The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  “It’s the attorney’s job to cast doubt.” Professor Statler spoke with conviction. “But in the end the gun was in Joe Billy’s hand.”

  It was in my hand first, I could have said.

  But I didn’t.

  The jury began its deliberation Thursday afternoon. Thurman Shaw did everything he could for his client, closing before the jury with the admonition—“You cannot condemn this boy for trying to protect his sister!” After barely an hour’s sequestering, the jury’s foreman sent the judge a note asking for instruction in the nuances differentiating manslaughter from first-degree murder. Twenty-three hours later a verdict was announced in court. My brother was found not guilty of murder with premeditation, nor with malice. He was convicted instead of simple manslaughter. The conviction for manslaughter protected me from further investigation. Provided, of course, that I stifled my mouth and any pang of conscience. Joe Billy could expect to pay for my freedom with five years in the penitentiary at Raiford. Five years, that is, with good behavior.

  “…and still a young man,” the sheriff had said and it looked as though, once again, Collard had called it right.

  I had planned to stay the weekend with Corrie Jean and Grandma, but elected to leave early. Even Grandma was suspicious that I was somehow involved in Monk’s killing. “I don’ remember you comin’ home that night,” she said, and I did not reply.

  What could be simpler than silence?

  I knew that rumors would grow the longer I stayed and I knew that if I lingered the shame attached to me would associate with my small family. There were too many rumors now unleashed in Colored Town which I could not allay or answer. Too many hostile or averted stares. Miss Chandler agreed to board Dr. Statler overnight so that I would have a ride back to Tallahassee.

  The next morning I rose early, very early, so that I might haul water unobserved. Then I made some eggs, took care of Mama, and walked over to Miss Chandler’s house. Professor Statler was waiting. I embraced Miss Chandler briefly,

  “Write me,” she said.

  I promised I would and then stooped to enter the Cadillac. Once inside it was as though a sudden bile of fury and disappointment, rage and guilt, boiled up inside and I vomited a stream of vile invective.

  “FUCK THESE PEOPLE!”

  I pounded the dash of my counselor’s car.

  “FUCK THESE PEOPLE!”

  He waited patiently for me to finish.

  “Is there anything else?” he said finally. “Before we leave?”

  We crossed the tracks separating Colored Town from Laureate and I did not look back. But I couldn’t leave without seeing Joe Billy. The desk sergeant worked hard to pretend he didn’t see me as I pushed through the single door opening to the street.

  “May I see him?”

  Another deputy lazily waved a scrap of paper.

  “Sheriff said let her in if she came.”

  The desk sergeant returned to his Field & Stream . “You take her, then.”

  One more trip to the county cells. One more passage through that forbidding portal dull and gray, that pad of keys, the buzzer raucous and abrupt. I walked down, down to the seventh circle. My guide abandoned me half way.

  “You’ll find him.”

  The sheriff had given Joe Billy the suite cell. The commode had a lid. There was a sink with faucets in repair. He even had a radio, a portable. Some deejay was going on about a British invasion. Joe Billy switched off that transistorized miracle as soon as he saw me.

  “Joe Billy…”

  I couldn’t think of anything to say.

  He stood up and wrapped his hands around the bars. “It’s awright.”

  I shook my head. “No. It’s not.”

  “Cilla, it was right before. It’s more than right now. Look at me, girl—you my sister. How could I let my sister wind up in a place like this?”

  “You shouldn’t be here, either.”

  “You sound like Thurman.”

  “Thurman’s right.”

  “Right don’t always win out, Cilla. If life was right colored folks wouldn’ get cut by Klansmen. Wouldn’ get set on with dogs or hoses. Wouldn’t get they churches burned to ash, or hung on dogwood trees.”

  You know how light changes? I mean the light of the sun, how it changes from nadir to zenith through the seasons, the shadows getting longer and longer from summer when it’s bright all the time to winter when it’s dark before you can haul your water? It must happen slowly, that gradation into the diurnal.

  But the thing is, when you notice it, you notice it all at once. That’s the way it was with Joe Billy. He had changed, I could see that clearly. I saw it all at once.

  “Did Thurman tell you before the trial?”

  “Tell me what?”

  “You know what.”

  “That you was my sister? Naw. He din’ tell me nuthin.”

  I clutched myself. “I feel dirty.”

  “Don’t,” he reached out a hand to comfort me. He, in jail, awaiting a term of damnation, comforting me. “You din’ know. Ain’t no sin less you know.”

  “I know you didn’t kill Monk Folsom,” I replied. “But I’m letting you take the blame, aren’t I? Lied in front of God to do it. Under oath! Isn’t that a sin?”

  “Prob’ly,” he allowed. “But it’s my sin, too. I’m the one tole’ you to do it, Cilla. And if I had it to do over? I’d do the same thing. ’Specially now, knowing we’re kin. Do it every goddamn time.”

  “They blame me for it, anyway.” I wiped my eyes on the sleeve of my Seminole sweatshirt. “Ever’body. They hate me.”

