There were three types of trouble you could get into as a negro kid in Cooltown and by the time he was eight years old, Fortis James "Lick" Holden had tasted them all like an infant tongue-dipping moonshine without the swallow.
The worst type of trouble was with white folk. It was worst because whatever you'd done, you could be sure that the punishment would exceed the crime. Lick knew of kids who'd been beaten senseless for mimicking an accent or cakewalking behind a white lady; and he'd received a stinging slap or two himself for no more than a misplaced glance at a fine-looking gentleman or for leaving his ice cart outside the wrong shop front. And, of course, Kayenne [Lick's mother] had surely told Lick the story of Squint-Eye Jack who'd been lynched down in Storyville the sins of his lazy eye.
After white-folk trouble, the next worst type for a negro kid was trouble with your own kind, which had a whole chanciness to it that could make it more scary still. Say you stole a sweet orange from a fruit man's wagon just because you couldn't bear the fresh smell that tickled your nose like ambrosia and say the fruit man caught you at it. Well! You surely had some quick figuring to do because the fruit man might pat you on the head and say, "Shooter! You know you just got to aks me." Or he might pull his razor and slice your face so bad your own Momma wouldn't know you. See, it was just how Momma Lucy used to tell it: "Desperation has a craziness all of its own."
All the kids in Cooltown agreed, therefore, that the third type of trouble was the best. And that was trouble with the law. Law officers stood on every corner of Cooltown - at least until sundown anyhow - and they liked nothing better than to pick up a little nigger for all manner of misdemeanours. The law officers were all white, of course. But they rarely had the time or inclination to administer a beating (save for repeat thieves) and they could generally be relied upon for no more than a stern lecture using words like "jucation" and "spect".
Back then, when he wasn't hang-dogging after Sylvie (who wasn't no blood relation), Lick spent most of his time with his best friend Naps, Big Annie's youngest son. Naps was a small wiry kid with a wicked streak that ran through him like a vein in a cliff face. He had a terrible daring about him and the devil's smile that made grown men giggle like babies. His real name was Isaiah but this name was lost on account of the boy's ability to sleep just about any place, from the cradle of a tree branch to the roof of his family's apartment (any time his momma was on the war path). At first he was called "Oddnaps". Later just "Naps".
Naps got Lick into all manner of trouble. But mostly it was law trouble, the best type. On one occasion, when they'd been ejected from the balcony of Brown Sugar's low-rent honkytonk for the umpteenth time and received their umpteenth lecture from two of Cooltown's finest, Naps explained it to Lick like this: "You get in trouble with white folks and you may's well fall down a hole so deep you can't even see the sunshine. Now with negroes, be like gettin' stuck in swamp mud right up to your waist. But law trouble? That's no worse than splashin' through a puddle, Fortis boy. No worse than splashin' through a puddle."
With hindsight, therefore, Lick was kind of glad that, when big trouble followed his eighth birthday, it was the law type. But, at the time, he didn't feel so lucky. It was Naps's fault. It was always Naps's fault. And it happened like this.
Lick was seven years old when he took his first job to support Kayenne's shrinking household. Sina had long since left to marry an itinerant preacher and, the last Kayenne had heard, she'd made it all the way up to Chicago. Sister and Ruby Lee were still in and out of the apartment. But they spent most of their time in Brown Sugar's, turning tricks and spending the chump change on opium and alcohol. As for Corissa, Kayenne hoped she'd soon grow up and find herself a good husband. But there wasn't too much in the way of "husband material" to be found in Cooltown and the way Corissa reacted to men - with a nervous tick and a lost tongue - suggested that, even aged eleven, she was destined to, at best, prostitution and, at worst, a spinster's life. Meantime, she looked after the apartment and the fading soul of Kayenne who now spent most days sitting in the corner rocker and watching the shadows for the ghosts of her past that came at night. What with Sylvie being Kayenne's favourite - though she wasn't even her blood daughter! - and above any kind of working, that left little Lick to earn what money he could.
