Coming Through Slaughter - Michael Ondaatje [1]
In the Skin of a Lion 1987
Running in the Family (memoir) 1982
Coming Through Slaughter 1976
The Collected Works of Billy the Kid 1970
POETRY
Handwriting 1998
The Cinnamon Peeler: Selected Poems 1991
Secular Love 1984
There’s a Trick with a Knife
I’m Learning to Do: Poems 1963–1978 1979
First Vintage International Edition, March 1996
Copyright © 1976 by Michael Ondaatje
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover by W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., New York.
Vintage Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Ondaatje, Michael, 1943–
Coming through slaughter / Michael Ondaatje.
—1st Vintage International ed.
p.cm.
1. Bolden, Buddy, 1877–1931—Fiction.
2. Jazz musicians—Louisiana—New Orleans—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.05C65 1996
813′.54—dc20 95-46416
This page constitutes an extension of this copyright page.
eISBN: 978-0-307-77661-7
www.vintagebooks.com
v3.1
For Quintin and Griffin. For Stephen, Skyler, Tory and North. And in memory of John Thompson.
Contents
Cover
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Credits
Acknowledgements
About this Guide
Three sonographs—pictures of dolphin sounds made by a machine that is more sensitive than the human ear. The top left sonograph shows a “squawk.” Squawks are common emotional expressions that have many frequencies or pitches, which are vocalized simultaneously. The top right sonograph is a whistle. Note that the number of frequencies is small and this gives a “pure” sound—not a squawk. Whistles are like personal signatures for dolphins and identify each dolphin as well as its location. The middle sonograph shows a dolphin making two kinds of signals simultaneously. The vertical stripes are echolocation clicks (sharp, multi-frequency sounds) and the dark, mountain-like humps are the signature whistles. No one knows how a dolphin makes both whistles and echolocation clicks simultaneously
ONE
His geography.
Float by in a car today and see the corner shops. The signs of the owners obliterated by brand names. Tassin’s Food Store which he lived opposite for a time surrounded by DRINK COCA COLA IN BOTTLES, BARG’S, or LAURA LEE’S TAVERN, the signs speckled in the sun, TOM MOORE, YELLOWSTONE, JAX, COCA COLA, COCA COLA, primary yellows and reds muted now against the white horizontal sheet wood walls. This district, the homes and stores, are a mile or so from the streets made marble by jazz. There are no songs about Gravier Street or Phillips or First or The Mount Ararat Missionary Baptist Church his mother lived next door to, just the names of the streets written vertically on the telephone poles or the letters sunk into pavement that you walk over, GRAVIER. A bit too stylish for the wooden houses almost falling down, the signs the porches and the steps broken through where no one sits outside now. It is farther away that you find Rampart Street, then higher up Basin Street, then one block higher Franklin.
But here there is little recorded history, though tales of ‘The Swamp’ and ‘Smoky Row’, both notorious communities where about 100 black prostitutes from pre-puberty to their seventies would line the banquette to hustle, come down to us in fragments. Here the famous whore Bricktop Jackson carried a 15 inch knife and her lover John Miller had no left arm and wore a chain with an iron ball on the end to replace it—killed by Bricktop herself on December 7, 1861, because of his ‘bestial habits and ferocious manners’. ‘And here One-legged Duffy’ (born Mary Rich) was stabbed by her boyfriend and had her head beaten in with her own wooden leg. ‘And gamblers carrying cocaine to a game.’
History was slow here. It was elsewhere in town, in the brothel district of Storyville, that one made and lost money—the black