THEO BOYKIN WAS the smartest person in Piedmont County, and everybody knew it. Whether folks liked it or not was another matter. Theo, who was about the same age as Force, could do sums in his head better than Mrs. Bibben’s adding machine at the store, and he could read you anything he laid his hands on, even if he never saw it before in his life, without ever stumbling over a single word. One Fourth of July, when the parade marshal of Piedmont County waited till the last minute to line up his post-parade program, he couldn’t find but one person in Claytonville, Brennan, and Threestep combined who knew all the words to the Declaration of Independence. Theo was ten or eleven at the time. You’d better believe a murmur went through the audience when he stepped up to the podium on the courthouse lawn in Claytonville that day, but by the time he got to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness,” he had the whole audience in the palm of his hand. I’m told they applauded louder and longer for Theophilus Boykin than they had for the tap dancers or the Land of Liberty tableau.
He could draw, too. Miss Templeton, his teacher at the colored school out in the country, said one time that Theo was a Renaissance man, by which she meant he could do anything he put his mind to. This led to Miss Spivey calling him “Signor da Vinci” later on, when he was drawing up plans for the Baghdad Bazaar, beautiful sketches with numbers and arrows to show what went where. None of us knew who Signor da Vinci was until we had a lesson at school on him and Michelangelo that included the opportunity to lie on your back and paint whatever you wanted on the underside of your desk for as long as your arm could stand it.
When Theo came to Threestep School to see about Miss Spivey’s haunted house, Force and Ralphord and I came with him, as did his brother Eugene, a quiet boy who was a little younger than Theo but bigger and taller than all of us. Eugene waited outside, leaning against the trunk of the walnut tree. Miss Spivey invited him to come in, but he declined.
Theo hesitated at the back of the schoolroom himself, which caused me to remember something from a long time before. When I was in the first grade, my brother Force brought Theo to school with us one time, I don’t recollect why. Our teacher Miss Chandler met us at the door and explained that even though Theo Boykin was “smart as a whip,” the law prohibited her from allowing him inside Threestep School. She might have said that she could not permit him “to get a foot in the door,” but what I heard was “to put his foot on the floor,” which made me wonder. If somebody would pick him up and carry him, could Theo come inside? Or what if we put a carpet down for him to step on? I had some idea that his feet were the problem—like ours in walnut time—and I know I thought about pointing out to Miss Chandler, in my first-grade wisdom, that the bottoms of Theo’s feet were the lightest part of him and no threat at all to her floor. I had noticed this paleness on the hands and feet of colored people only recently. In fact, it was Theo Boykin who pointed it out to me. We were all cleaning white clay off ourselves after digging some out of a hole in the Boykins’ yard, when Theo rubbed his palms together and said, “Well, look at here, Gladys. That white dirt bleached the color right off my hands and feet!” This seemed plausible to me, especially in Piedmont County, where white dirt is abundant. His momma set me straight on the matter. She scolded him for teasing.
In the doorway of Threestep School, Theo Boykin took off his work shoes and carried them, one in each hand, across the threshold. He set his two bare feet flat on the pine floor, under which crickets were singing their swan song, it being late in October. You could see him take a quick inventory of the place: the neat rows of desks in three graduated sizes, the map that pulled down like a window shade, and the blackboard as big as the whole front wall of the room, except where the door to the half-room broke into it. The long tall windows, four on each side of the room, had glass in every pane but one, due to a ball game last winter.
Miss Spivey, who was waiting for us, acted like it was the most natural thing in the world for Theo Boykin to step inside Threestep School—“Come in!” she said, and “Please take a seat”—but she did seem a little shy about telling him what she had in mind for the haunted house. “Well, I thought we’d hang some sheets and wet string in the half-room,” Miss Spivey said, “and make people walk through it in the dark?”
Theo paced the length of the glorified closet that constituted the “half” in our one-and-a-half-room schoolhouse. It had no windows and no electric light and was almost completely dark. When he stood in the doorway, his white shirt and expertly patched gray pants were easier to see than the expression on his face.
Miss Spivey said, “What do you think?”