It was Momma Lucy who found Lick a job with Old Man Stekel, the Jew who owned a general store in the Jones district of Mount Marter, right where it bordered Cooltown. Stekel was just about typical of Mount Marter's poor white folk, caught between a rock and a hard place. As a Jew, the richer whites considered him "jus' one step above a nigger" and they would shop in his store only as a last resort. The negroes, on the other hand, distrusted Stekel as a white man who was sure to con them out of their hard-earned nickels and dimes. And, besides, they couldn't afford much of what he sold anyhow.
So Old Man Stekel had two principal ways of scraping a living. First, he opened his store on Sundays when the good Christians were in church or with their families and he could furnish shamefaced whites and blacks alike with an ounce of butter or tobacco. Second, he sold ice to the Cooltown honkytonks to freshen their liquor and to any negro kid with the terrible thirst and a penny to spare. And this was where Lick fitted in. Because Stekel was too old and too scared to be pushing an ice cart down Canal Street when Old Hannah hid her face from a devilish night in Cooltown.
Every evening, about seven o'clock, Lick would run the ten minutes to Jones to collect the ice cart and he'd be greeted at the neatly swept shop front by Old Man Stekel himself or, sometimes, his son Dov (with hair so curly and lips so fat that Lick was sure he had some black in him). The negro kids skitted Lick from the first day for his association with a man who'd "killed the Lord Jesus himself". But that didn't bother Lick any because Stekel was always good to him, paying what he could afford and feeding him a good Jewish meal of chicken and flat bread any time there was some to spare. And, for his part, Stekel always regarded Lick with a mixture of admiration and concern: admiration for the way the seven-year-old managed to shift the hefty weight of the full ice cart and concern that he might be stopped by a gang of white good-time boys before he even reached Cooltown (white boys for whom a good time got no better than the chance to "teach a nigger kid a lesson").
Lick soon knew the routine of his job as well as he knew the expressions on his sister Sylvie's face. He would start at the north end of Canal Street (right by Kayenne's apartment) and work his way down the long line of honkytonks: Brown Sugar's, Tonk's, Toothless Bessie's, Black Cobb's. At some of these places, they actually employed doormen - terrifying giants with scarred faces and gentle hands - who would come to the cart and tuck an enormous ice block under each arm. But, mostly, fetching the ice was the job of the most junior whores, who laboured with a block between them and then cussed each other if they dropped it in the dust. Often, outside Brown Sugar's, it was Sister and Ruby Lee who were sent out to fetch the ice and if they'd smoked enough pipes of opium or gage they wouldn't even know their own brother.
Lick used to say, "They's flyin' so high, they be lookin' down on the angels." But it didn't bother him any because that was Cooltown all over and it was Lick's world.
When he'd reached the end of Canal Street, the second part of his job began. He would turn the cart round, take out whatever ice was left in the compartment and parade back the way he came, singing out his ice at the top of his voice. Even at the age of seven, Lick's voice had that rasping tone that seemed to bounce off the buildings and carry for a mile or more.
Lick sang all kinds of foolishness: "Iced sasparilla! It's a real belly filler!" Or, "Come buy your ice! It sure tastes nice! Cures pox and lice! Taste it once you'll want it twice!"
Then Lick would take out the heavy sharpened metal spatula that Old Man Stekel called a "doohickey" and he'd scrape away at the top block of ice until he had a nice pile of fragments. Next he took a sheet of waxed paper from the stack on the back of the cart and rolled it expertly into a cone. He scooped the ice to the brim of the cone and upturned a splash of sasparilla over the top just in time for his first customer.
The shooters came running for a taste of the ice - negro kids of prostitutes, pimps and preachers; because there weren't no other kind of kids in Cooltown - and their faces lit up as they brandished their dirty pennies. And their eyes watered happily when the cold hit the back of their throats.
"A penny a lick!" Lick would shout. "A penny a lick! No penny, no lick!" More than half a century later, white jazz junkies (or "mouldy figs") who called themselves "purists" wrote their histories of New Orleans jazz, lifted mostly from the slanted recollections of men like Louis Armstrong, Joe "King" Oliver and "Jelly Roll" Morton. And they felt obliged to make mention of the mythical Lick Holden and his golden horn, though they knew little of his life.