Edisto

by Padgett Powell

  “Aw Got! Simons. Simons, why you wont to grind me up? You allus just grinin’ me up.” And here she would be about to cry, I swear, and I’d pull off surprised. I only did it twice, because it really did get to her. You could do the same thing by saying she had a phone call from a man about her social-security check and she’d start in on aspirin and leave early.

  “I’m leaving, never coming back, Miz Manigault. Simons, that Simons is just grinin’ me up …” And she’d leave ten minutes early and always be back. She could take any other teasing but the gubmen and the TV show.

  They called us back in and we watched the tape. In the frame were tourists and baskets and then Theenie and her aunt—she calls her that but I think it’s her neighbor—weaving, over against a wall. The second video lord, who was nice to us, is running over the baskets with an electric-shaver light-meter thing, poking it at everything. Then he gets this boom mike and says okay and the action starts. Then he leaves the frame and we hear a thump and sound check sound check okay.

  So they had Theenie and her aunt there, all contained by those python co-ax and lesser electric mamba, afraid to move because of the equipment and the occasion. But they won’t take any kind of picture guff except TV, which is too big to refuse, unless they are disoriented by having gone to Chicago or someplace when young, or somehow else got sophisticated. An integration program or two don’t change a person’s fundamental suspicion of film. It may even be old voodoo stuff.

  Once we stopped on Meeting Street to get some flowers and a lady was selling baskets. The thing is, they always have about a thousand items arranged around them and they sit in some aspect of focus in the center or at a corner of the inventory and weave more. You could run off with eighty pieces before they could get up and shake off the marsh grasses and throw the one-tined weaving fork at you and call down Wrath. It wouldn’t be pretty when It caught up with you and the loot, sitting around with eighty hot basket things you stole from a woman. So no one ever tries it. They are so confident—sitting and weaving, their whole factory spread out, being walked on by tourists—they watch only the present basket, reach into their grocery sack beside the chair for new straw, and answer questions.

  “Ma’am, how much is this one?”

  “Hum? Hum fuff-teen.”

  The basket is preciously set down.

  “And this one?”

  “Hum sebem.”

  Ah. The money begins to fish out and she stops weaving. “Two for twelb.” Consternation. But no. One will do.

  During the purchase a man with his family steps up and says, “Ma’am, can I get a picture of you and your work?”

  She ignores him and he starts eyeballing with his camera. “What choo wont?” she says.

  “A picture—”

  “You ain’ buyin’.”

  “Well … no … I just—”

  “Well, you got to be buyin’.”

  The first deal is still closing. The buyer gets a bright idea. “I’m buying,” he says. “I could take it for him.”

  She looks at him with a reserved scowl—reserved for the money yet in his hand. “Is it your cambra?”

  “No.”

  “Is the pitcher for you?”

  “No.”

  “Well den.” And they close the deal. The false buyer leaves, uppity in his mind. He considered buying something to get the picture, but the word “extortion” or some such got to him. He don’t know she knew he wouldn’t buy, she wasn’t trying to sell anything, she was just stopping the picture-taking.

  Well, that’s what happens when a plain camera comes around. But when the federal oral boys rolled up looking like Fellini with zits and surrounded them with a TV studio—brushed aluminum and diffusion parasols—and scared them with the full brunt of the Modern Age, they took it, staring into the indigo zoom. Great big glass eye looking like a gasoline spill on a black tar road.

  It makes me think of the first federal historians. What a time! The W.P.A. hired writers to write stuff like this. At least I have this book the Doctor said was very good and it seemed like this kind of stuff. But those writers were invisible, perched up in a corner watching sharecroppers bag z’s, composing with a whispering pencil. Today’s federal historians perch you up, light you up, make you up, and put you in the can, electronically. So here’s the part of basket weaving that they got, which they wanted to get—Theenie and her aunt sit there weaving away. They wrap coils of grass around the shape in their mind and tie the coils in with other straw, which they push through with one tine of a fork. They mix in dark pine straw to make their design. They reach into their grocery bags for grass and keep building the coils. Their eyes never leave the work except when tourist money comes out of a pocket.

