Saxophone Colossus

Chapter 1

ST. EUSTATIUS

(1864–1930)

The rhythm and the family name go back to Sonny’s grandfather Steadman Rollins—but Sonny Rollins was almost Walter Berkel. Sonny’s musical inheritance is straightforward, but the name—the name is more complicated. “I had something about the name, I guess: Sonny Rollins,” Sonny later said. “It’s just a name that… it sort of has a melody to it in itself, so that when people begin to hear it… I mean, it sounds like somebody already.”¹

Sonny never met Steadman Rollins, but he felt his influence. “My father told me that he played clarinet at one time. I never heard him play,” Sonny said, “but other than that I think it’s probably further back. I think my grandfather on my father’s side was a singer. That’s what I was told, and they were from St. Croix. And my sister… had pictures, and she said I resemble him very much.… He was also a lothario, and she gave me these stories about him being chased out of—jumping out of windows when guys would find him.… I’m not like that, but I may have gotten my musical thing from him.”²

Sonny’s story, and the story of how he got his melodious name, begins not on St. Thomas, but on the tiny island of St. Eustatius, a former Dutch colony in the West Indies of only eight square miles. Sonny’s paternal great-grandmother, Martha Bennett, was born on St. Eustatius, or Statia, in 1864, the year after Emancipation in the Dutch West Indies.³ By the time she was fifteen, Martha worked as a teenage cook at Judith’s Fancy, a plantation owned by a prominent Statia family, but traveled to the surrounding islands for seasonal work.⁴

Martha’s son, Steadman Rollins, or Rawlins, shared a name with a former governor of neighboring St. Kitts, a sugar plantation owner and slave trader who had died in Nova Scotia in 1830. Sonny’s grandfather was born Steadman Warten Berkel on September 12, 1881—a birthday within a week of Sonny’s—to Martha Berkel, née Bennett, in Statia.⁵ For children born out of wedlock, no father was listed on the birth certificate. In 1885, when Steadman was a young child, Sonny’s great-grandmother Martha gave up her nomadic lifestyle and moved them to St. Croix on a more permanent basis, where they lived in a beachfront property at 31 Strand Street in Southeast Christiansted, a short walk from Fort Frederik and a block from the shore. Rather than seeking employment on one of the Crucian sugar plantations, Martha continued working as a cook, and the two of them attended the Moravian church. By the time he was eight, Steadman was going by Steadman Rawlins. By twenty, Steadman stood five-foot-nine and had become a carpenter in St. Croix, though he frequently traveled to the surrounding islands in the Caribbean for work, most commonly to St. Thomas. Eventually, Sonny’s father, Walter, would follow in Steadman’s peripatetic footsteps, enlisting in the navy; likewise, Sonny would also become a world traveler.⁶

Before Steadman’s twentieth birthday, on June 27, 1903, Sonny’s father, Walter William Rollins, was born to his carpenter-singer-lothario grandfather and Grace Ann Claxton, a servant from Nevis whom Steadman had met after she arrived alone and unmarried on St. Croix in 1900.⁷ The relationship was not to last, and Grace returned to Nevis. She still maintained contact, though, eventually visiting Sonny and her other grandchildren several times in New York, but Sonny’s father was raised by Steadman in St. Croix.

In 1908, Steadman married Helena or Helene Lyburt, and in 1911 they welcomed a son, Mathias, Walter’s half brother and Sonny’s uncle.⁸ That year, Steadman was living in a rented property not far from the area Crucians call Contentment in a building named Perseverance with Helene; Mathias; Sonny’s father, Walter; and Sonny’s grandmother Martha, who at forty-four was still working as a cook. Martha would teach Sonny’s father to cook, and he would eventually take it up as a profession. Medical care on the island was lacking; the first ambulance on St. Croix didn’t arrive until 1917 after the transfer of power to the United States. In 1912, Helene gave birth to a second child, Sonny’s uncle, who was stillborn.⁹

In St. Croix, music pulsated across the rhythmic topography, and it was not uncommon for a Crucian carpenter like Steadman to learn a trade while performing regularly.¹⁰ The music of the Virgin Islands spans different traditions that are all communal and polyrhythmic, require an improviser’s ingenuity, and are inextricably linked to dance. Steadman would have been familiar with quelbe (pronounced “quell-bay”) and the various dances that were popular in the Virgin Islands: the cariso, quadrille, and bamboula. Quelbe, played by scratch bands, was an early calypso form emerging from St. Croix with a Taino influence that incorporated melodic improvisation, syncopated rhythm, and a storytelling thrust. Much of the repertoire has only three chords, but its nuances reside in the group interaction and the joyful mix of harmony, rhythm, melodic phrasing, and sexual innuendo.¹¹ As the music developed in the twentieth century, the flute was increasingly replaced by the saxophone. Scratch bands performed quelbe at masquerades, dance halls, and “moonlight excursions” at the parade grounds that were planned according to the almanac.¹² Quelbe would also be performed at impromptu gatherings on opalescent beaches or under the indigenous tamarind and baobab trees, the latter of which could live to be hundreds of years old and are often referred to as the “tree of life.” This is the tradition Sonny inherited.

