The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  “Nope.” Pellicore denied that last request peremptorily. “It’s impossible to put Coltrane on paper.”

  So Coltrane would have to wait. But classical music and swing starting jumping off the sheet and playing in my head. I could hear Beethoven’s music or Ellington’s. In fact, anything I could read I could hear. I educated my ear for classical instrumentation on Pellicore’s substantial collection of LPS , reveling in the interplay of strings and winds, the cello and alto sax, a violin and oboe.

  It was very interesting for me to see how differently instruments could be orchestrated, how Ellington, as an example, broke with conventional notions of organization when he integrated different kinds of instruments—brass and woodwinds and so on—into single, seamless units, creating a wholly new synthesis of sound and breaking the rigid lines that kept, say, cellos separate from trumpets. I guess you could say that (in more than one respect) The Duke desegregated music.

  The extent to which Pellicore tolerated my extracurricular explorations directly related to how well I satisfied his needs. I was doing well with the French horn, actually enjoyed it. I had vaulted that obstacle. But then I had to learn to march.

  “You’re no good to me if you can’t execute on the field, Handsom.”

  So every lesson concluded with Pellicore marching me in the martial sense of the word from the band hall to the football field, where I would be drilled like a Marine on a parade ground.

  Left face, right face, about face.

  Dress right, dress left, dress up.

  The commands all ran together in my head. There were other adaptations that also did not come easy. It’s one thing to play your instrument seated on a stable chair from music situated on a stand, quite another to perform that tune on the metered hoof with a half-secured score of music bobbing up and down on the lyre affixed to your brass.

  I was so bad I had Pellicore wishing he had hair to pull.

  “God damn it, girl, can you walk and chew gum at the same time?!”

  I decided that I had enjoyed about as much of music and Pellicore as I could stand. I needed to get away from that chalked field, away from my director, away from any demanding thought or labor. “Please God…!” I left the specifics open to His pleasure, and on the following Saturday my prayer was answered.

  It was late August, the weekend before the commencement of my senior year, a rare weekend—by which I mean a weekend completely free of labor. I was on the porch early that morning, seated alongside Hard On and Mama as I pored over the Sears catalog. Mama was fascinated by it. I wondered if she imagined that all those models displayed on its pages were actually small people. She kept pulling the thick volume from me and onto her own lap, rubbing her hands over the Young Adults Section, smiling at the displays of slacks and lingerie, the inflections in her voicebox rising and falling with exactly the same pitch and cadence as do young girls’ when confiding to their dolls. Those dolls, that is, not already decapitated by eager boys needing baseballs.

  I was trying to calculate how far my summer earnings would go toward buying the shoes and clothes I badly needed for the coming integrated school year. I was late to mail-order and worried I’d have to find a ride to Gainesville or Live Oak to shop. I had my Sunday things, of course, for my first day, but I didn’t know if Sunday dress was appropriate for my first day in the white school.

  That worry aside, it was a fine weekend. We were having a high-ol’ time, for the Handsom family, Grandma shelling peas, me and Mama with the catalog, Hard On with his snout buried in my warm lap. About that time I heard a car pull up.

  It wasn’t unusual to hear a car or truck pull by , but nobody pulled up to our house, not even Mr. Thistle.

  “Who that?” Grandmother noticed it right away.

  “I’ll go see,” I said, extricating myself from mother, dog, and catalog.

  Hard On followed me off the porch and out front and what did I see idling before my house but Joe Billy behind the wheel of a two-toned, ’56 Ford.

  “Joe Bee,” I said severely. “I thought I tole’ you ’bout stealin’ them cars.”

  The smile on that boy’s face like to have split his skull. “Ain’t nuthin’ stole here,” he slid out proudly. “Bought her this morning. HEY, DOG!”

  Hard On had his leg hiked and was pissing on a tire.

  “Hard On, git off!” I tried not to laugh and failed.

  It had once been a beautiful machine, white top over robin red panels, a fiery Ford Fairlane with the big V -8. A pretty hot vehicle for 1956, but by 1963 it was definitely pre-owned.

  “Only one owner ’fore me,” Joe Billy bragged, but I was way ahead of him.

  “Ever’body know that’s Spence MacGrue’s car,” I said.

  Older folks in Colored Town insisted that Spence MacGrue was once a man of means. Owned his own timber mill, that yarn went. Others had Spence flying fighter planes in the war. Some apocrypha claimed MacGrue was a mathematical prodigy. You know how it is. If you don’t have a history, you invent one.

  People got to have a story.

  “How much you pay for this thing?”

  “Repairs.” Joe Billy said this with great self-importance. “Transmission needed work. Tires and brakes.”

  “Got air condition?”

  “Right here.” Joe Billy reached back to roll down a window.

