It started out with an invocation. Then Principal Ben Wilburn led the Pledge of Allegiance. One nation. Under God. Minutes came next, followed by some quasi-parliamentary wrangling. Old business, somebody called it, and somebody else said, no, it wasn’t. People were mad, I could tell that, but had no notion what had stirred their anger until Garner Hewitt took the floor.
“We don’t do something we’re going to have nigras in our school this coming fall.” Garner Hewitt summed up the new business nicely.
Representative Latrelle Putnal then straightened his silk tie and pin before rising to explain, or justify, the defeat of the School Board’s court-side assault.
“…long and short of it is, we got sold out. The governor pulled out his support and the circuit court has ordered us to integrate.”
But giving an order, Mr. Hewitt pointed out, was not the same as enforcing it.
“What you have in mind specifically, Garner?”
This from Mr. Land, owner of the SafeWay grocery and second only to Garner in property and cash.
“What I have in mind,” Garner took over the floor from Rep. Putnal, “is for white people to stand arm-in-arm before the schoolhouse doors and make clear to every colored child, and their families, that they are not welcome in our school. The court says they can go to Laureate Consolidated. Nothing says we have to make ’em go.”
“Gonna take more than a protest to keep them niggers outta our school,” came a voice I could not locate. “They’s a couple of agitators at Kerbo, what I hear. And they’s teachers tellin’ those kids they got to go to Laureate. They got to!”
Garner Hewitt waited until it was quiet enough to hear the squeak of his shoes before he responded.
“Last thing any of us needs, white or colored, is outsiders telling us what to do with our children. But it’s easy to manipulate a Negro; we all know that. Which is why we, as members and associates of this Council, must unite right now to make our views known. Make ’em known…and make ’em stick.”
Ben Wilburn coughed into his Coca-Cola.
“Not talking about anything illegal here, are we, Garner?”
“I wouldn’t think so,” Garner closed a lid slyly over his birth-marked eye. “But that’s for the sheriff to decide, way I see it. Sheriff’s got responsibility for enforcing the law in the county. If he don’t arrest, there ain’t a crime, way I see it. It’s the sheriff’s call.”
“But-is-the-sheriff-on-our-side?”
Monk Folsom raised that question as though reading off a cue-card.
“I must confess to the Council that this is the one area troubles me,” Garner offered that condemnation like an apology. “I’m not sure where Sheriff Jackson’s loyalties are. Not sure he understands the social and economic implications that will surely follow if we start mixing blood in our schools.
“Little black boys with little white girls. Young bucks with teenagers. It’s too much to put young people in a situation like that and not expect something sooner or later to happen. I don’t have to tell ya’ll this. You know I’m right.”
“If the sheriff won’t back us it won’t matter that we’re right.” This from Ira Gardner, owner and editor of The Clarion . Ira pushed a pair of thick-framed glasses deep into a thicket of silver hair. “Without Collard’s backing, or at least assent, it is possible that in the normal exercise of our duly constituted right to assemble, some incident might transpire, almost certainly will transpire, that could put a right-thinking citizen in a dubious light with the law. Could put him, that is, depending on the stance of our sheriff.”
Garner nodded in somber concession to Ira’s assessment.
“We hafta make sure Collard’s with us,” somebody offered from the back of the room.
“Or get a new sheriff,” Garner amended. “Get a new sheriff.”
The white citizens convened at Betty’s Café would not have been happy to know that as they debated Collard Jackson’s intentions, a colored girl was already taking steps, however timorously, to attend Laureate’s all-white school. It was my first time inside that enormous building. The long, wide, cool hall. Three or four sets of doors opening onto a campus shaded with pine trees. Mr. Pellicore met me and Miss Chandler in the lobby outside Principal Ben Wilburn’s office.
I could see the principal through his open door, staring out at the colored teacher and her student. Mr. Wilburn wore those glasses you used to often see, the flat lenses set in heavy black frames, that seemed likely to slide off a pug nose bright enough to guide Santa’s sleigh. Hair always neatly combed. Miss Chandler turned my attention to the director of the Marching Saints.
“Cilla, meet your director.”
“James Pellicah, Mizz Hanesome. Chawmed.”
Even if you’d never set foot in Laureate in your life you would have to know that James Montrose Pellicore was not a native to the region. I could only understand about half of what came out of his mouth.
“Mr. Pellicore will be different than anyone you’ve met,” Miss Chandler warned me ahead of time. “He may strike you as impatient. Maybe even rude. He has some ways that are odd.”
I’m sure she meant well, telling me this.
“Cam along,” Pellicore bundled us away in a hurry.
