—My name’s Henry Smart!
This time, he said nothing.
I was going. Home? I doubted that. But I was ready to get right up and go there. I’d walk, old man, back from the dead, broken old man, with a leg of cheap wood; I’d walk right out of the desert. I’d walk across America, east, back the way I’d come. I’d walk on the ocean. Back. And I was going to tell my story. I was alive, still fighting.
I was alive. I was forty-five. I was Henry Smart.
To the authors of the following books, thank you:
Laurence Bergreen, Louis Armstrong: An Extravagant Life; Louis Armstrong, Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans and Swing That Music; Thomas Brothers (ed.), Louis Armstrong – In His Own Words: Selected Writings; Gary Giddins, Satchmo; Joshua Berrett (ed.), The Louis Armstrong Companion; Samuel A. Floyd Jr, The Power of Black Music; Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball, Reading Lyrics; Nancy Groce, New York: Songs of the City; Rick Kennedy, Jelly Roll, Bix and Hoagy; Rick Kennedy and Randy McNutt, Little Labels, Big Sound; Nat Shapiro and Nat Henton, Hear Me Talkin’ To Ya: The Classic Story of Jazz as told by the Men Who Made It; Frederic Ramsey Jr and Charles Edward Smith (eds), Jazzmen; Dempsey J. Travis, An Autobiography of Black Jazz; Hoagy Carmichael, The Stardust Road; Nick Tosches, Where Dead Voices Gather; John Hammond, with Irving Townsend, John Hammond on Record; Mezz Mezzrow and Bernard Wolfe, Really the Blues; Alan Lomax, Mister Jelly Roll; Duke Ellington, Music is My Mistress; Ethel Waters, with Charles Samuels, His Eye is on the Sparrow; Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s; Jeff Kisseldoff, You Must Remember This; Samuel Fuller, New York in the 1930s; Henry Moscow, The Street Book: An Encyclopedia of Manhattan’s Street Names and Their Origins; Georges Perec, with Robert Bober, Ellis Island; E.B. White, Here is New York and Farewell to Model T; Hasia R. Diner et al (eds), Remembering the Lower East Side; Harpo Marx, with Rowland Barber, Harpo Speaks … About New York; James Weldon Johnson, Black Manhattan; Alain Locke (ed.), The New Negro; Ric Burns, James Sanders and Lisa Ades, New York, An Illustrated History; Maren Stange, Bronzeville: Black Chicago in Pictures 1941-1948; Wayne F. Miller, Chicago’s South Side: 1946-1948; David Garrard Lowe, Lost Chicago; Elizabeth McNulty, Chicago – Then and Now; Nelson Algren, Chicago – City on the Make and Never Come Morning; Studs Terkel, Chicago, Hard Times, My American Century and Talking to Myself: A Memoir of My Times; Kenan Heise, Chaos, Creativity and Culture: A Sampling of Chicago in the Twentieth Century; Allan H. Spear, Black Chicago: The Making of a Negro Ghetto (1890–1920); Herbert Asbury, Gem of the Prairie and The Gangs of New York; Frederick Lewis Allen, Only Yesterday: An Informal History of the 1920s; F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Crack-Up, with Other Pieces and Stories; Edward Behr, Prohibition; Stanley Walker, The Night-Club Era; Henry Allen, What It Felt Like: Living in the American Century; Gerald Leinwand, 1927 – High Tide of the 1920s; Maury Klein, Rainbow’s End: The Crash of 1929; Claude McKay, Home to Harlem and Banjo; Jean Toomer, Cane; Richard Wright, Native Son; Thomas Wolfe, Look Homeward, Angel; Carl van Vechten, Nigger Heaven; Ring Lardner, You Know Me Al; John Dos Passos, Manhattan Transfer, Sinclair Lewis, Main Street; John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath; Upton Sinclair, The Jungle; James T. Farrell, Young Lonigan, The Young Manhood of Studs Lonigan and Judgment Day; Michael Ondaatje, Coming Through Slaughter, Woody Guthrie, Bound for Glory; Errol Lincoln Uys, Riding the Rails: Teenagers on the Move During the Great Depression; Roland Marchand, Advertising the American Dream; Gene Fowler (ed.), Mystic Healers and Medicine Shows; Peter Huston, Scams From the Great Beyond; Emile Coué, Self Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion; Michael Flanagan, Stations: An Imagined Journey; Robert S. Lynd and Helen Merrell Lynd, Middletown: A Study in Modern American Culture; William Foote Whyte, Street Corner Society; H. L. Mencken, The American Language and Heathen Days (1890–1936); Zora Neale Hurston, The Sanctified Church; Walker Evans, Signs; Judith Keller, Walker Evans: The Getty Museum Collection; Lewis W. Hines, The Empire State Building; Joseph McBride, Searching For John Ford; Garry Wills, John Wayne’s America; Gerald Peary (ed.), John Ford Interviews; James Durney, Ciontiori: The History of Irish Gangsters in America; Rich Cohen, Tough Jews: Fathers, Sons and Gangster Dreams; Jay A. Gertzman, Bookleggers and Smuthounds: The Trade in Erotica 1920–1940; David W. Maurer, The Big Con: The Story of the Confidence Man; Emily Thompson, The Soundscape of Modernity.
Thanks also to the many people who helped me with information, advice, music and caffeine.
Table of Contents
Cover
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Contents
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Two
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Part Three
Chapter 8
Part Four
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Acknowledgements
Roddy Doyle, Oh, Play That Thing
Thank you for reading books on BookFrom.Net Share this book with friends