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CHAPTER 1
Winter, 1942
There were teeth in the soup again, horse teeth. It was repulsive even to a starving man, and Arthur Briggs was a starving man. Hunger was a song stuck in his head as he shivered in a filthy hut, lice crawling on his skin. Evenings were once filled with jazz and risqué dancing, with gaiety and tumbling laughter, with champagne and fine cuisine. Now it was winter. He was hungry. And there were teeth in the soup again.
Briggs was trapped in Stalag 220, a Nazi prison for British citizens and other enemies of the Third Reich. Six miles south was Paris, where he had made his reputation as the greatest jazz trumpeter in Europe, earning the nickname "the Louis Armstrong of France." But isolated here in this camp, he might as well have been on the moon.
He could have fled the Nazis. He had family in Harlem, and his reputation as the greatest trumpeter in Europe was known in America. African American newspapers had followed his every move for years, including his work with Coleman Hawkins, Django Reinhardt, and Josephine Baker. Both Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong wanted to hire him. But he remembered the sting of American segregation, and he hated it. He chose to stay in Europe.
Briggs believed he could hide in his Montmartre apartment until the trouble passed, but the trouble did not pass. Hitler now controlled Austria, Czechoslovakia, Belgium, Poland, Luxembourg, and half of France. He installed puppet governments in Denmark, Norway, the Netherlands, Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia, and the other half of France. He counted Italy as an ally, and his armies had penetrated so deep into the Soviet Union, they threatened to do what even Napoleon couldn't do.
While the Nazis stormed Europe and Russia, internment camps like Stalag 220 sprung up to house their prisoners, some held captive as forced labor, others as enemies of the state. As a black jazz musician and a citizen of a British colony, Briggs was an enemy twice.
To forget his fear and loneliness in captivity, he turned to the only thing the Nazis hadn't taken from him: music. Camp guards allowed the prisoners to form a makeshift orchestra, and Briggs led its brass section, honing it into a unit capable of tackling Beethoven, Strauss, and Mozart. He played to save himself but also to soothe the men's souls, ending each concert with an old Negro work song. In a previous age, the song gave harbor amid the horrors of slavery; now it kept the cold ember of hope alive for Briggs and two thousand men amid the horrors of World War II. If the Nazis understood what the song meant to their wretched prisoners, the punishment for playing it surely would have been severe. Briggs played it anyway, blowing life into the melody, while the lyrics rang in his bruised heart:
Don't be sighing, little darling, Sunshine follows after rain; Though the shadows now are falling, Better days will come again.
Then he climbed from the bandstand and walked to his hut, aching, shuddering, wondering, How did I get here?
Arthur Briggs never told the truth about his birth, not even to his only daughter. He claimed to have been born in South Carolina in 1899, and his memoirs begin with dozens of pages of handwritten memories of Charleston, all of them fabricated. His dishonesty, as we'll see, came from a rather touching sense of honor and an understandable desire for self-protection, but it leaves most of his life until age sixteen a mystery.
Historians have tried to pinpoint his birth for decades without success, but new research shows conclusively that Briggs was born in St. George's, Grenada, on April 9, 1901.
Born to Louisa Wilkey and James Richard Briggs, James Arthur was the youngest of eleven children, including sisters Constance Amelia, and Edith Inez, as well as brother Warren Sinclair. Briggs was the baby of a large clan that included at least seven aunts and uncles on his father's side, as well as his paternal grandparents, Peter Harte Briggs and Dorothy Ann Bourne. Briggs's father was a sanitary inspector and perhaps also a preacher. He used the house as a meeting place for Bible study. Briggs's family was upper-middle class. His father owned land in Grenada, and although birth records are hard to trace past his mother's mother, Celia, it is almost certain Briggs's lineage on his paternal grandmother's side goes back to the great London Bourne.
London Bourne was born into slavery on the island of Barbados in 1793. He was of unmixed African ancestry. His father, William, was also enslaved but became politically active after gaining freedom, signing a petition in 1811 to let free people of color testify in court against whites. William also bought his son's freedom for $500 and eventually freed his wife and other children.
London was an iconoclast. By 1830, he worked as a sugar broker, owned three stores, and was worth between $20,000 and $30,000. This success made him unique among freed slaves. The fire of conviction made him important. Though he was socially conservative by nature, Bourne supported radical causes. He joined several antislavery organizations, some of which sought to establish settlements for Barbadians who wished to return to Africa. He also served on the governing body of the Colonial Charity School, established for the children of slaves and free people of color.
Bourne's biographer called him a precursor to Marcus Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois, "in their continuous espousal of pride in being African, and in their actual involvement in African affairs, including emigration movements to Africa." Bourne loved education, charity, and culture. He hated racism, violence, and ignorance. These traits were passed unchanged to Arthur Briggs.
