The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  You couldn’t hear anything, either. Could have been a vehicle ten feet behind and I’d never know it. We had the radio on, recall. The rumble of our own v-8 was amplified by Joe Billy’s rusted muffler. The road itself diverted attention, those twin ruts offering a bone-jarring ride over a pan furrowed by rain and erosion.

  “Hope we don’t lose an axle.” I was gripping the dashboard.

  “We’re almost there,” Joe Billy promised, and almost immediately wheeled off that dirt road to enter a clearing hedged in palmettos.

  “Here we are.”

  A sudden silence as he killed the engine. The chatter of a squirrel. Caw of a crow. Nothing more.

  I couldn’t even see the river, at first.

  “See?” He pointed and I saw the Old Landing, the one that used to receive ships of timber and turpentine. The flint shelf stretching beyond. And the Suwannee, of course, waters running dark. The Ford was parked before a grid of decomposed timbers. It took me a moment to realize I was looking at the foundation of some purposefully constructed structure. Actually several structures.

  “Used to be a busy place,” Joe Billy reported. “They’d bring logs down the river. Square ’em off and cut ’em into lumber. Then ferry that dimension to the mouth of the Suwannee and load it onto these big-ass sailboats. Take that lumber all the way to Jacksonville with nothing but some wind an canvas and some drunk-ass sailors. Made a damn fortune, too, what I heard.”

  But whatever concern had thrived in years past was now thoroughly overtaken in a riot of brambles and undergrowth. The only thing left of interest or color inside the rotting foundations of the abandoned mill were yellow motes of camphorweed, and sensitive briar.

  And dogwood trees.

  There was a splendor of wild dogwoods raised in the ruins of Fort McKoon. They flourished in the clearing created by the mill’s construction. Pearl-white blossoms framed against a hyacinth sky.

  Chaste and perfect.

  Joe Billy walked with me past that Christ-cursed arbor and toward the landing.

  “See the water? Breaking over the flint?”

  Whitecaps foaming over the submerged shelf.

  We sat down, Joe Billy and I, pressing our backs against a water oak spreading massive roots into a bank of loam and clay. You could hear the brook of water over the ancient rock beyond. You could hear the calls of robins and the raucous reply of blue jays and squirrels. From somewhere on the river came the far off whine of an outboard engine. Some fisherman, probably. Or maybe a diver taking his tanks and fins to the caves at Mearson Springs.

  It had been a long time since I’d idled by a tree. The sun warming. The somnolent effect of uncoordinated sound. A breeze. Odors of damp earth and new life. Of wisteria and the blooms of dogwood trees.

  “I’m sleepy.”

  “Lay down,” Joe Billy accommodated. “Take a nap, you want to. I’m owna find me a arrowhead.”

  The last thing I remember seeing before drifting off to sleep was Joe Billy calf-deep over that flint shelf. That cyanine sky. The blooms of dogwood trees.

  I woke up some time later. The sun was low on the rolling water. Too low.

  “Joe Billy?” Where was he? I pulled up on an elbow lazily, turned west to gauge the set of the sun.

  “Joe Billy?” I asked again. Some deep instinct told me to turn around.

  There were three of them. Three sets of identically faded jeans. A pair of brogans. Pair of sneakers. I was seated, remember, so I saw their footwear first. The third one wore some kind of rubber overshoes. Something like you’d wear if you worked a dairy. They had masks. They were hoods, actually, just like for Halloween, shapeless sacks with holes that distorted their shapes, their sounds, their voices.

  “Where’s Joe Billy?” I croaked, and Rubber Foot cawed derision.

  “You want Joe Billy? Well, come own. We’ll take you to him!”

  I am no small thing, but there were three of them. They got my arms, first, one on either side and pulled them back behind. I heard my shoulders pop in their sockets and I screamed.

  “Go own,” Rubber Foot urged. “Scream all you like. Scream ’till daylight if you wont to.”

  “JOE BILLYY!”

  They had him spread not fifty yards away between a pair of dogwood trees. He was naked. Strung up like a deer you were getting ready to gut.

  “JOE BILLYYYY!!”

  He tried to reply, to give voice to outrage or fear or whatever meaningless comfort could be imagined, but a smear of duct tape secured the socks gagging his mouth. His arms were pulled out wide as if in an enthusiastic parody of some semaphored message, just pulled up and out, tied to the slender trunks of dogwood trees. His feet were similarly stretched and anchored just above the ground. His genitals were exposed and hanging. His penis shrunk inside its foreskin.

  “Oh, God!”

  They dragged me to a pair of trees facing him. I was fighting every step of the way. Terrified. Kicking wildly. My feet banging into roots and bottles and broken timber. They got me beneath the dogwoods’ arbor.

  “Turn her over.”

  Rubber Boot kicked me in the kidneys and I couldn’t breathe. I had stars before my eyes. That’s when they tied me up. A heavy rope cinched over my wrists, first one, then the other, each coil cutting deeply, deeply. I could not imagine bearing more pain. They threw one end of my leash over a branch and jerked me upright.

