In the classroom that first Monday morning with my chair facing in from the wall of shoulder-high windows toward the lectern and the blackboard because that way you could see the back row without having to turn and look behind you, and with everybody hushed and waiting to hear and see whose name came next, and with the hailing and chattering back-on-the-scene voices coming and going down along the walks and hedges outside and with the back-to-work sky music of delivery truck horns and motors grinding and rumbling and honking in the distance beyond the nearby tempo of the neighborhood traffic humming and buzzing and beeping back and forth along the campus thoroughfare, I said what I said. I said, Here, meaning not only here as in present in the flesh on the spot as of now as against absent and thus not here but elsewhere. I said, Here, meaning not only as prescribed and thus required by attendance codes and regulations but also as promised on my own in all sincerity and thus here above all as in partial fulfillment of that which has long since been intended.
Because even as I said it I was thinking, Me and my own expectations me and also the indelibility of the ancestral imperative to do something and become something and be somebody. Then when the instructor finished checking the roster and opened the textbook and held up the blackboard pointer for attention it was precisely as if he were about to say and one and two and three and four and so forth and so on and onward.
The campus was inside the corporate limits of the township that it was named for, but it was also almost like another complete town in itself, with its own surrounding communities and satellite neighborhoods. The main grounds added up to about 145 acres at that time, and the tree-lined avenue that ran from the dormitories near the academic quadrangle and curved and sloped all the way past the trades school workshops and ended on the low hill known as the ag side just about one mile long. Then there were some three thousand more acres of cultivated fields, orchards, and fenced-in livestock ranges.
It had all begun back at the end of the post-Civil War period known as the Reconstruction when it was a makeshift elementary school for freedmen and their families. The first classrooms had been in a cluster of stick-and-dirt cabins in one of the old slave compounds on the old Strickland plantation, some of which was still owned by contemporary Stricklands who were still among the most powerful people not only in the county but in the central part of the state.
The founding fathers, three former fugitive slaves also known as the Triumvirate—a fieldhand, a blacksmith, and a handyman—who had escaped to the North to join the Union army eighteen months before Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation and had in exchange for various personal chores during free time in camp between battles been given elementary-lessons in reading, writing, and arithmetic by Yankee soldiers, some officers, some enlisted men, some abolitionists, some just plain Billy Yanks willing to make a swap.
After Appomattox, which ex-slaves almost always referred to as Surrender, the three of them worked their way back from Virginia to Alabama with the express and unwavering purpose (however vaguely defined at the outset) of initiating their own local Reconstruction program even as other ambitious freedmen here and elsewhere sought to achieve, exercise, and safeguard the rights to full citizenship provided for in the Thirteenth, Fourteenth, and Fifteenth Amendments, by going directly into politics as such, some as local, state, and even national office-seekers, and some as agitators and organizers.
They had begun as sharecroppers, with their own mule, plow, two-wheeled ox carts, jerry-built wheelbarrows, credit for seeds, fertilizer, rations, hand tools, and farming implements at the Strickland commissary plus an option to buy their first forty acres on an installment plan, and before very long they had the beginnings of a school that was to become an attraction for students not only from all over the state and region but also from across the nation at large, so much so that as the names on so many of its buildings indicated, it also attracted a considerable amount of financial assistance from such movers and shakers as Collis P. Huntington, John D. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and numerous others who regarded it as a pioneering effort in post-Civil War education.
In the early days all students were required to work for room, board, and tuition. There were no entrance fees or incidental charges. Those who could afford to pay were directed to the contributions office where they were given forms requesting their parents to become subscribers to the ongoing campaign for funds. But no student could pay in lieu of work and every student was also required to learn a trade in addition to whatever courses you chose as your primary vocation.
The first two generations of students were summoned to and from field, shop, and classroom alike by the same old bell that had once regulated life on the plantation before the war, and they planted and processed the food they ate. They produced and marketed such farm products as chickens, eggs, dairy products, and also livestock. They also cut the timber for lumber and they made the bricks and constructed the buildings that were to house them, and in the process they also learned to build and furnish their own houses, provide for their families, and develop or improve their communities wherever they settled.
Nor was there any end to the tasks early members of the faculty, whose dedication is a story in itself, had to perform. They had to be artisans, husbandmen, and tradesmen as well as classroom instructors. They had to be church workers as well as health and hygiene missionaries. They had to be fund-raisers combing the country for benefactors and able to convince many of the toughest captains of commerce and industry that by making generous donations to the school they were doing far more than underwriting the education of the children and grandchildren of slaves. They were investing in the future of the reunited United States as a great twentieth-century nation among the other great nations of the world, not in such direct words to be sure, but that was the point they put across.
Anecdotes and details about all of that were very much a part of the indoctrination that your orientation sessions during that first week were all about. And you were also to hear it again as the “gospel of Afro-American uplift,” not only during the annual commemoration ceremonies that next spring, but also in allusions and quotations by almost every speaker who addressed the general student assembly on any official occasion.
