The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  Cody was out there, throwing a tarpaulin over the bed of the shiny, red truck he was unlicensed to drive.

  “Excuse me,” Miss Chandler startled me, she got up so fast.

  “Mr. Pellicore?”

  Pellicore turned from Ben Wilburn’s desk.

  “Miss Chandler?”

  “Can you come with me? Quickly?”

  I left my seat for the window. Presently I saw Ben Wilburn following my old teacher toward the line of shaded vehicles, huffing protest every step of the way.

  “We can’t just go looking at every vehicle in the yard!”

  “Won’t be looking in every vehicle,” Miss Chandler assured him, and made a bead straight for Cody’s truck.

  From my vantage point I saw the principal overtake her in short, jerky steps.

  “You cannot go in that truck, Miss Chandler.”

  “Not going in.”

  “I forbid it.”

  She turned on him, a big woman whipping around tail to snout, like a sow defending a litter.

  “You forbid , Mr. Wilburn? Stolen property at your school and you forbid a search of this vehicle? Very well, I’ll call the sheriff.”

  Wilburn’s hands fluttered at his waist. “No, don’t do that. You can’t do that.”

  “Yes, I can. So can Mr. Pellicore.”

  “Pellicore!”

  The principal appealed to the band director for help that would not come.

  “What’s the problem, Ben? There’s probably nothing in there anyway.”

  About that time Cody saw the teachers and Wilburn converging on his truck.

  “Hey,” he started over at a jog that turned to a sprint. “YOU CAIN’T TOUCH MY TRUCK!”

  “That’s Garner’s son, isn’t it?” Miss Chandler observed coolly slipping the knot that secured Cody’s tarp.

  It was the band director who actually pulled the tarpaulin back. There were two bales of hay beneath that rude cover. A spare tire. Some lumber. And one French horn.

  “I’ll be damned,” Pellicore leaned over to retrieve the school’s property.

  Ben Wilburn looked ready to choke.

  “HEY!” Cody skidded to a halt on the caliche drive.

  “Any idea where this came from Mr. Hewitt?” Miss Chandler’s sarcasm would have chilled ice.

  “Who said you could go in my truck?!”

  “Be quiet, Cody.”

  This from the principal.

  “You let her go in my truck. I saw!”

  “Quiet!” Wilburn snarled and you could see the gums above his teeth.

  “You should call the sheriff, Ben,” Pellicore huffed.

  “No need. You’ve got your horn.”

  “Got our thief, too,” Miss Chandler observed.

  “I’ll make sure my daddy knows about this,” Cody bowed up to Miss Chandler. “Breakin’ in my truck!”

  “I intend to tell your father myself,” she assured him. “I’m sure the chairman of our school board would want to be informed of stolen property. Especially when it is recovered.”

  “I’ll make the calls, Miss Chandler, thank you,” Wilburn’s open hand snaked out to take Cody’s arm. “Young man, you go to the office. Wait for me there. Go on.”

  By now the entire schoolyard of juniors and seniors, black students and white, were fully engaged. Only moments before Cody had been bragging to his teammates that there wouldn’t be any nigger playing horns in the band. Now here he was slinking off to the office. Wilburn turned around to face the gathering students.

  “Nothing more to see here. Go on. Get about your business. I said, get on!”

  The yard of students turned sullenly to obey, leaving Pellicore and Miss Chandler with their principal.

  “What do you plan to do?” Miss Chandler inquired.

  “Do?”

  “For punishment. It’s a serious theft.”

  “You’re one to talk about thieves, Miss Chandler.”

  “If you’d consent to have Master Hewitt punished in the same manner as that Miss Handsom endured, I’d be pleased to administer it myself.”

  “You stay out of this!”

  “Do I have to remind you who found the instrument, Mr. Wilburn? Now, I know that there are political considerations for you, here. I know who runs the school board. What I don’t know, but suspect, is that some effort is being coordinated to intimidate black students at this school.”

  “That’s outrageous.”

  “Not an ounce of conviction in your voice, Ben,” Miss Chandler called the principal by his given name.

  “Watch what you’re saying, Eunice.”

  “ You watch. Watch good, ’cause I will not stand by and see any student, black or white, made the scapegoat for bigotry.”

  “This wasn’t bigotry!”

  “Of course it was,” she retorted. “Unless you’re fool enough to believe Cody Hewitt’s got a sudden urge for music.”

  With that Miss Chandler bustled off. Mr. Pellicore followed, laden down with brass. Ben Wilburn took up the rear, following Miss Chandler like a rooster after a hen, jerking along with those truncated steps.

  I returned to my seat in the anteroom just as the bell rang. Doors burst open from the playground. Teenagers rushed in from the drama outside.

  “What’s happenin’?” Joe Billy caught me in the hall.

  “Tell you later,” I said. I did not want to be late for Biology.

