Down Sand Mountain

IT WAS THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST 1966, and me and Wayne and Dad and about two hundred people were sweating and stinking in the auditorium of the Sand Mountain High School, home of the Mighty Mighty Miners. We were there for the Rotary Club Minstrel Show, but Wayne fell asleep after fifteen minutes. When he did that in church, Mom always said it was because of his hay fever and let him alone. That night of the minstrel show, I stayed awake with Dad, who was the treasurer of the Rotary Club, although as it turned out, he fell asleep, too. I sometimes wished I had hay fever like them so I could fall asleep anywhere. I also wished I had a bag of marbles with me, since the auditorium floor was slanted and if you dropped them on the hardwood floor, they would probably roll all the way down to the stage. Not that I wouldn’t about die if I ever did that and got caught.

Dad couldn’t carry a tune — that’s what my mom said. I remember the day she said it, I asked her, “Carry it where?” and she said, “Oh boy, here we go again.” Anyway, that’s why he wasn’t in the minstrel show but down in the audience with us. They started up with a prayer, “Lord bless us and keep us,” then the Pledge of Allegiance, then the Rotary Club song —“R-O-T-A-R-Y, that spells Rotary. R-O-T-A-R-Y is known on land and sea. From north to south, and east to west, He profits most who serves the best.” After that a guy sang “Old Man River,” then a kid I knew shuffled onto the stage and it was Boopie Larent, who was twelve, the same as me, and used to be a friend of mine. We were in the same kid choir at the Methodist Church. He wore a white bow tie, which I bet somebody tied for him, and white gloves, and big white lips, and his face was shoe-polish black, not like real colored people. He sang “Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy,” which was about a very happy colored boy who shined people’s shoes and made them happy, too.

Boopie carried a shoe-shine kit and danced soft-shoe. That’s what my dad told me it was. It just looked like sliding around to me, then some leaning way forward, and some running in place to keep from pitching over on his face while he windmilled his arms. The only other kids I ever saw dance before that were the twins Darla and Darwin Turkel, who always tap-danced at County Fair, where my dad worked in the Rotary Club corn-dog booth. Darla and Darwin were all dressed up with their mom a couple of rows in front of us that night at the minstrel show. Their mom used to wear a mermaid costume and do underwater ballets and stuff over at Weeki Wachee Springs by the Gulf of Mexico. Now she taught dancing lessons sometimes. Darla had fifty-two ringlets in her hair, just like Shirley Temple, or that was the story, anyway. Everybody said to stay away from Darwin — he was worse than a girl.

I realized something about halfway through Boopie doing the “Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy.” “Is that my shoe-shine kit?” I asked my dad. I was holding his hand, feeling his calluses. I was too old to be holding his hand — when you get to be twelve, you’re too old for a lot of things — but I did it anyway and he let me when it was dark like that in the auditorium and nobody could see. I liked how it felt from him working at the phosphate mine where he was an engineer, only not the kind that drove a train.

I thought maybe my dad was listening to the show and that’s why he didn’t answer, so I asked him again. “Is that the shoe-shine kit you bought me, Dad?” I don’t know why it made me mad. But if it was my shoe-shine kit, I thought I ought to get to be the Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy. Everybody was laughing at old Boopie up there, and the harder they laughed, the more I wished it was me. I wanted to be funny like that, and dance, and sing, and wear a white tie and white gloves and white lips and shoe-shine face darker than the colored people.

“Dad!” I said again. He was asleep like Wayne, like it was Sunday and we were in church. He opened his eyes and I asked him once more.

“Hush, Dewey,” he said. “I let them borrow it. They needed it for Boopie’s routine.” Boopie dropped down on one knee about then. A fat man came onstage and stepped his shoe on the slanted footrest on top of the kit so Boopie could buff it with a shine rag. That was my job on Sunday mornings, shining my dad’s shoes and then my own shoes before we went to Sunday school. Wayne had to do his own.