  Then something happened, right in the middle of a perfectly good taping. The bag holding the green and brown spray of grass and pine needles fell and exposed Theenie’s feet, and one of them was in a slipper, which was fine, and one of them was in a steaming half of a sweet potato, which was not fine.

  “What is that?” cried the sociologist behind the camera.

  Looking down at it, the other historian bent over and accidentally let the boom mike into the picture, like a closed umbrella pointing at the potato, going to stick it.

  “Cut,” said the first cameraman. “Dammit, it was perfect.”

  “We can edit it,” said the sound man, and that’s all you see, except for the sound man’s head going in for a look at Theenie’s foot in the potato, like he’s going to hold his nose. His head is at the very bottom corner of the frame looking at it, and Theenie is in full center, looking at the camera with the face of a bull. Then they cut the filming.

  “Never did edit out that damn potato,” the pale one says when the show was over.

  “Why would you want to?” Taurus says.

  “Hey. Who would like believe it wasn’t a joke or Monty Python or something? This is oral history.”

  Taurus looked evenly at the six screens whining off with little piss noises coming out. “I guess so,” he said.

  “Thanks for showing us,” I said. “We got to go. Dr. Manigault is very grateful. I’d seen it.” I lied. “It was him that needed—” Taurus was out the door; I was going to give them an oral history spew they’d never edit out.

  But he was already down the hall.

  “Hey. Let’s go get something to eat.”

  “Like what?”

  “Potatoes.”

  He smiled. “What was that, anyway?”

  “They use them for corns and bunions. Potatoes are the second great cure.”

  “And the first?”

  “Ammonia.”

  “Ammonia?”

  “Yeah, except not like you said it. Say it ah-MON-ia and it’ll cure whatever it won’t clean.”

  The only thing I remember about the rest of the day is the shirt I had on. It was my green-and-yellow. I tried to picture a new universe of potato wearing, who could and who couldn’t. It was at the Grand. Preston and Jinx had on potatoes big as brogans, flared open at the ankles like construction workers’. The bitches came in in high-heeled spuds as trim as cigars. Jake had on a nondescript pair. I had on some saddle oxfords, warm ones. Then I saw the oral history boys trying theirs on, and every time they reached for them, red sparks hit their fingers like Dorothy’s red shoes. They couldn’t get their potatoes on. The Doctor had a pair at the foot of the wicker settee which she chose not to put on. They were out of style. She just sat on her legs folded up under her and had a dreamy look. Then I took mine off and tried on everybody else’s, like Goldilocks. Daddy’s were in a drawer at his desk with his golf shoes. He could wear them, I thought, for a special occasion. Then Taurus showed up very inconspicuous. He was kneeling down, I thought looking at his. Then I saw he was polishing his potatoes. He was the only one taking care of them. He was using a big Kiwi hardwood brush and the skins were lightly steaming, and the brush stroking through the steam pulled it in slow clouds like a tug on the waterway in the early mo
rnings.

  One of My Custody Junkets

  WHEN WE GOT OUT of the oral history studio we went over to the market to see some real basket weaving. It was going on as usual—about five or six ladies on their metal cafeteria chairs (they must have got a deal, or they closed a school out in the country, or it burned, except chairs). They were all set up on the outside corners of the old slave-market longhouses, surrounded by their four hundred straw artifacts and sacks of new grass and straw at their feet, in the sunshine. Just inside, where all the flea market tables were, it was dark, with all kinds of van people selling jewelry and belt buckles and other things you can get in a pawnshop.

  The van people came every weekend and sold this stuff like portable garage sales, stopping in on Friday night to hold their booth and early Saturday setting up, mostly in the middle of the market. At the upper end, where the auction block for the slaves had been, they filled the market in with boutiques painted in pastels. They have antiques there too, but these are on consignment from the North, Daddy says. They also have fancy restaurants that write what they have to eat on a blackboard outside so you know the food is as fresh as new chalk. They should use one of those at school, to upgrade the image: “Today we have a fresh, steamed hot dog, pork beans, butter squash, Tuesday surprise cake, cold, sweet milk. $.35.”

