The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  JayBee would be represented by Thurman Shaw, the same attorney who barely a year earlier defended Cody Hewitt for shotgunning road signs. In fairness, I believe Thurman did what he could to help Joe Billy. But even with Sheriff Jackson helping in the wings Thurman was going to have a hard time selling Joe Billy’s story—I should say my story, or at least the story invented for my benefit.

  “Here,” I greeted Joe Billy, slipping an RC Cola from beneath my top.

  “Bring any candy?”

  “Honey Bun.”

  Conversation turned from those banalities to the coming trial. Depositions and procedures. What he’d be wearing in court.

  “Mr. Raymond got you a suit,” I told him. “Bought it secondhand at the Thrift Store. You’ll look real good.”

  Eventually my chatter wore thin.

  “Ten minutes,” a deputy called out.

  “Joe Billy.”

  “Uh huh? Well?”

  “I just want you to know I went to Collard. I told him I shot Monk.”

  I swear he almost turned white.

  “Cilla Handsom!”

  “No, no,” I whispered fiercely. “He wouldn’t let me do anything.”

  “Wouldn’t let?!”

  “He told me to keep quiet. Said it wouldn’t help anything.”

  “That’s for damn sure,” Joe Billy grabbed the bars of his cell. “Goddamn, Cilla, you want us both in here?”

  “I could’n keep it inside! I just couldn’t!”

  “Never would of guessed you’d pick Collard,” Joe Billy shook his head. “Why didn’t he arrest you? Didn’t he believe you?”

  “He didn’t come right out in so many words. But, yeah, he believes me. He knows for sure it wasn’t you.”

  “Good to hear,” Joe Billy looked like he’d bit off a chunk of lemon.

  “I could tell your lawyer, Joe Billy. I could tell Mr. Thurman, couldn’t I? Why don’ I do that?”

  “‘Why don’t you’, Cilla? Why?” And then he looked at me straight and when he did I had no more place to hide. “Because you don’t want to.”

  “But I do!”

  “No. You don’t, Cilla.”

  He smiled like one of those clowns at a fair.

  “Jesus maybe drank his bitter cup, but you ain’t no Jesus. Don’t get me wrong, I don’t blame you. It’s all right, it really is. Remember I’m the one talked you into it. Just think about where you’re gonna be this September. ’Cause if you was in here, in my shoes? You’d be on trial for killing a man.”

  He took both my hands in his.

  “You got a chance at college, Cilla. You got your music. You cain’t throw that away for no jail time. What kind of scholarship gone be waitin’ for a colored girl when she get out of jail? If she get out?!

  “Get real, sugar doll, you don’t want to swap places with me. Your conscience is eating, surely. I can see that. Going to Collard proves that. But the only thing to do is just lay it down. You got to just lay it down, Cilla. I made the decision that put me in this jail. Remember? Me. And I’d do it again.

  “Only thing you can do for me is go to Tallahassee and make your mark. Make your mark, baby, and swagger when you do. And when you talk about where you come from, where you been, things you did, you can brag on me. Yes, you can.

  “You can tell ’em you knew Joe Billy King.”

  Chapter twenty-one

  “Negroes Excluded From Jury”

  — The Clarion

  O ne of the last things I did before leaving for Florida State was to fabricate an alibi. Sheriff Jackson insisted. “Nobody’s even looking in your direction, Cilla. This here’s just to make sure it stays that way.” So I signed a statement swearing/affirming that on the night in question I left Betty’s Café by myself and was home with my mother and grandmother a little after ten-thirty in the evening. “Simple is best,” Collard filed the paperwork. “Just keep it simple. The rest you keep to yourself.”

  Had I remained in Colored Town I’m not sure I’d have been able to keep that counsel, but by September I was entirely absent from Lafayette County and adjusting to dorm life at Florida State. My roommate at Landis Hall was Cuban, had fled with her family from Castro. She was always on the phone chattering with relatives in a vulgate Spanish, spouting vitriol at any opportunity, railing constantly about the spoiled fortunes of:

  her once-wealthy family:

  “We drank from silver cups.”

  her fidelity to Batiste:

  “A misunderstood man.”

  her hatred for Castro:

  “Fidel fucks dogs.”

  While tacking posters of Che Guevara all over our undergraduate walls.

  Despite Dr. Weintraub’s best efforts I was not prepared for college life. There were physical challenges that caught me by surprise. I found, for instance, that for all my hard use in watermelon and tobacco fields I was not in good physical shape. The rolling hills around Tallahassee that city slickers negotiated with ease, daily tested my own endurance. Just getting back and forth between classes left me winded. I did handle the heat better than most, a not inconsiderable advantage, I suppose. And since I was not accustomed to air-conditioning, I did not experience its absence as keenly as did the vast majority of students attending.

  I was used to misery.