  “You in danger of turnin’ country, Joe Billy, I do believe.”

  “Guess we better get to the city, then.”

  “Who’s we?”

  “You and me, baby.”

  “I’m’a just up and go? Leave Mama and Grandma?”

  “For the day, yep. And well into the night.”

  “What city we gone to?”

  “Jacksonville. City by the sea.”

  “I see you. Whatchu doin’ in Jacksonville?”

  Joe Billy jerked a thumb in the direction of the trunk.

  “Got some merchandise.”

  “You mean a guitar.”

  “Couple of guitars. For some real musicians, Cilla. Blues-men. Jazz. A genuine nightclub. You should bring your sheet music. They might let you play.”

  “So this here is an educational opportunity, is that it, Joe Billy?”

  “Like a field trip,” he agreed, grinning to the promontory of his ears.

  I considered a moment.

  “Wait right here,” I said. “I be right back.”

  Chapter eight

  “Like a heat wave/Burnin’ in my heart…”

  — Martha and the Vandellas

  I have been on the road for most of my professional life, but I can honestly say that no journey or concert or cruise was more exhilarating than that first road trip with Joe Billy King. I had never been an hour away from my home in any direction, had never transgressed the county line. We went sailing past the Hal W. Adams Bridge at sixty miles an hour, then on to Live Oak and onto the interstate still under construction. I’d never seen a road so broad and so long in my life.

  Four lanes of traffic. And a median between?!

  “You could put a field of tobacco in there and still have room for peanuts,” I declared, and Joe Billy shook his head.

  “Take the girl out of the country, but you cain’t take the country out the girl.”

  “You country as I am, Joe Billy.”

  “Maybe,” he allowed. “But at least I’m ashamed of it.”

  I pointed to the dash. “That a radio?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  It took nearly four hours to reach J-ville and in that time I heard more pop tunes from more groups than I’d heard in my entire life. The Beatles were just reaching the charts. The Beach Boys were surfing U.S.A. I rolled into Jacksonville on Martha and the Vandellas wailing “Heat Wave” like I’d known the song all my life.

  Ten minutes later we were lost. Joe Billy pulled over at a gas station. A black man tended the pump, a glowing cigarette lipping from his mouth.

  “You wantin’ Manuel’s Tap Room? That’d be down on the joo
kin’ side of town. Yeah. You want Ashley Street. Yeah. Broad and Jefferson and Davis, they all cross Ashley. Yeah. You’ll see the Roosevelt Theater down there pretty close. The Strand.”

  “Anyplace to eat?”

  “Roosevelt Grill. Yeah.”

  “Thank you.”

  “Be seven fifty.”

  I had never seen the civil face of a city before, much less its jazzy, violent, sensual heart. I was not sophisticated enough to see the pimps and hustlers trailing knots of shore-leave sailors, the brown bags wrapped in the fists of alcoholics. The boarded windows and jacked-up cars. All I saw from the comfort of Joe Billy’s newly acquired coupé was a huge, mingling bustle of people and clothes and aromas as exotic as Egypt.

  I had never seen such Negroes, these black men and women who walked, strolled, and swaggered with such insolent nonchalance. And nobody dropped his head, not even to white people.

  “There it is.” Joe Billy tapped the brakes.

  “Hmm? What?”

  “Manuel’s. Up there.” Joe Billy shoved his arm out the driver’s window to indicate a storefront squeezed between two other businesses. The place looked more like a shoe store than a nightclub. I almost missed the signage:—Manuel’s Tap Room—

  We parked beneath a billboard advertising whiskey. A blonde woman reclined on a chaise lounge, an ink-black gown draped over white, white skin. She had a deep cleavage, generously revealed, and the tumbler of Seagrams in her hand promised a lot more than a nightcap.

  “Don’t forget your music.” Joe Billy hustled his cased guitars from the Ford’s back seat.

  We pushed through a narrow door that did not immediately open out into the club’s interior but into a cramped lobby where a bouncer kept the cash drawer. A monster blocked our way to the den’s inner regions. I had never heard of bouncers or doormen, and this gatekeeper was the biggest man I’d ever seen. Pudding’s daddy was a big man; I saw Mr. Reed lift a Farmall tractor one time. Lifted it, held it by the drawbar—with one hand—and spun a tire with the other. Did you know if you lift a tractor and spin a tire in a particular direction that the tire on the other side will rotate in the opposite direction?

  This man didn’t look as hard as Pudding’s papa, but he was a head taller. Had on loose slacks and a tee-shirt cut low at the neck. Little curls of hair on a dark chest worthy of a sumo wrestler. He had a single key mated to a shoelace that wrapped onto a wrist thick as a fence post. A brace of keys hung from some kind of leather contraption on his belt. Made me wonder how many doors this place had.

