The King of Colored Town

by Darryl Wimberley

  “I used to get concerts. I used to get invited to Berlin, to Vienna. Now I do soundtracks for horror movies.”

  “Is that what they call writer’s block?”

  “I don’t believe in writer’s block. I don’t believe in blocks of any kind.”

  “Then what’s holding you back?”

  That was the question, wasn’t it? That was the disturbing, unnerving, frightening question.

  And I did not know the answer.

  “I have something for you,” Juanita leaned over her nightstand to retrieve a tattered cigar box.

  “We were cleaning out one of the old residences the other day and found this squirreled away in a closet. It was your mother’s, Cilla. I’m sure of it.”

  I hesitated before the humble box.

  “Go ahead. You need to see.”

  The cardboard lid came off in my hands. First I saw was a photograph, an old one, black and white.

  “Good Lord.”

  I brushed the photo with my fingertips as if to make certain it was real. A mature man and a lanky teenaged girl held their backs to the camera, smiling broadly, each of them, over the shoulder. I recognized myself in the grainy likeness, a gawky, tall, chocolate-skinned teen. The player beside me was also tall, six feet at least, and slender. He had thick hair, groomed back a lot like Joe Billy’s. His fingers were preternaturally long, you could see them in the picture splaying across eight octaves of keys. He could probably have held a basketball in either one of those hands. A black man, a musician in his prime, dressed to the nines in suit and tie.

  “That’s you, isn’t it, Cilla? On the bench?”

  “Yes, Joe Billy took the picture. And that’s Alex McBride.”

  I sat with the photograph, holding it as if to soak the emulsion into my eyes, my mind. He had changed my life, that man. In the space of an afternoon he showed me a new path.

  “I was seventeen years old,” I said.

  There were a few other mementos hoarded away. A locket, cheaply engraved. A postcard, one of the few I sent home while on the road. Some newspaper yellow with decomposition papered the bottom of my foundling box. I picked up a clipping.

  “Local Negro at Carnegie,” ran the headline.

  “You all right, Cilla?”

  “I’m fine,” I said and returned my inheritance carefully to its flimsy keep. “Is this why you sent word to Charles?”

  “You’re my friend, Cilla. You will always be my friend. I didn’t need a reason.”

  She lay open as a book before me. That modest, firm architecture of bone and muscle. Hair aged and splendid and spreading like linen. I leaned over and pressed my lips to hers. Juanita smiled up at me. Not a hint of embarrassment or censure.

  It was like kissing an angel.

  I emerged from the smell of disinfectant and bedpans into a summer breeze redolent with ozone and the admonitions of a coming storm. I had long missed my flight out of Tallahassee and was surprised to find that I was untroubled by that failure. I could take a room overnight in the capital city, after all. Make a connection through Atlanta to New York or Newark in the morning.

  Syd, or John, or whatever his name was, could wait.

  I remained on the grounds of Dowling Park, lingering about the place where I was born, to hear wind shaking the cymbals of leaves, to anticipate the flicker of sheet lightning. I strolled away from the infirmary, pausing outside some open commons to see a group of aging residents rapt before a widescreen television, their faces slack and passive before that lambent hearth. There was a piano in that open room, unused. I tried to imagine my mother still among them, how they might crowd about her perfect performance animated and active, recalling the lyrics of some long-ago song, rekindling in Corrie Jean’s untutored play the music of a durable youth.

  Double your pleasure. Double your fun.

  I tried to imagine what it must have been like for Corrie Jean dying here, no mother of her own to hold her hand, her daughter uncomprehended and a continent away, a son never imagined. Did she know I had deserted her? I hoped not. Thank God Juanita had been here to care for Mama; thank God she forgave me for running away.

  I hoped Joe Billy forgave me, too.

  By the time I picked my way back to my car, leaves and twigs were whirling off the pebbled path in ominous dervishes. Sliding beneath the wheel, I saw a faint glow from an infirmary window.

  I would call, I promised myself. I would write.

  It was almost eleven o’clock when I re-crossed the Suwannee. Not a hint of moon showing. I could not see the water churning darkly below, nor the sky above. I hit a thunderstorm near Perry, turned north soon after to take the wide four-lane leading to Tallahassee. My car rocked with fresh buffets of wind. The rain slapped my windshield in heavy sheets. It was now as dark as the inside of a cow, impossible except in brief flashes of lightning to see anything along the road, though through the interval of my wipers’ arms there would appear brief and distant flickers of light. Just small winks of illumination, well off the pavement. Trailer homes, probably, intruding onto what were once fields garnished exclusively in islands of dogwood.

  Without the stimulation of scenery the radio was even more welcome than usual. I tapped the scanner of my car’s digitized receiver and picked up a publicly funded station.

  The overture to Von Weber’s Oberon is instantly recognizable. It has been often observed that the opening themes find a concrete link, sometimes even repetition, in narrative details later encountered. The overture’s opening horn, for instance, calling soft as a lute, provides the tune played by Puck’s magic horn. The violins that climb quickly and with energy in the allegro will later run with the lovers to their waiting ship. The fairy kingdom itself, that ambiance, that mood, (especially when accompanied by wind and storm) is mostly the product of wind instruments; the woodwinds in particular descend on a steep staircase to establish a musical constellation for Puck’s fairyland, and when the bassoons came in I instantly recognized my own.

