One Mississippi (12 page)

“Isn’t this fun?” Tim said in my ear. “Did you see Red’s face?”

“Dudley’s face, you mean.”

He laughed. “God, don’t you love that?”

“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” I said.

“Aw, Eeyore, you’ve always got a bad feeling. Lighten up!”

Miss Prentice fled the stage. Hamm called for order, too late. Black kids were up out of their seats, yelling. Nervous white kids were streaming out of the auditorium. It was one kind of shock to see the star linebacker handcuffed and taken away, quite another to find that our black students — the well-behaved twenty percent of our school who stayed quiet and kept to the back of the auditorium, the classrooms, the bus — were not so quiet now. They were angry and loud. This was new.

That afternoon I rode over the river to find Mrs. Beecham in her yard, whacking a rug with a broomstick. She wore her hair bound up in a polka-dot kerchief, like Mammy in
Gone With the Wind
. “Musgrove! You’re late!”

“Assembly went long today. The police came in and arrested Red Martin.”

“Is that right.” Her stick went
smack!
on the rug.

“Yep. They put handcuffs on him.” I dragged the latest gallon of paint from under the steps.

Mrs. Beecham said, “Did they say what the charge is?”

“Assault with a deadly weapon. I don’t understand it. Are they saying he had a gun?”

“No. If you run over somebody, your car is considered a deadly weapon.”

I spilled a pool of pale green paint into the tray. “Also leaving the scene of an accident, and something else. I forget.”

“They wish it was an accident,” she said. “They’d like to cover it up. They didn’t want to arrest him. But there was one problem with that. Arnita remembers.”

My heart started banging against my ribs. “She does?”

“That’s why they came and got him today,” she said. “They said they couldn’t do anything without a witness — well, now they’ve got one. She remembers. Don’t sit there and tell me you can’t make a case against him! Hell, you had him in jail the night it happened — and let him go! But he plays football, his daddy’s some kind of a deal at the Baptist college. You watch — they make a show of arresting him, then a month or two from now they will very quietly drop the charges.”

“Did Arnita say he ran into her?”

“Ah, Musgrove.” She grinned. “How you coming along on that wall in back? You nearly done with that first coat?”

“First and only coat,” I said. “I’m just counting the days till I’m done. Do you know I have to spend my whole weekend cutting grass at our house so I can come over here all week and paint your house?”

“Good for you,” she said. “Keep your mind off the girls.”

The only girl on my mind was Arnita. I’d stretched out the painting job, taking longer than was really necessary on the eaves and trim, knowing she’d be home from the hospital any day. I balanced the paint tray up the ladder.

Mrs. Beecham said, “Red Martin tried to follow her home from Charlene’s. He was drunk. He was trying to get her to go with him. When she wouldn’t, he knocked her off her bike. And took off.”

“That’s what she says?”

“Why, Musgrove? Did you see different? I always thought you might have been there that night. For sure you know more than you’re telling.”

I flung down my paintbrush. “I’ve told you a million times, I was not there! I’m painting your stupid house for free — what else do you want?”

“Okay, watch out!” She harrumphed. “Ol’ Musgrove gettin’
pissed off
now. Watch out!”

“Well? Stop accusing me of stuff!” I picked twigs off the brush.

“Musgrove, I got good instincts,” she said. “Some folks are just not born to be liars. If you could see yourself. Your poor ears go just as red . . . it’s like the truth is just a burden weighing on you.”

“Why are you so hateful to me?” I said. “What the heck did I ever do to you?”

“Hateful, how?”

“Even to my mom — she went to all that trouble to make you a cake, and you threw it in the garbage!”

She peered at me. “Ahhh, you been carrying that? You could have just asked. That was a lemon cake, Musgrove. I’m deadly allergic to lemons. I swell up if I even touch one. I had to get it out of the house.”

I didn’t dignify this with an answer. I’d seen her drink plenty of lemonade. I hammered the lid back on the paint can. I didn’t need any of this. I would get on my bike and ride the hell out of here.

