The King of Colored Town Page 3

  “What you want, Cilla?”

  This from Mr. Charles. I just stood.

  “Cat got your tongue, girl? What is it?”

  “Need somethin’ for Mr. Raymond’s pump.”

  “Pump, hah.”

  Charles rolled to the balls of his feet tight and lithe as a gymnast. Disappeared inside his garage. I tried to avoid Sheriff Jackson’s considered stare. Mr. Charles emerged after an eternity with a rust-red inner tube. Actually walked it over to me.

  “Tell Mr. Raymond anytime, you hear?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Whose girl are you anyway?

  “Corrie Jean’s,” the Sheriff answered.

  I looked up, briefly, to meet the Sheriff’s unbroken inspection. He chewed on something awfully hard for just a moment.

  “Git your tube, girl. Git on.”

  I ran all the way back to Colored Town. The ground seemed to race beneath my feet. My heart was hammering in my chest by the time I reached Mr. Raymond’s sweltering porch.

  “Mr. Charles said anytime,” I gasped.

  I used to dream about a tub and endless quantities of water. All summer and through most of the school year, I was hotter than a June bride in a feather bed. The sun was hot. The sand was hot. I’d pad home from school or work sweating through my underthings. Then have to feed Mama her grits and cornbread sweating, comb her hair dripping sweat, sponge her off while blowing sweat off my brow.

  Go to bed sweaty. Sleep in sweat. Wake up next morning rinded in salt. There wasn’t enough Old Spice in the world to smother the perspiration of Colored Town and no water to bathe, and yet white folks complained because we smelled.

  There were only two places where you could forget the heat, the sweat, and the slim feel of your wallet. One place was Mama’s, a juke-joint way over in Suwannee County. The other place, and nearby, was Church. In both of these sanctuaries people looked forward to music. My mother played the piano at the Antioch Assembly of God, Fully Redeemed. And Corrie Jean could play anything —any tune, ditty, or composition. Religious, spiritual, popular, classical—it didn’t matter. If Mama heard it, she could play it. “Plum perfect,” folks used to marvel. “Note for note.” That was Mama’s gift, but it came at a terrible cost, for mother could not speak more than a dribble of anything that made any sense. She could not make sense of more than the most routine of outside stimuli. I cooked for her, cleaned her, and I’d always reply to whatever she said, however shocking.

  “Fug me, fug me.”

  “Yes, Mama. Have some ice tea.”

  There was no doctor in Laureate to recognize autistic symptoms in any form, nor could we have afforded one if there was, and so Corrie Jean was labeled a retard, or, more kindly, “simple.”

  But there was nothing simple about her gift. Mother could play with absolute fidelity any music she heard, but she could not play anything unless it was first heard and that presented a problem because there just was not much music in Colored Town for Mama or anyone else to hear.

  There had been no local AM broadcasts receivable in Lafayette County until 1962. FM transmission was twenty years away. White folks in Laureate mostly tuned in to WSM in Nashville—Hank Williams and Minnie Pearl. Maybe if the weather was right you could catch a scratch of Frank Sinatra or Doris Day. Even rock ’n’ roll phenoms like Elvis Presley or Buddy Holly had to bounce off the ionosphere to reach northern Florida, and as for jazz? Or blues? I guarantee you there were GIS surviving the invasion of Normandy more familiar with Count Basie or Duke Ellington than any man, black or white, confined to radio in Lafayette County.

  Mama was not bothered by that paucity of choice, of course. She didn’t care what kind of music she heard or played. But the rest of us would rather be beat with sticks than listen to Minnie Pearl or The Grand Old Opry. We needed a wireless capable of receiving transmissions beamed far from Nashville. The sets available at the Western Auto were not adequate. Somebody said maybe Army surplus might have something we could afford. Somebody else said, no, we didn’t have that kind of money, what we needed was a godsend, and you know—that’s just about what we got.

  Mr. Raymond was setting rat traps at Doc West’s drugstore when he came across a radio, an old Philco ’38–33, that must have been sitting unused for twenty years. The receiver operated from around 550 to 1700 kiloherz, which in those days were called kilo-cycles. It was called a tombstone set because its cheaply veneered cabinet was taller in dimension than wide. Thing must have had a half-dozen vacuum tubes; their filaments, glowing amber, looked like streetlights in a miniature city. It took a pair of six-volt batteries to juice the receiver’s aging circuits, but once you did—Lord! You could pick up stations all the way to Canada.

  If you had a good antenna.

  Mr. Raymond could scrounge enough copper wire to ground the receiver onto the water pump on his front porch, but for the antenna he relied on the telephone company, cutting off what he needed from a spool of wire left untended behind the depot.

  I got recruited to raise Mr. Raymond’s aerial.

  “Cilla, see can you shinny up that turkey oak, that fork up the top, thea. And take this here wire wit you.”

  Well, I could climb. And within a few minutes we folks in Colored Town had a dipole antenna mounted thirty feet high to the hardiest radio receiver in the county. Hardly a week went by after that feat that folks didn’t gather ’round Mr. Raymond’s overburdened porch, our water pulled, to snatch from the aether broadcasts originating in New York or Cincinnati or Chicago. Sometimes we’d get Atlanta’s WERD , though never for long, as that black-owned station was limited by statute to daylight transmission.

