Chuck Berry, page 3
Months after the statue’s dedication, a petition was presented to the Board of Election Commissioners calling for a vote “to prevent ill feeling, conflict and collisions between the white and colored races in the city of St. Louis.” The initiative would prevent ill feeling by making it illegal for African Americans to live on a city block that was 75 percent or more white. In the spirit of equality, it was pointed out, whites would not be able to live on a Black-dominated block.
Soon afterward, the film Birth of a Nation, depicting the founding of the Ku Klux Klan, was shown in St. Louis. Segregationists stood by the door of the theater handing out literature in support of a controversial ballot proposal. Early in 1916, a city ordinance barring integration of white neighborhoods passed with a two-thirds majority. As Roger Baldwin wrote at the time, it was “the first popular vote in the United States on negro segregation.”13
“Victory” was brief: the United States Supreme Court soon ruled unanimously, in Buchanan v. Warley, that such laws violated a property owner’s right to sell to whomever they pleased. Property rights trumped racism, but enterprising individuals in St. Louis found other ways to limit Black mobility. A favorite approach was through use of restrictive covenants, which were lists of contractual obligations assumed by the purchaser of a property. Such agreements covered everything from what color you had to paint the house you were buying to what color you had to be to buy a house, and they flourished in America in the 1920s. Deed clauses had stronger backing in court when they were signed by all members of a subdivision or community association, and just these sorts of associations started popping up around St. Louis in the years after World War I.14
St. Louis was a pioneer in other approaches as well. Immediately after Buchanan v. Warley, zoning became a tool for limiting the free movement of Black citizens. As cities grew, they increasingly seized on the nascent field of zoning law in order to shape the racial makeup of communities. While race-based language could not appear in a zoning requirement, conditions that banned apartment buildings or imposed minimum residential lot sizes had the intended effect of limiting African American movement into new areas.
In 1916 St. Louis hired Harland Bartholomew as a planning engineer. Bartholomew was the Johnny B. Goode of “slum clearance.” His mission, as he himself saw it, included helping St. Louis block movement into “finer residential districts… by colored people.” As Richard Rothstein writes in his book The Color of Law, Bartholomew believed that “where values have depreciated, homes are either vacant or occupied by colored people.” He began logging every single structure in the city, and as he did so he made note of the race of each building’s occupants. In this way he could bird-dog where Blacks were likely to move next. Then the planning commission followed with restrictions making it hard for movement to occur.
Bartholomew was the first full-time planner hired by an American city, and he plotted suburbs and ballparks, dismantling Black neighborhoods in the name of “urban renewal.” When he died in 1989, the New York Times called him the “Dean of City Planners.” He died at the age of one hundred, thus living longer than Chuck Berry (ninety) and Michael Brown (eighteen). He had a huge, though little-understood, influence on everyone who has lived in St. Louis over the last century.15
In his 1987 Chuck Berry: The Autobiography, Berry traces his family tree with a mix of specific details and ambiguity. It’s a fascinating full-on opening solo, meandering, fuzzy, featuring Blacks, whites, Indians, European visitors, all crossing state lines, racial lines, and profoundly unequal power lines to follow their hearts and make families.16
He traces his father’s family as far back as the Wolfolk plantation in Kentucky before the Civil War, then to Ohio and finally to a farm north of St. Louis. His mother’s story starts on a Muskogee, Oklahoma, plantation, where a “Chihuahua Indian” cook named Susan and a “fearless African” slave named Isaac Banks met while working on the Banks plantation. They escaped the cultural taboos of their families and eloped to Mississippi; their granddaughter, Martha Bell Banks, was Chuck’s mother.
His ancestors don’t stay in one place long—even in bondage they change states, work on railroads, or just wander. They aren’t defined by racism, and Berry steps lightly on the hardships of slavery or the miseries of Reconstruction that led to the Great Migration. Those existence-shaping historical forces are barely touched on in his account. His is a story of strong-willed individuals who keep some hold on their fate.
