The Magic Keys

by Albert Murray

  I didn’t really know him, I said, but during my junior and senior years he did hire me to help him tidy up a term report and also to look up something in the library for him from time to time. And, of course, with him it was always cash on delivery. But as for borrowing money from him, man, not me. Man, that was for the ones who were getting those monthly or quarterly checks or money orders from home. Which old Jay was promptly collecting on because he had somebody in the campus post office keeping tabs on when each one of his debtors’ letters from home arrived.

  Which was when Taft Edison said, Well, I knew him well enough to bet that he wasn’t going to finish all of his courses and end his student status until he had accumulated enough capital to go directly from college into business on his own. Because I did know that he already had enough money to take a regular four-year course of study and that he wasn’t dependent upon any support from whatever family he had. Anyway, I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that he’s running his own business by now or even his own bank of some kind. Or that he actually is up here with something going on for him down on Wall Street.

  And when I said, Where the hell was he from?, he said, Florida, boy, and then he said, Somebody else that everybody probably remembers from those old bull sessions is old Freeman Clark. And then I said, Better known as the ghost of Marcus Garvey. And old Marcus Garvey himself wasn’t even dead yet, he said. And I said, Which is to say ghost as in Holy Ghost, man. Then I said, Zebra jockeys, man, zebra jockeys. I said, Man, Mr. B. Franklin Fisher had inoculated me and most of my classmates against all of that old zebra jockey hocky jive by the time we reached the ninth grade at Mobile County Training School.

  That was when Taft Edison said what he said about not having much time to spend on the stem and in the stem lounge, what with working in the library and living in the band cottage, and with all the hours he was required to spend down in those old rehearsal cubicles in the basement of Harrison Hall plus the sheet music copy work and also the endless reading time involved in preparing for Mr. Carlton Poindexter’s junior-year course in the novel.

  But I did have one part-time buddy that I used to run with every now and then, he said. Old sleepy-eyed Sid Palmer. You must have known him. We were the same year but he was in the School of Education, majoring in science with a minor in math. He used to make it down to old Jay Gould’s floating concerns pretty regularly. But when he’d get the urge to hit a few spots in the outlying regions he always checked to see if I could go along, and whenever I could I would, beginning back during that first summer that I spent down there. Man, I stuck pretty close to prescribed campus routine during my freshman year. So by that next summer I was beginning to figure that I knew enough about who was who and what was what and where on campus to do a little extracurricular exploration and by that time I also knew enough about old Sid Palmer to take him up on his invitation to come along on a few rounds in the outlying districts.

  He went on eating his clam chowder, smiling to himself as he remembered his days on the campus again. And then he said, Old Sid Palmer, down there from Richmond, Virginia. Man, being a loner that I guess I’ve always tended to be, old Sid was about the nearest I ever came to having a running mate down there, not that the two of us actually had any common career objectives. He didn’t seem to have any trouble getting passing grades in those School of Education courses he was taking, but my guess is that he was really interested in becoming some kind of school administrator, not a classroom teacher. Anyway, the only books he read were the ones required by his assignments, mostly chapter by chapter as assigned. But come to think of it, he was pretty keen on the statistics of tests and measurements, which he was taking during our junior year.

  He shook his head still remembering, and then smiling he said, We did have fun hitting those joints together though, but that was about it. We liked the same joints, but we never really talked very much about barrelhouse, honky-tonk, and gut-bucket music as such, except to mention the local guys that we liked or didn’t really think very much of. Anyway, when I think about old Sid and all of that now, I give us both credit for realizing that it was something that we should stay in touch with in spite of the fact that most of our teachers seem to regard it as something beneath the taste of the kind of respectable people college-educated people were supposed to be.

  I said I knew what he meant because I had gone to college not only from the Mobile County Training School of Miss Lexine Metcalf and Mr. B. Franklin Fisher, but also from the Gasoline Point of old Luzana Cholly and Stagolee Dupas fils and old Claiborne Williams of Joe Lockett’s-in-the-Bottoms. And that is also when I went on to say what I said about the one and only Mrs. Abbie Langford, the legendary housemother of the upperclassmen’s dormitories on the upper end of the campus who was actually employed as the supervisor of housekeeping and maintenance by the Buildings and Grounds Department but acted as if her authority came from the Dean of Men’s Office and the Disciplinary Committee.

  Man, I said, not that I have any plans to be heading back down in that direction anytime soon, but boy, just wait till I tell her that old Taft Woodrow Edison is up here in New York City and is still as quietly studious and as dapper as ever, but is carrying a Madison Avenue briefcase instead of a trumpet case.

  And when he said, Man, how is that old battle-ax, I said, Still there as far as I know, still exactly the same, and still outraged at the slightest mention of your name.

  Oh, boy, he said, shaking his head, and we both laughed and he said, Man, she had me all figured out and sized up on her own and she wouldn’t let me tell her anything.

