High Cotton: A Novel Read online

  “Buster Brown came to town with his big old britches hanging down,” Buzzy whispered very close to my ear.

  Late at night Uncle Castor drifted along the walls like a daddy longlegs. I heard the bath fill very discreetly. The creak of the back stairs told me that Uncle Castor was on his way to the living room. I watched him from the front stairs, through the banister. He unpacked score paper and books. He’d shown me the choice calligraphy on several title pages that read “Paul at Samothrace.” An oratorio based on Shango cult themes, it was to be his apotheosis. Anyone could have guessed that he was touchy about having played “Sweet Georgia Brown” instead of Debussy on stage all those years.

  He moved his hands, but didn’t depress the keys. Perhaps he was afraid to wake us. He made a stray mark or two with his pencil, one from a bundle that looked like the Italian Fascist emblem. He removed his shoes and stretched out on the sofa, one sheer sock hitting the other, making a sound like someone trying to strike a match as if to say this was what the paralysis of being both too afraid and too superior to compete looked like. Then he saw his address book. The number he dialed was a long one. “I haven’t seen a thing,” I heard him say softly. “There was an enormous tree. Today I looked and it was gone. They chopped it down. But it’s a lovely view.” Perhaps the person on the other end of the line was like me and believed everything everyone said.

  Soon it would be time again for school, for gray Sundays of “Izler Solomon Conducts the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra,” for cold Mondays of new math, new threats to the cliffs of Dover, stapled mimeographed sheets of paper crowded with “Thoughts for the Day” and rhymed couplets in praise of the War on Poverty.

  Sometimes, after school, these sheets dropped from linty pockets and sailed ahead of me in the wind. Once, when the rain was falling quickly, smoothly, like grain from a silo, I watched a sheet get away from me into a locked yard formerly known for its peonies. The blue-green ink dissolved and made a map of some far country, of roads into the open.

  Buzzy made racing-engine sounds behind the wheel of Uncle Castor’s Studebaker, and the dandy who reversed charges in the middle of the night leaned through the passenger window and struggled to calm the windshield wipers and lights. I arrived as he finished his story.

  “I spent the first twenty years of my life assuming that my feelings would be hurt. The people coming toward me on the street I thought were going to beat me up. Like they did Roland Hayes in Georgia. You may think I exaggerate, and I do, but it was like that.”

  I watched Uncle Castor in his outlandish suit with the Chaplinesque seat head toward the filling station to begin his daily look around the neighborhood. Buzzy stroked the corroded edges of the car’s body and said that Uncle Castor had been, like him, a janitor’s helper. The big boys from the alley had teased Buzzy about the pickup truck he rode around in when he worked one Memorial Day weekend helping one of his mother’s friends to spear and bag litter in the city parks.

  I was sure Buzzy had gotten it wrong or was just being evil, but when I later asked Uncle Castor to set Buzzy straight he said that he had been a shoeshine boy as well. One summer when he was still a student, he bumped into a nice little ragpicker who had the 25-cents-per-hour practice room across from his. The Italian boy worked as a barber’s apprentice and talked his boss into giving Uncle Castor a job. The boss didn’t like the way they got on. He gave them breaks at different times and then ordered the ragpicker to keep his distance from the shoeshine boy because their friendship was bad for business. Eventually, he found fault with Uncle Castor’s buffing and fired him.

  Buzzy continued to position himself on our steps, but he wasn’t waiting for me. I suspected that Uncle Castor bought him pizza. He could go to the bad corner anytime he wanted. He shared with me his versions of Uncle Castor’s stories, who in turn was delighted to confirm that he had once earned $19.80 a week in a railroad yard replenishing the linen supply on the sleeper cars and worried about his hands, the bags were so heavy. When Uncle Castor was not much older than we were he had worked at a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio. He hurt himself making bands for cotton bales and was reassigned to a more strenuous position at stacking until a friend told the foreman that Uncle Castor had lied about his age.

  “It usually means your ears are not working when you prefer slow pieces to fast pieces. You should be glad to have them both.” I’d intercepted Uncle Castor and played the new Beatles album twice in an effort to detain him. He was itchy, as though his Stutz were waiting so machine and man could flash together down the Avenue Gabriel. Uncle Castor said the houses on our block were close together, but there was more neighborliness in the beagles’ pen behind the filling station and the helicopters overhead returning to the army base.

