THE FIRST THING we actually built, after a period of scrounging up lumber and wheels and retrieving old nails and hinges and the like, was the minaret. When Theo carried the preliminary drawings over to our house to see what Force and Ildred thought before he showed them to Miss Spivey, my brother Ralphord took one look and said with delight, “That there’s a crow’s nest! Are we making a crow’s nest?” (Prior to the arrival of Miss Spivey and The Arabian Nights, Ralphord’s favorite story was Treasure Island.) To most of us at Threestep School, Theo’s idea of a minaret looked like a balcony with a hidden ladder up the back and nowhere to go from there. Mavis Davis saw a nine-foot-tall version of the baptismal font in the back of Threestep Methodist Church—a resemblance that she found blasphemous and which she conveyed to us via Florence Hodges, Mavis herself having nothing to do with the Baghdad Bazaar, on principle. Later, when we got it painted white, everyone could see that Mavis had a point.
The lumber and nails came from an abandoned springhouse in the woods behind Threestep School and the unburned half of our old chicken coop, which my brother Ebenezer helped us take apart board by board.
Miss Spivey supervised the construction according to Theo’s specifications, with a certain amount of well-meaning interference from Mr. Bibben, who was sworn to secrecy about the whole thing. To start with, she lined up a dozen volunteers after school, each of us with a hammer in hand and a pile of springhouse or chicken coop boards stretched out on the dirt at our feet, nails sticking up everywhere. Our job was to bang the nails out backwards just far enough to flip the board over and use the claw end of the hammer to pull them out the rest of the way, so the boards could be used again. Each person also had a little sack to save the nails in. It took a while to get a feel for the work, but I can tell you there’s a real sense of satisfaction when you catch hold of a nail head just right and pull that whole nail up out of the wood smooth and straight as drawing a knife up through butter, even though the wood is squealing about having to let it go. Miss Spivey said it was no coincidence that big strong fellows like Arnie Lumpkin couldn’t get the hang of it, whereas girls like me and Harriet Eskew got really good at easing those nails out of the wood. She said that applying the right kind of pressure in exactly the right place was superior to the application of brute force, at which point my brother Force stood up and pounded his chest like Tarzan in the movies.
Miss Spivey also set us to experimenting with white dirt, both in school and out. We were looking for an unlimited quantity of free white paint and plasterlike material, she said, and everybody whose yard was full of the stuff was required to bring in a bucket or two. We painted boards with every kind of combination she could think of: white dirt and water (cracked when it dried); white dirt, cornstarch, and water (cracked less); white dirt and corn oil (slipped off); white dirt and kerosene (stank). With all that experimenting, we were still no closer to what Miss Spivey was after, until Ildred stopped by Threestep School very early one morning on her way home from O’Quinn’s pond with a foot-long string of bluegills that she planned to cook up for breakfast. Nobody was at school yet, but the door was open, so she slapped those fish down on Arnie Lumpkin’s desk in the back row—we all could smell the evidence of that for the rest of the day—and she proceeded to examine the results of our experiments thus far, which were laid out on the floor by the windows.
When she determined that we were not going about our research in a sufficiently systematic manner, she took over for us. She set out like a regular scientist in the remaining half of the scorched-black chicken coop adjacent to Daddy’s melon fields, where she lined up her tin cans half full of white dirt (ground and pounded to varying degrees of fineness) on the rough wooden shelves where the chickens used to roost. She added different things to the white dirt in each can, carefully wrapping a label around it so she’d remember what was what. The labels were tied on the cans with bits of string and strips of cloth, which gave them a festive look. (Ildred could tie any knot with one hand, don’t ask me how.) Leaning against the shelves behind each can was a piece of wood the size of an individual blackboard slate. Some of the boards were solid white but cracked all over, most had dark spots where chunks of white coating had fallen off, and some were barely gray, as if the whiteness had been absorbed by the wood. About a week into her experiments, Ildred showed Miss Spivey a board completely coated in white that was solid and dry and only slightly flaky at the edges.
“This here’s what you get if’n you mix white dirt with butter beans.”
Miss Spivey took the board and tilted it to the light. She tried to pick a bit off with her fingernail and looked pleased. “Butter beans,” she said.
