And that was that. She didn’t even insist that what she chose to do with her own life was her own private business, because she had already made that point once and for all by dropping out of school when she did. But even so, most of the people who had always concerned themselves about her future all along went right on reacting as if her beautiful face and body were really sacred community commonwealth property and that she therefore had an inviolable obligation to turn into some sort of national credit not only to Gasoline Point and Mobile but also to the greater glory of our folks everywhere.
Nobody ever either accused her of or excused her for not having enough nerve, gall, guts, and get-up to take a chance out on the circuit and up North. Self-confidence was not the problem. Not for Creola Calloway. The problem was her lack of any interest in what, in the slogan of Mobile County Training School (and most church auxiliaries as well), was, A commitment to betterment. Given her God-given assets, that was not just disappointing and exasperating, it made her somebody even more reprehensible than a backslider. it was a betrayal of a divine trust.
That is why by the time she was twenty so many people had given her up as a lost ball in the high weeds and no longer called her old Creola Calloway (with a passive smile) but that old Creola Calloway (with their eyes rolling). Nor did the outrage have anything to do with the fact that she spent so much time hanging out in jook joints and honky-tonks. There were many church folks who condemned that outright to be sure, but the chances are that if she had gone north and become a famous entertainer like, say, Bessie Smith or Ethel Waters, she would have had their blessing along with everybody else’s.
But she stayed right on in the old Calloway house on Front Street by the trolley line even after Miss Cute (also known as Q for Queenie and as Q T.), who had always been more like a very good-looking older sister than a mother anyway, had gone up North and decided to get married again and settle down in Pittsburgh.
She did pay Miss Cute a visit from time to time and she also used to take the L & N up to Cincinnati and continue on up to Detroit to spend time with her brother every once in a while. His name was Alvin Calloway, Jr., but everybody always called him Brother Calloway, not as in church brother but as if you were saying Buddy Calloway or Bubber Calloway or even Big Brother or Little Brother Calloway. He must have been about three or four years older than his sister and there wasn’t a better automobile mechanic in Gasoline Point before he left to go and get a job in an automobile factory.
One time he came down for Easter in a brand-new Cadillac and she drove back with him and was gone for ten days, and another time she was away for a month because she also spent some time visiting cousins in Cleveland and Chicago. Everybody knew about those trips and also about the time she went out to California to spend six weeks with her father, whose name was Alvin Calloway (Senior) but who was called Cal Calloway and who had gone out to Los Angeles not long after he came back from France with the AEF. He had a job as a carpenter in a moving picture studio.
I remember knowing that she took the southbound L & N Pan American Express from Mobile to New Orleans and changed to the Sunset Limited, which I can still see pulling out of the Canal Street Station as if with the departure bell dingdonging a piano vamp against the crash cymbal sound of the piston exhaust steam and as if with the whistle shouting California here I come like a solo above the up-tempo two-beat of the drivers driving westbound toward Texas and across the cactus country and the mountains en route to the Pacific Coast which was two whole time zones and three days and nights away.
You couldn’t say that she stayed on in Gasoline Point because she hadn’t even been anywhere and seen anything else. She went everywhere she wanted to go whenever she wanted to go, especially after Miss Cute left town. But she never went anywhere without a return ticket, and she always came back not only as if on a strict schedule but also almost always before most people who didn’t happen to know when she left had a chance to miss her.
That was why even those who knew better used to talk as if she were always in and around town. But then she, which is to say her stunning good looks, always had been and always would be a source of confusion and anxiety. So much so sometimes that people used to accuse her of causing outbreaks of trouble that she had absolutely nothing to do with, as if she caused trouble just by being in town. As if Gasoline Point which had also come to be known and shunned as the L & N Bottoms long before Creola Calloway’s parents were born had not been a hideout hammock for bayou-jettisoned African captives and runaway slaves before that and a buccaneer’s hole even before that.
When she got married to Scott Henderson, whose family owned the Henderson Tailor Shop and Pressing Club, nobody expected her to settle down, and she didn’t. She was going on twenty-two that summer and the whole thing was over in less than a year. Scott Henderson had left town to start his own dry cleaning business down in Miami, Florida. So when Eddie Ray Meadows, who worked in a drugstore downtown and was one of the best tap dancers around and also a pretty good shortstop and base runner, took her to the justice of the peace, people didn’t give him but six months and he barely made it. Then there was Felton Edmonds from the Edmonds family of the Edmonds and McKinny Funeral Home downtown. He and his silk suits and two-tone shoes and fancy panama hats and Willys-Knight sports roadster made it through one high rolling summer.
I don’t know which ones were annulled and which were divorced, but by the time she was thirty she had gotten rid of four husbands, because Willie York, better known as Memphis Willie the gambler and bootlegger who was sent to the penitentiary sometime later, was also with her for about a year.
People didn’t know what to make of all of that, but they had to wag their heads and say something so the word was that she just really didn’t care any more about having married than she cared about anything else, and they also decided that she didn’t make things happen. She just let things happen. Not anything and everything, to be sure, just the things she became involved with. In other words, she didn’t get married any of those times because she had picked out a husband for herself on her own. She just let one man like her for a while and then there would be somebody else.