“Ma’am,” he said, “a white sheet never fooled anybody. What you need is something moving. We can fix it so if you open the door, things drop down and slide around—ghosts swooping like they’re coming to get you, like that. Spiders are good, too, and easy to fix up. And I might have time to make a skeleton, if I could get some help with that. I’ve got a skull we could use.” We all held our breath for a second when he said that. “A deer skull,” he said. “They’re about the right size. Skeleton’s the best, Miss Spivey. Nothing’s scarier than a skeleton rattling its bones. D’y’all know why?”
We knew just to wait, but Miss Spivey said, “Why?”
“Because everybody knows they’ve got one of those alive inside of them,” Theo said solemnly. “They’ve got to carry it into bed at night.”
The next morning, Miss Spivey set all twenty-six pupils of Threestep School loose in the woods around the schoolhouse to hunt up sticks and branches in specified sizes. By afternoon, all the fifth-through seventh-grade boys in possession of pocketknives were busy whittling the bark off the sticks and branches, turning them into skeleton bones. The rest of us used Miss Spivey’s stock of school scissors to cut large and small gray spiders out of a pile of old felt blankets she brought in. I, Gladys Cailiff, was part of a select group handpicked by Miss Spivey to thread and tie the whittled sticks together with scraps of fine copper wire, following a kind of bones-by-number system Theo had devised to enable us to construct what he called “a respectable fac-simile” of a skeleton. It took us three days to assemble the skeleton, and in the end it was not precisely like the ones we carry into bed with us at night, but close enough.
When Miss Spivey changed the date of the Halloween Costume Ball from Monday to Sunday, she lost Mr. Bibben, who had agreed to judge the pumpkin-carving contest in his turban, and also Mrs. Bibben, of course, and a few other folks who prayed on Sunday to the exclusion of everything else, but nobody held it against her, not even the Bibbens. Some people expected Reverend and Mrs. Stokes from Threestep Methodist Church to bow out, too, but they did not. The Reverend’s original position on the party was that it would keep the young folks out of mischief on Halloween night. Now that it was changed to the night before Halloween, Reverend Stokes claimed that his presence was needed more than ever to ensure a certain level of decorum and maintain the moral caliber of the event, seeing as it would take place on the Lord’s Day.
The Baptist Reverend Whitlock was heard to say that this was the most highly original interpretation of the Third Commandment he had ever heard.
Every evening that week, pounding and sawing and clattering could be heard coming from the schoolhouse. Theo and Force and my sister Ildred were working on a system of ropes and wires and pulleys to hang the ghosts and the skeleton. Ildred, who was three years older than Force, was mechanically inclined, even though she was a girl and born with one arm. (She used to say there was only one thing she couldn’t do, having only one arm, and that was to clap her hands.) They kept the side door out to the schoolyard locked, except for deliveries of supplies, which included biscuits from Momma and Mrs. Boykin, and odd boards and hoary objects scrounged by Ildred during the day. Miss Spivey spent every one of those evenings keeping watch over the half-room while they worked, often propping her teacher’s chair in the doorway to shed light on the project. Some nights, Eugene Boykin lent a hand, or one of the Veal boys. Usually they worked until almost eleven, stopping minutes before Mr. Wicker turned off his generator behind the barbershop, and the electric lights in Threestep, such as they were at that time, went out all at once, like a door slammed shut.
On the Friday before Halloween, it looked like everybody in town had come to see the costumes “straight from the bazaars of Baghdad” that Miss Spivey had hanging in the back of the schoolroom on a clothesline cleverly arranged by Theo Boykin to look like a giant spider web. Miss Spivey was worried that the men would balk at wearing the long brown robes that Force called “them dresses.” (Our momma muttered, “Don’t see why. They got no problem with white ones.”) To overcome any such resistance, Miss Spivey prevailed upon Force to dress up like a Bedouin, which is a man of the desert, in a long brown robe with a white-and-black scarf thing on his head and a pair of red leather boots that were killing his feet. Fifteen minutes before the drawing was set to commence, Miss Spivey sent him striding down through the middle of town as best he could in those boots, with the robe flying behind him and that scarf fluttering away from his square jaw, and before he reached the end of Main Street she had the deputy sheriff and a half dozen other men, including Reverend Stokes—along with most of the bigger boys in our school—lining up to drop their names into the hat in hopes of getting themselves fitted out like a man of the desert.
