The King of Colored Town Read online

  The veteran players only occasionally returned, their balding pates and graying hair wreathed in sweat and the smoke of cigarettes. Sometimes they’d let Joe Billy sit in, and he’d be keeping rhythm behind men with sobriquets like Blind John Davis or Pinetop Perkins. Pigmeat Jarret used to show up now and then. Nobody paid any attention to the kid on backup. But the night Joe Billy went behind that stage and unpacked his painted Gibson he acquired an instant audience—outraged, amused, intrigued—depending on the concupiscence of the beholder. Pigmeat spoke up first.

  “Boy. Where you get that goddamn guitar?”

  At first, only a few musicians sought him out. Only a couple of those actually surrendered their instruments to the painter’s charge. But then as word of mouth spread news of Joe Billy’s innovation, a coterie of Bohemians, serious musicians and the merely titillated began to provide something like a regular stream of demand. Even before I knew him, Joe Billy had worked on Gibsons and Martins worth more than a thousand dollars. He received acoustic guitars, electric guitars, double-necks and twelve-strings—exquisite canvasses for the conception of nudes variously innocent or salacious.

  Joe Billy completed all of his illustrations at his mama’s place on Pearl Street. Fanny was proud to own her own home, a white frame house that nestles, still, deep beneath a clutch of mimosa trees. She would remain beneath those lacy limbs on summer mornings, a glass of sweet tea sweating in her hand as she observed the endless passage of single, mostly unemployed men who strolled the broken sidewalk out front. Spying coyly from her shaded retreat like a demoiselle peeking from beneath a riot of pink parasols. Joe Billy would have remained in the shade of those trees himself, living rent-free and without responsibility, finding satisfaction and some profit in the transformation of guitars, had it not been for that mess with the church.

  In 1963, The Mount Zion African Methodist Episcopal Church was situated on Fourth Avenue, only a few blocks from its contemporary location on Old Bainbridge Road. The architecture was unremarkable, two storeys of brick and hardwood vestured in Spanish moss. A pair of pilasters framed the double doors granting entry, the woodwork rough with dry rot. But there were lead-paned windows set into the east wall of the sanctuary that were by any standard distinguished, a morality play stained deeply into glass that each Easter fractured a rising sun’s ordinary light into purple and green and gold reminders of the Passion and Resurrection. These were Mount Zion’s pride and joy.

  “The bed is way shorter than a man can stretch hisself on it!” The right Revered Willy Waintree used to bellow Isaiah’s prophecies from his pinewood pulpit as if they were self-evident. “An’ the covers is narrower than he can wrap hisself in it !”

  Every Monday morning the Reverend selected a passage from his worn Bible. It was the church secretary’s job to post those verses in wood-carved letters on a plywood sign that anchored just beside the single, splintered sidewalk leading from Fourth Avenue’s steaming asphalt to Mount Zion’s gospel shade. Admonitions from the Old Testament alternated weekly with replies from the New.

  “For, behold, the Lord cometh out of his place to punish the inhabitants of the earth for their iniquity…”

  ISAIAH 26:21

  might be followed by:

  “For God so loved the world, that he gave His only Begotten Son…”

  JOHN 3:16

  The scripture displayed on the moonless night of Joe Billy’s pilgrimage was filled with revelation: “ Behold I come as a thief .” 2 PETER 3:10

  It was rare these days to see the church unoccupied. A Florida judge had recently ordered desegregation of the county’s all-white schools. This in Tallahassee, where public cafés, water fountains and toilets were still off-limits to black people. There were beatings in the wake of the judge’s edict. Tires were slashed, windows broken. Mount Zion’s faithful turned to their church in droves, initially seeking refuge, later with determination to resist, to demand. To “organize.”

  Not that any of this mattered to Joe Billy. Joseph William did not approach Mount Zion in stealth after midnight for any socially redeeming purpose. Weeks earlier Mama Fanny had been raising hell concerning an extra collection taken at church, the collection that came, she said, after the regular offering already destined for missionaries and air-conditioning and Vacation Bible School.