One thing was always clear. She didn’t have to marry or become a common-law wife to get somebody to earn a living for her. Everybody knew that as an heiress to the old Calloway place she not only had a home for herself and her own family if any for the rest of her life, but she also had Miss Sister Mattie May Billings there to run the part she rented out to long-term roomers. Everybody knew that and most people also knew that her share of the boarding house once known as River Queen Inn, which her grandfather had built on Buckshaw Mill Road back during the days of William McKinley and which was being managed for her and Miss Cute by Brother Buford Larkin, came to more than enough for her to live well on, even without the old homeplace.
People used to forget about all of that when they got started on Creola Calloway, or so it seemed to me. But even so, what all the botheration always came down to was not whether she could or would earn and pay her own way as expected or would even let somebody else look out for her. No matter what folks said, everybody knew better than that. The problem was that people felt let down because she didn’t do enough with herself and the extra special God-given blessing she was born with.
Not that anybody ever really expected to reap any personal profit in dollars and cents from her success. All most expected was that she would come back through town every now and then. It was not that folks had put their hopes on her coming back and changing anything around town. Others were expected to do that. All they wanted her to do was go out and become Gasoline Point’s contribution to the world of show business.
Such was people’s downright exasperation once they finally came to realize that they might as well give up so far as she and all of that were concerned, that the very way they called her name (behind her back to be sure) sounded as if they had already decided what to put on her headstone: CREOLA CALLOWAY—SHE COULD HAVE BEEN
FAMOUS.
And yet nobody ever really hated or even disliked her. How could you not like somebody who was just as friendly as she was good-looking? She was not a nice girl because nice girls didn’t ever go into the low-down joints and honky-tonks she spent so much of her time in. Still, she was such a nice person.
Yet even so, by the time I was old enough for Mama to start worrying and warning me about fooling around and getting myself all tangled up with no good full-grown women out for nothing but a good time day in and day out, it was as if Creola Calloway had become the very incarnation of all the low-down enticements that had always led so many promising schoolboys so completely astray.
That was why Little Buddy Marshall turned out to be the one who finally got to do what I too had hoped to grow up to do, if only one time, one day. When he came back from one of his L & N hobo trips and asked me if I had made any move on her yet and I told him what Mama and some others, especially Miss Minnie Ridley Stovall had been preaching for my benefit, he said, Man she may be getting on up there with a few wrinkles after all these goddamn years of fast living and all that, but man I don’t care what anybody say I got to see if I can get me some of that old pretty-ass stuff.
He said, Man, I been wanting me some of old Creola ever since I found out what this goddamn thing was made for. Man, remember what we used to say when she used to say what she used to say. Man couldn’t nobody else in Gasoline Point, Mobile County, Alabama, say hello sweetheart to a little mannish boy like she could, and I ain’t just talking about the sound of her voice. I’m talking about couldn’t nobody make it sound that good because couldn’t nobody else look at you with a smile like that.
I said, Oh man. I said, You know it too. Remembering also that she was the only grown woman you didn’t have to call Miss and say ma’am to. You said Creola because that is what everybody else always said and also because it was what she herself said when she wanted you to do something for her. That was when she always used to say: Hello, sweetheart. Come here sporty. Listen darling, would you like to do Creola a great big favor and run up to Stranahan’s store if I say pretty please and promise you something very nice. (Oh Lord!)
What she almost always wanted was a package of Chesterfield ready-rolls and two or three bottles of Coca-Cola and when you came back you knew she was always going to say, Now there’s my sweetheart, and you also knew that she was always going to say, Keep the change, sporty. Then she was going to give you a hug and a kiss, and you would be that close, and she would be wearing cologne that always made her smell as good as she looked, even when she was smoking a cigarette. Some lagniappe!
But the more Little Buddy Marshall went on talking and I went on remembering, the more I wanted to change the subject because I didn’t want to say anything about being on the spot, since you couldn’t bring up anything about school with him anymore. You couldn’t, but he could, and he did, because he already knew and he was rubbing it in without ever mentioning it.
As if I didn’t know, and I also knew that he honestly felt that he, not I, was the one with the experience and nerve you needed to make a move on Creola Calloway because he, not I, was the one who had skipped city and made it back from beyond far horizons (although not yet all seven of the seas) and on his own. But I just let that go. I just said, Old Lebo, I said, Hey man, goddamn. I said, Yeah man.
To which he said, Hey man, let me tell you something for a fact. Man, I ain’t never stopped having them goddamn dreams about me and old Creola. Man when I think about all the times I been thinking about that frizzly-headed quail when I was climbing up on some tough-ass northern whore, man you know I got to find out if I can handle that heifer. Man I got to see if I can make somebody that pretty whisper my name in my ear.
When I saw him again, it was about three weeks later and when he saw me he started sporty limping and whistling “Up a Lazy River,” and as we slapped palms he winked and then he said, Hey man guess what? and stood straddling his left hand and snapping fingers with his right saying, Hey shit, I reckon hey shit I fucking fucking reckon.
