One Mississippi Read online

  The Sousa got off to a ragged start, and Waxman looked disappointed. “No, sloppy, sloppy, the brass — are you guys asleep back there? Wake up and try it again. Drummers, come right in, nice and crisp. Ready?” He counted off. He was quickly displeased by something in the reeds. “Band. In Vicksburg we can’t stop and start over. If we don’t have a nice crisp attack, we’re sunk. Do you want to bring home straight Twos again?”

  Bad bands got Fours at Contest, and great bands got Ones. Year after year, the Mighty Titans had earned solid Twos in all four categories: performance, musicality, presentation, marching band. Only once in history had Minor brought home a One, for musicality, back in 1968. That certificate hung on the wall behind Waxman, to goad us on toward our most elusive goal: another One.

  The closer we got to Contest, the more Waxman snapped at us. He was hearing only the mistakes. Everyone could play their parts blindfolded, but to blend them into a unified sound was harder than it looked. As the mallet-instrument specialist, I had exactly one moment of solo glory, one place where all you heard was me — a xylophone run in the Stephen Foster medley. I had practiced that run till my wrists ached.

  Today I staggered in a beat late, and missed half the notes in the run.

  Waxman rolled his eyes and waved the band to a halt. “Daniel Musgrove? Anybody home?”

  I knocked the mallets against my head. “Sorry, Mr. Waxman.”

  “You’ve only got that one run, but if you let us down, it’s like Jim missing every note on first trumpet. Pay attention, would you?”

  Oh the ignominy! Waxman never had to stop the band to correct me. The mallet parts were so unimportant that he let me bang away back there as I pleased.

  One day I was alone at the piano in the band hall, feeling out the melody to “Color My World” by Chicago, when Waxman came out of his office. “Musgrove, that’s pretty good. I was under the impression you didn’t have a musical bone in your body.”

  “I’m just fooling around,” I said.

  “Seriously, all this time I thought you had zero talent. I could have been teaching you a real instrument. Why didn’t you tell me you could play?”

  I smiled. “I didn’t want to mess up a good thing.”

  “Okay,” he said. “It’ll be our little secret.”

  Now he backed the whole band up to measure 128, taking aim at my four-second gap. I lifted my arms and struck out blindly with my mallets, a blizzard of notes. The band hall echoed with the tinkling excellence of that run — sharp, sprightly, every note in place.

  Waxman gave a nearly imperceptible nod and moved on to “Oh, Susannah.”

  When he stopped to work on the trumpets, Debbie Frillinger leaned back from the row of clarinets with gossip. “They’re letting Red Martin come back to school for one week so he’ll be eligible to play football next year.”

  “Oh, is he out of jail yet?” I tried to sound nonchalant. “I can’t keep up.”

  “His parents paid ten thousand dollars to bail him out,” she said.

  “I’m sure it was worth every penny.”

  “He really should transfer to some other school,” Debbie said. “They’ll make it impossible for him to have a normal life here.”

  “Who will?”

  “The blacks. They’ve got it in for him now — well, you were at that assembly, you heard them. They’ll make his life miserable.”

  “I hope so,” I said. “Just like he does me and Tim.”

  “Daniel Musgrove!” Oh Jesus: Waxman glaring at me again! “Is this why you miss your one solo, cause you’re too busy flirting with the clarinets?”

  I had no defense. I shrugged, guilty.

  “You’re a junior, supposed to be an example of Pride in this outfit, and there you sit flapping your jaw. What is it, people? I can feel it — y’all are not here! Half of you are off in the clouds somewhere. I can’t have that in Vicksburg. I won’t have it in my band hall, you hear?”

  “Sorry, Mr. Waxman.”

  “Sorry doesn’t cut it. Back to 148. Flutes? I want to hear that daaaa, da-dee dum — let that sing out, you carry the melody here. Oboes, give it everything you’ve got on the rise. And Daniel, let me really hear that chime.”

  “Way Down Upon the Swanee River” reached its pensive denouement. I lifted my felt hammer and struck the domes of the long gold tubes with all the art I could muster.

