The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  Night began to fall. Spanish moss, welcomed in daylight for its shade, fell now in a dark and minatory shroud and I felt a tightness in my chest.

  “Cilla?”

  His voice floated from behind a massive water oak.

  “Where you been?!”

  “I’m sorry. Really. I should of tole’ you to wait for dark.”

  He reached out to take my arm and I pulled away.

  “You been out here since school?”

  “Just about.”

  “Let me make it up to you. Here. I brought you somethin’.”

  I eyed him with new suspicion. “Whatchu brought me?”

  He reached inside his shirt and pulled out what I took to be a sheet from our local paper, The Clarion .

  “I get all the news I need at Mr. Raymond’s.”

  “Don’t judge no gift by its cover.”

  He unfolded the paper. What I expected to see was some kind of print arranged in columns to frame the usually indecipherable black and whites photos purporting to represent a board meeting or ball game or bigmouth bass.

  “Go on, take it.”

  I lifted the folder from its cloaking paper. Opened it.

  “My good Lord!!”

  Right there in my hands was the folder filled with sheet music that I had stolen from James M. Pellicore’s disheveled office. The torn sheets inside were scotch-taped to a decent repair, their riven staffs carefully realigned to perfect measure. I had been restored to Mozart, to Ellington and God knew who-all else!

  “Where in the world—?!”

  “I took ’em,” he replied simply. “After that business at recess, me and Chicken was waitin’ in the office for Miss Hattie to come paddle us, which she did. A paddle, not a switch. Anyway, I seen the music I know you must of took just sittin’ there on the bitch’s desk. Just out there in the open.

  “Soon’s she’s done with me ole’ Briar Patch turns her attention to Chickenswamp and while they’s both occupied…” His teeth glowed like pearls. “I swiped it. Pulled it right out the trashcan. Right by her desk!”

  “You are crazy,” I responded in unqualified admiration.

  “Fool, for sure,” he allowed. “Now come on. I got a place I want you to see.”

  I don’t think he actually took my hand. I just recall us striding across the tracks into Laureate, just like we owned the town with no fear, no doubt, no worry.

  “Joe Billy, do you know where we at?”

  “Sure I do.”

  Laureate’s dozen stores stretched in bricked facades on either side of Main Street, a single avenue of commerce. There were no apartments, here. No houses. I could see the SafeWay, the offices for the Clarion . There was a moviehouse had shut down for lack of business. A gaudy marquis still wilted in a fractured window, “The Blob”. I had not seen that picture.

  Churches, always “First” something or other, First Methodist, First Baptist—extended uniformly white spires to bracket the town’s one traffic light on each point of the compass. The courthouse occupied the center of town, of course. Its bronze-handed clock was in constant repair. There was a good bit of traffic which made me nervous, families coming to town for groceries. Teenagers cruised up and down their drag in hotrods and sedans that cost more than any house in our part of town. I thought I saw a passing jalopy slow down, a tow-headed passenger glancing back.

  “We’ll be all right.” Joe Billy spoke to my yet unvoiced fear.

  Black people just did not go for walks in Laureate. You were downtown, you’d better have a reason. You’d better be getting groceries, or kerosene, or of course you could be running errands for any white man. But just to go for a stroll? Einen spaziergang ? We didn’t do that.

  In small towns most everybody gets recognized by his car or truck. I saw Mr. Thistle’s vehicle—a decal for his nursery made that Chevy truck distinctive. I saw the Lands’ Cadillac, the Henderson’s bright green Fairlane. They didn’t seem to notice me, not that I could tell. Then I saw Collard Jackson’s cruiser, far ahead, pulled up to the town’s only lighted intersection.

  “I see him.”

  My heart was racing as if I’d run a mile. But nobody stopped us. Nobody said anything. We traveled nearly the length of the town, almost to its solitary traffic light, without a single catcall or challenge. I found myself actually beginning to relax when up ahead I saw Cody Hewitt’s bright-red pickup run the light.

  “Shit my eyes.”

  Joe Billy pulled up short as though jerked on a leash.

  “What’s wrong? Joe Billy?”

  “You know that truck?”

  “Me an’ everybody else,” I replied. “Belongs to Cody Hewitt. That’s the boy caught me in the band hall. You know Cody?”

  “I don’t know nobody,” he jerked me hard into the alley.

  “Joe Billy—?”

  A flash of red dragging down Main Street.

  Hubcaps spinning like one of those chariots in Ben Hur .

  “It’s all right,” Joe Billy pulled me down the alley between the Western Auto and the drugstore. “Come on. I’ll show you my place.”

