The King of Colored Town Read online

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “First off, is this a sentence or a phrase?”

  “It’s a sentence. Just like ‘I sing of thee’.”

  “Good. So the word ‘sing’ is what part of speech?”

  “Must be a verb.”

  “That’s correct. Does it take an object?”

  “No, ma’am.”

  “Which makes it?”

  “Intransitive.”

  “Right again. And as a verb it has no person, case, number or gender. What about the ‘I’ in this sentence, Mr. Reed?”

  “I’s tired,” Pudding cracked, and Chicken Swamp guffawed.

  “Maybe you need to run see Miss Hattie. See if she can wake you up.”

  “No, ma’am.”

  Pudding was suddenly straight in his desk.

  “All right, then.” Miss Chandler put us to work parsing sentences and turned her attention to the seniors sitting an arm’s length away.

  Juniors and seniors and everyone else did most of our work at our desks, in class, because Kerbo had no textbooks for students to take home. If I had homework in mathematics, I had to copy the problems at school. And how can you study history or biology, or write a report, without books and without a library? What do you do?

  We drilled. We memorized. We improvised. And this was not altogether a bad thing. Miss Hattie, to give her credit, forced us early to commit works of literature to memory. I had not even held a complete novel in my hand by my junior year, but I could recognize long passages from Pilgrim’s Progress , or The Deerslayer or Huckleberry Finn . I could recite entire poems by Longfellow, “Under a spreading chestnut tree the village smithy stands….” Or from Tennyson’s Ulysses :

  …for my purpose holds

  To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths

  Of all the western stars, until I die.

  We took the same approach to every subject, memorizing multiplication tables, for instance, names of states, presidents. By my junior year I could figure interest on any bank loan, could compute the area under a triangle or the volume of a cone. The New England states came as trippingly to the tongue as Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy.

  The law of the land had long held that segregated schools were inherently unequal, which was undoubtedly true, but as a junior in high school I had little sense of that deficit. You don’t miss Bunsen burners in a place where there is no science lab, electricity, or indoor plumbing. The only thing I coveted from the white school was their piano. Kerbo had no piano, or any other instrument. I used to imagine what it would be like to come in at noon or recess and just sit down with a sheet of music at a piano, all by yourself. Play anything you like.

  Mr. Raymond said the courts were trying to shut down Kerbo School. “Alla colored children gone be sent to the white school,” he told us, with unconcealed disapproval. But Mr. Raymond also talked about hurricanes and communists and all sorts of things and nothing ever happened. Which was fine by me. I had no great urge to leave my neighborhood school. But then one morning Shirley Lee Lewis had caught me just as Miss Hattie was ringing us in off the playground.

  “You know Miss Chandler going over to the white school?”

  “Miss Chandler? Who tole you that?”

  “Daddy say. Say in the paper the court gonna make us all go over.”

  “But Shirley Lee, don’ white folks run the courts?”

  “Surely.”

  “Then, girl, rest assured we ain’ gone nowhere.”

  There were only about a hundred children at Kerbo, from the very first grades through seniors in high school. Why couldn’t we just stay where we were? Why couldn’t we remain in our own, lamplit rooms? With our own teachers?

  “Miss Chandler,” I burst out.

  I had interrupted her but Miss Chandler remained composed. She just turned that big head like an owl until my face was all in hers.

  “Why they want to shut down our school?”

  A dead quiet ran through the classroom and I could tell I was not the only one who had heard the news. Miss Chandler folded the book she was holding in her lap.

  “A lot of very powerful people don’t want our school shut down at all.”

  “Then we can stay?”

  “It’s not settled,” Miss Chandler replied. “And it won’t affect our seniors. But you juniors need to prepare for the possibility of integration.”

  “Innagration?”

  “When black students and whites share a school it’s integrated.”

  “They gonna mix us up? Why?”

  “You deserve a better education than you can get here,” Miss Chandler answered simply. “You need to move on.”

  “I don’t want to move on.”

  “That’s understandable. Kerbo is familiar to you, Cilla. Familiar to all of you. I’ve heard Reverend Dipps remark that the Devil’s been so long in Hell he’s got comfortable. Even Hell can get familiar. But there are opportunities away from here, away from Laureate, that will pass you by if you stay comfortable.”

  The class fell silent. I could see Miss Chandler picking her words very carefully.

  “Did you know that President Roosevelt built the school in Laureate? Yes, he did. He built it with tax money collected from everybody, black and white. So you remember it’s not their school over yonder. It’s not theirs . It’s our school.

  “Now, I’m glad you brought this up, Miss Cilla. And come Civics class we can visit here again. But remember what the Good Book says—leave the day’s troubles unto itself.”

  You couldn’t argue with the Good Book, I supposed. Nor Miss Chandler.

