Such Sweet Thunder (62 page)

Clapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclapclap!

Rrrrrrrrring!

The assembly broke up into patterns of light and movement through which he ran, frantic with the fear that he could not fully embrace the total volume of the moment.

“Amerigo Jones?” A little old lady with off-white purple skin, good gray hair coiled into a little tower held in place with combs, looked at him expectantly as he entered the office. He stood before the desk in front of the sun-filled window.

Like the Queen! in her old-fashioned navy-blue dress with lace trimming around the neck and sleeves, and the long golden chain hanging from her neck and a brooch at her throat.

“Amerigo Jones?” the lady was asking. She drew her leg toward her chest and smiled at him.

“Yes’m … Yes.”

“Won’t you sit down?”

He sat down.

“I’m Miss Birdie, the student counselor. It’s my job to decide what courses you should take. Do you intend to go to college?”

“Eh — yes’m. I’d-I would like to go. Yes.”

“Do you think your parents will be able to send you?”

“Eh.”

“What is your father’s profession?” She took up her pen and prepared to write upon the white card in front of her.

“He’s —”

The Father of the Country. But not because …

“A maintainance man — at a hotel.”

“Does your mother work?”

“Yes’m. She works — is employed — at — at a hotel — an apartment hotel, as a head maid.”

“I see.…” She tapped the point of her pen gently against the edge of the large green ink blotter that partially covered her desk. “Amerigo, don’t you think it would perhaps be wiser to learn a trade? And prepare yourself for some practical profession, in case you might not be able to go to college?”

Cast down thy
Booker T. began, but before he could get it out the angry voice of Frederick Douglass had overpowered his senses with the word
Freedom!
and he blurted out:

“No’m! I’m gonna go to-to
college!
”

“In that case, are you interested in the sciences or the humanities?”

“Eh.”

“I mean, would you like to become a doctor, or a chemist, a mathematician, or would you like to teach, or perhaps be a lawyer or a social worker or something like that?”

He dropped his eyes and studied the floor for a moment, trying to take in the myriad possibilities that flashed and popped in his mind like the movie reel on the silver screen just before it got dark and the pictures filled his eyes: Ten! Eleven! Twelve! Thirteen!
Boom!

“— or something like that?” her voice was saying.

“I don’t know yet.…”

“You have time, son.”

She’s saying something else.

“I suggest the general college preparatory course for now — and then we’ll see how you do.”

Rrrrrrrring!

The red room divided itself into long rows of rooms. Within each room a woman, lying upon a white bed at the foot of which he stood, trembling:

Rrrrrrrrring!

They drew their legs toward their chests and articulated the question — which resounded upon the air like the myriad-timbred voice of a Great Host:

What do you want to be when you get to be a man?

The word
MAN
boomed in his ears with a deafening sound. It overwhelmed his senses and set his body to trembling so violently that he
could hardly contain himself. And he ran, desperately, frantically, from room to room, confronting the upturned faces whose smiling lips intoned the pregnant question:

English?

— A soft dark-eyed woman with a deep autumnal smile who spoke of the beauty of the literary idiom “…  over the sea and over the sea and over the sea to France and England.”

Dramatics?

Ruth Regal and Lillie Bryant and he among unknown heads bent toward the black soft-spoken iron-gray-headed little man with the face of a lovable bulldog: Mr. Larson, founder of the Larson Players who gave plays at Lincoln Hall where Principal Powell played in
The Emperor Jones
by Eugene O’Neill. Like Ira Eldridge! Like I’m gonna-going to be … do-when … if I wanna-wish to. After the first two years, we’ll see.

Algebra?

Pretty little Miss Dark-brown Thin-lipped Big-eyed Forty-year-old Algebra, taxing the star-crossed imagination with the enigma of the infernal X.

That means Hell, son.

General Science?

Tall, thin-lipped, off-white, smiling and laughing and joking, pumping the little hand generator that made the lightbulb light up like the lightbulbs in the alley … His son’s a freshman, too. Smart. Off-white. Plays tennis. Him and-He and Cosima!-in-the-paper.

Reserve Officer’s Training Corps?

