Miss Tee was the expert auntie who told me about fairy-tale beanstalks, and she also used to used to say Jack be nimble, Jack be quick, Jack jump over the candlestick, ooping me up and out and dedoodling me over and back down and enfolding me to the bosom of herself again. She also riddled me riddles and nourished me on nursery rhymes and caught me with catches and girded me for existential guessing games.
She had a good-fairy smile and fairy-godmother ring fingers, and I can still remember her story-time voice saying once upon a time over my shoulder and that close to my ear as she rocked me rock-a-bye in Mama’s rocking chair. It was as if all of that had always been there along with everything else, and even before I was old enough to know what a storybook as such actually was, I could help her turn the page so that I could look at the pictures on the next page while her voice went on spinning out the yarn of the story for that day.
As far back as I can recollect, seeing her coming back again I can also remember that it was as if she had only just rearrived from the far blue ever-and-ever land of storybook castles and boy blue derring-do once more and that I was going to find out something else about how heroes set forth to seek their fortune and about how they prepare themselves to brave the elements and to slay dragons and giants and other dangerous creatures because such, being their destiny, was also their duty.
I was still very young when she got married to Mister Paul Miles Boykin, a stacking-yard straw boss at Buckshaw Mill, but from then on I knew what neighborhood she lived in, because you could see her house from Miss Betty Dubose’s corner when on your way up Dodge Mill Road toward the crawfish pond and the streetcar loop; and you could also see it from the end of Gins Alley as soon as you passed Miss Blue Eula’s gate on your way to the L & N post office and looked to your left along the street that ran from the tank yard and across Dodge Mill Road to the A T & N and the pecan orchard.
Whichever route you took, her house was only about two and a half blocks away and so was still a part of Gasoline Point although it was also another neighborhood, just as Gins Alley was still another neighborhood. It was called Main Street, but it really should have been called Second Street because the main thoroughfare where all of the business concerns were located and along which most of the traffic came and went was Buckshaw Road, which later on (at the time when the Cochrane Bridge was built across that part of Mobile River) became a part of U.S. 90 and the old Spanish Trail.
When you opened the gate there was a cowbell sound, and there were flower beds on both sides of the brick walk as you came on toward the trellis screening the swing porch. Then when you came up the steps by the potted plants and into the parlor there were heavy draperies that matched the chair cushions and a big bouquet of fresh flowers in a blue vase on the lace-covered center table in front of the settee and bright blue-and-yellow flower patterns on the store-bought wallpaper.
I also remember the high beds with the fancy fringed counterpanes and frilly window curtains I saw as we went through the back rooms on our way to the kitchen that first time, and after we ate a sandwich Miss Tee and Mama went on talking and drinking coffee. She said I could go out into the backyard if I wanted to, and as soon as I opened the door onto the screened-in porch, I saw the toy store playthings.
Then that house turned out to be the first place I was allowed to go when I became old enough to be that far from the chinaberry yard on my own, and in the beginning you had to go by way of Gins Alley because of all the heavy traffic along Dodge Mill Road, and when you arrived she was always waiting either at the gate or on the front steps, and there was always something that she said she had been saving as a little surprise, and when time was up she always went with you to the gate and handed you a package to take back to Mama.
The best times were when Mister Paul Miles Boykin was not there. Because whenever he was, even if he just happened to make a quick circle by the house during the twelve o’clock whistle break, he would be watching and cutting his eyes at you even when he didn’t say the same old thing about not being able to waste all of his time playing when he was a child.
One time he showed up at our house as if from the clear blue sky (but probably directly from a spluttering argument with Miss Tee) and asked Mama if he could hire me to run errands and do chores for him on a weekly basis so I could realize that I had to earn my keep and pay my way because nothing comes free in this world. And Mama said, Be time enough for him to realize that, and she said, He got to be a child before he can be a man, and she also said, He sure better mind his manners and show due respect for grown folks because God knows I don’t mind them chastising him and I better not hear tell of him opening his mouth back at them neither, let alone sassing them. But me and Whit the ones raising him and I don’t want nobody bossing him around and abusing him for no little old few cents a week, don’t care who it is, and don’t care what color neither. To which he said, I’m Edie’s husband now and I’m thinking of his welfare, and Mama said, I want him to grow up a step at a time, and he sure will be coming to all of that soon enough. Too soon if you ask me.
Then one day Deljean McCray was there standing on the front steps below Miss Tee waiting for me as I came through the cowbell gate. She was that much older and that many more inches taller than I was and she stood with her arms akimbo, smiling down at me like a newfound cousin. Then she took my hand and we went around the house to the backyard, and the first thing we ever played on was the seesaw, and I still get a sweet, warm feeling every time I remember how she looked bouncing and kicking her heels and opening her long rubbery cinnamon-brown legs with her skirt billowing and shutting like a parasol as she sang, Seesaw, cut the butter, seesaw. Then we also had a good time with the toy store playthings on the screened-in kitchen porch, and when I came back outside to the live oak and got on the swing, she stood up behind me and pumped so high that you could see out over the back fence and all the way across the dog-fennel meadow between there and the telegraph poles above the mill-quarter’s houses along that part of Buckshaw Road.