“It sticks pretty good to wood. Must be something in the beans works as a bonding agent.”
“What kind of agent?” I said.
Ildred shot me a look. “Theo was over here, him and Force, with the chemistry book. He said that’s what we’re looking for. A bonding agent. To make it stick.”
Theo Boykin knew white dirt from experience as well as books. At least half the Boykins’ little farm was nothing but a thin layer of red dirt over untapped depths of white. When a tree fell over in their yard, a white cave was exposed underneath it. Ants brought up little balls of white along with the red clay, which made their anthills pink. Once, in a serious dry spell, the Boykins’ old well turned milky, but Theo’s father dug them a new one before he died. The white dirt beneath the surface of their scrubby acres did not matter much to the Boykins, except insofar as it limited what they could plant, until Mr. Gordon started trying to get them to sell him the rights to mine it.
In addition to being keeper of Klan night and Threestep’s only lawyer, Mr. Gordon went around the county regularly, trying to talk people into leasing him the mineral rights to their farmland. The way Mr. Gordon explained it, if the owner of the farmland signed a lease, he (or she, as in Mrs. Boykin) would get a certain amount of rent money per acre per year just to keep anybody else from having the right to dig up any white dirt underneath that farm. Once a company started actually mining, they would pay the farmer even more for the white dirt taken from the land, Mr. Gordon said, as much as ten cents per ton, on top of the annual rent. Theo Boykin’s daddy died in 1934, I believe, which was about the time the kaolin companies were getting very interested in the surrounding farmland, enough so they sent fellows like Mr. Gordon around to see what they could buy up. Mr. Boykin used to say he’d be happy if they could suck all the white dirt right out from under his feet, but he sure wasn’t fool enough to sign control of his land over to anybody in the meantime.
Mr. Gordon sent a heap of flowers for Mr. Boykin’s funeral and he waited a decent interval before he started coming by the Boykins’ place again with his papers, encouraging Theo’s momma to sign. He came to our place, too, not because it was loaded with kaolin, but he thought if we signed and started getting our annual rent, for doing nothing whatsoever, we might help talk “the widow” into signing, too. With Mr. Boykin gone, Mr. Gordon thought it was only a matter of time before he got his lease, but Mr. Gordon hadn’t reckoned on Theo. Theo had already thought to take a bucket of white dirt from his yard over to the pottery, where Mr. Veal the foreman was pretty nice to him on account of his daddy dying on the job there. According to what Mr. Veal told Theo, Mr. Gordon was going to turn around and sell those leases to a kaolin company in an arrangement that would mean a lot more money for him and the company than for the farmer who signed the lease. “The better your dirt, the bigger the gyp,” Mr. Veal said. In a shed heaped with broken bricks and cracked clay tiles, he helped Theo mix vials of his white dirt with various liquids and all, to determine the quality of it. Theo said Mr. Veal glanced around the shed and lowered his voice to say, “Don’t sign nothin’ yet. That’s my advice, boy, but don’t tell nobody I said so. Don’t sign a thing.”
Planning for the Baghdad Bazaar gradually took up more and more of our time out at May’s on Saturdays, much to Miss Templeton’s mostly unspoken dismay. When we were finished with lessons, we would sit around the table talking and eating biscuits with maypop jelly. A lot of the time, it was Miss Spivey telling us about Baghdad, the real Baghdad, while Theo Boykin took notes—not in words but in pictures. With a few pencil lines and shadings in his notebook or on a sheet of art paper, Theo could make you see tunnellike streets with buildings crowding over them, as if the arched windows and stone balconies on one side had secrets to whisper to the houses on the other. He could make you see a boy leading a laden donkey to the stone bank of the Tigris River just below Miss Spivey’s hotel window, or the cool white and black stone tiles on the floor of her rooms there, or the arched and domed house next door, where “little married ladies,” as she called them, would gather on the flat part of the roof in their long dresses and veils. In Baghdad, Miss Spivey said, people used their roofs like we used our porches, for a cool place to sit in the evening or to sleep on a hot night. (Except in Baghdad, there were no mosquitoes!) The roof had a wall along the edge, waist-or shoulder-high, for privacy and safety, she said. The little married ladies on the roof next door liked to show Miss Spivey things: an arrangement of flowers, a fancy box, the fabric of their dresses, or a new pair of shoes. “They’d climb up on a chair or a stool so I could see them better,” Miss Spivey said. Once, one of them held up a baby for her to see, wrapped, like Jesus, in swaddling clothes. All the while Miss Spivey was talking about these things, Theo would be hunched over his notebook, and when she was finished, he’d slide it across the table and show us what he’d drawn: three little figures in long gowns and veils that left only their eyes showing, one holding a baby up over her head, another one waving a bunch of flowers, the third one standing on top of the wall, her arms out for balance. He’d even drawn her toes curled over the edge.
