High Cotton: A Novel Page 6

  My sisters offered water, then yelled that our parents were calling the police. The old man was sitting so low his hat made a bridge between his shoulder blades. Cars came up, tiptoed around the mule, and sped away. Where the ritual apparition had come from, how he’d gotten his name, and where he was heading we were never able to figure out. He never passed my way again, though I heard the alarm from time to time, when the big kids from the alley clubhouses wanted to amuse themselves.

  Capitol Avenue was the emotional equivalent of a child’s depthless, one-dimensional drawing: a swatch of blue at the top, a strip of green at the bottom, brown stick figures in the blank space of the middle. A little sadism crept into the smallest pleasures, like capturing red and black ants in jars and watching the two armies bite to the death. When the ground froze we stole rice and listened to the robins feud with bigger birds over who was entitled to it, until much larger crows entered the picture and that was that.

  I had information Buzzy would be sorry he missed. Something was up with the Last of the Mohicans. Two men in plaid shirts had been sniffing around the doors of our seldom-seen neighbor all morning. Their faces were red and looked undefrosted. From my porch I could spy unseen as they banged on the side door, the back door, and pleaded with the three diamond-shaped windows of the front door. “Ma?” They left and returned several times. Finally, they came back with a box-shaped woman in white shoes with thick soles. She gave one of the men a key and dabbed at her hairnet.

  I forgot about them until the ambulance arrived. My mother wouldn’t let me cross the yard to watch, but I could hear the Last of the Mohicans when they carried her out. The attendants and the two men talked into the stretcher. Sheets poured over its sides like Kleenex sticking up after too much has been yanked too fast. The boxcar woman tested the front door and waddled with a suitcase and a grocery bag under her chin. The bag split, a can of Ajax poked out.

  They tilted the stretcher to get it down the steps, and the Last of the Mohicans whimpered, very much like the dachshund I’d once found in our back yard. It whined when I tried to touch it. The handyman called the pound. He said the dog had worn its halter too long and it was cutting into its skin. The ambulance was down the street when Buzzy arrived with his dummy Molotov. He chucked it anyway. “Go home, Whitey.”

  Things always finished in the same place. Trips that began with loading the car under the cover of darkness ended in the middle of the night at familiar steps worn smooth like headstones or soap. In the mornings, surveying Capitol Avenue, swaying like a cobra, I tried to capture the sensation of being in between places. I was a passenger on a plane or a bus who doesn’t worry about what he has abandoned or what will greet him when he arrives.

  One day an eyesore pulled alongside the cliffs of Dover. The driver’s door of the ailing Studebaker was broken. Uncle Castor climbed from the passenger’s side, without presents, a confiding, appealing expression all over his face. To look at him was to think that Buzzy had been right about black people never showing their age. He was thin as a celery stalk and not much taller than I was, but his clothes were vintage and weird. Before I learned he was a musician, I thought he was a gangster. Grandfather said Uncle Castor played the horses.

  “What’s your story, Morning Glory?”

  Sometimes they “passed away,” the old-timers, but still more appeared on the porch of our wrecked hull like arguments for the spontaneous regeneration of barnacles. They emerged from the grime of highway travel—“Swing low, sweet Cadillac,” the Dizzy Gillespie song goes—from bright, dry hours, trailing ribbons of exposition about absent kinfolk. They brought plants overwhelmed by the cellophane around the pots, heavy suitcases with empty secret compartments, boxes of chocolate, and were themselves like nut-filled morsels in a Whitman Sampler.

  We weren’t ready for Uncle Castor. He’d been scheduling and canceling his trip all summer in a series of urgent communications that worked my mother’s nerves. Telegrams were Uncle Castor’s little secretaries. He adored to be on the telephone to Western Union, crusading against lawyers, shady music publishers, former colleagues, and Grandfather. Wires not only demonstrated Uncle Castor’s importance, they were proof of his sincerity. Once, when he was really hard up, friends at the Tuskegee Institute arranged for him to teach there. At the last minute he got cold feet and sent a telegram of apology to practically every member of the student body.

