Inspired by true events
Buchenwald. April 11, 1945. The images of the survivors—more bone than flesh—were seared into Jimmy Armstead’s mind and heart. Shadows followed him now, even in daylight. His mother and grandmother Mémé, the two women who’d raised him after his father vanished, pleaded with him to come home to New Orleans. The war was over, they insisted. He’d done his part. It was time to return to life.
“I need more time,” Jimmy told them, his voice hollow on the transatlantic line.
There was a pause, the crackling static like distant gunfire. Then his mother’s voice, low and urgent: “There’s a murder,” she said, “and it involves your music.”
Jimmy’s pulse quickened. “Jazz?”
His grandmother’s voice cut in, weathered and knowing. “Yes, jazz.”
“What does the murder have to do with me?” The images of Buchenwald flickered behind his eyelids. “I’ve seen enough murder. I don’t want to think about it.”
“You need to hear this.” Her voice dropped to a whisper. “When you’re ready, you come home.” His Mémé sighed. “But don’t wait too long. I’m getting older by the minute.”
But so was Jimmy. And he needed to search for signs of humanity before he sank into the pit of darkness like some of his fellow soldiers. He needed to go after the light. And for him, music was light. The minute he stopped playing, the darkness came out.
He went to Paris, bought himself a used Benge trumpet. Its rich golden resonance reminded him of sunset over the Mississippi River. He shared a cramped room in Montmartre with another Black ex-serviceman. By day, he washed dishes at a café in the Place des Abbesses, hands raw from hot water and cheap soap. By night, he haunted the jazz bars and clubs that were springing up like defiant flowers through the cracks of post-war Paris. He did his best to blow back the blues, each note a small victory against the shadows.
A year passed, then another. His ma and Mémé kept urging him to come home, their letters growing more cryptic, more insistent. But there were all-night jam sessions, Blacks and whites busting their guts on the same stage and afterwards, laughing and drinking together. Jimmy was young, he was alive, and every woman he kissed and every song he played was a way of thumbing his nose at the Nazis.
One night at an underground club, its ceiling so low it seemed to press down on their shoulders, he watched through a haze of cigarette smoke as a short curly-haired Moroccan Jew named Maurice attacked the drums, then made love to them. Jimmy joined the musicians, trumpet to his lips like a lifeline. There was a sweetness to Maurice, even as he pounded the drums, the kind of innocence Jimmy thought he’d never recapture. At dawn the two men strode to Les Halles, arm in arm, collars turned up high, Gitanes dangling from their lips.
“Frères,” said Maurice, with his soft French accent.
“Brothers,” agreed Jimmy, the word tasting strange and hopeful on his tongue.
Another night, he and Maurice went to the Caveau de la Hachette, a club that specialized in New Orleans-style jazz. The basement space was thick with anticipation as they dug the sound of the pianist, Dix—a tall, skeletal Black man from Memphis whose fingers seemed unnaturally long in the dim light. Dix jabbed the piano keys like a prizefighter, giving them no leeway. He made the piano seethe, until smoke seemed to rise between the keys. That night, when the three of them jammed, Jimmy’s torment, Maurice’s purity, and Dix’s rage combusted, and magic happened. The three formed a combo, bound by something deeper than contracts.
In late 1947, they recorded an album called “Black and Blue” for The Hot Club, that got some attention. And finally, in early 1948, they decided it was time to return to America. First stop: New Orleans. The city of secrets.
Jimmy and Maurice wore berets and dark glasses, even at night. As for Dix, he might be raging inside, but with his pinstripe suit and short, wide tie, he was the essence of cool. They arrived in winter, and it was unseasonably cold. Heavy rains, brutal winds, people huddled in threadbare coats and hats. The lucky ones had scarves. No one was smiling. Looked to Jimmy like they were struggling to set one foot in front of the other. Maurice said it reminded him of the Jews in Casablanca during the war: “We walked tilted to the side, one ear close to the ground to hear the German and Vichy boots.”