  “Church gettin’ itself all messed up in politics, I declare.” Mama dipped a pork rind into her perspiring tea. “Talkin’ ’bout some kinda march someplace. Got to raise three hundred dollah, just for bus fare! Mo’ money than I make in half a year, and they sin that plate around asking me to put in my pennies. Like the widow in the pearble, tellin’ me how righteous I am, giving all I got to Jesus! ‘Shoot,’ I tells ’em, ‘Jesus rode a donkey,’ I’m keeping my money.”

  Fanny reported the church’s ad-hoc collection at two hundred and twenty-eight dollars, short of the needed fare, perhaps, but more money than Joe Billy could make in three months painting guitars. Just sitting there. Waiting to be claimed. And so buoyed by prophecy Joe Billy came to cash in, slipping after midnight from the cover of Mount Zion’s splendid oaks and dashing across its lawn to reach the churchhouse steps.

  His heart hammered in his chest like a child’s—had he been spotted? Some other interloper lingered in the shadows across the street, a smudge in the gloom. Crazy Maggie, he realized, with some relief. Maggie was a crone known to everyone in the neighborhood, the original bag lady. She owned nothing but a shopping cart which she pushed day and night in a route which regularly circled Mount Zion. After a moment, not hearing her familiar caw, Joe Billy began to allow himself to believe he had reached the church unseen. Only then did he reach for a door, pulling its iron-worked handle.

  Sweet Jesus, was ever a hinge so loud?

  He stepped inside. There were no lights switched on at this hour to illuminate Mount Zion’s ample nave, but a fulsome moon filtered through the church’s famous stained windows, reminding Joe Billy of Jesus and Mary and the Tomb. Jesus and Golgotha. And Judas, of course, hung from the neck of a dogwood tree. Joe Billy jogged furtively down the sanctuary’s wide aisle, lurched hard left at the pulpit, away from admonitions of glass. A selection of hymns was displayed in white letters on a large, varnished sign anchored above a doorway. “Pg 172: Just As I Am”, or some variation.

  The door below the lettered hymns opened onto a short hallway off which other doors accessed the choir’s loft, the baptismal fount, and a storage room renamed for dignity’s sake the Office of Church Secretary. The knob in Joe Billy’s hand was brass and cool and did not turn. He applied a hammer and screwdriver to that flimsy obstruction—

  Knock and it shall be opened unto you.

  A short rummage later Joe Billy re-entered the church’s somber interior with two hundred twenty-eight dollars and seventy-three cents in a velvet collection bag and was well down the aisle before he noticed on the eastern wall, a wavering, unsteady glow.

  “Jesus!”

  At first he had the notion that this was some apparition, a ghost, perhaps. Perhaps the Holy Ghost—Joe Billy was not entirely without superstition. But then he saw tongues of light licking up the stained glass windows from outside , a whole wall of light, growing. And then came the smell…

  “FIRE!!”

  Joe Billy bellowed at the top of his lungs and when he did he heard outside a muffled chorus of men, shouting, cursing.

  “FIRE!” he yelled again, instinct overcoming any caution as he sprinted for the door. An explosion, then. Like a hand grenade, Joe Billy would later say. A WHOOOOOSH of fire, skirts of flame caught in an angry wind. Stained glass bursting in shards of shrapnel. Joe Billy picked himself off the floor and stumbled past rows of pews to stagger outside in a billow of black smoke, the church’s collection bag plainly in hand.

  “YOU!”

  Some woman came off the sidewalk, running toward the burning church as if seeking death.

  “YOU, BOY!”

  Joe Billy thought at first it had to be Crazy Maggi
e, but there was no craziness in this woman, or fear, either. And then he recognized Mary Tully, Red Tully’s fiery and born-again wife. She probably hadn’t seen him on more than a hundred occasions at her husband’s club.

  “I KNOW YOU!”

  She pointed a nailed finger and Joe Billy ran. He ran with his balls in his throat, down the line of oaks bounding the property on its fire side, through a thick hedge of ligustrum.

  That’s when he saw the truck.