  Mr. Raymond often recalled that during World War ii the fate of men and boys got decided with slips of paper and a shoebox in the Masonic Lodge over Doc West’s drugstore. Doc West’s surviving son moved the old two-storey pharmacy so that he could build his own store on Main Street. It was still an old-fashioned drugstore with cheap sunglasses and a comic book section and a counter for ice-cream or sodas or burgers. Of course in 1963 you couldn’t get any of those things, not even a glass of water, unless you were white.

  Joe Billy and I emerged from the alley at the rear of the modern pharmacy to find the ruins of the original nestled in a grove of wild dogwood out back.

  “Where we goin’?”

  “Upstairs.”

  “I ain’t goin’ up there. They was Masons up there.”

  “Don’t be country.”

  You entered Joe Billy’s lodge by an exterior and rail-less stairway. A padlocked door offered security; Joe Billy urged me through, his palm in the small of my back.

  It felt good there, that pressure in the curve of my spine.

  “Downstairs is nasty. But here? Well. See fuh yourself.”

  The door closed and I could not see a thing. I mean not a thing . That room was darker than the inside of a cow.

  “Joe Billy—!”

  “Hold your britches,” he said and I heard the snick of a switch, that distinctive snap of plastic and metal, and then—

  “Lord!”

  I visored my eyes with my hands against the glare of a lamp big as a headlight. Once accustomed to that singular torch I was able to survey a room as sparely appointed as a monk’s cell. He had one small table and a straight back chair. A hotplate propped nearby on a milk can. There was a sink. A shelf above supported a jelly-jar glass. Welch’s, it was. Grape. A single coffee cup drained upside-down alongside a wind-up alarm clock. Tick-tock, tick-tock. The only other possessions lay side-by-side in their cases on a pinewood floor.

  “Those your guitars?”

  “One of ’em,” he said. “Other one I got to get back to Tallahassee.”

  A crate, hotplate and crockery, two cased guitars.

  “Whass wrong? You don’ like my apartment?”

  “Joe Billy—”

  There was vital information that needed to be conveyed here, but I could not find the words to do it.

  “What is it?” he asked defiantly.

  “Joe Billy, you cain’t live here.”

  “Why not?”

  “’Cause this ain’ Colored Town.”

  “Sure as hell ain’t. And it’s mine. Thirty dollah a month. You can ask Doc West.”

  Was it possible there were arrangements for domiciles that I had not considered?

  “They’s a bathroom in that closet, right over there. Inside plumbing. And you know what? I got running water.”

  “Water? Anytime you want?”

  “Any old time.”


  “Lord have mercy—!” To be alone? In your own room? All by yourself with light and water! No rat snakes or outhouse! “Joe Billy…how’d you do this?!”

  “I am one amazing nigger, no doubt.”

  “But where you gonna get thirty dollars every month?”

  “I got my business.”

  “You keep tellin’ me.”

  “And now you get to see.”

  I saw a burst of bright, bold colors the moment he opened the guitar’s case. At first I did not see a particular form in the pattern of line and color on the body of the guitar, but then—

  “It’s a woman!”

  “You like her?”

  The mouth dominated. The sound hole of the guitar was framed by lips as lush as Marilyn Monroe’s and layered like flowers or labia in a psychedelic lavender. Only the barest suggestion of a nose or chin; you were drawn to the lips. Then I realized that the apparently random tendrils streaming over the woman’s face were hair, wild blonde locks whipped by some unseen wind past those outrageously exaggerated lips and mouth.

  “Can I hold it?”

  “Go ahead.”

  I cradled the instrument as gently as a baby.

  “How come the strings doubled up?”

  “It’s a twelve-string guitar. You can get richer harmonies with more strings. I cain’t. But good players can.”

  He pulled over the second guitar case and pulled out a six-string Gibson. I saw the raven-haired harlot painted along its length.

  “This here insterment was my daddy’s. Mine, now.”

  He ran through a short progression of chords, pausing now and then to pick on a single string, up and down the neck, adjusting the tuning pegs according to a fair ear.

  “Look like you know what you’re doing.”

  “Some. Know this one? ‘Summer time…’”

  He picked those steel strings and the whole room filled up with sound. A rich, full tone. I would not at the time have known what tone color meant, or timbre, but I bet if you’d had a dozen six-strings playing the same song I could have picked out Joe Billy’s blindfolded.

  “…And the livin’ is easy/Fish are jumpin’/And the cotton is high…”

  “You wouldn’t make our choir,” I chuckled, and he smiled, pleased as pie.

  We just had ourselves a good time. Joe Billy loved playing blues, but he listened just as much to jazz and swing. He loved B.B. King. Loved Satchmo’s early horn. Loved singers of all styles, Jimmy Rushing, Eddie Jefferson, even Sinatra. Liked the ladies, too. It was Joe Billy who introduced me to Billie Holiday and Lee Wiley and Carmen McRae.

