THE UNVEILING OF the minaret—and the typed “specks” passed around afterward with the peach cobbler—had exactly the effect Miss Spivey was aiming for. Not only did Mr. Hall contribute a stack of lumber and Mr. Tuttle provide kerosene for us to kill the termites in it, but the next time Miss Spivey attended a Sunday service at United Methodist Church in Claytonville (as she did from time to time, mostly for the stained-glass windows), the wife of the Superintendent of Schools introduced herself on the way out of church and said she wanted to help make costumes for the Baghdad Bazaar. The name of the Superintendent’s wife was Lucretia Louise Blount—which meant the Superintendent must have been Mr. Blount—but everybody called her Lulu, she said.
“Pleased to meet you, Mrs.—Lulu,” Miss Spivey said.
Mrs. Blount wanted Miss Spivey to know, by the way, that her daughter Louise was an extremely talented actress, having distinguished herself in several dramatic productions at Sidney Lanier High School, from which she would be graduating next spring. Louise was a lovely girl, Mrs. Blount told Miss Spivey. She had violet-blue eyes and raven curls.
Back in Threestep, Miss Spivey was warned by Mrs. Reverend Stokes of Threestep Methodist Church (which had no stained-glass windows) that Mrs. Blount was not a talented seamstress. Mrs. Stokes based this opinion on various items of clothing that Mrs. Blount had donated to the Methodist Mission from time to time. “I wouldn’t dress my dog in anything made by that woman,” Mrs. Stokes said, none too reverently. She did not, in fact, have a dog. Miss Spivey was too tactful to suggest to Mrs. Reverend Stokes that perhaps the items Mrs. Blount chose to donate were ones that hadn’t turned out as well as she might have hoped.
In McIntyre on Saturday, when Miss Spivey pointed out that Mrs. Lulu Blount owned a genuine Eldredge sewing machine—the only electric-powered sewing machine in the county, it was claimed—May and I exchanged glances. I said, “She might tell that Superintendent about every last thing we’re doing, Miss Spivey, being his wife and all.”
Miss Spivey didn’t think she would cause us any trouble, not if we gave “the daughter” a good part in our production of Alaeddin.
“There’s only one good part in Alaeddin for a girl,” May pointed out, meaning, of course, the Princess. “Unless you count Shahrazad.” She paused. “I can’t really picture Louise Blount being Shahrazad.”
Miss Spivey said she hadn’t met the daughter yet.
“She’s more the harem-girl type,” I explained.
Miss Spivey wouldn’t hear objections from anybody. “We want to get people involved,” she said. “This is a community effort.” Besides, the Superintendent’s wife’s brother owned a down-and-out cotton mill in Brennan. “She said he’s got bolts of muslin and calico feeding the mice in that warehouse of his,” Miss Spivey said. “That’s another man who needs to get involved, wouldn’t you say?”
Well, he did get involved, to the tune of one hundred bolts, twenty-five yards each, of plain white muslin only partly riddled with holes. Daddy and Force carried Miss Spivey to Brennan to pick up the cloth. In addition to her sewing machine and her daughter Louise, Mrs. Lulu Blount also volunteered the use of her genuine silver gravy boat, which looked more like the lamp Alaeddin found in the underground chamber (according to the colored plates and illustrations in Miss Spivey’s book of Arabian Nights) than any of the oil lamps and kerosene lanterns kids had been rubbing and spilling all over town for months.
Miss Spivey took charge of the gravy boat, but the muslin wound up in our barn due to the fact that our own mother, Daisy Cailiff, also got involved. All that spring we had our big iron washing pot full of blue or red or green or brown or yellow dye bubbling over a wood fire in the yard. Momma would be out there stirring the pot with a big stick, or lifting out wet lengths of cloth to see what color they had got to. The green looked for all the world like giant collards cooking. We all had to help wring out what Theo figured to be over a mile of cloth (100 bolts times 25 yards per bolt equals 1.42 miles of muslin, to be pretty exact) and hang pieces of it on the clothesline and the fences and what was left of the old chicken coop—everywhere but near the pigs. Pigs liked that dyed cloth better than collard greens, as we had the misfortune to find out. We lost two whole bolts one Saturday when we hung a batch on bushes that were just close enough to the pen for a few enterprising snouts to poke through the fence and grab ahold of it. Ildred, who looked after our vegetable garden, wound up with a week’s supply of green and blue manure.
