“Hell, mister, I don’t understand a thing you’re talking about.”
“Nor will I tolerate any lying or duplicity. No excuses, no complaints, no back talk. Once you catch on, you’re going to be the happiest boy on earth.”
“Sure. And if a legless man had legs, he could piss standing up.”
“I know your story, son. So you don’t have to invent any tall tales for me. I know how your pa got gassed over in Belgium in ‘seventeen. And I know about your ma, too, and how she used to turn tricks over in East Saint Louis for a buck a tumble, and what happened to her four and a half years ago when that crazy cop turned his revolver on her and blew off her face. Don’t think I don’t pity you, boy, but you’ll never get anywhere if you dodge the truth when you’re dealing with me.”
“Okay, Mr. Smarty Pants. If you’ve got all the answers, why waste your breath telling me things you already know?”
“Because you still don’t believe a word I’ve said. You think this stuff about flying is a lot of hot air. You’re going to work hard, Walt, harder than you’ve ever worked before, and you’re going to want to quit on me almost every day, but if you stick with it and trust what I tell you, at the end of a few years you’ll be able to fly. I swear it. You’ll be able to lift yourself off the ground and fly through the air like a bird.”
“I’m from Missouri, remember? They don’t call it the Show-Me State for nothing.”
“Well, we’re not in Missouri anymore, my little friend. We’re in Kansas. And a flatter, more desolate place you’ve never seen in your life. When Coronado and his men marched through here in 1540 looking for the Cities of Gold, they got so lost that half of them went insane. There’s nothing to tell you where you are. No mountains, no trees, no bumps in the road. It’s flat as death out here, and once you’ve been around for a while, you’ll understand there’s nowhere to go but up—that the sky is the only friend you have.”
It was dark by the time we pulled into the station, so there was no way to vouch for the master’s description of my new home. As far as I could tell, the town was no different from what you’d expect to see in a little town. A trifle colder, perhaps, and more than a trifle darker than what I was used to, but given that I had never been in a little town before, I had no idea what to expect. Everything was new to me: every smell was strange, every star in the sky seemed unfamiliar. If someone had told me I’d just entered the Land of Oz, I don’t think I would have known the difference.
We walked through the station house and stood outside the door for a moment scanning the dark village. It was only seven o’clock in the evening, but the whole place was locked up, and except for a few lamps burning in the houses beyond, there was no sign of life anywhere. “Don’t worry,” Master Yehudi said, “our ride will be along any minute.” He reached out and tried to take hold of my hand, but I yanked my arm away before he could get a firm grip. “Keep your paws to yourself, Mr. Master,” I said. “You might think you own me now, but you don’t own squat.”
About nine seconds after I uttered those words, a big gray horse appeared at the end of the street pulling a buckboard wagon. It looked like something from the Tom Mix western I’d seen that summer at the Picture Palace, but this was 1924, for Christ’s sake, and when I caught sight of that antiquated vehicle rumbling down the street, I thought it was an apparition. But lo and behold, Master Yehudi waved when he saw it coming, and then that old gray horse stopped right in front of us, sidling up to the curb as gusts of steam poured from its nostrils. The driver was a round, chunky figure in a wide-brimmed hat whose body was wrapped in blankets, and at first I couldn’t tell if it was a man, a woman, or a bear.
“Hello, Mother Sue,” the master said. “Take a look at what I found.”
The woman gazed at me for a couple of seconds with blank, stone-cold eyes, and then, out of nowhere, flashed one of the warmest, friendliest smiles I’ve ever had the pleasure to receive. There couldn’t have been more than two or three teeth jutting from her gums, and from the way her dark eyes glittered, I concluded that she was a Gypsy. She was Mother Sue, the Queen of the Gypsies, and Master Yehudi was her son, the Prince of Blackness. They were abducting me to the Castle of No Return, and if they didn’t eat me for dinner that night, they were going to turn me into a slavey boy, a groveling eunuch with an earring in my ear and a silk bandanna wrapped around my head.
