Harlem Nocturne (21 page)

Through Williams's music, places of architectural and acoustic wonder, the concert halls, were transformed into spaces where traditions met, conversed, and sometimes collided; they were spaces where paper men met improvisational genius. Places like Café Society and Williams's Sugar Hill apartment brought together integrated groups of musicians and integrated audiences that challenged convention and tradition. This urge to challenge traditional sounds, spaces, and communities was reflected in the broader desires of progressive artists and activists, especially in Harlem. They remade the city in their own image, and they imagined and sought to bring into being their own version of a beloved community.

The acetates of the Town Hall performance were stolen and not recovered until more than forty-five years later. Williams's friend Timmie Rosenkrantz would eventually release the recording of the Carnegie Hall performance in Europe, but the recording of the live performance of the
Zodiac Suite
would not be available for decades in the United States.
³⁶

Moses “Moe” Asch recorded and released the studio version of
Zodiac
in 1945. Shortly after arriving in New York, Williams began to record for Asch, and she continued to do so during her most productive periods. Williams always admired and respected Asch. She noted, “The poor guy never quite made it financially because he was too nice to musicians.” Williams was grateful to Asch for a number of reasons: “He submitted my music to all the New York libraries, he paid me for recording musicians I had heard in Pittsburgh,” she explained. “Sessions for Asch brought me more royalties than
I've had from any other record company, and gave me the freedom to create.”
³⁷

Even after recording it, Williams continued to recompose and revise
The Zodiac Suite
. In addition, other artists performed portions of it. Williams's fellow Café Society performer and friend Pearl Primus choreographed and performed parts of it, and would continue to do so throughout the decade. Talley Beatty and Katherine Dunham also choreographed dances to portions of
Zodiac
. Williams dedicated “Scorpio” to Dunham, Imogene Coca, and Ethel Waters, whom she called “my friends the sexpots.” Gray Weingarten arranged for Williams to perform parts of the suite in Syracuse at a benefit for the NAACP. Dizzy Gillespie recorded three movements in 1957, arranging them for big band.

Following the whirlwind surrounding
The Zodiac Suite
, Williams took a much-needed break. The rush of writing, the anxiety and excitement about the performance, the nightly gigs at Café Society, the benefits, and all the recording sessions had contributed to her emotional and physical exhaustion. She requested a leave from the club; Josephson agreed, gave her a beautiful watch as a token of his gratitude and admiration, and let her go. Ordinarily, she would have gone home to Pittsburgh; seen her nieces, nephews, and sisters; enjoyed homemade cooking; and maybe sat in with local musicians. Unable to muster the energy this time, she stayed in New York. More specifically, she stayed in Harlem. She'd been so busy, she hadn't really gotten to know her neighborhood; it had been a place to eat and sleep, meet with other musicians,
and workshop her music. At most, she would go to Minton's on 118th Street. The newspapers claimed that 118th Street was the most dangerous street in the city because of the crime, but Williams hadn't found that to be true. The people who hung out there got to know her, loved her, and treated her with courtesy and respect. The food at Minton's was good—a man named Lindsay Steele used to cook wonderful meals and then come out and sing during intermission.

Because of these experiences, Williams greatly looked forward to knowing the neighborhood more intimately. Like most musicians, she was a night person. She walked the streets of Harlem after the sun went down, when good, hardworking people were at home with their families. Ever the generous one, always wanting to help, and believing she could save people's lives, she became an easy mark. “I must have gone all over Harlem in about 4 weeks from Lenox to 7th and 8th Avenues [and]from Hamilton Heights to 135th and below.”
³⁸

Postwar Harlem was a transformed place. It lacked the optimism that had characterized it during the war, and the neighborhood never recovered from the riots. Rows of abandoned, boarded-up buildings invited criminal activity. As the defense industry began to shut down and men returned from the war, many people who had found work in the defense industry and other forms of manufacturing now found themselves without work. The garment factories that had lined East Harlem in earlier times had closed and moved outside the city, leaving in their wake high rates of unemployment. Gangs and heroin had begun to dominate street life.

