Free Chasing the Devil's Tail by David Fulmer Page B

and at concerts and white folks' dances to work in filthy Rampart Street saloons. She recalled him all happy at getting to lead his own little band, how he heard himself called "Kid Bolden" for the first time and rushed home to tell her about it.
    She allowed herself a small smile. It was not so long after that people on the street started to talk about The Bolden Band, kids peeked in the windows to see her husband, young women at church looked him up and down and wet their lips.
    His star rose. The word spread that his band could play anything, from sweet and solemn spirituals to double-time rags to gutbucket blues that would milk blood from a rock. And the show he put on! People loved it that Kid Bolden didn't sit stuck to a chair like the others. He got up and moved, up and down the stage, using his horn like a magic wand and sometimes like something dirty. Nora watched as he began to change, as he got lost in all the fawning attention, as he fell prey to the free whiskey and the loose women.
    But it was really always the music. Thomas Edison had invented the machine to make sound recordings on cylinders of wax and then play them back. It was a true wonder, and as soon as the first contraption arrived in New Orleans, Buddy herded his band to the back room of the music store on Canal Street and made a recording, a rushed mess that convinced
him to tear that band apart, build another. And then a third and a fourth and each one moved him more out in front, like the engine on a fast train.
    How it all got crazier then! People rushed to listen to his wild music, to stomp their feet and yell, to flail about like they were in the jungle somewhere. At Longshoreman's Hall on South Rampart or Odd Fellows Hall in Storyville or Masonic Hall across the river in Algiers, at the outdoor dances in Jackson and Johnson Parks, in dirty saloons and in pavilions built on pilings on the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Anywhere Buddy's band played, a crowd gathered. And it wasn't just colored folk either; downtown Creoles and even some reckless young whites from proper Garden District families were coming round to see what all the fuss was about.
    So his one or two late nights a week turned into five or six. And then "Kid" became "King." And the music changed, not just popular styles "jassed-up" or "ragged," like they called it; Buddy turned everything around, then inside out.
    Nora didn't understand what he was playing at all. She didn't hear the music; it sounded like a mush of noise. She didn't understand why it made people so frantic. She didn't understand why it started young girls fighting over who would hold his coat and scarf (but never his horn; he never let anyone touch his horn). She didn't get all the rambunctious motion up on the bandstand. And, as the months passed, she realized that she no longer knew the man who was her husband and father to her daughter.
    But he was part-time in that role anyway, staying with her, disappearing and turning up at his mother's house on Howard Street, then disappearing again and coming home days later as if it was the most natural thing in the world.
    They started having spats. Buddy would be calm and sweet one moment, in a rage the next, stomping from one end
of the shotgun house to the other, ranting nonsense and scaring the daylights out of Bernedette. Then he was quiet again, lying on the couch with a wet cloth across his face. He got headaches.
    Nora knew about the drinking, suspected opium. She didn't mention the women, either, though she surely knew about all them, too. It had been going on for a year or more, Buddy tottering around his home life with his wife and child, then crashing off into uptown New Orleans like some animal released from a cage.
    "And this time they took him to jail," she said, ending on a weary note.
    Valentin looked at her. "This time?"
    "Oh, I had to call the po-lice myself," she said. "Once when he came in all crazy and started breaking things. The other when he stood