  With the benefit of Dr. Weintraub’s summer instruction I was able to navigate from my dorm on The Green to lecture halls or to the library. I could find the post office and my chemistry lab and, off campus, got to know the stores and hangouts convenient along Copeland Street and Tennessee and Magnolia Way.

  The physical terrain was new to me but the cultural topography was in some ways unexpectedly familiar. It didn’t take long to realize that white students at FSU regarded black people in ways not much different than Caucasians in my home county. I should not have been surprised. Florida State’s campus body was, still is, comprised overwhelmingly of students from the South, usually the Deep South. In ’64, these were young people who had always been in positions socially superior to African Americans. The inevitable stereotypes and attitudes arising from that segregated milieu were only rarely challenged at the university.

  This isn’t to say that life as a Negro at Florida State was like life in Colored Town. It was not. I had many more comforts at FSU than I ever enjoyed in my childhood home. I ate better. I was healthier. I was safe from the injuries of overt bigotry, so long as I didn’t stray off campus. And though the academic life at State did not extend much past college algebra and the poetry of John Crowe Ransom, it was still a life infinitely richer than any I had imagined. Dr. Weintraub was crucial in that development, a mentor as unfailing and wise as Miss Chandler.

  Still, now and again, and always at the unexpected moment, I would be challenged with some question or remark that made me feel as though I were back in the heart of Colored Town. Nearly every co-ed in my dormitory, to give the recurring example, found a way to ask how I had gotten admitted into Florida State. Was there a special provision? What string had been pulled? Those students with whom I studied, other music majors, were generally astounded to find I had a serious interest in classical composition. There really aren’t any successful Negroes in that field, I would be reminded.

  Though I lived on a college campus, I was expected to keep my place. And I honestly didn’t mind. I didn’t mind eating a little crow, now and then, because it was so much better than eating shit day in and out. I knew how to be a black spot on a white wall, ende problema . So it was almost alarming to stumble on a clutch of students who did not care about color at all.

  All these women cared about was that I was tall.

  I should mention that there were few women of any race over six feet in height on FSU ’s rolling campus. The only other females close to my size, of which there were three, and only one black, were on the basketball team. I met one of those “ladies”, as they called themselves, a little over a month into the semester. I had spread out on the marble bench that was recessed just i
nside the Music Building. It was a brutally hot September day. Ours was the only centrally-cooled building on campus, recall, and so students who had nothing to do with the School of Music came panting to KMU , clustering around that long marble bench like bees around a honey jar, spreading out homework or term papers that clinged wet to forearms damp with perspiration. Prying apart the leaves of an assigned Republic , or Tolstoy, or chemistry text. Or simply pressing sweat-drenched backs to a cool wall.

  Anything to beat the heat.

  I had cornered part of the marble, spreading out my books and puzzling over some variations of folk music that I’d come across in an anthropology class. The professor had recorded what he described as some “primitive” instrumentals. Somewhere in Brazil, I think it was. Those erotic and persistent rhythms reminded me of the music I used to hear in tent meetings and revivals, and I was taking some time in KMU ’s Arctic cool to construct a melange of those themes, those shared characteristics. Reclined like Scheherazade on a stone couch.

  Making music in my head.

  “Do I know you?”

  I looked up and saw the Nubian of my dreams, that negress I’d seen on the stairway a summer earlier on my first trip to Tallahassee. She who was unafraid of uniformed men. A backpack, not ubiquitous in those days, was now slung casually over those broad shoulders. She had traded her short skirt and classy blouse for warm-up slacks and a sweatshirt tied off to offer a peek at a washboard belly beneath. It was daring, those campus days, to show any skin at all. That cream and coffee skin.

  “From the stairwell?”

  I was still in the Southerner’s habit of ending statements in the interrogative even when intending the declarative.

  She slid the L.L. Bean off her shoulders.

  “There are lots of stairwells.”

  “Right here. In fact—” I indicated with my hand-sharpened pencil, “right over there? I’d come for an audition. Last summer?”

  “So you’re a freshman.”

  “Uh huh.”

  “Got a name?”

  “Sorry. It’s Priscilla. Or just Cilla? Cilla Handsom.”

  She stuck out a hand. A firm grip, not hurried. “Ever play basketball?”

  “I play music,” I said as if that activity excluded the other.

  She laughed. “It’s just intramurals, no big thing. We meet each Saturday morning, around nine, at the gym. That’s Montgomery Gym. You know it?”

  “I’m at Landis,” I nodded.

  “Can’t get lost from there, can you? So come on over. It’ll be a lot of fun. And I’m guessing you’ll find it won’t hurt your music.”

  She turned away.

  “Got a name?” I said to her back and she tossed that long, naturally unbrindled hair.

  “I’m Kate. Kate Dobson.”

  “You’re not from the South.”

  She winked. “You got that right. See you Saturday. If you’re game.”

