The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

“You couldn’t get a bet on Collard Jackson,” Cutter’s daddy complained, “if you offered odds of a hundred to goddamn one.”

  That was on Saturday.

  But Monday morning Miss Eunice Chandler emerged from West’s Drugstore and marched straight across Main Street, past the courthouse to the County Jail.

  “I’m here to see Sheriff Jackson,” Miss Chandler informed the desk sergeant.

  Pudding’s father was there to record the event. He was being released from his cell after an overnight binge, a regular gig for Mr. Reed.

  “I’m here to see the sheriff,” Miss Chandler repeated.

  “You’ll have to wait.”

  “Is he in?”

  “I said you’ll have to wait.”

  “Tell Sheriff Jackson if he’d like to win his election he will see me now.”

  I would love to have been there to register what look of astonishment, incredulity or fury was kindled in the deputy with that retort.

  “Wait here.”

  A few seconds later, according to Pudding’s daddy, Collard came out.

  “He looked wore out to me,” Mr. Reed later declared when reconstituting the scene for those gathered on Mr. Raymond’s porch.

  “He come right out from behind the desk and said, ‘Miss Chandler, I know you’re worried about this business with Cilla and Joe Billy, but…’”

  “I’m not here about that,” Miss Chandler interrupted smoothly.

  “You’re not?”

  “No, Sheriff. I am here, as I explained to your deputy, to help you win this election.”

  The deputy wagged his head back and forth, like a hound trying to get rid of fleas.

  “May we speak privately, Sheriff Jackson?”

  And to the deputy’s astonishment, and Mr. Reed’s, Collard Jackson stepped to one side.

  “My office,” he said.

  Thus ended Mr. Reed’s contribution to the tale. But there were at least half a dozen other witnesses, black and white, to take up the narrative when within the hour Jim Hicks emerged from his courthouse office to find Sheriff Jackson, two deputies, two cardboard boxes, and Miss Eunice Chandler waiting.

  The supervisor of elections was nonplussed.

  “What-all is this, Sheriff.”

  “Little paperwork is all,” Collard replied gruffly. “Some voters need their cards. Just want to make sure they get put in before tomorrow’s election.”

  “You mean registered? By tomorrow?!” Mr. Hicks wrung his hands. “Sheriff, I can’t do that.”

  “Let’s set a minute, Jim.”

  It was not a request. Collard came around the counter to guide Mr. Hicks back to his office. The door closed. The walls trembled with the conversation that ensued. Jim emerged from his office whiter than the average sheet.

  “Wanda,” he barked, and slapped a slip of paper beside her. “Get this man on the line for me.”

  “Washington D.C .?” Wanda seemed to require a higher authority. “But, Jimmy, that’s long distance.”

  “Just make the call,” Hicks barked again and then, bam! slammed the door as he re-entered his office.

  Wanda slowly dialed the number she’d been given. She used a rotary phone. All they had in those years. And there was no direct dialing, either. Click, click, click. You could hear the travel of that old phone’s rotor.

  “Long distance, please.”

  People began to drift in from other offices, from the hallway. From the County Clerk’s office.

  “Would ya’ll quit lookin’ at me?” Wanda complained, and then with the distinctive chirp of a connection segued smooth as pie—“Mr. Jim Hicks for Sydney Reiner…Mr. Hicks, yes. Supervisor of elections…pardon me…? He’s expecting the call? Well, yes, certainly. I’ll just transfer you…JIMMY!”

  Wanda yelled through the closed door to her brother.

  “IT’S THE DEPARTMENT OF JUSTICE.”

  I knew that Miss Chandler had been collecting black signatures on registration cards. What I did not know was that, rather than turn them in piecemeal, rather than alert the county to the growing potential for a vote of color, Miss Chandler had hidden her lights under a very large bushel. Kept a card up her sleeve, you might say.

  Actually, a bunch of cards.

  By the time Garner Hewitt knew what was down it was too late to do anything about it. With the Attorney General of the United States threatening an investigation of Jim Hicks’ conduct, the supervisor of elections was forced to certify virtually every Negro in Lafayette County eligible for the following day’s election. I should quickly say that it wasn’t obvious how the new registrants would affect the outcome, if at all.

  Black people had been beaten for trying to vote. We had been lynched. And just because you cast your ballot behind a curtain didn’t mean it was secret; it was hard to keep secrets from Garner Hewitt. It was a time of fear and trembling and not even Miss Chandler could say with confidence how many people of color would cast a vote for Collard Jackson.

  The next day, we all found out. On the fifth of May, a Tuesday, 1964, the white citizens of Lafayette County acquitted themselves well. The paper reported that of the thousand eighty-eight votes registered to Caucasians, over seventy percent made their mark at the polls. Seven hundred and eighty-three votes altogether, all from white people. Collard lost that constituency by a margin of three to one, gaining only 196 white votes from the 783 cast.

  That was the white vote.