The pottery where Theo worked made mostly bricks and hollow tile in rows of kilns that looked like Eskimo igloos, except that they were built of blackened firebrick, instead of blocks of ice. Theo spent most of his days either swinging an ax and stacking wood, or standing and sweating at the back of the kilns, keeping a sharp eye on the vents, waiting for the diminishing smoke and a signal from the foreman to tell him it was time to open the iron door in the back and push in more wood. Previously, Theo might have passed the time while he waited for the foreman’s signal by counting the bricks in the great chimneys that rose from the back of each kiln. He might have rearranged the bricks in his mind to make a tower or a bridge or a great wall that went three-fifths of the way around the pottery. (There were only enough bricks in all the chimneys put together for three-fifths of the way around. Theo’s imagination was mathematically precise.) Now, instead, he conjured up Baghdad as Miss Spivey had described it to us. He watched it shimmer in the waves of heat rising up from the kilns.
“You won’t get to college drawing pictures for Miss Spivey,” I heard Miss Templeton warn him once—not, of course, in Miss Spivey’s hearing—but that didn’t stop him. In time, he would draw up all the plans for the Baghdad Bazaar—not just the minaret but the balconies and gates and arches and everything else, each one detailed as a blueprint, showing every board and cut and nail.
I expect Miss Templeton knew it wasn’t Miss Spivey he was doing it for.
The deputy sheriff was the first official person Miss Spivey approached with her plans for the Baghdad Bazaar. Linwood Perkins was a valuable ally, she said. He would be useful later, Miss Spivey felt, in negotiations with the Reverends Stokes and Whitlock. They would be tougher nuts to crack. After school one day—it must have been in March—Miss Spivey lent me her umbrella and sent me through a steady rain to the deputy sheriff’s office to deliver a sheaf of rolled-up papers that included drawings, lists, and the like. She called these papers “specks” for the Baghdad Bazaar. Attached to the specks was an envelope with a note inside. Threestep had two blocks of wooden sidewalk on both sides of Main Street in those days, with a slough of red mud in between when it rained. I took my shoes off to cross the street and held them in one hand, the umbrella in the other, the roll of specks under my arm like a baton. Deputy Sheriff Perkins paid no mind whatsoever to the muddy tracks my bare feet made leading up to his desk. He recognized Miss Spivey’s handwriting on the envelope I gave him and sat down to read the note. “Go on now, Gladys,” he said, waving me and my clean shoes on our way. I forgot the umbrella behind the door, as instructed.
Miss Spivey took me with her when she dropped by to pick up her umbrella the very next day. “We don’t want to give him too much time to think,” she said.
The afternoon was sunny and warm, more like June than March, but the street was still muddy in patches from yesterday’s rain. Miss Spivey stopped to scrape the mud off the bottom of her hiking boots on the edge of the wooden sidewalk, first the left one, then the right. She was wearing a green-checked dress with sheer white puffy sleeves and a pair of silk stockings. She usually wore cotton ones to school. I wasn’t used to seeing her legs looking bare from midcalf to the tops of her ankle-high hiking boots. Neither was the deputy sheriff.
