Mr. Vertigo (12 page)

Now that he had graduated to manhood, Aesop decided the moment had come to sit down and write his autobiography. That was how he planned to spend the months before he left home—telling
the story of his life so far, from his birth in a rural shack in Georgia to his deflowering in a Harlem bordello, wrapped in the blubbery arms of Mabel the whore. The words began to flow, but the title vexed him, and I remember how he dithered back and forth about it. One day he was going to call the book
Confessions of a Negro Foundling
; the next day he changed it to
Aesop’s Adventures: The True History and Unvarnished Opinions of a Lost Boy
; the day after that it was going to be
The Road to Yale: The Life of a Negro Scholar from His Humble Origins to the Present
. Those were just some of them, and for as long as he worked on that book, he kept trying out different ones, shuffling and reshuffling his ideas until he’d built up a stack of title pages every bit as tall as the manuscript itself. He must have toiled eight or ten hours a day on his opus, and I can remember peeking through the door as he sat there hunched over his desk, marvelling at how a person could sit still for so long, engaged in no other activity than guiding the nib of a pen across a leaf of white foolscap. It was my first experience with the making of books, and even when Aesop called me into his room to read selected passages of his work aloud, I found it hard to tally all that silence and concentration with the stories that came tumbling from his lips. We were all in the book—Master Yehudi, Mother Sioux, myself—and to my clumsy, untutored ear, the thing had every intention of becoming a masterpiece. I laughed at some parts, I cried at others, and what more can a person want from a book than to feel the prick of such delights and sorrows? Now that I’m writing a book of my own, not a day goes by when I don’t think about Aesop up there in his room. That was sixty-five springs ago, and I can still see him sitting at his desk, scribbling away at his youthful memoirs as the light poured through the window, catching the dust particles that danced around him. If I concentrate hard enough, I can still hear the breath going in
and out of his lungs, I can still hear the point of his pen scratching across the paper.

While Aesop worked indoors, Master Yehudi and I spent our days in the fields, toiling untold hours on my act. In a fit of optimism after his return, he’d announced to us at dinner that there wouldn’t be any planting that year. “To hell with the crops,” he said. “There’s enough food to last through the winter, and by the time spring comes again, we’ll be long gone from this place. The way I look at it, it would be a sin to grow things we’ll never need.” There was general rejoicing over this new policy, and for once the early spring was free of drudge work and plowing, the interminable weeks of bent backs and slogging through mud. My locomotion breakthrough had turned the tide, and Master Yehudi was so confident now that he was willing to let the farm go to pot. It was the only sane decision a man could make. We’d all done our time, and why eat dirt when we’d soon be counting our gold?

That doesn’t mean we didn’t bust our asses out there—particularly myself—but I enjoyed the work, and no matter how hard the master pushed me, I never wanted to quit. Once the weather turned warm, we usually kept going until after dark, working by torchlight in the far meadows as the moon rose into the sky. I was inexhaustible, consumed by a happiness that swept me along from one challenge to the next. By May first, I was able to walk from ten to twelve yards as a matter of routine. By May fifth, I had extended it to twenty yards, and less than a week after that I had pushed it to forty: a hundred and twenty feet of airborne locomotion, nearly ten uninterrupted minutes of pure magic. That was when the master hit upon the idea of having me practice over water. There was a pond in the northeast corner of the property, and from then on we did all our work over there, riding out in the buckboard wagon every morning after breakfast to a
point where we could no longer see the house—alone together in the silent fields, barely saying a word to each other for hours on end. The water intimidated me at first, and since I didn’t know how to swim, it was no laughing matter to test my prowess over that element. The pond must have been sixty feet across, and the water level in at least half of it was over my head. I fell in sixteen or twenty times the first day, and on four of those occasions the master had to jump in and fish me out. After that, we came equipped with towels and several changes of clothes, but by the end of the week they were no longer necessary. I conquered my fear of the water by pretending it wasn’t there. If I didn’t look down, I discovered I could propel my body across the surface without getting wet. It was as simple as that, and by the last days of May 1927, I was walking on water with the same skill as Jesus himself.