It is strange, then, that both Bourne and his wife owned slaves. Barbadian records show Bourne owned six slaves in 1826, and five in 1834. It isn't clear what to make of this. Perhaps Bourne was an abolitionist and a slave owner — a bizarre combination to be sure — or maybe he took a lesson from his father and bought members of his own family to protect them. As with much of Briggs's lineage, this remains a question with no answer.
Briggs's family had deep ties to Barbados, likely stretching far beyond London Bourne. It must have been a major event, then, when they moved to 43 Green Street in St. George's, Grenada. Christening records show Arthur was the second and last child born there.
Grenada is a speck of sand, its landmass roughly half the size of Harlem. Christopher Columbus first sighted the island in 1498, and Europeans spent the next century and a half trying to beat the native Island Caribs into submission. The Caribs fought ferociously but fell to France in 1650. Within fifty years, Grenada was home to more than five hundred enslaved Africans.
England and France spent most of the seventeenth century ripping control of the island from each other, until England finally prevailed in 1784, making Grenada a British colony. Consequently, Briggs was born a British citizen. After England's Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, British masters tried to keep their former slaves in captivity through a system of apprenticeship. Like America, Grenada made no room for freed slaves in its economy or its society. Unlike America, the island had no physical room either. Slaves and masters executed an intricate social reconfiguration in extremely close quarters, as if they were ballroom dancing in a closet.
After apprenticeship came métayage, a sort of sharecropping that kept ex-slaves in perpetual poverty. In addition, they now had to compete with imported indentured labor. By Briggs's birth, the tiny island was home to Maltese, Spanish, Indian, French, English, and Portuguese laborers, and hundreds of African ethnic groups.
This creolized cultural stew was Briggs's incubator.
Briggs was raised in the Christian church, and though he quickly dispensed with its formalities, he never lost its lessons. Despite everything he experienced in life — from racist club owners, to corrupt bandleaders, to political executions, to a Nazi prison camp — he always believed in honesty, charity, humanity, and brotherhood. These traits remained remarkably steady throughout his life. He was moral but not moralizing; upright but not stuffy; rigid but not hard-hearted. He was formal in speech, impeccable in dress, and obsessed with dignity. From an early age, he was accustomed to the spotlight but not beguiled by it. He possessed enormous self-confidence, but not arrogance. He was quick to forgive, but when slighted, often because of his deep black skin, he made sure he was given restitution.
He had rough spots too. He was impulsive and quick to take offense, and he was known to abandon friends and break contracts with no warning when he felt his dignity was in question. But above all, Briggs refused to bend his principles to fit an unprincipled world. This set him on a difficult path, for those who do not bend often break. But he did not break. Though it never ceased to hurt and shock him when the world abused his ideals, he did not abandon them. He was the rare steadfast man.
He was also the rare straightlaced man. In a profession filled with drunks and addicts, Briggs was the soul of discretion. But beneath his conservative façade, he possessed an artist's fire. This fire propelled him around the world, from Grenada, to Harlem, to Paris, to Cairo, to Constantinople. It drove him to make some of the greatest jazz records in Europe, and it saved his life in a Nazi prison.
The fire was ignited when Briggs began taking trumpet lessons as a child. He immediately excelled. One of the first pieces he learned — he called it his "workhorse" — was "The Carnival of Venice," a showoff piece featuring dizzying scales and dazzling displays of double and triple tonguing, all at astonishing speeds. It demanded virtuosic ability, which Briggs had.
Though the music of Grenada was Calypso, Briggs's training was classical. As a young black man in a British colony, he had to be fluent in European culture, though Europeans knew nothing of his culture. This fact dogged him throughout his life, but it gave him an advantage that served equally well in the world's finest cabarets and in a Nazi prison. Briggs could please any audience. He didn't separate Beethoven from bebop. Music was music.
Like any normal kid, Briggs loved the pop music of his era — an early form of jazz called ragtime. Popularized by artists such as Scott Joplin, today most famous for writing the immortal rag "The Entertainer," ragtime was, as one historian described it, "White music played black." It was the result of European instruments in the hands of musicians who carried Africa's rhythms in their bones. Perhaps no one described it better than seminal jazz clarinetist — and one of Briggs's close friends — Sidney Bechet:
It comes out of the Negro spirituals. ... The only thing they had that couldn't be taken from them was their music. Their song, it was coming right up from the fields, settling itself in their feet and working right up, right up into their stomachs, their spirit, into their fear, into their longing. ... Rag it up, we used to say. You take any piece, you make it so people can dance to it, pat their feet, move around. You make it so they can't help themselves from doing that. You make it so they just can't sit still. And that's all there is to it. It's the rhythm there. The rhythm is ragtime.