  Then down at the far end it’s no boutiques or even van people, but Negroes selling vegetables. I mean they sell them—running up and shouting down a neighbor’s price and demanding you feel their tomatoes. That end of the market is like it was before the front end got boutique cuisine and turquoise. It is just heavy green paint, open rafters, dirty shale floor, tables, and vegetables. It was like that all the way, before: bats in the rafters and pigeons, paint heavy as metal falling loose, piss in the corners, bums, and very dark—except at one or two places there were these enclosure’s, like a barbershop or a hot-dog joint.

  But those places weren’t boutique-y. No one went in them, and they were run by Negroes. Well, someone went in them, I guess. Daddy took me in one of them once, we were just walking around. I remember now. It was a place about as big as a car, a room behind swirled old glass in green wood framing, and up against the glass were pressed all these clothes. Inside, there were some on hangers and on a table, but a lot were just piled up against the windows. Daddy stopped and went in.

  A Negro, invisible except for his white shirt, was in there.

  “Yezza.”

  “Need suspenders.”

  Nothing.

  “How much are your suspenders?”

  “’Pend which.”

  Daddy plunged his hand into the wall of clothes at the door, and I saw through the window this banded strip of material with a brass buckle disappear into the dark mountain like a snake into the ground. The strip snapped free inside.

  “These,” he said, holding up a brown-and-white set of suspenders.

  The Negro felt them and said a dollar. Daddy got them.

  “Those would cost you fifteen dollars on King Street,” he said, when we left. And suddenly we were looking into a barbershop, built like the haberdasher’s, with another lone Negro very much like the first, but this one behind a barber chair with white porcelain armrests and a white porcelain headrest, looking twenty degrees away from us.

  Then there was this food place where you stepped up to a half-open door and ordered.

  “I’m hungry.”

  “All right, let’s go on up to Hen—” He stopped. “What do you want to eat?”

  “What do they have here?”

  “Let’s see.”

  We did, and had two very reasonable hot dogs and Pepsis in Coke cups—they explained the difference before they sold them to us. They put ice cubes from an ice-cube tray in them out of a refrigerator like at a house.

  The next time I went to the market it was all gone. Bats, rafters, shale, pee, lead paint, clothes wads, the stuck barber pole, chili in open pots, all went to dropped ceilings for energy saving, parquet, rest-rooms, pastel, jean shops, international flags waving in front of a deli store, and food described on a blackboard. It was something.

  The only thing left intact was the vegetable end, where, besides the women shouting could they help us with something that day, Daddy and I saw this kid with a big dog on a kite string leash.

  He was going from table to table piled high with vegetables, showing it off. “Lookit my new collie!” They couldn’t help but lookit: it was tall as his shoulders, and prancing ahead of him without straining the kite string, as if it had been trained. Its back was bowed up and it had a long, skinny bone-head, and the whole dog was about half a foot wide, like it was sick, and smiling.

  “What’s wrong with that dog?”

  “Probably nothing,” Daddy said. “Except he’s lost.”

  “Lost from where?”

  “From his owner.”

  “It’s not his Bonsai?”

  “That’s a Borzoi.”

  That’s where I learned they weren’t Bonsais, but they still look as tortured as those little trees they plant in square china pots. Daddy made a call from the corner and a big car came around in a minute and Daddy told the man to go up the market.

  “On a string?” the man said, laughing. “They something else, aindee, Iv?” He sped off.

  Daddy’s name is Eversoh Simons Manigault. You shorten names here to the least sound workable and then, if you can, change the sound, Iv. A regal name like Cambridge becomes Bridge, then Brudge, then Budge. And so forth. Girls, sometimes it’s lengthened. Mary can’t be plain Mary, but Mary C., stuck on. Anne won’t do, it becomes Annie, still something missing, so Annie-boo. People get more charming that way, more memorable and distinct.

