These stories gave me a lot to chew on during the hours I spent alone, but the more I pondered what Mother Sioux had told me, the more twisted and confounding it became. My head grew weary from trying to parse the ins and outs of such complex doings, and at a certain point I just stopped, telling myself I’d short my brain wires if I kept up all that cogitation. Grown-ups were impenetrable creatures, and if I ever became one myself, I promised to write a letter back to my old self explaining how they got to be that way—but for now I’d had enough. It was a relief to let go like that, but once I abandoned those thoughts, I fell into a boredom so profound, so taxing in its bland and feathery sameness, that I finally went back to work. It wasn’t because I wanted to, it’s just that I couldn’t think of any other way to fill the time.
I locked myself in my room again, and after three days of fruitless endeavor, I discovered what I had been doing wrong. The whole problem lay in my approach. I had somehow gotten it into my head that loft and locomotion could only be achieved through a two-step process. First levitate as high as I could, then push out and go. I had trained myself to do the one thing, and I figured I could accomplish the second thing by grafting it onto the first. But the truth was that the second thing canceled out what came before it. Again and again, I would lift myself into the air according to the old method, but as soon as I started to think about moving forward, I would flutter back to the ground, landing on my feet again before I had a chance to get going. If I failed once, I failed a thousand times, and after a while I felt so disgusted, so bedeviled by my incompetence, that I took to throwing tantrums and pounding my fists on the floor. At last, in the full flush of anger and defeat, I picked myself up and jumped straight into the wall, hoping to smash myself into unconsciousness. I leapt, and for the briefest eyeblink of a second, just before my shoulder thudded against the plaster, I sensed that I was floating—that even as I rushed forward, I was losing touch with gravity, going up with a familiar buoyant surge as I lunged through the air. Before I could grasp what was happening, I had bounced off the wall and was crumpling onto the floor in pain. My whole left side throbbed from the impact, but I didn’t care. I jumped to my feet and did a little dance around the room, laughing my head off for the next twenty minutes. I had cracked the secret. I understood. Forget right angles, I told myself. Think arc, think trajectory. It wasn’t a matter of first going up and then going out, it was a matter of going up and out at the same time, of launching myself in one smooth, uninterrupted gesture into the arms of the great ambient nothingness.
I worked like a dog over the next eighteen or twenty days, practicing this new technique until it was embedded in my muscles and bones, a reflex action that no longer required the slightest pause for thought. Locomotion was a perfectible skill, a dreamlike walking through air that was essentially no different from walking on the ground, and just as a baby totters and falls with its first steps, I experienced a goodly dose of stumbles and spills when I began to spread my wings. Duration was the abiding issue for me at that point, the question of how long and how far I could keep myself going. The early results varied widely, ranging anywhere from three to fifteen seconds, and since the speed at which I moved was achingly slow, the best I could manage was seven or eight feet, not even the distance from one wall of my room to another. It wasn’t a vigorous, smart-stepping amble, but a kind of shuffling ghost-walk, the way an aerialist advances along a high wire. Still, I kept on working with confidence, no longer subject to swoons of discouragement as I’d been before. I was inching forward now, and nothing was going to stop me. Even if I hadn’t risen higher than my standard six or seven inches, I figured it was best to concentrate on locomotion for the time being. Once I’d achieved some mastery in that area, I would turn my attention to loft and tackle that problem as well. It made sense, and even if I had it to do all over again, I wouldn’t budge from that plan. How could I have known that time was already running short, that fewer days were left than any of us had imagined?
After Master Yehudi and Aesop returned, spirits in the household percolated as never before. It was the end of an era, and we were all looking ahead to the future now, anticipating the new lives that waited for us beyond the boundaries of the farm. Aesop would be the first to go—off to Yale in September—but if things went according to schedule, the rest of us would be following suit by the turn of the year. Now that I had passed to the next stage of my training, the master calculated that I’d be ready to perform in public in roughly nine months. It was still a long way to go for someone my age, but he talked about it as something real now, and what with his use of words like bookings, venues, and box office net, he kept me humming in a state of permanent excitement. I wasn’t Walt Rawley anymore, the white trash nobody without a pot to piss in, I was Walt the Wonder Boy, the diminutive daredevil who defied the laws of gravity, the one and only ace of the air. Once we hit the road and let the world see what I could do, I was going to be a sensation, the most talked-about personality in America.