“T-a-l-l and s-t-r-a-i-g-h-t!” A nut-brown, strong-lipped, plainnosed, sharp-eyed, straight-talking, curly-headed man. The general! Sergeant Shores of the regular army: “Tramp! tramp! tramp!” I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice —
for all!
”

Physiology?

Miss! — Tall, dark, healthy and robust, but fine, dignified, well poised upon the square heels of low-quartered shoes, enveloped by an aura of perceptible sadness that intensified her forty-three-year-old explanations of the circulation of the blood and the functions and interactions of the eye, the ear and the heart: Preachers! She’s been waitin’ on that cat to marry’er for
forty
years — an’ ain’ nothin’ happened yet!

Rrrrrrrring!

Rrrrrrring!

Suddenly the door swung open.

“Whatttt do
you
want?”

He stood gaping at a little man not much taller than he, who looked more like a boy than a man, with a clean hairless face and closely cut hair and a slightly humpbacked nose. His lips were fleshy and there was a nervous twitch in his right eye. A trace of mischievousness in his smile gave the lie to the aggressive attitude suggested by his tenacious grip on the door handle.

He looks sort a like a chipmunk … or a rabbit!

“Whatttt do
you
want?” he was saying.

“I-I-I want to join the choir. They tol’-d teold me at the office to come, but I-I couldn’t find it.”

“Caun’t you
read!
What’s your name?”

“Jones.”

“
What
Jones!”

“Amerigo Jones!”

He began to laugh in an exaggerated manner, his large boyish teeth flashing, his nervous but sturdy little frame trembling beneath his eggwhite shirt, which was too large.

He’s Mr. Rogan, he thought admiringly. He got a scholarship to the university. The youngest teacher on the faculty.

“A —
merigo
Jones!” Mr. Rogan cried, tugging comically at his oversized pants. The belt had been drawn to the last notch, but they still gathered around his flea-sized waist like a sack, sagging in front, while the cuffs stacked in several folds over the insteps of his oversized shoes.

“Ladies and gentlemen!” he exclaimed to the members of the class. “This fine-looking young man —
who has interrupted our rehearsal
by
snooping
outside the door! — is Mister
A-merigo
Jones! And I
know
he sings! Because with a name like
thattt — and
being late,
too
, he’d
better
sing! SING!”

Boom!

— In a flash Mr. Rogan had sprung to the piano, a loud chord resounded from the keyboard.

“…  Sing!…”

The pupils only smiled at first, but now their smiles deepened, laughter bubbled from every throat. Amerigo’s mouth was standing wide open, but no sound escaped. His ears filled to overflowing with
the peals of laughter that animated all the faces with the bared teeth and sparkling eyes, faces that were mostly new.

“That’s a c-chord, Mister Jones!” Mr. Rogan screeched. “Sing: ah”

“Ah …”

“Ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — aaaaaaaaah!”

“Ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — ah — aaaaaaaaaah!”

“Sit — ohav theah,” said Mr. Rogan, looking down his nose at him, “with the tenors.”

He took his seat with the tenors.

With the second tenors, he reflected with a pang of regret, consoling himself, however, with the thought that Paul Robeson sang baritone. But tenor’s the highest.

He looked around at the new faces except for Carrol T., who was sitting back with the baritones and Ruth Brashears and Lillie Bryant who sat with the altos and little Clista Jones with the sopranos, the tenors and basses were brand-new.…

He watched Mr. Rogan, his rimless glasses mirroring fragments of the windows and the globular light overhead, now banging away at the piano, now waving his arms frantically, as they, the choir, he too, strained to produce the high notes and the quick that rippled from the tips of his fingers and flickered from the pupils of his eyes and quivered upon his lips, which made him smile or frown, or fold a phrase gently within the palms of his fine hands and cuddle it, as though it were a bird, and suddenly release it, send it flying, soaring through the air, beyond the southern windows!

“Ohhhhh — my good Lo-ord!” shouted the first tenors, and his mouth flew open with wondrous admiration.

That’s Roscoe Howard! he thought, remembering the enthusiastic sighs of the girls the first time he had heard the choir sing.

A tall, smooth black young man from Texas, like the reverend, with wavy hair and feathery eyelashes, like Dad’s, his lips quivering beneath his thin mustache and regular nose, trembling with the vibrations of the sad sound suspended above the sustaining hum of the choir, which now replied:

“Show me the waaaaaay! to entah the charriot — an travel along!”