Bechet came from New Orleans, which is generally accepted as the birthplace of jazz. In Storyville, New Orleans's seedy red-light district, black Creole musicians took European instruments such as the tuba, clarinet, trombone, and trumpet, and added their own traditions of syncopation and improvisation to create something new. Bechet recalled hearing the bands tear down the street blasting this irresistible sound: "It was laughing out loud up and down all the streets, laughing like two people just finding out about each other ... like something that had found a short-cut after travelling through all the distance there was. That music, it wasn't spirituals or blues or ragtime, but everything all at once." These were the first nonmarching, instrumental, blues-oriented groups, and they played a rougher, more fluid version of the Creole marches and quadrilles. It was first called "jass," a dirty sexual reference, which like rock 'n' roll fifty years later, sneaked into common usage.
Jazz lived in the notes between notes, the soulful wails that defied notation on a staff, the rhythms that lived, as the phrase went, between the cracks. Improvisation was the heart of this new music, a conversation between instruments that had no equivalent in European music. "The purity of tone that the European trumpet player desired was put aside by the Negro trumpeter for the more humanly expressive sound of the voice," wrote the poet-historian LeRoi Jones (later Amiri Baraka). "The rough, raw sound the black man forced out of these European instruments was a sound he had cultivated in this country for two hundred years. It was an American sound." Briggs wanted this American sound, but he also valued purity of tone. He'd spend his life perfecting both.
We know two more facts of Briggs's youth in Grenada. In 1913, his sister Inez moved to New York to marry a man named Thomas Hall (Briggs often claimed to have accompanied Inez on the trip, but there is no evidence of this). Four years later, Briggs's father died. Arthur was only sixteen years old. If not for this tragedy, he might have stayed in Grenada and become a classical trumpeter. Instead, perhaps to ease the burden on his mother, perhaps to make his way in the world, he decided to leave his island and join Inez in New York. In November 1917, James Arthur Briggs boarded the S.S. Maraval and sailed away from home, never to return.
CHAPTER 2
"The music is ... a lost thing finding itself."
— Sidney Bechet
November 22, 1917: From the deck of the S.S. Maraval, Arthur Briggs gazed at the Statue of Liberty. She filled the sky above his head, her coat covered in frost, her torch glinting in the cold sunlight. It was one of the coldest winters ever recorded. He was sixteen years old and alone at the doorstep of America. In the distance, Manhattan stretched like an open hand. The Registry Room at Ellis Island swarmed with bodies bent from the voyage at sea. Briggs waited in line for his medical and legal inspection, and sat patiently as a customs official questioned him.
"Profession?" the official asked.
"Musician."
Briggs had plans.
His entrance to America was a lesson in extremes. After the thrill of arrival came the shame of being herded onto a segregated subway car. He recalled the journey to Grand Central Terminal with typical formality and understatement: "[It was] tiresome ... due to certain unsocial railway methods of segregation of which I was not aware."
Then there was Grand Central Terminal itself, a perfect marriage of artistry and machinery. Briggs had never seen anything so magnificent. He walked through halls of imitation Caen stone and polished Botticino marble to the Express Concourse, where the turquoise ceiling seemed as big as the sky. He picked his way past red-hatted porters pouring through the terminal like ants from a toppled anthill; past women in tiered skirts and velvet hats festooned with ostrich feathers; past men in derby hats and fur-trimmed Ulster coats. The size and speed of New York was dizzying. Finally, a familiar face: Inez.
She took young Arthur to her apartment at 24 West 134th Street, where she and her husband roomed with another couple — the Spooners — and several tenants. They lived under a common Harlem agreement: the tenants helped Inez and the Spooners with rent, and in return, they received affordable rooms and use of the kitchen and other amenities at certain hours. The big apartment impressed Briggs, who had only known the cramped embrace of a tiny island.
In bed that first night, Briggs dreamed he was in a concert hall listening to Chopin's "Heroic Polonaise." In fact, the bold, passionate strains came from down the hall. Mr. Spooner was a trained pianist who dreamed of performing at Carnegie Hall. "Unfortunately," Briggs said, "although being qualified for such a task after years of intense studies, he realized that such an event must be discarded, maybe forever." Spooner was the first musician Briggs had met whose color barred him from his dreams.
He was not the last.
Arthur Briggs found Harlem at the exact moment it became Harlem. It was the beginning of the Great Migration, a massive demographic shift, during which six million African Americans fled the Jim Crow South and moved to northern and western cities, changing America's face forever. Meantime, black immigrants from Africa and the Caribbean joined this flood, Briggs among them, causing tension between black Americans and black foreigners. As a child of Grenada, Briggs knew complex racial hierarchies, but the lines separating black and white on the island were permeable enough that Briggs was related to two black slave owners. He had never faced anything as limiting and dangerous as American segregation. As the great writer and activist James Weldon Johnson explained it, segregation was "the dwarfing, warping, distorting influence which operates upon each colored man in the United States. He is forced to take his outlook on all things, not from the view point of a citizen, or a man, or even a human being, but from the viewpoint of a colored man."
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Better Days Will Come Again"
by .
Copyright © 2020 Travis Atria.
Excerpted by permission of Chicago Review Press Incorporated.
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