As for Aesop, his tour back East had been an unqualified success. They’d given him special exams, they’d interviewed him, they’d picked and probed the contents of his wooly skull, and to hear the master tell it, he’d knocked the socks off the lot of them. Not a single college had turned him down, but Yale was offering a four-year scholarship—along with food and lodging and a small living allowance—and that had tipped the balance in their favor. Boola boola, bulldogs of the world unite. Recalling these facts now, I understand what an achievement it was for a self-taught black youngster to have scaled the ramparts of those cold-hearted institutions. I knew nothing about books, had no yardstick to measure my friend’s abilities against anyone else’s, but I took it on blind faith that he was a genius, and the idea that a bunch of sourpusses and stuffed shirts at Yale College should want him as a student struck me as natural, the most fitting thing in the world.
If I was too dumb to grasp the significance of Aesop’s triumph, I was more than bowled over by the new clothes he brought back from his trip. He returned in a raccoon coat and a blue-and-white beanie, and he looked so strange in that getup that I couldn’t help laughing when he walked through the door. The master had had him fitted for two brown tweed suits in Boston, and now that he was home, he took to wearing them around the house instead of his old farm duds, complete with white shirt, stiff collar, necktie, and a pair of gleaming, dung-hued brogans. It was altogether impressive how he carried himself in those threads—as if they made him more erect, more dignified, more aware of his own importance. Even though he didn’t have to, he started shaving every morning, and I would keep him company in the kitchen as he lathered up his mug and dipped his straight-edged razor into the chilly bucket, holding a little mirror for him as he told me about the things he’d seen and done in the big cities along the Atlantic coast. The master had done more than just get him into college, he’d shown him the time of his life, and Aesop remembered every minute of it: the high spots, the low spots, and all the spots in between. He talked about the skyscrapers, the museums, the variety shows, the restaurants, the libraries, the sidewalks thronged with people of every color and description. “Kansas is an illusion,” he said one morning as he scraped away at his invisible beard, “a stopping place on the road to reality.”
“You don’t have to tell me,” I said. “This hole is so backward, the state went dry before they even heard of Prohibition in the rest of the country.”
“I drank a beer in New York City, Walt.”
“Well, I figured you must have done.”
“In a speakeasy. An illegal establishment on MacDougal Street, right in the heart of Greenwich Village. I wish you could have been there with me.”
“I can’t stand the taste of them suds, Aesop. Give me a good stiff bourbon, though, and I’ll drink any man under the table.”
“I’m not saying it tasted good. But it was exciting to be there with all those people, quaffing my drink in a crowded place like that.”
“I
’ll bet it wasn’t the only exciting thing you did.”
“No, not by a long shot. It was just one of many.”
“I’ll bet your pecker got some good workouts, too. I’m just making a wild guess, of course, so correct me if I’m wrong.”
Aesop paused with the razor in midair, grew thoughtful for a moment, and then started grinning into the mirror. “Let’s just say it wasn’t neglected, little brother, and we’ll leave it at that.”
“Can you tell me her name? I don’t mean to be pushy, but I’m curious to find out who the lucky girl was.”
“Well, if you must know, her name was Mabel.”
“Mabel. Not bad, all things considered. She sounds like a dolly with some flesh on her bones. Was she old or young?”
“She wasn’t old, and she wasn’t young. But you hit it right about the flesh. Mabel was the fattest, blackest mama you’d ever hope to sink your teeth into. She was so big, I couldn’t tell where she started and where she ended. It was like wrestling with a hippo, Walt. But once you get into the swing of it, the anatomy takes care of itself. You creep into her bed as a boy, and half an hour later you walk out as a man.”
