The Spyglass Tree

by Albert Murray

  XVII

  It is just about impossible to keep your thinking from becoming outright wishful when you are with somebody like Hortense Hightower, but I was not about to let myself jump to any hasty conclusions about what she was up to. I told myself that it was probably some sort of little game, that upper-level college man that I had finally become, I was supposed to be up to playing along with it until I found out whatever it was. In any case, the main thing was to keep from being faked into making a country break. Not that I was actually suspicious. There was no reason to feel that I was being set up. It really only was a matter of not taking for granted that somebody liked you on your own terms.

  When I went back the week after that, she spotted me as soon as she came on, and at the end of the first set she came over and said, Say, there’s my new schoolboy friend. What say, Schoolboy? Take care of my brand-new schoolboy friend, bartender. I was wondering when you’d come back to see me again. I was thinking about how much I enjoyed talking to you.

  So there she was, sitting on the next bar stool smiling at me again, and it was not a matter of believing your luck or even of what to say, because after she asked me about the campus routine, she said, You know, when I was thinking about you I was also thinking about how some people come in here all the time because they just like to have some music going on around them when they’re sipping a little taste of something and jiving or maybe conniving and carrying on.

  Then she said, Now don’t get me wrong. They all right with me because that’s all a part of what a place like this is here for, too. Always has been. Some people just like to hear it without really listening to it. But you can get to them because they feel it. Just like they dance to it. That’s how come when it stops, they stop whatever they’re doing and start looking up and around like a fish in a pond you just dried up.

  But somebody like you, now, she said, now you’re not just hearing and feeling it. You also pay attention like you also got something personal and private going on. Like me, she said, and I don’t mean like no musician either. Because I know a whole lot of musicians can’t hear doodly-squat. I know some can read anything you put in front of them and then can’t play anything you want to hear, and I know some others that’ll look at you like you crazy if you want them to go back and read something they just played the stew out of by ear. But later for all that, she said, because I can tell you a few things about musicians. I know some that just come in to watch you working so they can argue about what you did do or didn’t do, and you never know when they just looking for something to steal and sometimes when they can’t find nothing they want to steal they subject to say you ain’t doing nothing. So later for them. I don’t call that listening to music because me, I’m just up there trying to help people have a good time.

  Which is exactly what she did when she came back on the floor show in which there was also a guest instrumentalist from Montgomery on alto sax whose solo feature was a takeoff of “Sweet Georgia Brown” which was very much like the one that Paul Bascombe was to record on tenor sax with Erskine Hawkins’s band of mostly former ’Bama State collegians a year or so later.

  I went back again that next Wednesday night and at one point in what was becoming our ongoing conversation, about listening and hearing, she said what she said about some hotshots from the campus who usually seemed to be mainly interested in showing how hip they were by making requests just to find out if she was up with the latest tunes they had been picking up on the radio and from the phonograph and that is how I found out that she herself still had every recording she had ever bought or had been given over the years.

  So I said, What about Ma Rainey and Bessie and Clara and Mamie and Trixie? What about Jelly Roll and Papa Joe and Sidney Bechet and Freddie Keppard and young Satch and she just nodded, smiling, and said, Well, no wonder I noticed the way you listen. Because you listen like somebody already on some kind of real time. Because I can tell, and let me tell you something else. When you’re already on some solid time you don’t have to go around worrying about being up-to-date.

  Then she said what she said about a college boy being the one who was supposed to know where stuff came from because that was also how you found out how and when it came to be the way it was as of now. That’s what school is supposed to be all about, she said, and a hip cat ain’t nothing but somebody trying to be a city slicker, and if you really think you can slick your way through life, shame on you.

  Now that’s what I say, she said, and that was also when she told me that I was welcome to come by her house and play some of her records if I wanted to, and I said, I most certainly do want to, and when it was time to get ready for the next show, she described how to get to her neighborhood from the campus, and said what the best time was and left it at that.

