The Spyglass Tree (15 page)

As a matter of fact, Giles Cunningham and the Pit and the Dolomite and the Plum (and thus also Wiley Peyton and Flea Mosley and Speck Jenkins) were all very much a part of what was on my mind when I woke up that morning, because as soon as I realized that I was no longer asleep and remembered what day it was, I began thinking about Hortense Hightower and the way she had said what she said.

After all, I had already found out most of what I knew about him and his concerns long before I had finally come to realize that
she herself even existed. Nor had I just been hearing about him. I had actually been seeing him at fairly close range although not with any one-on-one personal familiarity ever since the first term of my freshman year because he always came on the block at least once a week. He was always there every Friday afternoon, the big black Cadillac parked head on into the curb in front of the barbershop.

That was when Skeeter always got him ready for the weekend. That included a hair trim, shampoo, shave, and facial, and there was also a manicurist on Friday and Saturday. Sometimes when all of that was over, he would also hang around for a while swapping lies and signifying with Deke Whatley, the owner, or he would come back out and stand in front of Red’s Varsity Threads next door, talking sports with Red Gilmore.

You couldn’t miss him, standing with one leg dropped back like that, the toes of his highly glossed, elegantly narrow, and thin-soled shoes pointing inward, shoulders erect but with the left ever so slightly lower than the right and with his hat, which always looked brand new, and which he wore tilted toward his left brow, blocked long with the brim turned up all around in what I used to call the Birmingham/Kansas City poolroom homburg style.

Whatever he was wearing always went well with his barbershop-smooth ginger-brown skin and the way he handled himself. He was just about six feet even, solidly built but with a little bulge in the midsection that along with his smartly hand-tailored hand-finished suits and custom-made shirts and accessories made him look more like a road musician or gambler who might go hunting and fishing from time to time than like an athlete.

But as I found out early on, he had started out to be a prize fighter, another Jack Johnson, and heavyweight champion of the world. A lot of boys were going to be another Jack Johnson or another Joe Gans back in those days, and he made a pretty good start and he had kept it up when he was conscripted and sent to
camp. But when they shipped him overseas, he got a chance to see another part of the world and all of that had given him a lot of other possibilities to consider.

He had not really been old enough to be called up, but he looked more adult than he was at the time, and he had been putting his age up so that he could hang around the saloons and pool halls so he was drafted and he fought in the Vosges mountains and also in the Argonne forest, and he had had himself some fun over there, too. He had lied to go AWOL to get into Paris, but he and Wiley Peyton had made it there three times. He and Wiley Peyton had been in the same company from the very outset and by the time they reached the embarkation point of Newport News, Virginia, they were buddies, so they had gone on to do a lot of French towns together just as they had done their share of going over the top and through the barbwire together.

When he came back stateside, he had started running on the L & N as a Pullman porter and had also become a dining car headwaiter, and that was when he really began to pick up on how you made good money by providing first-class service. And then he went to Harlem during the boom in the 1920s and got a job in a big midtown hotel, and that’s when he decided what he wanted to do and started putting money aside and laying his plans.

Then when the big Depression struck at the end of the decade, he took what he had saved, along with all of the tricks of the trade that he had picked up from the railroad and New York by that time, and came on back down home and went into business for himself, starting with the Pit, which was just another old rundown roadside chicken shack when he made his downpayment on it.

S
he said, Hi there, Schoolboy, and I could have said not for very much longer. Because it was already the middle of that third January and I was less than five months away from being a senior, and then there would be the summer and I would be on my way to what comes after commencement. But I didn’t say that. I said, I don’t deny my name. I said, I don’t deny my name because going to school is still my game. And she had to smile and then she winked and said, I don’t deny my name either, Schoolboy, and sat on the next stool with her back to the bar.