“Gonna serve my Lord while I have breath!” the sopranos declared.

Earline! A name he had come to know with a nervous sensation of pleasure and regret, adoring the shy quivering dimpled voice that made her bosom heave and her eyes shine and her fingers fidget with the note she was trying to pass to Roscoe.

“Wait!” Mr. Rogan shouted. “Miss Whisonant! Is this a choir rehersal or a
crap game?
”

“I don’t know, Mr. Rogan,” she answered in a mincing voice.

“It is
nottt
a crap game, Miss Whisonant! NOR is it an English composition class — Now
pass
that damned note to Roscoe — or put it in your pocket, but in GOD’S NAME STOP TWISTING IT!”

Earline blushed amid the gale of laughter that immediately swept through the room.

She loves Roscoe, Amerigo thought, sorry, infinitely sorry, that he could not sing first tenor.

“Now take it from where we left off!” Mr. Rogan was saying.

“Ohhhh — my good Lo-rd!”

“Show me the waaaaaay!” This time the basses answered.

Cecil Jefferson. His regular black face with the playful mischievous eyes made him think of Turner’s eyes when he said: “Give ’um the claps, men!”

“Show me the waaaaay!” the basses were singing, and as they held the note, Cecil’s bottom jaw extended, dropped, like the jaw of a great steam shovel, as though the low note were rolling out of his mouth, up from the bottom of the great river.

He loves Edna. Alto. The word
love
detached itself from the words around it, separating into sonorous notes that tripped up and down the scales of the song — now inflaming the tenors, now the sopranos, now descending to the deep shades where the solemn basses pined for the altos.

“Gonna serve my Lord while I have brea-eth!” the baritones declared, and he observed that Sidney was a baritone and that they sit behind the altos. He’s gonna get a scholarship and be a great singer! He loves Willa, second soprano.

“So I can see my Je-sus aaaaa-fter de — ath!” Virgil. He had long eyelashes like his sister, Ruth. First tenor real-verreh high! But not like Roscoe. Loves Margret Raves who isn’t in the choir. Off-white, pretty bosom, and a gap between her front teeth like the Wife of Bath. But she doesn’t love him.

The notes arranged themselves into a minor chord, as his affections vacillated between Edna who was Jeff’s and Earline who was Roscoe’s and Willa who was Sidney’s and Margret who wasn’t Virgil’s. They were all older than he and would graduate next year and go to college. A familiar feeling of dread gathered around the thought of next year when they would go away, when the singers of the song would go away, when the notes would receive their diplomas and go off to college.

I hope it never changes!
said a voice from the shadowy reaches of the past, as he sang his way through the days and weeks, searching for the four little notes through the medium of which his energetic second tenor might send the sad sound soaring through the air to engulf the burning question.

“Boy!” Viola declared, noticing the urgency with which he stuffed a biscuit into his mouth. “You gonna
kill
yourself if you keep on goin’ like you goin’!”

“Gotta go to the choir rehearsal!”

“Rutherford, talk to your son!”

“Stop crammin’ that food in your mouth like your momma tell you!”

“He’s runnin’ from mornin’ till night!” Viola declared. “Don’
never
stay home no more. Singin’ in that choir, an’ runnin’ out to Roscoe’s an’ Earline’s an’ ’em’s all the time! I don’ see how he has time to
study!
Comes home every evenin’
loaded down
with books an’ don’
neeeeever
open ’um!”

“That little joker sure likes to carry them books!” Rutherford said: “Hey! hey! A intel
lect
ual! Well, sonny, before you git out a here
tanight
, I want to see your homework!”

“Aw Dad! I did it! Eny-anyway, all I had to do was mostly readin’ — a reading assignment.”

“Zaaaaaaaawlways got a excuse! Well, we’ll see what you been doin’ when your grade card comes. Singin’
all
the time! Better be tryin’ to git somethin’ in your head. It’s a cinch you can’t sing you way through college, that is, if you git in at all!”

IF?

“Anyway,” Rutherford was saying, “what you doin’ out to Edna’s house
all
the time!
I
thought
she
was supposed to be
Jeff’s
girl!”