  So it was as if it was all up to me. But when she answered the doorbell that Sunday afternoon three days later and saw me standing there and said, So there you are, I could tell that she had actually been expecting me, and before I could apologize for intruding on her precious free time, she said, I’m sure glad you could make it. Come on in and let’s get started.

  So there I was indeed (with my wishes firmly in clutch and my senior year pretty much within reach and my long-range objectives a matter of no less urgency for being not yet specific), and there was the long living room with a nine-and-a-half-foot ceiling and there was the console-model Magnavox phonograph at the end where the floor-length draperies of the tall French windows were.

  Some of the records, most of which were ten-inch and all of which were 78 rpm in those days, were in the built-in storage compartment, some were on the glass-top Hollywood coffee table between the overstuffed lounge chair and a hand-me-down rocking chair facing the console as if it were a fireplace, and there were others along with the stacks of sheet music on top of the white lacquer-finished grand piano near the arch where the Persian rug ended and the dining area which could be closed off with folding glass partition doors began.

  I had never seen that many records of that kind anywhere before, and while I was looking through them and trying to make up my mind where to begin, she started the one that was already on the turntable, and as soon as I heard the first six notes of the piano intro I said, Hey, Earl Hines, hey Jimmy Mundy, hey “Cavernism,” hey you, too, and she said, That’s my favorite dance hall stomp-off and getaway number. Right after the theme, to break the ice and get ’em out there on the floor.

  That’s the one, she said when it was over, but now here’s another one of it that they made about a year before that one and I like it too. I like those little differences in the call part of that opening phrase, she said, and I said, Me too, and I said, That guitar up front like that is all right with me too. Years later, Earl Hines was to tell me that he and Jimmy Mundy named that piece for a Washington, D.C., nightclub called the Cavern, but it was strictly Chicago music even so, because when you heard it going on the radio in those days, it was as if you were being taken to the South Side, just as Ellington’s “Echoes of Harlem” took you to uptown Manhattan and Count Basie’s “Moten Swing” took you out to Eighteenth and Vine in Kansas City.

  The first side I handed her was old Jelly Roll Morton and the Red Hot Peppers playing “Kansas City Stomp” as if to charge the atmosphere of Gasoline Point with train whistles and sawmill whistles and riverboat and waterfront whistles. So that Little Buddy Marshall and I would have to do Old Luzana Cholly’s sporty-limp strut going past dog-fennel meadows and crepe-myrtle yard blossoms en route once more to infield clay and outfield horizons by day and honky-tonk pianos by night.

  I remember everything we played and hummed and whistled along with that first Sunday afternoon. After “Kansas City Stomp” I handed her Duke Ellington’s “Birmingham Breakdown” which Little Buddy Marshall used to like to whistle and walk to as much as I did, especially when we were making the rounds beginning around twilight time on Saturday nights when the atmosphere of Gasoline Point was also charged with barbershop bay rum and
talcum powder and the aroma of cigars, bootleg whiskey, and cookshop food.

  And then one that Little Buddy and I also used to think of as our briar-patch music was Fletcher Henderson’s orchestra playing “The Stampede.” Then I said, Talking about something to make them so eager to get out there and cutting that they can hardly wait in the hat-check line, how about this? and I handed her “Big John’s Special.”

  Then we went on to the one labeled “Wrapping It Up,” but which coast-to-coast radio announcers call “The Lindy Glide” (as in lindy hop, another name for jitterbugging, as up-tempo dancing to jazz music was called in those days), and that led to “Back in Your Own Back Yard,” “King Porter Stomp,” “Stealing Apples,” “Blue Lou,” and “Sing You Sinners,” which, like Bessie Smith’s recording of “Moan You Mourners,” was a mock church sermon pop song whose words I can still hear Nathaniel Tally, also known as Little Miss Nannie Goat of Tin Top Alley, shouting like stomping the blues with the Shelby Hill street-corner quartet backing him up, especially at a Saturday night fish- or chicken-plate benefit social.