The three men crashed in the back bedroom of the old shotgun house on St. Philip Street in the Lower Ninth Ward, where Jimmy had grown up. Dix and Maurice were fascinated by the layout. The idea was you could shoot a gun through the front door and the bullet would go out the back door. A straight line of death, Jimmy thought but didn’t say. The living room with its tall stained-glass windows faced the street, bedrooms lined up one after another, and finally the kitchen.
Jimmy’s mother, Lucille, used to radiate joy, like a bowl of fresh-cut flowers, but the war had her looking over her shoulder like she was scared she’d be jumped. And his tiny, intimidating grandmother Mémé needed a cane to get around. She’d been old when she gave birth to Lucille, and now, her face was a map of wrinkles, her black eyes too deep, as if they’d seen things no one should have to witness. The daughter of a Black man and a Creole woman, she’d been a free woman of color, and tiny as she was, she held herself with pride.
Maurice saw it right away: “Your Mémé is a force. Like this town.”
Lucille fed them gumbo and crawfish etouffee, and Mémé advised the men on the best way to eat crawfish: “Pinch the tail and suck the head.” Her words had the cadence of ritual, of wisdom passed down.
As soon as Jimmy arrived, he hugged his grandmother, feeling the bird-like bones beneath her dress. “I made it home, Mémé. What did you want to tell me?”
Her eyes flickered toward the windows, as if checking for eavesdroppers. “Soon,” she promised, her voice barely above a whisper.
Night after night, the three musicians rehearsed. It was the only time they could let go and feel free. There was a small club on Frenchman Street, where they jammed with local musicians, dove into bebop, added more improvisation, extended solos, and wild experimentation. They’d sit for hours too, absorbing the new music, letting it fill the hollow spaces inside them.
One February night, the rain tapping against the windows like impatient fingers, Mémé told Jimmy it was time. The women sat in the two stuffed armchairs facing the stained-glass windows that opened onto the street. Mémé puffed on her pipe, the smoke wreathing her head like a ghostly crown. Lucille’s fingers flew as she knit a pale green blanket for Jimmy’s sister—she was expecting a baby in Chicago, where she’d moved with her husband.
Dix hunched over the antique piano, his fingers unable to resist feathering the keys, coaxing out whispered melodies. Jimmy and Maurice sat on the floor and leaned against the low table, where a bottle of rye whiskey and five shot glasses waited like silent witnesses.
In a voice like rough honey, Mémé told them the story of a killer who’d terrorized the streets of New Orleans when Jimmy’s mother was a teenager. Fear had stripped the town and its people of life and color, and for a time, they seemed to live in a movie where everything and everyone was black or white.
“That hasn’t changed,” said Jimmy, a bitter edge to his voice.
Mémé’s eyes lingered on his face for a moment before she continued. “This killer was known as the Axeman.” The name hung in the air, almost visible. “He wandered the streets of New Orleans at night, no weapon in hand. But imagine the horror of the men and women who opened their eyes and saw him in their bedroom or kitchen.”
Her voice dropped lower, forcing them to lean in. “He’d smash their heads with their own axes or hatchets. Most of his victims were Italian-Americans, butchers and grocers. The Axeman killed a dozen people during 1918.”
Jimmy’s ma corrected her, “He tried to kill a dozen, but some managed to get away. He only got five.”
Mémé snorted, a sound like dry leaves. “You playin’ word games with me, cher. Them that got away never lived full lives again, not after what they seen. You escape the bogeyman once, but you know damned well he’s gonna come after you again. You spend the rest of your life waitin’. You never sleep the same either.”
Her deep, dark eyes met Jimmy’s, and he shivered from the roots of his hair down to his toes. The old woman understood the darkness he carried with him, the darkness he couldn’t shake no matter how hard he blew his trumpet. “Did you ever see him, Mémé?” he asked, his mouth suddenly dry.
“I did.”
The single candle on the table guttered, as if a draft had passed through the sealed room.
