Free Mozart and Leadbelly by Ernest J. Gaines Page A

we’ll hear ’bout it, yeah.”
    At San Francisco State and at Stanford, I was issued the hammer, the chisel, a grinding stone, and a few sharp knives to do the work. I got a part-time job at the post office in the evening; the rest of the time I was at the task.
    A woman I had met while I was at San Francisco State told me how lucky I was to have this huge block of granite (she didn’t know it was oak) to work on, when many others who wanted to work had nothing at all to work on. I thought, “No kidding”—only I didn’t say “kidding.” I thought, “You don’t know the half of it. It wasn’t my choice; it was theirs.” But I didn’t say this to the woman, because she was a nice woman, and she and I would be very close friends for thirty-one years, until she died in 1987. She told me in 1956 that she would help me in every way she could, that she would like to see the work when it was done. She said that during the time I worked on the block she would help me buy and select clothes, she would cook and bring me food—but she wouldn’t give me money for whiskey or for other women.
    I didn’t argue with the woman because she was very nice, and I accepted what she was kind enough to give me. And when I had chiseled off a chip from the block and carved it as well as I could, I would take it to her, and she would say yes, but not quite. And we would have small glasses of Stolichnaya vodka and orange juice, and we would sometimes go to a movie. She liked foreign films, so we would see one of the great Eisenstein films, or a Truffaut, or maybe one of Kurosawa’s films. Other times, we would go to a symphony, and always to a bookstore. There were great bookstores in North Beach and on Haight Street and Polk Street. Most of the bookstores had prints of famous paintings, and while she looked at the prints of Monet or Degas or Dufy, I would look at Modigliani and Van Gogh. Modigliani for the nudes, and Van Gogh for his country people. I like
The Potato Eaters
and the worker’s shoes and the people sowing wheat in the field. All this reminded me of home—Van Gogh did, not Modigliani.
    And after leaving the bookstore or seeing a great film, I would go back home to work on the block. And I would go back to the woman to show her what I had done, and she would say yes, but not quite yet. And sometimes I would get angry with her, and I would ask her what the hell she knew about it. But after returning home, I would go to a pay phone and call her and apologize because I knew that she only wanted me to do it right. So I would go back and work again. I don’t know the number of hours or days or weeks or even months that I would put into one carving—but I do know that the Chinese grocer knew I had bought many cans of pork and beans, because one day when I came into his store he said, “Ah, the writer, pok-n-bens.”
    “Did I say I wanted pork and beans?” I asked him. “Can’t you wait till I order?” He waited, eyeing me. Laughing inside, not out. “I want a can of Boston baked beans,” I said.
    “Same shelf,” he said with a nod.
    Then back to the block. Hours and days don’t matter. Ultimately I would take the little figure to the woman in Pacific Heights, one of San Francisco’s most exclusive sections, where we could look out of the window and see the bay and Angel Island and Alcatraz and part of the Golden Gate Bridge. The woman always had classical music on the big German radio, and she tried to show me the difference between Beethoven and Brahms. Beethoven’s Seventh and Ninth were her favorite of Beethoven’s symphonies; she liked Brahms’s Second and Fourth better than the First and Third. She tried to teach me the difference between the music of Ravel and that of Debussy. And she told me never to say Debussy, but to say De-be-see. She tried to get me to say Bach the way she did, but I told her it sounded as if I were trying to get phlegm from the roof of my mouth. “Have it your way, E,” she