No conversation, at first. The moon was well up. The air was fecund with the day’s stolen nectars. Joe Billy strolled along, deep in some unspoken rumination.
“Cilla,” he finally broke the silence, “you need to be on a piano playing. You need to be practicin’. All the time.”
“Tell you what,” I replied, “I’ll just pull out my upright from behind our outhouse an’ get started.”
“They’s a piano at the church.”
“Play anything but gospel on Reverend Dipps’ piano, I’ll be gettin’ me another whipping.”
“We was in Tallahassee, I could put you behind a piano anytime you wanted,” he declared.
“But we ain’t in Tallahassee,” I said wearily. “And while we’re at it, you didn’t say you was from Tallahassee, neither. In school? You said you was from Valdosta. Why you need to lie about that?”
“Didn’t kill nobody, if that’s what you’re worried about.”
“Not ’till you mentioned it.”
“ You lied ’bout your daddy.”
I felt blood rising in my cheeks.
“You tole’ me your daddy was in the war,” he pressed on doggedly. “Lester say nobody even know who you daddy is.”
“Mama had me. That’s all the information I need.”
“Your mama, she kind of simple?”
“I don’t know. Most times I don’ think she knows.”
Gravel showed white through the creosoted picket of crossties. I tried to measure my step exactly to the ties. Joe Billy was hitting mostly gravel; you could hear his lace-ups—crunch-crunch, crunch-crunch.
“Grandma tole me when Mama got pregnant ever’body got theirself concerned ’cause they din’ know how mama could even survive havin’ a baby, much less take care of it once it was born. Soooo…they took Mama over to Dowling Park, to this midwife there. She nursed her and took care of her. Grandma stayed away, mostly, what I gather.
“But soon as I was out and preacher knew me and Mama was awright, he ’tole Grandmama it was time to come get us, and she did. She drove out with Mr. Raymond in his truck and brought us back to the house. We been there, the three of us, ever since. I don’ know who my daddy is.”
We crunched along together beneath a swelling moon.
“How old are you, Cilla?”
“Seventeen.” I did not meet his eye. “Be eighteen come Halloween.”
“I was born the week after,” he offered.
“Scary notion,” I said and we both snorted laughter.
“Maybe your birthday I get you a piano,” he proposed. “Maybe I buy you a baby grand.”
“Baby grand, yeah,” I smiled. “Now that would punch the ticket.”
Chapter six
“The Negroes’ Blueprint for Civil War,” by Dr. George S. Benson
—The Clarion
O f course I knew I would be getting no piano, of any kind. There was only one piano in Colored Town, a battered Chickering regarded by Reverend Dipps as his private property. Occasionally I would slip into the church after school, risking eternal torment for twenty minutes of Duke Ellington or Scott Joplin. After my whipping I was banned from so much as touching the Reverend’s piano for any purpose except to key the meager measures necessary for the stimulation of my mother’s flawless and Gospel performance. As at Mr. Raymond’s, my place at church was to prime the pump, and it was driving me crazy.
“I got to have me a piano.”
Joe Billy gnawed a toothpick.
“Gonna hafta take you someplace, then. Or rob the church.”
We had become an item, Joe Billy and I. All it took was a public rendezvous. I was to meet Joe Billy at Mr. Raymond’s directly after Sunday service. Come the appointed hour, I dashed in my church things straight from benediction to that familiar front porch where Joe Billy waited with my Radio Flyer wagon, my dog and water buckets.
“Thought we’d fill that barrel up,” he smiled as I arrived.
There were a few snickers among the women.
“Cilla got herself a boyfren.”
“YA’LL GOT A PROBLEM WITH THAT?”
Joe Billy’s challenge rang like a first sergeant’s over a parade field and the women fell silent. Lester had been drinking. Usually the old coot tried to hide it, but on this afternoon you could see the brown-wrapped bottle sticking up between his overalled legs like an erection.
“Got you somethin’t to squeeze, nephew?”
Taking up where the women left off. Joe Billy stopped, turned. Then he raised his hand and extended his finger like a pistol toward the old man.
“I ain’t on your back porch no more, Uncle. And this here girl is now and hereafter out from under your inspection.”
“You cain’t talk to me like that!” Lester’s eyes bulged in their dark sockets.
“’Pears to me he just did,” Mr. Raymond’s reply was sharp enough to cut another crease in his always-creased khakis.
Lester went mute and everybody around that porch knew that whatever gossip people wanted to make about Joe Billy and me would not take place around Mr. Raymond’s porch. Joe Billy set himself up then and there as my advocate, my champion. I was convinced he was my only defender, my only friend.
It took me a long time to recognize there were others.