“You know, Musgrove, I think you are a good boy, I surely do. A hard worker too, especially when you’re scared. And you are scared. Every minute of the day.”

“No I’m not.”

“Something working on you,” she said. “You’re even scared of me.”

“Not scared. But you do make me mad.”

She made a face, me being mad. “How’s that?”

“You’re always testing me. Always.”

“I thought we might do a bit of digging and put in some flower beds,” she said. “Wouldn’t that look good, a whole bunch of zinnias going all the way around the house? Plenty of good sun for it. Zinnias like the sun.”

“Miz Beecham, I offered to do you one favor. You’re starting to take advantage of me.”

“Starting?” She laughed. “I been taking advantage for a while now. But you just keep showing up, don’t you? You surely do. What power I got over you? I’m just some old cullid woman, yassuh I jes’ works cleanin’ de house for de nice white folk like yo mama and daddy. My husband, he the janitor in yo white chillun school. Now how come is a white boy like you over here doing these favors for us?”

I thought it over. “I guess I like painting the house. Nobody ever asked me to do anything this big by myself.”

“What did I tell you? Stick with me, we’ll get you straightened out. You want some lemonade?”

“No thanks. I’m allergic to lemons.”

She grinned. “Too bad for you.”

Mom said how odd that I would do all this work for Mrs. Beecham, when at home I wouldn’t put a plate in the sink without being nagged for an hour. I reminded her the whole thing was her idea. If she didn’t want me mixed up with the Beechams she should never have taken me over there. “I don’t know how she does it,” I said, “but the second she starts ordering me around, I forget how to say no.”

“You never had any trouble with that word in my house,” said Mom. “Just explain to her you have other things to do. Twice now Daddy has come home and found the yard uncut when he specifically told you to cut it. I’m tired of being caught in the middle of you two. It was my idea to help these people out, but my goodness, there is a limit. If I have to call her, I will.”

“No. Don’t. I’ll tell her.”

Walking out of English the next day I found Lincoln Beecham waiting for me. I was used to seeing him in his blue jumpsuit, pushing a dust mop down the hall, or sitting in his janitor’s closet with the door open, listening to his radio. It was Mr. Beecham’s job to clean up after eight hundred kids. His face was solemn, his hair silvered from many years of this work. He was never home in the afternoons when I was painting his house. He always went straight from school to the hospital. “Young Musgrove.”

“Yes sir.”

“Understand you been doing the work at our place,” he said. “Like to thank you for that.” He looked uncomfortable saying that many words in a row.

“It’s okay, Mr. Beecham.”

“We bringing her home tomorrow. If you was to come around four, you might hep us take her out of the car. She ain’t walking all that good yet.”

“Sure. I can do that.”

“Wife said you might.” He nodded, and let me go.

7

D
ISORDERLY NOISE FLOODED
out of the band hall, drums rat-a-tat-tatting like machine guns, horns and saxes blatting, flutes shrilling, Jimmye Brashier honking away on her bassoon.

The band hall didn’t look magical, but it was the only place in school where actual magic was made. The first time I heard these wild jumbled noodling sounds pouring out the doors, I wanted to be a part of it. I was the Mighty Marching Titans’ mallet-instrument specialist, a talent I brought with me from Indiana. In concert band I played xylophone, vibraphone, bells, chimes. In the marching show at football halftime, I carried the glockenspiel, the lyre-shaped arrangement of chrome bars — the easiest instrument in the band, except for cymbals.

I didn’t care about playing an instrument. I just wanted to be in the band. If you weren’t jock-popular, which I never would be, band was the coolest thing to do in high school. While everyone else had to suffer in the classroom, you got to go outside and march around and make a big noise. You got to perform at all football games, home and away, which made for interesting bus rides on Friday nights in the fall.

The best part was that sometimes within the concrete-block walls of the band hall our noise came together into actual music, and left us all flushed with pleasure.