One day Martha Bell heard from a Banks uncle in Missouri that she should come up from Mississippi and meet a man the uncle highly approved of. That was Chuck’s dad, Henry William Berry. Henry had spent time on a naval ship during World War I and was now in St. Louis, working at a flour mill.
Thus began the courtship of his parents. They were introduced in 1917 at the single biggest social event of the year, held in the area many still called Elleardsville, the annual summer weekend when funds were raised for an African American orphanage. The force behind the event was Annie Malone, a pioneering hair-product inventor and saleswoman. (Malone mentored the better-known Madam C. J. Walker and ran a million-dollar business from her St. Louis neighborhood.) Malone’s yearly event filled both Tandy Park, the center of the community, and the many blocks surrounding it.
Arvell Shaw, a jazz bass player born in St. Louis, carried fond memories of the
one Sunday a year that they’d have a big benefit for the orphans in St. Louis—it was called Orphans’ Home Day.
They used to have a big parade, and it was my first chance to hear all of the bands that were around town—the Shriners, the Knights of Pythias, American Legion.
The community parade spotlighted the prestigious benevolent, social, and secret societies of Black St. Louis. Thousands took part in the dances and parties that marked the weekend. Everybody was involved: “If you had a little nickel band or nickel drum and bugle corps, you’d get out and put on a uniform and march,” recalled a longtime resident decades later.
Berry was born right when the neighborhood was fully coming into its own, growing from 8 percent African American in 1920 to 86 percent a decade later. This steep increase shows the impact of both the Great Migration and the housing restrictions that made it hard to live in areas without a large Black population. The community was a thriving square about a mile across, with a sizable middle-class base and a total population of just over nine thousand in 1930.
“The bulk of the black middle class were a historically new segment that supplied paid services to an expanding African American clientele—schoolteachers, undertakers, lawyers, beauticians, barbers, physicians, nurses, and dentists,” writes historian Clarence Lang. He describes a thin wall between these folks and the working class; few could afford to feel too secure. Lang notes that after employment at barber and beauty shops, the most common job for Blacks in St. Louis was going door-to-door selling coal or ice.
The neighborhood Berry was born into featured Black-owned shops and stores and restaurants, Black schools and churches. It had its own flavor and was not the largest African American neighborhood in town. In a place celebrated for its blues and piano players, his neighborhood didn’t produce the best music either. It was a little apart and aloof, home to many of the older institutions and hopes of Black St. Louis. Which was a necessity, because just outside the community’s boundaries were plenty of places where a Black family would not feel comfortable, plenty of people ready to chase you back across the street. The neighborhood became a world unto itself.
Demosthenes DuBose, an educator born a few years before Berry, recalled life in this corner of St. Louis. The neighborhood, he explained, “was peopled primarily, almost exclusively, by blacks, except for the people who owned the stores. There were restaurants, movies, nightclubs, and schools. There was the Ameytis Theatre in the Poro College Building on Pendleton; the Douglass Theatre on Whittier and Finney, and the crème de la crème, the Comet Theatre on Sarah and Finney. It was the newest, and they got most of the first-run movies, and they would put you out for loud talking. You had to behave yourself there.” There were midnight ramble shows at the Comet, where DuBose saw Billy Eckstine sing.
From one angle, it could look like a life forced on those born there. But DuBose, Berry, and others found in this place a self-sufficiency and independence they never forgot. “There was a time when you could have stayed completely in the Black community for almost everything,” said DuBose.
Elleard’s people had long moved out, and the old wood houses, which wouldn’t have been up to city codes, were grandfathered in when the village joined St. Louis. Many were holding up fine, along with many newer brick structures. Covenants marked the perimeter.
By the 1930s a local could go through childhood without knowing there was such a thing as white people. “What first made me aware that there were people whose skin was a different color than mine?” said DuBose. “I have no idea except that the difference was so obvious if you grew up in a self-contained community like I did.”
