The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  “Now it’s a fact that Miss Hart and her father live on one side of the tracks, and I on the other. But that does not mean we don’t know each other.

  “We all know each other, don’t we? One way or the other. For instance, I know that even though Mr. Simms and Mr. Reed have until this year attended different schools, they have cropped Ed Henderson’s tobacco side by side for—how many years, Mr. Simms?”

  “Since I was ten,” Terrell Simms allowed.

  “Yes,” Miss Chandler nodded. “Since you were children. So let’s not start off the year pretending we’re strangers.”

  She let that sink in a moment.

  “All right, then, let’s get started.” Miss Chandler reached for the glasses that hung by a string of pearls about her round neck. “What I need ya’ll to do now is to get a piece of chalk, and take a place at the blackboard.”

  “Go to the board?” Cody Hewitt asked, as if that were the most absurd notion in the world.

  “You have problems finding it, Mr. Hewitt, I’m sure I can help you out.”

  The nervous laughter that broke then was at Cody’s expense, a situation to which he was not accustomed.

  Miss Chandler addressed each student by name as we passed her desk. Cody sat in a huddle with the class jocks. Barlow “Cutter” Land was Harold Land’s son, a poor relation of the Lands who owned the SafeWay grocery. Terrell Simms was second only to Cody in status at the high school, a fullback destined for Florida State. Dean “Digger” Folsom was Monk Folsom’s nephew. Dean’s mother taught fourth grade at the school. Theirs was the only family in the county split by divorce. People excused it by saying Dean’s daddy was just plain crazy and it was clear to me looking at Digger that the apples in that family did not fall far from the tree.

  “To the board, class. Everyone,” Miss Chandler repeated herself calmly.

  There was some jostling, then, black students and white necessarily in close contact. Elbows and shoulders brushing. Side by side. Lonnie trailed me (as he used to do at Kerbo) to the board. Bonnie Hart cut ahead of us, squeezing out a space between Cody and another white boy. Everyone saw that maneuver, of course. I took the other board, winding up with Lonnie hard on my right hand but nobody at the board to my left.

  “We have spaces remaining at the board,” Miss Chandler observed.

  Sally O’Steen slipped in beside me shyly. She was a big-boned kind of girl, what some would call a dishwater blonde, and others, unkindly, trailer trash, even though at that time there were no trailers to speak of in Lafayette County.

  “Chalk?” Sally offered.

  “Thank you.” She pressed a piece into my hand. Her nails, I noticed, were dirty.

  “We all have a place?” Miss Chandler breezily inquired. “Yes, I believe we do. So let’s start with grammar. Conjugate for me, please, the verb ‘see’.”

  Black hands rose in virtual unison from the board’s dusty tray. Black hands scratching chalk on the unfamiliar board.

  I see, you see, he sees.

  We see, you see, they see.

  The white students stood nervously, limed stubs impotent in their hands. One or two giggled at their predicament. Sally’s fair face flushed pink as roses.

  “Mr. Hewitt.”

  I saw Cody scowl. “What?”

  “That is not how you address a teacher, Mr. Hewitt. I am ‘Miss Chandler’.”

  “What, Miss Chandler?”

  “I don’t see you conjugating.”

  “Conugatin’!” he guffawed. “Who does that ?”

  “Educated people.” Miss Chandler smiled sweetly and there was genuine laughter in the classroom.

  Miss Chandler turned to the board. “Miss Handsom, what is the simple past conjugation of the verb, ‘see’, singular and plural?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I responded from the ritual of a thousand drills. “The simple past for the verb ‘see’, singular and plural, is: I saw, you saw, he saw. We saw, you saw, they saw.”

  “Thank you. Now the point here, class, is not simply to be educated about grammar. It is to demonstrate that we all have things to learn from each other. Miss Handsom and Mr. Reed and the students new to your classroom have much to learn from you. But you, Mr. Hewitt, and all the rest of you, have much to learn as well from your new classmates. And from me.

  “So before we get to Shakespeare and Macbeth we are going to use this first six week period to review the basics of grammar—”

  Groans erupted around the room. Miss Chandler smiled good-naturedly.

  “You can thank me when you take your SAT s. For now, you need to return to your desks and get out your Little Browns. We’ll start with Chapter One.”

  Miss Chandler’s third-period class was a respite from a morning bloated with apprehension. My stomach was growling before eleven o’clock and that distress had little to do with hunger. The integration that had begun with the bus ride from hell had continued to produce one gut-wrenching experience after another. I had barely caught my breath in Miss Chandler’s class, seemed like, when the jarring intrusion of the bell forced me from that safe haven to Fourth Period and Band.