Bernie Waxman was probably the only Jew in Minor, except for his wife. To us his Jewishness made him exotic. He was the only teacher who let us call him by his last name without the “mister.” (I had found a few teachers at Minor who really knew their subjects, but none of them cared as much as Waxman.) Band was his obsession: he walked, drank, slept, ate, and breathed Band. He had a big head of curly black hair, dark eyes, big trumpet ears that scooped up every sound in the room. If a third-chair clarinet missed a note, Waxman heard it. He would wave us to a stop, chewing the tip of his baton while he figured out what was wrong. By this time in the band year, that baton was nibbled halfway to the quick.

The first chair in the flute section was still empty, in honor of Arnita.

Waxman charged out of his office tap-tapping a nervous rhythm in his palm, and stepped up on the carpeted box supporting his podium. “Okay, germs and germies, let’s go! Places, places. ‘King Cotton.’”
Whack!
His baton cracked against the rim of the music stand.

We were heading for the climax of the band year — our journey to Vicksburg in May for All-State Band Competition, which we referred to as Contest. Contest was a huge deal to Waxman, and by constant wheedling and rehearsing he had turned it into a huge deal for us. Band practice grew more intense by the day. We marched our marching show until we could have done it backward. We played our concert pieces dozens of times, refining them phrase by phrase. A jaunty Sousa march, the moody “Incantation and Dance” by John Barnes Chance, and “A Tribute to Stephen Foster” — we played them in our sleep, we heard them in our dreams.

The Sousa got off to a ragged start, and Waxman looked disappointed. “No, sloppy, sloppy, the brass — are you guys asleep back there? Wake up and try it again. Drummers, come right in, nice and crisp. Ready?” He counted off. He was quickly displeased by something in the reeds. “Band. In Vicksburg we can’t stop and start over. If we don’t have a nice crisp attack, we’re sunk. Do you want to bring home straight Twos again?”

Bad bands got Fours at Contest, and great bands got Ones. Year after year, the Mighty Titans had earned solid Twos in all four categories: performance, musicality, presentation, marching band. Only once in history had Minor brought home a One, for musicality, back in 1968. That certificate hung on the wall behind Waxman, to goad us on toward our most elusive goal: another One.

The closer we got to Contest, the more Waxman snapped at us. He was hearing only the mistakes. Everyone could play their parts blindfolded, but to blend them into a unified sound was harder than it looked. As the mallet-instrument specialist, I had exactly one moment of solo glory, one place where all you heard was me — a xylophone run in the Stephen Foster medley. I had practiced that run till my wrists ached.

Today I staggered in a beat late, and missed half the notes in the run.

Waxman rolled his eyes and waved the band to a halt. “Daniel Musgrove? Anybody home?”

I knocked the mallets against my head. “Sorry, Mr. Waxman.”

“You’ve only got that one run, but if you let us down, it’s like Jim missing every note on first trumpet. Pay attention, would you?”

Oh the ignominy! Waxman never had to stop the band to correct me. The mallet parts were so unimportant that he let me bang away back there as I pleased.

One day I was alone at the piano in the band hall, feeling out the melody to “Color My World” by Chicago, when Waxman came out of his office. “Musgrove, that’s pretty good. I was under the impression you didn’t have a musical bone in your body.”

“I’m just fooling around,” I said.

“Seriously, all this time I thought you had zero talent. I could have been teaching you a real instrument. Why didn’t you tell me you could play?”

I smiled. “I didn’t want to mess up a good thing.”

“Okay,” he said. “It’ll be our little secret.”

Now he backed the whole band up to measure 128, taking aim at my four-second gap. I lifted my arms and struck out blindly with my mallets, a blizzard of notes. The band hall echoed with the tinkling excellence of that run — sharp, sprightly, every note in place.

Waxman gave a nearly imperceptible nod and moved on to “Oh, Susannah.”

When he stopped to work on the trumpets, Debbie Frillinger leaned back from the row of clarinets with gossip. “They’re letting Red Martin come back to school for one week so he’ll be eligible to play football next year.”