For three lucky female partygoers, Miss Spivey had hung on the wall three long gowns that she called “abayas”—one in blue, one in plain black, and one in black silk that was embroidered with gold thread. Each abaya gown came with a matching veil. You could see from the way they were hung on the line that, worn together, they would pretty much cover a body from head to toe. I put my sister May’s name in for the blue abaya, mainly because it was way too long for me to wear and blue was May’s color and maybe if she won she would come to Threestep for the party instead of waiting on pins and needles at home in McIntyre for her husband Ed to show up. Ed and our oldest brother Ebenezer traveled all across the state and clear up to Tennessee with their stove repair business, going into people’s homes and dismantling their stoves, replacing oven door hinges and cleaning stovepipes and the like. Their busiest time was from August until mid-October—after canning season but before winter—when folks could best afford to have their stove laid out in pieces in the yard. Neither Ed nor Ebenezer had any training in how to fix a stove, whether wood-burning or bottle-gas. They just went in and did it. They were already one week past due on their return from the stove repair circuit, so May was a wreck with worrying.
Miss Spivey waited until the last minute to pin up the harem lady costume, which consisted of long full trousers made of filmy sheer fabric, like voile or chiffon, to be worn over the smallest of short pants, with a little satin blouse that left most of Mamie Eskew’s middle showing when she tried it on after the drawing. It was the only costume in Miss Spivey’s trunk that did not come from Baghdad, she said, having been sent to her by a friend who lived in Hollywood, California. When Pinkie Lou Griffith saw it, she swore that it was identical to the outfit worn by the actress who stole the heart of Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., in The Thief of Baghdad, for which she, Pinkie Lou, had played the organ at the Dixie Way years ago. This Miss Spivey could not confirm or deny, so we were left with the possibility that Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., had touched the very costume that was pinned to the schoolroom wall. Where he might have put his hands was a question you couldn’t think about for long without straying into forbidden territory.
Mrs. Reverend Stokes and the Baptist minister’s wife Mrs. Whit lock, both of whom were present at the costume drawing, tried to enlist Reverend Stokes in a campaign to ban Mamie’s harem costume—the Reverend being famous for his annual “whores of Babylon” sermon about the dangers of going to the movies—but somehow he couldn’t see the harm in it. He was too busy sliding his knobby toes into the red leather boots to see if he could wear them with the Bedouin outfit for which Miss Spivey had already drawn his name. To the Reverend’s delight, the boots were a near-perfect fit.
Waiting for the doors to open on the night of the Halloween Costume Ball, my sister May, Florence Hodges, and Miss Pinkie Lou Griffith all looked like fancy ghosts floating around the schoolyard in the genuine Baghdad abayas and veils they’d won the chance to wear. May’s little girls were made up like Three Blind Mice in shirts and rolled-up pants from Ralphord, cardboard mouse ears, and dark glasses Ildred had made for them out of wire, with “lenses” cut from a cheesecloth bag stained black by walnuts. My own daddy joined my brother Force and Reverend Stokes as men of the desert—the Reverend’s red leather boots polished to a shine—while Mr. Hall looked more than fit to judge the pumpkin-carving contest in a green turban and a long blue “robe of honor,” Miss Spivey said it was. Cyrus Wood’s daddy and two other men wore their turbans with long white robes we knew they would be wearing again very soon with a change of headgear, Monday being Klan night. Roy Kemp and Ollie Harvey—sixth-graders both—were required by Miss Spivey to wash their hair in kerosene before she would consent to touch their heads, much less do either of them up in a turban. They went around all night smelling like torches.
In between wrapping turbans, Miss Spivey showed all the girls who’d come up with their own abayas and veils made of croker sacks or window curtains—which group included me—how to “tattoo” a ring of little blue crosses, such as Arab girls wore, around their ankles. We drained the inkwell on her desk bone-dry. Mavis Davis declined the blue crosses, insisting that she was a witch, not an Arab lady, although I noticed that she watched everybody else get theirs.
