The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  “He’s teaching me French horn and helping some with piano.”

  “He a good teacher?”

  “He’s the band director for the white school. We got to go there next year? I have to march in the band or he won’t take time for lessons.”

  “He won’t, won’t he?”

  The tip of the cigar glowed a ruby red.

  “I catch your name, sugar?”

  “Cilla Handsom.”

  “Cilla, does your teacher know you can sight-read?”

  “He’s got an idea. He don’t, doesn’t, believe I can hear the music, though. In my head? He say it take years to do that. Like a conductor, or somethin’.”

  “Or something,” Alex agreed. “Tell you what, why don’t we work us in a lesson right here?”

  “With you? Now?”

  “Ain’ no big thang. Why don’t you play me somethin’ out your folder? Anything you like.”

  “How about Ode to Joy ?”

  “Didn’t know they was a piano in there.”

  “I put one in. Sort of.”

  In fact, ever since I learned that there was no part for the piano in the Master’s original, I had begun reducing his score to accommodate that instrument, sometimes finding it in the flute, sometimes with the strings or another instrument, playing the melody with my right hand, working out the harmonies as I sifted through Beethoven’s densely orchestrated composition.

  “You wrote a piano for the Ninth?”

  “Just a little.”

  I slipped a sheaf of hand-staffed pages from behind the school-purchased original. My hands trembled.

  “Butterflies are awright,” Alex crooned. “Long as you know all they is is butterflies.”

  That got me to laugh. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine, sugar doll. Now play.”

  I had worked hard to come up with a performance that I could duplicate, something that I could play over and over, each iteration faithful to the last. Precise. Exact. Perfect as a metronome.

  Just like Mama.

  Mi-Mi-Fa-So/So-Fa-Mi-Re/Do-Do-Re-Mi/Mii-ReRe/

  I couldn’t have played for long, certainly not through the entire movement, but when I stopped I was sweating as if I’d been stringing tobacco. “That’s all I got so far.”

  Alex smiled. By that I mean his cheeks pinched—he never displayed his teeth when he smiled.

  “I’d say that was ’bout perfect.”

  Perfect? Nobody had ever told me I was perfect at anything. Except maybe Joe Billy when we were in his apartment. I had never received such praise. I was elated.

  “Perfect,” he nodded again. “No variation. Just like you got it on your paper, there.”

  It didn’t sound quite so complimentary the second time around.

  “Tell you what, doll, you stay at this piano.”

  McBride popped up from our shared bench to take the upright’s nearby.

  “Now what I want you to do is play four measures at a time. Just four. Then let me play those same measures, can you do that?”

  “But you can’t see my music,” I objected.

  “Long as you can,” he assured me. “Now, you ready? One, two, three….”

  Once again, I performed my handwritten piece as if on a metronome. But this time there was another piano in accompaniment and another interpretation. Everything I rendered on my piano Alex repeated, but not verbatim. He varied my own faithful reproduction, tweaking it, teasing it, ornamenting it with no apparent respect for my score or the original.

  It was disconcerting at first. Then irritating. Sometimes he’d vary the key, sometimes he’d take my piece to a whole different chord or harmony. He wandered all over the tempo. And the melody—how could anyone tamper with Beethoven’s melody?

  I frowned visibly at one variation.

  “Didn’t work,” Alex agreed, without losing a beat. “Just keep playing.”

  We went through the whole thing, I playing my modified ode, Alex complementing with variations based on progressions from blues and jazz.

  It was a jarring experience. But then my own performance began to reach that wonderful place of what I call focused-inattention, the place non-musicians erroneously describe as “automatic”, where I seemed to be observing my own performance, the keys and muscle-memory in perfect coordination and when that happened the music I heard in my head—

  Was brand new. It was powerful. It was compelling. The harmonies and progressions of chords in Alex’s performance, those liberties that initially seemed inchoate, began to build in layers, to comment upon, to reflect the progressions laid down before.

  I realized, then, that Alex McBride was one of those very rare musicians who really could hear the music, hear all the music, hear past the melody to the possibilities of chord and harmony beneath to make something new, something different.

  And to hear it in his head.

  “That’s enough,” McBride concluded, with a rake down the keyboard.

  I turned to him mute, discouraged.

  “What was that?”

  “Chord progressions.”

  “Mr. Pellicore told me about chords.”

  “Yeah, but all he’s got you doin’ is readin’ side to side.”

  “Side to side?”

  “Left to right. The melody. That’s okay if all you want is to play like it’s wrote. Hear one thing at a time. But if you want to hear all the music? Every instrument off the score? You need to learn to read up an’ down ’cause that’s how the harmonies are arranged. That’s how you hear chord progressions, which is what I do. Which you got to do if you gonna jam.”