  “Chu wont?”

  “Here to see Ruben,” Joe Billy replied.

  “He ’spectin’?”

  “He’s expecting me, yeah.”

  “Way chere.”

  So we waited. Few minutes later the bouncer comes back sucking a Coke floated up top with a handful of peanuts.

  “Chu wont?”

  Just like he’d never seen us.

  “Here to see Ruben,” Joe Billy repeated, without the least hint of impatience or exasperation.

  “Thass right, thass right,” the big man nodded as if confirming Joe Billy’s intention.

  “Come own back.”

  Turned out we were only twelve feet from the club proper, the area defended by the bouncer being a mere bottleneck to the interior. It had the smell of a nightclub; of stale beer, cheap cologne and cigarettes. It was dark inside, and cool. There were palm trees fading in amber pots. Fans churning at odd intervals from the ceiling. A teak bar ranged along one wall, its brass foot rail dragging a floor of cheap mexican tile.

  The stage was raised low at the far end of the club, distant from the bar, overlooking a small empire of tables and chairs. There were two pianos onstage. An upright Baldwin was unremarkable, but the Steinway was a beauty, black as coal, hardglossed, a truly grand instrument with a sounding board big as a wing on a plane.

  The grand was situated so that its ivory keys faced the still-depleted room. A man lounging on the bench that served the piano swung a microphone on its long arm to the lobe of his ear. He was about my height, just a smidgeon under six feet, tall even for a man in those days. He was pretty sloppy in that setting, a white shirt rolled up at the arms and stuffed into unbelted slacks. A slouched felt hat. Laces spilling, untied, off his shoes.

  He had a cigar. I followed the smoke as it curled in gentle tight tendrils only to disperse in the heat generated by a spotlight hot and high in the rafters above.

  “He the one want your guitars?” I nudged Joe Billy.

  “No, that’s Alex McBride. He’s headlinin’ at the club.”

  I didn’t know what it meant to headline, but the headliner must have heard us enter his domain.

  “Is this the guitar man?” Alex McBride turned on his bench to greet Joe Billy.

  “Yes, sir. Is Ruben here?”

  “Dressing room. Why don’ you go on back? Tiny, can you take ’im?”

  “On me,” the misnamed bouncer detoured offstage to a side exit and Joe Billy followed, leaving me alone with Alex McBride.

  He ignored me, at first. Just returned to his piano. He was a tall slender man, took off his hat long enough to run his hand through hair that was processed, like Joe Billy’s, pomaded and combed back. With the advantage of broadened exposure I now see a strong resemblance between Alex McBride and Nat King Cole, though at the time, having never seen an image of Cole, I could not make that comparison.

  McBride was working something out on the piano that teased me. It was probably no more than a dozen measures, played over and over, but never played the same way twice, which was irritating for me. I had heard this music before, or had seen it, I was sure. But what I was hearing did not match up with this man’s rendition. It wasn’t quite the same.

  The hell was he playing?

  “‘Rocks in My Bed’.”

  It came out of my mouth as soon as it lodged in my head. Those slender, dark fingers stopped over the keys. McBride peered mildly over his shoulder.

  “What was that, sugar?”

  “’Scuse me. What you were playing? Duke Ellington’s song? ‘Rocks in My Bed’.”

  “It’s an easy listen,” McBride smiled.

  “I ’spose. Never heard it, yet.”

  “Never heard?”

  “Not till just now. With you.”

  “You never heard it, sugar, how’d you know what it was?”

  “I saw the music.”

  “Saw it?”

  “The sheet music. Once or twice. Not the whole thing.” I hesitated. “You aren’t playin’ it right.”

  The smoke from his cigar scattered to the ceiling.

  “What’s that you’re carryin’?” He nodded brusquely to the folder tucked in my armpit.

  “Just some music.”

  “Ah hah. Why own’t you come on up here?”

  I backed away.

  “Come on, sugar, it’s all right.”

  He dragged leisurely on his cigar as I approached. “How old are you?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “How tall are you?”

  “Six feet, more or less.”

  “I’d guess more,” he said.

  He rose from the bench as I clumsily mounted the stage, and he remained standing for me.

  “You play the piano?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Call me Alex. Why own’t you take a seat here?”

  A seat at a real piano? At a real nightclub? With a headliner?

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “It’s a piano, sugar. Same as any other.”

  He seated me graciously at the bench beside that grand, grandpiano.

  “Tall girl with long fingers. How big a reach you got?”

  “I don’ know,” I blushed. “Enough, I guess.”

  He chuckled, the cigar wagging in the corner of his mouth, and nodded at my folder of music.

  “You got ‘Rocks in My Bed’ in there?”

  “No, sir, I only seen that a couple of times. At Mr. Pel
licore’s.”

  “Pellicore?”