The Spyglass Tree by Albert Murray Read Free Book Online Page B

Creola Calloway was never to go anywhere with any road show. It turned out that in spite of all the speculation and predictions that everybody else had been making over the years, by the time she was almost nineteen she had decided that she didn’t want to leave Gasoline Point. All she wanted to do was goon having a good time, making the rounds from one jook joint and honky-tonk to the next as she had begun doing not long after she dropped out of school (truant officers or no truant officers) even before she finished the ninth grade.
    Some people said that she just stayed on in Gasoline Point because she hadn’t ever been able to figure out what she was supposed to do about being so good-looking except to act as if it didn’t really matter. But most others realized that talk like that had more to do with bewilderment if not exasperation than with insight, because all that anybody could actually quote her as saying was that she did not want to go on the road because she did not want to leave Gasoline Point.
    And that was that. She didn’t even insist that what she chose to do with her own life was her own private business, because she had already made that point once and for all by dropping out of school when she did. But even so, most of the people who had always concerned themselves about her future all along went right on reacting as if her beautiful face and body were really sacred community commonwealth property and that she therefore had an inviolable obligation to turn into some sort of national credit not only to Gasoline Point and Mobile but also to the greater glory of our folks everywhere.
    Nobody ever either accused her of or excused her for not having enough nerve, gall, guts, and get-up to take a chance out on the circuit and up North. Self-confidence was not the problem. Not for Creola Calloway. The problem was her lack of any interest in what, in the slogan of Mobile County Training School (and most church auxiliaries as well), was, A commitment to betterment. Given her God-given assets, that was not just disappointing and exasperating, it made her somebody even more reprehensible than a backslider. it was a betrayal of a divine trust.
    That is why by the time she was twenty so many people hadgiven her up as a lost ball in the high weeds and no longer called her old Creola Calloway (with a passive smile) but that old Creola Calloway (with their eyes rolling). Nor did the outrage have anything to do with the fact that she spent so much time hanging out in jook joints and honky-tonks. There were many church folks who condemned that outright to be sure, but the chances are that if she had gone north and become a famous entertainer like, say, Bessie Smith or Ethel Waters, she would have had their blessing along with everybody else’s.
    But she stayed right on in the old Calloway house on Front Street by the trolley line even after Miss Cute (also known as Q for Queenie and as Q T.), who had always been more like a very good-looking older sister than a mother anyway, had gone up North and decided to get married again and settle down in Pittsburgh.
    She did pay Miss Cute a visit from time to time and she also used to take the L & N up to Cincinnati and continue on up to Detroit to spend time with her brother every once in a while. His name was Alvin Calloway, Jr., but everybody always called him Brother Calloway, not as in church brother but as if you were saying Buddy Calloway or Bubber Calloway or even Big Brother or Little Brother Calloway. He must have been about three or four years older than his sister and there wasn’t a better automobile mechanic in Gasoline Point before he left to go and get a job in an automobile factory.
    One time he came down for Easter in a brand-new Cadillac and she drove back with him and was gone for ten days, and another time she was away for a month because she also spent some time visiting cousins in Cleveland and Chicago. Everybody knew about those trips and also about the