Linwood Perkins stood up when we came in. He was not a bad-looking man, a little too skinny to be completely convincing as an officer of the law, and mysteriously unmarried. In one flurry of movement, he patted his shirt pocket flap as if to check the position of his badge, hitched up his belt to make sure that his trousers hadn’t dropped too low, and combed the fingers of one hand through his sandy hair without undoing one iota of the damage his hat had all day to inflict upon it. “Good afternoon, Miss Spivey,” he said, nodding his head smartly in what amounted to a kind of bow in her direction. He looked a little surprised to see me trailing after her, but he sounded friendly enough when he said, “Hey, Gladys.” There was a little business about the umbrella. “Are you sure?” “Gladys left it?” “Ah, here it is!” That put the deputy sheriff at ease by giving him a chance to “come to my rescue,” just as Miss Spivey said it would.
I sat, meanwhile, on a bench against the window under the word JAIL, which I could read backwards in shadows on the floor at my feet. Linwood Perkins pulled a creaky leather chair out from behind his desk for Miss Spivey and squinted at the papers in his hands. Miss Spivey had typed them up in a neat and professional manner on the gleaming black Underwood she had in her room: a map of “Baghdad, Georgia,” as well as detailed specifications for the booths, games, stage, and audience areas of the Baghdad Bazaar, all of which centered around Main Street. Several scenes from The Arabian Nights that Miss Spivey had taken from the back wall of the schoolroom were soon spread across his desk. In addition, Miss Spivey had brought with her today, rolled up and tied with a blue ribbon, Theo’s latest drawing of Main Street, which was done on a long piece of pale brown wrapping paper from Mr. Bibben’s store. Unrolled, it showed every arch and all the balconies (both working and purely decorative), along with a minaret somewhat grander than the one we’d been working on, an onion-domed ticket booth, benches lined up in the street for the audience, and the wooden part of the sidewalk turned into a stage with footlights aflame. In the center of the stage, a scowling jinn in a turban floated over a lamp, his massive arms folded across his chest.
The deputy sheriff held one end of this drawing down on the desk while Miss Spivey held the other. Anyone could see that Miss Spivey was aiming high.
“Y’all want benches set up in the street?” he asked, as if that were the most astonishing aspect of the scene.
“That’s right. For the audience. See, here? They’ll be facing the stage.”
“Beggin’ your pardon, Miss Spivey, but ain’t nobody fool enough to sit out there in the sun.”
He paused, but Miss Spivey didn’t say anything. So he continued.
“And it ain’t only the audience, Miss Spivey. All these here booths and tables—ain’t a spot of shade for them, either. Unless you’re plannin’ to have a tent, and I can’t guess where you’d get enough tent for all of this here.”
Miss Spivey sat back in the deputy sheriff’s chair. Whether she had her next statement planned all along, or if she made it up on the spot, we’ll never know. She said, “They won’t be sitting in the sun. They’ll be sitting in the dark.”
“Come again?” said Linwood.
“It will be dark. It will be night. This is the Arabian Nights we’re performing.”
“You mean y’all’re fixing to put on this…show…after dark?”
This was news to me, too. There were a lot of lit torches in the drawings, but I thought that was for atmosphere. I wondered if Theo knew Miss Spivey pictured the Baghdad Bazaar going on in the dark.
“It don’t get dark till pretty near nine o’clock that time of year,” Linwood added.
“Curtain time is twelve o’clock,” Miss Spivey said decisively.
“What time?”
“The show starts at midnight!”
“Now, a wait a minute, Miss Spivey. D’y’all expect folks to stay up half the night?” He shot a glance at me, like he was looking for help here, but I kept my face still as stone.
“Not half—the whole night. Because before they see Alaeddin, they’ll be hungry. They’ll be looking for a little barbecue and a piece of pie. And afterward, they’ll want another try at the Turkey Shoot and the Dunk Tank!”
I have to say that, coming from Miss Spivey’s mouth, Turkey Shoot and Dunk Tank sounded about as foreign as Ifrit and vizier coming from anybody else’s.
“But it’ll be dark!” he said. “How they gonna shoot turkeys in the dark?”
“There are ways,” said Miss Spivey.
Linwood Perkins leaned over the drawing spread out on his desk, searching for clues, I expect, as to what in the world she might be thinking. In the meantime, Miss Spivey gave him a look like she was sizing him up as Dunk Tank material. He was just the right height and heft, it turned out—brought in more money than anybody except for Reverend Stokes.