  “Got us a college girl, boys.”

  A cackle of laughter.

  “‘College bound’!”

  Then they took an ankle each and pulled. Like a wishbone.

  I heard my pelvis pop and I screamed.

  It took a while, even defenseless, to get me situated on the twin pillars of my dogwood trees. They wrestled one limb at a time to its separate tree. Then a cinch around my belly.

  “One, two, three—”

  Screaming again as they hoisted me off the ground.

  “Git her clothes.”

  His fingernails, filthy, scratched sharply, stripping me of my blouse, my skirt and underthings.

  “Whoooooeee, boys! She got lips all over!”

  Joe Billy screaming through a gag of tape, thrashing in his wildwood frame. The dogwoods shook with the violence of his objection, their blossoms loosed and tumbling gently like snowflakes to scent the earth stained with urine at his feet. The Hooded Men ignored him for the moment. They were recovering from the labor required for my crucifixion. Rubber Foot in particular labored to regain his breath. I could see his hood suck in with each respiration, like the gills of a fish.

  “Damn nigger…put up a…fight…din’ she?”

  The voice was distorted, yes, by that hateful hood, and filtered through my own pain and panic. But I tried to place it. Tried to place it.

  And then I saw his belt. It was a wide belt, inlaid with silver. The silver latch was familiar to me, familiar to anyone in the county. The head of a rattlesnake. That long, slender tongue.

  “J.T.?!” I gasped and he punched me in the belly.

  I didn’t have air to scream. My whole body just cramped up like fingers in a fist. Those ropes cutting deep. I kicked in spasm a couple of times, as helpless as a moth. The only thing that didn’t hurt were my fingers which I could no longer feel. He let me recover, so calculated was the cruelty.

  And then I cried. I bawled. I prayed. I begged to Jesus for mercy.

  “Please, don’! Please, Jesus!”

  “Heard you could blow a horn, college girl? Well. We’ll see.”

  “Please…please, Jesus!”

  Snake Belt took me from behind and humped me like a dog.

  “JESUS! JESUS!” he cawed.

  Rubber Foot hooted laughter, and Sneaker, and I didn’t care. I was past caring. My sobs heaved with the hammer of my heart. But eventually I had to stop, to breathe if for no other reason. They waited for that respite and then let me see the razor.

  “We’re gonna do him, first,” Snake Belt promised. “And then for you? You muddy bitch? We got some
thin’ special.”

  It might have been two hours or two years later when Carter Buchanan docked his outboard at Fort McKoon’s well-known landing. “I came looking for deer tongue grass,” he would later tell investigators. “It was getting dark. I saw Joe Billy’s car. Then I saw where something was dragged along the ground.”

  I was delirious when he found me, hemorrhaging from my crotch, my breasts. My lips, of course. Joe Billy was in a critical condition, unmanned, unconscious and bleeding. They say Carter’s mother was some kind of medicine woman. I don’t know. But I know he managed to staunch Joe Billy’s hemorrhage. And I can remember him ministering to me, too. Coaxing something into my mouth.

  Bitter. Like gall.

  “Take it, Cilla,” a voice directed me calmly, and I did.

  “There, now.”

  Then water. That was welcome. Then there was nothing. Some vague sense of sky. Blue. I came to and tried to say something but only mush came out. You know you’re in bad shape when you can’t pronounce a scream.

  “Wowz Zho Birry?”

  (How is Joe Billy?)

  “He’s in surgery,” Preacher Buchanan was there to answer.

  His hand holding mine. I saw a wedding band.

  “You’re in a hospital, Priscilla.”

  “We’re ready for her.”

  A calm, professional voice.

  “Don’ teh’ GramMaaah!”

  (Don’t tell Grandma.)

  “Pwease doan.”

  (Please don’t)

  The request sounded ridiculous, even to me.

  “I doan wan nobye worryin.”

  I was fortunate Brother Carter favored water transport. I would not have survived the jarring, root-crossed ruts leading back out to the paved road. Joe Billy certainly would not have survived. Carter took us across the river in his flat-bottomed boat and moored on the far side, near Convict Springs, where he actually was forced to briefly leave us as he ran with that bad heart to fetch the Highway Patrol always loitering at the weigh station.

  We were ambulanced to the hospital in a black and tan cruiser of the Florida State Highway Patrol. Apparently the car was later auctioned. Too much blood to be cleaned, was the official explanation. Our teacher stayed with us the whole time, which was why Carter was at my side at the Live Oak emergency room.

  I remember being wheeled beneath a bright and enormous lamp. Freezing cold. Needles and masks. Somebody in a green smock leaning over.

  “God in heaven…”

  I heard the words.

  “What kind of animal did this?”