  Something went wrong — not my fault! Somebody talking? In the brass section, somebody talking out loud. Waxman flung down his baton. “What is going on here?”

  “I said, do you even know what this song says?” said Shanice James, one of the French horns. “Because I looked it up, Mr. Waxman. I looked up the words. I don’t think you ought to be making us play it. It’s insulting.”

  Waxman gaped. “Shanice, what are you talking about?”

  Shanice James was big and round as the bell of her horn, as round as her Afro and the rims of her horn-rimmed glasses. The whole horn section was black, including all three tuba players — something about the big brass appealed to the kids from East Minor. Shanice lifted up her sheet music. “Here’s what the words say — ‘All de world am sad and dreary, ebrywhere I roam. Oh, Darkies, how my heart grows weary . . .’”

  “Shanice, this is an instrumental,” said Waxman. “We’re not using the words. And anyway the song is a hundred years old. What is the problem?”

  “I just don’t think we ought to be playing a song about darkies,” said Shanice. “I’m an Afro-American. I am not a darkie. That’s all.”

  “I ain’t a darkie either,” said Brian Fairchild on tuba. Every black member of the band muttered assent.

  Waxman bristled. “Are you telling me you don’t want to play this melody because you don’t like the lyrics?”

  “Well, yeah,” Shanice said. “That’s right. I don’t.”

  “For gosh sakes,” said Waxman, “I picked this piece myself, and I’m Jewish.”

  She crossed her arms. “So?”

  “Are you trying to say that I, as a Jewish person, would intentionally pick music that I thought would offend a black person? Look, Stephen Foster was an old-time composer working in the tradition of minstrel music. He wrote beautiful melodies. You can’t just not play his tunes because you don’t happen to like the social conventions of his time.”

  “Did he write any songs about Jews? We could play one of those.”

  Shanice’s friends laughed, but she was dead serious.

  Waxman said, “Look, Shanice, I’d love to debate you on this. You may even have a point. But Contest is two weeks from tomorrow. We don’t have time to put aside the Stephen Foster and learn some entirely new piece. You understand that, don’t you?”

  She turned her nose up. “I still think it’s insulting.”

  Waxman ran a hand through his unruly hair. “Look, it shows great initiative that you went to the trouble to look up the lyrics. And now let me apologize on behalf of Stephen Foster that he was so old-fashioned on the subject of race. But that doesn’t mean we can’t play his music ever again. Don’t you see the difference? The man is dead, he died a long time ago. His music lives on.”

  “If you had some music Hitler wrote,” said Shanice, “would you play it?”

  Waxman cracked an unexpected smile. “Depends if it was any good.”

  His little joke saved the moment. Shanice had to be a good sport. Once again I had witnessed something new from the black students, this new style of interruption and confrontation. A willingness to argue, to talk back.

  They seemed to be making new rules for themselves.

  “Okay,” Waxman said. “We will stipulate that the lyrics are racist and reprehensible. Shall we pick it up from 148? Shanice, if you don’t want to play, just hum along.”

  THE FAMILIAR ORANGE taxi crept to a stop by the mailbox. It wasn’t really a taxi, just an old beat-up orange Plymouth driven by a man called Jimmy for the East Minor folks who needed a ride to the doctor, et cetera. He charged them a dollar each and
loaded his car up with older folks. Today his passengers were the Beechams. Lincoln Beecham got out and hurried around the car.

  “Hullo, Musgrove,” Mrs. Beecham said. “Look baby, your first visitor!”

  Arnita smiled up at me from the backseat. She was even lovelier than I remembered, bright brown eyes, a luminous smile that lit her whole face. Her hair was cropped close to her head, like a boy’s. She wore her wire-rimmed glasses, and a plaid lumberjack shirt over pink flannel pajamas. “Hello,” she said. “Who are you?”

  “I’m Daniel. We’re in the band together, remember?”

  Her eyes flickered past me. “Is this your house?”

  “No, it’s your house.”

  “Mr. Musgrove,” said Lincoln Beecham, “if you’ll take that arm, we’ll just stand her up and see can she walk to the house. You can walk that far, can’t you, Arnita?” We stood her on her feet. “Don’t let her drop.”

