At first, I made some inane comment about the difference between playing in clubs and conducting in concert halls, and he replied with the non-committal and equally banal agreement that yes, the two experiences were very different.
Then I told him that I had seen him play with Hat all those years ago in New York, and he turned to me with genuine pleasure in his face. “Did you? At that little club on St. Mark’s Place? That sure was fun. I guess I must have been thinking about it, because I played some of those songs we used to do.”
“That was why I came over,” I said. “I guess that was one of the best musical experiences I ever had.”
“You and me both.” Hawes smiled to himself. “Sometimes, I just couldn’t believe what he was doing.”
“It showed,” I said.
“Well.” His eyes slid away from mine. “Great character. Completely otherworldly.”
“I saw some of that,” I said. “I did that interview with him that turns up now and then, the one in Downbeat.”
“Oh!” Hawes gave me his first genuinely interested look so far. “Well, that was him, all right.”
“Most of it was, anyhow.”
“You cheated?” Now he was looking even more interested.
“I had to make it understandable.”
“Oh, sure. You couldn’t put in all those ding-dings and bells and Bob Crosbys.” These had been elements of Hat’s private code. Hawes laughed at the memory. “When he wanted to play a blues in G, he’d lean over and say, ‘Gs, please.’ ”
“Did you get to know him at all well, personally?” I asked, thinking that the answer must be that he had not—I didn’t think that anyone had ever really known Hat very well.
“Pretty well,” Hawes said. “A couple of times, around ’54 and ’55, he invited me home with him, to his parents’ house, I mean. We got to be friends on a Jazz at the Phil tour, and twice when we were in the South, he asked me if I wanted to eat some good home cooking.”
“You went to his hometown?”
He nodded. “His parents put me up. They were interesting people. Hat’s father, Red, was about the lightest black man I ever saw, and he could have passed for white anywhere, but I don’t suppose the thought ever occurred to him.”
“Was the family band still going?”
“No, to tell you the truth, I don’t think they were getting much work up toward the end of the forties. At the end, they were using a tenor player and a drummer from the high school band. And the church work got more and more demanding for Hat’s father.”
“His father was a deacon, or something like that?”
He raised his eyebrows. “No, Red was the Baptist minister. The Reverend. He ran that church. I think he even started it.”
“Hat told me his father played piano in church, but …”
“The Reverend would have made a hell of a blues piano player, if he’d ever left his day job.”
“There must have been another Baptist church in the neighborhood,” I said, thinking this the only explanation for the presence of two Baptist ministers. But why had Hat not mentioned that his own father, like Dee Sparks’s, had been a clergyman?
“Are you kidding? There was barely enough money in that place to keep one of them going.” He looked at his watch, nodded at me, and began to move closer to his sidemen.
“Could I ask you one more question?”
“I suppose so,” he said, almost impatiently.
“Did Hat strike you as superstitious?”
Hawes grinned. “Oh, he was superstitious, all right. He told me he never worked on Halloween—he didn’t even want to go out of his room on Halloween. That’s why he left the big band, you know. They were starting a tour on Halloween, and Hat refused to do it. He just quit.” He leaned toward me. “I’ll tell you another funny thing. I always had the feeling that Hat was terrified of his father—I thought he invited me to Hatchville with him so I could be some kind of buffer between him and his father. Never made any sense to me. Red was a big strong old guy, and I’m pretty sure a long time ago he used to mess around with the ladies, Reverend or not, but I couldn’t ever figure out why Hat should be afraid of him. But whenever Red came into the room, Hat shut up. Funny, isn’t it?”
I must have looked very perplexed. “Hatchville?”
“Where they lived. Hatchville, Mississippi—not too far from Biloxi.”
“But he told me—”
“Hat never gave too many straight answers,” Hawes said. “And he didn’t let the facts get in the way of a good story. When you come to think of it, why should he? He was Hat.”
After the next set, I walked back uphill to my hotel, wondering again about the long story Hat had told me. Had there been any truth in it at all?
2
Three weeks later I found myself released from a meeting at our Midwestern headquarters in downtown Chicago earlier than I had expected, and instead of going to a bar with the other wandering corporate ghosts like myself, made up a story about having to get home for dinner with visiting relatives. I didn’t want to admit to my fellow employees, committed like all male business people to aggressive endeavors such as racquetball, drinking, and the pursuit of women, that I intended to visit the library. Short of a trip to Mississippi, a good periodical room offered the most likely means of finding out once and for all how much truth had been in what Hat had told me.
I hadn’t forgotten everything I had learned at Columbia—I still knew how to look things up.
In the main library, a boy set me up with a monitor and spools of microfilm representing the complete contents of the daily newspapers from Biloxi and Hatchville, Mississippi, for Hat’s tenth and eleventh years. That made three papers, two for Biloxi and one for Hatchville, but all I had to examine were the issues dating from the end of October through the middle of November—I was looking for references to Eddie Grimes, Eleanore Monday, Mary Randolph, Abbey Montgomery, Hat’s family, The Backs, and anyone named Sparks.