Writer Ntozake Shange felt the community presented her with a jolting duality. “Above all else St. Louis was a colored town: ‘a whiskey black space.’ That’s not to say there were no white people. It’s just to say I had to go out of my neighborhood to find some and then they’d wish I hadn’t.”
By the time Berry was born, those who lived there gave the old neighborhood a new name, one that came with its own cool breeze: the Ville.17
Charles Berry came into the world on October 18, 1926, making a strong impression from the start. “I was born in the best year of my life. My mother tells me that before I was even dry, I had begun singing my first song; I started crying prior to the customary spank that brings one unto life,” he wrote in his autobiography. “For the second show, at an age of five hours, I amazed my mother again by raising my body up with my arms. I tell you, I already wanted to look the world over.”
He enjoyed saying that he shared his birthday with Plato and Einstein. This was greatness as birthright, and so what if nobody knows when Plato was born, and that Einstein was born March 14. The point was clear: Chuck Berry occupied himself with greatness and considered his place to be in its company.
His family called him Charles as a boy. Before he was one year old, a freakish event marked the city of St. Louis: the cyclone of 1927. It touched down at one p.m. on September 29, 1927, and in five minutes it had gouged a track twelve miles long and six hundred yards wide through the city, slamming into a high school and killing seventy-eight. “The air seemed to be sheeted with fire, indicating a violent electrical storm,” said the New York Times. The storm left twenty thousand people homeless.
Four days later, a guitar player in town, Lonnie Johnson, recorded a new tune: “St. Louis Cyclone Blues.”
The shack where we were living, she reeled and rocked but never fell.
The shack where we were living, it reeled and rocked but never fell.
How the cyclone spared us, nobody but the Lord can tell.
The first year of Charles Berry’s life, the Veiled Prophet made history, addressing the people of St. Louis for the first time by radio; he spoke about the St. Louis Cardinals and Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, and championed waterfront development. There were forces out there bigger than oneself, forces that buffeted, and there were forces at home to beware of too. Berry acknowledged such problems once in an interview, saying, “My childhood was not so good. My parents were getting divorced.”18
He referred to affairs his father had. Henry and Martha never went through with the divorce, but there would be undercurrents. Berry’s mother wanted to teach school, but Henry wanted her home and made sure her hands were full with six children.
His father grew cucumbers, squash, and tomatoes in the family’s garden. There were two washtubs in the kitchen, one for laundry, the other for bathing. Sunday nights were for big dinners when the house was filled (“infested,” said Charles) by deacons from their church, praying before passing food around the table.
Central to Charles’s own story were two “magic boxes,” as he called them: a piano lorded over by sister Lucy, who sang hymns and classical music, and a Victrola record player on which his parents played foxtrots. Charles crawled toward the piano before he could walk, its music pulling him in. And one afternoon a four-year-old Charles tiptoed to the Victrola and put the needle on a 78 recording all by himself. When she heard what he had done, Martha administered “my first whooping,” a spanking that he never forgot.
Another sound that filled the house: Martha chanting hymns while she did chores around the cramped space. She wasn’t rote reciting, for as she moved through the home, his mom was incorporating her sound into her work, physically massaging the passages into her efforts. She was working music and God into her space, finding a dramatic moment in a line and in her voice displaying the feeling that she was carried away by something more powerful, and as Charles listened from another part of the house, this didn’t carry him away so much as make him feel frightened that his mother could be weakened by song, and that the feelings bleeding out in daily life could be so powerful that they could make one lose control.
Berry caught pneumonia, bad enough that a nurse came to the house to take care of the child. She was a white woman, and while she worked Charles playfully peeked into her medical bag, pulling out instruments. The nurse spanked him and then his mother spanked him as well, and the discipline excited him. “I became determined to satisfy the nurse’s instructions,” he remembered. “It wasn’t long before the noticeable change in my mischievous nature brought a hug and a kiss from the nurse. The feeling of her lips, the same lips that forgave me after once punishing, has yet to leave my memory. In fact there are things today that I realize are related to the sting that was embedded in my character then.”