“Oh, is he out of jail yet?” I tried to sound nonchalant. “I can’t keep up.”

“His parents paid ten thousand dollars to bail him out,” she said.

“I’m sure it was worth every penny.”

“He really should transfer to some other school,” Debbie said. “They’ll make it impossible for him to have a normal life here.”

“Who will?”

“The blacks. They’ve got it in for him now — well, you were at that assembly, you heard them. They’ll make his life miserable.”

“I hope so,” I said. “Just like he does me and Tim.”

“Daniel Musgrove!” Oh Jesus: Waxman glaring at me again! “Is this why you miss your one solo, cause you’re too busy flirting with the clarinets?”

I had no defense. I shrugged, guilty.

“You’re a junior, supposed to be an example of Pride in this outfit, and there you sit flapping your jaw. What is it, people? I can feel it — y’all are not here! Half of you are off in the clouds somewhere. I can’t have that in Vicksburg. I won’t have it in my band hall, you hear?”

“Sorry, Mr. Waxman.”

“Sorry doesn’t cut it. Back to 148. Flutes? I want to hear that daaaa, da-dee dum — let that sing out, you carry the melody here. Oboes, give it everything you’ve got on the rise. And Daniel, let me really hear that chime.”

“Way Down Upon the Swanee River” reached its pensive denouement. I lifted my felt hammer and struck the domes of the long gold tubes with all the art I could muster.

Something went wrong — not my fault! Somebody talking? In the brass section, somebody talking out loud. Waxman flung down his baton. “What is going on here?”

“I said, do you even know what this song says?” said Shanice James, one of the French horns. “Because I looked it up, Mr. Waxman. I looked up the words. I don’t think you ought to be making us play it. It’s insulting.”

Waxman gaped. “Shanice, what are you talking about?”

Shanice James was big and round as the bell of her horn, as round as her Afro and the rims of her horn-rimmed glasses. The whole horn section was black, including all three tuba players — something about the big brass appealed to the kids from East Minor. Shanice lifted up her sheet music. “Here’s what the words say — ‘All de world am sad and dreary, ebrywhere I roam. Oh, Darkies, how my heart grows weary . . .’”

“Shanice, this is an instrumental,” said Waxman. “We’re not using the words. And anyway the song is a hundred years old. What is the problem?”

“I just don’t think we ought to be playing a song about darkies,” said Shanice. “I’m an Afro-American. I am not a darkie. That’s all.”

“I ain’t a darkie either,” said Brian Fairchild on tuba. Every black member of the band muttered assent.

Waxman bristled. “Are you telling me you don’t want to play this
melody
because you don’t like the
lyrics?
”

“Well, yeah,” Shanice said. “That’s right. I don’t.”

“For gosh sakes,” said Waxman, “I picked this piece myself, and I’m Jewish.”

She crossed her arms. “So?”

“Are you trying to say that I, as a Jewish person, would intentionally pick music that I thought would offend a black person? Look, Stephen Foster was an old-time composer working in the tradition of minstrel music. He wrote beautiful melodies. You can’t just not play his tunes because you don’t happen to like the social conventions of his time.”

“Did he write any songs about Jews? We could play one of those.”

Shanice’s friends laughed, but she was dead serious.

Waxman said, “Look, Shanice, I’d love to debate you on this. You may even have a point. But Contest is two weeks from tomorrow. We don’t have time to put aside the Stephen Foster and learn some entirely new piece. You understand that, don’t you?”

She turned her nose up. “I still think it’s insulting.”

Waxman ran a hand through his unruly hair. “Look, it shows great initiative that you went to the trouble to look up the lyrics. And now let me apologize on behalf of Stephen Foster that he was so old-fashioned on the subject of race. But that doesn’t mean we can’t play his music ever again. Don’t you see the difference? The man is dead, he died a long time ago. His music lives on.”

“If you had some music Hitler wrote,” said Shanice, “would you play it?”

