Near to my fiftieth year, a musician colleague asked "Why did you go and play with the egg and spoons?". "Egg and spoons", if you don't know, was racist rhyming slang for "coons". Oh, well. I am glad he at least did not use the K word. He did not mean any offence with his rhyming slang: it was the language of his time and place. He was one of four vigorous siblings, brought up by a strong, beautiful and illiterate mother from Lithuania. His parents wearily settled in South Africa, grateful that they no longer needed to flee from Russians, Germans, or anyone at all. Their lives improved dramatically and instantly, and neither he nor his siblings wanted to rock their new boat. They uncritically slotted into "the way things are done", eager to conform. Brought up strictly in their faith, they were a loving family, none of them short of humour. The society they found themselves in operated much as any Eastern European expected. Living in Johannesburg looked much the same as Europe. If one looks at photos of the streets of Johannesburg when these young lads were growing up, few blacks are visible. Their mother did not hire a domestic worker: that cost money, and anyway, it was the done thing for a young mother from their stetl to run her house unaided, and she saw no reason to change that.
It was only on holidays that he and his siblings drove out of the city and saw tribal blacks. They wondered at how little clothing was worn. In the rural areas, they found young boys, girls and men wearing nothing above the waist. They were told it was traditional. One man's isicoco is another man's yarmulke. It was normal to take holidays in summer. Since it was so hot, it made sense for men to wear nothing above the waist. They tried not to look at the girls and women: it was strange for them to see men stop, have a cordial conversation with a girl or woman naked from the waist up, and continue, having paid apparently no attention to her nakedness. It soon became unremarkable.
It was popular back then among young men to imitate the Cockney East End tradition. Whitechapel may be known for Bangladeshis today, but it was known for Jewish people when I lived there in the 1960s, and Jewish people would have come and gone between London and Johannesburg. The rhyming slang phrase for "fart", was "horse and cart". Horses were still common in Johannesburg. Anyone who has ever ridden in a horse drawn vehicle knows how apt this is. Horses get rid of a lot of methane.
Being as decent as one could, one would say that so-and-so "let off a horse and cart". When somebody went to the toilet, they went to "have a pony and trap". A girl with good looking legs had good "ham and eggs", and if she had cute eyes, she had "nice mince pies". He was simply curious about how I came to play with Africans, because it was not common. To be Jewish was to know racism. No-one knew better than early Jewish settlers that crossing colour lines could be a risk.
The thing is, with his inoffensive questioning, it was clear that he thought I had made a choice, that I had chosen to play with blacks, but it does not work like that. A boss hires a worker. A worker does not, unless s/he works for Semco on Brazil , hire a boss. Musicians, especially unknown musicians, do not go up to a band leader and order them to "hire me". It is the band leader that does the hiring, just as with any boss in any field of work. In my case, an adult male dressed in a suit booked me. He had a kindly look, I had seen him before. It would have been disrespectful for a youngster like me to refuse him. Did I have a choice? Yes, I did. I could have easily said no. But, I made a conscious choice from the perspective of the market, too. At the time, we knew that blacks outnumbered whites by around 6 to 1. In other words, I was being welcomed into a market with potential to increase sales sixfold. I may be crazy, but I am not stupid. It was simple arithmetic: it made good business sense to play to as many people as possible.
If I listened to adults at the time (I did not, much), the first band I was booked by was a "mixed race" band. That is how my elders would have seen it. I struggled to see it that way. All I could see was "multi-horn swing band". a thrilling opportunity. Who would not want to climb on that bandwagon? Why would anyone, offered a seat in any band, let along such an urgent, swiging band, refuse?
There were nuances, however. Would I rush around telling my school contemporaries how lucky I was? Would it not be normal, at sixteen years of age, to shout it to the rooftops that I was getting into a band, and not just any band, but a biggish band of experienced elder musicians? Four reeds, two trumpets is not far shy of being a big band in jazz. Six wind players short of the classic big band is still a medium band. In the event, I said nothing to anyone at school, not even to my closest friend at the time. Partly this was for fear of jinxing, but also because for me, a teenager, to join a band with adult black males would have been thought strange, but to brag about it would peg me as certifiable. Is this how people drift into spycraft, realising one or other side of their life is totally inadmissable and off-limits?
It was just as well my mother was incurious. Only years later did she learn how that gig in Umkhumbane was ended by a bomb. That is another story. I had told her I was doing a gig, but I could not have told her where, because I did not know. Also, she was unsure of what a gig was. We did not pester grown-ups for details, and they did not pester the youth for them either. It may help to understand that we had only recently got a car. We walked everywhere, or went by train.There were buses, eventually, but not many, ever, in Pietermaritzburg, and I hated them. White buses allowed blacks, but they had to sit in the back row. Black buses did not even stop for whites. So, because it was a different world then, why ask where I (or anyone) would be? With no car to get into and drive in it to fetch me, what would be the point? In those days, when someone was out of the house, we did not think about them until they were back. They were gone. And I really was. Within minutes after the bomb blasts (it felt more like within seconds), I found myself alone. Everyone had climbed into cars and whizzed off. I was left, a little dazed, dangling my trumpet case, in clouds of dust, eighty kilometres from home, and in gathering dusk. It was a good thing that loneliness did not scare me. It was people that I feared.
Outside of towns, there were not even many telephones around. There were entire rural districts that had no phones. For one example, I used to take occasional walks down the Umsindusi and Umgeni rivers, along the canoe race route. These were long walks. I could not walk it in less than two days. There was not a telephone to be found along those rivers. Even in a so-called "Trading store", the name given for "shop" in a "native" area (who knows why, but we all knew what we meant), seldom had a telephone. We were in touch by post, had been for a century. That was all we knew. It was good.
In the USA, a sixteen year old getting an invite to a working big band would have been huge news, something that happens only to the likes of Tony Williams, who was invited to join Miles Davis at only seventeen years of age.
Hell, of course I said yes. Did I have the luxury of choice?