Platter News

Ellington's "Black and Tan Fantasy” is a new Decca release of considerable interest and novelty. The pianist in "Creole" gets on a boogie-woogie kick that's odd but effective.

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

NOVEMBER 20, 1940

It was raining in Chicago, and Artis O. Peavey was running down the street. He ducked into a doorway, under a sign that read SEA FOOD LUNCH, FRIED FISH 35c. Across the street, at the RKO Alhambra, Dealers in Crime and Hoodlum Empire were showing. He felt like a fugitive, himself, up here, away from home, hiding out from a dusky damsel named Electra Greene.

He stood there, smoking a Chesterfield cigarette and contemplating life and its turmoils. His mother had said, whenever she was down, that just the thought of her sweet Jesus could always make her spirits rise.

But it hadn't been such thoughts that made Artis rise. It was the sight of a certain high-hipped, thick-lipped black beauty; and it hadn't been just his spirits that would rise and stay risen, much to the delight of said beauty. His main problem in life, at the moment, was that he loved too well and not too wisely.

He had always played a dangerous game where the lovely ladies' husbands were concerned, for Artis knew no boundaries. Every living female was his particular domain, and because of that lack of respect for territorial rights, he had often been forced to search his own body for stab wounds and broken bones, and on too many occasions had found them. After being caught with the wrong woman at the wrong time, one bronze amazon stuck him with a corkscrew. He was much more careful after that unhappy affair, the result of which was an interesting scar, to say the least, and a natural hesitation to fool with any more women who were bigger than he was. Still he was a heartbreaker. He had told one too many to look for him the next night, and that's just what they wound up doing—looking...

This skinny little man, so black he was a deep royal blue, had caused a lot of trouble for the opposite sex. One gal drank a can of floor wax and topped it off with a cup of Clorox, trying to separate herself from the same world he was in. When she survived, claiming that the liquids had ruined her complexion for life, he became continually uneasy after dark, because she had snuck up behind him more than once and cracked him in the head with a purseful of rocks.

But this situation with Electra Greene was more serious than a purseful of rocks. Electra was packing a.38 revolver that she knew how to use and had made uncouth threats pertaining to his manhood, and the extermination of such, after finding out he had not been true. Not once, but eight times, to be exact, with a Miss Delilah Woods, her sworn enemy, who had also left town in a hurry.

As Artis stood there today in the doorway, he was hurting so bad, he thought he would die. He missed Birmingham and he wanted to go back.

Every afternoon, before his hasty exit from Birmingham, he had driven his blue two-toned Chevrolet with the whitewall tires up Red Mountain and had parked to watch the sunset. From up there he could look down and see the iron and steel mills, with their towering smokestacks billowing orange smoke all the way up to Tennessee. There had been nothing more beautiful to him than the city at that hour, when the sky was washed with a red-and-purple glow from the mills and neon lights would start coming on all over town, twinkling and dancing throughout the downtown streets and over to Slagtown.

Birmingham, the town that during the Depression had been named by FDR "the hardest hit city in the U.S."... where people had been so poor that Artis had known a man that would let you shoot at him for money and a girl that had soaked her feet in brine and vinegar for three days, trying to win a dance marathon... the place that had the lowest income per capita of any American city and yet was known as the best circus town in the South...

Birmingham, which at one time had the highest illiteracy rate, more venereal disease than any other city in America, and at the same time proudly held the record for having the highest number of Sunday School students of any city in the U.S.... where Imperial Laundry trucks had once driven around town with WE WASH FOR WHITE PEOPLE ONLY written on the side, and where darker citizens still sat behind wooden boards on streetcars that said colored and rode freight elevators in department stores.

Birmingham, Murder Capital of the South, where 131 people had been killed in 1931 alone...

All this, and yet Artis loved his Birmingham with an insatiable passion, from the south side to the north side, in the freezing-cold rainy winter, when the red clay would slide down the sides of hills and run into the streets, and in the lush green summers, when the green kudzu vine covered the sides of the mountains and grew up trees and telephone poles and the air was moist and heavy with the smell of gardenias and barbecue. He had traveled all over the country, from Chicago to Detroit, from Savannah to Charleston and on up to New York, but there was never a time when he wasn't happy to get back to Birmingham. If there is such a thing as complete happiness, it is knowing that you are in the right place, and Artis had been completely happy from the moment he hit Birmingham.

So today he made up his mind to head on home, because he knew he would rather be dead than be away any longer. He missed Birmingham like most men miss their wives.

And that's just what Miss Electra Greene intended to become... if she let him live, that is.

As he walked by the Fife and Drum Bar, somebody played a song on the jukebox:

Way down South, in Birmingham. I mean South, in Alabam’

An old place where people go to dance the night away,

They all drive or walk for miles to jive

That Southern style, slow jive, that makes you want

To dance ‘til break of day.

At each junction where the town folks meet

At each function, in their tux they greet you.

Come on down, forget your care. Come on down

You'll find me there. So long town!

I'm headin' for Tuxedo Junction now.

BY MR. MILTON JAMES

NOVEMBER 25, 1950

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