Two weeks after my public lashing I was still cleaning the privy behind Kerbo School. Miss Hattie had assigned latrine duty as an ongoing humiliation and mandated that the duty be performed at the end of the day. This normally would have created a problem for me, or at least a serious inconvenience, since my habit was to haul water as soon after school as I could. But Joe Billy’s fifty-gallon reservoir relieved the necessity for daily trips to Mr. Raymond’s pump, thank God, so Miss Hattie’s punishment was not as onerous as I’m sure she intended.
Not that cleaning a shithouse can ever be an easy chore. First thing, was to knock down the spider webs and chase out whatever arachnids or scorpions had taken up residence. No snakes, praise the Lord. I never saw a snake at Kerbo, but there was always a stench. Sometimes the little ones made it worse when they made a mess of their business and I’d have to mop up. Except I didn’t have a mop; newspaper served that utility, along with its other purpose. I used plain old ammonia for cleanser, scrubbing every square inch of that outhouse to ensure scalded lungs if not sanitation. I was finished with the hard part that Wednesday and was tearing more paper when Miss Chandler came waddling up.
“You about finished here, Miss Cilla?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“See me before you go.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said and immediately became anxious. What else had I done? Whom had I newly shamed?
Miss Chandler, I believe I have mentioned, was as big as she was ugly. She couldn’t begin to accommodate her wide buttocks on the small chairs intended for our narrow behinds and the school certainly could not afford specialized furniture so Miss Chandler brought to school a chair of her own: a wide, wing-backed antique. She told us that this well-crafted accommodation was a Chippendale, which we understood as ‘Chip and Dale’, the animated rodents familiar to us from the picture-show, so we renamed Miss Chandler’s only concession to comfort The Chipmunk Chair and for weeks snickered just about every time she sat in it.
Miss Chandler was deposited now in the Chipmunk Chair, but I was not snickering.
“Yes, ma’am?”
She looked up from a pile of conjugations.
“Cilla, come in. Sit.”
I stood looking at the floor.
“I didn’t bring you here to punish you, Cilla. Take a seat.”
She waited for me to settle into a hard-backed chair.
“I want to talk about your future, Cilla.”
“Future, ma’am?”
“What happens tomorrow, Cilla. And the day after that.”
“I be done with the restrooms by the end of the week,” I offered.
“I’m not talking about punishment, Cilla. I’m talking about accomplishment. I want you t
o think about what you can accomplish after you leave Kerbo School.”
“I got another year before I think about that. Don’t I?”
The flesh on her jowls sagged like a basset hound’s. “No, Cilla. This fall we’ll be in the consolidated school in Laureate.”
My heart hammered. “I cain’t go to no white school, Miss Chandler!”
“Yes, you can.”
“I’m not ready.”
“Cilla, you’re more than ready. You’re a lot smarter than you think you are. And you have gifts you underestimate.”
“Kind of gifts?”
“You read music, don’t you?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I confirmed, unsure how that could be construed as a gift.
“And the piano. You enjoy playing?”
“But I need practice. Joe Billy say I could be really good if I can practice.”
“Joe Billy, yes. He’s a musician of sorts himself, what I understand. The guitar?”
“He play good ,” I spoke up.
“Plays ‘well’. So you think highly of Joe Billy?”
“Yes, ma’am,” I looked at my lap.
“He speaks well of you, too.”
My head came straight up.
“Joe Billy talk to you about me ?”
“He stayed after school to tell me that you read music, that you taught yourself to read, and that you needed a piano and instructor. He pretty well laid it out, just like that.”
“Don’t be mad with him, Miss Chandler.”
“I’m not mad with Joe Billy at all, Cilla. I admire anyone who takes time to help a friend, especially when that particular friend isn’t exactly Miss Popular. And believe me, Cilla, I know something about what it means not to be popular.”
That was the first time, I think, that I ever looked a teacher in the eye. And when I looked Miss Chandler in the eye, funny thing, I wasn’t thinking anything about ugly at all.
“Can you teach me to play the piano, Miss Chandler?”
“No. But I know someone who can.”
“Who?”
“Mr. James M. Pellicore. You know Mr. Pellicore?
“He’s the band director. I took his music.”
“He is. You did. That is correct.”
“What’s he want teaching me?”
“First and foremost, Mr. Pellicore is a teacher. He teaches children black, white, green—doesn’t matter. I’m not saying he’s perfect, and I’m not saying you should ever plan to profit by theft, but Mr. Pellicore was intrigued that of all the pieces in his office you could have taken, you took a folder of classical music.”
“It’s the kind of music angels make,” I said. “That’s what Joe Billy say.”
“What Joe Billy ‘says’. I see. Well. At any rate Mr. Pellicore will be your teacher in the fall. We’ll start right away, though. And all through the summer.”
“All summer? On the piano?”
“Yes. You’ll use the piano in the Band Hall.”
“In the white school?”