  But I wondered what I would do in the white folks’ school if I was bleeding and had no napkins? Would they let me go out at noon beneath some water oak and gather moss for myself? Would they let me cut strips of gingham from my dress for ties? To bundle a napkin?

  Come lunchtime Pudding and Chicken Swamp had every boy on the yard recruited for baseball. The boys had no field, of course, no bats or gloves or balls, but that circumstance did not seem to dampen their enthusiasm. A broomstick served for a bat. You didn’t need a glove, everybody played barehanded. Balls were trickier. What was required was something roughly spherical, tough and resilient. The heads of dolls were favored. Baby dolls, in particular, being larger, were preferred. Those bloated white faces. Sightless eyes. The boys would rip the head off a doll, pull the hair, and go to town. Chicken Swamp was famous for the curve he could put on one of these improvised baseballs. He was out there, now, fondling the stitches of his jerry-rigged ball, getting ready to deliver a blue-eyed strike.

  Pudding was at bat, his slender slugger weaving like a cobra.

  “Come own, Pudding! Put one outta here!”

  Younger children cheered their elders about a makeshift diamond. Bare feet running to bases of burlap sacks.

  “Come own!” Pudding challenged the pitcher. “Lessee some smoke!”

  Chicken Swamp reared back and fired. The thwaaaaaack of a hard stick rang over a rude playground and, yep, there went a Kimmy or Baby or Sophie sailing for center field.

  About that time Miss Hattie came quick-marching out the single door of our fort-like school.

  “Miss Cilla.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” I pulled awkwardly erect to jog alongside the school’s principal.

  “I want you and Pudding to the office. Got a chore needs doing.”

  I swear that woman could walk faster than I could run.

  “Yes, ma’am…me and…Pudding.”

  “‘Pudding and I.’ Meet me side of the yard. We’ll be taking Mr. Raymond’s truck.”

  At about that point a gaggle of eager outfielders crossed our path, little Sarah Brock in ragged pursuit.

  “Miss Hattie, Miss Hattie! Them boys got my baaaaby doll!”

  “Sarah Brock hush that nonsense.”

  Kerbo School’s principal never broke stride.

  “Girl with any sense knows to leave her valuables at home.”

 
Within minutes Pudding and I were on the grounds of the school that Miss Chandler insisted did not belong to white folks. There were two wings to the main building. Grades one through six kept one wing. The other wing was designated for high school, which in those days meant grades seven through twelve. These two wings were linked in a single building that looked like a bomb shelter, a one-storey monolith of concrete shaped like a giant “H”, the exterior walls punctuated by heavy, jalousied windows.

  As we approached I could see rows of yellow buses in a chain-linked enclosure off to one side of a playground generously shaded with yellowheart pine. The football stadium peeked into view. There was a cafeteria back there, somewhere, and a gymnasium and a band hall, all connected to the main building by shaded breezeways. I sat in the back of Mr. Raymond’s truck with no clue as to why we had been transported to this alien place.

  Turned out we were there to haul books.

  The school’s aging janitor, a colored man, was our envoy. Mr. Herman directed us to the breezeway outside the band room where dozens of textbooks used up by white students were crated for donation to Kerbo School. The books were in various states of disrepair. Some were completely ripped from their spines. All were marked or defaced inside. Nearly all had pages missing.

  “Just load ’em up,” Miss Hattie commanded. “We’ll cull ’em later.”

  I wondered briefly why white people were giving books to a school destined for extinction, but I knew better than to voice that question. Miss Hattie was already fussing over our labor, directing Pudding and I to unpack every box of books so that she could conduct a strict inventory. Four seventh grade math books. One book, Driver’s Education. Fifteen, no make that sixteen history books, eleventh grade. Twelve geometry books.

  And so on.

  It was lunchtime. There were no teachers or students in sight. Nobody in the band hall, either, which was disappointing. I would have liked to hear the band practice. Especially close-up. The only reason I attended football games was to hear the Marching Saints’ halftime performance. I would stand with Chicken Swamp and Pudding and Shirley inside the roped-off area where Negroes were allowed, wishing that I had my mother’s gift so that I could play by ear the marches and arrangements floating to me on the Friday-night air.

  When we had loaded our second-hand charity to Miss Hattie’s satisfaction, she announced that she was required to check with the office before leaving.

  “I won’t be a minute,” our principal declared tersely. “You two just stay with Mr. Herman by the truck.”

  She tottered down the shaded walk toward the main building whose ponderous rear doors, I noted, were open to receive whatever breeze was available. I waited for Miss Hattie to disappear through those twin portals before I slipped off the truck’s tailgate. “Mr. Herman, I need a restroom.”

  The old man seemed nonplussed.

  “They ain’t nuthin’ fuh you here.”

  “They’s a chinaberry tree ’round to the back of the band hall. That’ll do.”

  “Reckon it’ll have to,” he replied.