At Threestep School, Miss Spivey had the boys move her desk way back into the corner of the schoolroom to make the stagelike platform up front available for auditions and rehearsing. There she sat in the corner, tapping away at our increasingly unwieldy story, she and her Underwood typewriter surrounded by open volumes of The Thousand Nights and a Night, from which she stole freely. We kept ourselves busy, teaching each other arithmetic, checking each other’s spelling and handwriting, the older children reading to the littler ones, or vice versa, while Miss Spivey stitched together the script.
She held auditions in the schoolhouse, starting on a Friday evening, while the script was still a work-in-progress. There was no shortage of roles to play. She had customized “Alaeddin: Or, the Wonderful Lamp” until it was crowded with subplots, so in addition to him and his mother and the evil magician who set out to steal the lamp in the first place, Miss Spivey needed emirs and nabobs almost by the dozen. She needed a gullible Sultan and a Chief Eunuch and a Grand Vizier. She needed merchants named Ali and Ahmed, Mustafa and Ma’aruf. She had a harem to fill. She needed a beautiful Princess and the tireless Shahrazad. She was ready to offer a part to anyone brave enough to get up on the platform at the front of the room and repeat, with feeling, the lines she whispered to them from her prompting position, a seat in the first-grade row. Miss Spivey prompted everybody in this fashion. She said it was so they wouldn’t get her one copy of the script all messed up, but it was really to keep folks with limited reading experience from being too embarrassed to try out. A lot of the parts didn’t require any talking anyway. The harem girls—of which I was one eventually—just sat around onstage between dance numbers, and the eunuchs would spend most of the play standing like statues with their arms folded across their chests.
Miss Spivey had already handpicked her Alaeddin, of course, although she made my brother get up there anyway and play two scenes over and over again, one with Alaeddin’s mother and one with the Princess, as different girls tried out for each part. This was a clever stratagem. When word spread that a girl could audition for a part in the dramatic production at the forthcoming Baghdad Bazaar by playing a scene with Force Cailiff—and that anybody could come and watch—the schoolhouse audience and the number of auditioning hopefuls doubled. Fourteen girls, including five or six from the college up in Milledgeville, tried out for the part of Alaeddin’s mother, and all of the above plus another ten or more tried out for the role of the Princess, even though pretty much everybody suspected that Miss Spivey had already cut a deal with Louise Blount’s mother (which she had).
Mavis Davis wasn’t having a thing to do with the Baghdad Bazaar, at least not publicly. Secretly, she was coaching Florence Hodges to try out for another highly coveted role, that of the storyteller, Shahrazad. I think Mavis may have had some ideas about sabotage, but we’ll never know, since Florence didn’t get the part. Plenty of girls tried out for that one, too, knowing from the pictures Theo drew that Shahrazad would get to wear a costume of midnight-blue “silk” adorned with golden moons and stars. Plus, she got to read her lines instead of having to memorize them. The Shahrazad hopefuls included the college girls and some high school students, plus three girls from our school and my sister May.
To try out for Shahrazad, each girl had to sit in a chair in the middle of the platform up front and read any two pages picked at random from a fat green volume of The Thousand Nights and a Night. Before they got started, Miss Spivey reminded them that everybody who tried out was automatically guaranteed a place in the harem, if they didn’t get the part. I saw Florence Hodges exchange a quick look with Mavis Davis, who was standing in the back and who had already announced to all and sundry that her friend Florence would not stoop to wearing a harem-girl outfit in public. Mavis was wrong about that.
Miss Spivey sat in the front row, as usual, so she could prompt people when they stumbled over auspicious or withal or any of the long and unfamiliar words that Shahrazad was so fond of. She let each girl read the whole two pages, no matter how many times she stumbled. There was a certain amount of suspense in the process. That’s what kept it interesting, at least to me, in spite of the stop-and-go delivery. The most impressive tryouts before May got up there were two of the college girls from Milledgeville, with nine and ten stumbles apiece, and Florence Hodges with only seven. I was keeping score, unofficially.
