It’s an odd feeling, first time you read about yourself in the paper. Even the headline felt offensive. “Negroes Found”, for instance, implied that Joe Billy and I had simply got ourselves lost. That was it. A stroll along the river got those poor Negroes plumb dislocated. Or perhaps the headline was meant to encourage the implication that the Negroes were discovered , yes, found in a place where they were not supposed to be. If you were where you weren’t supposed to be, you couldn’t complain about what happened, could you? Knowing your place, in this case, an injunction that was meant to be taken literally.
There was no hint in the headline that the foundling Negroes were assaulted or tortured or even inconvenienced. How about in the accompanying copy? I still have a clipping. Here is the sum total of what the local paper had to say about the horrific ordeal inflicted on Joe Billy and on me:
…Sheriff Jackson confirmed that two Negroes from Colored Town were found in suspicious circumstances near Fort McKoon. Joseph William King and Priscilla Handsom are reported to be in good condition…
Suspicious circumstances? Good condition?
“How you doin’, Cilla?” Miss Chandler was checking on me from the front seat.
(Fine.) I replied.
I knew that’s what I was expected to say. You couldn’t say, “I feel terrible.” You didn’t lay that hardship on other people, not in Colored Town. Not until you got so old it was expected, like from Grandmother, in which case the complaints were a mantra so constant as to be safely ignored.
“Mizz Janduh?”
By which I meant, Miss Chandler.
“Wi din’ Joe Bee gom ged me? Gan’ he drive?”
(Why didn’t Joe Billy come get me? Can’t he drive?)
Miss Chandler did not immediately reply. Reverend Dipps hunched over the wheel of his vehicle, searching for any obstacle that could claim his attention.
“Mizz Janduh?”
“Joe Billy’s having problems, Cilla,” Miss Chandler answered finally. “You know…what they did to him.”
“I zaw, Mizz Janduh! I wah theah .”
“Yes, of course, you were,” she said. “I’m sorry.”
The Reverend shook his head. “Shame to see a boy so full of life done like that. ’Member how he used to love to socialize? Be on the porch with Mr. Raymond? Or with you youngsters at school? Always in the middle of everything.”
He sighed heavily. “Not now.”
We crossed the Suwannee at Brandford. An angry whine from down below got my attention. I looked out the window of Moses’s automobile and saw a motorboat crease a coconut wake across water as brown as chocolate. The racket from the boat was what caught my ear. It was an engine, an outboard engine, and I remembered everything.
Dusk was falling by the time Preacher Dipps nosed his paneled wagon up to my shanty house. Grandma Handsom held a lamp on the back porch as Miss Chandler and Preacher brought my things.
“Whass dat?” Grandma pointed at the long, black leather case.
“It’s a bassoon,” Miss Chandler replied, and Granny sniffed.
“Look like a shotgun.”
Then Granny stared at me. “C’mere.”
She raised my chin. Held the lantern before my face. Dropped it, shaking her balding head. “Lawd, Lawd. I too old be nursin fuh two.”
“Ah woan need nurdin,” I promised.
Mother waited in the bedroom. She turned to me when I entered, vacuous and stupid and dull.
“Mahmah, izz me,” I said as Miss Chandler arranged my things. I checked first to make sure she was clean. Grandmother hated wiping up after her daughter. I sort of looked on it like changing diapers. She was fine, on this occasion.
“Lemme gome yo air,” I fumbled for a comb.
Mama sluffed over and I pulled a rake through the tangles of her dark, dark hair. I was preoccupied with that task as Miss Chandler entered with my suitcase.
“You going to be all right, Cilla?”
Her face had taken an ashen pallor. Like the leavings in the fireplace. “You all right?” my teacher asked again.
“Yeth, ma’am. Thag you, ma’am.”
“Just get some rest.” I did not know at first whether my teacher’s advice was intended for me or for herself.
“Wad aboud sgool?”
“School can wait.”
I was so tired myself I didn’t even bother changing my clothes. I just crawled into my cot, pulled over my blanket.
“Naad, naad, Mama.”
I meant to say, ‘Night Night’, of course, that simple preamble to slumber which was one of the few phrases that mother recognized, one of the few things to which she could respond.
So simple to say, even for an idiot. So easy to pronounce. I tried again.
“Naah, naaahhh…”
I could not shape the sounds, could not make them conform. I sounded like a retard, I knew.
Exactly like my mother.
I fell to sleep like a stone into a deep well and I dreamed. Or maybe it wasn’t a dream at all. Maybe it was an hallucination conjured in that half-world between consciousness and slumber.
I was with my mother, in her company. But this was my mother as I had never before seen her. This was a woman polished and intelligent and cultured, dressed in a silver gown and seated with other swells in a place also without precedent, a vast auditorium. A theater, I realized. Carnegie Hall, perhaps, or maybe some European theater with chandeliers dropped from a cathedral ceiling and balconies fixed with gilded decoration and heavy, scarlet curtains.