  Arnita swayed in place, regarding the house with a dreamy smile. “Why are we here? I’d rather keep riding around.”

  “Now, now,” said her father.

  “Arnita? Stand up and walk now,” said Mrs. Beecham. “Like at the hospital. Come on, baby.” She led the way to the door, bearing a suitcase and three paper sacks.

  “If you could remind me where it is we’re going?” Arnita said.

  “Home,” Mrs. Beecham said. “This is our home.”

  “Are you sure? This really doesn’t ring a bell.”

  “Maybe because I painted it,” I offered. “See how it’s green now, remember it used to be yellow? And those flower beds, those are all new.”

  She shook her head. “This is not my house. I’ve never been here before.”

  “Bring her on up the steps.” Mrs. Beecham opened the door. “Baby, you’re gonna have to take my word on it. This is home. We’re home.”

  We eased her over the threshold. In all my time working around the place, I’d never been invited inside the house. White walls and pine furniture, a rich smell of food and old rugs, pictures of ancestors and babies and Jesus and Martin Luther King on the walls.

  “Tell me your name again?” Arnita’s breath smelled like strawberry candy.

  “Daniel. Daniel Musgrove.”

  “I know you told me, but I forgot.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “Honey, where you want to be?” said Lincoln Beecham. “You want to sit by the TV?”

  “Are you sure this is the right house?” said Arnita. “You’d think something about it would look familiar.”

  “We’ll put her right here in this chair, Mr. Musgrove.” Beecham guided her with his large hands.

  “It’s so good to be out of that hospital.” Arnita drew her legs up under her, and gave me that glorious Prom Queen smile. “Maybe you can explain it to me, Daniel. I don’t quite understand why these people have brought me here.”

  Mrs. Beecham was fishing around in one of the sacks. “Arnita, we’re all home now, I’m your mama and that’s Daddy and we’re home.”

  “What’s that?” Lincoln Beecham turned, cupping a hand at his ear.

  “Talking to Arnita,” his wife said loudly.

  “Well,” Arnita said, “I guess I should thank you for everything you’ve done.”

  “You’re just confused,” Mrs. Beecham said. “It’s your injury. The doctor says it’s getting better every day.”

  Arnita clutched my arm. “Do you know these people? I keep telling them I’ve never seen them before, but they don’t believe me. They keep insisting they’re my parents. Don’t you think that’s kind of ridiculous?”

  “Not really,” I said. “I mean — I don’t know —”

  My confusion made her laugh. “Oh, come on. Don’t get me wrong, they’re nice as can be, but I certainly can’t be related to them. I mean, look at me! I’m not black!”

  I glanced to Mrs. Beecham for some hint that she was in on this joke. She was giving her daughter the same cool, appraising stare she’d been giving me all these weeks.

  “I really hate to make an issue of it,” Arnita said. “I don’t have anything against black people, but I’m sorry, you cannot be my mother and father.”

  “Arnita,” her mother said, “baby, remember you had an accident, you hurt your head. The doctors say no two brain injuries are the same. I am your mother, and this here’s your father. He’s been sitting beside you the whole time, remember?”

  Arnita said, “Daniel, what do you think?”

  I swallowed. “She’s right.”

  “It’s a matter of opinion, I suppose,” she said, with a trace of irritation. “What time is it?”

  I glanced at my watch. “Five-thirty.”

  “Gomer Pyle is on.” She sank back in the chair.

  Mr. Beecham switched on the TV and walked me out to the porch. “It’s a serious thing, Mr. Musgrove.”

  “She thinks — she said —”

  Beecham said, “Sometimes she knows us, and other times not. She thinks she’s a white girl. Called Linda.”

  “Linda?”

  He nodded. “Ever since she woke up.”

  Mrs. Beecham came out. “Musgrove, those doctors told me things I could hardly believe. Did you know there’s a place inside your brain where you keep just your name, and a picture of what you look like in the mirror? If that one particular part gets damaged, you don’t know your own name. You can’t recognize your own face. That’s what’s happened to Arnita. When she looks in a mirror, she can’t see who she really is. She sees this other girl.”