Waxman cracked an unexpected smile. “Depends if it was any good.”

His little joke saved the moment. Shanice had to be a good sport. Once again I had witnessed something new from the black students, this new style of interruption and confrontation. A willingness to argue, to talk back.

They seemed to be making new rules for themselves.

“Okay,” Waxman said. “We will stipulate that the lyrics are racist and reprehensible. Shall we pick it up from 148? Shanice, if you don’t want to play, just hum along.”

T
HE FAMILIAR ORANGE
taxi crept to a stop by the mailbox. It wasn’t really a taxi, just an old beat-up orange Plymouth driven by a man called Jimmy for the East Minor folks who needed a ride to the doctor, et cetera. He charged them a dollar each and loaded his car up with older folks. Today his passengers were the Beechams. Lincoln Beecham got out and hurried around the car.

“Hullo, Musgrove,” Mrs. Beecham said. “Look baby, your first visitor!”

Arnita smiled up at me from the backseat. She was even lovelier than I remembered, bright brown eyes, a luminous smile that lit her whole face. Her hair was cropped close to her head, like a boy’s. She wore her wire-rimmed glasses, and a plaid lumberjack shirt over pink flannel pajamas. “Hello,” she said. “Who are you?”

“I’m Daniel. We’re in the band together, remember?”

Her eyes flickered past me. “Is this your house?”

“No, it’s your house.”

“Mr. Musgrove,” said Lincoln Beecham, “if you’ll take that arm, we’ll just stand her up and see can she walk to the house. You can walk that far, can’t you, Arnita?” We stood her on her feet. “Don’t let her drop.”

Arnita swayed in place, regarding the house with a dreamy smile. “Why are we here? I’d rather keep riding around.”

“Now, now,” said her father.

“Arnita? Stand up and walk now,” said Mrs. Beecham. “Like at the hospital. Come on, baby.” She led the way to the door, bearing a suitcase and three paper sacks.

“If you could remind me where it is we’re going?” Arnita said.

“Home,” Mrs. Beecham said. “This is our home.”

“Are you sure? This really doesn’t ring a bell.”

“Maybe because I painted it,” I offered. “See how it’s green now, remember it used to be yellow? And those flower beds, those are all new.”

She shook her head. “This is not my house. I’ve never been here before.”

“Bring her on up the steps.” Mrs. Beecham opened the door. “Baby, you’re gonna have to take my word on it. This is home. We’re home.”

We eased her over the threshold. In all my time working around the place, I’d never been invited inside the house. White walls and pine furniture, a rich smell of food and old rugs, pictures of ancestors and babies and Jesus and Martin Luther King on the walls.

“Tell me your name again?” Arnita’s breath smelled like strawberry candy.

“Daniel. Daniel Musgrove.”

“I know you told me, but I forgot.”

“That’s all right.”

“Honey, where you want to be?” said Lincoln Beecham. “You want to sit by the TV?”

“Are you sure this is the right house?” said Arnita. “You’d think something about it would look familiar.”

“We’ll put her right here in this chair, Mr. Musgrove.” Beecham guided her with his large hands.

“It’s so good to be out of that hospital.” Arnita drew her legs up under her, and gave me that glorious Prom Queen smile. “Maybe you can explain it to me, Daniel. I don’t quite understand why these people have brought me here.”

Mrs. Beecham was fishing around in one of the sacks. “Arnita, we’re all home now, I’m your mama and that’s Daddy and we’re home.”

“What’s that?” Lincoln Beecham turned, cupping a hand at his ear.

“Talking to Arnita,” his wife said loudly.

“Well,” Arnita said, “I guess I should thank you for everything you’ve done.”

“You’re just confused,” Mrs. Beecham said. “It’s your injury. The doctor says it’s getting better every day.”

Arnita clutched my arm. “Do you know these people? I keep telling them I’ve never seen them before, but they don’t believe me. They keep insisting they’re my parents. Don’t you think that’s kind of ridiculous?”