The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

I wasn’t sure what she meant by circumstances. Would that refer to my performance in Myron Putnal’s algebra class? Carter Buchanan’s Biology? Miss Chandler’s English? What about P.E., History or Pellicore?

  “No, no,” Miss Chandler’s jowls wattled like a turkey’s. “Talkin’ about your tests scores, first of all. The step test? That you took at Kerbo School?”

  The step, yes. At our old school. Already Kerbo had acquired the distance of Troy. Miss Chandler shuffled a leaf of papers off her desk.

  “I have your scores, Cilla.”

  “Did I do bad?”

  “No. On the contrary, you did quite well. You scored in the seventieth percentile in language skills, which is remarkable, I would argue, considering. And in math skills, Cilla, you are ranked in the eighty-fifth percentile of students taking this test. That is a terrific score. Pushes you into the seventy-ninth percentile overall.”

  But what did that mean? What good would it do me?

  “I’ve been talking on the phone with Dr. Clarence Ransom, he’s a professor in the School of Music at Florida State. I’ve told him about your situation. Cilla, if you can demonstrate as much competency with your French horn as you did on the step and finish your academic year with decent grades, I believe you can earn a top-notch scholarship.”

  “Scholarship?”

  “To college, Cilla. Florida State University.”

  “How much of a scholarship?”

  “With a job on campus I think it would amount to a full ride. But your horn has to be good. You have to be able to perform.”

  “Would I have to march?”

  “No. The scholarship isn’t attached to the marching band at all. It’s offered through the School of Music.”

  “Music? You can study music in college?”

  “You most certainly can.”

  The prospect was so alien, so overwhelming, that at first I could not digest it. I almost missed the remainder of Miss Chandler’s excited brief.

  “…they want a recording. Something you perform on your instrument. Mr. Pellicore has agreed to arrange that. You listening, Cilla?”

  It was a lot to hear.

  “Dr. Ransom doesn’t expect perfection. But the scholarship is performance-based. We need to do well enough to get his attention.”

  “His attention?”

  “I’m hoping you can be invited for an audition, Cilla. A formal audition. This is just the first step.”

  To study music? Without marching? It seemed too good to be true.

  “But, Cilla, you can’t look too far ahead. You still have obligations to Mr. Pellicore. You can’t quit the Marching Saints.”

  “Oh, Lord.”

  “You can’t . You accepted Mr. Pellicore’s quid pro quo and you’re going to keep your part of that commitment. It’s the proper thing to do, not just for you, but on behalf of the next Negro coming behind you.”

  The next Negro? I don’t suppose I realized until that moment that I was at the center of several ‘firsts’. I was the first black student of any gender to play in the high school band. The first to march on a field that still flew a Confederate flag in its end zone. Friday night would also be the first time I marched before a real audience. The first time any Negro ever marched with the Laureate’s virgin saints.

  “Cilla. Cilla, are you hearing me?”

  I roused myself. “Yes, ma’am.”

  “This is a tremendous opportunity, an exceptional opportunity.”

  Tremendous? I didn’t know whether to shout or hide.

  “But, Cilla—and this is very important—we can’t go bragging about this. The word will get out, but not from you, do you understand?”

  “I wouldn’t never brag, Miss Chandler.”

  “It goes beyond the issue of comportment, child. Lots of students in this school would resent anyone getting this kind of opportunity. Much less a Negro. And a girl. So you don’t talk about scholarships or colleges to anyone.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Something else. Keep a record of your grades. Keep every quiz, every test, every piece of homework. Just take ’em home and put ’em in a box. I want to make sure, come semester’s end, that you get what you earned.”

  That I earned? “My grades? Can they take them away?”

  “Not if we keep everything in the light, Cilla. And I aim to keep a very bright light. That is my job. Your job is to study hard, practice your instrument, and keep your commitments. Don’t give anybody an excuse to pull you down. Remember that a full ride to college is now a real possibility. Stay humble, stay prayerful. Keep your eye on the ball.”

  First thing I did on leaving Miss Chandler, of course, was to corral Joe Billy in the hall and give him the news.

  “College, can you ’magine?! And I wouldn’t have to march! Whatchu think?”

  “Beats hell out of stringing tobacco,” Joe Billy agreed, but not with enthusiasm.

  “Joe Billy, aint, aren’t you excited for me?”

  “I am, Cilla. It’s just—”

  “Just what?”

  “We got kicked off the team. Me and Pudding and Chicken.”

  “Off the football team?”

  “They fired Coach Newton, too.”

  “Who? Who did?”

  “The hell you think? Garner Hewitt watn’t about to have niggers playing on the same field as his blond-headed boy.”

  “Joe Billy. But—? Does that mean you cain’t be excited for me?”

  “I’m ’cited. Just ain’t showin’ is all.”