Williams found Harlem at night both fascinating and frightening: fascinating
because
it was frightening. “I had never in my life been in such a terrible environment with people who roamed the streets looking for someone to devour. . . . It was fascinating watching one race of people live off of the other. I wondered why with all their shrewd brains, they never ventured downtown.”
³⁹
By different races, she meant those who preyed and those who were preyed upon. Malcolm Little, then serving time in federal prison in Massachusetts, would later concur. Only months before, he, too, had walked these same streets, and he had been part of that “race of people” who preyed upon others.

Like an anthropologist or sociologist, an observer but not an objective one, Williams walked. “The new experiences began to mean a great deal to me,” she later wrote. “I considered myself a guinea pig in finding out answers to certain downtown gossip concerning Harlem. I had read several books on the subject and thought the authors ridiculous or biased. Yet I can say it can be quite a hell hole if one is weak enough to go for all that happens here.” This was the Harlem of Ann Petry's novel
The Street
and her article “Harlem.” For both Petry and Williams, Harlem had become a ghetto. Williams had an extensive library and informed herself through reading and observation. She had lost any romantic sense of Harlem and had become aware of its underside. At the same time, her world was expanding significantly beyond the small, close-knit circle of musicians who constituted her family.
⁴⁰

Without the protection of her musician brothers, and distancing herself from her girlfriends, Williams let her naive
curiosity get the best of her. She had successfully avoided the substances that plagued her friends, yet another habit, just as expensive, if not more so, awaited her: gambling. On the road between sets and gigs, she had always enjoyed the occasional card game with other musicians as a way to pass the time. The soirees at 63 Hamilton Terrace often included an occasional game of poker or tonk, but she had never been involved in any serious game where the stakes were high.

That would change when, one night, an acquaintance took her to a card game in one of Harlem's after-hours spots. Williams lost $150, but she was having a ball. On her nightly strolls, she encountered the elite and the denizens of the night, all of whom were hooked on gambling. “I was introduced to the cream of the crop . . . nice teachers, apartment owners, housewives who'd come to the game with $5.00, others who if they lost, would pull out $200–300 more. The first game I played there were more than ‘a few doctors' as well.” At the gambling table she met the full cross-section of Harlem. “I remember the first big game I went to I was a nervous wreck for days, after hearing all the loud mouth jive and big talk. Everyone talking at the same time. It took some time to get used to this.” Williams, the sensitive artist, was both stimulated and overwhelmed by her surroundings.
⁴¹

Harlem supplied her with plenty of opportunities to pursue her new interest. “My name was ringing all over Harlem as the poker chump,” she later wrote. Although Williams lost more and more money, she justified it by telling herself that her opponents needed the money more than she did, “to keep their rent going and other necessities.” Soon her friends and her two
half-brothers, Jerry and Howard (who were living with her following stints in the army), expressed concern and alarm. But she paid no heed to them, later saying, “I continued to stay up working nights and gambling, never getting any rest until I had a breakdown [and] went to a doctor.”
⁴²

She kept playing; she kept losing. The more she lost, the more she withdrew from her savings account. She withdrew so regularly, in fact, that federal authorities thought she was being blackmailed. “I must have stopped counting at $7,000,” she wrote.
⁴³
Some games would last as long as four days nonstop. There was constant stimulation. She emerged from them into the rose-colored dawn, dazed, but thrilled nonetheless. She also became involved with a new man, Lindsay Steele from Minton's. Steele was the first of Williams's lovers who was not an artist; he was a numbers banker. He also seemed to have offered her some protection in her new environment, though he didn't help her stop gambling.

After weeks of roaming the streets, hitting the after-hours spots, and sitting in on card games the way she used to sit in with musicians, Williams came to a conclusion about the city. “New York is a town [where] if one takes a vacation or relaxes and tries to be normal and nice something happens. To explore New York means certain death. One has to be tough and on the alert.”
⁴⁴
Williams began to experience New York as a place that was unsafe and unwelcoming to those who lacked the toughness required by life in the city. Suddenly, the city she loved, the city that had been a source of inspiration, became a place of “certain death,” both literal and spiritual.