May went last.
I might have been the only person there, other than May and Miss Spivey, who was aware that Miss Spivey had been coaching May for weeks in advance of the auditions. They did it on Saturday while Force and Theo were working on Shakespeare’s major tragedies in the kitchen with Miss Templeton, and May and Miss Spivey were supposed to be studying The Merchant of Venice, a second-year high school requirement that my brother had actually studied in his second year. May would open up the little blue Yale Shakespeare book that Miss Spivey loaned to her and then she would send me out to check on the girls. “You know they never do watch little May the way they should,” she’d say. Or else she might ask me to see if little Ed looked like he’d be waking up from his nap anytime soon. “Can you just wait on him to wake up, Gladys, and bring him out here when he does? I’m scared to death he’ll get out the bed and wander off.”
They were getting rid of me, I could tell that easy enough. It hurt me some, until I spotted the first volume of The Thousand Nights and a Night in Miss Spivey’s knapsack one Saturday. I knew what they were up to then, although I never let on that I did.
Fair or unfair, when it was May’s turn to audition, she didn’t stumble at all, not once. She sat up straight in the chair—with the dark blue veil Miss Spivey provided to each girl draped over her hair and shoulders—and she read the first two pages of the prologue in a voice as rich and smooth as sweet-potato pie. When May said, “It hath reached me, O King of the Age, that there dwelt in the city a tailor, withal a pauper, and he had one son, Alaeddin hight,” you didn’t have to know what hight meant, or even pauper, to appreciate the spell that the voice of Shahrazad cast over the Sultan for a thousand nights and a night. May looked the part, too. Maybe it was the veil, or maybe the late afternoon sunlight reflecting up from the pages of the book, erasing the tired lines around her mouth and rearranging the shadows under her eyes and cheekbones. Her face looked years younger, it looked lit up from within. I heard Billy Bonner’s mother, who used to rent to Ed and May before they moved to McIntyre, whisper to Ildred behind me, “Who is that girl up there, Ildred, honey, with the sweet voice?”
“Why, that’s my sister May, Mrs. Bonner,” Ildred said, sounding a little surprised herself.
There was only one student from Threestep School who came in secret to ask Miss Spivey for a part in our Arabian Nights entertainment, and that was Arnie Lumpkin. In public, Arnie insisted, like Mavis Davis, that he didn’t want anything to do with something as sissy and fake as any Arabian Nights. He wouldn’t be caught dead in those bloomers and little vests that Mrs. Blount was already sewing up for jinni and slaves and harem girls alike.
Arnie Lumpkin was a case, no matter how you looked at him. A big boy with squinty eyes—round in the belly, thick in the arms and legs, and as tall as a man—he was the very image of his father, Rufus Lumpkin, a sharecropper who raised cotton and corn on a farm that belonged to Mr. Gordon. Arnie should have been in high school or maybe graduated by now. The problem was he could not read. He came to school every September, his poor mother always hoping that something had happened to his brain over the summer that might make all the difference. What really might have made the difference was a pair of eyeglasses, but Arnie’s daddy wasn’t likely to pay good money to have his lamebrained son’s eyes examined on the advice of a loopy schoolteacher.
Arnie came looking for Miss Spivey early on a Saturday morning, which was when Miss Spivey minded the store so Mr. and Mrs. Bibben could take their one morning off per week to go fishing. The Bibbens were two hours gone by the time Arnie arrived, at about half-past seven. Miss Spivey was in the yard out back, keeping an eye on the store through what she alone called the service entrance and tending the fire under a big iron pot in which she was cooking up a twenty-five-yard bolt or two of sand-colored cloth. She looked up when Arnie came around the corner of the store.
“Well, Arnie Lumpkin!” she said, as if he were the last person she expected to see. “What I can do for you?”