  Old Smack, she said, and started it again. Old Smack Henderson from right over there across the state line from Eufaula in Cuthbert, Georgia.

  So we listened to it again right then, and we still had to hear it one more time as much as we both also liked “Wrapping It Up.” When I realized to our surprise how quickly the time had passed and that I had to head back to the campus, and when I said what I said about the arrangement being strictly instrumental in spite of the fact that the lyrics for it were about singing, she said, That’s Smack Henderson and when you got tenor players like Coleman Hawkins or Chu Berry or Ben Webster who is the one on this one, and you got trumpet players like Joe Smith, Red Allen, Rex Stewart, Roy Eldridge, and Emmett Berry who is the one on this and you got Buster Bailey and people like that, you ain’t got much for a vocalist to do.

  I don’t mean he don’t like them, she said. He knows what to do with them all right. Ethel Waters, Alberta Hunter, Bessie and Clara, Smith, Fletcher Henderson put some righteous stuff behind them and a whole lot of others. Then she said, But what about this? Here I am supposed to be a singer and this whole afternoon was strictly instrumental. But that’s just the kind of singer I am, if you know what I mean. Ain’t nothing like having all that good stuff behind you. I started out in the Mount Olive Choir and then went on to those bands. As far as I’m concerned, that’s the getting place for my kind of singer. All them old pros sitting back there in them sections, and you got to go out every set and make them like having you up there. Now, that’s the real conservatory for this stuff.

  At the door she said, Wouldn’t nobody believe that we didn’t get around to but one thing by Duke Ellington, and not one bar of old Louis, and I said, I know I wouldn’t and I was right here. Then when I said, I sure do thank you for letting me stop by like this, she said, Well now, you know your way over here and you got this many months left before graduation time.

  XVIII

  The main newspaper topic in the barbershop as I took my seat in front of Skeeter’s chair that morning was baseball. There were only a few more weeks before opening day in the major leagues, and the preseason exhibition games were in full swing and just about all of the talk was about last year’s World Series and this year’s most likely pennant winners and how the stars in both leagues were shaping up and also about what outstanding rookie prospects were already beginning to show up.

  Skeeter was touching up Red Gilmore who ran Red’s Varsity Threads Shop next door and always came in on Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday mornings to keep from looking as if he ever needed to go to the barbershop. Skeeter’s chair was number two. In chair number one, Deke Whatley, the manager whose real name was Fred Douglass Whatley, was working on a sophomore basketball player known as Kokomo because that was the town in Indiana that he came from. The third chair was not in operation because Thursday was Sack McBride’s day off, and in the fourth chair Pop Collins was giving a facial to somebody I didn’t know.

  I did know who Pete Carmichael was. He was taxi number one and he was sitting on the high chair that Deke Whatley, who liked to keep his eyes on the shop and the sidewalk at the same time, used to rest his legs every now and then, but at the moment Pete Carmichael was sitting with his back to the window because he had the floor.

  They went on talking about the spring training games of the big league baseball teams, and I heard them, but I was not really listening and following what points were being made because I was rereading the chapters on the commedia dell’arte, or comedy of improvisation of sixteenth-century Italy in a book entitled, The Theatre: Three Thousand Years of Drama, Acting, and Stagecraft, by Sheldon Cheney, and remembering how my roommate already knew so much about the masks, costumes, and characteristic gestures and stage business of such stock figures as Harlequin, Pantalone, Pierrot, Columbine, the pedantic Doctor, the swaggering but cowardly II Capitano, when I mentioned the commedia dell’arte while we were talking about what we had been reading over the summer when he came back that second September. Later on we had also talked about how all of that was related to minstrels, medicine shows, and vaudeville skits, but now he was no longer around so that I could talk to him about what I was thinking about how it was also related to the way jazz musicians play and also to the way they work out their arrangements and compositions.

  I was thinking about how whenever you talked to him about anything like that, you were in touch with somebody who was always ready to find out something else about customs, manners, and methods because as a student of architecture he was always involved with matters of design, construction, and engineers, and playing around with stage sets and puppet shows was as much a hobby with him as building and flying model airplanes and assembling and operating ham radios.