Forming a band required a resourcefulness born out of financial hardship.¹³ If instruments were beyond their means, they fashioned them from whatever they could find: sardine tins, whittled mahogany, or fishing line, which gave a dual purpose to carpentry skills. It is a collaged art form, created out of disparate parts and pieces of the islands just as the musicians created themselves, not unlike the jazz tradition.

In addition to scratch bands, Steadman would have also been familiar with the Crucian tradition of cariso, a subversive West African musical form. It was sung in Virgin Islands Creole by all-female “Cariso Queens” in a code the slavers could not understand, accompanied by one or two goatskin barrel drums in a call-and-response with the singer never quite on the beat, a fugitive voice in rhythmic counterpoint to the drum’s inexorable pulse.¹⁴ Sonny would later adapt these West Indian forms to the jazz tradition—on the saxophone-conga duet “Jungoso” with Candido on his 1962 album What’s New? and in “Duke of Iron,” “Don’t Stop the Carnival,” “Brownskin Girl,” and, of course, “St. Thomas.”

This inheritance was part of a long-standing tradition of using music as a means of social protest. White plantation owners were wary of slaves using music for organized resistance, so laws were passed to prohibit it.¹⁵ Yet in St. Croix, this free music galvanized rebellions nonetheless. In 1848, Moses “Buddhoe” Gottlieb, a twenty-eight-year-old free black who worked as a sugar boiler, led eight thousand slaves in a successful Crucian revolt that began with the ringing of bells and the blowing of conch shells, with cariso melodies and dances performed to the bamboula drum.¹⁶ It happened again at the “Fireburn,” a successful 1878 labor revolt on St. Croix orchestrated by David Hamilton Jackson that fought to end de facto slavery on the island. This was the musical tradition Steadman participated in and that would become Sonny’s cultural heritage.¹⁷

As Sidney Bechet did before him, Sonny may locate his musical lineage through his grandfather and his peripatetic lifestyle, but he inherited his music at least as much from his mother’s side. Valborg Solomon was born on St. Thomas on December 2, 1904, to Miriam Walcott, who gave birth to her before her twentieth birthday.¹⁸ Valborg was a common Danish name, meaning “protector of the battlefield,” a meaning that would be apropos later in life. Sonny’s grandmother Miriam, who stood five-foot-four and projected a sense of inner strength and a canny intelligence, was also born in St. Thomas and worked as a domestic. Valborg’s father and Sonny’s maternal grandfather, Dr. Solomon, lived and worked in Haiti; he did not raise the children.¹⁹

In St. Thomas, Sonny’s mother, Valborg, grew up in a full house. In 1911, she was living at 30 Norre Gade in Charlotte Amalie, the cosmopolitan center of the island, in a large multifamily town house, most likely of the colorful nineteenth-century terraced, painted-brick style, with scenic views of the lush countryside. Valborg lived with her stepfather, Adolph Victoria, a thirty-year-old Episcopalian blacksmith; her twenty-three-year-old mother, Miriam, Sonny’s Lutheran grandmother, who worked as a washer; and Reuben Victoria, Valborg’s two-year-old half brother who would become Sonny’s uncle.²⁰ In the apartment next door lived Miriam’s mother and Sonny’s maternal great-grandmother, Eliza Walcott, who was born free in St. Croix in 1854 or 1855. Like Miriam, she was also Lutheran and, at fifty-six, was still working as a nurse on St. Thomas. Elizabeth Walcott, her daughter and Sonny’s great-aunt, was nine years older than Miriam and took care of her own five children, Sonny’s second cousins, aged two to fifteen.²¹ Sonny’s mother, Valborg, had only an eighth-grade education on St. Thomas, though she would eventually take night classes, and his grandmother Miriam had only a sixth-grade education, but their lack of formal education belied their fierce intelligence.