She said, So you the little old cute Scooter boy Miss Edie Belle always carrying on so much about be coming over here, and she held my hand again, looking at me with her head tilted and her eyes twinkling with catlike curiosity and puppylike mischief. Then she said, Boy, Miss Edie Belle sure real crazy about you, always calling you her little Mister. Just wait till you see my little Mister. He’ll be coming over for a visit. So this is you, she said, and then she said, and I guess you all right with me, too. So you want to be friends and play-like cousins.
I said okay because I was already very glad that she was going to be there. I said, You all right with me, too, Deljean. Because I liked her cinnamon-brown skin and the cinnamon-brown tree bark she chewed and smelled like even when she also smelled somewhat like sardine oil, and I also liked the Vaseline sheen on her braids although I never did like girls with braided hair as much as I liked frizzly-headed girls like Charlene Wingate. In those days I liked it better when girls with hair like that wore it either bobbed and poroed like Miss Slick McGinnis or hot-combed and styled like the most popular blues singers and vaudeville entertainers, and so did she as I found out as soon as she was old enough for it to be dressed for special occasions.
When I went back over there that next time, I could tell that she was glad to see me even before she said what she said, and I said I was very glad to see her too, and she said, Now come on now tell the truth now you’re not just playing with me because you come over here to see Miss Edie Belle. I’m talking about sure enough now, Scooter, saying my name exactly as somebody does who has been thinking about you since you were there the last time, and I said, Me too, Deljean. I said, I’m talking about sure enough too. And she said, Well, I reckon we must still be good friends then so come on, let’s go play.
The time after that was when she said, Maybe if you ask your mama maybe Miss Edie Belle will let me come over to your house sometime and play too, and I said I would and I did and that was when I realized that she hadn’
t met anybody else her size to play with yet because Mister Paul Miles Boykin did not want her to get herself led astray by a pack of good-for-nothing mill-quarters niggers. Not that I was really surprised one bit. So I certainly was not surprised when she told me that as soon as he found out that she and I were becoming playmates, he said what he said about her not having any time to be working loafing around playing with the likes of little old mister precious me instead of earning her bed and board.
It was not long afterward that she ran away the first time. She was gone for a week and I missed her as if I had known her all my life. I missed her every day not because I had ever seen her every day but because I didn’t know where she was or if I would ever see her again, and when Mama told me she was back, I could hardly wait to see her again and when I got there she saw me coming through the gate and said, Here come Scooter, and she was still trying to smile down at me even with her face bruised and swollen like it was because Mister Paul Miles Boykin had finally traced and found her up in Chickasaw Bend. He had slapped and cuffed her all the way back along the A T & N railroad in the dark.
That’s all right. Don’t you worry about me, Scooter, she said when I touched her and asked her if it still hurt bad, and she didn’t cry when she told about what had happened.
In fact, I don’t remember ever seeing her cry about anything. Sometimes she used to get so mad about something that her eyes would water but that was not the same thing as crying because when you cry about something happening to you that means you feel sorry for yourself. But when you get so angry about something that tears almost come that just shows how much determination you have.
She says, Boy you don’t know, Scooter. Boy, you don’t know nothing at all about my uncle Paul Miles Boykin. She said, Boy you ain’t never seen nobody like that in your whole life. She said, I’m talking about every time he think he got to chastise somebody about something, here he come, slapping you up side the head before he even tell you what he mad about, and when you try to move out of the way and ask him what’s wrong, he subject to pick up anything he can get his hands on and chuck it at you. And then come talking about he love me because I’m his flesh and blood kin and he don’t want me to end up in the gutter and some old stuff like that, I declare, Scooter.
But that’s all right with me, Scooter. She also said, That’s all right with me because I don’t care no more because I know good and well he crazy. I declare before God that man just as angry as he can be. And you know something? If it wasn’t for Miss Edie Belle I never would be coming back here no more. Don’t care if he tried to kill me to make me come back. He the one always talking about looking after me because I’m his dead sister’s child, but Miss Edie Belle she the one know how to be somebody’s auntie and treat you like you supposed to do what you do around the house because you at home and you got your tasks just like everybody else. But him, I’m telling you Scooter. Boy, you pretty lucky. I know what I’m talking about. You got Miss Melba and Uncle Whit and you got Miss Edie Belle on top of that, and they all treat you like you somebody special, she said, and you know why, and I said, Why? and she said, Because they want you to be somebody special and you know something, me too.
I don’t remember how old I was when Miss Tee first said you are my mister because it is as if that is what she had always called me, and I cannot remember when I didn’t already remember her voice and her eyes with her face that close and then her cheeks against mine and her godmotherly arms around my shoulders smelling like rainbows look.
But however young I may still have been at the time in question, I was also already old enough to have heard enough of her storybook stories to realize that when she put the tips of her fingers on your shoulders and held you an arm’s length away smiling her fairy godmother smile at you, it was her secret way of saying arise Sir Knight and sally forth doing good deeds time after time after time in place after place after place.