  Chapter seventeen

  “Martin Luther King Gets Nobel”

  — The Clarion

  J oe Billy remained in the Live Oak Memorial Hospital for less than a week. I, on the other hand, required an extensive hospitalization, though not at the Live Oak facility. The reconstruction I required would be performed by a specialist affiliated with the medical school at the University of Florida in Gainesville. Carter Buchanan and Miss Chandler and even Mr. Pellicore lobbied to get me admitted to Shands. There was no Blue Cross for me, you see. No safety net. Fortunately, the university’s hospital did admit Negroes for treatment.

  My doctor was nice. He was from Senegal and was doing research involving plastic surgery. Discussing my case, he explained that the labia was normally a good site to take tissue for rebuilding the lips around the mouth, but that my genitalia were too mutilated to be salvaged for that purpose. But there were options, he assured me, and did his best to prepare me for the procedures that were to follow.

  “It will not be easy,” he warned me.

  “Iss saw ride,” I spread my hands on my clean white sheet. “Log as I gan blay mah hon.”

  But I couldn’t play my horn.

  I believe I have already made the point that you don’t actually blow a horn. First thing you’re given when you start a brass instrument is the mouthpiece. Instructors will typically give you the piece specific to your instrument, just the mouth, nothing else. If you can’t lip that lump of brass, if you cannot excite in that vulva of metal the peculiar buzz familiar to any youngster starting out on the trombone or trumpet or the French horn, then you cannot sustain the vibration of air necessary for the controlled production of melodious sound.

  Whether your ambition is to jam, swing, or sit first chair, it all starts with a purse of powerful lips. The lips of my mouth had been razored both laterally, left to right, and vertically. The nerves were severed in too many places to count which, with the resulting scar tissue, accounted for the problem with elocution.

  But I wasn’t concerned with oration. My future did not depend on that eluctation. It depended on my ability to make a mouthpiece buzz and I couldn’t, not with all the surgery in the world. My hopes for college, for music, were taken away with the wizards’ pass of a cruel wand.

  “Day tug my hawn!” I wailed.

  (They took my horn.)

  I was sedated much of my first week in Gainesville and spent most of my recovery by myself. I honestly did not expect regular visits, from anyone. Even though the hospital where I would endure my several surgeries was little more than an hour south of Laureate that was a journey from Colored Town. Miss Chandler was good about sending notes of information and encouragement, but with school in session she could not do much more. Mother and Grandmother were barely able to take care of themselves; they never made the trip. Other folks were similarly strapped or occupied. They had their own concerns. So I was left alone in my hospital room for long periods of time, a circumstance initially welcomed which quickly became tiresome.

  Distraction is hard to get in a hospital. My room had no television, a common diversion nowadays. I had no radio. No newspaper or magazines. My bed was situated beside a single window through which I could see storey after storey of twins to my own, metal-framed and recessed into walls of uniform brick. The only variable in that exterior was the steam rising in cotton tendrils from the hospital’s boiler, strands of steam sundered in what Frost once called the capriciousness of summer air.

  I did have water. At my bedstand was a splendid steel pitcher invariably replenished and ice cold. As the ice melted, beads of sweat would slide down that metal decanter’s curved landscape. I would follow those stochastic meanderings with the focus of a shaman, guessing the destination of an individual blister of water. This was all I had to differentiate one moment from the next.

  I was restive and bored, but even so became increasingly ambivalent about receiving visitors. After all, I knew, or imagined I knew, what I looked like. Even the carefully restrained reactions of doctors and nurses were hard to bear. I was not even sure I wanted Joe Billy to see me. I was spared that encounter, at least, when a day or two after my first surgery a nurse entered my room.

  “You have a call.”

  She handed me a telephone and I experienced for the first time in my life the thrill of long-distance communication.

  “Cilla. Iss me.”

  It wasn’t the same voice. It was tired and distant. But I could hear him perfectly. Every word! Joe Billy, however, had a hard time understanding me. I had to articulate slowly, had to often repeat myself. And of course it was more difficult, talking by phone. I had supposed that Joe Billy was still in the Live Oak hospital and was stunned to hear that he was already released. “They just sewed me up, put me on the antibiotic, and sent my ass home.”

  I figured home was back to Fanny and Tallahassee, as far away from the Suwannee River and Colored Town as could be managed, but I was wrong.

  “Mr. Raymond say I can stay with him,” the voice on the line went on. “Mama ain’ no nurse. Besides, Sheriff say it’d help him if I am close by. Has he come to see you, Cilla?”

  “Woo?”

  “The sheriff, has he talked to you?”

  “I doan wan dalk do duh shaff. I gan’ dalk!”

  (I don’t want to talk to the sheriff. I can’t talk.)

  “You got to try, Cilla. Please, baby. For both of us.�
��

  Sheriff Jackson arrived the very next day. He stooped slightly, unnecessarily, to enter my semi-private room. My Senegalese doctor insisted on being present. A nurse filled up my pitcher as Collard took off his wide, tan hat.

  “Lo, Cilla.”