“Hop in, sonny,” Mother Sue said. Her voice was so deep and mannish, I would have been scared to death if I hadn’t known she could smile, “You’ll see some blankets in the back. If you know what’s good for you, you’ll use ‘em. We got a long cold ride ahead of us, and you don’t want to get there with no frozen fanny.”
“His name is Walt,” the master said as he climbed up beside her. “A pus-brained ragamuffin from honky-tonk row. If my hunch is correct, he’s the one I’ve been looking for all these years.” Then, turning in my direction, he said brusquely, “This is Mother Sue, kid. Treat her nice, and she’ll give you only goodness in return. Cross her, and you’ll regret the day you were born. She might be fat and toothless, but she’s the closest thing to a mother you’ll ever have.”
I don’t know how long it took us to get to the house. It was out in the country somewhere, sixteen or seventeen miles from town, but I didn’t learn that until later, for once I climbed in under the blankets and the wagon started down the road, I fell fast asleep. When I opened my eyes again, we were already there, and if the master hadn’t roused me with a slap across the face, I probably would have slept until morning.
He led me into the house as Mother Sue unhitched the nag, and the first room we entered was the kitchen: a bare, dimly lit space with a wood stove in one corner and a kerosene lamp flickering in another. A black boy of about fifteen was sitting at the table reading a book. He wasn’t brown like most of the colored folks I’d run across back home, he was the color of pitch, a black so black it was almost blue. He was a full-fledged Ethiopian, a pickaninny from the jungles of darkest Africa, and my heart just about stopped beating when I caught sight of him. He was a frail, scrawny fellow with bulging eyes and those enormous lips, and as soon as he stood up from his chair to greet us, I saw that his bones were all twisted and askew, that he had the jagged, hunchbacked body of a cripple.
“This is Aesop,” the master said to me, “the finest boy who ever lived. Say hello to him, Walt, and shake his hand. He’s going to be your new brother.”
“I ain’t shaking hands with no nigger,” I said. “You’ve got to be crazy if you’d think I’d do a thing like that.”
Master Yehudi let out a loud, prolonged sigh. It wasn’t an expression of disgust so much as of sorrow, a monumental shudder from the depths of his soul. Then, with utmost deliberation and calm, he curled the index finger of his right hand into a frozen, beckoning hook and placed the tip of that hook directly under my chin, at the precise spot where the flesh meets the bone. Then he began to press, and all at once a horrific pain shot around the back of my neck and up into my skull. I had never felt pain like that before. I struggled to cry out, but my throat was blocked, and I could do no more than produce a sick gagging noise. The master continued to press with his finger, and presently I felt my feet lift off the ground. I was traveling upward, rising into the air like a feather, and the master seemed to be accomplishing this without the slightest effort, as if I were of no more consequence to him than a ladybug. Eventually, he had me up to where my face was on a level with his and I was looking directly into his eyes.
“We don’t talk like that around here, boy,” he said. “All men are brothers, and in this family everyone gets treated with respect. That’s the law. If you don’t like it, lump it. The law is the law, and whoever goes against it is turned into a slug and wallows in the earth for the rest of his days.”
They fed me and clothed me and gave me a room of my own. I wasn’t spanked or paddled, I wasn’t kicked around or punched or boxed on the ears, and yet tolerable as things were for me, I had never been m
ore down at the mouth, more filled with bitterness and pent-up fury. For the first six months, I thought only about running away. I was a city boy who had grown up with jazz in his blood, a street kid with his eye on the main chance, and I loved the hurly-burly of crowds, the screech of trolley cars and the throb of neon, the stink of bootleg whiskey trickling in the gutters. I was a boogie-toed prankster, a midget scatman with a quick tongue and a hundred angles, and there I was stuck in the middle of nowhere, living under a sky that brought only weather—nearly all of it bad.