  Mr. Raymond granted a much more generous license with his wireless receiver, allowing visitors to scan the vernier-styled tuner from afternoon to late night according to individual taste or caprice. Only two restrictions were imposed: First, we weren’t allowed to tune in rock ’n’ roll at any time; for that reason Chicago’s WLS was generally off limits, as was Cincinnati’s WSAI and New York’s WABC . “Don’t want ya’ll messin’.” Mr. Raymond’s proscription needed no further specification. Secondly, you didn’t get anywhere near Raymond’s radio on Friday night, ’cause Friday was when Raymond and half the men in Colored Town gathered to hear the fights.

  One Friday evening Mr. Raymond was trying to tune in a Chicago station for a Patterson fight, the classy older boxer defending his heavyweight crown against the deadly hands of Sonny Liston.

  The match was to be broadcast ringside from Comiskey Park, but Raymond could not get a signal off his tombstone receiver.

  Nothing but static.

  That’s the way it is with amplitude-modulated transmission; sometimes it comes in clear as a bell, other times it’s just noise. Mr. Raymond, normally a placid man, was having fits. Here he had looked forward all week to hearing his favorite boxer take on a reviled ex-convict in a crucially important match and all he could get was WSM and the Grand-Goddamned-Opry.

  “Now, now,” Preacher Dipps’ corpulent wife tried to console him. “Forget about that radio. Have some ice cream.”

  Miss Mona had brought rock salt and a churn to make homemade ice cream. Somebody else had brought the vanilla extract, the peaches. Cream thick as molasses.

  “Don’t want no sweets,” Mr. Raymond grumbled. “What I want is to hear my man fight.”

  Him bent over the radio, fooling with the tuner. Nothing in reward of that effort but the whistles and squawks of uncooperative carrier waves. Mr. Raymond seemed determined to sulk beside his Philco, but preacher’s wife would not be denied.

  “You need somethin’ sweeten that temper,” Mrs. Dipps declared, pulling a steel cylinder thick with ice cream from a wood keg filled with Morton’s and melting ice.

  “Nothing like a good churn.”

  She then grabbed the keg off the floor of the porch and dumped its salty slush to the ground beside Mr. Raymond’s iron pump.

  All of a sudden, clear as a bell—

  “…Welcom
e to the Windy City where tonight Floyd Patterson is set to defend his title against…SOONNNNY JAAAAAIL-HOUSE LIIIISTON!!!”

  Mr. Raymond jumped back like Moses from the burning bush.

  “What happened? What’d you do?!”

  “I din’ do nuthin’.” The preacher’s wife was ironically skeptical of miracles in any guise.

  “What’d you dump on my pump?”

  “Just the leavings. Good Lord, Raymond, it ain’t nuthin’ but salt and water.”

  “Salt and water…? Why, sure!” Mr. Raymond slapped his lap with a meaty hand. “Miz Dipps, you can make ice cream at my house any Friday you likes.”

  The brine discarded from the churn’s enclosing keg had, of course, boosted the effectiveness of the radio’s antenna by improving its ground. From that night on, Mr. Raymond kept a blue-and-white bag of Morton’s to sprinkle at the base of his pump and would not switch on his radio until buckets of water had soaked the sand around.

  On fight nights boys were allowed to mingle in. These were my schoolmates, by 1963, juniors in high school. Johnny Boy Masters lived closest to me, only two houses down. Lonnie Hines, a shy, inarticulate boy, kept his desk behind mine at school. Lonnie had trouble reading, always getting things backwards. And then there were the class Romeos: Chicken Swamp Lewis and Pudding Reed, who were always feeling up whoever they could get next to. Chicken was lean as a chicken. Pudding had a large, strong frame, but never lost his baby fat. When he was little we called him Crisco, but then as he entered his teens somebody called him Pudding and that’s what stuck. He was determined to earn himself a reputation. What they call a lady’s man?

  I’d be pumping water, or priming, bent over that long, iron handle and he’d come from behind.

  “Keep you hands to youself, Puddin’.”

  “I ain’ doin’!”

  “Now, Pud’nin,” Mr. Raymond would say. “Be a gennelmun.”

  I wasn’t worried about the boys, but Mr. Lester was another matter. When I was little, Lester didn’t pay me any attention at all; I was just the little bastard living with the retard. But coming through puberty I began to get heavy in the bosom. I was broadhipped, tall, with big shoulders. And that Brillo pad of hair. Lester started letting me know he was taking an interest.

  “Ain’ that girl growin’?” he’d say. Or, “Girl like that need a daddy. I be yo’ daddy, Cilla? Yo’ sugar daddy?”

  He’d laugh, then, as if he didn’t mean a thing by it. Nothing at all.

  As I got older I began to get lots of looks from the men at Mr. Raymond’s porch, until Friday nights became the occasion I most hated hauling water. Come fight-night I would dip my buckets and leave as quickly as I could manage. But the rest of the time the radio palliated my hated chore and I would crowd right up to that funereal cabinet with Mama where we could get in the mood with Glen Miller or Count Basie or Duke Ellington.