Lucille stopped knitting for a moment, her needles suspended in mid-air. “I did, too. I was rebellious at sixteen. I sneaked out at night to meet my boyfriend—don’t you look at me like that, Jimmy. You think my life began when you were born?” The brief flash of humor vanished as quickly as it had appeared. “I’d meet him near St. Louis Cemetery, where Marie Laveau, the Voodoo Queen, was buried. That’s where I saw Malvina Latour, who’d taken over the voodoo work.”
She leaned forward, her voice dropping to a hush. “Malvina was almost as scary as the Axeman. You were never supposed to meet her eyes because once she saw you, she could do things to you or make you do things. I’d look at her sideways, from the corners of my eyes. She was known to make dolls and stick needles in them, and she mixed her own poisons and spells.”
“The police and the gris-gris workers like Malvina Latour were searching for the Axeman,” said Mémé. “But this man lived in the dark, and Malvina lived in both the dark and the light. In order to see him, you had to have the kind of eyes that see in the dark.”
The musicians were quiet for a time, picturing the Nazis they’d fought during the war. Men of the night who did unspeakable things in the light of day. The silence stretched, taut as a wire.
“Do you think I’m making this up?” asked Mémé abruptly, her voice cutting through the room.
“No,” said the three men at the same time, as if compelled.
After a moment Dix’s fingers rippled across the keys and stopped with a discordant chord that seemed to linger too long in the air.
“Folks started thinking the Axeman must not be human,” said Mémé, shadows dancing across her wrinkled face.
Jimmy looked from his grandmother to his mother, a chill creeping up his spine. “Well, did they ever find him?”
Mémé puffed on her pipe. The faint maple sugar scent of her tobacco brought back Jimmy’s childhood, when he sat on her lap and listened to that wonderful voice tell stories about old New Orleans. But this was no fairy tale.
Without looking down at her clicking knitting needles, Lucille said, “The Times-Picayune ran a story, and what a story! It was a letter written by the Axeman himself to the people of New Orleans. He said he was a Devil writing from Hell, and he promised more murders. He enjoyed them.”
Mémé told Dix to open the piano bench. He pulled out a stack of yellowed newspapers and sheet music, brought them to the table and scattered them over the surface. The papers seemed to give off a faint smell of decay.
Jimmy was certain those papers hadn’t been in the bench when he was growing up. After his father left, no one else played the piano, and Jimmy himself gravitated to the trumpet like a baby in search of his mother’s breast. He vaguely remembered hearing about the Axeman, but the way Mémé and his mother talked about him, it almost sounded personal. Too personal.
Mémé aimed her pipe at the folded newspaper. “My eyes ain’t what they used to be, cher,” she said. “Go down to that part that starts with ‘Now, to be exact.’”
Jimmy skimmed the first few paragraphs, his heart quickening with each line, then read aloud:
Now, to be exact, at 12:15 o’clock (earthly time) on next Tuesday night, I am going to pass over New Orleans. In my infinite mercy, I am going to make a little proposition to the people. Here it is: I am very fond of jazz music, and I swear by all the devils in the nether regions, that every person shall be spared in whose house a jazz band is in full swing at the time I have just mentioned. If everyone has a jazz band going, well, well then, so much the better for the people. One thing is certain and that is some of those persons who do not jazz it on Tuesday night (if there be any) will get the ax.
Well, as I am cold and crave the warmth of my native Tartarus, and as it is about time that I have left your homely earth, I will cease my discourse.
Jimmy frowned. A word had gnawed at his ear like a mosquito. He went back and found it. “Tartarus,” he said. “What does it mean?”
“The place of punishment for the wicked.” Mémé narrowed her eyes, and in the candlelight, they seemed to glow. “The jail at the bottom of the world. Under everything else. We’re walkin’ on Tartarus every day of our lives.”
Dix sank to the floor next to Jimmy and Maurice, his long frame folding awkwardly. “Did I understand this right? This Axeman murderer was a jazz lover?”
“And he’d spare any establishment that played jazz?” Maurice rubbed his scruffy chin. “Every man must have some good in him.”
“But do you think the Axeman really wrote that letter?” asked Jimmy, the hairs on the back of his neck standing up.