She is beautiful, my mother. Her hair is naturally straight, and soft, almost like a white woman’s. She is as tall as I am. I don’t believe I had noticed that before, my mother’s height. A regal carriage. She carries one of those small binoculars, opera glasses.
“Sit with me, Cilla.”
We share a box. I, too, am gowned, the bodice deeply cut. I have a necklace, a small cross fashioned by some Basque artisan in Spanish silver. I like the feel of the chain around my neck, on my full breasts. My mother indicates a plushly stuffed accommodation. I take a seat beside her to overlook the chandeliered hall.
“Mother,” I say and kiss her the way I imagine Ingrid Bergman would kiss her mother, the way I used to mime movies I had never seen.
A chaste gesture. One peck for each cheek.
“Pick a peck of pickled peppers.” She smiles at me, warm and beautiful. Her voice is cultured, well-elocuted. The consonants break clean and crisp, like fresh celery.
The lights dim.
“Look,” mother indicates with her glasses.
I follow her golden arm and see a tall African-American woman stride onto the boards. Wiry, undisciplined hair, I can make out that much. Not at all like mother’s. She takes a seat at center stage beside a bulky, unfamiliar instrument. It could be a length of pipe. But bulged at the lips, on one extremity, like a blunderbuss. A swan’s neck plated in silver and thinly attached.
No other player attends. No composer. No diva. She is by herself before the arena.
Alone.
“I can’t play,” I tell my mother.
She adjusts the lenses of her binoculars. “That is a beautiful woman onstage.”
I do not have binoculars. I can tell that she is tall and black as ebony. The hair sprouts out like a sinner’s halo. That is all I can see with unaided inspection.
“Cilla.”
I turn back to my mother, but we are no longer in the box of a grand theater. We are at home. In our shack. But Mother is still beautiful, still grand, even in her simple cotton shift. She holds a comb in her hands instead of binoculars, but her words still break crisply.
“She sells seashells on the seaswept shore,” Corrie Jean recites proudly and I throw myself into her arms.
“Mama!”
Her breasts are warm and I want to bury myself between them.
“I can’t play,” I confess again, but this time my own words have got back their edges. The consonants report as cleanly as acre peas shell
ed into the thin wall of a tin pan.
Tap, tap, tap.
“You will play, Cilla.”
My mother speaks and I listen. I try not to covet her hair and I listen.
“Music is your heart, your soul, and you will play. You will become one of the most recognized performers in the world. People will wait in lines outside concert halls in foreign lands to hear you play. They will camp outside shopping malls to buy tickets for your concerts, to purchase recordings of your performances.
“Your scarred lips will make music more wonderful than anything anyone has ever heard,” my mother promises me. “You will mix jazz and blues and classical compositions in ways no one anticipates. And after all that you will find that you are beautiful, as well. Just like your mother.”
I did not want the dream to stop. I could see it getting away, the way dreams do. Like water receding from the stern of a speeding boat.
“Mama!” I protest and touch my mouth.
Then I wake. A febrile light filters into my pine-boarded room. I remember, now, that I have been discharged from hospital. That I am home. But there is something warm in my bed. It’s Mama, of course, lying beside me. A puddle of drool collects, dampens her filthy pillow. I pull the blanket down to cover her feet and when I do, I see the brass hinges of the well-used case on the floor at the foot of our pallet.
The sun was barely risen as I slipped from beneath my blanket. Red sky in morning, sailor take warning. I barely took time to don jacket and sneakers before grabbing the hated case and slipping past Grandma and out the back door. I stumbled a distance from our modest home. Away from the sagging porch. Away from the outhouse and associated vipers.
I opened Dr. Weintraub’s finely constructed case and with some clumsiness assembled the instrument inside. A fingering chart was tucked neatly beneath a pair of double reeds. I was completely untutored, of course. If there had not been some guide for my fingers and a pair of reeds pre-carved and ready for use, I would probably have just re-cased the bassoon and carried it back to the house. After all, I had only risen on the inspiration of a dream.
I handled the instrument, finally. The feel of the reed on my mouth was unfamiliar. A tentative effort produced no sound at all. I pressed the reed once more between my corrugated lips and blew until I saw stars before my eyes, and then, at the limit of my exhalation something came out of the bassoon’s long, hardwood chamber that sounded like the baying of a scalded pig.
“Thit.” I mauled that word easily enough and would probably have packed everything in right then and there had it not been for some unexpected encouragement.
“Don’t stop,” somebody said, and I turned around and it was Joe Billy.
“Don’ stop,” he raised his finger in warning. “Don’ you even think about stoppin’.”
His face appeared bloated, tumid. His eyes, always set narrowly, seemed squeezed now on either side, like pecans pressed between pouches of dough.