  I never was worth a damn at basketball. But the physical release of sporting activity accomplished in the company of strong, vulgar, and exuberant women was liberating. We’d play for an hour or so, pounding (or, in Kate’s case, gliding) up and down the hardwood court to shouts of encouragement from roommates, some of them boys, who came to cheer on the game.

  The intramurals at Florida State were optional, of course, completely self-elected. At first I thought that school and music and work would not leave time for Saturday play. But almost immediately I began to look forward to that weekend combat. I was amazed that no one had much to say about my lips or obvious injuries. No one averted their eyes. No one made comments. And everyone seemed to genuinely respect my chosen course of study.

  “One of the hardest majors on campus,” Kate said proudly, herself a junior interested in vocal studies.

  I met a fair number of students majoring in music those first few weeks, most of them as scatterbrained as any teenager, a few, as I was, scared to death and self-absorbed. We were always squirreled away with our instruments, practicing. At any hour freshmen could be found in soundproofed booths, leaning over their piano or oboe or cocked over a violin. But the hard courses for me were the ones that didn’t have anything to do with music. I spent hours sweating out biology exams and quizzes in college algebra. Literature just took time; I never got the knack of reading quickly. And then more hours were consumed in a library where Dewey Decimal was the sole search engine.

  But the hours I spent performing or researching papers or studying, even when accomplished in groups or in the presence of familiars, was a lonely endeavor. I never got over feeling that I had to prove myself, that my inclusion with other students at the university was not the result of a handout or special consideration. Even in the dormitory I felt the odd woman out.

  On the basketball court, however, where I was truly a neophyte, I felt immediately at home. The coeds who slapped me on the back or butt each Saturday seemed cut of an entirely different cloth. They were rowdy. They were sassy. They were smart. My classmates came from Music, or Education, or Pre-med. But my buddies shot hoops.

  We showered together afterward. I avoided that exhibition initially, making one excuse or another. One Saturday I was set to sneak away again when I felt an arm drape across my shoulder like a cloak.

  “Cilla. What say we get some steam?”

  It was Kate. My first impulse was to decline her invitation.

  “Naw, I need to get back.”

  “Are you embarrassed? Is that it?”

  The question, directly given, could not be dodged. Her arm remained firmly along my shoulder.

  “It’s not what you think,” I said. “It’s worse.”

  She squeezed me. Just a little squeeze. “Think I can’t see? ’cause what I can see looks bad enough.”

  “I don’t know—”

  “Cilla, no one is going to make fun of you. Just about everybody here’s got something she wishes she could hide.”

  “Not you,” I protested, and she grinned lasciviously.

  “I know. Ain’t I a bitch?”

  The womens’ locker room featured spare metal cabinets, long wooden benches and a tiled floor slick as snot on a doorknob. We’d strip in a line before the lockers, tossing pants and only the occasional bra inside, padding then to the showers, our flanks squeezed tight as virgins. Then to reach overhead, turn the chromed faucets on full and hot! To luxuriate in a virtual bath of steam. What a team was there, a gaggle of young, healthy women, pores bursting with perspiration, our voices a constant contralto of teases and curses and other invitation.

  The first time I showered in the company of my teammates I contrived to face the tiled walls. But the horseplay around shower stalls and lockers goes a long way to alleviate self-consciousness or absorption. A towel snapped smartly on your rear brings attention vividly to present circumstance. A challenge from a teammate can be terrific diversion from self-pity. It would be naive, certainly, to say that the scars on my lips or between my legs were no different in kind than the acned complexion or sagging boobs variously afflicting my teammates. The signs of my torture would not rinse away in the rowdy communion of that Spartan shower.

  But they were largely ignored.

  Certainly I saw no one inspecting my genitalia. Any man standing at a urinal knows how to ignore the tool of the fellow pissing next door. Women are no less delicate. It was a tremendous relief to discover that I could stand naked and not be regarded as an object of either disgust or derision. My teammates wanted me under the bucket to break up the fast break. They wanted me to haul down rebounds. They wished to hell I could sink a shot from the free-throw line. They were not interested in a view of my pudenda, and the scars on my lips, open to regard, drew no more comment than those on my closed and private parts.

  “Cilla,” Kate shouted one day above the pound of stinging needles.

  “What?”

  “We’re going to The Sweet Shop. Wanta come?”

  The Sweet Shop was a short walk away, a hangout contrarily named, f
amous for burgers and beers and other hydration. I could not afford a sandwich or Budweiser, but iced tea was only twenty-five cents and you could get all the refills you wanted. So first came the Saturday games. Then you hit the showers. Then the well-shaded patio at Sweet’s.

  I was probably a month into that routine before Kate suggested I drop by her room.

  “I’ve got some old forty-fives and a Beatles LP . Be interesting to hear what you think of it.”

  She had a small garage apartment off Tennessee Street.