He hemmed and hawed for such a long time that Miss Spivey began to entertain the notion that he might be here to confess and apologize for something—maybe for the latest desecration of that tomb in the cemetery that somebody was always breaking into, searching for a trap-door to hidden treasure. But Arnie had no such thought in his head. There were things that Arnie knew, like how to be a bully, and there were things he didn’t know, like how to tell Miss Spivey why he’d come. What he really wanted was out of his reach, and he knew it. He wanted to be Alaeddin. He wanted to marry the princess. He wanted to rub the lamp and make the jinn do his bidding and deliver his heart’s desire. Gathering all of his courage and swallowing what he had of pride, Arnie asked Miss Spivey if he could be in that show of hers.
“Of course you can,” she said, hiding her surprise. She looked him up and down, and up again, and offered the opinion that he might be just right for the role of Chief Eunuch.
Naturally, Arnie Lumpkin asked, “What’s that?”
Miss Spivey explained. “He’s the one who keeps watch over the women of the harem.” This piece of information made Arnie’s eyebrows twitch. Miss Spivey lowered her voice as she continued. “The Chief Eunuch is the only man, other than the Sultan himself, who is permitted to look upon the Sultan’s wives unveiled.”
Arnie rubbed his palms on the seat of his baggy overalls. “What’s he got to wear, this yoonick? In the show, I mean.”
Miss Spivey had just begun to describe billowing purple pants gathered at the ankle when Arnie, who had a view of the lane leading up to the store, interrupted her with an urgent, “Somebody’s coming!”
Miss Spivey looked over her shoulder. “It’s probably Force and Ebenezer Cailiff. They’re supposed to help me wring out all this cloth when it cools.”
“I got to hide!” Arnie cried.
“What for?” said Miss Spivey.
“They’ll know I come and ast you.” Arnie was already backing toward the Bibbens’ new outhouse.
“Well, Arnie, everyone will know if you’re in the play, won’t they?”
“I thought they was veils over your face and things,” he said, whispering now and backing away faster.
They could hear Force and Ebenezer talking, out around the front of the store. Arnie turned to run for the outhouse.
“Not in there!” Miss Spivey said in a loud stage whisper, and Arnie stopped dead, his shoulders hunched in alarm. He turned toward the second outhouse, the old one, but she said, “No! The springhouse, Arnie—not the woodshed, no, no, no—the springhouse. Go!” Poor Arnie stopped and started and stopped himself from seeking refuge in one place after another until finally she let him run for the cool darkness of the shed farthest from the store, where the cold spring that bubbled up out of the ground used to keep the Bibbens’ milk and butter from going bad before they got their electric icebox. Miss Spivey went back to stirring her sand-colored cloth.
Hiding in the springhouse, afraid that Force and Ebenezer had seen him before he got all the way inside the door, Arnie was too busy worrying about himself to wonder why Miss Spivey wouldn’t let him hide in the old outhouse or the new one or the woodshed or the chicken coop. What Arnie didn’t even know he didn’t know was this: He was not the first to come see Miss Spivey that morning, shyly and in secret, to seek a part in the pageantry. The deputy sheriff had arrived so early the sky was still pink, and it cast such a flattering light on Miss Spivey that Linwood Perkins almost forgot what sort of role he was after. When she asked him to come to the schoolhouse to audition, Linwood mistook her intentions momentarily and said, “It’s a date!” He was in the woodshed now, feeling foolish enough to hide from Mr. Hall, the lumberman, who was second to arrive. Mr. Hall was in the Bibbens’ new outhouse with his hand over his nose, Reverend Stokes was in the old one being very careful of the rotted wood over the hole, and none other than Rufus Lumpkin, Arnie’s father, had hidden himself in the Bibbens’ abandoned chicken coop only moments before his son came up the lane. With the exception of Reverend Stokes, each man had listened as intently as Arnie had to Miss Spivey’s description of the Chief Eunuch’s place in the harem of the Sultan. To Reverend Stokes, whose thorough knowledge of the Bible no doubt made him familiar with the concept of eunuchs, she had suggested he audition for the role of the Sultan himself. Reverend Stokes had looked pleased. He replied that he would pray and think on it—and also ask his wife.
She would say no.
