The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  “That’s ‘Ode to Joy’!” I exclaimed.

  “For the vulgar. It’s actually a portion of the final movement of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony.”

  I scanned the score.

  “It’s different. Different than the ‘Ode’ I got.”

  “That you stole,” Pellicore corrected.

  “Yes, suh.”

  “Si rrr . If you talk like a field hand, Miss Handsom, people will treat you like a field hand. Enunciate the ‘r’.”

  I was much too fascinated with the architecture arranged in measured harmony before me to worry about anything so mundane as elocution.

  “Lord a’mighty.”

  “It’s similar to scores you’ve already seen.” Pellicore seemed pleased with the effect he had wrought. “Except, of course, that this is Beethoven’s. We start with the flute on top, here. And work down to the string basses here at the bottom.”

  “But where’s the piano?”

  “There isn’t one. There is a horn. There. You see?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Play it.”

  I sat for a moment. Trying to get my time.

  “What key?” he queried as I bent to retake my wind instrument.

  “D Major,” I replied, and buzzing into my stingy mouthpiece, worked through a few measures.

  He frowned, “That’s enough. Tell me, Miss Handsom, can you hear this in your head? Without an instrument? As you read? Can you imagine even a single cello, or violin, or clarinet or flute following this? How about all together?”

  “I can hear some,” I answered cautiously.

  “Some?”

  “A lot, then.”

  “Can you, now?” he slipped his hands inside those patterned suspenders. “Difficult, even for an experienced conductor to hold a symphony in his head, but here you are, a colored girl barely able to work through the scales and yet at a glance you say you can hear this music, this orchestra of magnificent music? In your head?”

  “I don’t know all the instruments,” I qualified. “But what I know I hear pretty good.”

  “‘What you know’—!” he shook his head. “Miss Handsom let me begin your education by informing you that you don’t know squat. You hear me? You cannot sight-read as well as the sorriest church organist. You are barely competent on the piano and until tonight you never heard a French horn.”

  Not true, I had heard. Every Friday during football season I heard the French horn and the trombones and the flute—I heard every instrument in Pellicore’s band! I even went home, sometimes, and wrote down the music. I used grocery bags, from the SafeWay, that parchment serving as the vellum for my own re-constructed compositions.

  Something was stinging my eyes.

  “You are the student, here, Miss Handsom. Don’t forget it.”

  “Yes, suh—sir.”

  “Now take that horn.”

  He slapped another piece of music on the stand. It was tame compared to Beethoven’s work, I discerned immediately. Not a lot of range. Regular as a metronome.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “How you earn your piano lessons,” he snapped. “‘Oklahoma’ will be our half-time feature for the first game of the season. We have ten games. You’ll need to master this and nine other pieces. Plus ‘Saints’, of course. We always march out on ‘Saints.”

  “But…when will I get to play Beethoven?”

  “When you’re ready. When I say you’re ready. For now, you’ll be with me here, practicing. Every night, Monday through Thursday. It will get old, I warn you. It will get hard. And sooner or later we have to get you on the field to march.”

  With that he spun his chair around, rolled across the floor away from the piano and into the dock of his cluttered desk. There was no formal dismissal. No, “We’re done for the day.” I was expected to realize on my own that the lesson was ended, that I had been dismissed and that my director was not interested in odes to joy or hope or ambition or anything else.

  I was already out of Pellicore’s office when I heard his parting words.

  “Close the door behind you, Miss Handsom.”

  His back turned to me.

  “And make sure it’s locked. We don’t want anything valuable to leave the band hall.”

  Chapter seven

  “Court Orders Integration of County School”

  — The Clarion

  I skirted downtown Laureate on the way home from my first formal piano lesson. Dusk had fallen by the time I left the band hall, red streaks of what looked like fire coming up from behind the silhouettes of pines to lick the bottoms of clouds stacked like anvils. I suppose I knew my path would take me by Joe Billy’s lodging. I penetrated the girdle of dogwoods easily enough, but it was not possible looking up to that windowless retreat to know whether Joe Billy was inside. I took the stairs two at a time, that fragile scaffolding swaying as if with the weight of silent Masons.

  “‘Body home?” I rapped the postern of his feeble door. “Joe Billy, you here?”

  I imagined I heard someone inside, some shift of weight or response. But it seemed to take forever before the door opened.

  “Cilla, look at you! Whatchu up to, girl?”

  “Practicin’ at piano.” I hesitated before stepping into his apartment. A sharp, pungent aroma stopped me at the doorway. I saw a bench sagging with paints and lacquers and varnish, their vapors pushing like a finger to the back of my palate.

  “You painting guitars?” I asked.

  “Started one.”

  “Best leave the door open,” I told him. “Fumes are bad for your head.”

  “You prob’ly right,” he said, peeking warily outside. “Or maybe work downstairs, there’s plenty ventilation down there. Come on. Git in here.”

