WHAT IS
HALF-BLOOD BLUES
ABOUT?
PLOT
SUMMARY: Half-Blood Blues is
about a group of jazz musicians, the Hot-Time Swingers, trying to
survive in Europe just before and in the early months of the Second
World War. The timeline jumps around in six chapters--Paris 1940,
Berlin 1992 (which opens in Baltimore), Berlin 1939, Berlin 1992,
Paris 1939, and Poland1992. In pre-war Berlin the musicians are
persecuted by laws against their degenerate music and laws denying
rights of citizenship and travel papers based on their place of
birth, parental nationality, and race. Two of the musicians, Chip
Jones, the drummer, and Sid Griffiths, the bassist narrator, are
African-American friends from Baltimore, USA. The pianist, Paul
Butterstein, is Jewish and epileptic. Ernst "the Mouth" von
Haselberg on clarinet is a German rebelling against a Nazi father.
Fritz Bayer, alto sax, chooses to stay in Germany. Hieronymus Thomas
Falk, trumpet player, is the son of a Black occupying soldier and a
German mother. As a half-blood German-speaker, he has no papers.
Although German-born, he is denied citizenship. Ernst's father
arranges for forged papers, exit visas for all three including Hiero
to pass as American (as long as he doesn't speak).
Delilah
Brown, a Canadian American singer with two passports, comes to Berlin
to ask the musicians to come to Paris and play for/with Louis
Armstrong. They arrive a few months before Paris falls to the Nazis.
Delilah arranges for visas to allow Sid and Chip to leave with her
for the States but there are no papers for Hiero. As they wait for
his travel papers, they decide to cut their own blues record which
Sid saves and smuggles out of the studio before Hiero is really
satisfied with the take. Their "Half-Blood Blues" is a jazz
interpretation of the second official German national anthem, the
Nazi Horst Wessel song. They had taken the enemy's signature piece
and made it their own. Hiero, who has been ill, insists on going out
for milk. Sid agrees to accompany him. While Sid is in the washroom,
the Boots arrive. Hiero has no papers. He is arrested. Sid can only
stand and watch. Hiero spent the rest of the war in a concentration
camp and they heard he died shortly after being liberated. However,
just before Chip and Sid are set to fly over to Berlin in1992, for
the premiere of the documentary about their group, Chip reveals to
Sid that Hiero is alive and living in Poland.
Fifty
years after the war, in Kurt Caspar's1992 documentary about the
group, Chip betrays Sid by accusing him of being responsible for
Hiero's arrest. A crime, he calls it, caused by personal and
professional jealousy. Denying Hiero the way Peter denied Christ. Sid
continues to tell details of their last days in Paris, revealing
that, in order for the group to complete the recording, he had hidden
Hiero's visa and papers which would have allowed Hiero to escape to
Switzerland.
After
the premiere of the film, Chip convinces Sid to come with him. They
take a bus to Poland to visit Hiero. Sid confesses the truth to Hiero
who is shocked but comes around. He has matured. He does not blame
anyone. Chip also absolves Sid, telling him "We all done things
we ain't proud of, especially back then." "What you done
was inexcusable, Sid. Absolutely wrong" but at the same time his
old friend recognizes that "you'd have given you whole life to
spare him if you could." The novel is about moral complexity and
ambiguity, and the individual's need to come to terms with himself.