“Pour yourselves a drink, boys,” said Mémé, her gaze fixed on something only she could see. “You’re gonna need it.”
Jimmy poured rye into the small glasses, his hand trembling slightly. The amber liquid caught the light like trapped fire. Everyone drank. The spicy pepper of the whiskey burned his throat and chest.
Mémé set down her empty glass with a decisive click. “The night of March 18th 1919, jazz was played in every single building in New Orleans. Like cries to the angels. Trumpets, cornets, pianos, and drums all lighting up the dark.”
Jimmy shivered, imagining the entire town lit up and blasting music, a defiant chorus against the darkness.
Lucille set aside the knitting needles and blanket. She leaned forward and pointed at the sheet music—a song called, “The Axman’s Jazz (Don’t Scare Me Papa),” by Joseph John Davilla. The cover was a cartoon of a family frantically playing music while looking out the door.
Jimmy and Maurice studied it, the yellowed paper almost brittle under their fingers. “Who’s this guy, Davilla?” asked Jimmy.
“A musician,” said his mother. “He wrote the song the very next morning after the night of jazz, and he started to play it right away, and to sell it. The cops believed he wrote the letter and then wrote the song to make money off it.”
“But you don’t think so,” said Dix, his perceptive eyes fixed on Lucille’s face.
“There were many suspects.” Lucille glanced at Mémé, who was staring at the front windows, as if expecting someone to appear.
Jimmy picked up the newspaper again. His ma used to tell him that he didn’t see the world, he heard it. And his ear told him something was off-key. That mosquito was gnawing at his ear again. He fumbled through the dozen or so folders of sheet music. They were all jazz songs written in the early twentieth century. He didn’t know what he was looking for till he found it: a word that lit up the page and stopped the gnawing.
He tapped the cover sheet, his pulse racing. “This here song: ‘Requiem for the Dead.’” Jimmy opened the folder. “And this line: ‘The heat of my Tartarus.’”
He lifted his head, his eyes wide. “Not just Tartarus, but my Tartarus. His Tartarus. Now, that don’t seem like the most common word. And this song is dated 1917. Before the Axeman wrote his letter.”
The silence that followed was deafening.
Mémé held up her glass, her hand steady despite her age. “Pour us another round, Maurice. I believe it’s time to raise a glass to Lucille. She noticed the same thing back then.”
“To Madame Armstead,” said Maurice, his voice hushed with new respect.
When they set down their glasses, Jimmy said, “The songwriter, he—”
“He was staying here,” said Lucille, her words falling like stones into water.
“Here?” Dix looked spooked, his eyes darting around the room. “In this house?”
“It used to be a rooming house,” said Mémé. “The back bedroom where you boys are staying, two men shared it. They were strangers to each other. One was a salesman, a chubby little man with a big heart. Tell them about the other one, cher.”
Lucille nodded, her hands clasped tightly in her lap. “He was heavy-set, but quick on his feet. You’d never hear him coming, and suddenly he was there, almost on top of you, in the kitchen. A very dark man, very quiet. He went out most nights, his hat tilted low over his head, overcoat collar pushed up high. When I sneaked out, I saw him.” She caught her breath. “One night I followed him.”
“With your boyfriend?” asked Jimmy, unable to imagine his mother as this daring young girl.
She sniffed. “That boy was scared. I went alone. Some nights this man went to bars on Frenchman Street with his trumpet—”
Jimmy groaned. “Aw, hell, you didn’t say he was a trumpeter.”
“I’m sorry to say he was. But I wanted to find out where he went the nights he didn’t take his horn with him.”
Maurice held out his hand with a flourish. “Madame, you possess a rare courage.”
“Thank you, Maurice.” She grinned mischievously, a glimpse of the girl she had been. “You might not think it looking at me now, but I was a tiny slip of a thing, and I was fast. And this was my town, remember. Born here, and I’ll die here.”
“Go on, Ma.” Jimmy leaned forward, caught in her story’s web.