  A deliciously sinful invitation. To enter a dwelling inhabited by a single, young man, no adults or grandparents or half-uncles to chaperone or deceive. Just by yourself with one other.

  “Tell me what it is.” He plopped himself on the floor and I provided an edited version of my first lesson with Pellicore. Joe Billy let me go on and on. How fine it was. How much better I was going to play. All about scores and orchestral arrangements and the thrills of marching band and “Oklahoma”.

  “How’s your teacher?” he finally asked.

  “Just fine.”

  He nodded. “You got a talent, Cilla. You don’t need to apologize for it.”

  “I’m just learning.”

  “Still—you got a talent. Don’t go hiding under no bushel.”

  “I’m gonna take what he’ll give me. And I do like the horn; I’m surprised, but I do. Playin’ winds is like running. You get done, you got your music, but your heart and lungs, they’re in it, too. It’s like everything on you is making music.”

  “You a crazy colored girl.” He ran a comb through his hair, past his temple and down a ducktail.

  “You a fool.” I ducked my head so he wouldn’t see I was blushing, but when I came up there he was.

  “Cilla—”

  “What?”

  He kissed me. It was a pretty timid effort at first, but then I started feeling real warm and I kissed him, and then we were down on the hardwood floor together, stretched out like cats, sucking tongue, his hands all over my scabbed back, that lace of wounds still healing. Not embarrassed, not hesitant.

  Something between my legs got wet. I think I let down the top of my shift. He sat over me amazed.

  “Cilla, you got the finest breasts inna world.”

  I knew I was blushing, then, but I didn’t care.

  He got something out of his pants pocket. I didn’t look right at him, at first.

  “I don’t want no baby put in,” I said.

  “No, that’s what this is,” he said.

  “Used one ever?”

  “Sure, I have.”

  “Have you?”

  “No.”

  “It’s all right,” I said.

  I just assumed that my city boy had made time wit
h lots of girls, but it turned out Joe Billy needed guidance about as much as I did.

  “Can you help me?” he freely asked at one point.

  I slipped on the condom.

  “Thank you.”

  Then I leaned back, wrapped my legs over his hips and raised up off the small of my wide back. He was plenty long enough by then and hard as a dime and I guided him in.

  “Cilla…Cilla!”

  We’d have sex several times after that, on several occasions. But that was the first time. We lay like spoons afterward. I could see his guitar lying with us, on the floor.

  “She got a nice belly.”

  “Who got?” he stirred.

  “Girl on your guitar. What is she? ’Gyptian? Jezebel?”

  Joe Billy followed the curve of my body with his hand, his smooth hand, starting at my shoulder, down the curve of my back, my hip, my leg.

  “Maybe next guitar I do’ll be you,” he said.

  “Be a dirty guitar sure enough then.”

  We both laughed at that. Virgin, no longer, but still innocent. We were shy getting dressed; I think I made him turn away. He had some milk yet unspoiled that was cooling in a block of ice in the sink. We had some of that. By that time it was well dark. Joe Billy walked me home, skirting the downtown, following the safety of the railroad tracks, wary of dogs and white

  Next morning I was at Mr. Raymond’s working the pump when Preacher Dipps comes trotting up the street like lickety split. I froze. Last person on the Lord’s earth I wanted to see on the lee of losing my virginity was our hellfire and brimstone minister. But Preacher Dipps took no notice of me, instead stomping right up onto Mr. Raymond’s porch waving an as-yet-unripped copy of The Clarion .

  “You seen the paper this mawnin’, Brother Raymond?”

  “I have,” Mr. Raymond might have been confirming the arrival of a train.

  “They closin’ down Kerbo! They shuttin’ our school!”

  “Looks like.”

  “What about our children? What’s gone happen?”

  Mr. Raymond inspected the crease of his khaki trousers in reply. Our preacher noticed me, finally, attached as if welded to the iron handle of the pump.

  “Lawd Jesus,” he declared and stumbled off the porch.

  It would be wrong to assume that black people in all areas of the South unanimously welcomed integration. Many, perhaps most parents in Colored Town were not happy to see their children cross the tracks to Laureate. Many were loathe to give up the school that had for generations defined our community.

  Most of all, no one wanted trouble.

  The Friday following The Clarion ’s headline, Miss Hattie Briar led the pledge of allegiance for the last day of the school year, the very last day for Kerbo School. Our teachers had, in the midst of many distractions, attempted to prepare their students for what I believe were called step tests. These were tests designed to evaluate progress in skills related to reading and mathematics. The County School Board had redundantly directed Kerbo School to assess all its students “in anticipation of the coming integration” of white and black students.