Boopie finally quit singing and buffing. It was the end of the “Chattanooga Shoe-Shine Boy,” and him and the fat guy danced off the stage. Only as soon as they disappeared, they ran back with all the other men in their minstrel show costumes, more fat men in black suits and black painted faces, until they stopped and spread their arms out and sang really fast out of their big white lips:

Swanee, how I love you, how I love you, my dear old Swanee.

I’d give the world to be among the folks in D-I-X-I-E-ven now.

After that it was Mister Bones and Mister Interloculator, with colored faces like the rest of the others. Mister Bones looked like the choir director at our church. Mister Interloculator looked like Boopie’s dad.

“Did I hear correctly that you asked your wife if she believed in the Hereafter?”

“Well, you see, Mister Interloculator, it happened thisaway. I comes home and I says to my wife, ‘Wife, does you believe in the Hereafter?’ and she says, ‘What you talking? You knows I do.’ So I says to her, ‘That’s good, honey, that’s mighty good, on account of I is here, and you knows what I is after.’”

I didn’t get it, exactly, and asked Dad what the heck that was all about. He said he’d explain later, but he never did.

On the way out after the minstrel show, we saw a real colored man, Chollie the janitor, pushing his mop and bucket in to clean up. My dad said, “Good evening, Chollie,” and Chollie said, “How are you, Mr. Turner?” Somebody else walking out behind us said really loud, “Mistuh Chollie!” It was Mr. Hollis Wratchford, who ran the produce market downtown, under the Skeleton Hotel. He said Chollie’s name a couple of more times, like he enjoyed the sound of it. Then he said, “You’re the expert, Chollie. What is your assessment on the minstrels this year?”

Chollie nodded and nodded and worked his mop handle back and forth as if the answer might come out of the soapy water in his pail, but also as if he’d rather not answer at all. My dad had told me Chollie lost his job at the mine after the strike last year and Dad helped him to get on at the high school. Chollie looked at Mr. Wratchford’s feet. “Yes, sir,” he finally said, still nodding. “I believe the jury coming in with a guilty verdict on that one, Mr. Wratchford. The gentlemen of the Rotary Club might of out-colored the colored folk tonight.”

Mr. Wratchford laughed and slapped Chollie on the shoulder and gave him a dollar, then he repeated what Chollie said to everybody else all the way down the stairs, laughing every time, and I heard him until we got outside, where there was a bunch of people looking up at something on the roof and laughing, too. Me and Dad and Wayne stepped farther away toward First Street and then we saw it — an old, wood outhouse with a crescent moon somebody must have hauled up on top of the high school. There was a sign on the door, but the words were too small to read from where we were. The high-school boys were always doing funny stuff like that. Wayne told me that the seniors caught every seventh-grader during the first month of school, all the boys, and held them down, pulled up their shirts, and gave them red bellies, which I was very nervous about and which was why I didn’t want to start the seventh grade. I wished we had a junior high at Sand Mountain, but I guess the town was too small for something like that.

After a while we went home and told my mom. She said, “Oh, for goodness sake, what’s wrong with these people?” The way she said it made me think she didn’t just mean why would they haul an outhouse on top of the high school. They had a picture of the outhouse in the Sand Mountain Citizen a couple of days later, which was the only newspaper we got except for the Sunday Tampa Tribune my dad bought so he could sleep with it over his face while he watched football on TV after church. The sign wasn’t in the picture, though. Wayne, who was going into eighth grade that year, told me it had said COLORED PEOPLE GO TO THE BATHROOM HERE, only the newspaper got rid of it before they took the picture, and it didn’t say COLORED PEOPLE, and it didn’t say GO TO THE BATHROOM, either. I don’t know how Wayne knew that stuff. I guess when you’re older like him you just do.

I asked him why anybody wanted the colored people to use an outhouse on the roof, and he said, “They don’t want them to go to school there.” I said, “But the colored people don’t go to school there, just white people,” and he said, “Well, they don’t want the government to make them let them go to school there.” I still didn’t get it. But that’s the way things always were in my family, and in the whole town as far as I could tell. You asked a million questions but you never knew what was really going on.