The Magic Keys

by Albert Murray

  Southbound once more by erstwhile thunderbird become at least for the time being Whisperjet. Me and the one who was the one for me and would also go north or south and would go east or west and also east of the sun and also west of the moon even as she also fulfilled ancestral hometown expectations along with personal aspirations of her own.

  In those days you took the Delta Airlines Shuttle from La Guardia in New York to Atlanta International. Then you transferred to the southwest-bound commuter flight to Montgomery and central Alabama and so on to Mississippi and Louisiana was only one more hour, departing Eastern Standard Time and arriving the same hour Central Standard Time. And as our flight entered the landing approach pattern and we brought our seats upright, I said, Here we go, thinking, all the way back to within this many Alabama miles north by east from the outskirts of Mobile and the river and the canebrakes and cypress swamp moss and the state docks and the bay and the Gulf Coast beyond the storybook blue and storm gray horizons of which were the old Spanish Main and also the Seven Seas and the seven storybook wonders of the ancient world.

  As the airport limousine pulled on away from the city limits and settled into the thirty-mile interstate highway drive to the campus exit, we said what we said about the central Alabama preautumn countryside, and when she closed her eyes I went on remembering how uncertain everything had been for me that first September.

  But I had said to myself what I had said to myself even so. Because I was there not only from Mobile County Training School and Miss Lexine Metcalf and her windows on the world and Mr. B. Franklin Fisher and the early birds, I was also there from Gasoline Point. So I said what I had already been saying long before school bell time became more urgent than train whistle and sawmill whistle time. I said, Destination Philamayork, remembering the comings and goings of old sporty-limp-walking Luzana Cholly with his blue steel .32-.20 in his underarm holster and the delicate touch and locomotive thunder of his rawhide tough twelve-string guitar fingers and what he said that time under the Three-Mile Creek L & N bridge. And there was also old patent-leather-footed, pigeon-toed-tipping Stagolee Dupas fils with his diamond-flashing piano fingers and tailored-to-measure jazz-backed suits, who did what he did that night at Joe Lockett’s in the Bottoms and didn’t skip city afterward. Because Philamayork was not somewhere you escaped to. It was somewhere you earned your way to, your hithering and thithering way through, thick and thin and wherever and whatever to.

  I also said what I said when I arrived on campus that first September because my destination was already what it was long before I was aware of anything at all about what actually made Luzana Cholly Luzana Cholly and Stagolee Dupas fils the notorious Stagolee Dupas fils. Because for me it all had actually begun all the way back during the now only vaguely remembered time when Mama began calling me her little old scootabout man, even before I had learned enough about words to know what scooter and scooting about actually meant.

  But by the time I had arrived on campus as a college freshman that first September I had learned what I had learned from that many rockabye tale times and all the midwinter fireside times and summer night mosquito smoke times even before the day came when Mama let Miss Tee take me to be enrolled because my school bell time had come. And I was a schoolboy from then on and Mama said, That’s Mama’s little old Buster Brown scootabout man over there scooting about that school-yard just like some little old cottontail jackrabbit scooting all over the briar patch.

  So I said what I said about myself as I looked out on the part of the campus you could see from my dormitory room, and when my roommate arrived from Chicago, I said what I first said about him because his nickname was Geronimo, which I associated with the escapades of Reynard the Fox. But when class sessions began I said he was like a young Dr. Faustus, which earned him the campuswide nickname of the Snake, as if that made him a devil-ordained tent show and vaudeville magician or snake-oil con man, not to mention an ever so—and ever so lethal snake in the grass.

  When the limousine stopped, I opened my eyes and realized I had dozed off and that we had taken our exit from the interstate highway and were waiting to pull into the local route into town. So I said what I said because I knew we would be rolling through the Court House Square area and on out by the old antebellum Strickland Place and into that end of the campus within the next twenty-plus minutes.

  We signed in at the campus guesthouse, and when we came back downstairs after I called Mr. Poindexter and helped with the unpacking of what was needed from the luggage for the time being, it was not yet late afternoon. So we decided that there was enough time for a leisurely homecomng alumni stroll before changing clothes to join the Poindexters for dinner and information about a choice of a furnished apartment on or off campus.

  Which was why we headed up the incline of Campus Avenue under the overhanging oaks and elms instead of popping across to the off-campus main drag for a drugstore fountain Coca-Cola, for a quick peek around in Red Gilmore’s Varsity Threads Haberdashery, and the mandatory back-in-town-from-up-the-country-and-elsewhere round of palm slapsnatching and back patting in Deke Whatley’s Barbershop.

  So here we are once more, I said, as the upcurving sidewalk leveled off and we came on by the concrete steps leading down to the main campus promenade lawn where the outdoor concert bandstand was and across which the three-story dormitory where the dean of women’s office and the campus clock tower faced the white Doric columns and recently repainted dome of the antebellum-style brick red, white-trimmed dining hall. We came on past the main building of the School of Music and came to the turnoff to the dining hall, the building on our right was the one then known as the Office Building because at that time it not only included the president’s office and registrar’s office and those of the treasurer and the dean of men but also the post office and the bank.

