Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch Read Free Book Online Page A

that freshened what was often described as a monotonous landscape, a kind of visual drone.
    On August 29, 1920, a brown baby, with a red undertone to his skin, came yowling from the womb. He was born not on the Missouri side, where the political machine of Tom Pendergast kept contempt for the law alive, twentieth-century Packard style, but across the river in Kansas City, Kansas. His name was Charles Parker Jr., though no one remembers him ever being referred to as a junior. His father, Charles Parker Sr., was, by his own account, born in Mississippi to Peter Christopher Parker—a second-marriage baby for Peter, who would eventually have four wives, according to Fanny Blake, his half sister by the fourth wife. Part Negro, part Indian, with some white genes from an overcast point in the family history, Charles Sr. was light-skinned and attractive, a cook on the railroad, a well-groomed man who wore a part in his hair and combed it neatly across his head, not forward or backward. His shoes had the powerful gloss of those who earned their money on the passenger trains, his dancer’s legs long acclimated to the swaying and rattling of the Pullman cars as their metal wheels turned on the tracks. He was a man of charm and wit, but his exuberance and his ability to learn quickly were tainted by an excessive attraction to nightlife and dissipation.
    The consequence was that all-American heritage of Charlie’s: the Asian and European blood running beneath his reddish-brown skin. Yet the forming of the Wild West in which he grew up had a much earlier start and one that was given the glory and the gore of its beginnings and shapings by the same three sources that constituted his genetic line.
    Charlie Parker’s mother, Addie, was from Oklahoma, the region once called Indian Territory. Like Jay McShann, she claimed Muskogee as her hometown. She was part Choctaw, her Indian blood probably the result of President Andrew Jackson’s policies, which had pushed the tribe northwest from Mississippi. About five feet five, she had high cheekbones, a pointed nose, thin lips, a big bosom, and an ascendant rump. Mrs. Parker wore her hair long, in what was known as a cat-and-mouse style, with a bun on either side of her head and one on top.
    The Parker family, two adults and two children, lived in a five-room frame house on Washington Avenue between Ninth and Tenth Streets. Before he married Addie, the light-skinned Charles Sr. had coupled with an Italian woman named Edith; she gave birth to John Parker, a jolly, big-eared boy named after his peg-legged uncle, another resident of Kansas City, Kansas. Three years later came Charles Jr., and he soon became the favorite. Charlie was Addie’s only child, and he became her obsession—especially when Charles Sr. made it obvious that he had no intention of giving up the firewater that made him cut the fool. When she scolded him for his behavior, he stood his ground: “I’ll stop drinking,” he told her, “ten years from today .”
    When he first answered her that way, it was almost funny. Charles Sr. was the kind of handsome man who got used to being funny. But he did not know when he had ground her patience and belief in him down nearly all the way. She beganto lose faith in her husband as a responsible man. Over time, Addie Parker started to believe it would take a hundred years for this man to stop his drunkenness, and as she did, her eyes became hard as cherry pits. An acidic bitterness had scalded her skin. But she willed herself to do what would protect what was important. That was a sorrowful but sure thing that had its own brightness.
    Edward Reeves, who lived across the street, played often with Charlie and John Parker. He remembered the neighborhood as one where everybody knew everybody else and a child seen misbehaving had to face whippings in triplicate: the first from the neighbor who saw the act; the second from Mother when he got home, or after