  I was familiar with the chinaberry tree and its location, of course. It stood between the Shaw’s watermelon field and the fire-door of the band hall which I hoped to find open. Public schools, particularly rural public schools, were nowhere near as concerned with security as schools are nowadays. Part of that had to do with air conditioning. You couldn’t stand to shut the windows anywhere once the weather warmed. The hallway doors were almost always open. Teachers routinely opened classroom doors to take advantage of any moving air.

  So I was not surprised when I rounded the corner to see the band hall’s rear door propped open with a Coca-Cola bottle. I took a quick glance at the field behind me. Nothing but the rising waft of Bahia grass heating in the noonday sun. I strode quickly to the inviting entry, and stepped inside the band hall.

  The hall itself was layered in shallow terraces, like an amphitheater. I stepped through the rear door and into what I would later learn was the percussion section. Snare drums and cymbals and other instruments unfamiliar to me were arranged like lily pads at the highest level of the theater. Moving through that section I jostled a music stand and a drumstick fell onto a snare drum. It sounded like the shot of a pistol and I cringed—could the janitor hear? Or Pudding?

  I had to make a quick decision what I was going to take and get out . I saw a trombone left carelessly beside a folding chair. A clarinet, first one I’d seen up close. The tuba stood massively on its stand, hard to sneak that one out. Other instruments were visible but locked behind a cage of heavy-gauged wire. Didn’t matter—I couldn’t take anything larger than I could stuff in my blouse or under my skirt. So what would that be?

  I wended my way quickly through silent stands of music to reach a corridor outside. One step around the corner and there it was, the director’s office—‘James M. Pellicore’. Had a nameplate cut out of the same colored brass as the trombone. I nudged the door with my foot. It opened without a squeak and I knew I’d hit a goldmine.

  The director’s cramped niche was junked with sheet music. There must have been a hundred folders stuffed in crates on the floor or lying loose on the director’s roll-top desk. Books of music all over. One composition was taped to the wall with cryptic directions for a variety of gridiron choreography.

  “South Pacific,” I mouthed silently.

  An upright piano crowded beside the roll-top desk. A folio stuffed with sheet music was opened for inspection. I perused the exposed and topmost sheet. God from Zion, how many instruments were scored here? I leaned over the piano and sighted the first half-dozen measures, then scanned them once more and my head began to fill with sound, a pattern nagging and familiar.

  Yes! This was it! This was the exact same piece of music that had been cut short those weeks ago on Mr. Raymond’s radio. The snatch of music lodged in my memory spread before me now in full, eternally captured in bars and measures and notes, reproducible at will.

  “Mow Zart.” I tried sounding out the composer’s name.

  And the title?

  Concerto in D Minor .

  I pulled the folio from its stand and scanned the contents to find completely unfamiliar names—Chopin, Haydn, Mendelssohn. But I knew this was no ragtime. I scanned my trove of titles like a miser, completely absorbed in my good fortune, when the bell rang and I almost shit myself. This was no schoolyard bell, you understand; this was an electrically hammered clarion. A bank alarm. I jammed the folder of music inside my blouse, bolted out of the Director’s office.

  And came face to face with Cody Hewitt.

  I didn’t recognize Cody at first, in my panic. For one thing I’d never seen him up close. For another he was dressed good enough for church, not in the familiar jeans, T-shirt or football pads. Most importantly, my startled flight had put me eye-to-eye with Garner’s youngest son, a position so close as to blind recognition. Never, never would I of my own accord dare raise my head to look into a white boy’s eyes, but that was exactly where I was now.

  “The hell you doin’ in here?”

  A girl hung on his shoulder. Her hair dribbled down her shoulders like tallow off a candle. I stood there like a deer caught in headlights for a split second. Then I lunged for the door.

  He caught me. I kicked and fought, but he had a fullback’s arms tight around my waist. The girl started screaming. I don’t know how many people started pouring in and I didn’t care. I kept clawing, kicking. Somebody ripped the sheet music from my hand and then my head snapped to one side and stars floated before my eyes. When my vision cleared all I could see was Miss Hattie Briar. Standing over me, her face pulled tight as if with wires.

  “Git up,” her voice came like the hiss of a snake.

  “Git up and get in the truck.”

  I pulled myself off the floor.

  “What’s that?” the tallow-haired girl pointed, and next thing I knew Miss Hattie had her hands inside my top and I saw my stolen sheets torn and scattered over the f
loor.

  My music! My Mozart!

  “ This what you doin’ in heah?!”

  In anger my principal’s speech became colloquial.

  “I…I just found it.”

  She backhanded me, a hard, vicious slap, and once more I was seeing stars. I could hear the white girl’s startled gasp. Others, too. I could sense their forms, their voices. But only indistinctly. I wondered if this was what it was like for Mama, this nimbosity of perception. But then things cleared. Cody swam back into my vision broad-shouldered and golden-haired, a pair of welts raising red and parallel across an otherwise unblemished face.