  The afternoon seemed to move in slow motion. I was ravenously hungry through fifth period, sixth. Seventh period was nominally free but Pellicore expected band members to prepare for practice after school. My instrument was stored in its summertime location. I got it out. Went through a scale tentatively. The valves were a little sluggish at first, but I stuck with my scales and within minutes she was blowing free as ever.

  Juanita skipped up, a virtual Pan trailing her flute.

  “Cilla! Got your horn back!”

  “Miss Chandler found it.”

  “Good. Mr. Pellicore asked me to walk you through the routines this afternoon.”

  “Routine?”

  “For half-time.”

  “I don’t know ’em so good,” I confessed.

  “Rodney said you tramped around all summer, up and down the field. Right by yourself.”

  “Naw, I had Mr. Pellicore.”

  “Like I said—right by yourself.”

  Took me a moment to realize she was kidding. I felt something tugging the corner of my mouth.

  “That’s better,” Juanita approved. “I don’t want our French horn looking like she plays dirges for a living.”

  I didn’t know what a dirge was but I made a note to find out.

  “Now come on.” Those ponytails danced irrepressibly as puppies. “We’ve got work to do.”

  Our band rarely got to practice on the football field. Most of the time we rehearsed on a rutted boundary chalked off between the football stadium and Shaw’s watermelon field. From those wavering demarcations I could see Cody Hewitt and Cutter Land dressed out in pads, running drills opposite Digger Folsom and Terrell Simms. The roped-off area reserved for Colored Town was the only buffer between our field and the team’s. I had never been outside that rope.

  Pellicore got us out on our field around four. It was a hundred and three degrees, the air thick enough to cut. We stayed on the field from four to half-past six. Dress right, dress left. Diagonals. About face. I tried not to screw up as the band formed its basic formation, L-H-S. The covered wagon was harder. Pellicore wanted a wagon as emblematic of “Oklahoma” but the wheels were a problem. Any band will tell you circles are the hardest thing to get right in formation. Everyone but me was in shorts. There was no shade. I don’t know how white people stood such heat. And Pellicore was in a foul mood.

  “Dress and cover, people! That line is crooked as a black snake!”

  I began to see stars in my eyes.

  “I want some energy people—OOOOOOOOklahoma!”

  Halfway through the Sooner State
I had grass in my face. My instrument stared at me, a brass Cyclops.

  “Back up everybody,” a shrill voice filtered through a bale of cotton.

  “Cilla, are you all right?”

  Juanita’s elfin face was prominent among those leaning over me.

  “I didn’t eat,” I said.

  “You just stay still.”

  I thought that was a good idea.

  With some water and an ice compress I was able to stand, though with a splitting headache. Pellicore didn’t lose a beat during the whole episode. Neither did the band. Neither did anyone on the football field. Save for Juanita, everyone just kept marching. I wondered if this was what it was like to be a soldier, looking up from your wounds to see your mates marching into maws of shot and grape to the trill of pipes and the snare of drums, their advance marked out, as with chalk, in perfectly dressed lines.

  I wished many times going to school that I could hide behind some martial formation. There was always a provocation of some sort. Between classes was worst, in the halls, all those fists and elbows. And slurs, of course. The things people said. The big thing was, you never wanted to be alone, or isolated. Black students stayed bunched like bovine, seeking security in numbers and in the open. Many of the rules already internalized for behavior downtown applied double at school.

  Don’t look anybody in the eye, especially in that long hallway.

  Keep your head down.

  Stay out of the way.

  It didn’t take long to figure out what tables at the cafeteria were reserved for jocks, which for the fall semester meant the football team. And there were other rules that you picked up on the fly. Despite official policy, for instance, we did not drink from the water fountain. You wanted water you cupped your hands under the spigot in the restroom. We did not raise our hands in class. We did not laugh or speak boisterously. We did not buy ice-cream or drinks from the little store Mr. Butch ran within sight of the playground. We knew how to keep our place, even in crowded and uncolored quarters. Everybody in Colored Town knew.

  Everybody except Joe Billy.

  From the first day, Joe Billy walked the halls and raised his hand in class and asked questions just like he’d been in white schools all his life. In particular, Joe Billy refused to defer to Cody Hewitt, whether at the water fountain or in the locker room. And then there was that issue with the football team. Before integration Joe Billy, Chicken Swamp, Pudding, Lonnie and Johnny Boy would meet the Saturday morning following every Friday-night game to re-enact on our rude yard every play they could recall from the white boy’s game. I’d see my friends at that pitiful reconstruction, calling out signals that had no real meaning, spiraling a Del Monte juice can for ten, twenty, thirty yards and an imagined first down, or touchdown. This was where black students were supposed to dream their gridiron dreams. These were the friendly fields on which they were expected to stay.