  Those were magical nights, spent beside Mr. Raymond’s receiver, inhaling the aroma of honeysuckle and magnolia trees, mixing that with the sizzle of lard and the smell of kerosene off somebody’s stove. Mullet frying, or bacon, or chitlins. Somebody would bring out a mess of acre peas and we’d strip the shells as we listened to Perry Como catch a falling star or Fats Domino find a more intimate thrill. It was my first, best, and unsullied introduction to music.

  There were limits, of course. I have mentioned that Mr. Raymond despised rock ’n’ roll. And it was hard to make him linger on any of the classical pieces. One time I recall so well, he scrolled past WNYC and a kind of music completely unfamiliar to me. All I heard at first was a piano, then a swell of orchestra wove in, and then again the piano, taking up some theme. Then the orchestra. More instruments than I’d ever heard, some instruments I had never heard.

  “What is that?” I can remember asking.

  A structure as complex as jazz, but more deliberate and vastly instrumented with an execution so perfect, so powerful! My heart swelled up in my throat.

  “Highbrow white.” Mr. Raymond snorted and rolled the dial.

  A solitary radio was our ear to the outside world, our censor not only for music, but for comedy, for drama. I heard “Gunsmoke” on the radio long before I ever saw it over cable-fed television. I heard Agnes Moorhead playing the bed-ridden Mrs. Stevenson in “Sorry, Wrong Number” while sipping iced-tea and gnawing sugarcane. I would tremble to broadcasts of “Green Lantern,” or “The Shadow” (What Evil Lurks in the Hearts of Men?) And I have laughed at the antics of Kingfish and Sapphire never contemplating the insult implied in that black-face humor. But occasionally a jarring note would intrude. Once in a while, tuning in Orson Welles or Glenn Miller, Mr. Raymond would pause over a news broadcast. Politics would gain our attention for a fleeting moment. Kennedy and Nixon. The Communist Threat. Cuba. It may help in present crisis to recall that our country has been threatened before with nuclear weapons placed a boat ride from Key West.

  And sometimes you’d hear other things, terrible reports from Birmingham or Mississippi. Confused claims involving water hoses and dogs. Lynchings. I remember my first inkling that trouble was close to home. It was early May. Mr. Raymond was tuned in to WSB in Atlanta and we caught the tail end of some local deejay reading off the UPI teletype.

  “…reports today confirm that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has launched an investigation into yet another church burning, an alleged arson, that took place this past Sunday in Tallahassee….”

  “Tallahassee? Is that our Tallahassee, Mr. Raymond?”

  “Don’ worry child.”

  He rolled the dial.

  “It ain’t nuthin’ to do with Colored Town.”

  The several aromas of supper hung palpably in the air as I left Mr. Raymond’s that evening. I was alone and would therefore have to haul the water back home by myself, but I didn’t mind. I had recently taken (by which I mean stolen) a pull-wagon from behind the grocery store. A Radio Flyer, appropriately. I figured whoever left a good wagon unattended must not need it very much. It was ideal for hauling water. Without the wagon I doubt I would have taken the short detour which took me past the railroad station.

  It was about ten o’clock. A full moon beamed silver through a pair of dogwoods that, I believe I have mentioned, bent toward each other like old ladies kissing to form a white-blossomed arbor over the dock where the L.O.P . & G dieseled to a noisy stop.

  Railroads meant escape, I knew that. But for me the passenger car and the locomotive meant escape to some place not even imagined. For Joe Billy it would mean escape from a place all too familiar.

  I liked to watch the people getting off, observe their appearance, their behavior, and then invent a story for them. She’s got a baby, running from her rich mama to see some buck in Madison County. He’s an insurance salesman. A politician, a movie star. You can be anything once you ride those gleaming rails.

  So that’s what I was doing that night, just making up stories, standing there with my water and wagon, observing a black porter helping some white lady with a portmanteau that I imagined held a million dollars. Couple of black men got off next, in suits. They couldn’t have been local, but before I had a chance to make something up for that odd pair, Joe Billy bounded off the train.

  I do mean bounded. Boy had springs in his legs. Those tight jeans. Jar of grease in his hair. A high forehead and narrow eyes. I had never seen Sammy Davis Jr. at that point in my life or my fantasies would have leaped to that suggestion on the spot.

  He had a cardboard suitcase in one hand and a guitar case in the other. He saw me looking.

  Time to leave. I leaned on my wagon.

  “Hey, baby.”

  Time to leave for sure .

  “Aw, honey, come on. Wait up.”

  I didn’t wait up. But I have to admit I didn’t make a big effort to outrun him. What chance would I have had, anyway, in sand ruts with a toy wagon and ten gallons of water?

  “I don’t know you,” I said when he caught up. Before he could say a thing.

 
; “That’s fine by me, I ain’t looking for recognition.”

  “Good, then why don’t you just get you narrow ass back on that train and move on.”

  “I’m here to see relatives.”

  Relatives. Kinfolk? That was different.