  But Miss Chandler had made a deal with the devil in Lafayette County. Colored Town would deliver the vote to the incumbent sheriff. And in return?

  “I just told him to enforce the law,” Miss Chandler would insist when asked. “I asked for nothing special. No favors. Just that he enforce the law fairly. Without regard to race or color.”

  In return for assurances that he would uphold the law, Miss Chandler promised Collard Jackson that she would do her best to turn out the vote of the county’s newly emancipated constituency and that she would urge every Negro voter to cast against Monk Folsom.

  Turns out that the cardboard boxes Wanda Hicks was forced to accept held registrations for four hundred and thirteen African American citizens. Of that population, four hundred and three black women and men from all over the county made it to a voting booth. One hundred percent of those citizens cast for the democrats and Collard Jackson.

  People remember dates for different reasons. The end of a war. Family tragedies. The assassination of a President. But the date that Colored Town still holds sacred is Tuesday, May 5th, 1964, because that was the day my people beat Garner Hewitt, Monk Folsom, and all their minions by the margin of just twelve votes.

  “Twelve votes!” Preacher celebrated from the height of his makeshift pulpit. “Twelve! One for every disciple! Praise the Lord!”

  Miss Chandler changed our town and county a lot more with her patient, stubborn campaign than I ever would with my music. Garner Hewitt woke the following Wednesday morning to taste the bile of defeat and to reflect that the Negroes he despised now made up more than a third of the vote in Lafayette County. May 5th, a Tuesday—that was the day my people were truly free. It broke Garner’s hold. It ruined Monk. But it would also ruin Joe Billy, ultimately.

  And, absent a great sacrifice, it would have ruined me.

  Chapter nineteen

  “Negroes Vote in Primary”

  — The Clarion

  I could not afford to spend a lot of time celebrating my community’s first political triumph and newfound strength. I was not, for example, present at the Wednesday prayer meeting when Collard Jackson in person came down the aisle to thank Miss Chandler and our congregation for giving him a victory that was by any account Providential.

  “There’s gonna be changes,” the sheriff promised. “Gonna be some changes made.”

  It’s not that I didn’t care about the election. I was proud of Miss Chandler, proud that my community had gone to the polls, even though at eighteen I was too young to participate. But there were other things c
ompeting for my attention.

  I had missed more than a month of school. There were weeks and weeks of homework and tests to make up: trigonometry, English literature, world history, biology, civics, and, of course, band. I had to make time for the bassoon. And beyond those immediate demands was a summer regimen that Dr. Weintraub mandated, readings in literature and philosophy and fine arts. A glance at that list told me there would be more to college than cosines and scarlet letters.

  My physical condition was a great hindrance. The wounds to my crotch and lips were not completely healed, not to mention the scars on my psyche. I never felt I had enough time; there were only three weeks between the election and final exams. I completed the semester tapped out, terrified that I would not graduate.

  Miss Chandler saw my grades before I did. I did not at first believe her report.

  “You will graduate, Cilla,” Miss Chandler was beaming. “And with distinction.”

  My standing in class necessarily suffered due to the absence caused by four weeks of hospitalization. Even so I graduated salutatorian of our class. Juanita Land was valedictorian. I don’t think I would have been comfortable being on stage with any other classmate. Juanita was never afraid to look at me.

  I got to see her backstage, out of her gown. That silk of hair swaying like a rope between slender shoulders. Down to the small of a well-toned back.

  Mr. Land’s daughter delivered the kind of valedictory address expected by her community. Articulated well her remarks, mated a heartfelt optimism to sparkling notions of choice and destiny. It was a clean, predictable world Juanita painted, a place where Guinevere never cheated and Lancelot never got hard.

  I was not required to speak. It is traditional for the salutatorian’s address to complement the address given by the valedictorian, but I was physically unable to elocute anything so demanding, and even if I had been able to speak I don’t believe I could have delivered, at least not convincingly, the sorts of sentiments that seemed, coming from Juanita, entirely believable.

  I could have been heroic, I suppose. I could have, for instance, performed ‘The Impossible Dream’, on the piano at least. Or I could have muddled through some sort of pithy expression of gratitude. But I didn’t. With Joe Billy’s help, I had begun to aspire to a wider audience. I wanted a different accolade in a different theater.

  Someplace with boxes and curtains and chandeliers.

  The formal dinner that traditionally followed graduation was held, as always, at Betty’s Café. Pudding and Chicken and Shirley Lee were all excited about going. It was as close to a prom as we would ever come. I was reluctant to attend, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I would be virtually the only attendee unaccompanied by a parent. But Juanita recruited Rodney and Jerry Fowler and a dozen other of my band hall stalwarts to insist that I be present.

  “You can sit with us,” Juanita proclaimed. “We’ll be your family.”

  Tradition was broken when for the first time black students and their families mixed in the same space and time as whites. I was greeted by white folks I’d known all my life as if we had never met. I knew Juanita’s parents, for instance. Had seen the Lands innumerable times at their SafeWay store. But we had never been introduced. Not socially.