  The bell rang. Joe Billy seemed disinclined to elaborate regarding his enthusiasm for my opportunity.

  “See you this afternoon, then,” I said.

  He shook his head. “Got to make a run to Jacksonville. ’Nother Jimmy wantin’ hisself a guitar.”

  “When you back? When I see you?”

  The press of students filling the hall pushed him downstream.

  “Sometime.”

  And before I could reply he slid sideways along the wall and down the hall. A lump started crowding out the glad place that had been in my heart, in my stomach.

  “Hell with you, then!” I called out to the startled aspect of students nearby. “To hell with you, Joe Billy!”

  I didn’t see Joe Billy the remainder of that week, not at school or in his lofty apartment. I was pressed with obligations of tests and homework at the time, and had other distractions at home. Corrie Jean had acquired some kind of croup. I was up two, sometimes three times a night, rubbing liniment on her chest.

  “Fug me,” Mama crooned gratefully.

  Come Friday morning I was dog tired. By Friday afternoon I was nervous as a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs. That night, I knew, a thousand people would be watching me, seeking in my performance evidence for conclusions already reached or justified. Waiting for that nigger girl to go marching on their field.

  “Settle down, Cilla,” Pellicore jerked me to earth sometime around fourth period before addressing the rest of the band.

  “Remember to check your uniforms early. Go over your instruments, your music. Check with your section leaders if you have questions.”

  “When you want us to be back here, Mr. Pellicore?”

  “ In the hall by six o’clock.”

  We got out of school around three-thirty. Grandma and Mama would not have supper before six. I decided to remain in the band hall. Juanita brought me a soda and banana and a tuna fish sandwich. We shared a meal quietly.

  “You’ll do fine,” she patted me on the arm. “Just follow the trombones. And if you make a mistake, don’t worry about it. Everybody does. Just don’t stop. Get back and pick it up.”

  I would hear that advice many times in my career, and would freely give it to other nervous musicians.

  “You make a mistake, don’t stop. Keep going.”

  I remember performing with an opera orchestra in Milan in the late seventies for a performance of The Marriage of Figaro . I was not a featured player, then, but I
was at principal on my instrument. Act iv of that opera can be a challenge, Mozart’s music tumbling from one number to another in keeping with the activity on stage, revelations, switched identities, a piercing of disguise, an apology. It is a pall-mall piece of storytelling in music, an operatic denouement of Beaumarchais’ play.

  You miss a measure as I did in that kind of run and you can throw off an entire orchestra. But the only thing you can do is keep playing. The singers can’t stop, the conductor can’t stop, the musicians absolutely cannot stop, but the audience can stop, can be lurched to a halt dead in their seats which is the last thing in the world you want them to be.

  So you just keep going. You pick it up as though you never missed a beat. But on this one occasion I paused, I tried to correct a mistake, God knows why. I knew better. And so at the end of the performance the conductor cornered me in the pit.

  “YOU LOST AN ENTIRE MEASURE!”

  “Yes. Sorry.”

  “WHO THE HELL MADE YOU FIRST CHAIR?!”

  I stared at him coldly.

  “Probably the same asshole made you conductor.”

  Before I left the house I called my agent and told her to get me another orchestra. In life as well as in art you learn quickly that when you make a mistake the worst thing you can do is stop.

  Juanita Land and I had the band hall to ourselves and I was a bundle of nerves. I seem always to either have too much time on my hands or too little. That day I had roughly two hours to kill between the end of school and preparations for my first, momentous appearance on a high school football field. Two hours to kill and no idea what to do with myself.

  After our short meal Juanita had a suggestion.

  “Let’s take a look at your uniform.”

  Earlier that week we had been given our uniforms; red wool with white leather epaulets and trim, Prussian hats with fake horse-hair plumes and genuine leather visors that Pellicore had us shine with shoe polish. They were stored, all the band’s uniforms, in a classroom just off the auditorium. It was a nice smelling room, a mixture of leather and mothballs and wool. Damp and cool, too, like a basement.

  The band’s uniforms hung on hangers from a long steel pipe that ran sagging at intervals the length of the room. A litter of harnesses, instrument cases and spare parts crowded the floor.

  “Here’s yours,” Juanita had to get on tiptoe to reach my accoutrement.

  I had the largest jacket on the rack except Rodney’s, who was nearly three inches taller than six feet. I already knew that the trousers fit me perfectly, plenty of room, fire-engine red with a gray, Confederate stripe straight down the side. The jacket was all right, too, except in the arms. I felt like a yokel with half my forearm sticking out to reach my two-toned hands. Felt like a vaudeville player. In blackface.

  “Got mine,” Juanita sang out, fishing her own uniform off the jerry-rigged rack. She paused a moment to fuss over her jacket’s brass buttons, bright as dimes with Brasso, the set of the collar. A very masculine collar.

  “What do you think?”