Somewhere in the middle of that time, Lindbergh made his solo flight across the Atlantic, traveling nonstop from New York City to Paris in thirty-three hours. We heard about it from Mrs. Witherspoon, who drove out from Wichita one day with a pile of newspapers in the back seat of her car. The farm was so cut off from the world, even big stories like that one escaped our notice. If it hadn’t been for her wanting to come all that way, we never would have heard a peep about it. I’ve always found it strange that Lindbergh’s stunt coincided so exactly with my own efforts, that at the precise moment he was making his way across the ocean, I was traversing my little pond in Kansas—the two of us in the air together, each one accomplishing his feat at the same time. It was as if the sky had suddenly opened itself up to man, and we were the first pioneers, the Columbus and Magellan of human flight. I didn’t know the Lone Eagle from a hole in the wall, but I felt linked to him after that, as if we shared some dark fraternal bond. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that his
plane was called the
Spirit of St. Louis
. That was my town, too, the town of champions and twentieth-century heroes, and without even knowing it, Lindbergh had named his plane in my honor.

Mrs. Witherspoon hung around for a couple of days and nights. After she left, the master and I got back to business, shifting the focus of our attention from locomotion to loft. I had done what I could do with horizontal travel; now it was time to attempt the vertical. Lindbergh was an inspiration to me, I freely confess it, but I wanted to do him one better: to do with my body what he’d done with a machine. It would be on a smaller scale, perhaps, but it would be infinitely more stupendous, a thing that would dwarf his fame overnight. Try as I did, however, I couldn’t make an inch of headway. For a week and a half, the master and I struggled out by the pond, equally daunted by the task we’d set for ourselves, and at the end of that time I was still no higher than I’d been before. Then, on the evening of June fifth, Master Yehudi made a suggestion that began to turn things around.

“I’m just speculating,” he said, “but it occurs to me that your necklace might have something to do with it. It can’t weigh more than an ounce or two, but given the mathematics of what you’re attempting, that could be enough. For each millimeter you rise into the air, the weight of the object increases in geometric proportion to the height—meaning that once you’re six inches off the ground, you’re carrying the equivalent of forty extra pounds. That comes to half your total weight. If my calculations are correct, it’s no wonder you’ve been having such a rough time of it.”

“I’ve worn that thing since Christmas,” I said. “It’s my lucky charm, and I can’t do nothing without it.”

“Yes you can, Walt. The first time you got yourself off the ground, it was slung around my neck, remember? I’m not saying you don’t have a sentimental attachment to it, but we’re intruding on deep spiritual matters here, and it could be that you can’t be
whole to do what you have to do, that you have to leave a part of yourself behind before you can attain the full magnitude of your gift.”

“That’s just double-talk, I’m wearing clothes, ain’t I? I’m wearing shoes and socks, ain’t I? If the necklace is bogging me down, then those things are doing it too. And I sure as hell ain’t going to flaunt my stuff in public without no clothes on.”

“It can’t hurt to try. There’s nothing to lose, Walt, and everything to gain. If I’m wrong, so be it. If I’m not, it would be an awful pity if we never had a chance to find out.”

He had me there, so with much skepticism and reluctance I removed the good luck charm and placed it in the master’s hand. “All right,” I said, “we’ll give it a whirl. But if it don’t turn out like you say, that’s the last we’ll ever talk about it.”

Over the course of the next hour, I managed to double my previous record, ascending to heights of twelve to fourteen inches. By nightfall, I had raised myself a good two and a half feet off the ground, demonstrating that Master Yehudi’s hunch had been correct, a prophetic insight into the causes and consequences of the levitation arts. The thrill was spectacular—to feel myself hovering at such a distance from the ground, to be literally on the verge of flying—but above two feet it was difficult for me to maintain a vertical position without beginning to totter and grow dizzy. It was all so new to me up there, I wasn’t able to find my natural equilibrium. I felt long to myself, as if I were composed of segments and not made of a continuous piece, and my head and shoulders responded in one way while my shins and ankles responded in another. So as not to tip over, I found myself easing into a prone position when I got up there, instinctively knowing it would be safer and more comfortable to have my entire body stretched over the ground than just the soles of my feet. I was still too nervous to think about moving forward in
that position, but late that night, just before we knocked off and went home to bed, I tucked my head under my chest and managed to do a slow somersault in the air, completing a full, unbroken circle without once grazing the earth.

