The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  “What’s the Sheriff gone do with you, Joe Billy?”

  “Let me go. Soon’s I testify.”

  I was not sure exactly what constituted testimony.

  “Mr. Shaw done cut me a deal,” Joe Billy was almost cocky. “All I gotta do is tell what happen at the church.”

  “What did happen, Joe Billy?”

  “I saw Cody’s truck .”

  “Oh, Lord!”

  “I was inside when the dynamite went off. I come out, there’s Cody’s truck, haulin’ ass. ‘Burn baby!’, I heard ’em yell it out the cab.”

  “Who was driving?”

  “Think I was lookin’? I just stole damn near three hundred dollah. I was runnin’ my ass. But the police, they got witnesses. Two brothers an’ ole Crazy Maggie. Guess Cody near run them niggers over. Or maybe it was J.T.”

  “And when you told the Sheriff, he believed you?”

  “Din tell the Sheriff anything. Not voluntary, anyhow. But by the time he got done with his baton, I was persuaded. He cut me some slack after that. Say if I help him out, he help me.”

  “Why the Sheriff wantin’ to help you?”

  “The Sheriff doesn’t give a damn about Joe Billy,” Thurman Shaw interrupted to reply. “Sheriff Jackson wants to keep his job. Anything he can hold over Garner Hewitt, he’ll take. Even if it comes from a no-account nigger.”

  Next day, The Tallahassee Democrat quoted anonymous sources confirming that negotiations concluded between federal prosecutors and Attorney Thurman Shaw granted Joseph William King immunity from felony charges of grand theft in return for testimony related to the arson of the Mount Zion Church. The Democrat did not specify that Joe Billy’s testimony would put Cody Hewitt’s vehicle at the scene of the crime, but it didn’t have to.

  We all knew. Cody knew. Certainly Garner Hewitt knew.

  The grand jury would not be convened before mid-January. Joe Billy was moved under federal supervision to his mother’s residence in Tallahassee and Garner Hewitt raised all kinds of hell. He accused Collard Jackson of framing his sons for a crime they did not commit, that treachery accomplished, according to Garner, in retaliation for his support of Monk Folsom in the coming election.

  In a county registering fewer than twelve hundred voters it didn’t take a lot of gossip to tip the scales. Collard Jackson still had supporters in the county, from his family, from those who quietly hated Garner Hewitt, but that constituency was shrinking in relation to the percentage of white folks furious at their sheriff for colluding with niggers and federals to put a pair of white boys in jail. They called Collard nigger-lover, those voters of Lafayette County.

  But what they really meant was that he did not hate enough.

  By mid-November Joe Billy was back at his mama’s shaded house in Tallahassee. Rumor was that charges related to burglary (and resisting arrest) had been dropped in return for what was loosely described as “cooperation with authorities.” I can’t say I made much effort to stay in touch with JayBee. I told myself I could not afford the time. I was burning my candle at both ends, keeping my grades aloft in hostile classrooms while laboring to master my French horn. Three afternoons a week Miss Chandler drilled me mercilessly in preparation for the Scholastic Aptitude Test. The usual chores at home could not be slighted. Mama had not been able to shake her croup, which made things even more trying than usual. Even so I was composing music, sneaking off to Kerbo School with my brown grocery bags. Scoring my imagination in clefts and bars.

  Citizens with broader interests or less crowded schedules were engaging the larger events of the day. President Kennedy, recovering confidence after the debacle at the Bay of Pigs, was challenging the Soviet Union on a broad front from Cuba to Berlin, mangling German and extricating missiles as the situation demanded. He challenged the nation to sacrifice, to excellence. He pledged to put a man on the moon. He was willing to pay any price, was President Kennedy. Bear any burden.

  He’d even go to Dallas. If he had to.

  But neither space travel nor nuclear war nor rumors involving sex, lies and Marilyn Monroe were topics generating appreciable heat in Lafayette County. As I studied and drilled to improve my understanding of set theory and the distinction between shells and rowboats the citizens of our county raged in Old Testament fury over Sheriff Jackson’s treachery, and Joe Billy’s, those righteous voices suggesting that one way to shut up Collard’s witness was to stretch the nigger’s neck on a rope.

  One afternoon I was at school, with Miss Chandler poring through the paperwork required to apply for admittance to Florida State. Miss Chandler had insisted that I apply early. There were bundles of forms involved for a variety of offices, most in triplicates separated by carbon and all demanding accurate reply. If my Kerbo teacher had not been there to assist, I’m sure I’d have given up.

  The other seniors were attending a mandatory School Assembly, some somnambulist from the Department of Public Safety urging students to use seatbelts. I completed the required formalities for Florida State before the program was concluded; Miss Chandler said rather than risk interrupting the invited speaker to our auditorium I should simply go on to the location of my next class and wait for the bell.

  My next class was band. I thought I’d go down and get some solo time with my horn. Our football team was to play Greenville that night, an away game with antagonists the Hornets would entertain with a record worse than their own, but we still had our halftime theme to perform. I headed for the band hall. An icy wind sliced right through my olive green jacket as I negotiated the breezeway connecting the school proper to the band hall out back. I arrived at Pellicore’s Hall chilled and alone.