Miss Spivey herself wore a long, straight dress with a square neckline that seemed to be woven of different-colored threads in such a way that you couldn’t exactly say what color it was overall. This, she said, was the sort of dress that married ladies wore at home in Baghdad.
“How does she know what married ladies wear at home?” Mavis Davis said to the rest of us in the schoolyard while we held our makeshift gowns up off our ankles and waited for the ink to dry. “She ain’t married to anybody.”
I couldn’t help myself. I said, “How do you know what Miss Spivey is or ain’t?”
Mavis gave me a pitying look. “Gladys,” she said, “her name is MISS Spivey. Don’t you know what Miss means?”
“I reckon it means she’s missed her chance,” Florence Hodges said, and that set them all to giggling.
I was saved from pinching Florence Hodges, or otherwise getting myself in trouble, by a long and undulating shriek that could only mean Miss Spivey had unlocked the door to the House of Haunts and Terrors, thus allowing the first of the partygoers to find herself face-to-face with the ghost that dropped down from the ceiling when you opened the door. It was Pinkie Lou Griffith who went in first, we could tell by the melodious quality of her scream.
Except for the Gordons and Arnie Lumpkin’s folks, along with the most fervent of the Baptists and Mavis Davis’s mother, it looked like every white person in Threestep and the surrounding district was present at the costume ball, most of them in costume. Miss Spivey collected almost five dollars in three-cent admissions to the haunted house in the first hour alone. Everybody wanted to go through at least twice. The whole party would have gone off without a hitch if Mavis Davis hadn’t set out to find a little dance music on the radio. It was well before the ten o’clock time frame that Miss Spivey had designated for dancing (following the pumpkin-carving contest), but Mavis was tired of bobbing for apples and she had no intention of sticking her hands in any pumpkin guts, she said.
The radio was a tabletop model in a green Bakelite case bequeathed to the school by our old teacher Miss Chandler’s last will and testament. Enthroned on a table between two windows, the radio was surrounded on this occasion by a little army of caramel-coated apples and bowls of roasted pecans and the like. Mavis twirled the tuner knob until she found an orchestra playing in a hotel ballroom in New York City, at which point she turned it up as loud as she could without losing the music in a cloud of static. Everybody looked at Miss Spivey, who was helping the little kids carve pumpkins in the corner, to see what she thought of Mavis turning on the radio. Before Miss Spivey could say a word one way or the other, my sister Ildred—who’d bucked the Arabian tide to come as a turtle with half a cracker barrel for a shell—dragged our brother Force out into the open space between the apple bobbers and the pumpkin carvers for a foxtrot. Off they went, turtle shell, Bedouin robes, and all. Two more couples joined them—first Momma and my sister May (with her veil off but still looking lovely in the blue gown), and then Miss Spivey herself, with none other than the deputy sheriff in striped prison garb he’d borrowed from his cousin. Mavis—who was, I’m sure, expecting to annoy Miss Spivey—ignored the invitational gesticulations of Florence Hodges and sulked on the sidelines, though not for long. The dancers didn’t get once around the room before the radio announcer cut into the music and took us to New Jersey for a news report from a late-breaking story. Some kind of meteor-type object had fallen from the sky and made a big hole in a farm field out that way. The couples dancing bumped to a stop and everybody stood looking at the radio and listening to the reporter on the scene.
In 1938, a lot of folks in Piedmont County were still pretty much in awe of the miracle of the airwaves. The radio at Threestep School was one of only three in town, the others being in Bibbens’ store and at the home of Mr. Wicker, whose generator provided electricity for some folks in Threestep. The Gordons had a radio, too, but they lived closer to Claytonville, which was a bigger town and already electrified by then. We listened, entranced, in the schoolroom as the reporter described the object, which was shiny and smooth and didn’t look like a meteor at all, he said. Then he got even more excited because there was a door opening up on the object and out came somebody carrying something that sent out a brilliant ray of green light! Before long, you could hear a lot of screaming in the background, which was pretty disturbing, until all of a sudden, in the middle of a sentence about the green ray getting closer and closer, the report went dead. There was a moment of shocked silence while we looked at each other in our robes and gowns and turbans and veils and stripes and turtle shell, and then, just as the announcer came back with something about technical difficulties and a return to the ballroom and the music of Ramone Somebody, the double doors at the back of the schoolroom flew open, both at once. Arnie Lumpkin’s daddy came stumbling in, drunk as a skunk and smelling about as bad.