  “That is weird,” I said, because it was.

  “She thinks Arnita is somebody else. A girl she went to school with. She remembers things that happened to Arnita. She says Arnita had an accident. But she’s convinced she’s this Linda.”

  Mr. Beecham touched my elbow. “We was hoping you might come around, help her catch up with her lessons. She ’posed to get a scholarship if she can keep up her grades.”

  His wife looked me in the eye. “You don’t have to do it, Musgrove. You’ve done a lot already. I ain’t gonna make you do anything this time.”

  A blue jay pelted the air with its cries.

  I peered through the screen door to where Arnita sat quietly watching Gomer Pyle. “Do they think she’ll always be like this?”

  “Oh, no, she’s already so much better. If she keeps on making progress, she’ll be going back to school in the fall.”

  “She likes you,” Mr. Beecham said. “She talks to you. She hardly talks to anybody. Not to us, anyway.”

  I squared my shoulders. “I guess I could talk to her teachers.”

  “I done that already.” Mr. Beecham drew a much-folded paper from his pocket. “If you see Mr. Hamm on Monday, he’ll have her work ready for you.”

  Lincoln Beecham had arranged it all in advance. His wife must have told him I would do whatever they told me to do.

  “You a fine young man,” he was saying.

  “Don’t tell him that, he’s already got the big head,” his wife said. “Do you see now, Musgrove? See why Red has to pay for what he did? He took my baby from me. My beautiful baby don’t even know who she is anymore. I can’t let him just walk away scot-free, can I?”

  Her husband said, “Now Ella, leave it be.” That was the first time I’d heard her name. Ella Beecham, with tears running down her face.

  I could have said Wait, you’ve got it all wrong, Red didn’t do it, it was an accident, yes we did drive off and leave her, yes we let Red take the blame. I tasted those words on the back of my tongue.

  I climbed on my bike and rode away.

  8

  TIM ORDERED A BANANA split. I got a cherry Big Slushee that froze my brain on the third slurp. I staggered to a booth and sat down, gripping my skull in my hands.

  “Oh my God Durwood, don’t look up — don’t!”

  I looked. Mrs. Passworth was studying the Dairy Dog menu with her Jackie O sunglasses pushed up on her forehead. She spotted me looking. “Hey, boys!”


  Tim waved hello, don’t come over don’t come over. The minute she had her chocolate swirl cone in hand, she came right over. “Mind if I join you? This place is filled to the gills!” She eased down beside me on the bench. “I just had to have a little something cool before I got in that car. My A/C’s on the blink. Good gravy, is it ever hot!”

  “Of course it’s hot,” I said. “It’s Mississippi. When is it ever not hot?”

  “Daniel, I wanted to thank you for helping Arnita with her homework.” She spoke around a mouthful of ice cream. “That’s very admirable. Poor girl, how’s she coming along?”

  “Pretty good,” I said. “I just hope she doesn’t need any help in algebra. I’m useless.”

  “Oh, you’re fine,” she said. “At least you pay attention in class, instead of just giggling and cutting up.” Plainly she had me confused with some other guy.

  It felt bizarre to be sitting with a teacher in a public place, away from school. That was breaking an unwritten law. And there was this aura of loneliness around Mrs. Passworth, even in a crowded place. You never heard anything about a Mr. Passworth. She licked her cone and asked what our plans were for the summer. When we said we didn’t have any plans, she got all excited.

  “Really? Oh, that’s great! It’s a miracle! There’s a project at our church you’d be perfect for,” she said. “You’re both musicians, aren’t you?”

  Not really, we said — I played xylophone, glockenspiel, a little self-taught piano, and Tim played a bit of guitar. “Perfect!” she cried. “Piano and guitar are exactly what we need! I’m in charge of this fantastic new Christian rock musical our youth group is putting on. Two boys from the combo up and quit on me yesterday, the rats. Y’all are a gift straight from heaven!”

  “You don’t even know if we can play,” Tim said.

  “I’m sure you’ll do fine. The music’s easy. The next rehearsal is Sunday. You’d be absolutely saving my life. Plus you’d make good money. Oh, am I glad I ran into you.”