In the midst of the auditioning, Miss Spivey took it into her head and couldn’t get it out that Eugene Boykin—Theo’s six-foot-tall little brother—ought to play the Ifrit (which is a kind of jinn, you may remember) in Alaeddin: Or, the Wonderful Lamp. The Ifrit’s job was to do Alaeddin’s bidding whenever he rubbed the lamp, which meant he had to carry off the Princess from time to time. It wasn’t only Eugene’s overall size that made him right for the part, Miss Spivey said, or his big dark shoulders, or the way his arms looked when he folded them over his chest. It was the scowl he could put on his face when he chose to. Ifrits like to scowl, and Eugene Boykin was a champion scowler—a scary prospect, given his size. Folks from out of town didn’t mess with him. Miss Spivey said we could not have found a more perfect Ifrit if we’d sent off to ninth-century Baghdad for one.
The key word in Miss Spivey’s campaign to swing public opinion over to the cause of Eugene playing the Ifrit in our Arabian Nights entertainment was verisimilitude. At fourteen letters, verisimilitude may have been the longest vocabulary word ever written on the blackboard at Threestep School. It certainly was the one with the most occurrences of the letter i. As Miss Spivey explained it, the word meant “resemblance to the truth, apparent likeness to reality.” She said that Eugene Boykin’s resemblance to a “real” Ifrit was so perfect and complete, so verisimilitudinous, that it would cast an aura of reality over the whole production. (Aura went up on the board, too.) People would be so astonished by the sight of the Jinn of the Lamp that they would forget they were sitting in the middle of an unpaved street in Georgia. They would be transported—we would all be transported—to Baghdad, just like that! All we needed was that one utterly convincing detail: an Ifrit who looked the part.
“Miss Spivey really wants Eugene to be in that play,” I said to Ralphord.
“I do, too!” said Ralphord. “Don’t you, Gladys?”
I suppose I did, although it gave me a fluttery feeling in my stomach sometimes to picture Eugene Boykin in close proximity to Arnie Lumpkin and Florence Hodges and Dalton Veal and all. It made me want to warn Eugene to watch his step.
Miss Spivey’s idea led to some heated discussions around town. Among the white folks, the question was: Could a colored boy play a part in The Arabian Nights? To help them picture it, Miss Spivey invited everybody to stop by anytime to see Theo’s drawings of scenes and characters on the back wall of the schoolroom. Various individuals did so, often enough that we came to ignore the creak of the door and the rustle of whispers coming and going all day long. In my own personal favorite among the pictures on the wall, Theo had drawn the mighty Ifrit as a swirl of smoke rising from the lamp and growing into a towering figure that bore a considerable resemblance to his brother Eugene, with his bare black arms folded over his chest, and a glimpse of spangly red vest above the smoky bloom of what Mrs. Lulu Blount persisted in calling pantaloons. The Ifrit’s scowling face was aimed at a small, pale, astonished-looking figure of Alaeddin way down there on his knees beside the lamp. Once people saw the pictures, you could hear the same argument a hundred times, all over town:
“But he’ll be a Ifrit. I believe they’re supposed to be colored.”
“Well, we could rub coal on somebody.”
“But ain’t nobody near as big as Eugene Boykin. Ifrit’s supposed to be big.”
“How about Arnie Lumpkin? He’s big—”
“In the belly, sure, but Eugene’s got them shoulders. Didn’t you see the pictures?”
To get the Superintendent of School’s permission for Eugene to take part in our production, Miss Spivey played her trump card, or cards: the Superindent’s wife and their daughter Louise. All Mrs. Lulu Blount needed was Miss Spivey’s guarantee that Louise would play the role of Princess Badr al-Budur, Alaeddin’s heart’s desire, and she, Mrs. Lulu Blount, promised to bring her husband into line on the Eugene question. The only additional stipulation laid down by Mrs. Blount—one upon which she felt sure that the Superintendent would also insist—was that Eugene was not to touch any of the white children (particularly Louise) while playing his part.