On personal appearance: Our band director was one of those gentlemen who every morning wakes up to arrange a few wisps of hair on a skull trying its best to go decently bald. He wore a long-sleeved shirt white as chalk and starched stiff as a board, with pinstripe pants too big in the waist and worn beltless which didn’t matter because he always, and I mean always, had a pair of argyle suspenders holding up those out-of-place britches. I don’t think the man took those things off to shit.
He had short legs. Even so I had trouble keeping up. Miss Chandler didn’t even try, so by the time we reached the band hall Mr. Pellicore and I found ourselves with some moments unaccompanied.
“Why’d you take the folio?” he asked, with absolutely no preamble or introduction.
“You mean the music?”
“Of course I mean the music, that’s what you took wasn’t it?”
“Yessuh.”
“‘Sir’. Try the ‘r’. Then why? Why classical compositions? Why not something popular? Big band? Or march?”
I swallowed. “I heard some of Mr. Mozart on Mr. Raymond’s radio.”
“Over the radio.”
“Yes, sir . Then I saw the music in your folder.”
“The same piece? You’re sure of that?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hmph. Interesting,” he muttered, and rested his head on his chest.
About that time Miss Chandler caught up.
“I believe you know the way,” Pellicore said to me, and pulled a metal door open. He opened the band hall’s door, but did not go through. He just stood there, in the breech, off to one side.
“Well, come on, Miss Handsom,” Pellicore barked.
“You in the way,” I shot back.
“Cilla,” Miss Chandler puffed from behind me. “Mister Pellicore is holding the door for us. It’s a courtesy. Something a gentleman does for ladies.”
Pellicore brightened, the lines across his forehead immediately smoothing. “I have been described in a number of ways since my exile to this Godforbidden place,” he said. “But that, my lady, is the first time anyone has called me a gentleman. Come in, ladies, please.”
All of a sudden he was treating us like we were precious. Shooed us into his office like a hen behind her chicks. It was just as I remembered it, a mess. Papers strewn, pictures aslant. A hieroglyphics inscribed with magic marker ran off its board and onto the wall.
“Coffee, Mizz Chandluh?” he asked. I saw a percolator hiding behind a mess of Manilla folders.
“Yes, please.”
He took out a handkerchief to wipe out a mug salvaged from behind his desk, chatting the whole time. Where had Miss Chandler attended college? Howard, she answered and he seemed real impressed. Asked her if she still had friends there.
Scattered, she said and asked him if he finished his graduate work at Yale. Pellicore seemed amazed that Miss Chandler was familiar with Yale.
“We’re going to be colleagues,” she responded modestly. “I want to know as much about you as I can, within the limits of privacy.”
“Yale is wonderful,” Pellicore beamed. “Almost as fine a place, I’m sure, as Howard University.”
Then the two of them laughed like they were sharing some private joke. For a while I was just happy to sit out of the way.
That was not to last long.
“Miss Handsom, here are the terms. I teach you the piano. You give me a French horn. That’s the arrangement. Any questions?”
How could there be?
“Fine, then. Miss Chandler, thank you so much for coming. A pleasure.”
By which Miss Chandler knew she was dismissed. Leaving me alone with this crazy Yankee music man. He jumped right in.
“We have a lot to do over this summer. Two instruments, God! If I didn’t need a French horn so badly I would never consider this. And I must warn you—the horn is why you’re here. I will help you a half hour each session with your piano. Your teacher says you can read music. We’ll see. But understand that the balance of the time you’re here you’ll be fulfilling my need and what I need is a French horn for the Marching Saints. Are you ready to be a Marching Saint, Miss Handsom?”
“Don’t think I’m ready for sainthood yet,” I replied.
He wasn’t amused. “You know what a mouthpiece is, Miss Handsom?”
No segues or transitions. That was his way.
“A mouthpiece,” he snapped. “You’ve seen them?”
“For a trumpet,” I affirmed without a note of sass. “But only at a distance.”
“I don’t need a trumpet.” He reached into his pocket, pulled out a piece smaller than the cork on a syrup bottle.
“This is the mouthpiece for a French horn.”
He handed it to me.
“What I do with it?”
“See whether you can spit.”
The brass mouthpiece for the French horn felt natural to my wide lips, which was a surprise. Pellicore (he would not be called by any other name or title) demonstrated the technique of “blowing” through the mouthpiece. He called it spitting, which was misleading. It’s more like buzzing, really. Buzz like a bee.
Once I demonstrated I could keep up a consistent buzz through the mouthpiece, Pellicore gave me an actual French horn, the first one I had seen close up. It looked like a sea shell.