  Mrs. Land made a special effort to be nice.

  “You’ve been through so much, Priscilla. And you’ve been such a good friend to Juanita.”

  “Ses ban gud do me.”

  (She’s been good to me.) I honestly replied.

  “You going on to college now?”

  “Yeth ma’am.”

  “Music, is that correct? Florida State?”

  “Go Seminoles!” Pudding chimed in, and with the levity that followed, you could almost believe there were no divides of any kind in our newly gathered commune.

  Cody Hewitt attended, of course, his popularity only slightly diminished by his failure to get a football scholarship of any sort to any university. Plans were quietly announced that Cody would attend junior college in Lake City. I don’t think they even had a football team. We circled each other in that dining room like twin suns tied by a mutual gravity, but determined nevertheless to remain distant in our forced orbit.

  Garner and Florence Hewitt made a grand entrance. Garner could not afford to be absent at these public affairs, especially in the aftermath of his failure in the recent election. When I saw him, Cody’s father was smiling broadly. Grabbing hands and slapping backs all over that café. I even saw him buttonhole Preacher Dipps.

  Betty rang a cowbell to signify the serving of dinner, that sit-down meal spread over a dozen tables. I floated from pudding to pilau, listening in on the carefree give and take of my classmates, their flirts and teases mixed with apocrypha and memory, those last categories sometimes difficult to separate. For instance, it was surprisingly hard for our white classmates to believe that Pudding played baseball with heads ripped from the torsos of Barbie dolls, or to imagine Chicken spiraling passes with a juice can.

  Easier to believe that Rodney Land put Kool Aid in the Boy’s Room commodes—that solved a semester-long mystery. Or to hear squeaky-clean Juanita admit to smoking pot.

  “But just once. To see what it was like.”

  One tote won’t take you there, girlfriend.

  As I already knew.

  There were similar confessions of clandestine sin woven with expressions of hope, promise, and anxiety for The Future. I would have liked to take a more active role in that back and forth but was greatly inhibited by my impeded speech. I could not yet articulate well enough to be easily understood, especially above my classmates’ boisterous conversations. Of course, there are persons to whom a salutatorian is obliged to speak on these occasions. Miss Chandler was my interlocutor for those duties, making sure I left my classmates at intervals to say something pleasant, if not always sincere, to my principal and to each of my instructors.

  “Thag you Mister Pud’nal,” I made my manners to the master of home room.

  “Why…of course, Cilla.” He would not look at me. “Good luck at Florida State.”

  I nodded a thank you, using the language of body rather than tongue. So many people approached to offer me congratulations, to express admiration, even. Some of these were my own people, neighbors, folks from church. Some, like Juanita’s mother, were white people uniformly gracious in their congratulations and encouragement. It was, as Carter Buchanan would say, a pleasant span of moments, and yet I was prevented from fully enjoying them. It was hard for me to believe the accolades I’d received were deserved. Some deep pessimism warned that I was not really worth this kind of attention. From where did that dark voice originate? Why couldn’t I make it go away? Why couldn’t I believe that the praises I received on my graduation night were deserved?

  I circulated under Miss Chandler’s wing until my social obligations were fulfilled, returning to spend another hour or so with classmates. Then Miss Betty once again took up her cowbell. The tradition was for parents to dine with the graduating seniors and then, on the second bell, to leave. Normally board games or some such would be cursorily dispersed by chaperones as couples paired off to talk or smooch. This year, however, tradition would be violated a second time as amplifiers and speakers and crates of LPs were lugged in from Betty’s back porch and the floor was cleared for our school’s very first dance.

  Did some stories come out of that sock hop! Chicken Swamp got an instant reputation as a rug-cutter, a regular James Brown. Pudding was more predictably dubbed “Chubby”, for Chubby Checkers. There was some white soul on display, too. Juanita, for one, was reported to light fires all over the floor. Even the chaperones got funky; I would not have minded seeing that.

  But I did not stay for the dance. I offered the excuse of seeking fresh air to exit the dance floor, drifting without challenge through the kitchen. I exited the café by the veranda and saw off to the side the orange-tipped glow of a cigarette.

  Joe Billy stood up for me like a gentleman.r />
  “Cilla. Don’ you look somethin’?”

  (Look nice yourself.)

  His shirt was open at the collar, and short-sleeved, but he had added a nice blazer, very sharp, that complimented well-pressed slacks. His socks were white inside a pair of penny loafers. He was dressed as someone who wanted to attend an affair but was not invited.

  (How long have you been here?) I made myself understood.

  He shrugged. “How long are you gonna be here?”

  I hesitated. I did not want to return to the dance. I would be embarrassed to be approached with any invitation to go out on that wide floor. To be exposed. Not that I thought such an invitation was likely. I was convinced that whatever goods I had were well damaged.