The feeling was startlingly powerful. Later he would realize that even just speaking to a white woman would pull him back to that moment, the instant when desire and punishment came together.
The family bought a radio. Charles would take apart the back of the box, exploring where the sound came from. More spankings followed.
He was curious, undirected. Berry attended kindergarten at Cottage Avenue School, then entered Simmons School, a combination elementary and middle school that filled a formidable structure on St. Louis Avenue. He loved math, hated history, and may have been held back for a year. According to teacher Melba Sweets, Berry was “one of the worst kids I ever knew.… He was so bad that he was going to take me on one day by walking out of the room. No kid had ever tried me before. I told him, in the sternest voice I could muster, ‘You will be sorry if you walk out of this room.’ It worked, and he turned around and went back to his seat.”19
Poetry was regularly read and recited at home. Especially the words of Paul Laurence Dunbar, “the most loved poet in our family,” said Berry. So central was his writing to the Berrys that when Martha and Henry had another son in 1933, they named him Paul Lawrence Dunbar Berry.
The respect for Dunbar hardly set the Berry family apart. Born in 1872, among the first generation of African American artists to have lived their whole life in freedom, Dunbar was a celebrated poet who also wrote novels, short stories, and lyrics and libretti for the musical theater. He was revered as the first professional Black author, admired by Black and white audiences, and his example—as a shaper of the American tongue—inspired on multiple levels. To Berry’s parents he was a symbol of hard work and study. Those who read him were rewarded with a heightened sense of not just what words could do, but what voices could achieve. Dunbar had a genius for speaking his thoughts through the shape of other folks’ mouths. He was most famous for a group of poems spoken in what has been called Black vernacular, though it is sometimes also referred to as the dialect of minstrelsy. These poems in particular were read around the African American dinner table, recited in school assemblies and at church events from coast to coast.
As the Harlem Renaissance writer Arna Bontemps declared:
The name of Paul Laurence Dunbar was in every sense a household word in the black communities around Los Angeles when I was growing up here. It was not, however, a bookish word. It was a spoken word. And in those days it was associated with recitations which never failed to delight when we heard or said them at parties or on programs for the entertainment of the church-folk and their guests. I was still in grade school when I first heard a program chairman asking a prospective participant if he knew a “Dunbar piece” he could recite. A knowledge of Dunbar’s poetry and the pleasure it gave when spoken with a note of mimicry and a touch of pathos was all it took to melt our hearts and make us one.
The poems Bontemps heard around the table—“When de Co’n Pone’s Hot,” “The Party,” “When Malindy Sings,” “In the Morning”—were ones that shaped multiple generations of artists. Novelist Chester Himes, who attended high school in St. Louis in 1923, said, “Every black schoolchild knew the poetry of Paul Laurence Dunbar, which was recited in school.” Trumpeter Miles Davis, who grew up in East St. Louis, celebrated Dunbar’s as a singular blues voice, comparing him to singer Bessie Smith: “She affects me like Leadbelly did, the way some of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poetry did. I read him once and almost cried. The Negro Southern speech.”
What’s fascinating about Dunbar is that he was born in post–Civil War Dayton, Ohio, not the South, and was the only Black student in his high school class. The “Negro Southern speech” that moved Davis and others was both real and an invention. He found voices and strategies for talking to white and Black audiences at a time when they were hardly talking to each other. Dunbar was a salesman selling his art, using the way people spoke, as well as the way some people thought other people spoke, to rope in as many readers as possible. His poetry could make you feel like he was talking animatedly straight to you, just that direct, but he was gifted with tricks and contradictions, switching codes to envision a community of readers greater than existed at the time of his writing.20
