Esi Edugyan - Half-Blood Blues

Then this old gent come on and I known him at once. He’d been our band’s first manager. Hell, he’d lost his hair, his blue eyes was hazy with age and almost colourless, but I known him alright. He looked tidy and simple and entirely unscarred by life.

‘You have these four men in Paris,’ he was saying, ‘these men who’ve just watched the Nazis march in. And what do they do, instead of packing up to leave like everyone else? They write this song of resistance, they give their collective finger to the authorities. In this tiny little studio, where they could be arrested anytime. This studio where the equipment hasn’t been used for at least half a decade, the lathe and lacquers just sitting there gathering dust. Most of the blanks had been damaged, the coating scratched. I mean, in some cases you could see straight through to the aluminum. Now, you have to understand — to achieve perfect sound on lacquer-on-aluminum, the disc’s surface must be absolutely smooth. So the band had maybe nine or ten functional discs to work with. Nine or ten tries to get it right. And at the centre of it all, you’ve got this kid directing everything, this twenty-year-old Falk. And he’s screaming in the middle of takes, wrecking them, he’s grabbing the discs and gouging their surfaces with his pocket knife. Anything to stop a bad take from existing.

‘And amazingly, it’s on the very morning before Falk’s arrest that Griffiths decides he’s had enough of the kid’s perfectionism. So he takes the last disc they’ve cut and he tucks it into the case of his upright. You know, on the off chance it’s any good. And what’s remarkable about this fact is that those parts of the recording that couldn’t be remastered, those parts where there are actual pieces of the performance missing — those were pressed off by Griffiths’ bass strings boring into the lacquer. So those gaps are missing because the thing is that fresh, that literally hot off the press.

‘And it’s pure genius. Which would seem impossible — I mean, it’s just four men, barely half a band, the piece extremely pared down because of it. Minimalist. But Falk’s so gifted he can single-handedly make their four instruments sound like eight. His complexity is unbe liev able… the piece is brilliant. Even with Falk yelling halfway through — what does he say again? — “just a damn braid of mistakes”, something like that? Even his screaming doesn’t ruin it. If anything, the line’s now legendary. Just a damn braid of mistakes.’

That son of a bitch, I thought to myself. What did he know about us? He cut out on the first boat, day after Hitler was sworn in. Left poor Ernst to take his place, become our clarinetist and manager both.

More quick images. I closed my old eyes a minute. Then a scholar come on, some dry old owl I ain’t seen before, looking fit for the coffin in his suit and blue bow tie. ‘Life for black people under the Third Reich,’ he said through his nose, ‘was extremely contradictory. This is because there were so many different types of black people, and their treatment depended on what group they belonged to. For instance, you had the children of the African diplomats who’d come to the country during its colonial period. You had African — American performers, the opera singer Marian Anderson and jazzmen like Charles Jones and Sidney Griffiths, who, like their counterparts in Paris — Josephine Baker, Arthur Briggs, Bill Coleman and the like — all came to Europe to get away from the overwhelming racism prevalent in the southern United States in that era. The Jim Crow laws, in effect from the late 1800s right into the 1950s, barred blacks from active participation in society. In the twenties Europe was still a place black entertainers could come to earn a good living. Especially in Germany, whose borders were kept open to foreigners due to the Versailles Treaty. Also, the loss of the First World War had brought about a whole new artistic movement. The market for jazz had grown tremendously, and there was a decent following.’

Hell, it burned me up to see it. How the sweet jesus could he know what drove us there? He ain’t known nothing of my childhood, my thoughts, of that last-minute shrug brought me to Berlin back then. I been a hair’s-breadth from staying put in London, a whole other life.

‘Hieronymus Falk,’ he went on, ‘now, he belonged to a rarer group. He was what back then was called a Rhineland Bastard. See, after the First World War, part of the conditions levied against Germany were that France was given control of the Rhineland, which of course borders their country.’

He leaned forward, as though getting to the meat of his story. ‘Now, instead of sending French soldiers to occupy it, they sent men from their African colonies. As you can imagine, this didn’t sit well with some of the German populace. They dubbed the soldiers the Black Shame, the Black Scourge, the Black Infamy. Women who bore children with these men, like Falk’s mother Marieanne, they were assumed to be either prostitutes or rape victims. So even after the soldiers were sent home, and Hitler re-occupied the Rhineland, these children were seen as part of a significant insult to Germany. A cultural stain.’

New images come onscreen: black-and-white footage of soil-dark soldiers standing in a loose file, their uniforms muddy. ‘Is this what France calls a man?’ said the German voice-over.

The scholar’s voice drifted over the imagery. ‘Different types of black people were being treated in different and often contradictory ways under the Reich. This was in large part due to the fact that there were at most four thousand Germans of African descent in the whole country. And with a number that small, it was hard to effect cohesive legislation against them. Even so, many had their papers confiscated, making them effectively stateless.’

I hadn’t known most of what he was saying. You don’t stop to look around when you running, and back then we was all running. I sat sceptical, and pained by it.

‘In the end, Falk’s fate was outlandish in that he was one of a minority of Afro — Germans who were sent to concentration camps. Now if he’d been African — American, they would probably have held him indefinitely at Saint-Denis, like they did with other black musicians arrested in Paris. But Falk was German — or by their measure, ‘stateless’ — and so he was transferred to Mauthausen. Of course, it’s hard to get a sense of how many blacks actually went to the camps, because so many records were destroyed.

‘Remember, there was no on-paper legislation against blacks, so they were often admitted to work camps on trumped-up charges and under various crimes. Some were interned as Communists, or as Immigrants, who wore the blue badge. Or as Homosexuals, who wore the pink badge, or as Repeat Criminals, who wore the green badge, or Asocials, who wore the black badge. Even more obscuring is that the Asocial group included the homeless, pimps, pickpockets, murderers, homosexuals, and race defilers, so that it’s even more difficult to figure out who among them was black. These people are lost in the dark maw of history.’

Then there was some ruined old fool up there, his dour mug peering out at us. And then I saw with shock that the fool was me.

Well, hell. Nothing, nothing I tell you, can prepare you for the utter wreck of your face onscreen. I looked like one of them worn-out wood houses ain’t been painted in decades. My skin was thick with pores, my cheeks gaunt, my eyes like dim windows, going blond with cataracts and full of uncertainty. When my name flashed onscreen, I got that strange dark feeling welling up in me again. That sense something wasn’t right in me, something bad was coming.