  Everybody down there at that time knew the story about Taft Edison and Mrs. Abbie Langford. When he arrived on campus for his freshman year he was not only ten days early, but all he had with him was a state scholarship voucher and one extra shirt and a change of underwear and his toilet articles all folded up inside a twill topcoat, which he rolled so that he could carry it slung over his shoulder with a belt like a knapsack.

  He had hoboed and hitchhiked all the way from Oklahoma City and had arrived so far ahead of time that he decided to look for a temporary job to pay for interim room and board until official check-in and registration day. And when the grand old gal heard this story from somebody she not only hired him for the time being, but she also started talking about how if he passed the promptness and precision work test on his temporary tasks as the indigent young Booker T. Washington had done so well to enter Hampton she might sponsor him; and for the next week and a half he had bunked in a basement room and helped the janitors and listened to her praise him for being another young Booker T. letting down his bucket and getting ready to be the next one to keep one foot on the trail between the farmland and shop or factory while he stretched the other all the way to tea in the White House and board meetings on Wall Street.

  But behold! Outrage! Scandal! Flimflam!!!

  His trunk arrived and it turned out that he not only had a trumpet that was more expensive than any brass instrument owned by anybody else on the campus, music school instructors included; but he also had a wardrobe that was as up-to-date as anything in the September issue of Esquire, the number one men’s fashion magazine of the day. The twill topcoat that he had used as a knapsack and bedroll turned out to be the latest thing in what my roommate (who also had one) and I called cloak-and-dagger trench coats.

  She was so outraged that she threatened to have him kicked off the campus as an impostor who had come not because he was seeking higher learning and the uplift of his people, but to take advantage of inexperienced younger students and well-meaning but unsuspecting staff and faculty members. She didn’t follow through with her threat when he explained that he was there all on his own and with no family support whatsoever and that he had spent a whole year between finishing high school and his arrival on campus working in a haberdashery shop earning enough money to supplement his scholarship grant and also outfit himself (at employees’ discount rate) in the attire of a self-respecting collegian.<
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  Man, he said, I wasn’t about to let anybody treat me like a charity case because I had to have a job to supplement my scholarship grant. Not that I had anything against that Booker T. Washington and Horatio Alger true uplift grit that they were forever evangelizing as the salvation of the masses, but it was just not for me. My mother had to help me to get that far and when I finished high school I was on my own because she had my younger brother to take care of and she said she was very confident that I could not only look out for myself from then on but would also find a way to make myself somebody special.

  And that was also when he said what he said about finding his own way, which reminded me of what Miss Lexine Metcalf would say to me about how I was one who would have to go wherever I would go and do whatever I would do in order to find out for myself whatever I should try to make of myself. Miss Lexine Metcalf, who also said, Who if not you? and then always also called me her splendid young man. Who if not you?, my splendid young man. Which is also what Miss Tee, who almost always spoke as if for Mama herself, implied when she called me her mister. My mister. Here comes my mister. Hello, my mister. Because what Mama had always said from as early on as I ever remembered was, Mamma’s little scootabout man, that’s what him is.

  But I didn’t say anything about that at that time. I said what I said about Miss Abbie Langford. I said, Man, you know how some of these old house mothers are about some students that they always remember for one reason or another. Man, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years later, when certain ones come back for class reunion, old Abbie Langford is right there expecting them to come by to see her and be reminded of something she reprimanded them for doing however many years ago.

  And before he said what he was going to say I said, Hey, but reunion or no reunion, man, you are still one of the ones she remembered every time she heard somebody mention your name while I was down there: You all talking about Taft Edison? That old Taft Woodrow Edison could blow that horn like John Philip Sousa himself when he wanted to and he also could have become another R. Nathaniel Dett. So they used to say over in that music school. But with all them quiet manners and bow ties, and special tailor-made clothes, he was still tangled up with all that old low-life music, too, him and that old Night-hawk Palmer.

  As we came on outside again and headed back along Forty-second Street he shook his head chuckling and said, Well, the next time you’re down that way and see that old battle-ax you can tell her you saw old Taft Edison up in New York City still messing around some more of that old back-alley stuff that she didn’t report me and old Sid Palmer for. And tell her I’m not blowing any trumpet like John Philip Sousa or anybody else. Tell her I’m playing my riffs on a typewriter these days.

  When we came to the corner of Fifth Avenue, he said what he said about being almost ready to start reading sequences of his manuscript to me, and then just before he turned to head back up to Forty-ninth Street he reached into his right hip pocket and pulled out a set of brass knuckles and said, That old battle-ax never suspected that I was packing these, but man, you never know when you might have to take emergency action on some incoherent fool.

  VIII

  It was not until the night that I went up to his apartment at 749 St. Nicholas Avenue that I found out that Taft Edison was a longtime friend of Roland Beasley, the painter I had met in Paris before coming back to Alabama after the time I spent on the Côte d’Azur with Jewel Templeton.

  I had come uptown that evening because Taft Edison was finally ready for me to listen to him read a few scenes and sequences from the manuscript of the novel I knew he had been working on for some time but that he had not yet discussed in terms of any overall narrative context. So I was looking forward to finding out what the basic story line was. My guess was that the scene of at least some of the action would be a college campus based on the one where I first saw him when I was a freshman and he was a junior. The only hint, however, was what he had said that first afternoon as we came along Fifth Avenue up to Forty-seventh Street, and I said what I said about his briefcase not being the trumpet case that he had in college.