  I was petrified that I was going to make a fool of myself. I had never sat with anyone making music unless you counted Mr. Pellicore or Alex McBride. I had certainly never performed “Oklahoma” with forty other musicians, and even if my performance was sterling there was no guarantee I’d be welcomed into the company of the Marching Saints. There had never been a colored girl in their band. Wouldn’t I be seen as an interloper? An embarassment?

  And then, of course, I wore the added brand of thief. Not just a nigger girl, but the nigger who stole music from Mr. Pellicore’s office. I had already endured a beating in Kerbo for that offense. Would there be some fresh humiliation to be endured here?

  With the bell I was gathered like a leaf in a torrent of students pressing down the breezeway toward the band hall and gymnasium. Many of the youngsters negotiating that passage were freshmen and sophomores, students with whose names I was unfamiliar. I allowed myself to be carried along in that current of milling students to reach the band hall’s double doors. Gushing through with the press of that eager crowd.

  Hoping to remain invisible.

  “Miss Handsom.” Mr. Pellicore appeared.

  “Yes, suh.”

  “‘Sir.’ In my office, please.”

  The other students coursed by with barely averted glances. Bonnie Hart was already inside, I noted briefly, her skirt riding up her legs as she uncased her beautiful clarinet. There was no music in the hall, only noise, a slaughter of melody perpetrated by a racket of instruments each bawling for attention like dying calves in a hailstorm. But when Mr. Pellicore closed the door of his office, that reassuring din was suddenly dimmed.

  “Miss Handsom, I can’t find your horn.”

  “Sir? My horn?”

  “Your instrument, Cilla. The French horn. Did you take it home, by any chance? Get the janitor or someone to let you in?”

  “No, sir,” I shook my head.

  He ran his pampered hands through what was left of his hair. “It’s gone. Somebody took it. Sometime today, I think.”

  Today?

  “I’ve got in the habit of locking the door recently,” Pellicore continued. “Got in that habit since…well, you know since when.”

  Yes, I did.

  “But today I was working on your horn, right here in the office. One of the valves was sticking. I was cleaning it when Mr. Wilburn called. Had to run down to the office; couldn’t have been gone fifteen minutes! So I left the door out back open. It gets so damn hot in here.”

  “Yes, sir, it do. Does.”

  “Yes. And worse I left my own office unlocked. As I say—ten, fifteen minutes. Anyway when I got back I saw your horn gone.”

  He hooked his thumbs beneath argyle suspenders.

  “I am sorry to ask you this, Cilla, but where were you third period this morning?”

  “Miss Chandler’s room!” I replied too eagerly
. “English!”

  “You were there all period?”

  “Yes, sir,” I pumped my head. “You can axe, ask her.”

  “Thank God,” he sighed with obvious relief. “I will ask Miss Chandler, of course. Just so I can vouch for you myself.”

  “Vouch?” I was unfamiliar with the word.

  “Take your side,” he nodded. “I don’t want anyone accusing you of something you didn’t do, Cilla. I can be pretty self-serving, but I hope I would never falsely accuse any student of something so serious.”

  I could not remember any adult taking my side in any dispute and here was this man, a white man offering to—what a marvelous word—vouch for me. But without an instrument what was I supposed to do?

  He released the hold on his suspenders. “Just find your seat and follow along. This afternoon I want you on the field. Instrument or no, you need practice marching.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “After class you and I will see Mr. Wilburn.” Pellicore was back to all-business. “Somebody’s got to tell him about the damn horn.”

  I left Mr. Pellicore’s office to encounter a raucous hall gone suddenly quiet. Every student was seated, instruments propped and ready. I felt as though I were exposed to a hive of pale eyes.

  “Everyone,” the director took his podium oblivious to my reception. “Cilla Handsom has been working hard this summer to take our French horn. Who will direct Miss Handsom to her chair?”

  “It’s my turn, Mr. Pellicore.”

  A voice piped up whose face I could not at first find. But then she rose from her seat, this tiny freshman, slender as a reed, still in cornsilk ponytails, a flautist. I thought I knew everybody in the county but this nymph was unfamiliar.

  “Right here,” she offered what appeared to be a genuine smile. “Just one row up from the clarinets.”

  “Thank you,” I mumbled and was threading my way past the reeds to reach the brass when this little twig of a thing intercepted me.

  “No, no. I’ll take you.”

  “Take me?”

  “To your chair. It’s traditional,” she bobbed her head. “Every newcomer to our band gets taken to her chair, first time around. And then that person shows the next rookie to his chair. I am the youngest member of the band, see. Just started last year with the flute. So I get to take you to your chair.”

  “Get” to take you—not, “have” to take you, or “supposed” to take you.

  “What’s your name?” she asked.

  “My name is, is Cilla.”

  “I’m Juanita Land.”

  I knew the name and as her palm slid inside mine I realized that this was the daughter of the Land whose grocery I regularly plundered.

  “Watch your step.”