In 1922, Valborg, then eighteen, met nineteen-year-old naval steward Walter Rollins, who by that time had become “a friendly, polished individual who speaks French, Spanish, Norwegian and Danish,” as he was later described.²² Walter was five-foot-ten, muscular, and dashingly handsome, and he possessed the “dignity of an aristocrat” and “a New England accent.” He was also a hell of a cook. Taking after Steadman’s penchant for travel, Walter had decided to join the navy even sooner than was legally possible. It was common for Crucians to immigrate to the continental United States in search of employment, oftentimes through the military, and Walter enlisted on May 1, 1920.²³ To meet the age requirement, it seems Sonny’s father bent the truth and listed his birth date as May 7, 1902, more than a year earlier than was actually the case. Becoming a steward was “sort of the highest a black could aspire to at that point,” Sonny later explained.²⁴ Eventually, Walter would personally serve high-ranking government and military officials, including Admiral Ernest King in Seattle and President Warren G. Harding, one of the most corrupt conservative presidents in US history. Duke Ellington’s father, James Edward Ellington, also worked as a butler for Harding. Walter was professional to a fault and never let his politics interfere with his work—he would vote for Franklin Delano Roosevelt three times.²⁵

In 1922, when Walter met Valborg, he was stationed on St. Thomas on shore duty at the governor’s mansion. He was a promising naval steward with a glint in his eye; she was a young music student.²⁶ She must have been impressed that Walter worked on Charlotte Amalie at Kathrineberg, the opulent governor’s mansion. In 1923, their romance culminated in marriage, and they planned to come to the United States and settle in New York to raise a family.

The whole family would not arrive in New York immediately. On April 20, 1924, Sonny’s grandmother Miriam traveled to New York for the first time, arriving with thirty dollars to visit a niece, Emelyn Steven, who lived at 49 La Salle Street in Harlem.²⁷ On November 3, 1925, Valborg and Walter welcomed their first child, Valdemar, Sonny’s older brother, who was born on St. Thomas. In 1926, Valborg took a ship to New York with Valdemar, and they lived at 289 West 142nd Street at the corner of 8th Avenue in Harlem. On August 31, 1928, Valborg gave birth to her second child, Sonny’s sister, Gloria, who was also born in St. Thomas. Nearly a year later, with Walter stationed elsewhere, Valborg, Valdemar, and Gloria made yet another journey to New York from the island.²⁸ “She really wanted more for us, and there was, you know, a limit to what she felt that we could achieve in the islands,” Gloria later recalled, “and so she came in a boat across the ocean and there was a tremendous storm.… They were really pounded by waves.”²⁹

As Sonny explained of the decision to leave the islands, “I would imagine that it probably has to do with economics. Although my mother… was a person that always wanted to introduce us to culture.… So she might have been thinking about a better place to give her kids a chance to do whatever we do in this life—to be exposed.”³⁰

On April 18, 1929, they stepped off the ship Domenica,³¹ and they made their way to 2773 8th Avenue between 146th and 147th Streets, a brick building in a predominantly West Indian neighborhood. Though they had moved around a lot, it seemed they were getting ready to put down roots in New York and would soon welcome the first and only member of the family to be born in Harlem.

Sonny would never meet the grandfather who passed down the music, though Steadman Rollins would also immigrate to New York City.³² On May 4, 1923, Steadman, now forty-one, and his eleven-year-old son, Mathias, boarded a boat in St. Thomas heading to New York, where they took the five- or six-day journey to meet Helene, who had immigrated a year earlier and was living in Harlem at 265 West 136th Street, two blocks south of Strivers’ Row.³³ Steadman was listed on the ship manifest as a shipwright, a carpenter who repairs ships. He arrived at Ellis Island, also with thirty dollars in his pocket and after a rigorous interrogation confirmed he was not a convict, a polygamist, an anarchist, or a “person who believes in or advocates the overthrow by force or violence of the Government of the United States.” He was labeled “Likely Public Charge,” meaning he had no work prospects, then detained at Ellis Island for two days for further inspection due to what immigration inspectors deemed an unspecified “physical defect.”³⁴ Steadman had no intention of becoming a US citizen—it seems he understood what it meant to be free and needed no new encumbrances—but he did intend to stay indefinitely. Steadman would never make it to fifty and would never meet his grandson Sonny, who was born seven years after his arrival.³⁵

What’s curious, though, about Steadman’s immigration story is the multiple names he went by. When Steadman Rollins (or, as he was sometimes known, Stedman Rawlins, Stedmann Rollens, or Steadmann Rollings) arrived in New York in 1923, he was listed on his travel documents as Steadman Berkel, his birth name, married to Helena Berkel, with their son, Sonny’s uncle—Mathias Berkel. So Sonny always would have been Sonny, but he was only a name change away from having been Walter Berkel.

Steadman Rollins and Steadman Berkel—two names, depending on the context—may sound unusual. Yet in the tradition of the West Indies, where the self was improvised, Sonny too would be known by many names—some inherited, some earned, and some taken. Though he only ever had one legal name, Walter Theodore Rollins, he would go by many: Walter Theodore, Theodore Walter, Sonny, Newk, Wally, Roundtree, Brung Biji, the Saxophone Colossus. This is the story of how he got each.

³⁵