That was how I met Hortense Hightower. I already knew who she was. Everybody present knew who she was because she was the main attraction in that wing of the Dolomite complex. She was the singer the five-piece combo was there to play behind, and she was also the dancer featured in the Friday and Saturday night floor shows, which also included a chorus line of six dancers who doubled as backup singers, a comedian named Gutbucket, and also a guest spot for a singer or instrumentalist.

All I actually knew about her at that time was how she sounded and the way she came across on stage and what a good-looking, svelte, nutmeg-brown woman she was. I had not yet found out anything at all about where she had grown up and where she had worked before. I knew that she had been in town for five or six years, but I hadn’t ever seen her in person until that last Christmas break when I finally went along with Marcus Bailey and Clifton Jackson, two fellow upperclassmen from Birmingham who made the rounds of all the outlying joints several times a month.

On all of my other trips out to the club before then, I had always been in such a big rush to get inside the main hall to get as close as possible to the musicians in the big-name bands that came through on tour that I never had paid any attention at all to the ongoing local entertainment in the after-hours room on your left as you came into the main lobby. After all, the name bands such as Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie, and others that you heard on the radio and on records (and also some of the territory bands like, say, the Sunset Royals) were something you scrimped and saved up for.

She sang some new and some standard pop songs. She sang the blues in all tempos, and she would also do a torch song on request. But you could tell that she got a special kick out of swinging love songs like “My Blue Heaven,” “I Can’t Believe That You’re in Love with Me,” and “Exactly Like You” off-time to a medium tempo, and as soon as you heard her shout one twelve-bar chorus with the combo signifying back at her over an ever-steady, omni-flexible, four/four, you knew exactly why they called her Boss Lady.

Not that she was ever actually bossy, not in the least. She didn’t have to be. Her authority was as casual as it was complete. All she had to do was come tripping on stage with the combo riffing “At Sundown,” and it was as if the storybook queen herself had just entered the throne room, and when she bowed and smiled and
waited for everything to settle down, it was (for me at any rate and perhaps on some level of feeling if not quite of consciousness for others, too) almost as if it were about to be Mother Goose tale time around the fireside once more.
Schoolboy that I was and to some extent still am, that was what came to mind at the very outset of the first show I saw her open and just as I was about to whisper to Marcus and Clayton that there were few things anywhere in the world better with some down-home bootleg ale than a good-looking brown-skinned woman with another blue-steel fairy tale, there were the drum rolls, the piano vamping, and her opening proclamation: Let’s drink some mash and talk some trash this evening
.

On stage she came across as a seasoned professional at ease and in charge, but sitting next to her at the bar you could see that she was probably not yet in her midthirties, if she was yet thirty, and you also realized that she had seemed taller on stage because she had long-looking, rubbery-nimble legs and she also moved like the dancer she also was. From that alone I guessed that she was size fourteen (36”-24”-38”), which in those days used to mean that along with everything else she was built for speed and maneuverability and also stacked for heavy duty and endurance. It was not until later on that I began saying that she was bass clef, although I had already picked that up from my brand-new roommate during the very first term of my freshman year.

You could also see how little stage makeup she needed for a room that size, and you could tell that the high sheen of her long black wavy hair, which she wore pulled back and clamped into a ponytail, did not come from a hot-comb treatment. All it took was a very small amount of a very light oil and a few routine strokes with a regular dressing-table comb-and-brush set.

I saw you listening, she said, and when she smiled at that range you got a quick flash of one gold filling that looked more like a cosmetic touch than a necessary correction because the rest of her teeth were without any visible flaws at all. And so were her
hands and fingers, which, like those of so many brown-skin women I remember over the years, were every bit as small and elegantly tapered as I have always imagined that those of storybook princesses, being of regal birth, were expected to be.

This is not your first time in here, she said, and I said, My third time, my second time on my own, but before she could say anything else somebody cut in to say something nice and give her a show-biz hug and a fake kiss and then there was a couple who did the same thing, and when they left she said, A lot of college boys come in here all the time, but you’re the first one I spotted sitting back here all by himself listening with your ear cocked like that, so I said, Who is that one and where did he come from?