  My chair was situated with the other brass, a simple foldout before a tripod of music. But mine. My very own. A trombone player seated a row above offered a weak and congenitally lopsided grin.

  “Cilla.”

  I recovered enough from Juanita’s introduction to acknowledge Rodney Morgan’s. I didn’t really know Rodney all that well, but I had spent two summers on a stringhorse with his sister. Mandy Morgan on one side. Sherry Pridgeon on the other.

  Thousand sticks a day.

  “Rodney. I din’ know you played anything.”

  “We’re not so sure ourselves,” an acne-scarred percussionist leaned over his drums—

  Ba-da-boom.

  “But we heard you were hell on the French horn.”

  I looked hard for sarcasm but found none.

  “I don’ know,” I replied with caution. “I only had the summer to practice.”

  “Pretty damn amazing summer, what I hear.”

  He stowed his sticks and stuck out a hand.

  “Jerry Fowler. Rock and roll.”

  Chuckles rippled round the band hall; I realized then that this was a place where I might actually be able to relax, to let down my guard. Here were faces willing to give me the benefit of the doubt, even knowing my tainted history. Here were people who, in however qualified a way, valued talent.

  “Very well, ladies and gentlemen,” Pellicore rapped a music stand with a pencil-thin wand. “Tradition is served. Now pick up our feature, please. We’ve only two weeks left before our first game.”

  The rest of that class went by in a blur. But it was a pleasant blur. I actually enjoyed “Oklahoma” for the first time in my life. The bell came too soon.

  “Bye, Cilla.” Juanita bounced up. “Hope you find your horn.”

  “Thank you.”

  The trombones and drummer left with similar expressions of goodwill. Most of the girls said something, though Bonnie Hart once again snubbed me.

  “Don’t feel too special,” Rodney Morgan made an effort to blunt that edge. “Bonnie’s on the outs with everybody one time or the other. Even Juanita.”

  “Juanita Land?”

  “Bonnie’s got the notion Juanita’s interested in Cody Hewitt, which she ain’t. Now, he has got an eye on her. As much for the money as all the rest.”

  The notion that money could be a more stimulating inducement than sex was at the time a foreign notion. But I deferred to his opinion—

  “I see.”

  —and made for the door cheered by the thought that white folks’ gossip was as banal as any in Colored Town.

  “Not so quickly, Miss Handsom.”

  Pellicore speared his baton like a matador into a block of styrofoam.

  “We have an appointment.”

  Chapter ten

  “Turnout Good for Football Team”

  — The Clarion

  I suppose everybody figured I was in trouble, hitched to Pellicore’s train on the way to the principal’s office. Miss Hattie Briar surely made that assumption.

  “Lord,” she said. “Already?”

  Mr. Pellicore herded me brusquely down the hall and into the anteroom outside the principal’s office.

  “Take a seat,” he told me, leaning over to the school’s secretary. “Miss Gertie, will you tell Mr. Wilburn I need just a moment?”

  “He’s inside with Miss Chandler,” Gertie replied, over a typewriter and a triplicate of forms.

  I looked and sure enough, there through his opened door I could see Miss Chandler standing before our principal at his pin-neat desk.

  “Just a moment,” Pellicore assured Gertie, and without waiting for permission, stepped past her blockade and into Wilburn’s office.

  Miss Chandler paused with the bandleader’s intrusion. I could see the three of them, Pellicore, Wilburn and Miss Chandler routed to a new conversation. I was reading body language the way a mute would read lips. Miss Chandler’s large head turreting to find Pellicore as he bulled into Mr. Wilburn’s office. Gimballing, then, to find me outside. Then back to the band director, him now leaning on Wilburn’s barren desk. Like a Neanderthal, on the knuckles of his hands. Principal Wilburn rocking like Whistler’s mother in his high-backed chair, hands raking repeatedly over a hairless skull.

  A truncated, uneven consultation ensued. Principal to band director to teacher. Back and forth. Miss Chandler breaking off abruptly, dismissing her boss’s strident summons with a casual wave of her large hand.

  “Miss Handsom,” my old teacher addressed me the moment she cleared the membrane of Wilburn’s office.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Is there anything you can tell me about this morning that might help us find your horn?”

  “Not right off.”

  “Cilla,” she settled beside me privately. “Were you threatened? Were there any remarks?”

  “Cody said ‘nigger’ in home room.”

  “He said what?”

  “Said niggers were unequal to whites. We were talking about algebra.”

  “Clearly you were not. What did Mr. Putnal say? Was Cody punished?”

  “No, ma’am. Nothing. Nobody said nothing.”

  I don’t know if God or simple inspiration turned Miss Chandler’s eyes out t
he window at that moment. It was lunchtime, I recall. I was again aware of my stomach. Out through Gertie’s wide and open window you could see a line of cars and trucks, mostly students’, nestled beneath a shade of pine trees.