The Spyglass Tree (2 page)

Whenever it was that I first heard about the Underground Railroad, by the time I had met Little Buddy Marshall at the pump shed the day after he and his family moved into the shotgun house diagonally across the street from Aunt Callie the Cat, it was as if I had been calling myself Scooter all of my life. In fact, I still can’t remember ever calling myself anything else and I also said, That’s what I’m supposed to be able to do, and he said, Hey you too, hey me too, man, you want to let’s be good
old buddies? And I said, Hey that’s all right with me, man. So he said, I live right over there. So you want to come over to my house and I’ll get my goddamn mitt and I also got a mask and a breast protector because I got to be a badass catcher, man, and I bat right-handed or left-handed, don’t make no difference to me. And I told him I was supposed to be a big-league pitcher one of these days and that I got a regulation-size Spaulding glove that last Christmas.

He said, Hey call me Lebo, and before very long I also began calling him Skebo and then we began calling each other Skebootie because that was our way of saying that we were each other’s buddies and that we were both bred and born in the briar patch. Which was also our stamping ground. Hey, shit, I reckon, man, he said. Hey, shit, I goddamn reckon.

Y
ou couldn’t see the clock tower from your window but you knew it was on the women’s dormitory across the mall on the other side of the dining hall and you also knew that the mall, which was also known as the lawn, was where the band pavilion was, and when you walked up the wide brick steps and across the main avenue to the white columns of the music school and stood looking back that way there were two other women’s dormitories beyond the trees at the opposite end, and the main entrance to the dining hall was out to your right facing the clock tower, which was now out to your left.

The only part of the mall you could see from your window was the dome of the dining hall above the cluster of evergreens at the other end of the long four-story academic building that also completely blocked your view of the administration center and that part of the main campus concourse so that you couldn’t even see the flagpole in front of the post office, which you knew was only one block away.

What you saw directly across the quadrangle was the corner of the near end of the academic building where the delivery trucks turned off for the service entrance to the dining hall, the campus laundry, and the power plant. You couldn’t see any part of the laundry but you knew that the power plant was down the steep hill to your right because you could see the smokestack above the pine tops on the other side of the sophomore dormitory.

The water tank that is probably still the first campus landmark on the horizon after you turn off U.S. Highway 80 at the city marker on your way in from Montgomery and points north or south was all the way back to the left of your window and out of sight between the new science building where most of the academic class sessions were held at that time and the new gymnasium, which was also where dances were held and where concerts and plays were presented and movies were shown.

Back in those days the third floor of that dormitory was known as the Attic because the top half of the outside wall of every room slanted inward with the pitch of the rafters and also that was where the special freshmen students assigned to the upper end of the campus were quartered. But I liked everything about it as soon as I opened the door and saw that next to the window there was a door with a fire-escape landing outside.

As soon as my roommate came in, not more than fifteen minutes later, I liked him too. He was about two inches taller than I was and about ten pounds or so heavier. We had almost the same shade of brown skin, but his hair was coarse grain, almost straight, and almost glossy mat, and mine was soft, with a texture somewhat like moss and a sheen somewhat like steel wool.

He was wearing a tan corduroy sports jacket with khaki slacks and saddle oxfords and argyle socks, and he had opened the collar of his buttoned-down tattersall shirt, but he still had on his navy blue knitted tie. He also had a cloak-and-dagger trenchcoat slung over his shoulders and a tennis racquet tucked under his left arm.

I said, Hi, and he put down his overnight bag and Hartman two-suiter, checking out the room in one ever-so-casual glance, and as we slapped palms Satchmo Armstrong style, he said his last name out of the corner of his mouth like a movie gangster. Then looking at me sidewise but with a conspiratorial twinkle he tucked in his chin like a musical comedy cadet and made a break as if to click his heels and added his first name and middle initial.

