High Cotton (8 page)
Authors: Darryl Pinckney
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #United States, #African American
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 about 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.
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.
“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.
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.”
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.
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.
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 “muleology” 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.
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.
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.”
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