IX
So well now, hello there, Mister College Boy, the one I had given the nod said as we came on into the upstairs room she was using that night. She was the same shade of cinnamon-bark brown as Deljean McCray, but her hair was slightly straighter and glossier and I guessed that she was about three or four years older than Deljean McCray, but her legs were not as long because she was not quite as tall as I was.
I said, Hello Miss Pretty Lady, and she smiled and said, So where you hail from handsome, and when I said, Mobile, she said, You don’t tell me, and looked me up and down again, stretching her eyes as if in pleasant surprise and then she primped her mouth and said, Well go on then, Mister City Boy, you can’t help it. And watched me blush.
Then she said, You know what I heard. They tell me you young sports from down around the Gulf Coast and all them cypress bayous and all that mattress moss and stuff supposed to be real hot-natured from all that salt air and fresh seafood and fresh fruit and all them Creole spices and mixtures and fixtures and gumbo and all them raw oysters. And I said, I don’t know about all that.
I said, I don’t know anything about what other people think about us yet because this is really my first time away from down there, and she said, Well that’s what they been telling me for don’t know how long, probably ever since I found out what it’s made for. And that’s when I said what I said. Because I had been warned that if you came across as a smart aleck you were going to find yourself pussy-whipped and back out on the sidewalk in one short verse and about one-half chorus if not a verse and a couple of bars.
I said, Is that supposed to be good or bad, and she said, That’s what I want to know, so come on let’s find out. If I like it that means it must be good and if I don’t, it’s bad. And I saw my chance and said, Or maybe there’s really nothing to it in the first place and got myself a quick smile and the nicest squeeze I’d had since saying goodbye to Miss Slick McGinnis.
The room surprised me. I already knew that the houses in the district were supposed to be safer and nicer than those in Bearmash Bottom, Gin Mill Crossing, or out on Ellis Hill Road, and that this was the best house in the district because it catered strictly to the campus trade. Not that I had expected any joints of any kind anywhere in that section of Alabama to be as rowdy as just plain old everyday back alley jook houses around Gasoline Point or side-street joints off the waterfront in downtown Mobile. I wasn’t concerned about anything like that at all. I just hadn’t expected the room to be what it was.
I had thought that there would be just a bed and maybe two chairs and a nightstand with a washbasin and soap and towels and a clothes rack. But it was as if we were in one of the cozily furnished guest rooms of a big two-story house of a prosperous small-town businessman. Not only were there double windows with frilly curtains, a vase of fresh flowers on the chest of drawers, and watercolor prints and sketches of Paris, Rome, and Greece, but also a private bathroom with hot and cold running water, which was something very special everywhere except in deluxe hotels when I was a freshman.
So come on over here, sweetie pie, she said, pulling my arms around her waist and when I moved one hand up and the other down and waited, she said, Nice, very nice, you got nice manners Mobile, and when I moved my hands and waited again she said, Well all right then, sweetie pie, but just a minute, just a minute, and she stepped back and slipped off her boa-trimmed kimono and sat on the bed and kicked off her slippers and when I pulled off my shoes and stripped down, she said, Well hello sweet popper shopper. Let’s have some fun. Let’s do some stuff. She said, Let’s have us a ball. She said, Me and you, baby boy, me and you, me and you!
You couldn’t hear any voices in any of the other rooms down the hall. There was the static-blurred music and chatter on the radio downstairs for a while, but then there was only what was happening in the room where I was as she whispered sometimes with her lips and tongue touching my ear and sometimes as if to herself. But
even so I was still conscious of the dark, damp mid-October night outside and the campus that far away back across town.
I had the feeling that she went on whispering not only because that was something she did sometimes but also because she really wanted me to enjoy myself. So I said, Talk to me, big mama, talk to me hot mama, talk to me pretty mama, and she said, Me and you snookie pie, me and you sweet daddy me and you sweet papa stopper, and it was a very nice ride because that was the way she wanted it to be. Because as smart about things like that as I had already become before I came to college that year, I was also sharp enough to realize that I wouldn’t have been any match at all for a pro like her if she had wanted to turn me into an easy trick.
Afterward in the bathroom she said, Here, let me do this, and I raised both arms as if she’d said hands up and she winked and said, I hope you realize you getting some very special brown-skin service over here schoolboy, and I said, You bet I do, Miss Stuff, and she said, I heard that Mobile, that’s pretty good Mobile if it mean what some people mean by it, and I said, How about something you knew how to strut second to none how about something you got to watch because it’s so mellow, and she said, And what about something you trying to hand because you already so full of it and ain’t even dry behind the ears yet.
But you still all right with me, Mobile, she said and then she also said, You a nice boy, Mobile, I mean sure enough nice like you been brought up to be. Don’t take much to tell when it come to something like that. When you and your buddy first walked in down there, the very minute I laid eyes on you I said to myself, un-hunh, un-hunh, un-hunh, and then here you come picking me.
The Spyglass Tree Page 5