  My friends were divided into those whose houses I could enter and those I couldn’t. On our block it was advisable to play only in yards when I went visiting. If I wanted water, I had to come home. From the outside, on Capitol Avenue, the upstairs rooms of Buzzy’s house looked as though the walls were covered with a plush material, like the inside of a Lincoln Continental. I couldn’t put into words for Uncle Castor the trouble I thought I would be in if my parents found out that he had fallen into conversation with Buzzy’s mother and I had followed him into her living room.

  “Young lady, I was top cream.” Uncle Castor counted off the names again: Coleman Hawkins, Benny Carter, Will Vorderley, Willie “the Lion” Smith, Buster Bailey, Bub Miley, Tommy Ladnier, Don Redman, Wilbur and Sidney Deparis. He wiggled his fingers, as if he had inserted a large, sparkling emerald on each. Buzzy’s mother nodded from the bucket-seat position of an easy chair from which the legs had been removed. She wore a thug’s scarf and “pedal pushers,” stretch pants with stirrups under her soles. She looked naughty, like Eartha Kitt.

  The living room appeared as though it had been furnished with car seats. Except for the stereo cabinet, nothing had legs. I sat Indian-fashion on the low sofa next to Uncle Castor. A tonic-and-something stood on the sawed log that acted as a coffee table. Buzzy’s mother said she herself had painted the skyline that went around the walls. There were many Empire State buildings in it. She had had to experiment before she got one that satisfied her. Uncle Castor said that when he was in London he missed his chance to sit for a painter named Philpot because of the Palladium’s schedule.

  Buzzy’s mother said that before Buzzy was born, when his father was stationed overseas, she had sat in Hitler’s seat at the Olympic stadium. Her dream had been to compete in the Olympics in Rome. In an unofficial race she beat the official world’s record in the women’s mile.

  Uncle Castor said that once Sissle and the boys were flown over to play at the Cole Porter party at the Ritz in London. They held back on the open brass and outshone Jack Hylton’s band, then the toast of England.

  Buzzy’s mother said she once danced for a living on a pyramid. Her solo was to build to a crescendo as the spotlight fanned open. A stagehand missed his cue and instead of a pinpoint light he turned on the full spot. The glare frightened her so much she lost her balance.

  Uncle Castor said every nothing town with a depot now had a Ritz Hotel. At the Ritz in Paris the American clientele managed to keep out coloreds, no matter how famous they were. It did his heart good to see waiters and tradespeople spit on the tips white Americans left, though they were pocketed on second thought.

  Buzzy’s mother said that she opened a dance school when she came to Indianapolis, but she had to give that up, too.

  Uncle Castor said that a white woman on the Ile de France insisted that he vacate the chair that was too close to hers; an Indian on B deck accosted him with the insults he had learned on A deck.

  Buzzy’s mother said she let herself dry naturally when she got out of the tub. She didn’t use towels.

  Uncle Castor said whites in Paris cut in front of him at American Express and a woman from Virginia protested that she would not have been forced to share an elevator with him back home. Experts in “mule
ology” were forever approaching his table and saying to his guests that nice girls didn’t drink with tack heads. The Americans asked, “What do you boys want over here?” or “What do you boys have against the flag?” and the British said, “You, face-ache.”

  Buzzy’s mother said that what she liked most about the musicians who came out of Kansas City was that they were all so big and black. I said we had to go.

  Buzzy walked us down Capitol Avenue. He jumped on my back. Buzzy had his moments. Once, when I caught a high fly, he got me in a hammerlock and said, “Finally did something for the team.”

  I tried to keep an eye on Uncle Castor, in the way you worry that a relative might be giving away money to total strangers. When he wasn’t on the telephone, I knew he was flapping toward Hadrian’s Wall for another discussion with Buzzy’s mother about the times he came back dead tired from the steel mill and played a little Zeg Comfrey or Irving Berlin anyway to please his friends or the kind of music that used to fit a three-minute recording and what sort followed in the era of long-playing records.