Master Yehudi’s property consisted of thirty-seven acres of dirt, a two-story farmhouse, a chicken coop, a pigpen, and a barn. There were a dozen chickens in the coop, two cows and the gray horse in the bam, and six or seven pigs in the pen. There was no electricity, no plumbing, no telephone, no wireless, no phonograph, no nothing. The only source of entertainment was the piano in the parlor, but Aesop was the only one who could play it, and he made such a botch of even the simplest songs that I always left the room the moment he sat down and touched his fingers to the keys. The joint was a shit hole, the world capital of boredom, and I was already fed up with it after one day. They didn’t even know about baseball in that house, and I had no one to talk to about my beloved Cardinals, which was about the only subject that interested me back then. I felt as if I’d fallen through a crack in time and landed in the stone age, a country where dinosaurs still roamed the earth. According to Mother Sue, Master Yehudi had won the farm on a bet with some fellow in Chicago about seven years earlier. That must have been some bet, I said. The loser turns out to be the winner, and the winner’s a chump who gets to rot away his future in Bungholeville, U.S.A.
I was a fiery little dunce back then, I’ll admit it, but I’m not going to make any apologies for myself. I was who I was, a product of the people and places I’d come from, and there’s no point in whining about that now. What impresses me most about those early months is how patient they were, how well they seemed to understand me and tolerate my antics. I ran away four times that first winter, once getting as far as Wichita, and each time they took me back, no questions asked. I was scarcely a hair’s breadth greater than nothing, a molecule or two above the vanishing point of what constitutes a human being, and since the master reckoned that my soul was no loftier than an animal’s, that’s where he started me out: in the barn with the animals.
Much as I detested taking care of those chickens and pigs, I preferred their company to the people. It was difficult for me to decide which one I hated most, and every day I would reshuffle the order of my animosities. Mother Sue and Aesop came in for their fair share of inner scorn, but in the end it was the master who provoked my greatest ire and resentment. He was the scoundrel who had tricked me into going there, and if anyone was to blame for the fix I was in, he was the chief culprit. What galled me most was his sarcasm, the cracks and insults he hurled constantly in my direction, the way he would ride me and hound me for no reason but to prove how worthless I was. With the other two he was always polite, a model of decorum, but he rarely wasted an opportunity to say something mean-spirited on my account. It started the very first morning, and after that he never let up. Before long, I realized that he was no better than Uncle Slim. He might not have thrashed me the way Slim did, but the master’s words had power, and they hurt just as much as any blow to the head.
“Well, my fine-feathered rascal,” he said to me that first morning, “give me the lowdown on what you know about the three R’s.”
“Three?” I said, going for the quick, wise-guy retort. “I ain’t got but one arse, and I use it every time I sit down. Same as everybody else.”
“I mean school, you twerp. Have you ever set foot in a classroom—and if so, what did you learn there?”
“I don’t need no school to teach me things. I’ve got better ways of spending my time than that.”
“Excellent. Spoken like a true scholar. But be more specific. What about the alphabet? Can you write the letters of the alphabet or not?”
“Some of them. The ones that serve my purpose. The others don’t matter. They just give me a pain, so I don’t worry about them.”
“And which ones serve your purpose?”
“Well, let’s see. There’s the A, I like that one, and the W. Then there’s the whatchamacallit, the L, and the E, and the R, and the one that looks like a cross. The T. As in T-bone steak. Those letters are my buddies, and the rest can go fry in hell for all I care.”
“So you know how to write your name.”
“That’s what I’m telling you, boss. I can write my name, I can count to kingdom come, and I know that the sun is a star in the sky. I also know that books are for girls and sissies, and if you’re planning to teach me anything out of books, we can call off our arrangement right now.”
“Don’t fret, kid. What you’ve just told me is music to my ears. The dumber you are, the better it is for both of us. There’s less to undo that way, and that’s going to save us a lot of time.”
“And what about the flying lessons? When do we start with them?”
“We’ve already started. From now on, everything we do is connected to your training. That won’t always be apparent to you, so try to keep it in mind. If you don’t forget, you’ll be able to hang in there when the going gets rough. We’re embarking on a long journey, son, and the first thing I have to do is break your spirit. I wish it could be some other way, but it can’t. Considering the muck you spring from, that shouldn’t be too hard a task.”