  After a while he settled his guitar.

  “If I had me some music written for the piano, could you play it? I mean, without hearing it first?”

  “I’d have to work at it. Mama’s the player, really. Not me.”

  He regarded me a moment.

  “But you can read music?”

  “Well, surely.”

  “Who taught you?

  “I don’ know, I’d just kind of sit by mama while she play and look at the score. It just made sense.”

  “So you taught yourself?”

  “Sometimes I’d get help. Revival one time this lady helped me.”

  “Point is—you can look at those beats and notes and measures and hear them in your head?”

  “Anybody can,” I waved him off.

  “I can’t,” he said.

  “You?” I did not believe him.

  “I cain’t read off no sheet,” he shook his head. “I look at those black dots—I don’ hear a thing. And here you sight-read?”

  “Not well.”

  “But you read it, you know how it sounds?”

  “Most of the time,” I allowed.

  “Here, then,” he tossed the folder of music into my lap. “Find something. Make some music.”

  “I got no instrument.”

  “You got a voice box.”

  “There no words on this kind of music, Joe Billy.”

  “I know that. Make the sounds.”

  “Let me look.”

  The music familiar to me from Colored Town, the hymnals in our church, big band, swing, blues, even the jazz to which I had been exposed were outhouses compared to the cathedrals raised here. Haydn, Wagner, Tchaikovsky, Mozart— these were a different species of construction altogether, buttresses of sound and harmony, bridges of variegated instrumentation, sheet after sheet.

  I saw a piece of Chopin I might have tried if I had a piano and just half of eternity to practice. But then I spotted something in that folder so ordinary as to seem entirely out of place. A simple piece.

  “Whoa, mister,” I sat up. “Here’s one I can do.”

  “Whose is it?” Joe Billy leaned forward to see.

  “I cain’t say the name.”

  “Ludwig…” Joe Billy attempted. “Beat-Oven.”

  “‘Ode to Joy’,” I read the title supplied, confident that I could render its mute notation into sound, if not proper English.

  A work of genius, Dr. Weintraub would later tell me, almost always consists in taking something very complex and making it simple. Well, you couldn’t get much simpler than the music before me that evening in Joe Billy’s apartment. There were no sharps or flats to begin with; you didn’t even need the black keys. Key of C-Major, simple as pie. I scanned the staffed lines. Thirty-two measures, one slur after another, four-four time. This had to be the most elemental piece in my pilfered anthology.

  “You know how to sing a scale?” I asked. “Like from choir?”

  “You mean, ‘Do Re Mi Fa So La Ti Do’?”

  “That’s it,” I nodded and sat tall. “So here we go. ‘Ode to Joy’.”

  Beginning on the note of “E”, mezzo forte . “Mi-Mi-Fa-So/

  So-Fa-Mi-Re/

  Do-Do-Re-Mi/

  Miii-ReRe/

  “Mi-Mi-Fa-So/

  So-Fa-Mi-Re/

  Do-Do-Re-Mi/

  Reee-DoDo…”

  Moving then to two hands and mezzo piano. But since I could only sing one note at a time, I held with the melody.

  “Re-Re-Mi-Do/

  Re-Fa-Mi-Do/

  Re-Fa-Mi-Re/

  Do-Re-Sooo/

  “Mi-Mi-Fa-So/

  So-Fa-Mi-Re/

  Do-Do-Re-Mi/

  Reee-DoDo/”

  I was completely unaware that Beethoven never wrote a part for the piano in his Ninth Symphony. I had never heard the Ninth, after all, or any other symphony. I would later learn that the excerpt I rehearsed for Joe Billy was taken from a beginner’s lesson book. It was only a thread of the Master’s cloth extricated to lead some neophyte to the warp and woof of a much larger and grandiose pattern. Only a sample, a sip.

  Something to prime the pump.

  But it was enough. An ode to joy came alive in my voice and in my heart, and once it began I could not stop nor rest until it was finished. And when it was finally complete, when I finished my pure sung paean, the sheet music trembled as if alive in my hands. Joe Billy just sat there, his eyes wide and bright. The clock at his hotplate ticking like a metronome.

  Tick-tock, tick-tock.

  Joe Billy cleared his throat.

  “Guess I better get you home.”

  The rail-less stairway returned our trembling weight to earth. From there we jogged along back streets in a zigzag toward Colored Town. There were dogs along that route with which to contend, but a hound’s pursuit was preferable to what threatened on Main Street. Finally we reached Mr. Land’s fenced-in yard and the bed of silver tracks that raised behind. We skirted that wired periphery, scrambled up the railroad’s graveled bed, and only then relaxed, walking parallel lines of steel in perfect equanimity.