Really the Blues by Mezz Mezzrow

Author:Mezz Mezzrow [Mezzrow, Mezz]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-59017-946-8
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2016-02-05T05:00:00+00:00

That’s the stuff you got to watch.

12. TELL A GREEN MAN SOMETHING

WAY BACK THERE THE MUSIC GRABBED ME BY THE STRINGPOST and yanked me off The Corner on Chicago’s Northwest Side. Now the same music parked me right smack on another corner, this time in the heart of Harlem where 131st Street breezes across Seventh Avenue.

This wasn’t just one more of them busy street crossings, with a poolroom for a hangout. Uh, uh. This corner was a whole atlas by itself—the crossroads of the universe, meeting-place of the hipsters’ fraternal order. In this block-long beehive life was close-packed and teeming, a-bubble with novelty, and in its many crannies you could find all the many kicks and capers your heart yenned after. Back on Chicago’s street-corner haunts you tangled with gamblers and racketeers and poolroom sharks, and all day long your tongue wagged its way from money to horses to women and back again. There your outlook was plenty hemmed-in, squeezed down to one dimension. But on The Corner in Harlem you stood with your jaws swinging wide open while all there is to this crazy world, the whole frantic works, strutted by. Life was full and jumping in that fantastic place, covered all spots and invaded all dimensions, including the fourth.

Anything you had a yen for—that’s no lie. You couldn’t see for looking, there were so many things to dig on The Stroll between 131st and 132nd. Dramas and tragedies in your face all the live-long day, till there were more lumps in your throat than you’d find in drugstore mashed potatoes. Happiness and ease too, in such big doses that fine-and-mellow was the play day in and day out. All the emotions, all the time, simmering in one big bubbling cauldron that covered a city block. Most all the great musicians, performers and entertainers the race produced used to congregate on The Corner, drawn back there by a powerful magnet after traveling all over the world. This place was the central clearing-house for a global grapevine—you could stand under the Tree of Hope without budging from one year to the next and know what was going down all through the South, or in Hollywood and Chicago, or Paris and London and Berlin and Stockholm. Let any of our boys get in a scrape with the pecks down in Memphis or Little Rock, or let them panic the English in Albert Hall or send the Danes in the Tivalis Koncertsal, and the news buzzed back to us on Seventh Avenue quicker than right now.

When good old Buck, of Buck and Bubbles, was driving along down South in his big Cadillac and dared to challenge the supremacy of the white race by passing a couple of white trash in a dinky old rattletrap Ford, he spent the night in jail for his crime and we knew all about it almost before his cell door closed. When Fats Waller was touring the South and kept having his big Lincoln sedan wrecked, with

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