Free The Spyglass Tree by Albert Murray Page A

spite, or slander) and for all the same old stuff about taking advantage of opportunities other people either never had or had and didn’t take, there was still the fact that whatever they said was something they sincerely believed they were obliged to say so perhaps the main point of it all was to remind you of precisely that which everybody knew you were supposed to be mindful of already.
    Anyway, it was not until she said what she said while I was getting dressed that third time that I realized that she was really concerned about something that had much more to do with her own personal situation in particular than with me on general principle.
    She had asked me to tell her some more about growing up on the outskirts of Mobile, and when I came to the part about school and told her about how a lot of students used to come all the way out to Mobile County Training School not only from within the city limits of downtown Mobile itself and from Prichard and Cedar Grove and Chickasaw Whistler and Maysville, but also from as far away across the bay as Daphne, Fairhope, and Magnolia Springs, she said, Now see there, you never learn unless you ask. Boy, that sounds just like the kind of school I’m sure going to betrying my best to get my Roger in one of these days when he old enough.
    Roger was a three-year-old son that she had left with her mother, who was now living in Fort Deposit. She didn’t even mention anything at all about who Roger’s father was, and I didn’t ask anything. From what she said about how she ran away from home to go to Birmingham, I was pretty sure that she had not been married and that when she became pregnant she had had to look out for herself, but she mentioned that only in passing because what she was mainly if not only really interested in telling me about was the kind of man she wanted Roger to be.
    Not
what
she wanted him to be, such as a doctor, lawyer, businessman, teacher, or a political leader. That was going to be up to him to choose once he had come along far enough in school to make his own choice. The main thing she wanted him to become was somebody worthwhile and also somebody you could always count on.
    I just want him to have his chance to make something out of hisself. I sure God don’t want him to end up on on chain gang in no penitentiary. I don’t want him out there trying to lie and steal and cheat and double-cross his way. Just look at you, she said. That’s what I’m talking about. Done made it all the way up here in college because you can make it on your own scholarship. That’s what I’m talking about. I’m talking about, I want my Roger to turn out like you turning out so far. Boy, your folks got to be mighty proud of you and I’m sure you know it too, you rascal you.

X
    A s for mothers, I said one night not long afterward, I have three at the same time. Because along with Mama herself there had always been Miss Tee, and then when I had come that far as a pupil over at Mobile County Training School there was also Miss Lexine Metcalf who not only said but also acted as if I also belonged to her.
    The only thing I remember that Mama actually told me about my kinship to her was about how all babies came from the soft dark insides of a very special stump hole deep in the brambles and moss-fringed thickets where the baby man hid you like a seed to be found like an Easter egg on your birthday by the woman he picked to be your mother, who was the one who swaddled you to her bosom and gave you nourishment and kept you safe from the bad old booger man. Which was why your mother was the one you already owed your obedience long before you came to realize that you also had a father.
    That was all she had ever told me before I overheard whatshe said that night at Mister Ike Meadow’s wake, and that is the way she let it stay even when she told me what she told me about not letting that thing in my pants get me in trouble because she had decided that the time had come when she