Sons Without Fathers: What Every Mother Needs to Know by Dickerson James L. & Allen Mardi

Author:Dickerson, James L. & Allen, Mardi [Dickerson, James L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Sartoris Literary Group
Published: 2012-02-19T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 6

How Boys Cope

Through Self Treatment

Louis Armstrong is one of the most beloved musicians in American history. But his fame was a poor substitute for what he needed most growing up—a father. Born on August 4, 1901, in a New Orleans ghetto that was famously unfriendly, even to sons with fathers, Armstrong was abandoned by his father on the day he was born.

“The next time we heard of him, he had gone into an uptown neighborhood and made several other children by another woman,” Armstrong wrote in Louis Armstrong: In His Own Words. “Whether he married the other woman, we’re not sure. One thing—he did not marry [my mother]. She had to struggle all by herself, bringing us up. Mama Lucy [Louis’s sister] and I were bastards from the start.”

There is no indication that Louis’s mother, or his grandmother, who actually cared for him for the first seven years of his life, ever tried to find him a male role model, but he found an unlikely one himself, sort of by accident. From the age of seven to twelve, Armstrong worked for a Russian Jew, a ragman named Morris Karnofsky. The ragman paid him to help collect bottles and rags, and to accompany him when he made coal deliveries. One day Armstrong spotted a battered cornet in a pawnshop. He dearly wanted to own it, but the five-dollar price tag was out of his reach.

Seeing how much Armstrong wanted the instrument, Karnofsky loaned him two dollars so that he could purchase the horn on the “lay-a-way” plan, whereby he paid two dollars down and fifty cents a week until it was paid in full. When he finally was able to take the horn home, Karnofsky and his wife helped him clean and polish it and then encouraged him to learn to play it.

Karnofsky was the first father figure Armstrong ever knew.

When the Karnofskys moved to the white section of town, where Morris went into another line of work, Armstrong was left without a job—or a mentor. Not surprisingly, he dropped out of school and left his mother’s house to live on the street with other homeless children.

As an adult, Armstrong was a classic Unfriendly World son. He was unable to relate to women in any way other than physically, and even that was based solely on his sexual needs. He was resentful of male authority figures, but he was too inept at dealing with other men to be confrontational; instead, he simply went with the flow, doing what he was told, masking his frustration with alcohol and marijuana.

Armstrong married poorly the first time, choosing a prostitute with whom he often fought. He met his second wife, Lil Hardin, when he left New Orleans and moved to Chicago to play in King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band, which featured Lil on piano. She couldn’t stand him at first—she particularly disliked the “country” way he dressed—but she soon fell in love with him and they were married after they divorced their spouses.

Lil was a perfect match for Armstrong.

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