Over by the punch bowl, dressed as a ghost (he claimed) with a pillowcase over his head, Arnie looked like he was trying to hide himself in the crowd. His daddy was a trial to the whole Lumpkin family, but Arnie bore the brunt of it, seeing as Mr. Lumpkin always commenced beating on his firstborn and passed out, as often as not, before he got to anybody else. Arnie edged toward the half-room door while his father bellowed, “Zmah boy here?”
“Hold on there,” the deputy sheriff began, stepping toward Mr. Lumpkin, but he was drowned out by a chorus of “Ssshhhhh!” The radio announcer had broken into the music again to say that similar reports about smooth and shiny metal objects were coming in from all over the world. I don’t know what all else he had to say, because Ildred, who was standing right next to me, suddenly spun around toward the window and hissed, “Whoever is knockin’ on my shell better knock it off di-rectly!”
There was a Bedouin standing outside the window behind us with his headscarf drawn across his face. In Theo Boykin’s voice he said, “This is that Mercury show on the radio! Mercury Theatre.”
“Where’d you get that outfit?” I said. On the radio it was something about spaceships.
“Listen to me,” said Theo. “It’s Mercury Theatre on that radio. They do a different story every week. What he said about Martians? It’s not for real. It’s just a story. D’y’all understand what I’m saying?”
In a flash, Ildred understood. “Go git Force over here,” she told me, and then she plunged under the table, in search of the electrical plug.
In the meantime, all ears were tuned to the radio. Even Arnie’s daddy looked like he was listening. Another reporter was talking now, more excited than the last one. He was broadcasting from a hotel in New York City, he said. Martians were coming across the Hudson River there. A thick black fog was rolling in with them, he said. They were a hundred yards from the hotel where he was. He promised to stay on the air as long as he could, but he was coughing already. The Martians looked like giant insects, he said, talking fast. They had tentacles.
Somebody whispered, “What they got?”
The fog was rolling toward the hotel. It was fifty yards away. Thirty, the man said, coughing and coughing.
“What is it?” Arnie Lumpkin’s daddy was swaying on his feet and looking around at everybody like he wondered who we all were. “What the hell is goin’ on?”
Mr. Hall said, “It’s Martians, for God’s sake. They’re fixin’ to take over!” He sounded about equal parts annoyed with Mr. Lumpkin and plain scared to death.
Twenty yards, said the reporter. He could barely get the words out. Ten. There was a sound like something heavy hitting the floor. And then the radio went dead.
Ildred had unplugged it. Her intentions were good but her timing was bad. By the time she could get herself out from under the table and up on her feet, Arnie Lumpkin’s daddy had figured out the sense of what Mr. Hall had said about the Martians. Mr. Lumpkin dropped, sobbing, to his knees and cried, “Oh, my Jesus Lord, save us!” whereupon Mrs. Reverend Stokes fainted dead away, her fortune-teller’s bells and beads jingling down into a heap on the floor. Efforts to find another station on the unplugged radio were to no avail, which only seemed to prove that there was nobody left on the air, and I swear there was some genuine wailing and gnashing of teeth going on when my brother Force—him and Ildred and Theo having put their heads together over by the window—got himself up on a chair. He lifted his magnificently robed arms.
“Hey!” he cried. “Hey! Y’all listen up!”
The sight of my brother on that chair with his arms open wide and his handsome face framed by desert headgear caught everybody’s attention. The wailing and gnashing petered out until only Mr. Lumpkin’s sloppy sobs could still be heard. Force called to Theo over his shoulder, “Now tell ’em what you told me.”
All eyes turned to the Bedouin outside the window. With his scarf pulled across his face, the way a man of the desert might do in a sandstorm, there was no way to tell by looking that it was Theo under there. Even when he began to speak in his calm and reasonable Theo voice, folks still didn’t seem to recognize him. I heard murmurings around me of, Who is that? and so forth as he told them that there was no cause for alarm, they were listening to Mercury Theatre on the Air, which program Theo had listened to one week ago on the Bibbens’ radio. They had announced last week that tonight’s show, special for Halloween, would be “The War of the Worlds,” based on a book by H. G. Wells. That’s what we all heard on the radio, he said, and if we could just cut it back on, he was pretty sure everything would turn out all right. The Martians get wiped out by earth germs in the end. “Anyhow,” Theo said, the cloth poofing away from his mouth with every syllable, “that’s what happens in the book.”
