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I give many prayers on behalf of my own kids, and here’s one of them.

As my children grow into adulthood, I ask God’s help that they would become resilient, anti-fragile young men and women.

“Anti-fragile” is admittedly a tricky concept. On one hand, I don’t wish that my kids be anti-fragile in the sense that they’re uncaring, unsympathetic to pain and suffering, and disconnected from their own hurts and anxieties. But then again, like the old Little Walter song goes, it’s a mean old world, and that cruelty will come their way is, unfortunately, a matter of if, not when. When they're cruelly treated, I hope that they won’t become undone.

Notice, too, the converse. Rather than being anti-fragile, it’s far easier for me when I feel attacked to fall either into the ditch of arrogant detachment or instead into a moat of shattered paralysis. (Hello Scylla and Charybdis, my old friends; I’ve come to talk with you again.)

I suppose the psychological term that captures what I’m going for with anti-fragile is healthy or proper “differentiation.” But how do we get there?

I would submit to the jury as a buffer against both detachment and paralysis: Louis Armstrong, the old New Orleans singer and trumpet player. Louis Armstrong is one of my all time favorite musicians, and I’m a handful of biographies deep into his story, which encapsulates so much of the history of the 20th century itself.

Even though from our vantage point, Louis will be widely considered as one of the foundational titans–––if not the keystone–––of all jazz music, I’ve been shocked to read of how consistently he was criticized throughout his career. Some cardinal examples:
––– Louis didn’t invent jazz per se, but his Hot Fives and Hot Sevens recordings from the 1920’s represent the full flourishing of jazz’s first and classic period. Those sides feel as fresh and thrilling now as the day they were lacquered, and they were radically innovative for their time. However, as jazz evolved from New Orleans to Kansas City, Chicago to New York, and as it shifted from Armstrong’s signature style (call it “trad jazz,” probably, as opposed to “Dixieland”) to swing and then to bebop, just plain bop, and modal, Louis never changed. He was savaged by the jazz press for it. In Louis’ defense, though, he always considered himself first and foremost an entertainer, and even through all of the advances in jazz idioms, he remained one of the best-selling and highest-grossing jazz artists in the world. Why deviate from course if an adoring public can never get enough? And besides, until the very end of his career, Louis sustained an astonishingly high level of musicianship.
––– This is a problematic phrase now, but in the idiom of the mid 20th century, Louis was accused of “Uncle Tom-ing” onstage. Critics would point out that in his shows Louis was incorrigibly corny and would mug around stage in a manner not un-reminiscient of Vaudeville and blackface acts from earlier eras. (Whether ultimately a satisfying rejoinder or not, the trumpeter would answer that he performed exactly the way he wanted to perform, and as a child in the Storyville barrelhouses of New Orleans, those were the shows he loved the most.)
––– His engagement of racial issues was a classic “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” proposition. Between the Vaudeville-esque stage schtick and the fact that over time his audiences became more white, Armstrong was continually barraged by the Black press for selling out. From the other direction, though, Louis was occasionally outspoken against President Eisenhower’s handling of racism (including during the Little Rock crisis), and the mainstream media branded him as an unpatriotic traitor to his country. (Remember that the Cold War was running hot during that period.) What’s more, Louis boycotted playing concerts in his hometown New Orleans for much of the 1960’s because he refused to abide by the local municipal edict which stated that people of different races were prohibited from performing together. (Armstrong’s band was an integrated one.) For this, New Orleanians of all colors heaped opprobrium on him for “turning his back on his own” and “forgetting where he came from.”

The poor guy couldn’t win. But one of my questions about Armstrong that’s stayed with me for years is to wonder how, in the face of consistent and trenchant criticism, Louis more than any other musician I’ve ever heard played music and sang with unfettered joy. Look at any number of pictures of him, and you’ll see lips (“chops”) ravaged by decades of blowing trumpet that nevertheless frame a smile as bright and wide as the sun. That’s Satchmo. To hear Armstrong hit a high note at the end of a song, chuckle on tape after the rendering of a sweet line, and glide through solos that younger trumpeters to this day struggle to match, it’s the sound of life itself. The marrow.

Louis Armstrong was anti-fragile.

Last night I was working through Ricky Riccardi’s What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years, and I think I may have come upon a skeleton key that unlocked my perception of Armstrong's resilience. During a 1960 recording session with the Dukes of Dixieland, Louis laid down a take of the old gospel chestnut, “Just a Closer Walk with Thee,” that by multiple eyewitness accounts left everyone else in the studio dissolved in tears. One of the musicians asked Armstrong how he could conjure such feeling in lieu of having an audience present, and this is how Pops replied:
“Well, I always play for somebody I love. That’s all. You play for somebody you love all the time. I always play for God because He gives me talent. They all want to listen, that’s cool. And if they don’t want to listen, it’s still cool, because I was going to play for Him anyway.”

This wasn’t an athlete praising God in a postgame interview after a big win, although I don’t have a huge problem with that. Still, what Armstrong said privately to this other session man strikes me as the un-affected, genuine article. He transparently observed, in essence, “People will keep criticizing me, but I don’t blow my horn for them. I do it for God, and he loves me.”

I could be wrong, but I don’t think any of my kids will ever become huge pop stars. (Although ya never know.) But I would deeply hope that as they face harsh words while they grow, they would find the place of deep resilience in Jesus that Louis did. That’s anti-fragile.

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