“I followed him.” Her voice dropped, as if she feared being overheard across the decades. “He went far, out of the Quarter. I was ready to turn back when he stopped at a small frame house. I hid behind a tree while he lurked about, then circled the house. My heart was pounding like the snare drums in your records. Then he disappeared. Musta gone in the back way.”
Dix shook his head. “I’m with Maurice. You got some guts, Mrs. Armstead.”
“I went back home and waited.” Her eyes were distant now, seeing that night. “Next day, I heard the news. A terrible thing happened in the night. At the same house where I’d seen him. He’d murdered a nineteen-year-old girl.”
She shut her eyes briefly, as if to block out the image. “That man slept in our house. Used our towels and sheets. We served him café au lait and beignets in the morning.” She gulped the rest of her rye, her hand shaking now. “That man was the Axeman.”
Wind shrieked outside the house and pounded the windows like desperate fists. No one said a word. The confession hung in the air, almost visible.
After a long moment, Mémé tapped her pipe thoughtfully against the small glass jar where she’d drop the ashes. “You know when you reach the crossroads Robert Johnson singin’ about? Choosin’ between the Devil’s road and the good road? But sometimes it ain’t clear which way is right and which is wrong.”
Lucille cupped her palms. “I held knowledge here, and I had to trust someone. There was only one person I could go to with something like this.”
Mémé grunted.
“Of course, you, mama. But first, I had to talk to Malvina Latour. I was trembling like a leaf in a storm, but I went to her in broad daylight, and I told her the truth. She didn’t seem surprised. She said that I needed the most powerful and dangerous gris-gris, the kind that called on spirits from other realms. She needed two days to gather ingredients and prepare. And that’s when I went to my mama.”
“About time, too,” Mémé’s voice was sharp as a blade.
Jimmy looked at these two queens seated regally on their armchairs, and he wondered if he’d ever really seen them before. “Weren’t you both scared of this voodoo lady?”
Mémé sighed, a sound like wind through ancient trees. “Marie Laveau and Malvina Latour both worked strong gris-gris, but they were also healers. Women with power, and no man like to mess with that. I believe men made up stories about those women so no girl would have the guts to step out of line. Except my girl.”
Lucille sat up straight. Her eyes glowed the way they used to when Jimmy was a boy, before the war stole their light. “Two days later mama and I went to Malvina Latour’s house.”
“I knew where to find her,” said Mémé. “She had a house out on St. Ann Street.”
“She recognized a sister spirit in my mama.” Lucille’s voice was almost reverent. “Malvina gave us the powder and explained what we had to do. She said it would take three days.”
Mémé nodded in satisfaction. “We stirred it in his café au lait every morning.”
“And mixed it in with eggs, flour, and everything we served him. We weren’t takin’ a chance. We were careful to separate his food from the family’s, and the other roomer’s. And we kept smiling and talking polite. Good morning, good night, as if we weren’t poisoning the man.”
Mémé studied her pipe for a moment. “It took four days. A big man like that, he had a huge appetite. He didn’t chew his food, he just swallowed and asked for more.”
“On day five, he didn’t wake up.” Lucille looked at the musicians, her gaze unflinching. “They took him away. Funny thing, the killings stopped after that.”
Jimmy lit a Lucky Strike from Dix’s crumpled pack on the table. His hand shook as he lit the match, the flame dancing wildly. “Ma. Mémé. You…”
Mémé snorted. “Don’t you get high and mighty with us, boy. We murdered a man who murdered many others, and who showed no signs of stopping.”
“After that, we were all different,” said Lucille, her voice hollow. “We saw what a human being could do to other human beings.”
“Maybe that’s what life is,” said Dix, his fingers unconsciously playing a minor chord. “Just recovering from one bad thing after another.”
“Don’t forget the bright spots,” said Mémé. “Like you boys coming here and making music. You’re the bright spots.”
Lucille leaned toward her son. “Jimmy boy, you’re the light coming out of the dark.”
Jimmy inhaled deeply and closed his eyes. For the first time in years, he went back in his mind to the Day of Liberation when he and his fellow servicemen entered the concentration camp, Buchenwald—the pit of Hell—that Tartarus aboveground—and he saw the skeletal creatures. A mound of bodies thrown over each other. At first, he thought it was a mass grave. But some were clinging to life, by a thread, and they were mixed in with the dead.