Linwood straightened up, as if something had just occurred to him. “I don’t know what plans you’ve got for lighting up your bizarre, Miss Spivey, but I hope you’re not countin’ on Horace Wicker kickin’ in, not for free. He’d as soon part with his skin as a nickel’s worth of electricity for free. If I was you, I wouldn’t even ask the man, Miss Spivey.”
That’s when Miss Spivey looked the deputy sheriff straight in the eye and said, “You can call me Grace.” This was another surprise both to me and to Linwood Perkins, and it caused him to flush pink clear up to the roots of his sandy hair. It also put an end to their conversation, since there was no way for him to get the word Grace out of his mouth in reference to Miss Spivey—not, at least, on such short notice.
When we were back outside on the wooden sidewalk, I asked her, “How will they shoot turkeys in the dark, Miss Spivey?”
Whatever she had in mind—and I also hoped it wasn’t Mr. Wicker—Miss Spivey was feeling pleased with our visit to the deputy sheriff, I could tell. She plunged both hands deep into the pockets of her green-checked dress, bouncing a little on her toes as she walked, and set herself to whistling in a tuneless, breathy way I recognized. My brother Force whistled like that when he was thinking about something good. We stepped from island to island of dry ground crossing the street and when we reached the other side, she finally answered my question. “I don’t know, Gladys. Any ideas?”
I had one idea—really, it was the only idea in town, apart from Mr. Wicker—but I was not supposed to mention it.
Mr. Horace Wicker owned and operated the only functioning electrical generator in Threestep, Georgia. He used to turn on the lights from dusk until eleven every night for those who could afford to wire their place up and pay him $2.50 a month for electricity. Not many people could do that in 1938 or ’39, although more than could afford it in 1936 or ’37. Mr. Wicker’s list of customers kept growing until the 1940s, when the REA came into Piedmont County and set out to electrify the countryside. In the meantime, the Bibbens paid Mr. Wicker extra for twenty-four-hour electricity so they could buy an electric icebox, as we all called it, and Mr. Wicker had wired up the schoolhouse out of public duty, but much of Threestep and all of the outlying country were still pretty dark at night.
It was Horace Wicker’s son Cecil who came home from electrician school in Atlanta in 1933 and built that electrical generator for his daddy. Theo Boykin wasn’t twelve years old at the time, but he was over there every day, watching Cecil bolt and screw and solder and weld that thing together in his daddy’s junkyard. Theo had made Cecil a little nervous at first, standing in a block of shade alongside the clapboard cottage that served as the junkyard office, silent and watching. Not that Cecil thought Theo was up to no good necessarily. It was just that look of concentration Theo always got when he was thinking hard, which was most of the time, as if he might be seeing right through whatever he was looking at, seeing straight to the innards, the gears and whistles of the thing. (Miss Spivey said that’s why Theo was good at drawing: he knew how to look at something.) If he was looking at you and thinking hard, sometimes you felt like he could see your bones and blood cells and all, maybe your heart and soul, too. I believe that look was what made Cecil Wicker and his daddy Horace sweat a little.
Theo spent three or four years collecting parts and working in the shed out back of the Boykins’ place on a contraption that looked like it was cooking something, my momma said the first time he took us around back to see it. I don’t pretend to know how it worked. There was a thing like a giant spool of thread, as big as two one-pound cans of peaches put end to end. The spool was all wrapped up in shiny copper wire and sitting in the middle of an axle that went out through a hole in the wall. The axle hooked up to the big rear wheel of a steam-driven tractor outside the shed. When Theo fired up the tractor, the wheel turned and the axle turned and so did the spool. This was somehow supposed to make electricity and send it through two copper wires wrapped in long spirals of rubber cut from old tires. These thick black wires ran from the spool out through a hole in the roof of the shed to the Boykins’ house, where they disappeared into another hole Theo cut for them, just under the eaves. Although the generator hadn’t made any electricity as yet, except for a few sparks, Theo was prepared for long-term operation. He had a sizable woodpile stacked up very neatly next to the steam-driven tractor, complete with a wooden-handled ax buried in a stump for splitting more. Theo had painted signs on the side of the shed that said: DANGER! DO NOT TOUCH WIRES! YOU WILL BE DEAD! In case you couldn’t read, he had drawn a picture of a very unhappy fellow in overalls holding on to a wire with his hair standing up on end and his eyes popping out and smoke coming out of his ears. My sister Ildred thought it looked like Arnie Lumpkin. “On a good day,” she said.