Then he said, Geronimo, which I guessed was a nickname meaning now you see me now you don’t because whether you played cowboys and Indians or went to the Saturday shoot’em-ups, Geronimo was the chief who was forever escaping again (never mind that he finally ended up on the reservation—in his heyday he was one more badass Indian). Then it crossed my mind that the texture of his hair might mean that his family was part Indian, but I didn’t say anything about that.

I said my last name, first name, and middle initial and we touched palms again but instead of my nickname I said Mobile,
seeing Bienville Square once more as you used to see the wrought-iron park benches and the splashing fountain and the tame squirrels when you stood waiting for the streetcar at the corner of Dauphine and St. Joseph with the Van Antwerp building against the sky and the waterfront only two blocks away
.

I also said Mobile County Training School,
seeing Blue Poplar Ridge again with the sky stretching away northward beyond the Chickasabogue and the flagpole above the flower circle and playground where the school bell scaffold used to be when I was in the primary grades
, and suddenly I felt a pang of nostalgia in spite of myself because I wouldn’t be going home for the Christmas holidays. I couldn’t afford the bus fare. Nor did I expect to be able to afford it for a visit next summer.

He said Chicago and named his high school and then he said that he had come to take courses in architecture and the building trades and that he intended to sneak in as many courses in history
and literature as he could choose as electives or would get permission to audit. I said that I was there on a liberal arts scholarship grant but that I hadn’t decided on my major and minor subjects yet because I still didn’t know what I wanted to do with myself.

He pulled off his jacket and tie and on the way back downstairs to get his steamer trunk I told him that I was there by way of the Early Bird program, and that was when he began telling me about his great uncle (his mother’s father’s brother) called Old Sarge by some but who sometimes referred to himself in the third person as the Old Trooper and so now was widely known as Old Troop and sometimes addressed as Troop and as Trooper.

The Old Trooper was now in the business of backing entertainers and promoting prizefights but he would always also be one of the legendary Buffalo Soldiers from the old Tenth Cavalry Regiment with an endless repertory of tall tales and historical anecdotes and footnotes about the wild west in the days of Cochise and Geronimo and the Chiricahua Apaches. He had mustered out after the Spanish-American War, and at one time he had managed a cabaret for Jack Johnson and for a while he had also been part owner of a showcase theater on the T.O.B.A. (Theater Owners’ Book Association, a.k.a. Tough On Black Asses) circuit and he had also underwritten baseball teams from time to time. One of the prizefighters he and two associates, one in Chicago and the other in Detroit, were backing at the moment was a very promising young heavyweight that I knew the
Pittsburgh Courier
and the
Chicago Defender
were already predicting would become a Jack Johnson and a Joe Gans all rolled into one.

On the way back from the dining hall that first Thursday night I found out that my roommate’s family, including the Old Trooper, was really from Fort Deposit in Lowndes County, which was only about seventy-five miles away. As it turned out, it was the Old
Trooper who had financed my roommate’s family’s move north, where he finally settled in Chicago when my roommate was four years old.

Back inside the room again he stood looking around, and then he sat at his desk humming and whistling “Sleepy Time Down South” and “(Up a) Lazy River” and opened his lettering and sketch kits. Then he turned and said, How about this for a start and held up a card that was to be our personalized door plaque which he called our reversible escutcheon, giving me that sidewise glance with the movie gangster, conspiratorial twinkle again.

He had printed “Atelier 359” on both sides. But on one he had lettered
CAUTION
in red ink and in all capitals and then “work-in-progress” in lowercase, and beneath that there was a black-ink drawing of a hooded monk near the column of a cloister above a quill and a T square crossed over a Leyden jar. On the other side the word in all capitals was
WELCOME
and the lowercase phrase was “mischief afoot” and the drawing was of a satyr wearing a top hat playing a trumpet instead of Pan’s pipes while cavorting on a keyboard that had a stem glass on his left and a cocktail shaker on his right.