  I went into our modest amphitheater, set up my stand and music and broke out my horn. After a few scales I went right into our halftime theme. “I’ve Got Rhythm”, the Gershwin standard. How many pop groups have copied that tune? But for a title dedicated to rhythm the piece was monotonous as a metronome. Nevertheless, I dutifully plugged along, following the score designated for my French Horn. Couldn’t have been at it more than ten or fifteen minutes when I looked up and there was Cody Hewitt.

  “What you doin’ here?” I put down my instrument.

  At first he didn’t answer.

  “You got no business at band, Cody. You know you don’t.”

  “I wasn’t there,” he replied in non sequitur .

  “‘There’?”

  His chin began to quiver. “I was not at that church!” Swear to God, I thought he was going to cry. “Nnn…neither was J.T.” Cody stammered on.

  “Joe Billy saw your truck,” I edged off my seat.

  “Joe Billy’d say anything to get out of jail!” Cody seemed to recover. “But I ain’t havin’ it, you hear me? YOU HEAR ME?!”

  “What is goin’ on here?”

  Mr. Pellicore stepped into the band hall. Looked at Cody. At me.

  “I am tired of this nonsense. You two. With me. Now.”

  I flanked Mr. Pellicore on one side, Cody trailed on the other as we cut a trough down the middle of the school’s Olympian hall. By the time we got to the Principal’s lair I was convinced that I was somehow at fault, that somehow I had to be in the wrong for something . The door to Ben Wilburn’s office was pulled open by Pellicore’s pale hand and I saw our principal, motionless with his secretary and Miss Chandler, before, of all things, a television.

  I had never seen a TV , not even in a storefront. It was startling to see that blizzard of black and white. Like a photograph, but with sound and a picture that moved. A middle-aged white man with soft jowls and owl eyes stared from a nearly round screen, his eyes bright behind thick, black glasses.

  “Mr. Wilburn?”

  The principal did not reply to my band leader’s salutation, but I failed to register the significance of that lapse. I was preoccupied, juggling the warring effects of my recent assault with the intrigue sparked by space-age technology.

  “Mr. Wilburn?” Mr. Pellicore asked more slowly, as if doubting the
propriety of his intrusion, and that’s when I realized that something was wrong. That my principal’s response, my teacher’s, the secretary’s, were out of the ordinary. It seemed to take an effort for Miss Chandler to drag her eyes from the TV ’s wavering screen.

  “It’s the President. President Kennedy.” She mopped her face with a wilted Kleenex. “He’s been shot.”

  JFK’s assassination eclipsed all other events of the day. Cody and I were ignored as the band’s director joined the other adults hanging word for word on Walter Cronkite and the hard news from Texas. We were eventually and cursorily dismissed with the promise, not kept, that the band hall incident would be dealt with on the following Monday. The biggest issue pressing for a decision was whether to cancel the football game, our game away from home. Should the contest be called?

  No, it was finally decided. Not even the death of a president could interfere with football. But there would be a prayer before kickoff. A moment of silence. Something appropriate to acknowledge the nation’s loss.

  I don’t recall whether we lost, won, or tied. The bus ride back to Laureate gave no indication. It was quiet, not the usual pranks or teases. Sometimes somebody’d cry, a quiet cry. I walked home alone. Plodding onto my sandy street I heard the Live Oak train, but that far-off whistle held no promise of romance that evening, nor of escape. It was a raven’s call, the night Jackie became a widow, a rip of fabric, a piercing of cold air offering an invitation as dark as a hearse.

  I crawled into bed with Mama and held her close. “I applied to college today,” I censored the day’s events. “President Kennedy got shot.”

  Corrie Jean stirred with that last. She was warm beneath our flimsy blanket. I tucked in close. Closed my eyes.

  “‘Night, night.”

  The Thanksgiving following the President’s assassination was subdued. I was surprised how personally the elders in my community took the death of Jack Kennedy. Everyone gathered around Mr. Raymond’s porch to follow the broadcast of the President’s funeral. Little John saluting his daddy.

  People wept openly. The Sunday following, Corrie Jean played “Rock of Ages” as Preacher Dipps exhorted us to remember what a good man Kennedy was. What-all he did for black people.

  The younger men were more divided in their opinion of JFK. Pudding’s father, for instance, said that Jack Kennedy had been mostly talk.

  “Now Bobby, he for real,” Pudding’s father averred. “You put Bobby in the White House, he gone do somethin’ for the black man. You kin count on Bobby.”

  “No one is going to help us, unless we help ourselves.” Miss Chandler challenged Pudding’s daddy. “And by the way, Mr. Reed, have you registered to vote?”

  As democrats in Washington pledged their allegiance to a vulgar Texan, Garner Hewitt was calling in favors in Lafayette County. Was unheard of for the county’s leading democrat to be backing a republican for sheriff, but voters understood that Garner had been forced by the timing of primaries to adopt that tactic. Garner himself was confident that his constituents would not hold a titular affiliation against Monk Folsom, but he was not about to take chances.

