Free High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney Page A

more than one storekeeper had tried to cheat him.
    We stopped at Buzzy’s corner. As usual, no one was on the street. Nevertheless, Uncle Castor looked over his shoulder, the way boys at school checked behind them in the bathroom before they invited a select few into the stall to view a stolen Playboy. He kept a small tin of snuff in his pocket, just for show, he admitted. Uncle Castor faked a sneeze and said that Grandfather never did have good sense.
    Across Capitol Avenue the girl no one played with because her father was said to be a numbers runner galloped around her yard, which had been rubbed down by the passage of children from school. She inserted hairpieces, “falls,” into her own nest, neighed, and tried to watch the synthetic tails fly behind her. Uncle Castor said that the masters of Sweetwater Creek and Crescent Plantation weren’t interested in female slaves. I waited. Where there is most light, the shades are deepest. He said that his grandfather and probably his grandfather’s father were dark because the men whose names sounded like those of Booth Tarkington characters had not been as interested in the female slaves as they had been in the males.
    Grandfather always said that Uncle Castor had a mean tongue, that he did a pretty good job on the dead, but he never got the living right. Uncle Castor was glad that Grandfather hadn’t found out he was in town. He said his brother was capable of dropping everything to come up and put rubber bands on his sleeves just because he himself had to wear them. He said Grandfather’s favorite meal was Drowned Scout.
     
     
    What I didn’t know about Uncle Castor he would one day put into a book. Born in 1905, he once brought home a bandleader who wanted to hire the precocious child as a novelty act for a tour of seaboard cities. One night he slipped out to keep an appointment playing for a social club. He was paid $9.60 in the traditional quarters, nickels, and dimes. The jingling in his pockets betrayed him.
    Uncle Castor never entertained any doubt that he was above the pentatonic eccentricities of the Tuskegee Institute Singers. He dreamed of going to the Royal Academy, like the black composer Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Instead, he was sent for safekeeping to Morehouse’s valiant, no-fuss preparatory school, which did its best to cram into black students what they hadn’t been offered in the schools they’d survived. Uncle Castor won his seat on the Louisiana Lackawanna, his ticket out of Georgia, by invoking the doctrine of the Talented Tenth, reminding his father that Booker T. Washington had entrusted his only daughter to the Hochschule in Berlin.
    As a result of his entrance examinations at the New England Conservatory, Uncle Castor was placed in the intermediate division. He who is perfect shall be a master. Dexterity passages and daily devotions: a book on each shoulder, a half-dollar piece on the back of each hand as he played through major and minor scales up to a certain metronomic speed for at least four octaves. The exercise was repeated with a quarter on each hand, then nickels, then dimes. If the coins fell, he had to start over.
    Students did not speak to each other without an introduction. They drank coffee side by side without an incline of the head. The six or seven other black students looked through him, but behind his back called him a “high hat” because his instructors thought well of him. Students were not required to wear formal dress at the opera and he sat alone with his half-price ticket in
the Metropolitan Theater, hoping that he had not overreached himself.
    The conservatory said that he was very good and that it was unfortunate a black boy could not hope for a concert career. He thought of signing up with the Pullman porters and running on the road, shipping out with the Twentieth-Century Limited on a dead run, but he discovered the blue notes of a fast set, the children of Ham and Japheth elbow to elbow over giggle water.