  “They get over it,” Joe Billy squeezed my hands. “I get out, I’ll tell ’em to git over it, how’s that?”

  That boy! He could get a laugh anywhere.

  Sheriff Jackson pulled up in his cruiser as I left the jail. That big, bronze-painted star on the door. The car slowed to a stop and the window rolled down.

  “You see Joe Billy?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How’s he doing?”

  “Holding up.”

  “Uh huh. How ’bout you?”

  “I’m fine,” I told him, and then, “Not really.”

  “No,” he shook his head. “It ain’t never gonna feel good. But you did what you had to do. Only thing surprised me was, well, about you and Joe Billy.”

  My cheeks burned. The sheriff shook his head.

  “You’d think a place this small I could know every hair on every head.”

  I swallowed. “What do they do to you, Sheriff? In jail?”

  He tapped the accelerator with the toe of his boot. “He’s young. He’ll be fine.”

  Then he pulled away. The window rolled up, the car purred past me and around the corner toward the chain-linked entrance protecting the county compound. I salved my own conscience that day with the pithy mantra that five years of a man’s life, though not desirable, was better than the dreaded Chair. I knew that Raiford was a dangerous place, but I told myself that Joe Billy would be protected, at least. I did not want to think what might happen to a castrated man, a boy, really, in the company of hardened felons. I don’t think I could have imagined what would happen to Joe Billy in that Sodom of sodomites.

  I just told myself that he’d be all right. He’d be fine. Maybe they would even let him illustrate his guitars. And I would help, I would. I’d send batteries for the radio. Cards and letters. I would not neglect my brother in prison. Not for five years.

  I walked from the jailhouse to the opened door of my attorney’s automobile and an hour and a half later was back in Tallahassee. I left Florida State within the year for a scholarship at Juilliard. I left New York for the concert in Manila. From there I took my bassoon to Berlin, then back to New York before recording in Los Angeles and Rome.

  During those travels Joe Billy was raped by an inmate, starved by guards, and felled by heatstroke on a chain gang.

  Thurman Shaw called me once, through my agent, with an urgent request to appear as a ch
aracter witness on my brother’s behalf, at a parole hearing. It would have meant giving up the Berlin tour. I made do with a letter and a videotaped plea for clemency. My manager assured me it was just as effective as going in person. Better use of time, he said.

  I was performing in Vienna the day Joe Billy’s parole was denied. It was not long afterward that JayBee made the first of two attempts to escape from Raiford. On the second attempt he killed a trustee, one of the inmates who’d raped him. Cut the bastard’s throat with a razor. With that act of defense or justice Joe Billy lost any chance at parole. His eighth year in Raiford he was jumped in the laundry room. A pair of inmates held him down while another pried out his eyes with a spoon. Joe Billy never got out of prison. And until I returned to bury him I never again saw my brother’s sightless face.

  I checked my watch.

  Until tonight.

  Chapter twenty-four: Homecoming

  It took a funeral to return me to the community of my childhood. I left the mortuary in my rented Lincoln, hooked a left on Highway 27, which doubles as Main Street, and on the way to my motel spotted the water tower. The only thing changed was the latest addition of grafitti—

  LHS SENIORS , 1993

  Cindy’s Motel remained unchanged in the shade of live oaks just behind Shirley’s Café. A message was waiting for me when I checked in. Edward Tunney had located dogwood blossoms in quantity and hoped I would be pleased. The message also assured that “the body” was ready for transport from the funeral home to Mr. Raymond’s residence.

  Mr. Raymond assumed that responsibility in my absence. Yet another debt accrued to my account.

  I did not sleep well that evening. I rose late, showered and walked in the damp, languid air to Shirley’s place. I looked for distraction in my coffee, the morning paper. But finally the moment could not be delayed. I left Shirley’s Café and the motel sometime before noon, turning onto a freshly paved street that took me to City Park, a place still shrouded in Spanish moss and memory. My rented towncar seemed pulled as if by some invisible hand over the railroad tracks and suddenly I had left the paved streets of Laureate and entered the shaded and sandy avenues of Colored Town.

  I was looking for Mr. Raymond’s home, but the sandy ruts that had been the boulevards of Colored Town were now converted to blacktop, those old latitudes and longitudes shifted to some unfamiliar Mercatur. Other landmarks I used to take for granted had been razed or renovated beyond recognition.

  The houses I used to see every day on my way to Kerbo School were gone, those framed boxes of pine and tin largely replaced by doublewide trailers presiding over what looked like used-car lots, the rusted hulls of Nissans and Mitsubishis replacing the chassis of the Fords and Chevrolets which for generations were the only vehicles to be seen in Colored Town.

  The fences of field wire or split rails that were once friendly perimeters around boisterous playgrounds were now forbidding boundaries bereft of children, reinforced by rebar and barbed wire and field fence. Dogs now patrolled the playgrounds of Colored Town, those mange-ridden sentries snarling at any passerby, their tails tucked into their anuses.

  I rolled right past Mr. Raymond’s, had to double back on a strip of splintered asphalt to find that once-familiar residence.

