The Spyglass Tree Read online

  Praise for

  Albert Murray’s

  The Spyglass Tree

  “Is Albert Murray America’s best black writer? There is certainly a case to be made for it, and his second novel, The Spyglass Tree, only makes the case stronger.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “[Murray] writes a rich, natural, vernacular English, mixing in learned allusions and complex time sequences with ease.… His writing is scored carefully to the occasion.… With his perfect assurance and his engaging style, Murray … has found a way to lift the spirit soberly.”

  —New Republic

  “[Murray] has honed a prose style that carries the tender, lyrical and big-beat cadences of down-home swing. You have to use your ears as much as your eyes to read him.”

  —New York Newsday

  “[A] dazzling novel of remembrance … [Murray] deftly brings the period and his characters alive as full, complex and yearning beings.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “In The Spyglass Tree … Albert Murray shapes his prose rhythmically and melodically [to] produce the sweet sad song of childhood remembered … without sentimentality and without anger.”

  —Miami Herald

  Albert Murray

  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.

  ALSO BY Albert Murray

  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

  Copyright © 1991 by Albert Murray

  All rights reserved under International and

  Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in

  the United States by Vintage Books, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York, and

  simultaneously in Canada by Random House of

  Canada Limited, Toronto. Originally published in

  hardcover by Pantheon Books, a division of

  Random House, Inc., New York, in 1991.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Murray, Albert.

  The spyglass tree/Albert Murray.

  p. cm.

  Originally published: New York: Pantheon Books, 1991.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82863-7

  I. Title.

  [PS3563·U76S69 1992]

  813′·54—dc20 92-50077

  v3.1

  For Mozelle and Michele

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Bench Marks

  Chapter I

  Chapter II

  Chapter III

  Chapter IV

  Chapter V

  Chapter VI

  Chapter VII

  Chapter VIII

  Chapter IX

  Chapter X

  Chapter XI

  Chapter XII

  The Briarpatch

  Chapter XIII

  Chapter XIV

  Chapter XV

  Chapter XVI

  Chapter XVII

  Chapter XVIII

  Chapter XIX

  Chapter XX

  Chapter XXI

  Chapter XXII

  Chapter XXIII

  Chapter XXIV

  Chapter XXV

  Chapter XXVI

  Bench

  Marks

  I

  That 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.

  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.

  II

  You 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 t
he 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.