And yet, she didn't retreat. She pulled back from the gambling, but unlike many of her friends and other members of the middle class, she refused to leave Harlem, and she continued to be observant of and sensitive to her surroundings. After the riots, many of the upper middle class left as surrounding neighborhoods opened up to them. St. Albans, Queens, became the preferred dwelling place of the jazz elite. A middle-class community located just a few miles from JFK Airport, it is now the center of Queens's African American community. Jazz musicians began to move to large homes, especially those located in the Addisleigh Park neighborhood. Lena, Pops, Duke, and even Lady Day moved there. Williams's beloved Dizzy found his way to the outer borough. Count Basie moved there in 1946, and shortly afterward, Ella followed. Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, and Williams wouldn't leave. Even during its lowest points, Harlem maintained a middle-class presence, and these three were part of it.

One day, a young boy who lived on Williams's floor was shot and killed in a gang war. Young boys between the ages of eight and fifteen were particularly vulnerable to gang membership and gang violence. In 1946, the nine-year-old Claude Brown, who would go on to write the memoir
Manchild in the Promised Land
, was recruited into a Harlem gang. On the other side of town, in Spanish Harlem, where a growing population of Puerto Rican immigrants and their children lived, nineteen-year-old Piri Thomas, who later became the author of
Down These Mean Streets
, also a memoir, was already a veteran of street battles. So prominent would gang life become that in
1948
Life
magazine ran a photo essay about a young gang leader named Red Jackson. The photographer, Gordon Parks, followed Jackson for months, befriending him, gaining his trust, and photographing him in ways that showed both his toughness and his vulnerability. Through the
Life
story, people across America got a glimpse of the violence that black urban dwellers already knew by experience. It was during this period that a growing discourse on juvenile delinquents emerged.

After the death of her young neighbor, Williams decided to devote herself to doing something for young people and for her community—that is what Harlem had become for her. Its residents were “her people.” At first her efforts were philanthropic. “I decided to help with the situation,” she explained, “through getting donations from people to build playgrounds, recreation rooms, etc.”

But as early as the spring of 1946, Williams expressed an interest in doing the work herself. She began to reach out to public schools, seeking to work with young people there. In a letter dated June 8, 1946, she wrote to a school principal, “Unfortunately until now I have been unable to accept these invitations[,] many of which came from the ‘trouble areas' so understandably in need of guidance. . . . I've been most unhappy at not having the time[;] if your office would approve the plan and arrange a schedule, I should be very, very happy to do two concerts weekly from now until the end of the present semester, at no charge naturally.” If her earlier involvement in political and civic activity occurred at the prompting of Barney Josephson, Teddy Wilson, or John Hammond, in 1946, especially after
having witnessed the conditions of the black poor firsthand, Williams set out on her own campaign. She did not limit her efforts to Harlem. On June 17, she wrote to the principal of Arts High School in Newark, New Jersey, explaining, “Playing jazz concerts for school audiences is one of the projects closest to my heart and knowing of your interest too, I am taking your suggestions and support in encouraging the board of education to approve and sponsor these programs.”
⁴⁵

As the seasons changed, Williams continued to be concerned about Harlem and to think of ways to help alleviate the suffering she saw there, but she also turned her attention to the racial situation on a national level. In spite of some courtroom gains, Jim Crow still ruled the day, especially in the South. Her friends Hazel Scott and Katherine Dunham made headlines by refusing to play before segregated audiences. Pearl Primus had gone to the South two years earlier to witness in person the degradation blacks experienced there, and the trip had transformed her art. Inspired, in part, by the political tenor of the times, Williams decided to directly challenge segregation: she came up with a plan to form a racially integrated all-female band that would present a concert in the city of her birth, Atlanta. It is surprising that she chose to form an all-female band, given that she considered them novelties—she had often resisted any efforts to characterize her as a “woman” player. Perhaps she was inspired by the success of great bands like the International Sweethearts of Rhythm. More likely, she didn't want to risk an interracial co-ed band. Women were less threatening to segregationists.