“It’ll be heavy,” he said, but it wasn’t. Not to me, anyway. Certainly not as heavy as hay or melons. And there were only four rotary valves, not the eighty-eight ivoried tongs of a piano.
Four valves against eighty-eight hammers? How difficult could this instrument possibly be?
I would shortly learn.
“Let’s start with a small confusion, gets to many neophytes, the phenomenon of transposing instruments.”
“Transposing—?”
“Instruments, yes. Like the French horn. You see, when you’re at the piano and you play a C, what note do you hear?”
Was this a trick question?’
“A C?” I obliged tentatively.
“Bravo,” he approved. “But if you play the note C on the French Horn you will not hear a C.”
“I won’t?”
“No. Assuming you’ve got an ear for pitch at all, when you play C on your French horn what you will actually hear is F.”
“I hear a F?”
“‘An’ F. Yes. And the reason for that is that instruments are built in different keys. Trumpets, for example, are in the key of B-flat. Alto sax in E-flat. The French horn is in F. I’ll demonstrate.”
He took my horn, but not before removing my mouthpiece. He replaced it with another piece, a clean mouthpiece, from off the piano.
“Listen,” he commanded. “I shall play the C indicated by the staff here. Tell me what note you hear.”
Sure enough, that F-note came across clear as a bugle.
“I hear it!” I was as delighted as if I had witnessed magic.
“Sure you’re not just agreeing with your teacher?”
“Sir?”
He lowered the horn to the floor and, keeping his hands concealed by the girth of his trunk, reached back for the piano.
“You say you recognized the F on the horn?”
“Yessuh. Sir.”
“Then do you hear this C?”
He hit a key on the piano and right away I was confused.
“That was a C?”
“For you to decide, Miss Handsom. Here. I’ll play it again.”
He keyed the ivory once again and this time I was sure.
“That wasn’t a C,” I declared.
“What was it, then?”
“That’s an F-sharp.”
His brow knitted a little as he continued to keep the keyboard concealed from view. Like a gambler protecting a hand of cards.
“What about these notes?” he said finally, and keyed a chord.
“E, C-sharp, B-flat, an’ D.” I replied without hesitation.
It seemed at the time a trivial demonstration. You either had pitch or you didn’t. But Mr. Pellicore didn’t seem too happy.
“I do somethin’ wrong?” I asked.
“No, no,” he said. “That was satisfactory. Satisfactory. But a good ear isn’t enough to make a serious musician.”
“No, sir,” I said, chastened.
He took out the horn’s mouthpiece.
“This will be your horn,” he handed it over. And then he had me demonstrate a simple Do Re Mi in C which sounded like F. Then we talked about the different keys, and different notes within keys. Did you know you can get fifteen notes out of a French horn without depressing a single valve? Try that on a piano.
We went on to scales. I had several varieties of scales from my years around church pianos, but had never heard them named—diatonic, chromatic, major and minor, pentatonic, wholetone.
“These are your warm ups.” Pellicore shoved a folder across his rolling desk. “You do these before you do anything else.”
Then he talked about chords and scale degrees.
“Scale degrees can be used to name chords,” Pellicore informed me. “For instance, a dominant chord is built on the fifth degree of a scale.”
He talked about a minor chord, then, and then a Neapolitan sixth (“A major chord, in first inversion, built on the lowered second degree of the scale…”). Some of it I could follow, the rest of the time he might as well have been singing scat.
Scales and chords and Napoleon!!
Was I ever going to play anything?
But finally, his pedantry well demonstrated, Pellicore came down to earth and shuffled a sheet of music off the floor.
“Seen this before?” he settled the music onto a three-legged stand.
“Three Blind Mice,” I read the title.
“Didn’t ask for a title.”
“Know the words. I never seen the music.”
“‘Have’ never seen. Good. That means you’ll be playing by sight. Well, go on. Play.”
First time out on the French horn I managed to blind the mice without butchering them, which pleased my new teacher.
“Right, fine. That’s all I need to hear for the time being. Let’s see what you can do on the piano.”
He swiveled his roll-around chair to the upright, sweeping sheets of music and Coke cans to the floor with total disregard for the mess ensuing.
“Take the bench, Mizz Han’som, we don’t have all day.”
I placed the French horn in its case, visions of farmers’ wives and carving knives gaining prominence.
“The piano. Quickly, please. Chop-chop.”
Well, all right, an axe would do as well as a knife, but I hustled on over. Pellicore slapped a sheet of music before me that had nothing to do with blind mice or any other grim tale. It took me a moment, in fact, to realize that I ha
d seen this music, or at least a variation of it, before.
The King of Colored Town Page 10