It wasn’t too long after Theo completed his electrical generator and explained to us how it (theoretically) worked that I was looking out our kitchen window after supper one night and saw all the front windows of the Boykins’ house—formerly lit by the flickering yellow glow of kerosene lamps—suddenly filled with what was, comparatively speaking, a blaze of light.
All of us Cailiffs were outside in a heartbeat, along with some O’Quinns from down the road and a half a dozen other neighbors from the woods beyond the Boykins’ house, everyone standing in and about the neat yellow squares cast on the ground from the Boykins’ windows. At the front of the crowd, her face bathed in light, Mrs. Faith Boykin kept saying, with as much fear as wonder, “Lord, Lord, Lord. Lord, Lord, Lord. He made it light.” Adding to our numbers was a steady trickle of folks who must have been passing by on the road and stopped, attracted like moths, leaving their wagons and one automobile in the lane.
Theo was just about to take a group of us around the back to show us the generator in action—“But y’all don’t touch the wires, don’t touch anything, you hear?”—when we heard another automobile rumbling down the lane toward us, its horn honking like a goose. Soon its head-lamps appeared, adding their feeble glow to the general illumination, and then it rolled to a stop alongside our house. Mr. Horace Wicker, his son Cecil, and three other men came stomping into the light. Before they said a word, my daddy stepped right in and said, “Evenin’, Horace, Cecil,” as if they’d just come to call. There wasn’t a thing they could say in return but “Evenin’, Jefferson,” that being my daddy’s name. Daddy greeted the rest, too, real friendly. Of course, he knew what had brought Mr. Wicker grumbling down to the Boykins’, so my daddy went ahead and nipped him in the bud, saying, “Horace, I hear tell it’s your boy Cecil taught Theo here how to light up the place.”
“Cecil never told that boy he could hook his house on up to our generator,” Mr. Wicker said in a rush. “Y’all know for a fact we can’t make no ’lectricity for free.”
That was kind of a low blow, seeing as how we Cailiffs couldn’t afford Mr. Wicker’s electricity, either.
“I sure know that, Horace, and that’s why Theo here just built himself an electrical generator all his own. Ain’t it so, Theo?”
Theo looked at Mr. Wicker, as much as at my daddy, and said, “Yes, sir.” It was amazing to me how much So there! Theo was able to pack into that “Yes, sir.”
“We were just going around back to have a look,” Daddy said. “Care to join us?”
Mr. Wicker declined. Cecil left, too, with his daddy, but he came back the next day to admire Theo’s setup and also to suggest, quietly, that Theo might want to cover the holes in the walls of that old shed and put a padlock on the door.
And that’s how Theo Boykin made his momma’s house the first and, as far as I ever heard of, the only colored family’s house in the county to have electricity before the Second World War. He was going to connect us up to his generator, too, along with another family named Turpin, but there was a windstorm that December—this was in 1936, I believe, two years before Miss Spivey’s arrival—and it knocked a big old pine tree down right on top of the shed. Theo was suspicious enough to check the trunk and see if it was cut at all, but no, it was just uprooted by the wind, the usual crater of white dirt opened underneath it. He wanted to move the tree and fix the generator, but Mrs. Boykin was against doing any such thing. She believed the tree falling was a sign, a warning. Theo was outraged.
“From Mr. Wicker, you mean? I told you, Momma, the wind blew it.”
“Not from Mr. Wicker,” his mother said. All along, Mrs. Boykin had been more afraid of fire from the wiring than of anything Mr. Wicker might do. It seemed like every other week some house or barn was burning down after being electrified, according to the newspapers Mr. Bibben passed along to our daddy. They’d had a fire once, the Boykins did, before I was born, and Mrs. Boykin had been extra-fearful ever since. “I’m talkin’ about a sign from the Lord.”
“Well, Momma!” Theo said, throwing his hands in the air. “Let’s go on back to the Dark Ages, then.”