“It’s not a school for whites, Cilla. It’s for everybody.”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“Now, there is one requirement in all this that you have to understand.”
She meant payment of some kind. I knew this wasn’t going to come free and clear.
“Yes, ma’am.” I was more wary in this reply.
“Mr. Pellicore needs a horn in his band, a French horn. His lead horn graduates in a few weeks. The only other French horn behind him has quit band altogether. Mr. Pellicore won’t have his Saints marching anywhere without a French horn.”
“I never played any kind of horn.”
“You can learn. Anyone who teaches herself to read music can master a horn. So you’ll pay Mr. Pellicore back for piano and music lessons by learning the French horn for the high school band.”
The band! That choreographed display of brass and wind and percussion. The uniforms, red and white and shiny. But then I realized that if I were on that lime-lined field I would have to march. I’d be exposed, the only black girl on the field, and a thief, caught in a crosshair of chalk.
“I don’t know, Miss Chandler.”
She leaned forward, that large woman, the flanges on her Chip and Dale spreading like the wings of angels.
“Listen to me, child. You are as good and as smart as any white child on the other side of these railroad tracks. You are gifted in music, probably also in mathematics. What you don’t have, on this side of the railroad line, is an opportunity to use those talents.
“There aren’t that many opportunities get presented to black people anytime or anyplace, but especially here , and especially to black women. So you have got to learn to take every single hand that reaches out to you, Cilla Handsom, black or white. And once you’ve got that hand you have got to find a way to pull yourself out of here. Pull yourself out and go on to something better.”
A whole host of improbable scenarios jumbled for priority in my head. Me at a piano? In a white school? With a band and a horn?!
All those saints marching in.
I cleared my throat.
“Would you help me write Mr. Pellicore a letter, Miss Chandler? I want to tell him ‘yes’ and thank him and I want to make sure it’s got good grammar.”
I have never seen a face of any kind light up with such joy as did my teacher’s in that moment.
“A letter, yes. That is a classy thing to do, Miss Cilla. That is the way to take an opportunity.”
When I got home I found a grocery bag waiting on my cot, an ordinary brown paper bag.
“Miz Chandler came by,” was grandmother’s only explanation. “Lord, that woman homely.”
I approached that bag the way most children sneak up on presents beneath a Yuletide tree. I opened it. Looked inside. First thing I saw was six bars of Ivory soap. Right below those scented bars were four rolls of toilet paper. The rest of the bag was boxed with Kotex, enough napkins on my regular period to last the year.
“What kinda teacher brings a mess like that?” Grandma scowled.
“She got me piano lessons, too,” I reported with pride. “With Mr. Pellicore. At the school in Laureate.”
“Ain’ no school in Laureate—you mean the white school?”
“Miss Chandler say, says, it’s everybody’s school.”
Grandmother spit between the floorboards of my room.
“Be careful, girl. Talk like that gone get us in trouble.”
Trouble lingered continually, never far from Colored Town. For as long as anybody could remember, the Ku Klux Klan had conducted meetings right on the county line at Taylor’s tavern. That hoochhouse of timbers and tin had been the scene of more than one atrocity seeded by race-hate. There had been crosses burned at Taylor’s since the twenties, those midnight celebrations duplicated through modern times and spreading to Dixie County and Suwannee County. Even so, by the early sixties the KKK was a diminished organization. It wasn’t that an enlightened citizenry disapproved of the Klan’s outrages, so much as they did not want to be actively associated with its membership. A certain odor attached.
Even bigots have a sense of class. Or think they do. So white folks wanting to identify with the goals of the Grand Lizard but chary of acquiring the aroma associated with that membership simply formed another organization. ‘The Council’ was a euphemism for ‘The White Citizen’s Council’, a clan whose nosegayed members enjoyed about the same status in the community as members of the Elks or Lions or Rotary Club. Organizations not transparently associated with reptiles or rednecks.
Or tar-covered crosses.
The Council met respectably across the street from Laureate’s only bank, in Betty’s Café, the only eatery in town. You could get grits and eggs and bacon at Betty’s. Coffee and cane syrup. An enormous plate-glass window in the main dining area gave an unobstructed view of the bank and Highway 27, but a side room thoughtfully bricked into the original clapboard structure also provided a private retreat, segregated,
appropriately, from the café’s other diners.
On a good night, “The Council” could count on perhaps a dozen of its exclusively white members to attend its business. However, in the wake of State of Florida v. Lafayette County School Board so many people piled into her café that Betty had to move the Council’s meeting from its private room to the main dining area. I was in the kitchen that evening, being rewarded with a drumstick and iced tea for skinning mullet on Betty’s back porch, the porch where colored people were served. The kitchen looked out to the dining area through a large service bay, a good vantage from which to observe the Council’s goings-on.
The King of Colored Town Page 9