  “Who was that man?” I asked Daddy.

  “Old friend of mine from Clemson,” he said.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Bun.”

  We Entertain: A Faculty Raree

  SOMETHING MORE THAN ALL get-out. That was the phrase at school one year. Sharp as all get-out. Fast as all get-out. Where did it come from? What could it mean? Well, the night the Doctor had her associates over to inspect her circus property, it was ludicrous as all get-out.

  I had to get the party condiments out of the Cadillac. She’d got a bunch of things she never drank herself, like Wild Turkey and J&B Scotch, to impress the guests with. And a box of Coke and things for mixing it. It was quite a load, though at the time I didn’t notice, except for the insane trips with one bottle in each hand so I wouldn’t break anything like I did once. “Please, honey, no more than two at a time. I don’t want you to strain.” She was always referring to the time a blue crab scared me on the steps and I bailed out because I was still in my childhood mode. He was perfectly crushed and pickled by the best discount liquor money could buy when she got there, holding the door open, looking down truly aghast, the lame crab waving his last threats from a pile of glass and wet paper sacking and sharp whiskey stink. She replaced everything with one stop at the Grand bootleg door, the day I first heard her called the Duchess, and the day they first saw her little prince. Apparently I did something to impress them, like pet a bad dog or look in its ears and tell them it had mice, which I thought was plural for “mite” then. We went home and transferred the cheap stuff to her decanters and got ready for that party.

  And ever since I have been a two-bottle lackey. Tonight was big if you considered the number of my trips. And on one of them I met her coming down with a coat on her shoulders, and she went up the beach toward Theenie’s. I thought she meant to get Theenie for a vacuum run, or even for maid work during the bash, until I remembered Theenie was gone. She was up there to talk to the star boarder. I was so dense, picturing him cracking ice for them or driving the soddy ones home. He was going to be it, guest of honor.

  The party collects very quickly because it is so casual, twos and singles parking up the road in the palmettos, which they think of as the jungle, and they walk in like soldiers on leave from all their trench
work teaching their ignorami, which great parts of their conversation dwell on in the early going. No one can write or read or—brace yourself—think in any of my classes. Nor mine. Nods. Toasts. A few more rounds and the culprit has been determined: the president of the college! Not the dean, not social promotions, not even their less adept colleagues (everyone not present). It’s the president. Then president stories.

  The president was a general in the army before he was a college president, which allowed him to view academic developments in martial terms. So funds were not appropriated by budgetary solicitation, the till was sacked. The fine-arts department was not enlarged, it was reinforced. So-and-So would not be denied tenure, he would be discharged without dishonor. They called him the General.

  “The General went up to poor Bill,” somebody says, “and smiled so effusively Bill thinks he’s in trouble. Then he said he’d heard Bill planned to get married.” They howled, because Bill knows the General knows he’s homo. He’s so scared for his job he can’t teach!

  But the way the General most significantly ruined the school was by designating department heads from the outside, rather than by promoting from within. This not only leaves them all unpromoted but at one time eight department heads were from military colleges or West Point itself, and the faculty meetings “sounded like Yalta,” somebody said. “Enfilades, for Christ’s sake. I need smaller sophomore sections and he says to me, in public, if I can’t run a full company, fall to the rear.”

  “Get off the pot,” somebody seconds, the party beginning to roll. But they never get very far with the General, because the campaign he runs is successful. They just don’t like the language. And he’s so powerful that even their most inept colleagues are reprieved and warmly taken back, because their fragile roles in the total ruination of education are by comparison so minor and incidental.

  But after a time gossip beats out professional problems, and all gossip is finally about sex and a lot of giggling gets going, with grown men putting their heads between their own knees and laughing at the floor about, say, a wager someone present has made that someone absent always takes a shower after “doing it.” “Whenever she’ll let him.” “Whenever he’ll let her!” Red faces buried in the bouncing knees, people going to the sideboard and losing count—something they rarely do. These are drink accountants.