And I told him, too. I said, Man, where you been, white man, just coming in here this time of night? I said, Man, you know this is Sadday. And he come talking about nigger, and I said, Man, nigger nothing. I said, Business is business. I said, Nigger ain’t got nothing to do with this. I said, What about all these old hungry white folks around here? Just like everybody else. And he said, Yeah, but nigger. And I said, Man, how you going to nigger your way out of something like this? I said, You know good and well I am eating out of a paper sack. I said, You the one eating out of the cupboard, not me and these people. I said, I’m eating out of a paper sack one can at a time.
I also knew what people in Gasoline Point meant when they said Old Evil Ed Riggins didn’t even lower his voice in the bank because I was there one day when he came in. It was not that he was loud. He wasn’t. But when he spoke in his normal tone of voice, you suddenly realized that the tone everybody else was using was hardly above a whisper and also that they were moving about as if they were not only in church but at a funeral.
As a matter of fact, he didn’t even raise his voice when you saw him standing somewhere signifying at everybody in earshot as I came upon him doing at the entrance to Hammel’s Department Store one day. When he said, Well, let me get on in here and see if I can figure out what these old Mobile, Alabama, white folks coming up with this time, he was not really trying to get attention. He was only thinking aloud in public and signifying and scandalizing anybody who happened to be listening.
He also used to like to say, You damn sure better be on your goddamn p’s and q’s because you can bet your bottom dollar these old goddamn white folks going to be trying to come up with something else, and damn if I believe they know what the hell it is they own selves most of the goddamn time, if you want to know the goddamn truth. Hell, it ain’t my goddamn fault. I didn’t make them. I’m just trying to find out how to deal with these we got around here.
People used to say he walked with one shoulder hunched just slightly higher than the other because he was so used to wearing an underarm holster for his 38 Special and that when the weather was too warm for a coat or his stiffly starched blue denim overall jumper-jacket, you could tell by a little added drag in his sporty walk that he was carrying his back-up Derringer in a leg holster.
He had started out up in the country as a turpentine worker. Then he had become a woodsman and hunting guide. That was how he got his reputation as the dead-eye pump gun and Winchester expert, bar none. He still hunted bear and deer as well as rabbits, possum, squirrels, and coons, ducks, and quail and now he also had a rowboat that he used not only for channel fishing but also for bagging ducks, marsh hens, and wild guineas up in Hog Bayou (which was also wild boar and alligator territory) and over in the canebrakes of Pole Cat Bay.
The only explanation I ever heard anybody give for the way he always woofed and signified wherever he was around white people was that it was what he did to keep everybody reminded that no matter who you were, he was not the kind of man you could mess with and expect to get away with it. Nobody I ever asked or overheard around the fireside, on the swing porch, or in the barbershop or anywhere else ever claimed to know about any specific occurrence that it all could be traced back to. Nor could anybody name anybody anywhere who ever called his hand.
I did know who Dudley Philpot was when I woke up that morning but only by name because of the sign on the front of his store, which I had never set foot inside of but which I knew was about a half of a block off Courthouse Square going toward Carmichael Construction Supply Company. I did not know him by sight and I had never wondered what he was like because he didn’t have any kind of reputation that I had ever heard anything about.
Giles Cunningham, on the other hand, was somebody I already knew by sight as well as reputation. I had never actually met him, but I became used to seeing him in the barbershop and on the block during the past three years, and so I had also picked up enough information about him (most of it casual and incidental) to know that he owned the Dolomite Ballroom out near Montgomery Fork, the hillside eating place called the Pit (as in barbecue pit), a short distance out of town on U.S. 80 going toward the Georgia state line, and that the Plum (as in plum thickets and also as in plumb out of town and nearly out of the country), the after-hours spot off Route 33 going south by east to the Florida panhandle, belonged to him.
By the time that I had become the upperclassman and prospective honor graduate that I was when I woke up that morning, I had also learned enough about him to know that he also owned two subdivisions, one near the campus and another out in the hill section where he lived, that he owned a chicken farm and fourteen hundred acres of farmland out in the country, and that he also had part ownership in several other concerns, including a dry-cleaning business which a cousin was operating in Chattanooga and a bay-front resort and fishing camp which his half-brother was getting started down below Mobile and Dog River.
I also knew that his houseman at the ballroom was Wiley Payton, an old trench buddy from the AEF and that one Speck (as in Speckle Red) Jenkins, an old L & N dining car chef out of Montgomery, took care of the day-to-day details at the Pit and that the man in charge out at the Plum was one Flea (for Fleetwood) Mosley, an old pre-Prohibition bartender and off-time pool shark from Birmingham.
Along with the ballroom into which headline road bands were booked once or twice a week, the Dolomite also had a big bar off the main lobby that was open every night and had its own combo and a floor show. The Pit was strictly an eating place that was open for breakfast and closed after dinner, which was served from 5:30 to 8:30 P.M. on weekdays and 5:30 to midnight on Saturdays. The Plum was an old-time down-home jook joint with a honky-tonk piano player named Gits Coleman.