  The street you came to from the rear entrance of the office building was the thoroughfare that ran from town and on out past the residential neighborhoods where most faculty, staff, and other campus employees either owned or rented homes. So we had to stop for the fairly steady stream of traffic, and then we crossed over and came on along the hedge-lined walk to the wide quadrangle in which the gymnasium faced the open end and across which the library faced the Science Building.

  As we passed the tall shrubbery framing the main entrance to the library we nudged each other without looking or saying anything. Then as we came on to the next open space, you could see the red clay tennis courts beyond the parking space reserved for the buses of visiting athletic teams. And up ahead near the side entrance to the gymnasium there was a traffic circle, beyond which were the ticket booth and entrance to the bowl down the steep hill directly behind the gymnasium.

  We followed the curving walk on around past the box office and main entrance to the gymnasium that was not only the headquarters of the Department of Physical Education and the venue for the annual conference basketball tournament in those days, it was also where all of the big campus dances were held, weekly movies were shown, and where touring repertory theater companies and dance and musical groups performed in those days.

  Off to our right as we came around the loop to the science building side of the quadrangle was the campus water tower, beyond which was the baseball field, which was up the steep wooded hill and on the other side of trees directly behind the covered student grandstand in the bowl.

  When you reached the other end of the science building, you were back at the tree-lined throughway, and as we came on across to Campus Avenue, the dormitory on the right of the quadrangle you faced was the one that Atelier 359 overlooked, and suddenly I missed my old one and only and best of all possible roommates again. But as we came on back along the main stem past the dining hall, the bandstand and the clock tower again, all I said was “seven league boots, indeed.”

  XXV

  The Poindexters lived in the first block of the faculty and staff off-campus housing area that began outside of the Emancipation Memorial Pillars of the ma
in entrance to Campus Avenue. So it was only about a two and a half block stroll from the guesthouse, which also meant that they lived only about seven blocks along the municipal thoroughfare from the academic quadrangle where the office of the English Language and Literature Department was in those days.

  When we arrived for dinner, our on-campus apartment assignment, and preliminary registration orientation that first Wednesday night, they both greeted us in the living room and there was now a second child, a boy, born during the term following my graduation. The first was a daughter, whom I remembered as having been in elementary school during my senior year.

  I knew that Mrs. Poindexter, whose first name was Estelle, and who was just about the same shade of teacake tan as Eunice, but with freckles that you didn’t see until you were close enough to shake hands, had been his hometown sweetheart when they were in high school in Washington and that they had married the year after he came back to Washington with his M.A. degree and then came down to central Alabama that following September. By the time I arrived on the campus he had not only been back to graduate school to finish his residence work toward his Ph.D., he had also become the chairman of the English Department, which always surprised visitors and new-comers to the campus because he could still be mistaken for an upperclassman.

  The first time I had seen his wife was during the break between the winter and spring terms of my freshman year, when I was invited to come along to his residence with my roommate and several upperclassmen for an informal extracurricular discussion of current books, magazines, and quarterly literary reviews.

  She didn’t come in to say hello that time until we were all in the study, which was on the left as you entered the living room. We were still standing and moving around looking at the bookshelves and the diplomas and citations and also at the paintings, sketches, and photographs. She had come in, and he presented each one of us by name in class, and she served us tea and cookies and excused herself to do what she had to do as a young mother.

  This time she left us in the living room with her husband and went to turn the children over to a babysitter and finished what she had to do in the kitchen and dining room before calling us in to dinner. So we were led into the study for a glass of dry sherry, and that was when the orientation session began. And the first item on his briefing agenda turned out to be a matter that was more personal than official.

  Incidentally, he said, you probably haven’t been back on campus long enough to have been cued in on one unmandated change in common student parlance since either one of you was last here. Your host this evening is no longer addressed or referred to by the official name you and your classmates used. He is now generally addressed and referred to even by faculty colleagues as Prof Dex.

  So it was to be Prof Dex and Prof from then on. I never addressed him as Dex even when he and I became as casual with each other as my relationship with my old roommate and with Taft Edison had become. I would say, Hey, man, and hey, Prof, but never hey, Dex, and he never did call me Scooter. He called me Don. Because from our Composition 102 self-portrait paper he had found out that when my roommate and I were not make-believe Belle Epoque, Montmartre bohemian offspring the likes of François Villon, we were the local versions of Oxford and/or Cambridge dons, which was not only appropriately academic but also had the titular ring of jazz, kings, dukes, counts, earls, and barons as well as tongue-in-cheek overtones of Don Juan and Don Quixote.

  As for our on-campus apartment assignment, all he had to do was name the address and give Eunice the keys. Neither she nor I had ever been inside that particular faculty residence, which was near the student nurses’ dormitory area and not far from the campus infirmary, but I was pleased because I liked the cross-campus walk from there past the clock tower, the bandstand on the campus promenade lawn, and through the post office to the main academic area.