So first there was Mama herself, whose little scootabout manchild I already was even before I was yet old enough to stay up late enough to hear the tales told on midwinter nights in the semicircle around the fireplace and during midsummer evenings on the swing porch with mosquito smoke rising and spreading in the chinaberry yard. Then there was also Miss Tee who began calling me her Mister in her storybook voice rocking me back and forth in Mama’s cane-bottom rock-a-bye riverboat rocking chair.
By the time Little Buddy Marshall came along, I had outgrown most of the playthings in Miss Tee’s backyard and what he and I used to spend most of our times together doing was rambling here and there and elsewhere like explorers and pioneers who were bred and born in the briar patch and we also hunted with a slingshot and the main game we lived to play was baseball. Sometimes I also thought of myself as a boxer with eyes and hands as quick as Joe Gans and a six-inch uppercut like the one and only Jack Johnson.
When he stopped in with me to meet her the first time that day when we were on our way to the shortcut through the kite pasture to get to the foot of Buckshaw Mill Road and the construction camp at the site where the Cochrane Bridge was going to be built, I knew he would like her and the first chance he got he nudged me and whispered, Hey shit I reckon old buddy boy, hey shit I reckon. Then when the time finally came to open her surprise package of sandwiches and tea cake cookies that we had promised to save until the twelve o’clock whistles started, he also said, Man, you sure got yourself some big auntie.
And that is when he also said, Now that’s what I call a sure enough fairy story godmother, buddy boy, which was really something coming from him, because as much as he always liked all of the things you found out about from the chimney corner and the steps of the swing porch and especially from the barbershop, he really didn’t have very much interest in storybooks as such. As far as he was concerned, there was no difference between storybooks and schoolbooks, and he never did come to like anything at all about going to school, not even the playground activities. He didn’t even like football and basketball and volleyball, which were all school-term games in those days. Later on when cowboy movies began to become popular, he liked the adventures of William S. Hart and Tom Mix and Buck Jones and Ken Maynard and hated crooks like Bull Montana as much as I did, but he never did become interested in reading anything about the wild West either, not even the Indians.
But whether Little Buddy Marshall knew it or not, Miss Tee was not only what fairy godmothers were really about, she had also always been a part of what school bell time was all about and when I became school age, she had been the one who gave me my first book satchel and blackboard eraser and collapsible aluminum drinking cup, and Mama had let her be the one to take me to be registered in the primer class at Mobile County Training School that first Monday morning.
XI
You couldn’t see any part of the downtown business district from anywhere on the campus, and except during the wee hours and on weekends you couldn’t even hear the courthouse clock striking until you rounded the curve and passed by the wrought-iron gate to the old plantation mansion known as the Old Strickland Place. But you could walk all the way from the academic area to Old Confederate Square in less than twenty minutes.
Then you were at the hub of a cotton market town that was also the county seat, and across North Main Street from the sheriff’s office and the jail and the municipal complex was the Farmer’s Enterprise Bank and from that corner you could see along the sidewalk past the movie theater and the next street to the brick and lumber yard of the Carmichael Construction Supply Company and you could also see all of the stores on the other three sides of the elm-shaded square.
In those days there was also a Merchants Bank, and there were also two drugstores, a Woolworth’s, a Bradley’s Furniture, and I don’t know exactly how many clothing stores, specialty shops, cafes, and lunch counters, but I do remember how Goldwyn’s Dry Goods store and Ransom’s Bargain Emporium used to look, and everybody remembers Tate and Davidson’s two-story department store.
My old roommate has
a pretty good reason to remember the young women’s Intercollegiate Toggery shop that was next door to Tate and Davidson’s in those days, but most people have probably long since forgotten Dudley Philpot and his General Merchandise Store. Sometimes I forget all about him, too. I wonder if Will Spradley has ever forgotten, but I’m pretty certain that you would have to prod Giles Cunningham for a while and then he could probably say, Yeah, I think I can picture the old son-of-a-bitch. What the hell happened and what the hell was it all about?
The heavy interstate traffic westbound toward Montgomery and points south to Florida and the Gulf Coast and eastbound toward Phoenix City and the Georgia state line, Atlanta, and points north, came through on the south side of the square, so from the corner where the telephone central was you could see gas stations and automobile dealers’ pennants in both directions and the bus stop beyond the light and power building.
The downtown post office was one block due south of the square on the tree-lined street which was called South Main and also South End and which was also where the white supremacist white high school, several white Protestant churches, and the neatly kept but not very old homes of a number of the most prosperous local white businessmen lived in those days.
Most of the downtown white families who could trace their bloodlines back to the earliest settlers lived on North Main, also known as North End which was an avenue of mostly pre-Civil War homes and with a center strip of shrubbery and flower beds and which began on the north side of the square and ended two blocks beyond the corner where it turned into a thoroughfare leading out to the campus.
The Spyglass Tree Page 7