  It was not the home I knew from teenage years, but at least it wasn’t a trailer. The exterior was most altered, asbestos shingles now lapping over the ageless cypress whose warps and grooves always before pleased my eye. The porch had a new roof but the pump, the hated hand pump remained, seized in rust.

  The yard about the house was gone to seed, the sandy ground once meticulously raked and weeded now grown over with briars and sandspurs. But heaving out of my luxury car I did see one thing that remained familiar; bleach bottles broken and amber and strung by their necks on the field fence defending Mr. Raymond’s home.

  For as long as I can remember my people have used bleach bottles to mark a grieving house. Bleach takes the stain of Death away, if not the sting. It disinfects, it makes white. Purity is still identified with the absence of color in Colored Town. It is hard in Laureate to make black beautiful, even for black people. Colored folks from my region know that when you’ve got something isn’t clean, it needs to be bleached, to be made sere.

  The broken bottles of Clorox ringing Mr. Raymond’s yard cordoned off an area now purified and sacred. Older people would simply say the bleached necklace wards off evil spirits, by which they meant darker malignancies, those succubi inhaled in moments of sin, concupiscence or, as in my case, when afflicted by a malformed or guilty conscience. Within the bottles’ defended perimeter the soul of the deceased enjoys a final evening with his family and friends before being subsumed into the bosom of a Savior always depicted with ivory white skin.

  I knew that somewhere in Mr. Raymond’s house I would find a casket and Joe Billy. It used to be common, bringing the dead into your home. Before the insinuation of funeral parlors we always laid out our dead in their own houses, or homes of kin, in open coffins. Ed Tunney and an industry of undertakers begging to save that inconvenience now offered a viewing room of the deceased in return for a down payment toward interment. In the older custom those “passing on” were carried without expense to a bedroom or out front. To the living room, so called. People filed by to grieve, or at least to affect symptoms of grief appropriate to one’s distance from the deceased: Husband, wife, son, daughter, grandparents, if applicable, uncles, aunts, first cousins—and so on.

  Following the family’s expressions came those of friends or neighbors. And of course there was a final group of mourners, not inconsiderable, who only passed the corpse on their way to the kitchen. Anytime you saw a coffin in a house there was food, my Lord, and the stricken family was not allowed to prepare a thing, not even a pot of coffee. Everything eaten for three days before a funeral and three after came potluck from relatives and neighbors and in generous quantity.

  When I was younger I felt perfectly at ease eating before a corpse. It was one of the few occasions I could have my fill and not feel as though it came from charity. And I was never alone; there might be a hundred people, or more, gathered to respect the passing of the most humble soul in our community. We all came. It was expected.

  But entering Mr. Raymond’s protected yard I saw no throng of mourners. A handful of men palmed smokes at the porch, their conversation lost in undertones. A few children played tag out front, their voices high and empty of grief. I was not recognized as I crossed the yard or even when I mounted the newly manufactured steps to Mr. Raymond’s porch. The doorbell was there, but on this occasion was not to be used. It was impolite, in these circumstances, to require anyone inside to abandon his cup, plate, or corpse for the simple purpose of opening a door. I rapped the knuckles of my hand lightly on the postern anyway, as if for luck. The door opened easily. I stepped inside.

  Pudding Reed saw me first.

  “Well, well.” He held a Ball jar filled with iced tea. “Somebody said you was back.”

  No hint of Romeo, here. The long soft body hanging heavy with flesh. A fold of belly over his belt.

  “Pudding,” I put on a big smile. “It’s good to see you.”

  Heads turned with that opener. Mr. Raymond was there to preside, seated at the same deer-hide chair that used to preside over the porch, formal, as usual, the crisply creased trousers sharp as any conductor’s.

  “Cilla. Been expecting you.” He did not rise from his seat.

  “How long you been back?” Another and younger challenge. I swiveled to locate a black woman in cornrows and a loud florid warp and almost did not recognize Shirley Lee. “I say ‘How long you been back?’”

  “Just since yesterday.”

  “Been a while since we’ve seen you.”

  “Yes, it has,” Pudding answered for me.

  “And where is Chicken?” I asked jovially of Shirley Lee’s brother. “Where is that Chicken Swamp?”

  Shirley Lee’s face seemed to stretch over a pi
cture frame. “Chicken’s been dead for years, Cilla. Died in Viet Nam.”

  “Cambodia,” Pudding corrected her. “But then that cain’t be right, can it? ’Cause we never had a war in Cambodia.”

  “Now, Pudding—” I turned to find Lonnie Hines. This could not be the boy who huddled behind my desk at Kerbo school! This could not be the boy I let cheat off my tests! Lonnie had grown tall and fit. He was wearing a suit that I could tell had been tailored. A Ralph Lauren shirt. Rolex watch. “Good to see you, Cilla.”

  Pudding reached past Lonnie to get a leg of chicken. “You’d of called or wrote anytime the last twenty years you’d of known about Chicken.”

  “Pudding, let’s don’t take it out on her. Joe Billy wouldn’t want that.”