V
I can still see myself at the long corner table by the rubber plant in the southeast wing of the main reading room on the second floor of the library, from which you could see part of the gymnasium through the poplar branches outside the windows that also overlooked the traffic circle and the lot where the visiting athletic teams parked their buses.
When you stood up you could also see the ticket shack and the admission gate to the athletic field which was out of sight down the hill. Beyond the high fence a few feet off the right of the vehicle entrance you could also look down onto the tennis courts at the other end of which you could also see the red-brick two-story residence of the dean of men at that time, and in the distance beyond the fence line and scrub-oak thicket there was the open sky above the sweet-gum slopes and the pine ridge somewhere south of Montgomery Fork.
As often as not when there was an assignment with a set of factual details to be looked up, I also used to work for a while at another long table near the open reference shelves at the other end of the main reading room and from there you could see across the thoroughfare to the back entrance to the administration building and the front columns of the old academic hall, and there was also the traffic along all of the walks in the academic area also known as the upper end.
Every time I looked down from that end of the library and saw all of the other students coming and going between class bells during those first weeks of that first fall term, I felt that old pang of isolation you often get when it hits you that you’re in a place that you’re not yet used to. But I didn’t feel lost because I also felt how lucky I was to be there and because I was so excited about all of the things I woke up every morning hoping that I was getting that much closer to. It was enough to make you cross your f
ingers, and every time I remember how often I used to do just that, I still feel very lucky all over again.
But my usual place in the reading room from the very outset was the table in the corner where the rubber plant was, and this many years later I can still see the chalk white lines against the red clay tennis court and the green-stained bleachers as they were in the late summer sunshine and sometimes also in an early mid-September shower while I was reading about the role of the bards, scops, and gleemen in the evolution of language and literature in England, and also about the origin of civilization in Mesopotamia and about the culture of Egypt and about the Nile Valley and the ancient dynasties.
Along with what I was reading later on about the decline and fall of Rome into the Dark Ages and about the coming of medieval times, and along with English literature from Chaucer through Sir Thomas Malory and also along with selected freshman classics for the Introduction to Ideas and Literary Forms, there was the central Alabama indian summer outside with the leaves turning from late September green to October yellow mixed with scarlet before becoming mostly shades of the tans and browns and brownish grays of harvest fields and game-bird feathers.
Nothing has ever surpassed the coziness of that corner of the reading room as it was when the first frost came that year. And then in a few weeks it was November and most of the trees were beginning to be bare and the thermometer outside had begun to drop below fifty degrees and then below forty, and inside it was as if you could smell the warmth from the radiators along the walls, but it was really the furniture polish and the liquid floor wax and there was also that trace of stamp-pad ink and binding glue and cataloging-room shellac that almost always used to be there when you used library books.
But before all of that and also before the gauze-thin tree whispering showers beyond the soft steady rattle of the drain pipes, there were those bright days during the first weeks of that September when all of the windows were open and along with the maps and illustrations spread out on the table in front of me there was a spicy smell of recently cut hedges and lawn grass and you could also hear the tennis balls being plipped and plopped and the voices of the referees and sometimes also a smattering of applause.
Then one afternoon I realized that for some time what I had been hearing was only a very casual plipping and plopping, plipping and plopping of fewer and fewer balls back and forth with no referee calls and no applause, because that many weeks of fall-term class sessions had come and gone along with that many social events including the first two home football games and also that much time hanging out on the Strip and in the radio lounge off the main stem, and I also realized that I already knew why I felt the way I felt about being where I was.
In the classroom you were a student among other students and you did what you did among them and along with them and sometimes together with them, not only as in roundtable discussions, seminars, and laboratory and workshop exercises, but even when you were responding to a direct question from the instructor, you were participating in a group session and as such you were also always reacting to and interacting with other members of the class.
But as soon as you came into the library it was almost always as if you were all alone and on your own again, not that you were ever really unaware that you were still actually surrounded by that many other students, faculty, and staff, and also visitors and sightseers. But even so it was very much as if everybody else was there to be an incidental part of what a college campus and a college library were really supposed to be.
Not only that, but what with the biggest globe (revolving on a tilted axis) I had ever seen, and what with all of the maps and atlases and mileage charts along with all of the books and documents and pictures and relics and artifacts only that many short steps away, it was also almost as if you had a sand table of the whole world always all to yourself.
My roommate went to the library mainly to browse through the current newspapers and magazines every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, mostly during free time in the midafternoon; and sometimes he would also go back again for a while on Saturday morning.
In those days the periodicals room was on your left as you came into the main lobby and you could usually find him by himself at the same table in the corner near the shelves where the technical journals were, but he always began with the big city newspapers. Then he would go through the Saturday Review of Literature and then the weekly news magazines and then the monthly and quarterly reviews.