  It came tearing out from behind the sanctuary, a brand new ’63 pickup sliding onto a street slick with dew. A Ford. Fire engine red. Rebel flag flying from a spring-loaded aerial. Spinner hubcaps. Spinner hubs on a truck. It ran the stop sign at Fourth Avenue, just ran straight through. Joe Billy would report seeing three men inside. Two or three. The cab was dark, the truck was hauling ass and so was Joe Billy. He could not even be certain that the driver was a white man.

  “BURN BABY!!” Joe Billy was sure he heard that command coming from one of the pickup’s confederates.

  About that time a pair of boys sliced across Fourth on their bicycles. Joe Billy heard a truck’s brakes lock on the damp pavement, saw the Ford swerve. More cursing then, as the black teenagers dumped their bikes and hurled abuse at the rampaging pickup. And then Maggie, Crazy Maggie, taking up the curse from the barricade of her grocery cart.

  “You sons of bitches!”

  Like the caw of a raven.

  “I seen you sons of bitches!”

  Dogs barking by then, porch lights spilling flimsy puddles of illumination all up and down the street and Joe Billy knew he was in trouble. Even if the boys hadn’t seen him, or Crazy Maggie, Red Tully’s wife surely had. The police would follow her accusing finger and even if between beatings he could get the cops to believe he hadn’t dynamited Mount Zion’s church, they’d know he stole their goddamned collection.

  I don’t know what I would have done. But Joe Billy King tucked his stolen purse beneath his arm like it was a football and he ran. He ran till there were sharp sticks scraping the inside of his lungs. He ran till his legs burned and cramped, and he kept on running. Straight to the heart of Frenchtown, to Mama Fanny.

  She would know what to do.

  Chapter two

  “Water Declared Unsatisfactory”

  — The Clarion

  A s Joe Billy painted guitars and robbed churches, I was raising my mama in Colored Town. Didn’t matter whether you were black or white, everyone in Laureate called everything on the shady side of the railroad depot ‘Colored Town’. Growing up I thought that Colored Town was a place name distinct and unique. Like Atlanta, say, or Montgomery, or New York.

  Nigger Town was another appellation commonly used; I suppose I could have said I raised mama in Nigger Town. Or I could have simply declared that our family resided in The Quarters, a term reminiscent of slave quarters even though nobody in my community could point to the obvious shackles of that earlier enslavement. I cannot truthfully claim to have had a sense of enslavement in my own Colored Town, at least not in those early years, largely because I had no situation, other than a Pisgah view of white folks’, by which to gauge my own.

  I was not aware in 1963 that black men and women in Detroit or Pittsburgh could earn twenty dollars an hour for an eight-hour day. That daily wage would buy you three month’s indenturement from anybody living in Colored Town. Not that you could depend on a month’s work. Men and women in my community were employed according to the demands of the season, loading hay or throwing melons or working in the tobacco fields. Much of that labor was piecework. A penny a stick. A dollar a sled. A quarter a row. I wondered as a child whether those poor Israelites got paid by the brick. Seemed like a pyramid’s worth of bricks could add up.

  Children worked, too, of course. Black children and white children sweating side by side, and generally for the same precarious wage. I think any of us would have been astounded to know that you could find urban and suburban-dwelling youngsters who by 1963 washed cars when they felt like it, or received allowances for chores. These young people did not string tobacco or throw melons or crouch for hours pressing thorn-laced cuttings into the damp rooting beds of Mr. Thistle’s nursery. No, sir. These other young people drove hot rods to sock hops. They played football or baseball or surfed golden waves, some of them, buying records by The Beach Boys or The Lettermen before heading off to college.

  But not in Colored Town. Ours was a cul-de-sac isolated from the larger culture by a perimeter of unpaved streets. My concerns were mundane, day to day. I was seventeen years old, a big, rawboned girl with a Brillo pad of kinked hair, a flat face, unabashedly flared nostrils and lips. My job was to take care of Mama, make money, and keep water in the house. Schoolwork got factored somewhere in between.

  I didn’t mind the paying work; tobacco, melons, Mr. Thistle’s nursery—it didn’t matter. I didn’t mind feeding Mama, or dressing her. Brushing her teeth. Wiping her clean. And Miss Chandler sparked a fire for learning in me that sustained a tolerance for the rote mnemonics that was my early education.