  The general plan was to get blocks of votes. Best way to do that was to organize around the white folks’ churches. There were about as many churches in Lafayette County as there were outhouses and Garner Hewitt went to every single one, telling those congregations that if there was to be any hope of keeping their children unsullied and safe, Collard Jackson was going to have to be turned out of office. He’d invoke Jesus as his helper in that campaign and then walk right outside to bribe the deacons. Roofs always needed fixing. Pews, missionaries, air-conditioning—Brother Hewitt knew how to reward the stalwart, yes he did.

  And he knew how to punish backsliders.

  Miss Chandler’s own campaign was quiet by comparison, but indefatigable. By the end of October she had registered half the eligible African Americans in Colored Town and by December was reaching with little assistance toward the isolated and rural population.

  I did not care at the time which horse won the race for sheriff. Made no difference to me. I was focused on the single, narrow goal of getting admitted to Florida State University. I had grades to worry about. Final exams. Those were pressure enough. And then, of all things, the high school fouled up the standard application required to receive our college board exams.

  The school board blamed Ben Wilburn for the screw up. Ben blamed the guidance counselor. Laureate High School had missed the first cycle of the sat and, worse, had failed to reschedule. Miss Chandler rescued the situation, contacting somebody on the Board to authorize a special test for our senior class. Myron Putnal and Mr. Pellicore proctored the examination. The test took most of the day. I don’t think I could have spelled “cat” by the time it was over.

  “How’d you do?” Miss Chandler caught me in the hall.

  “What is ‘puerile’?” I asked.

  “If that’s the only thing stumped you,” she smiled. “You did just fine.”

  Cody Hewitt kept his distance. In fact I never had two words with Cody or Cutter Land or Digger Folsom or any of that crew from Thanksgiving until well after Christmas. Part of the reason for that reticence was that Miss Chandler had me escorted every single minute of the day. She had students designated to be at my side between classes, at lunch, even on the bus.

  The only person I spoke to with less frequently than Cody Hewitt was Joe Billy. It had been a month since I’d heard from my first-time lover. He had not written me, or sent word through Mr. Raymond, but I was not offended. Cannot truthfully say that I even missed him. I would be reminded of Joe Billy sometimes, surely. I never hauled water without a silent prayer of appreciation for the barrels that saved me so much labor. But I was not interested in Joe Billy sexually, at that point, and he certainly seemed to have lost interest in me. And at any rate, I was involved with another love, a passion that would claim all my time, all my energy.

  I was writing music. Composition in one form or another now occupied virtually every free moment I could manage. I was making a systematic effort to hear the sounds in my head and write them down. And as I heard the music coming to be in my head, a completely unexpected gift came as if from Heaven to help me along.

  I got a piano.

  If you’re going to seriously compose you need some kind of keyboard, and I acquired a piano virtually to myself. That Christmas surprise was made possible when Rev. Dipps bought a new Baldwin for our local church. At first Preacher wanted to keep both the old piano as well as the new, but Miss Chandler talked him into selling her the old Chickering. Paid him seventy-five dollars for that badly tuned upright and had it delivered to the “old school” at Kerbo.

  “It’s over there now,” Miss Chandler had smiled to me. “You can play any time you like.”

  “But…how can I pay you back?”

  “Make music,” she replied.

  The rude timbers of my old classroom at Kerbo School became my conservatory. I took my horn and the three precious books of music that were my frankincense and myrrh and hauled the lot to my old alma mater, where I reworked familiar pieces while fashioning new ones, scrawling my nascent compositions on grocery-bags anchored with soda bottles along the floor. For that span of days it seemed that my fingers could not keep up with the scores I could hear in my head. I’d rip through a score of measures and try them out on my piano, sometimes on my horn, the crude and dim interiors of my clandestine studio as liberating as a cathedral.

  I had a visitor other than Miss Chandler once. I was working out the piano for a piece of music from an opera, opera seria , actually, Mozart’s transcendent Idomeneo . Professor Weintraub had sent Miss Chandler that piece, minus the libretto, along with some other music and a list of things to read to “be prepared” for my first year at Florida State. When taking breaks from my music I was engaged by a paperback of The Inferno . I expected Dante’s to be an alien work, and indeed the language was far from colloquial, something like a King James t
ranslation in its archaic structure and syntax. But the heart of the story was not foreign at all. The Leopard of Malice and Fraud and the Lion of Violence and Ambition, even the She-Wolf of Incontinence, as I presumed to understand incontinence, were completely familiar. I was actually reading the morning of my unexpected visit, trying to figure out exactly what the situation was between Dante’s hell-bent traveler and Beatrice, who was, for me, a beguiling and sensual benefactress, more intriguing by far than her sniffling suitor.

  “So there you are.” It was Carter Buchanan, my science teacher. “May I come in?”

  Took me a moment to realize a white man was asking my permission.

  “If it’s a bad time—”

  “Yessir,” I swallowed. “I mean, nossir. Come own in.”

  “Miss Chandler told me I’d find you here.”