When you saw him up in the main reading room, which was not often and never for very long, sometimes he would be in the open reference section making notebook entries at one of the wall tables where the high chairs were. But usually he went straight to the card catalog section at the main circulation counter, and when he found what he wanted he checked it out and did all of his reading back in 359, sometimes sitting with his leg folded under him in the sea captain’s chair that he had picked up from somebody in the furniture repair shop in the industrial arts area, and with the book tilted in front of him on the adjustable drafting board, sometimes with the chair turned so that he could rest both legs across the bed.
But most often he liked to read sitting propped up in bed with the book on his thighs, sometimes smoking one of his fancy pipes which he never took outside the room and sometimes not. But always with a pencil behind his ear and his notebook within easy reach.
The sketches, blueprints, and watercolors on the wall behind the head of his cot and near the drafting table were his own work. Some were class assignments but most were field sketches ripped from his 8½ʺ × 11ʺ grid pad and thumbtacked up as mementos that sometimes became entries in his ever-present notebook, which he kept like a sea captain’s log and sometimes called his daybook and clay book and clue book, his testament and also his doomsday book of portable property which he used to refer to as the goods not only in the sense of canned, packaged, and dry goods and other provisions for a survival kit, but also in the sense of getting and thus having specific inside information or evidence about something.
Incidentally, in no time at all you could almost always tell when he was about to reach behind his ear for his pencil for another entry, because he would either move directly back from what he was reading, or stand back from whatever he was inspecting and give it his sidelong stare and close his eyes for a moment, or he would rub his hands as if licking his chops and go into his heh-heh-heh imitation of the mustache-twirling, lip-smacking villain of the penny-dreadful pulp story, but then instead of actually saying ah-ah and all of that, he used to say, Yeah, verily.
As soon as I saw and heard him do that the first time, I could tell that it was something he probably always did because it reminded me of what Little Buddy Marshall always used to do. Whenever he was about to have to take a chance on something, old Little Buddy Marshall always used to tilt his head to one side and close his right eye and squint like a poker player, studying his cards through the haze of smoke curling up from the cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth. Then he would suck his teeth two times and say, Hey, mighty right, hey, goddamn right. Hey, shit I reckon.
When something was good or even outstanding to Little Buddy Marshall, it was either some great shit or some bad shit. So when he judged something to be no good he used to say, Man, that shit ain’t going to stack. Man, ain’t nobody going to tell me you can make some old thin-ass shit like this stack. Man, I bet you my bottom goddamn dollar. Man, I’m telling you. This shit come from running off at the goddamn bowels. I don’t care what nobody say. Because I know good and goddamn well what the goddamn fuck I’m talking about. I’m talking about you looking at some shit that ain’t shit and then I’m talking about something you can put your money on.
Anytime Little Buddy Marshall used to say, Hey, shit, I reckon, it meant that he was ready to take a chance on something, sometimes even regardless of the consequences. But it was not very long before I realized that when my new roommate said, Yeah, verily, you never knew when he was also going to say, But,
on the other hand. Not that he was less willing to take chances. He was even more of a gambler and a rambler than Little Buddy Marshall ever even dreamed of being. But the chances he took were more a matter of calculated risk. Whereas I always knew that Little Buddy Marshall took many more things for granted than I myself ever did.
VI
After lights out most nights I used to talk to him about Gasoline Point and Mobile; he asked about the Gulf Coast and about the bayous and sandbars and canebrakes; he also wanted to hear what I knew about Creoles and Cajuns, and I said I knew much more about Creoles than about Cajuns, but that I did know some and I had been to Chastang and Citronelle, which Gasoline Point people always used to think of as Cajun settlements.
He wanted to know which Indians, if any, I had grown up hearing the most about, and I said, The Chickasaws, the Choctaws, the Seminoles, and the Creeks, and I said, Especially the Creeks because from as long ago as I could remember, any time you saw somebody in Gasoline Point with very dark skin and coal-black straight or somewhat wiry hair, it was almost always said that whoever it was belonged to a family with blood mixed with the Creek Indians.
That was something you knew about just as you had always known about how Uncle Jo Jo the African and the people who had originally settled on African Baptist Hill and also founded African Baptist church had come through middle passage in the old Clotilde in August of 1859.
I said, Naturally you were always used to seeing Creoles and Cajuns, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles along with Cubans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans, a few gee-chee-talking West Indians and a whole lot of others during Mardi Gras every year, not only in the parades but also on the sidewalk all along the route of the procession.
As close as Gasoline Point was to the waterfront of a seaport town like Mobile, you also grew up used to seeing ships from the seven seas flying flags of many lands. And just as you were used to knowing which downtown stores sailors and merchant seamen gathered around and also what points on which downtown side-streets were mainly Cajun or Creole or Cuban, you also knew that when you came toward the foot of Government Street and approached the area of Commerce Street and Water Street, you were always going to hear sailors and shopkeepers speaking more foreign languages than you could identify.
The Spyglass Tree Page 3