  When he called that morning and asked when I would have time to come by and listen to a few passages that he was thinking about selecting to fulfill requests for magazine publication, I got the impression that what he wanted first of all was my response to a narrator’s voice on a page, his angle of observation and context of recollection. Then he would want my immediate opinion of the literary quality and orientation that the verbal texture suggested.

  But when he opened the door for me to step down into the vestibule of his studio apartment, the first objects I noticed on the wall before following him through the door on the right were two watercolor abstractions mounted on pale blue mats and matching, rimlike maple frames. And when I said they reminded me of the matted tear sheets of abstract paintings with which my roommate had lined the wall from the head to the foot of his bed by the end of the fall term, he said they were the work of a friend of his.

  I also said it was my old roommate who told me about what books to check out of the library if I wanted to find out what modern art was about. And when I said, The first book I checked out was A Primer of Modern Art by Sheldon Cheney, Taft Edison said that it had to be the same copy he had checked out when he was a freshman because he worked in the library and there was only one copy of it in the collection.

  That was when I said what I said about my roommate growing up going to exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago because Chicago was his hometown and also said that he was enrolled in the Department of Architecture, but he had a richer background in the humanities than all the students in the liberal arts courses that we took together. And Taft Edison said that the watercolor abstractions that I saw as I came in were the work of a friend of his who had gone to college to study mathematics but had become the painter whose work impressed him more than any other that he had seen by anybody else in Harlem.

  Then when he said who the painter was I said what I said about meeting him in Paris and as I did I also realized that I had not called him since coming to New York and also that I had not told Royal Highness about how I had gone over and introduced myself to Roland Beasley at the Metropole in Paris that afternoon because I overheard him telling his companion about seeing the great Royal Highness onstage back during the heyday of the old Lafayette and Alhambra Theaters.

  Old Rolly, Taft Edison said as we came on into the one-room plus bath plus stove and refrigerator nook apartment, and I saw the floor-to-ceiling bookshelves and other paintings, watercolors, drawing, and silk-screen reproductions. The furniture included his convertible couch and a coffee table that could be unfolded to become a six-place dining table.

  Look him up, man, Taft Edison said, giving me time to glance around. I’m sure he was right at home over there trying to come to personal terms with all of that heritage of articulate mankind. So you already know that he’s not just another one of these uptown provincials who have so few if any connections with the very things we went through what we went through to get up here to get next to. Look him up and go by and see some of his really ambitious pieces. I think he just might be the one to do for American painting what old Louie Armstrong and the Bossman are doing for American music.

  And that was also what he went on to say what he said about how local or idiomatic variations sometimes become not only widespread but also nationwide, just as a local joke, saying, tall tale or legend may come to be regarded as everybody’s common property. And then he also said, Look, as far as I’m concerned, if it’s supposed to be American art and it doesn’t have enough of our idiomatic stuff, by which I mean mostly down-home idiom, in there it may be some kind of artistic exercise or enterprise but it ain’t really American.

  I was ready for him to take my hat and trench coat then and when he hung them in the closet and came back saying what he said about what our old down-home stuff had done for church music not to mention pop tunes and ballroom music, I thought about Eric Th
readcraft and the Marquis de Chaumienne but I did not mention them because I did not want to use too much of the time that he may have hoped that I would be able to spend listening and responding to what he had planned to read. Which is also why when he asked me if I wanted to sip something I said, Maybe later.

  So, here we go, he said, pointing me to an overstuffed lounge chair as he turned and went over and sat in the swivel chair at his writing desk and began turning the pages of his manuscript, humming quietly to himself until he found the sequence he was looking for. Then he said, Let’s see how this comes across without any introduction.

  But then as he put on his reading glasses he smiled shaking his head and said, Look, I have just one restriction. I really want to know what you make of all this stuff. So I’m open to cross-examination. Except for one point. Man, don’t ask me why I’m trying to do whatever this stuff is about. With a pencil and a typewriter and not with valves and keys.

  Stipulated, my good fellow, I said, remembering my old roommate again, Stipulated. Then I said, But I must say this. What I remember about you down there on the campus I am surprised that you seem to have put that horn down altogether, but I’m not at all surprised that you are this serious about writing. After all, I was always more impressed with your interest in literature than with your special status as a scholarship student in the School of Music.

  Then I went on to point out that I had always remembered seeing him in the library more often than I could recall seeing him go to and from the School of Music or the band cottage. I also knew that he was an outstanding enough member of the band to be the student assistant who tuned the band for the bandmaster and who led the band when they played for the cheerleaders during football games in Alumni Bowl. But I didn’t mention that I couldn’t remember how he actually sounded on the trumpet. Nor could I remember whether he was a regular member of either of the two student dance bands. However, I did remember that he played with the chapel orchestra.