  Uncle Castor said he’d driven from Saratoga without stopping. From what we could make out, he was watering his herbaceous bed, thinking of where he last saw his car keys, and the next thing he knew he was on the Pennsylvania Turnpike, hoping his car had one last long trip in her. For a snap decision, he had quite a few suitcases and satchels.

  I got to help him take his things to the “extra room,” which was little more than an extension of the attic, a graveyard for lamps, chests of drawers dotted with woodworm holes, and corner tables with wounded knees. There were three mattresses on the bed alone. He asked if I remembered him. I did and I didn’t. That was the way it was with the passing clouds of old-timers. I remembered the story that back in the Depression he played with Nobel Sissle’s orchestra and had been loved by “café society.” One night in London he was busy with last-minute changes in the program. He felt someone tug at his tails and slapped the hand away. He felt another tug and saw the Duke of Windsor, then Prince of Wales, smiling. Uncle Castor’s surprise visit almost made up for Buzzy’s announcement that he was going to live with his father in Watts.

  I woke Uncle Castor at the crack of dawn. Yes, he had also seen the Duke of Kent before he was killed in the war.

  “Are you famous?”

  He tried his hands around my neck. “I will be by the time I get up.”

  Uncle Castor had brought his own sugar. He drank coffee with a cube between his teeth, wiped his hands with a soft handkerchief that he tucked up his left sleeve, and asked for toothpowder or dentifrice instead of toothpaste, all of which seemed to fit a man who dressed as flamboyantly and spoke as primly as George Washington Carver. Uncle Castor had sailed on the Ile de France, traveled on the Flying Scotsman, and been on friendly terms with the head porter of the North British Hotel. He had seen gigolos in Nice and Cannes with a suggestion of rickets in their leg do the Buzzard Lope and the Walk the Dog. He had made the Dolly sisters laugh. He promised to send me some of his clips, but he never got around to it.

  His life had been a travelogue, but around us his favorite topic was Grandfather. “To this day it is impossible to get through his head without an executive order.” Grandfather frequently said that his younger brother was a bum because (a) he had dropped out of the New England Conservatory, (b) he didn’t have two nickels to rub together, his savings would not fill the tip of his shoe, and (c) he never paid the phone bills he left behind.

  For his part, Uncle Castor answered that the only Latin Grandfather had ever had was “agricultural Latin.” In the program of a church conference of which he was moderator, Grandfather had added the University of Chicago to his education. “Those were correspondence classes,” Uncle Castor confided to my parents.

  The bad blood went back to the 1920s, when Uncle Castor arrived in Boston and Grandfather told him that he didn’t know enough Latin for the conservatory, that music students were expected to have mastered several languages. Uncle Castor took a job in a second-class hotel in order to pay for evening classes. The night school wanted to know why a colored boy needed to learn Italian. He also saved up for violin lessons. That’s when he found out that languages were only for voice students. His teacher took back his practice violin and recommended that Uncle Castor study the piano.

  I told him what Grandfather had said about our house. Uncle Castor remembered that the Klan so resented his mother’s parents they threatened to burn down their house if they painted it. Grandfather once told me that the family also came from Norfolk, that our name had Norman roots. Uncle Castor said his father and grandfather had been dark as tar. Uncle Castor was much lig
hter than Grandfather.

  I held to our Norman heritage all the way to and back from the drugstore on the bad corner where Uncle Castor hadn’t been able to find his brand of cigars. He wrote down the serial number of every five-, ten-, and twenty-dollar bill in his possession because in his time more than one storekeeper had tried to cheat him.

  We stopped at Buzzy’s corner. As usual, no one was on the street. Nevertheless, Uncle Castor looked over his shoulder, the way boys at school checked behind them in the bathroom before they invited a select few into the stall to view a stolen Playboy. He kept a small tin of snuff in his pocket, just for show, he admitted. Uncle Castor faked a sneeze and said that Grandfather never did have good sense.

  Across Capitol Avenue the girl no one played with because her father was said to be a numbers runner galloped around her yard, which had been rubbed down by the passage of children from school. She inserted hairpieces, “falls,” into her own nest, neighed, and tried to watch the synthetic tails fly behind her. Uncle Castor said that the masters of Sweetwater Creek and Crescent Plantation weren’t interested in female slaves. I waited. Where there is most light, the shades are deepest. He said that his grandfather and probably his grandfather’s father were dark because the men whose names sounded like those of Booth Tarkington characters had not been as interested in the female slaves as they had been in the males.