His heart shuddered at the memory of touching the dead and pulling out the living. They were nearly all bone, no flesh, their eyes stunned like they’d come back from the other world.
Later, one of the survivors said to him, “You smiled at me, and I couldn’t remember the last time I saw a smile, and I wanted to cry but there were no tears left in me.”
Jimmy recalled how he’d had to force that smile up from somewhere deep inside him, and how it felt like his face was cracking.
Maurice set his hand on Jimmy’s shoulder. “You okay, mon frère?”
Jimmy blinked. Mémé stared through him, to the heart of him, as if she could see what he saw, and his eyes burned with the survivor’s tears that hadn’t been able to fall that day, and with his own tears that he’d held back for too long, and once he started, he couldn’t stop.
In the distance, he heard his grandmother’s voice: “We have to rise up against the darkness. We have to be the bright spots.”
***
In the night, Jimmy thought of a question he needed to ask Mémé, it felt urgent, like a dream slipping away, but in the morning it disappeared. And he was raw and aching, every inch of him. He needed to do something. We have to be the bright spots.
He talked to Dix and Maurice, their voices hushed in the pre-dawn darkness, and later that afternoon, called on his old connections in town. Three days later, he, Dix, and Maurice had organized their own Night of Jazz in New Orleans. They spread the word: every bar, club, restaurant, and household was encouraged to play jazz as loud and as long as they wanted, till dawn, to bury the ghosts of the war and bring in a new era.
Jimmy, Dix, and Maurice called it the Night of Hope.
In their article, The Times-Picayune called it Illumination Night because there wasn’t a house or club or building that stayed dark and quiet. Even the Mississippi riverboats glowed with fairy lights as musicians on deck performed their magic and set the water on fire. Bourbon Street shimmered with the roar of brass bands. Couples danced to swing the way they used to during the war. Folks gathered at the cemeteries and played and sang, waking up the dead and the living.
That night, jazz of all kinds—from before the war and after the war—crisscrossed all over town, shooting off sparks. Bird bumping into Basie, Dizzy into Duke, and on the corner of Desire and Law, in the new club known as Desire, Jimmy, Maurice, and Dix blew back the horrors of what they’d witnessed. They played as if the Axeman would kill again if they stopped. They played as if with each note they murdered one more Nazi. They played as if they’d just been born, and if they didn’t keep on playing, they’d die. By the time the sun rose, they understood that music was survival in more ways than one.
Arm in arm, the three men staggered down the dirt road and back to St. Philip Street. Morning light slashed through the stained-glass windows of their house, casting blood-red and sapphire shadows across the porch. Jimmy felt a ferocious need to hug Mémé and his mother. He wanted to tell them they’d buried Tartarus so deep underground it would take a long time before it dared rise to the surface again. And he wanted to ask his grandmother if she’d somehow sensed they would create a second Night of Jazz, and if that was why she wanted him to know about the Axeman.
But as soon as they entered the house, he heard wailing.
The sound raised the hairs on his neck. No, no, no…
He pushed through the house to the room his ma and Mémé shared. His mother sat on the edge of the bed, keening and crying. And Mémé, she lay motionless on the bed, eyes glassy and staring above, a tiny curve to her mouth as if she smiled at something only she could see.
***
Mémé’s jazz funeral was dazzling, even in a town known for its astounding jazz funerals. The procession wound through the streets like a glittering serpent, musicians and friends, old and young, joining in and merging their voices and sounds to the texture and harmony of a great symphony reaching for the sky. They were sending off a woman who, with her daughter, had ended a reign of terror—even if only a handful of people knew. And Jimmy and his combo played his latest composition, a song that later became part of New Orleans legend: “Stompin’ on Tartarus.”
As the last notes faded into the twilight, Jimmy thought he heard his grandmother’s laugh, carried on the wind. We have to be the bright spots…
[Image Credit : Photo by Michael Fousert on Unsplash]
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