He never did tell his mother or mine how, in the weeks between the lights going on and the tree coming down, he used to find his wood-cutting ax in a different place almost every time he went out back. The first time, when he found it stuck in a log on the ground, he thought he must have forgotten to put it back in the stump. The second time, he knew better. The ax would be buried in one tree trunk or another, or it would be stuck in the door of the shed, or, one time, when he might have left the padlock off by mistake, he told Force, he found the ax cleaving the dirt inside the shed, right next to the big spool of copper wire that was the heart of the generator. He took the ax inside the house with him after that.
Theo didn’t try to fix his electrical generator after the tree fell on it—not because of the roving ax or Mr. Wicker, but because his mother asked him not to. One year after the tree mashed its roof in, that shed was so overrun with vines and voracious groundcover that a person would be hard put to find it at the edge of the woods behind the house, the generator tending toward rust inside of it, like a dead man in a tomb.
I never said a word to Miss Spivey about that generator, but with the Baghdad Bazaar on the horizon, I suspected that its resurrection was at hand.
The minaret turned out better than any of us dreamed it would. Except for the variously colored lumber making it obvious that it wasn’t made of stone—this was before we got it painted up with white dirt and butter beans—it looked almost exactly like Theo Boykin’s drawings. Miss Spivey left off calling Theo “Signor da Vinci,” and started calling him our Chief Engineer. When Florence Hodges pointed out that colored engineers were not allowed by the railroad—this was something she knew for a fact from her uncle, a conductor on the Central of Georgia—Miss Spivey said simply, “Not that kind of engineer.” Not a one of us was familiar with any other kind, and so Theo Boykin became our model and definition of a term that seemed to be another word for inventor, artist, and magician, all rolled into one.
Linwood Perkins continued to blush when Miss Spivey called him Linwood and he broke into a fit of coughing every time he said “Grace,” but he did prove to be a valuable ally, exactly as Miss Spivey predicted. When she asked him to round up the businesspeople of Threestep, he came through for her without so much as a Say who? or a What for?
Not that there were many businesspeople to round up. In 1939 some parts of the country had already turned the corner around which prosperity was said to be waiting, but in Threestep, like most of the South, we were a few steps behind. Dot’s Café had been the first to go under. Lumpkin Feed & Grain (which had belonged to Arnie’s more prosperous uncle) was another fading memory, three years gone. At the lumberyard, Mr. Hall said he could count on the fingers of his two hands—the left one of which had lost its pinkie in a sawmill accident long ago—the number of cash-paying customers he’d had since 1932. Mr. Tuttle of Piedmont Paints & Hardware fared a little better, O’Quinn’s mill and cotton gin hung on from year to year, or at least it had so far, and Bibbens’ store did a balancing act whereby a trickle of cash sales carried along a raft of folks who bought on hope and credit. Apart from scouting for the kaolin company and planning Klan nights, no one knew what Mr. John B. Gordon, Attorney-at-Law, did all day, but his wife’s bang-banging on the typewriter (the only one in town other than Miss Spivey’s) continued even though the bell over the door never rang.
Not a one of the businesspeople of Threestep, Georgia, had anything better to do on a weekday afternoon than come to the deputy sheriff’s office, where Miss Spivey was fixing to unveil her picture of Main Street transformed for the Baghdad Bazaar, which Theo had colored in and mounted on a piece of wood since the deputy sheriff saw it last. She set the picture up by the window, using the deputy’s chair for an easel, and covered it with a sheet so she had something to whisk off when she said, “Ladies and gentlemen”—Mrs. Bibben and the Reverend wives being the ladies—“Baghdad, Georgia!”
They all leaned in, squinting at Theo’s picture. Truth is, when Miss Spivey first showed us that picture at Threestep School, we all felt a little bad for her. Not a one of us believed that our Baghdad could look like the one she and Theo had in mind.
“Well!” said Mr. Hall, when he straightened up again. “That’s real nice, Miss Spivey.” Mrs. Bibben, who was in the know, said it looked like something from a storybook, didn’t it, though? Mr. Tuttle remarked that he had heard of Cairo, Georgia, and also Arabi, but never any Baghdad. He asked, “Where’s it at, Miss Spivey?”