The Pit was also his headquarters. So that was where he spent most of his time during daylight hours and that was where you called to get him on the phone. He also spent a certain amount of time at the other places, too, but anybody trying to get in touch with him always called the Pit first. Some people also knew that in case of an emergency, you could also get a message to him by calling Hortense Hightower.
He made a daily check of the Dolomite and the Plum either in the morning or early afternoon while things were being set up and then again at night when everything was supposed to be rolling. Sometimes he ran out to the poultry farm once a week and sometimes twice. Otherwise, he left everything up there to Ed Mitchell, a graduate from the School of Agriculture, who sent eggs and dressed chickens into the Pit and also to the clubs. The only time he made regular trips to his other farms further out in the country was during the planting and harvest seasons. Otherwise, he seldom went more than once every two or three weeks.
You could also find him in town for a while every morning because he usually went to the bank before noon, and when Wiley Peyton wasn’t with him during that part of the day, it was usually Flea Mosley, and unless there was some reason to check by the courthouse, the next stop was always his office at the Pit because that was where he usually took care of bills and orders. He always put in the big orders himself, and he also booked all the name bands and personally produced and promoted all of the special dances and coordinated the annual galas sponsored by the local social clubs.
As a matter of fact, Giles Cunningham and the Pit and the Dolomite and the Plum (and thus also Wiley Peyton and Flea Mosley and Speck Jenkins) were all very much a part of what was on my mind when I woke up that morning, because as soon as I realized that I was no longer asleep and remembered what day it was, I began thinking about Hortense Hightower and the way she had said what she said.
After all, I had already found out most of what I knew about him and his concerns long before I had finally come to realize that she herself even existed. Nor had I just been hearing about him. I had actually been seeing him at fairly close range although not with any one-on-one personal familiarity ever since the first term of my freshman year because he always came on the block at least once a week. He was always there e
very Friday afternoon, the big black Cadillac parked head on into the curb in front of the barbershop.
That was when Skeeter always got him ready for the weekend. That included a hair trim, shampoo, shave, and facial, and there was also a manicurist on Friday and Saturday. Sometimes when all of that was over, he would also hang around for a while swapping lies and signifying with Deke Whatley, the owner, or he would come back out and stand in front of Red’s Varsity Threads next door, talking sports with Red Gilmore.
You couldn’t miss him, standing with one leg dropped back like that, the toes of his highly glossed, elegantly narrow, and thin-soled shoes pointing inward, shoulders erect but with the left ever so slightly lower than the right and with his hat, which always looked brand new, and which he wore tilted toward his left brow, blocked long with the brim turned up all around in what I used to call the Birmingham/Kansas City poolroom homburg style.
Whatever he was wearing always went well with his barbershop-smooth ginger-brown skin and the way he handled himself. He was just about six feet even, solidly built but with a little bulge in the midsection that along with his smartly hand-tailored hand-finished suits and custom-made shirts and accessories made him look more like a road musician or gambler who might go hunting and fishing from time to time than like an athlete.
But as I found out early on, he had started out to be a prize fighter, another Jack Johnson, and heavyweight champion of the world. A lot of boys were going to be another Jack Johnson or another Joe Gans back in those days, and he made a pretty good start and he had kept it up when he was conscripted and sent to camp. But when they shipped him overseas, he got a chance to see another part of the world and all of that had given him a lot of other possibilities to consider.
He had not really been old enough to be called up, but he looked more adult than he was at the time, and he had been putting his age up so that he could hang around the saloons and pool halls so he was drafted and he fought in the Vosges mountains and also in the Argonne forest, and he had had himself some fun over there, too. He had lied to go AWOL to get into Paris, but he and Wiley Peyton had made it there three times. He and Wiley Peyton had been in the same company from the very outset and by the time they reached the embarkation point of Newport News, Virginia, they were buddies, so they had gone on to do a lot of French towns together just as they had done their share of going over the top and through the barbwire together.
When he came back stateside, he had started running on the L & N as a Pullman porter and had also become a dining car headwaiter, and that was when he really began to pick up on how you made good money by providing first-class service. And then he went to Harlem during the boom in the 1920s and got a job in a big midtown hotel, and that’s when he decided what he wanted to do and started putting money aside and laying his plans.
Then when the big Depression struck at the end of the decade, he took what he had saved, along with all of the tricks of the trade that he had picked up from the railroad and New York by that time, and came on back down home and went into business for himself, starting with the Pit, which was just another old rundown roadside chicken shack when he made his downpayment on it.
XV
She said, Hi there, Schoolboy, and I could have said not for very much longer. Because it was already the middle of that third January and I was less than five months away from being a senior, and then there would be the summer and I would be on my way to what comes after commencement. But I didn’t say that. I said, I don’t deny my name. I said, I don’t deny my name because going to school is still my game. And she had to smile and then she winked and said, I don’t deny my name either, Schoolboy, and sat on the next stool with her back to the bar.