I said, Hey, solid, Gates, and he looked around the room again and said, Not a bad pad, not great but okay for what we came to do, once we fix it up; and he started fixing it up as soon as he finished registration that next afternoon.

In those days there was an eleven o’clock curfew, and lights were supposed to be out at twelve, but that first night we went on talking in the dark until the wee hours, and that was when I found out that it was the Old Trooper who had decided to send him south for his first two years of college to get his bearings. Then he could transfer to any Ivy League or Big Ten university that he was eligible for. Or he could stay on in Alabama and get his bachelor’s degree and then still go to the northern university of his choice for graduate studies.

That was also when he told me about how the Old Trooper had taken him around in the limousine to shop for his freshman wardrobe in the college department of the top men’s stores in Chicago and when I told him that my Gladstone bag was my graduation gift from Miss Slick McGinnis in New York and that my cowhide looseleaf all-purpose notebook was from Miss Lexine Metcalf and my Elgin wristwatch was from Mister B. Franklin Fisher himself, I couldn’t see him in the dark but I knew he was giving me that sidewise look again because what he said was, Heh, heh, haay, heh, heh, haay, and then I also guessed that he had turned his conspiratorial twinkle into a mock penny-dreadful chuckle because then he added, You too, roommate, you too, you too.

M
iss Lexine Metcalf never did actually say what you were supposed to become or were on your way to becoming or even had already become another one of the very special bright-eyed little boys she was always on the lookout for but had found so precious few of over the years.

She herself didn’t have to tell you anything because when the time came there were always plenty of others who had been doing so for her all along. All she had to do was show any special curiosity about you, and you were on the spot, and as soon as they felt that they had seen enough to tell that you were going to be the next one at long last, they began pointing and signifying as if it were all a classroom version of the old playground game in which you had been tagged as the one who was to be It.

Everybody knew that she always made it her very special personal business to know what the new crop of first-termers looked like on the very day school reopened each September. Then, some weeks before Maypole Day during your second-grade
year, the speculation would begin about how well who would do next year when you finally made it to Miss Lexine Metcalf and her shawl of many colors and her magic blackboard pointers.

But before your classroom was the one with the globe stand and map rack and bulletin-board peoples of many lands and your front-row seat on the aisle next to the planting-box windows, there was first Miss Rowena Dobbs Singleton and second Miss Thelma Caldwell.

When Miss Tee took me through the double gate with the brick pillars and into the school yard that first Monday morning and we came on by the flagpole and the main building to the beginner’s area, Miss Rowena Dobbs Singleton was the one who was there, because that was the room where everybody started, and she collected the slip that Miss Tee and Mama had filled out about me, and she said my last name and then my first name, and then my last name again.

Then you had to stand in line along the wall with all the other boys until she called your name again and showed you the table where your seat was and said, Boys and girls, this is the primer grade. This is the beginners classroom and I am the primer teacher and my name is Miss Singleton, Miss Singleton, repeat after me, Miss Singleton, again, Miss Singleton. Very good, very good, and now quiet, boys and girls, and she picked up her ruler and hand bell and said, Children, children, children, pay attention. Boys and girls who talk in class after the bell sounds will have to hold out their hand for lashes as punishment. Then she said, Answer present to your name, eyes forward, back straight like this. That is good posture. When you slump and slouch like a grumpy grouch, that is bad posture.

Miss Rowena Dobbs Singleton was also the first one to say,
Repeat after me, this is the way we wash our hands, wash our hands, wash our hands, this is the way we wash our hands so early every morning. This is the way we brush our teeth, brush our teeth, brush our teeth, this is the
way we brush our teeth so early every morning. This is the way we brush our hair. This is the way we shine our shoes. This is the way we drink our milk. This is the way we raise our hands to recite and ask, repeat after me. May I not can I, may I, repeat, may I please be excused, Miss Singleton. And this is the way we stand and place our right hand over our heart when we say, repeat, I pledge allegiance to the flag and to the republic for which it stands one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all
.