So I spent my days shoveling manure in the barn, freezing my eyebrows off as the others sat snug and cozy in the house. Mother Sue took care of the cooking and domestic chores, Aesop lounged around on the sofa reading books, and Master Yehudi did nothing at all. His principal occupation seemed to be sitting on a straight-backed wooden chair from sunrise to sundown and looking out the window. Except for his conversations with Aesop, that was the only thing I saw him do until spring. I sometimes listened in when the two of them talked, but I could never make sense of what they were saying. They used so many complicated words, it was as if they were communicating in their own private gibberish. Later on, when I settled into the swing of things a bit more, I learned that they were studying. Master Yehudi had taken it upon himself to educate Aesop in the liberal arts, and the books they read concerned any number of different subjects: history, science, literature, mathematics, Latin, French, and so on. He had his project of teaching me to fly, but he was also engaged in turning Aesop into a scholar, and as far as I could tell that second project meant a lot more to him than mine did. As the master put it to me one morning not long after my arrival: “He was even worse off than you were, runt. When I found him twelve years ago, he was crawling through a cotton field in Georgia dressed in rags. He hadn’t eaten in two days, and his mama, who was no more than a child herself, lay dead from TB in their shack fourteen miles down the road. That’s how far the kid had wandered from home. He was delirious with hunger by then, and if I hadn’t chanced upon him at that particular moment, there’s no telling what would have happened. His body might be contorted into a tragic shape, but his mind is a glorious instrument, and he’s already surpassed me in most fields. My plan is to send him to college in three years. He can continue his studies there, and once he graduates and goes out into the world, he’ll become a leader of his race, a shining example to all the downtrodden black folks of this violent, hypocritical country.” I couldn’t make head or tail of what the master was talking about, but the love in his voice burned through to me and impressed itself on my mind. For all my stupidity, I was able to understand that much. He loved Aesop as if he were his own son, and I was no better than a mutt, a mongrel beast to be spat on and left out in the rain.
Mother Sue was my companion in ignorance, my fellow illiterate and sluggard, and while that might have helped to create a bond between us, it did nothing of the sort. There was no overt hostility in her, but at the same time she gave me the willies, and I think it took me
longer to adjust to her oddnesses than it did with the two others—who could hardly be called normal themselves. Even with the blankets removed from her body and the hat gone from her head, I had trouble determining which sex she belonged to. I found that distressing somehow, and even after I glimpsed her naked through the keyhole of her door and saw with my own eyes that she possessed a pair of titties and had no member dangling from her bush, I still wasn’t entirely convinced. Her hands were tough like a man’s, she had broad shoulders and muscles that bulged in her upper arms, and except when she flashed me one of her rare and beautiful smiles, her face was as remote and ungiving as a block of wood. That’s closer to what unsettled me, perhaps: her silence, the way she seemed to look through me as if I wasn’t there. In the pecking order of the household, I stood directly below her, which meant that I had more dealings with Mother Sue than with anyone else. She was the one who doled out my chores and checked up on me, who made sure I washed my face and brushed my teeth before going to bed, and yet for all the hours I spent in her company, she made me feel lonelier than if I had been truly alone. A hollowed-out sensation crept into my belly whenever she was around, as if just being near her would start to make me shrink. It didn’t matter how I behaved. I could jump up and down or stand still, I could holler my head off or hold my tongue, and the results never varied. Mother Sue was a wall, and every time I approached that wall I was turned into a puff of smoke, a tiny cloud of ashes scattering in the wind.
The only one who showed me any genuine kindness was Aesop, but I was against him from the start, and there was nothing he could say or do that would ever change that. I couldn’t help myself. It was in my blood to feel contempt for him, and given that he was the ugliest specimen of his kind I’d ever had the misfortune to see, it struck me as preposterous that we were living under the same roof. It went against the laws of nature, it transgressed everything that was holy and proper, and I wouldn’t allow myself to accept it. When you threw in the fact that Aesop talked like no other colored boy on the face of the earth—more like an English lord than an American—and then threw in the additional fact that he was the master’s favorite, I couldn’t even think about him without succumbing to an onslaught of nerves. To make matters worse, I had to keep my mouth shut whenever he was around. A few choice remarks would have blown off some of my rage, I think, but I remembered the master’s finger thrusting under my chin, and I was in no mood to submit to that torture again.