“Joe Birry.”
“I wanta hear some music.”
“Ah gan’.”
“Yes, you can. You surely can. Try.”
I fit the reed between my ruined lips and I tried again and got a perfect C. It floated in the heavy air like the song of whales.
“Sound good to me,” Joe Billy declared.
If he had not been there to encourage me, to challenge me after my first, futile effort, I am convinced I would have laid the bassoon aside and never looked at a piece of music again. Not ever. Not for any reason.
But Joe Billy was there and that first successful note got followed, with some fits and starts, by another. Then I decided to play something simple. A nursery rhyme, perhaps.
“Try ‘Three Blind Mice’,” Joe Billy suggested.
Instead and out of some perversion I played the eight bars of a piece I hated.
OOOOOOOOOaklahoma!/
When the wind comes rushing down the plain!
Joe Billy chuckled and his swollen face seemed lighter. I played just a few measures more. Then I stopped. I laid the bassoon into its case and walked over to JayBee. We held each other like children do, our arms wrapped fully about, heads side by side, swaying mutely. The aromas of wild hyacinth and wisteria and camphorweed and vanilla plant pressed into our nostrils like gentle tissues. Scenting our tears.
We held each other for a long interval in that glade near my home. We didn’t talk.
After a while we disengaged.
“Leth me go,” I articulated carefully.
He shook his head and pointed at my still-open case.
“You got work to do.”
“Ah dired.”
“Tired ain’t gonna get it done.”
“Joe Birry!”
“Looking for slack from me, Cilla? You ain’t gone get it. You got a chance here none of us has. Me or Pudding or Chicken or Shirley Lee. You cain’t let what happen’ pull you down. Pull us down. You got to practice.”
It was a chore to gain a new facility, to overcome the frustrations inevitable when learning to master a new instrument. I would never have persevered but for Joe Billy. He was my coach, my cheerleader. He simply would not let me quit. Every moment not engaged with algebra or history or some similar regimen was devoted to the bassoon. Mr. Pellicore gave me what help he could, but I was mostly on my own. I was not an instant success at my instrument, my still-borrowed double-reeded wind. But at some point I began to like the way it felt in my hands, my mouth.
I practiced in a gentle shade surrounded by blossoms of scarlet and white, the fruit of redbuds and, yes, even of dogwood trees. I kept a jug of water close by in sober imitation of Omar Khayam, a jelly jar to soak my reeds, and a papyrus of grocery bags onto which I scribbled my original scores.
I was beginning to heal. It was still hard, even so, to leave the privacy of my shaded retreat for public scrutiny. It was especially embarrassing to register the reaction of my peers and teachers. To see the disgust in those eyes, or the fascination. To endure the whispered comments.
Worst of all, of course, I had to face Cody Hewitt. He was inescapable. I would be walking down the hall from second period to third and there he would be, in his bright letterman’s jacket. I saw his truck every day when I came through the front door. I saw Cody and Cutter and Barlow and Digger in every chemistry class. At home room. My stomach would churn when I saw Cody. Had he been one of the cowled threesome who entertained me at Fort McKoon? Was he the Sneakers in that ugly coven?
Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble.
I inspected Cody’s shoes to see if they matched those of any of my tormentors. The relief I experienced at discovering his footwear to be unfamiliar was mixed with anger, with anxiety, uncertainty, fear.
Would any perpetrator ever be discovered?
Was there any great impetus to find the men who butchered Joe Billy and me?
Almost five weeks had passed since Fort McKoon and Sheriff Jackson was nowhere nearer an arrest than when he started. The County Judge told Collard bluntly that he was not about to sign an arrest warrant for J.T. Hewitt based on the identification of a mail-order belt. The Klan was not about to finger one of its own. In the absence of other evidence or witnesses, the case simply stalled.
“They gonna let it drop, you watch,” was Joe Billy’s conclusion. “They don’ give a tinker’s damn.”
Which was fine by me. I did not want to become the center of any further attention. I would give anything to be ignored. Joe Billy, however, felt very differently.
“Cut a man up and leave him, it ain’t right!” Joe Billy shook his pinched head. “Ain’t right just to give up on somebody been done like me. Sheriff, all he care about is his damn election.”
I pointed out in response that if the Sheriff was not re-elected then there would be no hope at all for justice. Monk Folsom, certainly, was not about to investigate the Ku Klux Klan in Lafayette County.
“Then we’re fucked for sure,” Joe Billy replied bitterly. “’Cause Monk is damn sure gonna be the next sheri
ff.”
That prognostication was accepted universally. If you’d spent the Saturday before the election in Punk McCray’s barbershop the only disagreement you would have gleaned from the patter of patrons and gossips would be around the margin of Monk’s victory.
The King of Colored Town Page 27