Here in Chicago, on Maxwell Street, everything was for sale. Place was a walk-in junkyard, they said, but you could find whatever you needed over there. They had plumbing tools if you wanted to fix bathrooms for businessmen up in the skyscrapers, or old rubber tires you could use in a construction, empty perfume bottles filled with moonshine to keep you warm in the winter, leather coats for windy days, cans of gasoline, barrels full of nuts and bolts, even an old ceiling fan. Down here you had to haggle for it, though. Chicago was a poor man’s city, and in the winter it got cold. “Chicago folks is poor? You kidding me? Only poor folks in this here city is black folks,” cried Larry Humford, strumming his guitar. Sometimes you could even find a used John Coltrane or Nina Simone record at the thrift market, left on top of a busted fridge. There were lots of odd jobs going in Chicago. Mechanics scoured the city far and wide for contract work. Larry Humford had no trade; he preferred to play his music than to learn to be a mechanic or a repairman. “Seems pretty complicated to me. For that kinda work you gotta read this whole bible on fridge repair. I can’t make no sense of it!” he grumbled, taking his harmonica between his lips and adjusting his satin top hat. It was time for a jazz tune. The sound of the guitar stole through the market, the sound of the harmonica sweetening the air for the buyers looking at used parts. Some dropped coins in Larry’s case, but he paid no attention. He played jazz from the heart. Jazz was life, and the sound of the persecution he had endured during the “Black Renaissance” years in Chicago.
Two decades earlier, the South Side of Chicago was an all-black metropolis – a long corridor stretching some twenty miles from end to end. Larry Humford was confined to that same enclave with all the other African-Americans, who lived in a segregated world. At night, Southern boys in big white hoods carrying clubs and crowbars would knock at their doors. They were out to intimidate black folks, and were not easy to ignore. They were outlaws, but nobody could report them. They would undress housewives without raping them, strike black children, call people niggers and worse besides. Black folks could not go to the same schools, drink from the same fountains or even shit in the same toilets as white folks. Blacks were a segregated race, to be kept apart from the white American supremacy. Out in the streets they were insulted, and at best ignored. They were neglected, and swept aside. Yet both sides shared the same sense of ambition: for an undefeated, all-powerful America. The South Side of Chicago was an overpopulated ghetto. The buildings were run-down, but Larry Humford remembered his childhood fondly. That was during the Chicago Black Renaissance, when there was a carefree feeling in the air. They’d go to a club, nowhere fancy but a place you could dance, drink beer, kiss girls and hear a sax player. The Pekin Theatre’s doors were open to all the South Siders. Sometimes you’d even get whites in there, looking for something they couldn’t find in uptown clubs. They came to the Pekin Theatre to feel free, and to enjoy the good times that you only found in black neighborhoods. The theatre was a nursery and a showcase for black talent, especially for vaudeville numbers and musical theatre. Those were the good times; it was different back then. Larry Humford started playing a new jazz tune. A man dropped him a nickel. “Hey man, thank you sir!” he said, blowing into the harp. Gone were the days of the shantytowns in the South, the days of Alabama juke joints, the days of Coca-Cola from a fountain for twenty-five cents. African-Americans had moved to the north to leave all that behind. Larry Humford had had good times at the Pekin Theatre. He plucked a few arpeggios. There was passion in his playing, and a passing mechanic slipped him a dollar. “Hey now, thank you brother! This here’s America, where anything’s possible!” he cried with a knowing smile.
Suddenly a commotion rose up. A truck was coming through with new wares from the junk yard. Larry Humford paid it no mind, playing to his own rhythm, to the tune of the fresh relics that would get a second chance at life here on Maxwell Street.
Alan Alfredo Geday
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