worked on his manners, and had him reading all kinds of books so that he could hold his own among the educated. However, after discovering that the kid could change his modes of speech with the facility of a traveling salesman or a world-traveled mynah bird, Sippy left his speech alone. Instead, he drilled the boy in the vernaculars of baseball, boxing, gambling, and in Harlemese, Brooklynese, and the bits of Yiddish which he himself had picked up while working for a Jewish agent whose specialty was booking vaudeville acts and jazz orchestras. And finally, being as good at the craft as you were back when I backed you on the drums, Sippy steeled his student against any easy provocation, whether from hostile individual, error of choice, or circumstance, by coaching him in the finer points of the dirty dozens. In fact, it was the boy’s familiarity with that form of contentious discourse that strengthened my suspicion that he was indeed your man.

Well, as far as I can recall I left town for a semester to continue my studies at Chicago and thus lost contact with the experiment. But by the time I returned Sippy had come up with a Falstaff-Pygmalion feat of transformation that can only be described as a combination of Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, P. T. Barnum, George Washington Carver, Groucho Marx, Billy Sunday, Yellow Kid Weil, Wlliam S. Hart, Teddy Roosevelt, Warren G. Harding, Gaston B. Means, and Lon Chaney
—plus
our own dam’ Sam, John Henry,
and
Brer Rabbit. A creation which turned out to be so swindle-prone, fluent, and shifty that absolutely
no one
could get him into focus. And that goes for most cynical and worldly-wise Negroes who happened to be tracking his progress.

Because even under the most rigorous scrutiny, the rascal’s image simply kept fading in and out of focus and reforming and realigning itself into so many ungraspable and shifting shapes that even the most knowledgeable and sociological of observers were utterly confused! Those two, mentor and student, operating as master and servant, Arab sheikh and interpreter, con man and shill, could charm the tail off a brass monkey or raw beefsteak out of the jaws of a hungry hound. They worked more scams than Houdini performed escapes, and were reported as having been seen from time to time on every level of white society. But what was so amazing to me was that most folks saw in them, and especially in the boy, whatever it was they
wanted
to see. All they had to do was think it, and there he’d be in the charismatic flesh!

And aliases? Hell, he had enough to fill an
encyclopedia!
Name a place and he was from it, accent and all. And with the manners and costume to fit. Sometimes he wore Texas boots and a cowboy hat, sometimes a derby, chesterfield overcoat, and spats; sometimes an opera hat, white tie, and tails; or, as the occasion or ploy demanded, high-rise gamblers-striped pants, spats, and an Oxford gray cutaway morning coat with its braided lapels adorned with a white carnation. And on one occasion, during which he must have been in the grip of some reckless frenzy of larcenous fantasy, he was seen ambling along the streets of New York’s Lower East Side wearing a prayer shawl and yarmulke!

Apparently the boy was driven by some obscure need to transform himself into any and every image of possibility that entered his Sippy-scrambled mind! Because once when I’m visiting my old church back in Dallas, I look up and there he is, up in the pulpit preaching a fire-and-brimstone sermon—and I mean rocking the church with such effect that I didn’t know whether to laugh, cry, scream, or expose him! Of course I didn’t, both out of respect for your concern and the kick I got from just watching him operate. In fact, watching him confirmed what I’d been taught during my excursions from the classroom, which was that in this country the most instructive drama is not to be found in the theater—where most of what you get is souped-up soap opera having nothing to do with the life we know—but in the street. And Hickman, I assure you, those two transformed the streets of every good-sized town and city in the country into their own reality-defying stage! Or so it seems, because I was often unable to keep an eye on them and had to depend on others for my information.

In fact, after that pulpit bit, it was a year or two before I saw them again, this time in the North; and by then something must have gone wrong between them. Because I learned that Sippy was serving time for cracking some thug’s head with a billiards cue. It was said that he had acted in self-defense, but that for some reason the boy refused to supply him with a lawyer. This ended their friendship, and shortly afterwards the boy disappeared. I asked some of my friends with whom I had been enjoying his and Sippy’s career what had become of him, but none would admit to having seen him—probably because they put him down for betraying Sippy. Nor was I surprised, because as I said earlier, Sippy was the type who always looked out for number one, and since he’d fashioned the boy in his own ideal image some such parting of the ways was to be expected. So, having lost his trail, I finally gave up; both out of frustration and because my fellow observers were not your ordinary variety of change-shocked and color-blinded citizens, they were experienced, people-watching
Negroes;
men who worked for all kinds of businesses and institutions, and included Pullman porters, dining-car waiters, and truck drivers with whom I patronized the same barbershop. Therefore I concluded that he had taken off for Europe, or perhaps Hong Kong. However, during the same period a Pullman porter friend did tell me of an incident which you as an old jazzman might find amusing.

It seems that one night when on a trip to the West Coast he looked into a parlor car to check it out and saw a white songwriter of some reputation who was drunk and down on his knees at prayer. So seeing the situation, my friend said that he was about to close the door when something the songwriter was mumbling pricked his ear and stopped him dead in his tracks. He said that in the first place he was surprised that the man, who he had served before, even
believed
in prayer. But what stopped him was hearing a white man asking the Lord to make his latest song a success by having it fall into the hands of
Louis Armstrong!

After I recovered from a fit of laughing I told my friend that he
had to
be lying, but he swore by his mother and Alberta Hunter that he was telling the truth, and went on to tell me in all sincerity that this celebrated composer and lyricist was not only laying his case before the Lord with the passion of a true believer, but that he was pleading with Him to “please, please,
please”
(these were my friend’s exact words) “make that gravel-mouthed nigger listen to Thy divine will and do right by my beautiful song.” This I give you for what it’s worth, but who knows? Certainly there is enough evidence around to suggest that maybe the Lord responded and gave ole Satchmo a nudge. What’s more, to my faulty ear that mocking, “Oh, yaaas!” which Satch uses to end some of his numbers sounds suspiciously like an ambiguous “Amen!” Anyway, I suspect that if you scratch an old-time Negro jazzman deep enough and hard enough you’ll find yourself a strayed apostate preacher!