  But I hated hauling water.

  Hauling water was a daily chore I never ceased to grudge. You could see Laureate’s water tower, a pregnant dome rising silver on steel stilts high above the live oak trees that separated The Quarters from ‘City Park’. Graffiti yearly announced the most recent graduates, the white graduates, of Laureate High School. “lhs snrs” was plainly visible, smeared over the tank’s shining face like lipstick on a crazy woman.

  For years white residents of Laureate had drawn tap water from that tower, a steady stream of clean water distributed through a grid of mains and copper lines to their homes and businesses and to the school. But there were no pipes crossing the tracks to Colored Town, which presented a problem. You had to have water—to drink, to cook, to bathe. But there was only one place in the Quarters to get your cup filled, and so twice a day, freezing rain or broiling sun, I pulled a pair of five-gallon pails over to Mr. Raymond Hatcher’s front porch.

  Mr. Raymond was a wiry, kindly old man. Retired from the railroad. Always dressed the same; long-sleeved shirt, white, with suspenders. Soft-shined, low-quarter shoes, black. Khaki trousers creased sharp as a knife. He had big knots on his face and skull, like carbuncles. He also had the only water well in Colored Town. There were probably forty families in our community of dog runs and outhouses, every one of us dependent on Mr. Raymond’s largesse for our daily necessity. Mr. Raymond had a half-brother living with him, a loose and louche old man. Lester wanted Mr. Raymond to make people pay for the use of the pump.

  “Why don’ we charge? Just even a penny a bucket?”

  But Mr. Raymond said no, that wouldn’t be right, the water just happen’ to be at their house like the water wells in the Bible where ever’body came and dipped and nobody got charge nuthin’.

  “Damn fools, you ask me,” Lester replied, but did not prevail.

  There could be twenty or thirty women lined up by Mr. Raymond’s porch, hardly ever a man or boy. Hauling water was distaff labor. It could make for a long wait, people taking turns on the long handle of his pump. First one to the pump, of course, was required to prime it. The pump would not bring water uncoaxed and it was funny how some women working that long handle, their hips rolling with the rhythm of sex, could get it to come right off, where others, laboring mightily, could bring up no more than air.

  I was good at priming the pump.

  Sometimes the pump would need fixing, the bellows, usually, leather valves that once torn or brittle would not allow a vacuum to be pulled in the pump’s iron cylinder. Even with Sears, Roebuck and Co. it took a week, sometimes two weeks, to get replacements, an intolerable state of affairs. So once every couple of years Mr. Raymond would send one of us young ones off to find or steal an inner tube so he could fashion a set of bellows for his pump.

  He sent me one time. I had no idea where to find the suitable material so I crossed the tracks into Laureate and walked up to Mr. Charles Putnal’s
gas station. Mr. Charles, as I called him, was a white man who ran a Shell station there on Main Street. Maybe he’d know somethin’ about pumps and tubes. I kept my head down as I found Main Street, a posture required of Negroes in town, and was pretending a fascination with the cracks in the sidewalk when a car prowled by that always frightened me. It was the Sheriff’s car, a big Dodge with county insignia and lights and a big hoop antenna whipping back and forth.

  The cruiser swung beneath the portico that offered the only shade at the Putnal station. Mr. Charles was changing a tire. I decided to wait for that job to be finished before I made a closer approach, trying the while not to imagine the Sheriff’s billy club wrapping around my head.

  Sheriff Collard Jackson, Collard Greens, Green-Man or more elliptically Hamhock, was a lawman we all assiduously avoided. He was rawboned and hard. His eyes, no more than a watery film sunk in a sinkhole, were usually masked behind a lens of cheaply framed sunglasses. He had a shock of white hair that ran like a skunk’s tail down the side of his head, but he was not Cajun. He was just mean. Grandma Handsom held it on authority that Collard carried a snub-nosed revolver in his boot to augment the Smith & Wesson on his belt. But it was his nightstick, open and swinging like an extra dick from his hip, that was most used and feared. Collard Greens split skulls with that truncheon, and no man or woman, black or white, could find redress for his justice.