Now that he had graduated to manhood, Aesop decided the moment had come to sit down and write his autobiography. That was how he planned to spend the months before he left home—telling the story of his life so far, from his birth in a rural shack in Georgia to his deflowering in a Harlem bordello, wrapped in the blubbery arms of Mabel the whore. The words began to flow, but the title vexed him, and I remember how he dithered back and forth about it. One day he was going to call the book Confessions of a Negro Foundling; the next day he changed it to Aesop’s Adventures: The True History and Unvarnished Opinions of a Lost Boy; the day after that it was going to be The Road to Yale: The Life of a Negro Scholar from His Humble Origins to the Present. Those were just some of them, and for as long as he worked on that book, he kept trying out different ones, shuffling and reshuffling his ideas until he’d built up a stack of title pages every bit as tall as the manuscript itself. He must have toiled eight or ten hours a day on his opus, and I can remember peeking through the door as he sat there hunched over his desk, marvelling at how a person could sit still for so long, engaged in no other activity than guiding the nib of a pen across a leaf of white foolscap. It was my first experience with the making of books, and even when Aesop called me into his room to read selected passages of his work aloud, I found it hard to tally all that silence and concentration with the stories that came tumbling from his lips. We were all in the book—Master Yehudi, Mother Sioux, myself—and to my clumsy, untutored ear, the thing had every intention of becoming a masterpiece. I laughed at some parts, I cried at others, and what more can a person want from a book than to feel the prick of such delights and sorrows? Now that I’m writing a book of my own, not a day goes by when I don’t think about Aesop up there in his room. That was sixty-five springs ago, and I can still see him sitting at his desk, scribbling away at his youthful memoirs as the light poured through the window, catching the dust particles that danced around him. If I concentrate hard enough, I can still hear the breath going in and out of his lungs, I can still hear the point of his pen scratching across the paper.
While Aesop worked indoors, Master Yehudi and I spent our days in the fields, toiling untold hours on my act. In a fit of optimism after his return, he’d announced to us at dinner that there wouldn’t be any planting that year. “To hell with the crops,” he said. “There’s enough food to last through the winter, and by the time spring comes again, we’ll be long gone from this place. The way I look at it, it would be a sin to grow things we’ll never need.” There was general rejoicing over this new policy, and for once the early spring was free of drudge work and plowing, the interminable weeks of bent backs and slogging through mud. My locomotion breakthrough had turned the tide, and Master Yehudi was so confident now that he was willing to let the farm go to pot. It was the only sane decision a man could make. We’d all done our time, and why eat dirt when we’d soon be counting our gold?
That doesn’t mean we didn’t bust our asses out there—particularly myself—but I enjoyed the work, and no matter how hard the master pushed me, I never wanted to quit. Once the weather turned warm, we usually kept going until after dark, working by torchlight in the far meadows as the moon rose into the sky. I was inexhaustible, consumed by a happiness that swept me along from one challenge to the next. By May first, I was able to walk from ten to twelve yards as a matter of routine. By May fifth, I had extended it to twenty yards, and less than a week after that I had pushed it to forty: a hundred and twenty feet of airborne locomotion, nearly ten uninterrupted minutes of pure magic. That was when the master hit upon the idea of having me practice over water. There was a pond in the northeast corner of the property, and from then on we did all our work over there, riding out in the buckboard wagon every morning after breakfast to a point where we could no longer see the house—alone together in the silent fields, barely saying a word to each other for hours on end. The water intimidated me at first, and since I didn’t know how to swim, it was no laughing matter to test my prowess over that element. The pond must have been sixty feet across, and the water level in at least half of it was over my head. I fell in sixteen or twenty times the first day, and on four of those occasions the master had to jump in and fish me out. After that, we came equipped with towels and several changes of clothes, but by the end of the week they were no longer necessary. I conquered my fear of the water by pretending it wasn’t there. If I didn’t look down, I discovered I could propel my body across the surface without getting wet. It was as simple as that, and by the last days of May 1927, I was walking on water with the same skill as Jesus himself.