  Joe Billy wasn’t in school a week before that policy got challenged. It happened on a Friday. Joe Billy was standing in the lunch line waiting to get served. Cody cut in front.

  “Whoa, there, sir,” Joe Billy spoke to Cody with the formality expected of an adult. “I believe they a few folks in line ahead of you.”

  “Football team gets to cut, Sambo.”

  Sambo?

  You could see hairs rise like ridgebacks on both sides of the color line, everyone poised for Joe Billy’s reply. Which came with remarkable aplomb.

  “Team gets to cut line? Really?”

  “Anybody with balls to play.”

  “Well, I be damn, I didn’t expect that.”

  “Bet you didn’t,” Cody moved to take a tray.

  Joe Billy stepped in smoothly to take back his place.

  “The hell you doin’, nigger?”

  Everybody heard it; the students, the ladies in hairnets behind the counter. Soup spoons and ladles halted in medias res, and for a moment the cafeteria was as frozen in time as a snapshot.

  But Joe Billy still did not rise to Cody’s bait. “You said the team gets to cut.”

  “What I said, Kingfish.”

  “Well, guess what?” And then Joe Billy stepped right into Cody’s face. “This morning I saw Coach Newton. I joined the damn team.”

  Cody went scarlet. “The fuck you did.”

  “Watch your language, Cody Hewitt.” A woman behind the counter not offended by racism and inured to threats of eternal torment felt compelled to protest any reference to fornication.

  “I joined the team, Cody,” JayBee was no longer smiling. “Me, Chicken, and Pudding. Three Negroes come to play in your fucking redneck conference.”

  That offense to gridiron reputation gave Cody all the justification he needed to swing. Fortunately, for everyone, our biology teacher was there to intervene.

  “Mr. Hewitt, I would not act on that impulse if I were you.”

  Carter Buchanan was forty years old when I knew him, a longstanding member of our faculty. Miss Chandler called him Brother Carter in deference to the fact that he preached part-time at a local Baptist church. There was Indian somewhere in the man’s blood, you could tell. He had high, almost feminine cheekbones. A burnished complexion. Face cracked like a creek bed. It was startling to see the blue eyes that never blinked in that permanently seamed and ocher countenance. His hair didn’t age like other men’s, running black as coal well into old age, and he wore it long, very long, down below his collar. This at a time when crewcut and flat-tops were still the fashion.

  He had a bad heart, people said, as if this were a character fault rather than a medical condition. And he had the reputation for being a soft man. Everyone knew Carter had been discharged from service during ‘The War’, by which they meant World War ii. Didn’t have the stomach for it, people said, and I suppose there was some truth in that because without doubt there were things that Carter Buchanan would not stomach.

  We all saw that long-haired preacher march Master Cody and Joe Billy out of the cafeteria and across the hall to Mr. Wilburn’s office, Cody loudly proclaiming the whole time that nobody was giving him a licking for standing up to a colored boy.

  “A man can’t serve two masters, Ben.” Mr. Carter was reported to have anticipated his principal’s objections as he gathered the wide paddle hung by a loop of rawhide on the ornate knob of Mr. Wilburn’s door.

  “Tell Garner I stole the initiative if you like. If you must.”

  Only moments passed before those of us left behind in the cafeteria heard something like shots from a rifle in the hall.

  PAM-PAM-PAM.

  Then a pause. Then another report—

  PAM-PAM-PAM!

  Directly afterward Cody trailed Joe Billy back to the cafeteria. Settling into their widely separated seats both boys were observed shifting cheeks.

  Chapter eleven

  “Kerbo Student in Marching Band”

  — The Clarion

  A couple of days after the boys got their bottoms warmed, Mr. Folsom paused at my desk and, with a curious inflection, said, “You’ve been called to the principal’s office.” That was it. No explanation. No reassurance. I went in fear and trembling to The Office, imagining myriad crimes of which I might be accused. Imagining, too, the report of the principal’s wide board on my ample bottom. But I had not been brought to be punished. There was only a note, handed to me by the principal’s secretary in a sealed envelope, labeled “Confidential for Miss Handsom.”

  I opened it. Inside, on ruled paper, was a note from Miss Chandler.

  “Come to my classroom fifth period. Imperative,” was scrawled the urgent if enigmatic command.

  Why in the world hadn’t Miss Chandler put her name on the envelope? Why couldn’t she have just passed me the note herself? Or passed it along by the hand of my homeroom teacher? What in the world merited such discretion? I rushed to finish lunch quickly, clenching my note like a passport as I traversed the hall to find Miss Chandler sunk into the Chip-and-Dale chair only recently integrated into her classro
om furnishings.

  “Cilla! Come in,” Miss Chandler rose heavily.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “I have some good news, Cilla. Exceptional news! Extraordinarily exceptional considering your circumstances.”