  I walked back and forth below Buzzy’s hill, just as he used to stake out ours. Buzzy’s mother emerged from the house with a tonic-and-something to cool her forehead. Uncle Castor followed, still counting on his slender, knotty fingers: Small’s Paradise with Sparky Bearden and the gang in the Dawn Patrol; Jean Patou and linebackers “beating up the watch” in the Buttes. Buzzy brought up the rear, doing the shilly-shally.

  One night Buzzy’s mother knocked on our door just before my bedtime. She said she was hunting for Buzzy and then said she had invited Uncle Castor over for an evening of chitterlings but he must have forgotten. The babysitter said she would pass on the message. The sitter came from one of those oviferous families of religious girls who weren’t even allowed radio. She studied Buzzy’s mother, particularly her hair, and never took her hand from the doorknob.

  Uncle Castor’s suitcases were packed and he’d gone out with my parents. He’d asked me that afternoon to slip up the street with a note for Buzzy’s mother. I waited to ask permission to go out until the hour I was certain the sitter would refuse me. Buzzy’s mother said she would have called, but she didn’t know our number. She said she was glad Uncle Castor wasn’t sick. I didn’t hear the screen door slam right away and knew I still had a chance to give her the note and say that I was sorry for having forgotten to deliver it, but something held me back.

  Later that night I surprised Uncle Castor at his post by the telephone. He quickly picked up a copy of Ebony when he heard someone coming. It was the centenary issue of the Emancipation Proclamation that had been carefully preserved under the telephone book. I’d taken a crayon to the face of Frederick Douglass on the cover.

  “Bless my soul, you winged me good. I nearly flew.” He uncrossed his legs. “I used to talk like that. I had to. It’s fine not to be one of them. You just can’t let it show.” He turned back to the business in his address book. “Ninety-nine and a half percent won’t do.”

  I meant to confess about the note, but something again held me back. He thought I had gone back to bed and dialed one of his long numbers. I watched him squeeze the sash of his bathrobe as he murmured wearily into the receiver, “In God we trust. Everyone else trusts in cash.” The person on the other end of the line was hearing, probably not for the first time, how Uncle Castor had been robbed.

  Every popular composer was, in his books, an “alligator,” one who stole the melodies and arrangements of others. He had a mental dossier of examples. Hadn’t John Powell plundered the songs of Virginia Tarheel plantations? More than anything, he wanted to frighten some Hollywood types with lawsuits. He said in 1947 one no-talent radio star actually sent an agent to climb his hotel fire escape, pry open his window, and take the music right off his desk. Uncle Castor believed he had been defrauded of fees and royalties, of all sorts of money, including the inadequate, paranoid kind, “black folks’ money.”

  As if he had used up his allotment of visits at one throw, Uncle Castor never passed through town again, but the beanstalk he planted in our back yard threatened to grow forever into the region of the clouds. While the widower who lived next door to the filling station cursed and worked to start the Studebaker, Uncle Castor said he was fourteen when he first informed his mother that he was going to Paris. He held out an atlas and she called the doctor.

  Buzzy and his mother never got to read about the lindy and tango lessons Uncle Castor would give them if they ever came up to Saratoga. “Hey, face-ache.” A week after Uncle Castor’s departure Buzzy waved a bag of potato chips over my head. “My mama said not to give you none.” He said he had something else for me. He said it as if he were citing an unusual but generally known fact of nature, such as that the Nile flows northward. My sisters said they didn’t realize how big Indianapolis was until they tried to run away from home.

  The Vienna Choir Boys came to Indianapolis. I badgered my parents, those suckers, until they secured tickets. I slept with mine under the pillow so that it came out looking like one of those unlucky stubs swept from warped planks at the racetracks in Ohio, where betting was legal. Curled up to hide from the garage light outside, I switched from the dream channel on which I appeared as a waif bedding down in the hay far from his dying father, the king, to the channel on which I lifted the pillow high to reveal in place of the ticket an embossed invitation from the Augarten Palace in the way I once found that a grubby lateral incisor had been transformed into a silver dollar.