  To that point I honestly do not believe I had ever heard a performance of my own over the radio. In studios, yes, many times I have listened to my recordings. On CD s as well, or tape. But not on a radio, certainly not traveling. And this was not one of my solo performances. I was barely a neophyte at the point in my career when this work was conducted, a day-laborer in ensemble with others.

  I turned up the volume, siphoning out Planche’s English libretto, and then something happened that had not happened to me for a long time. I was not only hearing the music, I was seeing it as written . Each instrument’s score flashed before me, each note. I imagined each score as code, a rune guiding the transformation of sound to electricity to analog to discreet digits of information—and then back again, the code broken, a pulse of magnets transmogrified to the flight of fairies, a composite of percussion and string and wind coursing invisibly through the integrated circuits, reproduced with fidelity through woofs and tweeters that niched like elves in the cage of my luxury car.

  What kingdom could be more fantastic? And what fairy was telling me to write it down? It seemed silly. Why would you write down other people’s music? Why would you do that? From where did this impulse derive?

  Then I remembered Colored Town and Mr. Raymond’s porch side pump. The red wagon. Hauling water. Mr. Raymond always said you couldn’t get any water until you first primed the pump. How long had it been, I wondered, since my pump had been primed?

  I rummaged around the console, feeling for the barrel of my pen. But what to do for paper? My legal pad and stationery were packed away in the car trunk. Was I really willing to rescue those parchments in the assault of rain and wind and lightning?

  Then I saw the bag.

  It lay there, brown and dry on the floorboard of my car, emptied of Perrier and potato chips. Within moments I was pulled off onto the shoulder of the road, scribbling measures of Oberon on a grocer’s parchment smoothed over the console between my bucket seats. I wrote as fast as I could hear. I’d pick up the
cellos for awhile, then the flutes, the clarinets. The solo clarinet. I wrote until I ran out of space. I wrote until there was no more bag to write on. Then I looked at the music in my lap, a mess of notes and instruments, folded it in squares, and got back on the road. The storm was spent by the time I reached Tallahassee. I stopped at a Seven-Eleven and purchased coffee bitter as bark.

  “There be anything else?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  I checked into a Holiday Inn and rose early the next morning to turn on the radio. I tuned in a jazz station, a pop station, back to the station I had heard the night before. Jazz, pop, classical, I did not discriminate. I just scored samples from every song, symphony, or jingle I tuned in. Anything with a melody in it I scratched down. An hour or so into that activity I paused to book a flight out of Tallahassee.

  Then I called my agent.

  “I’m going to be late.”

  “Columbia’s waiting.”

  “They can wait a few weeks longer.”

  “The hell are you doing, Cilla?”

  I board a plane in Tallahassee and spread my scores on the seat tray. I am no longer writing down the music that someone else has rendered. I am not writing down the tunes I hear from a radio, nor from the aircraft’s digital store. For the first time in a long time I am rendering the notes and chords and melodies for a composition that only I can hear, a work that exists only in my imagination.

  It comes so quickly I can scarcely keep up.

  “What is that?”

  The passenger beside is bemused.

  “It’s music,” I reply, thinking that ought to be obvious.

  “No, no,” he folds his Journal . “What is that ? That you’re writing on.”

  “Oh,” I smile. “It’s a grocery bag.”

  Not white paper. Not pure. Not regular, either. Not an eight-by-eleven tapestry, no. My vellum is dark and coarse and brown, an unruly citizen in the world of paper. Not pristine. Not elite. It is working class and ragged. It tears unevenly. Its folds are ravines for my scrawling pencils. I can wad it or stretch it or tape it to the wall. Or spread it with other bags on the floor.

  “I like the color.”

  I am not certain at first where I am going, so long has it been since I successfully composed. But as I write I begin to hear the sounds again, and see them. I nearly miss my plane in Atlanta so busy am I scoring my brown paper bags. I determine to remain in New York, or at least nearby, for weeks of labor and composition. I will listen to Joe Billy’s music, to blues and jazz. I will listen to Mozart and Beethoven and the White Album and Charles Mingus. I will listen to my mother, even in my dreams. And I will wrestle with angels hip and thigh until I fuse the music of Colored Town with classical ode to tell the story of a boy who painted guitars dirty and became a king.

  I am going to write this thing, I know now that I am, and there will be no pause. The dam is broken and I must haul water ’till the barrel’s filled. And then I will have to gather my crew, my musicians. Mend those fences. And then to find a producer. Someone willing to take a chance. I’ll use my own money, if I have to. Even if I lose it all. And when it’s done I shall find a radio and I shall listen to the work I have created. I will think of Joe Billy. I will remember Mama. I will write Miss Chandler, long letters, full of appreciation. And Juanita, too, I will write. I will tell her I am through wasting time. Go to her bedside to tell her.

  But not right now…

  As soon as I am finished.

  THE END

  Acknowledgments

  T hanks go to the Department of Music, Florida State University, and to the many performers who contributed to this novel. Special encouragement and support for my research along other lines came from educators, particularly Rev. Carolyn Demps and Mr. Taylor McGrew, whose courage, wisdom and generosity I am proud to acknowledge.

  About the Author

  Darryl Wimberley

  D arryl Wimberley is an author and screenwriter who resides with his family in Austin, Texas.