  “Can you help me hear them?”

  “Sugar doll. I can do better than that. Come own set by me. Let’s do the ‘Boogie Woogie’.”

  Next thing I know I’m sitting beside Alex McBride following chord progressions off the old standard. Every now and then we’d stop and he’d coach me, always patiently.

  “Hear that last one? That’s a very simple chord progression, one-four-five-one. Now you do it.”

  Almost immediately I began to hear a whole range of sound and harmony that had until that moment been hidden from me. It was like waking up a week after Christmas and finding more presents under the tree.

  “All right, let’s see how much you learned.” Alex stopped the boogie and launched into another piece. “Now what was that about?”

  “I heard the major chord, heard the dominant. You started in C, then swapped to the key of G.”

  “You got it, sugar doll. You cookin’.”

  But I was shaking my head. “I’ll never be good as you.”

  “They’s plenty better than me.”

  “Hard to believe that.”

  “Well, you better believe it. And when you get as good as I am, and you will, you really better believe it or you’ll go stale. You’ll get sloppy. You’ll get where you don’t give a damn about anything except what you’ve already done and that, sugar, is the killer for a performer.

  “What we just did? Keeps me sharp. I wasn’t even thinkin’ ’bout no Beethoven ’till you brought him in here, but now I own a piece of that man. It’ll change the way I play tonight and the next night and the night after that. I’ll see possibilities for things I already thought was iron-clad worked out in whole different ways.

  “See, they ain’t no ‘right’ music or no ‘right’ way, but there are rules. Trick is knowing the rules well enough to make ’em work for you.”

  “But when you march you can’t vary anything,” I objected. “You have to do the same thing over and over, that’s what Mr. Pellicore says.”

  “You ain’ gonna be marching all your life, are you? Well, are you?”

  “I hope not.”

  “No hoping to it. You either are or you ain’t. That band director sound like a prick to me, but that don’t give you license to use him for an excuse. Tell you somethin’, sugar doll, you don’t know what you can do. You got no idea how far you can go.

  “You gonna find Pellic
ores and pimps wherever you at in this business. You don’ have to love the man. Take what you can from him. Do what he tell you. Just don’t get to thinkin’ it’s Gospel. You ever hear any Mozart?”

  “Oh, yes! But just on the radio.”

  “B’lieve I can improve on that. Hang on.”

  McBride got up from the upright’s bench. Opened it. A litter of music was tossed carelessly inside. He propped his cigar on the upright before fishing all the way to the bottom.

  “Here you are.”

  The blues man pulled out the worn jacket of a long-playing record.

  “Mozart,” he said. “There’s a sonata for the piano on here, a couple of concertos, some opera—a bunch of stuff. Now, what I own’t you to do is wear this record out . See what makes Mozart a different cat than Beethoven. See how he’ll start something that look simple, and then how it change, how he varies it, mixes it up.

  “Listen to him a bunch, ’till you get a feel, then go get some Ellington and Satchmo and Miles Davis and B.B. King and listen to what they doin’. Get they records, steal ’em if you have to, and play ’em over and over and compare ’em back and forth.

  “You know what it means when a musician says somebody ‘got time’?”

  “No.” I shook my head.

  “Somebody got time it means they got a natural feel for music. You either got time or you ain’t, but if you can take what Mozart teach you, and Beethoven? And put it together with Miles Davis or B.B. King or the Beatles? You on your way to making music gonna blow folks out they seat.”

  I stayed for most of an hour, I guess, listening to Alex work the ivory. He showed me some footwork, too. “Why I like my shoes untied,” he explained as he worked the pedals. “I get a better feel.” Then Joe Billy came out with the group’s bass player, that would be Ruben. Alex got a kick out of Ruben’s dirty guitar, the sound hole a leering cunt in the one, an innocent navel in the other.

  It was getting close to showtime by then. The bartenders started rolling in fresh kegs. You could see the club’s regulars drifting in, taking their favored tables. Alex’s group drifted in one by one. He had a clarinet player, a trumpet and bass. Drum set.

  “Boys, this here is Miss Cilla Handsom. Real serious musician. And tall.”

  I felt real grownup, being introduced that way. Being teased. One of the girls brought out a camera.

  “Buck gets you a picture with Alex McBride.”

  “Cilla, get in there,” Joe Billy pulled a dollar from his wallet. A bulb flashed, I ’bout went blind, and the girl said they’d mail it and they did and that’s how I got my picture taken with Alex McBride.

  “Thank you,” I gathered my long-playing album as I left.

  “You welcome, sugar doll. Come back.”

  “I will,” I said.

  But I never did.