  My fantasy had me in some celestial tabernacle, aglow with such intensity that the conductor begged me, the sad, innocent soprano vulnerable with worthiness, to lead the brotherhood on stage. I assumed that the uniform of the Vienna Choir Boys had rating badges and that after a succession of standing ovations, joined in by my heretofore skeptical sisters, I would be elevated to an officer of the line. In my mind’s eye I saw the sailor uniform with the wide collar fussed over by my godmother and a bevy of classmates who fought back tears of contrition for having persecuted a nightingale.

  The disturbing sign was that in my dream the uniform was visible, but I wasn’t. Even when I pictured myself eating European style, with the knife in my right hand, the camera cut from the sailor’s sleeve to the plate to get around the thorny problem of there having been no brown wrists in my prophetic film of the moment, Almost Angels. But I wouldn’t be “Four Eyes” or “Chicken Chest” anymore. I’d be beautiful and in front of the Mozart Fountain. I didn’t know the difference between Schubert’s Twenty-third Psalm and “Ezekiel Saw the Wheel,” but scared money will get you no money, as Grandfather like to say.

  The night of the performance I brushed my teeth until the gums bled, applied coconut goo to my legs and elbows and such a quantity of dressing to straighten my hair that we were late. There was nothing I could do about the Chinese-lantern shape of my face or my father’s decision that he had to work late or my mother’s firmness that even if the choir had come from Tim-buckthree she was not going to wear gloves.

  The program’s phrase “world-famous” flitted around in my brain like a captured starling; the choristers, shedding radiance, wafting soft fragrance, looked and sounded alike; and an inner voice said, “Sleep.” My mother declined to nudge me, to win her point about the gravity of my desire to be a part of the Hurok audience. I wanted to meet the “singing ambassadors,” Fritz and Kasper, Master Zink, Peter the young overseer, and his pretty cousin Liese anyway.

  I knocked on heaven’s door and approached the nearest halo wearer, who every day was up at 6:15, never ill, never bad, stupid, or ugly in the opinion of his sisters. He received my program and produced a pen with the heavy sigh of one explaining for the last time the theory of relativity to the village idiot. I thought I had nothing more perplexing in my memory bank than the day numbers were added to zip codes, but backstage where, justified by grace, the dimples had been turned in with the sailor suits, I suddenly remembered the untouchable horses of Indianapolis’s Timberview Stables.
/>   It was my sister’s birthday and we had an appointment. A storm had passed through and dark branches on the roads reached up to snag axles. Timberview stood in what I thought of as country. Healthy steeds ate up grass and compliments unknown to the swaybacks that walked in a circle of flies at the state fair or dropped green mud on the trail at Fox Lake. Timberview’s horses cantered out of the 1957 World Book Encyclopedia that a salesman had agreed was the steal of 1958. But inside they said the stable wasn’t open and no horses were available. They insisted that the storm, the lightning, thunder, and other acts of God had left their horses in no condition for us to ride. I recognized the fence around the palomino in the glance of the Vienna Choir Boy.

  “They own the fields, but not the horizon,” Grandfather once declaimed in the aisle at 7-Eleven.

  4 /

  The Color Line

  Sounds were different in the suburbs. Because there were, to my ear, fewer noises, I imagined that they were bigger, clearer, and more meaningful than the medley of Capitol Avenue and its tributary, the alley. Our new neighbors were remote, hidden by trees, winding fences, ivy, and double doors. Raccoons and boogymen shook the woods; cardinals banged into the picture windows and boomeranged from view; crows kept watch from telephone wires, disappeared behind chimneys, and popped up with kernels of dry dog food in their beaks. Golden retrievers scampered ahead of half-naked boys on bicycles shouting themselves home from a swim. They moved into the weeds when a car went by. I, too, could tell from a long way off if a car was going too fast around the smooth curves.

  In the distance I could hear the rip of a hand-held buzz saw, the smack of a basketball hitting a garage, the swish of sprinklers making lawns soft and shiny, the slap of the evening newspaper landing on driveways the color of the lead in No. 2 pencils and, from the country club across the road, the whine of canopied golf carts, the exclamation of someone watching his ball fly over the barbed wire into the ditch. What we, the new black family, couldn’t hear our first day in the suburbs were the sounds that went with the slashing of our tires and the decapitation of our mailbox.