Her plan was to direct their attention to the window and say, with a wave of her hand, You’re looking at it, or something to that effect. She hadn’t counted on the late afternoon sun hitting the dust on the glass, turning the window into an opaque curtain with JAIL printed on it, backwards. Miss Spivey skipped the window and looked at the doorway instead, where I stood with Force and Ildred and a handful of compatriots (which was what Miss Spivey called us when we volunteered) that included Dovie O’Quinn and the Veal boys. Miss Spivey raised her eyebrows. That was our cue.
We disappeared like a passle of jinni, swift and silent, out the door.
Ralphord was waiting for us around the corner, sweating it out in the long narrow bar of shade the minaret cast on the street next to the hardware store.
“Damned if y’all don’t look just like a A-rab,” somebody said. We turned around. It was our brother Ebenezer coming up the street to the hardware store. He helped us roll our masterpiece out into the middle of Main Street and then up over the ruts to a spot right in front of the deputy sheriff’s office. When a nine-foot-tall tower of white stone-looking stuff stopped outside the open door, they were all looking right at it. By the time Ralphord had sung his first “Oooooo la la, ooooo ahhhhh la,” the businesspeople of Threestep, along with Mrs. Reverend Stokes and Mrs. Whitlock, were spilling out the doorway onto the sidewalk to hear the weird little melody, the notes bubbling up from the top of the minaret like a clear stream singing over stones. You could hardly believe that voice was coming out of Ralphord, because he sure didn’t look much like any kind of angel, although the long robe helped. Add in his checkered headgear fluttering and flying in front of his face, making the sound waver in the sweetest, most delicate way, and there wasn’t a one of us standing there in the street who wasn’t covered in goose bumps before he finished. Mrs. Reverend Stokes asked Miss Spivey, “What’s that he’s singing?” and Mrs. Whitlock jumped in to say that she’d heard it was a prayer of some kind and not anything Christian.
“A prayer?” Miss Spivey said. “Oh, goodness, no. I made the song up myself. It doesn’t mean anything, Mrs. Whitlock, I assure you.”
“Then it’s not some kind of incantation?” Mrs. Whitlock asked warily.
“And he’s not supposed to be a high priest up there or something in that line?” asked Mrs. Reverend Stokes.
“Not at all,” Miss Spivey said. Our muezzin would be more like a town crier, she told the Reverend wives.
They looked at her blankly. Linwood Perkins said, “You mean like Paul Revere?”
Miss Spivey said, “Yes, Mr. Perkins!” as warmly as she could. She couldn’t call the deputy sheriff “Linwood” in front of everybody. “Like Paul Revere.”
Listening to Miss Spivey explaining the role of the muezzin to the businesspeople and Reverend wives of Threestep, I couldn’t help but feel a little sorry for Mavis Davis, who’d gotten herself riled up for no good reason, it looked like. She would have had no objection to Paul Revere.
Mr. Gordon meanwhile stood in the long skinny shadow of the minaret, showing Mr. Tuttle some white stuff he’d scraped off the wood with the blade of his pocketknife. “Curious about your white paint,” Mr. Gordon said to Miss Spivey. Really it was more like plaster than paint, we’d spread it on so thick. Mr. Gordon made no apology for the inch-wide stripe of bare wood his knife had left behind. “Ralphord here tells me it’s white dirt and—what did you say it’s mixed with, young fella?”
“Our secret bounty agent,” Ralphord said from the minaret.
Mr. Gordon turned his amiable smile from Ralphord to Miss Spivey. “You’ve got a lot to paint up in that picture of Main Street. I reckon you’ll be making another trip out McIntyre way in Jeff Cailiff’s truck before long.”
Jeff—short for Jefferson—Cailiff was my daddy.
“I don’t think that’s likely, Mr. Gordon,” Miss Spivey said, also smiling amiably. “We have quite a supply right here.”
“Well, now, I know that for a fact, don’t I?” said Mr. Gordon. He wiped his pocketknife clean on his handkerchief, first one side of the blade, then the other, before he snapped it shut. “I just thought you might be needing the purest, whitest kind.” He looked straight at me when he said that, and I felt cold to think that I had said something that he remembered, something for which I might be held to account.