  Joe Billy and I headed home from Jacksonville dually enriched. It was late. We were virtually the only car on the road, that evening, all other traffic being commercial, big eighteen-wheel trailers, cattle trucks and refrigerated rigs. Trucks hauling watermelons or other produce. The sun settled on the road ahead like a BB centered in a rifle’s sight. We held onto 690 AM as long as we could, gradually losing that signal as we drove the interminable alley of pine trees shouldering the highway from Jacksonville to Live Oak. I felt a pang when the aether went to static, as though I’d lost a recent friend.

  “I wish Mr. Raymond liked rock ’n’ roll,” I lamented.

  “Owna get me my own radio,” Joe Billy promised over the wind that coursed cool and humid through the opened windows of our Fairlane. “Gone put up an antennae taller than a tree.”

  I held Mozart’s symphony close to my generous chest. Careful not to bend the long-playing vinyl in its worn jacket.

  “Be nice if I could play my Motes Art.”

  “Get youself a record player.”

  “I cain’t buy no record player.”

  “Who say anything ’bout you buyin’?”

  I turned to him.

  “Whatchu talking?”

  “We can stop in Live Oak. I know a place.”

  “Oh, Joe Billy! You sure?”

  “Baby,” him smiling like Sammy Davis, “I got money burnin’ a hole in my pocket.”

  We spent that night in The Lodge making love on a mattress with clean sheets. Clean at first, anyway. We only had the one record, but any sonata by Mozart will get you a long way.

  We were becoming more bold in our lovemaking. Except for oral sex.

  “Long as I’m strong in the hips, I be weak in the lips,” Joe Billy couched that reticence in humor. I didn’t mind, particularly. I had not experienced the kind of orgasm, at that point, that Joe Billy took for granted. In fact, my satisfaction came mostly with bringing JayBee to climax, and it was convenient, sometimes, depending on how I felt, to bring that ejaculation quickly.

  “Cilla, Cilla….” He arched like a gymnast when I brought him with my hand or with my mouth. We didn’t need a condom when we were like that, which is one reason I’m sure he locked up so fast.

  I loved the feel of his butt in those moments, how it tightened, his back and shoulders. More like a girl than a boy, really. He would come like a gorge. We took to keeping a towel or something handy.

  I never saw why it was that much different than kissing.

  “You do have a dirty mouth…” He moaned after one such experiment. “Praise Jesus.”

  I was perfectly satisfied to satisfy my man. Why wouldn’t I be? To that point, I had never experienced anything else.

  But the night Joe Billy bought me my record player I had a different experience with my lover. I don’t know if it was the excitement of the trip to Jacksonville, or the attention I got at Manuel’s, or the precious gifts bestowed in that jazz-joint, I don’t know, but from the first brush of his fingertips against the underside of my thighs, even before he touched me inside, before I guided him in, I felt something building up like wanting to pee, but better. It got better as we went. Better—

  “Cilla?”

  “Keep it…keep it.”

  I could feel myself letting go. The walls of my uterus jerked in short spasms that got longer, more urgent. I wanted to paw myself, grind my genitalia with pumice!

  “Keep it coming!”

  I wrapped my legs around him when I came and almost broke his ribs. That was the first time I experienced a climax, the first time, too, that I understood how a woman is different in love than a man, how our orgasm can be as powerful and potent as any ejaculation. It was an intoxicating revelation. A liberating discovery.

  But I could not stay to revel in it.

  Chapter nine

  “Negroes Bussed To White School”

  — The Clarion

  T he next day Joe Billy and I and every other school-aged child in Colored Town were bussed across the tracks into Laureate. Miss Chandler met us as we boarded our buses, tall and massive, the singular presentation of her basset-hound face a comfort now.

  “Miss Cilla, you all right?”

  “Fine, Miz Chandler.”

  “You look tired.”

  “Yes, ma’am.” I didn’t even bother to lie, still warm with the memory of my first real passion.

  “You’ll be on Mr. Raymond’s bus.”

  We had three aging Blue Bird buses to transport ninety-five black children, grade schoolers through seniors all mixed up.

  “The drivers will bring you right to the front door.” Miss Chandler mounted each Blue Bird to brief us. “There may be some people there.”

  “Kinda people?” Pudding was already scared to death with rumor.

  “No kind of people to worry about,” Miss Chandler replied firmly. “Do not look at them. Do not reply to them. Ignore whatever you hear. Remember that I and Miss Hattie and all the other teachers at the school will be there to meet you and take you to your classrooms.

  “Now is everybody here? Count noses. I think we’re all here. This is Bus Number Three. Mr. Raymond’s your dri
ver. You all know him. I will see you at school.”

  Miss Chandler stepped down from the bus. The doors slapped shut. I had never heard that sound before, the peculiar flimsy slap of a school bus door.

  Mr. Raymond peered up into the broad rearview mirror mounted above his head.