  Grandfather always said that Uncle Castor had a mean tongue, that he did a pretty good job on the dead, but he never got the living right. Uncle Castor was glad that Grandfather hadn’t found out he was in town. He said his brother was capable of dropping everything to come up and put rubber bands on his sleeves just because he himself had to wear them. He said Grandfather’s favorite meal was Drowned Scout.

  What I didn’t know about Uncle Castor he would one day put into a book. Born in 1905, he once brought home a bandleader who wanted to hire the precocious child as a novelty act for a tour of seaboard cities. One night he slipped out to keep an appointment playing for a social club. He was paid $9.60 in the traditional quarters, nickels, and dimes. The jingling in his pockets betrayed him.

  Uncle Castor never entertained any doubt that he was above the pentatonic eccentricities of the Tuskegee Institute Singers. He dreamed of going to the Royal Academy, like the black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Instead, he was sent for safekeeping to Morehouse’s valiant, no-fuss preparatory school, which did its best to cram into black students what they hadn’t been offered in the schools they’d survived. Uncle Castor won his seat on the Louisiana Lackawanna, his ticket out of Georgia, by invoking the doctrine of the Talented Tenth, reminding his father that Booker T. Washington had entrusted his only daughter to the Hochschule in Berlin.

  As a result of his entrance examinations at the New England Conservatory, Uncle Castor was placed in the intermediate division. He who is perfect shall be a master. Dexterity passages and daily devotions: a book on each shoulder, a half-dollar piece on the back of each hand as he played through major and minor scales up to a certain metronomic speed for at least four octaves. The exercise was repeated with a quarter on each hand, then nickels, then dimes. If the coins fell, he had to start over.

  Students did not speak to each other without an introduction. They drank coffee side by side without an incline of the head. The six or seven other black students looked through him, but behind his back called him a “high hat” because his instructors thought well of him. Students were not required to wear formal dress at the opera and he sat alone with his half-price ticket in the Metropolitan Theater, hoping that he had not overreached himself.

  The conservatory said that he was very good and that it was unfortunate a black boy could not hope for a concert career. He thought of signing up with the Pullman porters and running on the road, shipping out with the Twentieth-Century Limited on a dead run, but he discovered the blue notes of a fast set, the children of Ham and Japheth elbow to elbow over giggle water. They had parties every Saturday where he met piano plunkers who made money though they could not play a complete diatonic scale. Hearing Fletcher Henderson’s band was, for him, the killer.

  The white men at the musicians’ union to which Uncle Castor applied didn’t believe he was a student, and when they saw his card they sent him to the black union, where the secretary, hung over, pocketed his ten dollars. He met James P. Johnson, once the most sought after recorder in the player-piano industry, from whom he learned about um pah, fill in, and the Jim Crow that would confine him to the roadhouses on the outskirts of town.

  But Uncle Castor was lucky. He was chosen to wear the red fez of the Black and White Orchestra, a six-piece, racially mixed ensemble much in demand in Franconia, Crawford’s Notch, Mt. Washington, and Keene, New Hampshire. The “big” union accused them of booking engagements without its permission, held an inquiry, exonerated the white members of the crew, and fined the black ones. Uncle Castor didn’t want to go back to the Friday nights where it didn’t matter what a band played as long as it was loud or the fraternity parties where the bass sitting at the top of the steps used the collars of the drummers below as music stands. He caught the excursion train to New York in the company of Johnny Hodges, then a teenager too brilliant for the local scene.

  Hodges took him to the Hoofers’ Club, a basement on Seventh Avenue, where he entered the big leagues. He started a Boston that brought an answer from the sidelines: Louis Armstrong in cutaways. “Pops” or “Smack” Henderson took his band downtown, solemn as pallbearers. Uncle Castor went upstairs with the men from the theater pits who had no work on Sundays. He marveled at the stretch of Fats Waller’s hands at the organ, but cringed at the mugging and bouncing he did for the audience. Uncomfortable with the barrelhouse style, Uncle Castor auditioned for Noble Sissle, the ace of syncopation, who preferred a layered, flowing sound.