Somewhere in the middle of that time, Lindbergh made his solo flight across the Atlantic, traveling nonstop from New York City to Paris in thirty-three hours. We heard about it from Mrs. Witherspoon, who drove out from Wichita one day with a pile of newspapers in the back seat of her car. The farm was so cut off from the world, even big stories like that one escaped our notice. If it hadn’t been for her wanting to come all that way, we never would have heard a peep about it. I’ve always found it strange that Lindbergh’s stunt coincided so exactly with my own efforts, that at the precise moment he was making his way across the ocean, I was traversing my little pond in Kansas—the two of us in the air together, each one accomplishing his feat at the same time. It was as if the sky had suddenly opened itself up to man, and we were the first pioneers, the Columbus and Magellan of human flight. I didn’t know the Lone Eagle from a hole in the wall, but I felt linked to him after that, as if we shared some dark fraternal bond. It couldn’t have been a coincidence that his plane was called the Spirit of St. Louis. That was my town, too, the town of champions and twentieth-century heroes, and without even knowing it, Lindbergh had named his plane in my honor.
Mrs. Witherspoon hung around for a couple of days and nights. After she left, the master and I got back to business, shifting the focus of our attention from locomotion to loft. I had done what I could do with horizontal travel; now it was time to attempt the vertical. Lindbergh was an inspiration to me, I freely confess it, but I wanted to do him one better: to do with my body what he’d done with a machine. It would be on a smaller scale, perhaps, but it would be infinitely more stupendous, a thing that would dwarf his fame overnight. Try as I did, however, I couldn’t make an inch of headway. For a week and a half, the master and I struggled out by the pond, equally daunted by the task we’d set for ourselves, and at the end of that time I was still no higher than I’d been before. Then, on the evening of June fifth, Master Yehudi made a suggestion that began to turn things around.
“I’m just speculating,” he said, “but it occurs to me that your necklace might have something to do with it. It can’t weigh more than an ounce or two, but given the mathematics of what you’re attempting, that could be enough. For each millimeter you rise into the air, the weight of the o
bject increases in geometric proportion to the height—meaning that once you’re six inches off the ground, you’re carrying the equivalent of forty extra pounds. That comes to half your total weight. If my calculations are correct, it’s no wonder you’ve been having such a rough time of it.”
“I’ve worn that thing since Christmas,” I said. “It’s my lucky charm, and I can’t do nothing without it.”
“Yes you can, Walt. The first time you got yourself off the ground, it was slung around my neck, remember? I’m not saying you don’t have a sentimental attachment to it, but we’re intruding on deep spiritual matters here, and it could be that you can’t be whole to do what you have to do, that you have to leave a part of yourself behind before you can attain the full magnitude of your gift.”
“That’s just double-talk, I’m wearing clothes, ain’t I? I’m wearing shoes and socks, ain’t I? If the necklace is bogging me down, then those things are doing it too. And I sure as hell ain’t going to flaunt my stuff in public without no clothes on.”
“It can’t hurt to try. There’s nothing to lose, Walt, and everything to gain. If I’m wrong, so be it. If I’m not, it would be an awful pity if we never had a chance to find out.”
He had me there, so with much skepticism and reluctance I removed the good luck charm and placed it in the master’s hand. “All right,” I said, “we’ll give it a whirl. But if it don’t turn out like you say, that’s the last we’ll ever talk about it.”
Over the course of the next hour, I managed to double my previous record, ascending to heights of twelve to fourteen inches. By nightfall, I had raised myself a good two and a half feet off the ground, demonstrating that Master Yehudi’s hunch had been correct, a prophetic insight into the causes and consequences of the levitation arts. The thrill was spectacular—to feel myself hovering at such a distance from the ground, to be literally on the verge of flying—but above two feet it was difficult for me to maintain a vertical position without beginning to totter and grow dizzy. It was all so new to me up there, I wasn’t able to find my natural equilibrium. I felt long to myself, as if I were composed of segments and not made of a continuous piece, and my head and shoulders responded in one way while my shins and ankles responded in another. So as not to tip over, I found myself easing into a prone position when I got up there, instinctively knowing it would be safer and more comfortable to have my entire body stretched over the ground than just the soles of my feet. I was still too nervous to think about moving forward in that position, but late that night, just before we knocked off and went home to bed, I tucked my head under my chest and managed to do a slow somersault in the air, completing a full, unbroken circle without once grazing the earth.