She’d taken a year off between high school and college, and her father had used a connection to get her an age exemption and a gig in a piano bar, because she was a piano man, too. In fact, she was good on saxophone, primo on clarinet, and learning guitar fast. When God ladled out talent, He spilled the whole bucket on Sylvia Bledsoe. The bar was also a restaurant, and the cook—not the chef, the cook—was Tilton Kirk. He was twenty-four, six years her senior, and each time she took a break, he was right there with the charm, which, as far as I’m concerned, he got from a different source than the one that gave my mom her talent.
He was a handsome man and articulate, and as sure as he knew his name, he knew that he was going places in this world. All you had to do was say hello, and he’d tell you where he was going: first from cook to chef, and then into a restaurant of his own by thirty, and then two or three restaurants by the time he was forty, however many he wanted. He was a gifted cook, and he gave young Sylvia Bledsoe all kinds of tasty dishes refined to what he called the Kirk style. He gave her me, too, though it turned out that taking care of children wasn’t part of the Kirk style.
To be fair, he knew she’d have the baby, that the Bledsoes would not tolerate anything else. He did the right thing, he married her, and after that he pretty reliably did the wrong thing.
I was born on June 15, 1957, which was when the Count Basie band became the first Negro band ever to perform in the Starlight Room of the Waldorf-Astoria hotel in New York City. Negro was the word in those days. On July 6, tennis star Althea Gibson, another Negro, won the All-England title at Wimbledon, also a first. And on August 29, the Civil Rights Act, proposed by President Eisenhower the previous year, was finally voted into law by the congress; soon thereafter, Ike would start using the national guard to desegregate schools. By comparison, my entrance into the world wasn’t big news, except to my mom and me.
Trying to ingratiate himself with Sylvia’s parents, well aware of Grandpa Teddy’s musical heroes, my father chose to name me Jonah Ellington Basie Hines Eldridge Wilson Hampton Armstrong Kirk. Even all these years later, almost everyone has heard of Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Earl “Fatha” Hines, Lionel Hampton, and Louis Armstrong. Time doesn’t treat all talent equally, however, and Roy Eldridge is known these days pretty much only to aficionados of big band music. He was one of the greatest trumpeters of all time. Electrifying. He played with Gene Krupa’s legendary band through the early war years, when Anita O’Day was changing what everyone thought a girl singer ought to be. The Wilson in my name is for Teddy Wilson, whom Benny Goodman called the greatest musician in dance music of the day. He played with Goodman, then started his own band, which didn’t last long, and then he played largely in a sextet. If you can find any of the twenty sides that he recorded with his band, you’ll hear a piano man of incomparable elegance.
With all those names to live up to, I sometimes wished I’d been born just Jonah Kirk. But I guess because I was half Bledsoe, anyone who ever admired my grandpa—which was everyone who knew him—would have looked at me with some doubt that I could ever shape myself into a man like him.
The day I was born, Grandpa Teddy and Grandma Anita came to the hospital to see me first through a window in the nursery and then in my mother’s arms when I was brought to her room. My father was there, as well, and eager to tell Grandpa my full name. Although I was the center of attention, I have no memory of the moment, maybe because I was already impatient to start piano lessons.
According to my mom, the revelation of my many names didn’t go quite like my father intended. Grandpa Teddy stood bedside, nodding in recognition each time Tilton—who was cautious enough to keep the bed between them—revealed a name. But when the final name had been spoken, Grandpa traded glances with Grandma, and then he frowned and stared at the floor as if he noticed something offensive down there that didn’t belong in a hospital.
Now, you should know Grandpa had a smile that could melt an ice block and leave the water steaming. And even when he wasn’t smiling, his face was so pleasant that the shyest of children often grinned on first sight of him and walked right up to him, a stranger, to say hello to this friendly giant. But when he frowned and when you knew that you might be the reason he frowned, his face made you think of judgment day and of whatever pathetic good deeds you might be able to cite to balance the offenses you had committed. He didn’t look furious, didn’t even scowl, merely frowned, and at once an uneasy silence fell upon the room. No one feared Grandpa Teddy’s anger, because few people if any had ever seen it. If you evoked that frown, what you feared was his disapproval, and when you learned that you had disappointed him, you realized that you needed his approval no less than you needed air, water, and food.
Although Grandpa never put it in words for me, one thing I learned from him was that being admired gives you more power than being feared.