  We had made no special requests other than for an on-campus apartment for two, but both Eunice and I had hoped that we would not have to be assigned to one of the duplex or triplex units on the deans’ and administrators’ row along the municipal thoroughfare between the main academic quadrangle and the block where the drugstore, Red Gilmore’s Haberdashery, and Deke Whatley’s Barbershop were.

  Our on-campus quarters assignment turned out to be the only official orientation item on the agenda for the evening, because any detailed clarification of specific academic assignments and standard operation procedures in the orientation material would be addressed during the preclass period departmental meeting that first Monday morning and in one-on-one appointments with the department head.

  So I asked what I asked about faculty and staff changes since my graduation, because the only officials I had seen since our arrival that afternoon were the ones on duty at the guesthouse. And that was when I found out which of the people I remembered were away in graduate school completing their time in residence required of Ph.D. candidates. Then as we were taking our last sip of sherry we were called into the dining room and as we settled into our first course I said that I had nothing else to add to what I had said on the phone from New York about the Bossman’s Royal Highness proposition. So the main thing we talked about was the work of fiction that Taft Edison was already preoccupied with when I introduced myself to him in New York and told him that I remembered him from my freshman year on campus. Two of the sequences he had read to me sometime later had recently been published in current highly rated magazines, both of which placed more emphasis on literary quality than on social issues and political positions as such.

  I’ve seen a few things he did for the sociopolitical corn-bread paper sheets a year or so ago, Prof Dex said, but these new pieces are impressively different, and I must also say that they represent not only a logical but also an astonishing development of the Taft Edison who was a student in the course in the English novel which, by the way, he was concurrently supplementing on his own initiative with works of Zola, Hugo, Tolstoy, and especially Dostoevsky.

  As Jerome Jefferson and I were well aware, I said, and he also knew that he was reading a lot of twentieth-century poetry. You know, Pound, T. S. Eliot, E. E. Cummings, Wallace Stevens, Marianne Moore. Incidentally, I can also remember the copies of Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native, Jude the Obscure, and Mayor of Casterbridge on your bookshelves in the office of the English Department and also how old Jerome Jefferson, better known as Geronimo, used to sneer whenever he heard somebody saying, Beyond the maddening crowd. It’s madding crowd, my good fellow. Hardy got it from Thomas Gray’s poem, not from some goddamn sports column hack. Madding, my good man. You’re on a college campus. Faites attention.

  Then when I said, So you like what old Taft is by way of getting into these days, he said, If he can bring even most of it off as these two excerpts suggest, he just might be capable of doing. We just might have a quantum leap to reckon with.

  And I said, Well, I’m ready to tell you that he just might do just that. I can personally vouch for the fact that there is more to come that is even more outrageous. Voltaire, Cervantes, Rabelais, none of that stuff was lost on our boy. I must say, though, that it surprised me because as much as I had come to know about the library books he had checked out, old Jerome Jefferson was the one I had associated with the outrageous adventures and misadventures and absurdities of Candide, Gargantua and Pantagruel, and Don Quixote.

  My main concern is that the universality of the picaresque misadventures of Candide and Don Quixote may be mistaken for a fictionalized sociological documentation of yet another black boy being done in by his own incompetence or downright stupidity. Whereas nobody assumes that Candide stands for all Westphalians or Don Quixote represents the nuttiness of, say, Spanish idealism.

  He’s very much aware of all that I said. So he hopes to make some of it outrageous enough to offset at least some of the ever-ready condescending compassion of survey-addicted do-gooders. He has already concocted a hilarious takeoff on Don Quixote that I think he’s really going to bring off. The dr
aft he read me reminded me of some of the sneaky stuff that old Jerome Jefferson used to read to me from his sketch book, which he referred to as the goods as in the goods on.

  That’s good, he said. The idiomatic particulars should be as evocative as possible, but beware of fictionalized sociological findings. Remember the great allegories about “everyman” and Pilgrim’s Progress is about everyman who—who would become whatever. Let us not forget Rake’s Progress.

  Anyway, he continued as we headed for the door, this is all good news, and I don’t have to tell you how pleased I am to have had anything whatsoever to do with you two becoming the kind of, what shall I say, collegial friends you have become.

  And when Estelle Poindexter, who was walking arm in arm with Eunice, said, Spoken in parchment with the Honors Day enthusiasm of a certified and formally berobed Prof Dex if I ever heard one, he said, So, flip your tassels across your mortarboards.

  XXVI

  When we came downstairs to the cafeteria for breakfast that next morning, the main item on our agenda was what we were going to have to do to get settled into our on-campus apartment by that next Monday morning. It was now Thursday. Freshman students were already arriving, and general registration would begin Friday and end Saturday.

  At that time there were five academic class days per week, with some courses meeting on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, and others on Tuesdays and Thursdays. My first classroom session would begin at eight o’clock on Monday. But on that first Monday morning there would be a faculty orientation session in the office of the English Department at seven-thirty. That was when you picked up your roster of registration enrollees, your attendance and performance record book, along with your first stack of publishers’ promotion copies of new and revised editions of textbooks and anthologies.