  Then Skeeter had put the finishing touches on Red Gilmore, and it was my turn and I was sitting in the chair and being swung around toward the wall where all of the pictures, placards, and notices were and along with the chatter and laughter of the ongoing conversation, there was the also and also of clippers buzzing, scissors snipping, and also of shampoo and skin lotion and talcum powder and tobacco smoke, and outside there was the damp, overcast almost-spring weather, and you could also hear the droning and beeping traffic in that part of the morning on that part of the campus thoroughfare.

  I looked at all of the long since familiar pictures of Jack Johnson and Peter Jackson and Joe Gans and Sam Langford and of Satchel Paige and Josh Gipson and Buck Leonard and Cool Papa Bell and of such entertainers as Bojangles Robinson and Charlie Chaplin and Bert Williams. Just when I came to the band leaders, I stopped and tried to shut everything out because I did not not want to start thinking about Hortense Hightower that early on in the day that I was going back to see her again, and when I opened my eyes and ears again, the talk was about politics and Deke Whatley had the floor.

  He had a freshman in his chair then, and as usual he was working and talking with a short stump of a dead cigar in his mouth, his gold crowns showing as he clamped it in a way that reminded me of how some people hold a coffee cup or a drinking glass with that little finger extended, which is exactly what he did when he took the cigar out of his mouth from time to time.

  Red Gilmore was sitting on the shoe-shine stand by the door that led to the back hallway and the toilet. He had the morning paper open and folded to a pad, working on a crossword puzzle as he waited for the bootblack to come in. The others sat listening to Deke Whatley, who kept the clippers in his right hand all during the time that he was doing more talking than hair trimming.

  Politics. Politics. Politics, he said. You want to know something about politics? I can tell you something about some goddamn politics. In the first place, it really don’t take all that much. It really dont. It don’t take a thing but some plain old horse sense mixed in with a little grade A bullshit, and of course you got to have some nerve, too, because how you going to bullshit if you ain’t got no nerve. A good politician got
the nerve of a brass-ass monkey.

  I can tell you something about some politics because I been watching that business for a long time. I been studying that business and watching what some somitches doing so I’m talking about something I know from experience and mother wit. If you want to get somewhere in this mans world, you got to know how to play yourself some politics. That’s a fact. Don’t give a damn what nobody say. I’m telling you like it sure butt is as sure as you born. They supposed to be teaching them up yonder on the quadrangle, democracy and all of that no taxation without representation jive. You know what democracy is? I am going to tell you exactly what democracy is: playing politics. That’s all it is. That’s all it ever was and ever was intended to be and ever will be. Everybody playing politics. Everybody in there trying to get his little taste. You can say anything you want to, but you ain’t never seen no somitch yet and you ain’t never going to see one that wasn’t out there for what he can get. Hell, ain’t nobody going to admit it. Goddamn! old pardner, that’s just what I’m telling about: horse sense.

  He was into another one of his sermons then, as almost always happened when somebody said something academic about freedom and justice for all. He couldn’t stand to hear anybody talk about the Constitution as if it were the Holy Bible. To him it was a document that was used for making deals and that was about all it was intended to be.

  Ain’t nobody but a fool or some old aristocrat going to be going around saying I’m all for me and to hell with you. You don’t have to have no sense at all to know better than that. Hell, that other somitch is out there for hisself too. And ain’t no goddamn body going to think more of you than he do his own fucking self. Goddamn, gentlemen, and that’s how come I know I don’t really understand most of these old white folks to save my life. You see what I mean? You see what I’m driving at? Goddamn redneck somitch think they going to make you want to treat them better than you do your own precious goddamn self. Man, don’t nobody come before me, not in my own heart and soul. You follow this stuff. That’s something your goddamn dingdong is always telling you. That’s all that somitch down there between your goddam legs ever know: me, me, me.