The master and I rode back to the house that night drunk with joy. Everything seemed possible to us now: the conquest of both loft and locomotion, the ascension into actual flight, the dream of dreams. That was our greatest moment together, I think, the moment when our whole future fell into place at last. On June sixth, however, just one night after reaching that pinnacle, my training ground to an abrupt and irrevocable halt. The thing that Master Yehudi had been dreading for so long finally came to pass, and when it did, it happened with such violence, caused such havoc and upheaval in our hearts, that neither one of us was ever the same again.

I had worked well all day, and as was our habit throughout that miraculous spring, we decided to linger on into the night. At seven thirty, we ate a supper of sandwiches that Mother Sioux had packed for us that morning and then resumed our labors as darkness gathered in the surrounding fields. It must have been close to ten o’clock when we heard the sound of horses. It was no more than a faint rumbling at first, a disturbance in the ground that made me think of distant thunder, as if a lightning storm were brewing somewhere in the next county. I had just completed a double somersault at the edge of the pond and was waiting for the master’s comments, but instead of speaking in his normal calm voice, he grabbed hold of my arm in a sudden, panic-stricken gesture. “Listen,” he said. And then he said it again: “Listen to that. They’re coming. The bastards are coming.” I pricked up my ears, and sure enough, the sound was getting louder. A couple of seconds passed, and then I understood that
it was the sound of horses, a stampeding clatter of hooves charging in our direction.

“Don’t move,” the master said. “Stay where you are and don’t move a muscle until I come back.”

Then, without a word of explanation, he started running toward the house, tearing through the fields like a sprinter. I ignored his command and took off after him, racing along as fast as my legs could carry me. We were a good quarter mile from the house, but before we’d traveled a hundred yards, flames were already visible, a glowing surge of red and yellow pulsing against the black sky. We heard whoops and war yodels, a volley of shots rang out, and then we heard the unmistakable sound of human screams. The master kept running, steadily increasing the distance between us, but once he came to the stand of oaks on the far side of the barn, he stopped. I pushed on to the verge of the trees myself, intent on continuing all the way to the house, but the master saw me out of the corner of his eye and wrestled me to the ground before I could go any farther. “We’re too late,” he said. “If we go in there now, we’re only going to get ourselves killed. There’s twelve of them and two of us, and they’ve all got rifles and guns. Pray to God they don’t find us, Walt, but there’s not a damned thing we can do for the others.”

So we stood there helplessly behind the trees, watching the Ku Klux Klan do its work. A dozen men on a dozen horses pranced about the yard, a mob of yelping murderers with white sheets over their heads, and we were powerless to thwart them. They dragged Aesop and Mother Sioux out of the burning house, put ropes around their necks, and strung them up to the elm tree by the side of the road, each one to a different branch. Aesop howled, Mother Sioux said nothing, and within minutes they were both dead. My two best friends were murdered before my eyes,
and all I could do was watch, fighting back tears as Master Yehudi clamped his palm over my mouth. Once the killing was over, a couple of the Klansmen stuck a wooden cross in the ground, doused it with gasoline, and set it on fire. The cross burned as the house burned, the men whooped it up a little more, firing rounds of buckshot into the air, and then they all climbed onto their horses and rode off in the direction of Cibola. The house was incandescent by then, a fireball of heat and roaring timbers, and by the time the last of the men was gone, the roof had already given way, collapsing to the ground in a shower of sparks and meteors. I felt as if I had seen the sun explode. I felt as if I had just witnessed the end of the world.

W
e buried them on the property that night, lowering their bodies into two unmarked graves beside the barn. We should have said some prayers, but our lungs were too full of sobbing for that, so we just covered them up with dirt and said nothing, working in silence as the salt water trickled down our cheeks. Then, without returning to the smoldering house, without even bothering to see if any of our belongings were still intact, we hitched the mare to the wagon and drove off into the darkness, leaving Cibola behind us for good.