“Who the hell is that under there?” Arnie Lumpkin asked menacingly.
“It’s Theo Boykin!” somebody said.
Arnie followed that with a snarl. “Y’all got Negroes at this party?”
Negroes is not the word Arnie used.
Miss Spivey told Arnie sharply that it was time for him to take his blubbering father on home. She didn’t actually say blubbering, but then she didn’t have to, because he still was. Arnie did not utter another word, but if looks could kill, like they say, Theo would have been dead right then. Miss Spivey, too, I expect.
I caught sight of Mavis Davis over by the radio, sinking her teeth into a caramel-coated apple with obvious satisfaction. If she thought she’d succeeded in ruining the party, however, she was wrong. Miss Spivey clapped her hands the way she did at school to restore order. She pointed at two boys to help Arnie pick his daddy up off the floor, and we got the radio back on in time to hear Mr. Orson Welles (no relation to H. G. and spelled with an extra e, Theo explained later) inviting us to tune in next week for the chilling story of “Brian’s Brain.” He wished us all a happy Halloween.
After the fact, most folks who were at Miss Spivey’s Halloween Costume Ball remembered the whole Martian episode—even the part where Mrs. Reverend Stokes had to be revived with a splash of cider—as if it were all part of the entertainment, which, in a manner of speaking, it was. People like to be scared, as long as it comes out all right, although Momma and my sister May were both up half the night comforting May’s little girls, who kept waking up and needing a story or a song to chase away the pictures in their minds—not of Martians, but of all those grown-up people bent over the radio in their peculiar outfits, their usually calm and knowledgeable faces distorted by bewilderment and fear. It was some consolation for me to recall waking up during the night to hear May’s voice in the next room, singing or telling the girls a story.
The question of Theo’s costume came up. Miss Spivey said she had given it to him as a reward for all the hard work he’d put into the decorations for the party. Theo Boykin had remained outside the schoolhouse while the party was in progress, after all, and it was a measure of the success of Miss Spivey’s Night-Before-Halloween Costume Ball that everybody agreed—and Mr. Gordon himself later confirmed—that there was no rule of law, written or unwritten, that a colored boy could not wear a costume on occasion. If anything, Miss Spivey said at one point, a trifle bitterly, didn’t the state of Georgia’s “mask law” give every citizen express permission to cover his face and dress up like any kind of fool, on Halloween?
Nobody cared to remind her that the party did not take place on Halloween.
The deputy sheriff cost us a moment’s breath at school on Monday, after the party, by showing up like he was on official business. He hadn’t come for anything but to tell Miss Spivey that, for all the excitement, no complaints had been filed. “You don’t have a thing to worry about,” he told her.
“Well, that is a piece of good news, isn’t it?” Miss Spivey said, leaving poor Deputy Sheriff Linwood Perkins baffled as to why she looked so put out over a piece of good news.
On the evening of that same day, October 31, 1938, the last Monday of the month, men in hoods and robes did gather at Mr. Gordon’s law office, but the big doings they had planned—to take full advantage of the holiday exception to the state mask law—did not occur, even though Mr. Gordon had spent Saturday and Sunday helping his yardman hack the branches off two twelve-foot pine trees and then supervising some of his best Ghouls as they erected a great big cross on a ridge outside of town. They claimed it would be visible, lit, from as far as Milledgeville. At home on Sunday night, however, Mr. Gordon had rested from his labors by listening to the radio, and even though he knew by the end of the broadcast that it was just a made-up story, the night sky looked different to him afterward. All of a sudden, he couldn’t work up any enthusiasm for burning a great big cross out in the open on a hill you could see from Milledgeville. It felt too much like lighting up a signal fire to catch the eye of someone watching from the heavens. Months would pass before Mr. Gordon’s enthusiasm for such doings returned in full.