  Noble Sissle and His International Orchestra topped the bill at Les Ambassadeurs in Paris. An Argentine orchestra played at tea, a French group serenaded the dinner guests, followed by supposedly limpid waltzes from the Viennese. Spackled into the cracks was a band of morose Hungarians who complained when no one trod their way through the gloomy folk tunes. The piano was mounted on a platform so that Uncle Castor sat high above the quota of Polignacs, Twysdens, and Goulds. Detectives tried to blend in without losing sight of the necklaces they guarded. Electricians once drenched the assembly in a rainbow of light, but the effect was so tempting the police begged them to stop.

  In the 1930s Uncle Castor, first pianist and assistant arranger, working from 5 p.m. to 5 a.m., was too busy to notice as the “Spectac” began to list in the waters of fashion. The number of newsmaking engagements from Madrid to Stockholm declined. The jive-happy jumped ship. Meanwhile, Europe headed back to war. Sissle’s “noted aggregation” returned home to unlatch its horns, but something had been broken in the transplanting. And the miles dried up. Audiences at the Biltmore had even stopped singing “Farewell, Harlem!” Uncle Castor knocked around as a relief pianist, “ghosted” for Fred Waring, wrote and published songs no one recorded, and couldn’t recall precisely when he felt himself pushed aside by the new, aggressive sounds of 18th and Vine and 29th and Dearborn. He came to rest as the “featured nightly attraction” at a hotel in Saratoga.

  All of this Uncle Castor would one day type up in bold capital letters. He secreted over four hundred pages about the beauty of minor thirds, his triumphs over rivals and inadequate scores, the hectic life of numbers that had to be learned in an hour and princely sums that slipped through his hands in even less time. What Uncle Castor did not know was that his gladdened tribute to his own talent and times would fall into Grandfather’s possession. Grandfather stuffed the huge single-spaced manuscript inside the dustbag of a vacuum cleaner, where it remained hidden until both he and his brother were dead.

  Uncle Castor liked to quote Edith Piaf when he backed me into a piano lesson: Remember where you came from and send the elevator back down. But I was lost the minute he began to get misty ab
out contrapuntal devices, the rotary movement of his forearm, the special meaning of wrists thrown upward and high finger positions. The impromptu sessions were mostly a matter of his wiping my oily fingerprints from the keys. Uncle Castor relented and capped the tedium with stories: how his teacher dozed like a shrink until he felt the weight of the silence and snapped awake to tell him that his Czerny was unacceptable.

  The tutorials he offered me and my sisters were a form of singing for his supper. A week had gone by and Uncle Castor showed no sign of moving on. He sensed that there was a limit to the entertainment my parents and their friends derived from his demonstrations of how the open fourths and fifths of Nathaniel Dett’s “Jumba Dance” could be grafted onto another song, how the left-hand accompaniment gave it an open harmony and a foot-tapping beat. A rubato passage—he liked to lay on the lingo—of a Chopin prelude could also be taken uptown. “My improvisation is weak” came across as an apology and a need to be reassured that he was not overstaying his welcome.

  In his embarrassment that he was still with us, Uncle Castor became timid and elderly. Though he made himself scarce, we could tell when he was out and when he was holed up in the extra room trying not to breathe, pretending that even his ego was dormant. He had learned the tactic of being unobtrusive from his life on the road. Upstairs, he was back in Ostend or Sheffield, in the seedy rooming houses where he’d been given a bed with the utmost reluctance and had to practice by silently running his fingers over any flat surface at hand.

  He let himself out in the afternoons, dressed in a vaguely zoot-suitish mode. “Man and nature scorn the shocking hat,” Grandfather always said. Uncle Castor came back after we had eaten, also a legacy from the time when band dates had lost their glamour. He occasionally accepted what was urged on him in the kitchen. He must have been surviving on pizza at the new place on the bad corner. It was the only place nearby and he never used his Studebaker. He once told me he had lived for years on brandied peaches.