“It’s a funny thing how life can be a drag one minute and a solid sender the next.” — Louis Armstrong, in “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans”

Louis Armstrong was a man of character. And that’s the most important thing about him. Granted, he was a genius, an impeccable composer of great hits and riveting trumpet solos. But his character was what made his genius work. Let me say from the jump: This is not some isolated, historically obtuse reminisce on a long-forgotten figure.

Always alive, always mortal, always there, because he’s multifaceted, a man to be studied, with much to be taken from his life; it holding complexity and simplicity in a pose of paradox. That maybe the most apt description of genius, which Armstrong personifies, or him. Whichever it is, it occurs to me there’s much for this community’s black teenagers to draw inspiration and purpose from in his early life.

Black History Month has its generic purpose, drawing attention to the lives of singular black figures, thus showcasing and celebrating the cultural contributions of black Americans. The month-long affair maybe archaic, a well-intentioned but still, poignant insult —black history being American history as its oft-said —and history being hard to pigeonhole in the first place. But it’s there, so why not use it. In this case, as a way of showing the enduring lessons a wonderful life, holds?

Before he became a cultural emblem, Armstrong was a poor teenager from the hood in New Orleans, living off red beans and rice, and the rich music of Joe Oliver and Bunk Johnson. His mother, Mayann, was a maid and whore, he moved around plenty, lived in dirty and tough circumstances, with no male example, in the Jim Crow South of the infant 20th century. Essentially, a pretty bleak existence, without the modern conveniences we take for granted, for example, in-door plumbing and electricity.

From a standard sociological viewpoint, he was the poorest of poor, but also suffering from the same sociocultural reality as black male teenagers face now. Like many black teens, he was unfocused, being raised by auto-pilot in a way, fooling and hanging around bad news —all which one day led to the event of his life: His arrest, and detention in a house for the wayward young, the Colored Waif’s Home for Boys, for violating local ordinances by staying beyond curfew and shooting off an 18 caliber gun, which belonged to one of his many “step-dads.” The home gave him what he desperately needed: a sense of order and direction.

Moreover, it gave him the great gift of discovering his genius. Immediately afterward, his life didn’t change much. He went to stay with his real father, Willie, and continued to move around a bit. A few years went by, he was often working two jobs —pushing coal carts, and playing blues for the whores and pimps in the infamous Storyville district honky tonks.

What noticeably changed was a sense of his self, a realization that he was someone, which became vaunting ambition, a burning desire to be like his idols Joe Oliver and Bunk Johnson: a serious jazz musician, playing at the best clubs. Eventually, he would. In addition, he would get a chance to play for Fate Marable’s band on a steamer, one of the best gigs for black musicians to get, as it gave a talented musician a chance to play in front of a sophisticated and rich white audience for a good amount of bread.

A character-defining incident (as a critic notes) would happen as Armstrong came back into town, following his several weeks on ship, at one of the night clubs. He was at the bar, ready to pay for his drink. Up came Black Benny, a neighborhood tough, carrying on in his usual way. He sees Armstrong with cash in his hand, and he tries to strong-arm Armstrong out of his money. To have Armstrong tell it, ” If he had not strong armed that money out of me, I would have given him lots more. I had been thinking about on the train coming home from St. Louis. I sort of felt like he should have treated me like a man, and I did not like the way he cut under me. But I did not want to jump him up about it.” This is the moment where his character shines. Instead of turning this into violence, he smiles and turns the other cheek, making a fair appraisal of Benny, and making a clear distinction between Benny and himself.

In a young life freighted with incident, distractions, fights, discrimination, poverty, Armstrong would take the side of hard work, persistence, pluck, developing a Booker T. Washingtonian view of things. And his life shows how gloriously it can pay off. He polished his talent, achieved his dream of playing with his mentor Joe Oliver up North (“I had hit the big time. I was up North with the greats. My boyhood dream had come true at last…”), international and everlasting fame. Nothing stood in the way. All he had, ironically, was the notions of right and wrong, good sense and consideration, “character” his mother gave him, as he said to her in a good natured reply, “With my good sense and mother’s wit, and knowing how to treat and respect the feelings of other people, that’s all I needed through life.”

The Leon County School system could do worse than making “Satchmo: My Life in New Orleans”, a slightly PG-13 book, but a wonderfully self-written classic, an annual Black History Month reading selection for students. The fight for the minds and hearts of black teenagers has in its arsenal the life story of Louis Armstrong.

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Chris Timmons shares his insights and conservative sensibilities in a featured blog for The Village Square. (Photo credit: Mait Jüriado)