  “Looks nice,” I replied.

  “Think I’ll try it on,” Juanita declared. “Watch the door.”

  But before I could take a step to bar that entrance her T-shirt came up over her head and there she was tiny and white and naked from the waist up. No bra. Her breasts were perfectly firm and small as pears. The chill in the cloakroom had her nipples hard.

  “Cold in here!” she shivered coyly, and something still unfamiliar lurched in my loins. A contraction. A flutter.

  “How do I look?”

  “Fine,” I said through thick lips.

  “Well, then,” suddenly she was all brisk and ponytails. “Let’s be sure we put these back where we found ’em or Pellicore will have a hissy.”

  It wasn’t too long afterward that other students started dropping in. Pretty soon the band hall was a mayhem of teenagers scrambling to find their ensembles of uniform and instrument and music. Pellicore arrived to center the maelstrom that from then on I would find churning every Friday. It took what seemed to me a completely unorganized hour for the band to get uniforms and instruments and music and line up section by section beside the chinaberry out back. Section leaders strolled through the gathered ranks in military inspection. Rodney tapped me briefly on the shoulder.

  “Chinstrap, Cilla.”

  “Oops.”

  I snugged my chinstrap secure. Glanced over to Juanita. She was already in posture with her flute, straight and serene as an elf. Jade eyes caged straight ahead.

  We marched to snares toward the bleachers. Ralph-stepped up to our assigned places on those aluminum tiers. The air was so sharp, that evening. A concession stand situated along a Gulf-born breeze wafted aromas of popcorn and hotdogs. The field, just cut, was heavy with evening dew. That special smell of cut grass. That Friday night smell. Even the bleachers’ metal seats were damp with humidity.

  I wished Joe Billy could be in the stands, to see me. He was installed with Chicken Swamp and Pudding in the colored section. The rope that delineated the formal pen into which black spectators were herded had been taken down, but even Joe Billy could be influenced by local mores to keep his appointed place. Miss Chandler, however, rejected any such restriction. I was amazed to see my Kerbo teacher fixed like a boulder in the midst of the bleachers, her gaze, it seemed to me, fixed on the ostracized students at the end of the field.

  I felt like a fly on a plate. In a few minutes I would be the only person of color on the Hornets’ white-lined field. It would be I—not Pudding, not Chicken, nor Joe Billy—who would be the first black student that whites would see in uniform. Was that a cause for resentment among my classmates? Or jealousy? Was Joe Billy jealous of my sudden achievement, or the opportunity at Florida State?

  These concerns and others already in play threatened to disrupt the concentration I would need to do my business, tempting my eyes to stray from the monotonous music Pellicore required. It was simple music; nevertheless I was worried I would screw up, that with the first step onto the field I would freeze. And then our director stood up with his baton.

  “Instruments!”

  The brass of my horn crushing into my ribs.

  “Fight Song. One. Two. One, two, three…”

  A percussion of wind and brass split the summer air, the heaving air. lhs’s students accompanied our rousing fight-song with homegrown lyrics.

  “You bring the whiskey, I’ll bring the rye/We’ll get together at Lafayette High/Send the seventh graders out for gin/And don’t let a sober eighth-grader in…”

  That innocent and trivial variation was followed by other antics, other rituals and I began to relax. I felt secure on the sidelines, in the band. There was no marching required here.

  Kickoff came and I found myself cheering as if I had been in this high school forever.

  “AIN’T THIS GREAT?” Rodney Morgan offered a genuine grin.

  I nodded. “YES!”

  Before any time at all had passed Cody Hewitt had quarterbacked the LHS Hornets to one first down, two interceptions and a two-touchdown deficit. Not auspicious for an athlete looking for a ride at Florida State.

  And then it was halftime.

  “PLACES!”

  Our drum major and section leaders scrambling off the stands.

  “PLACES, PEOPLE!”

  My lungs started to heave like I’d swum the river. I rushed to find my spot of ground in a blind panic.

  Dress and cover.

  “First impressions, people!” Mr. Pellicore strutted before us like Napoleon. “I want those instruments snapped up on the beat. Step out with a full stride, brisk tempo, full and confident. “Miss Handsom—!”

  Pellicore’s fading dome suddenly thrust into my face.

  “Yes, sir!”

  “Find your ground! Keep your mind on your business!”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Remember follow your section leader and if you make a mistake—”

  “Don’t stop,
yes, sir, I won’t.”

  “All right, then. Here we go. Drum Major!”

  I felt scrambled like a chicken with his head cut off. I needed to find Rodney Morgan.

  “HERE, CILLA!”

  I heard laughter from the stands. There were people looking, I knew, as I scrambled to my choreographed location. That big, awkward black girl in a redcoat uniform. I found my place finally, but my knees began to lock. About that time a sharp elbow got jammed into the cage of my ribs.