That was how I met Hortense Hightower. I already knew who she was. Everybody present knew who she was because she was the main attraction in that wing of the Dolomite complex. She was the singer the five-piece combo was there to play behind, and she was also the dancer featured in the Friday and Saturday night floor shows, which also included a chorus line of six dancers who doubled as backup singers, a comedian named Gutbucket, and also a guest spot for a singer or instrumentalist.
All I actually knew about her at that time was how she sounded and the way she came across on stage and what a good-looking, svelte, nutmeg-brown woman she was. I had not yet found out anything at all about where she had grown up and where she had worked before. I knew that she had been in town for five or six years, but I hadn’t ever seen her in person until that last Christmas break when I finally went along with Marcus Bailey and Clifton Jackson, two fellow upperclassmen from Birmingham who made the rounds of all the outlying joints several times a month.
On all of my other trips out to the club before then, I had always been in such a big rush to get inside the main hall to get as close as possible to the musicians in the big-name bands that came through on tour that I never had paid any attention at all to the ongoing local entertainment in the after-hours room on your left as you came into the main lobby. After all, the name bands such as Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, and others that you heard on the radio and on records (and also some of the territory bands like, say, the Sunset Royals) were something you scrimped and saved up for.
She sang some new and some standard pop songs. She sang the blues in all tempos, and she would also do a torch song on request. But you could tell that she got a special kick out of swinging love songs like “My Blue Heaven,” “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me,” and “Exactly Like You” off-time to a medium tempo, and as soon as you heard her shout one twelve-bar chorus with the combo signifying back at her over an ever-steady, omni-flexible, four/four, you knew exactly why they called her Boss Lady.
Not that she was ever actually bossy, not in the least. She didn’t have to be. Her authority was as casual as it was complete. All she had to do was come tripping on stage with the combo riffing “At Sundown,” and it was as if the storybook queen herself had just entered the throne room, and when she bowed and smiled and waited for everything to settle down, it was (for me at any rate and perhaps on some level of feeling if not quite of consciousness for others, too) almost as if it were about to be Mother Goose tale time around the fireside once more. Schoolboy that I was and to some extent still am, that was what came to mind at the very outset of the first show I saw her open and just as I was about to whisper to Marcus and Clayton that there were few things anywhere in the world better with some down-home bootleg ale than a good-looking brown-skinned woman with another blue-steel fairy tale, there were the drum rolls, the piano vamping, and her opening proclamation: Let’s drink some mash and talk some trash this evening.
On stage she came across as a seasoned professional at ease and in charge, but sitting next to her at the bar you could see that she was probably not yet in her midthirties, if she was yet thirty, and you also realized that she had seemed taller on stage because she had long-looking, rubbery-nimble legs and she also moved like the dancer she also was. From that alone I guessed that she was size fourteen (36”-24”-38”), which in those days used to mean that along with everything else she was built for speed and maneuverability and also stacked for heavy duty and endurance. It was not until later on that I began saying that she was bass clef, although I had already picked that up from my brand-new roommate during the very first term of my freshman year.
You could also see how little stage makeup she needed for a room that size, and you could tell that the high sheen of her long black wavy hair, which she wore pulled back and clamped into a ponytail, did not come from a hot-comb treatment. All it took was a very small amount of a very light oil and a few routine strokes with a regular dressing-table comb-and-brush set.
I saw you listening, she said, and when she smiled at that range you got a quick flash of one gold filling that looked more like a cosmetic touch than a necessary correction because the rest of her teeth were without any visible flaws at all. And so were her hands and fingers, which, like those o
f so many brown-skin women I remember over the years, were every bit as small and elegantly tapered as I have always imagined that those of storybook princesses, being of regal birth, were expected to be.
This is not your first time in here, she said, and I said, My third time, my second time on my own, but before she could say anything else somebody cut in to say something nice and give her a show-biz hug and a fake kiss and then there was a couple who did the same thing, and when they left she said, A lot of college boys come in here all the time, but you’re the first one I spotted sitting back here all by himself listening with your ear cocked like that, so I said, Who is that one and where did he come from?
So where do you come from, Schoolboy, she said, and when I told her, she said, I’ve been down through there more than once. So you grew up hearing Old Papa Gladstone and y’all must have more jook joints on the outskirts of Mobile than any other town in this state.
She herself was from Anniston by way of Bessemer, she said, and within the next week or so she also told me about how she had started out in the church choir in Anniston and had become a soloist by the time she was a teenager. She had finished high school in Bessemer and won a scholarship to ’Bama State, but she had dropped out after a year to join a road band barnstorming through the Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi territory. That was when she became a dancer because the bandleader wanted her to be an all-round entertainer as well as a singer. And for a while she had also played around with the idea of becoming a headliner with her own road show.
The Spyglass Tree Page 11