  It seemed an insult to be so ordered; Kerbo students were routinely administered the STEP and Iowa tests. I had taken a STEP , I’m certain, every year since the ninth grade. Then, as now, black students fared worse on these tests than whites. The courts had long seen that segregated schools for coloreds were inherently disadvantaged, but interestingly many people in my community either resisted that assessment or ignored it.

  From my remove as an adult I can honestly say that Kerbo School’s students were well-funded in what later came to be called the “basics” of education. But come test-time you had to know more than the basics to do well. For instance, I was rarely intimidated by questions related to mathematics or geography. But I was consistently flummoxed by questions related to vocabulary and reading.

  I knew quite well what a shell was, for example; Lord knows, we had pecan shells and acorn shells right on our back porch. But if I got asked something like “An oar is to a shell as a propeller is to a/an: a) Rocket b) Automobile c) Airplane d) None of the above,” my personal experience of a shell’s possibilities made me hesitate to commit to the obvious answer. Pudding was stumped outright.

  “What’s a ‘oar’?” he asked Miss Chandler.

  “I can’t help you, Pudding. Just do the best you can.”

  Math was pretty straightforward, though some of the algebra I had simply never seen. Same thing for trigonometry. There were questions related to set theory and slide rules that may as well have been written for somebody on Mars. Chicken and Pudding were lost after the first hour. Shirley Lee and Lonnie kept looking over my shoulder until Miss Chandler’s stern warning waved them off. We were all distracted, naturally, both by the news that our school was to be closed and the fears associated with the coming integration. Still, we tried. By early afternoon, that STEP was finished.

  “Pencils down. After I collect your tests you want to clean out your desks.” Then came the ritual command. “Class will prepare for Final Assembly.”

  We all groaned. Every student at Kerbo hated final assembly. It was formal, uncomfortable, unnecessary and the only thing standing between you, the door, and summertime. This particular assembly would stand out, however; the last assembly of any kind at Kerbo School.

  We gathered in the yard, of course. There was no auditorium. Grades one through twelve simply filed out onto our rough playground, at which point Miss Hattie led us in a prayer before reading a statement mandated by Principal Ben Wilburn and the Lafayette County School Board.

  “‘All grades from first grade through twelfth will be bussed to the Lafayette County Consolidated School beginning in the fall semester’,” Miss Chandler read from the provided text. “‘Teachers at Kerbo will be assigned duties as appropriate at LCCS . Students from Kerbo will be required to wear…’” Miss Hattie paused over her text, frowning. She smoothed the paper she was reading. Then she continued. “‘Students from Kerbo will be required to wear shoes to class every day. Appropriate hygiene will be observed.’”

  Hygiene would be observed.

  The letter went on to specify procedures for registration and so on. But that business about shoes and hygiene was what stuck.

  The required reading completed, Principal Hattie Briar offered her own terse remarks to the final assembly of her students.

  “This will be the last time we gather at Kerbo School. But we move on to other assemblies of students and teachers, and other challenges. Do not be afraid. Be proud of Kerbo, and when you go next year to your new school, just remember that you are as good as anybody over there. You are just as smart. Just as valuable. And I am confident you are well prepared to participate.

  “But you will have an extra burden. There will be extra eyes looking at each and every one of you. Do not do anything that will embarrass me or your teachers or parents. Do not do anything that might in any way bring shame to your community.”

  Looked like Miss Hattie was glaring straight at me. I glanced to Miss Chandler for reassurance, but her eyes were closed, her lips moving.

  “All right, then,” Miss Hattie concluded briskly. “You have received your report cards. Your grades are duly recorded. Students of Kerbo, you are dismissed.”

  The summer following the closing of Kerbo School did not begin auspiciously. Summers brought long hours of work in miserable weather and in filth. Mother and I had regular days at the nursery, of course; Fridays and Saturdays were hired out to Mr. Thistle. Strung tobacco for the Hendersons most other days, standing eight or ten hours a day accepting the poisoned, tarred leaves of tobacco from tired handers, children mostly, three to five leaves in a hand, thirty hands to a stick, thirty sticks to a tier, ten tiers to a barn. Nine hundred, a thousand sticks to fill a barn and sometimes with four stringers we’d fill two barns in a day. For five dollars a day.

  When my day labor was done, I’d go home from the nursery or tobacco barn and sponge off wit
h the luxury of barreled water, then scrub Mama clean, finally to snatch a hoecake and sausage on the run for the band hall and music lessons. I was studying piano and French horn side by side, graduating in the latter instrument from “Oklahoma” to “Singing in the Rain,” to “The Impossible Dream.”

  Piano was coming along. I was sight-reading with more confidence. Pellicore was very good, if terse, in describing notations or progressions unfamiliar to me. I was well past scales and idiot-music and was pestering Pellicore for sheet music to match the tunes I’d only heard on Mr. Raymond’s radio. Jazz and big-band, mostly. Duke Ellington. Glen Miller. John Coltrane.