Clifford's Blues by John A. Williams Page B

he’d written to him for his help in getting out. I said I wished him good luck. What was his own work about, I asked, and he said it was cellular physiology (or philosophy?).
    I didn’t have one damned idea what he was talking about, but I could see that it made him feel better to talk about such things, so I sat there for an hour, thinking, Here are two darkies stuck in the middle of a cotton field, a concentration camp, and one is talking about all these ologies, and the other is hoping his officer is having a good time with his wife so he can go back where he lives and slip downstairs to his bed in the cellar and not be bothered. Didn’t neither one of us say anything about how strange it was for us to be here. When I got up to go, the glaze went out of his eyes and he suddenly started talking like a normal person. He asked me to tell him about jazz music, how it was played, how it felt to play it. He sounded just like white folks. I sat back down and I asked if he’d ever gone back to his father’s home in Tanganyika, and he said he had not, that he was sure he’d find it too primitive for him, but he liked jazz music because it was American. I said it wasn’t like any other music, because it was always changing. Not like playing Bach, I said. But is it fun playing? he wanted to know. I said it sometimes wasn’t.
    He smiled when I spoke. My German was street German, Berlin Alexanderplatz German, and I guess that’s why he smiled so much when I talked. Then he wanted to know if I knew Bessie and Jelly Roll, or Duke and Louis and Sidney, and I told him I’d met them, of course, and then went into Mr. Wooding and how I came to Europe with him and stayed, and now wished I hadn’t. He excused himself and came back with some “medicinal brandy,” he called it, and I said it was good for the Dachau Blues. Then I told him about this music running around in my head, new sounds, and then he said all this reminded him of music by an Austrian named Schoenberg, who developed a 12-tone scale. He wasn’t blue anymore. Nyassa poured some more “medicine,” and we just sat there, looking out the window at the Appellplatz.
    Nyassa asked me about my crime. He said real quick that he’d never known criminals until he came here and that I didn’t seem to be like the rest of them. I stroked my face with my finger and said “Black.” Then I got up and left.
    While I was walking across the ’Platz, through the Jourhaus gate and through the section where they were rebuilding the ammunition factory, and down the street to the officers’ quarters, I wondered, maybe for the first time with my dumb ass, if Malcolm would have done what he did to me if I’d been white. I cried when I got in and went downstairs without running into Anna or Dieter Lange, cried because there are some things you never let yourself know, even when you do know them.
    Sunday, Sept. 22, 1935
    Last night Dieter Lange had me playing the piano along with some new records he got somewhere. Know he didn’t buy them. But he had Charlie Barnet’s “A Star Fell out of Heaven” with “When Did You Leave Heaven” on the flip side, and a Cab Calloway, “Avalon” up and “Chinese Rhythm” over. Dieter Lange loved them because they were new, but they weren’t nothing special, even though Doc Cheatham was playing lead trumpet. It was nice playing with Doc again. Made me homesick and sad. Benny Payne was on piano, but I cut him good (or at least it sounded that way to me, because mine was real music and his was on a record). It’s been a little while since we had a good house-rent kind of party. Sometimes it just isn’t too good to move up in the world.
    So this morning, while Anna and Dieter Lange stuffed themselves with ham and eggs American style, and with biscuits I’d made and strawberry jam Annaliese’s mother had made, he talked about