So where do you come from, Schoolboy, she said, and when I told her, she said, I’ve been down through there more than once. So you grew up hearing Old Papa Gladstone and y’all must have more jook joints on the outskirts of Mobile than any other town in this state.

She herself was from Anniston by way of Bessemer, she said, and within the next week or so she also told me about how she had started out in the church choir in Anniston and had become a soloist by the time she was a teenager. She had finished high school in Bessemer and won a scholarship to ’Bama State, but she had dropped out after a year to join a road band barnstorming through the Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi territory. That was when she became a dancer because the bandleader wanted her to be an all-round entertainer as well as a singer. And for a while she had also played around with the idea of becoming a headliner with her own road show.

When it was time for her to get ready to go back on stage, she stood up and put her hand out and as I took it she said, A lot of college boys come in here all the time, but you’re the first one I spotted
listening like that, so I just decided to come over here and say something to you and find out what you’re putting down. And I said, I sure am glad you did, but what did you find out? and she said, A whole lot. I can usually tell a lot about people from what I see from up there, and it usually don’t take me but so many more bars to check them out close up.

Then as she stepped back to head for her dressing room, she gave me a playful one-finger push on the shoulder and said, You just checked out just fine, Schoolboy. I do believe that you just might do. Then, before I could get myself together to say something cute, she winked and waved and was gone and I couldn’t believe my luck.

S
o when I finally let myself take time out to think about her again that next morning, I said, Hello, Miss Hortense Hightower, whichever you are. Because I was also thinking about the one and only Miss Slick McGinnis, also known as Slick to some and as Old Slick to others, so-called not because she was so notoriously devious but from the time when she used to wear her hair bobbed and plastered flapper style. The fact that she always looked at you as if she knew more than she would ever tell and as if she always meant more than she ever actually said was really a coincidence after the fact.

She had been right there all along, although not all the time because she also traveled a lot. So much so that whenever you saw her it was as if she had either just recently come back down home from New York City and sometimes elsewhere as well. Or she was only a few days away from going back off again. Or so it seemed. But even so, everybody always used to think of her as being as
much of an ongoing part of whatever took place in Gasoline Point in those days as anybody else. And so did I and so did she.

Most of the time she used to be going back and forth between Gasoline Point and New York, but sometimes you also used to hear people talking about something she had brought back from Paris, France, or London, England, or Rome, Italy, or Madrid, Spain, where she, like Jack Johnson, had not only seen but had also met some of the world’s greatest bullfighters and had also heard a lot of great gypsy guitar players and had also seen a lot of flamenco dancing which I had also seen on the Spanish floats in the Mardi Gras parade which is why I already knew the difference between the sounds of castanets and the syncopated rifling of the old plantation-style bone-knockers and thigh-slappers you used to hear on street corners in those days.

At first I used to remember her as the pretty lady with the spangle-dangle ear pendants, diamond ring, and string of pearls, who sometimes also sported a cigarette holder that was said to be platinum and ivory. Then later the sound of whatever shoes she happened to be wearing as she came clip-clopping along the sidewalk always used to make me think of bunny-pink bedroom mules and boa-trimmed kimonos.

I always knew that she had been married for a while a few years ago, but didn’t have any children, and all anybody seemed to know about her ex-husband was that he was somebody who ran some kind of business up in New York, who refused to come down South even on a week’s vacation. So nobody in Gasoline Point, not even his in-laws, had ever seen him in the flesh, which probably was why nobody ever thought of him as an actual person anymore. He was only a shadowy part of a half-forgotten event that in itself was not very real to anybody in the first place. Anyway, by the time I was old enough to become just casually curious about who he was and what his line of work was, nobody could tell you or could remember what his name was (it was not McGinnis, to be sure). Or
could say if anybody else in Gasoline Point other than Miss Slick McGinnis and her family ever knew what it was.