The Spyglass Tree

Albert Murray was born in Nokomis, Alabama, in 1916. He grew up in Mobile and was educated at Tuskegee Institute, where he later taught literature and directed the college theater. A retired major in the U.S. Air Force, Murray has been O’Connor Professor of Literature at Colgate University, visiting professor of literature at the University of Massachusetts in Boston, writer-in-residence at Emory University, and Paul Anthony Brick Lecturer at the University of Missouri. His other works include
The Omni-Americans
and
The Hero and the Blues
, collections of essays;
South to a Very Old Place
, an autobiography;
Train Whistle Guitar
, a novel;
Stomping the Blues
, a history of the blues; and
Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Baste
(as told to Albert Murray). He lives in New York City.

Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography
of Count Basie
(as told to Albert Murray)
The Omni-Americans
The Hero and the Blues
South to a Very Old Place
Stomping the Blues
Train Whistle Guitar

T
hat many years later, the clock tower chimes you woke up hearing every morning were that many miles north by east from the sawmill whistles along Mobile River and Chickasabogue Creek, and the main thing each day was the also and also of the campus as it was when I arrived with my scholarship voucher and no return ticket that first September.

As you took your place in line with all the other freshmen waiting in the hallway outside the registrar’s office that first Friday morning, there was a moment when you suddenly realized that you were actually on your own and you felt so totally all alone that it was almost as if everything that had happened before you came through the main gate (less than twenty-four hours earlier) and saw that many brick-red buildings with magnolia-white eaves and antebellum columns beyond the late summer green shrubbery with the rust-red dome of the dining hall against the bright blue preautumn sky was now already a very long time ago and in a place very far away.

But even so there was also the also and also of L & N express train whistles and creosote trestles, and the marco polo blue skyline mist that is always there when you remember the spyglass view from the chinaberry tree in the front yard of our three-room shingle-top shotgun house on Old Dodge Mill Road. Not to mention the tell-me-tale times around the fireplace and on the swing porch of the house itself. To say nothing of the long since hallowed lie-swapping and all of the ongoing good-natured woofing and signifying you had been permitted to witness outright or had otherwise contrived to overhear in places like Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy’s barbershop and on the veranda of Stranahan’s General Merchandise store for that many years.

Another part of all of which was old Stagolee Dupas
(fils)
, the flashy-fingered jook joint piano player from New Orleans and elsewhere, with his custom-tailored jazz-back suits and hand-finished silk shirts and handkerchiefs and his deliberately pigeon-toed patent leather avenue walk and his poker-sly watchful eyes, in whose name and for whose sake Little Buddy Marshall and I had in time also come to do things that had nothing to do with playing music, just as I for my part had also already been cocking my all-purpose navy blue derring-do baseball cap and tightening my rawhide wristband like Gator Gus even when the situation I was in at the time had nothing at all to do with being the legendary money-ball pitcher he used to make you also want to be, along with everything else.

Yes, even as the copper-green sound of the vine-dampened reverberations—clinging and clanging over the huddled rooftops of the surrounding neighborhood—echoed across the rolling central Alabama farmlands and all the way out to the bright clay hills and the gray-green pine ridges of the outlying regions, took you back to storybook illustrations of medieval castles and cathedral towns, there was the also and also of Luzana Cholly and his twelve-string guitar and his
32-20
on a 44 frame and his sporty limp
walk. Not only because old Luzana Cholly was the one who had once said what he said sitting under the L & N Railroad bridge at Three Mile Creek that time after he had caught me and Little Buddy Marshall trying to follow him and skip city on a northbound freight train and had brought us back as if by the nape of the neck and (for me at any rate) as if specifically to the door of Miss Lexine Metcalf’s classroom—but also because of all the things Little Buddy Marshall and I had been daring and doing in his notorious name all along.

As for Miss Lexine Metcalf herself and her bulletin-board peoples of many lands, once she had singled you out, you were indelibly earmarked for Mister B. Franklin Fisher and his ancestral imperatives for the “talented tenth,” to whom he said much had been given in raw potential, acknowledged or not, and from whom therefore much in commitment, development, refinement, and ultimate achievement would always be not only expected but required.

Nor were any of the essential implications of any of that diminished in any way at all by anything that I had found out by that time, about how everything had finally turned out for the self-same but perhaps not identical Little Buddy Marshall who always used to be there for daring and doing, before he decided to go where he went and tried to do what he always wanted to do.

Incidentally, I can’t remember when Mama was not calling me Scooter because I can actually remember all the way back to the times when what she used to say was not really Scooter but Gooter. Which was probably all the way back during the time when I was still trying to crawl because what I remember her actually saying for Mama’s little man was
Mama’s yil man mamam yil gootabout man
and the way she always used to like to say bless his bones was
betchem bone betchem tweet bone
.

And when I was big enough to go outside the house and then the yard by myself, not only to play but also to run errands, she
also used to say
Mama’s little old scootabout man, lil old scootabout scootabout man out there amongst them. That’s what he is. Out there scooting about all over the place. That’s just exactly what he is. It what him im betchemtweet bone. With his little old sparkle-eyed buster-brown self and them nimble knees and twinkle toes just like little old Jack the Rabbit. Just like little old Jack the Rabbit in the briar patch, and Mama wouldn’t trade him for a rich man’s share in the Nettie Queen riverboat with that fifty-thousand dollar calliope
.

Once I came home from the first grade and Uncle Jerome the preacher, who was always christening or ordaining something said what he said, and it was as if he was conducting one of his services. He stood up from the rocking chair, looking at me with his pulpit-solemn eyes and cleared his throat until his voice was ceremonial and placed his baptismal-firm hands on my shoulder as soon as Mama said, Mama’s little scootabout man, he back home from all the way over yonder amongst them, he said, Now there’s a name, notion, and designation to conjure with. Gentlemen, sir, as I am a witness
.

Uncle Jerome may also have been the first one I ever heard talking about how secret messages from the abolitionists about the Underground Railroad used to be sent from plantation to plantation or by the grapevine. Because he was almost always there in the fireside crescent during midwinter yarn-spinning nights and he had his own rocking chair on the swing porch in the summer. In my case, you can bet that he was the one who wanted you to feel that Scooter was as much the code name for the fugitive slave zigzagging north by the Big Dipper as it was for Jack the Rabbit
.