Read Online Kansas City Lightning by Stanley Crouch - Free Book Online

. I must have bit her because she tied me to the bed, still switching me. She said, ‘I’ll teach you to go up on Twelfth Street!’ That’s why I hate Twelfth Street now . I don’t have no time for it.”
    But even such wrath didn’t sway Rebecca, whose feeling for Charlie thickened and deepened. He was different from other boys. For all his mischief, Charlie had very good manners. He wasn’t always pushing himself on her or trying to fumble his hands under her clothes. Rebecca knew the things boyswould try to get girls to do. But Charlie was different. With him, she felt safe. “He was old-fashioned,” she mused decades later. “He wasn’t aggressive like some of the young guys.” And there was something more: when she looked at him very closely, young Charlie seemed hurt. “I don’t know what he was. He wasn’t loved, he was just given. Addie Parker wasn’t that type of woman. She always let him have his way, but she didn’t show him what I call affection. It was strange. She was proud of him and everything. Worked herself for him and all, but, somehow, I never saw her heart touch him. It was odd. It seemed like to me he needed . He just had this need. It really touched me to my soul. He seemed like he needed someone to love him and to understand him.”
    With the Ruffins in the house, however, Charlie started to shed some of his melancholy. He was growing into a bigger and more attractive young man, almost as though the weight of his previous loneliness had stunted him. Charlie took to the Ruffin children and they to him. Birdy Ruffin’s disdain rolled off the children’s backs, though they all knew better than to argue with her. Winfrey Ruffin kept to himself, a bookworm, but Charlie had plenty of fun with the girls. Octavia, the oldest after Winfrey, had started working after graduating from Lincoln High School in 1933. She found Charlie as lovable as the rest of her sisters did, and she supported his budding romance with Rebecca.
    When he wasn’t playing with little Dorothy in the swing on the front porch, Charlie was doing something in the parlor to the left of the stairs—something to do with music.
    Besides its large potbellied stove and the huge table where everybody gathered for dinner, Addie Parker’s parlor harbored an old-fashioned Victrola in the right corner and a mahogany player piano nearby. (Behind a pair of sliding doors was Addie’s bedroom, where her possessions were guarded by Snow, her white and savage Alaskan spitz.) Charlie and the girls often got together around the Wurlitzer piano; when they weren’t banging out noise, Charlie was already teaching Ophelia the boogie-woogie songs that were in the Kansas City air at the time. He still didn’t talk much, but Addie’s only child seemed to blossom under the influence of the Ruffin daughters, as though he had suddenly been blessed with a frolicking gaggle of sisters.
    Rebecca recognized that Charlie was beginning to mature. He was an attentive boyfriend: “Whatever you talked about, Charlie Parker listened.” And, under their influence, he was finally going back to school on a regular basis. The younger Ruffin children went to Crispus Attucks, Rebecca to Lincoln High; Charlie walked with them, and he started attending classes again in the fall of 1934. “He was becoming a man then, once he started going back to school,” Rebecca remembered. “Of course, he didn’t say why he went back. Charlie didn’t talk. He talked with his eyes. . . . He was accustomed to being by himself.”
    Lincoln was on Nineteenth Street and Tracy Avenue. “It wasn’t integrated,” Rebecca recalled. “We didn’t have any trouble. There was no white folks there. Negroes went to the Negro school. Lincoln was deep redbrick and took up about two blocks. My class, 1935, was the last one to graduate from there before