It was no problem for Miss Spivey to give Louise Blount the part of the Princess, thereby dashing the hopes of dozens of other girls, but the second stipulaton (which should have gone without saying, some people thought) threw a wrench into the plot, which called for the Ifrit to carry Princess Badr al-Budur to Alaeddin’s castle not once but three times. Miss Spivey went ahead and swore to Mrs. Blount that Eugene would not touch any other person in the play, but when she sat down to change the script accordingly, she kept running into trouble. At school one day, when we were practicing our penmanship by the Palmer Method and she was tapping away, trying to figure how to get the sleeping Princess to Alaeddin’s castle in front of the whole audience without the Ifrit to carry her there (a technical problem that Theo would solve later, as he did so many others), Miss Spivey pushed herself away from the typewriter. Out of patience as well as ideas, she announced that she was sorely tempted to forget about Louise Blount and cast a colored girl as Princess Badr al-Budur. Miss Spivey mentioned Etta George (who would have eaten rocks before she’d get up on a stage surrounded by white folks) and also the family who lived behind the Boykins. They had a girl about Theo’s age, didn’t they? Maybe she’d like to be a princess. “That would serve everybody right!” Miss Spivey said.
When Louise Blount somehow caught wind of this remark, probably via the Mavis Davises, she hit the ceiling over in Claytonville. Louise didn’t care if Eugene toted her all over town as long as she got to kiss my brother Force at the end. She was broad-minded that way. She came driving down to Bibbens’ store in her daddy’s car, a 1932 Hudson convertible that left her raven curls in serious disarray, and pitched a fit.
“That colored girl can’t be no princess, Miss Spivey! The princess has got to kiss For—I mean, the princess and Alaeddin they got to kiss in the end, don’t they?”
“Yes, Louise,” Miss Spivey said wearily, “I suppose they do.”
Louise Blount figured she had Miss Spivey over a barrel then. I never liked Louise Blount. She was always asking me things about Force or making comments about how bad this or that girl looked in a harem outfit. (It was true that no one else filled out her costume as well as Louise did.) One time, during an afternoon dress rehearsal, while Miss Spivey was showing my sister May how to situate herself in Shahrazad’s balcony, Louise Blount whispered to me, “I wonder why Miss Spivey ended up an old maid. She ain’t bad-looking.”
“You better be glad she never did get married,” I snapped back at Louise. We were awaiting her cue, sitting in the shade of the Piedmont Paints & Hardware awning. I was already annoyed with her for her inability to pronounce Alaeddin the same way two times in a row. “You better be real glad, ’cause if she did, we wouldn’t never have heard of Alaeddin or Shahrazad, now, would we? We wouldn’t none of us know a damn thing about Baghdad!”
“Watch your language, Gladys Cailiff,” Louise said, with a bigger sniff of moral superiority than she had any right to.
“What’s so great about getting married, anyway?” I asked her, suddenly feeling sad and sullen, I didn’t know why.
“Oh, Gladys!” Louise sighed, her bosom rising and falling. “Only a dumb little girl would ask a question like that.”
At May’s for tutoring that following Saturday, Miss Spivey wanted us to be the first to know that both Reverends and their wives were now in favor of Eugene playing the Ifrit in the Arabian Nights entertainment at the Baghdad Bazaar. (She was largely correct in her belief that once she got the go-ahead from the Reverends, everybody else in Threestep would fall into line.) She did not mention, although it became widely known, that Reverend Whitlock had been persuaded to change his position upon learning that the Ifrit was also known as “the Slave of the Lamp,” and could not but do the bidding of his master, the possessor of the lamp, who was, for most of the show, my brother Force as Alaeddin.
Miss Spivey looked around the table, beaming, at Force and May and Theo and Miss Templeton and me, as if she expected us to burst into applause. “Who knows?” she said. “Eugene may be the first Negro actor ever to share the stage with white people in the state of Georgia!”
“What about Fourth of July when Theo recited the Declaration of Independence?” Force said. “There was white people on the stage with him.”
“There were,” Miss Spivey said.
“Yes, ma’am. A pile of ’em. Important folks.”
“Well, I stand corrected!” Miss Spivey declared, as cheerful as ever, and she moved right on into describing the special touches she had in mind for Eugene’s costume, such as a golden fez for him to wear on his head and a big curving sword and all, as befitted the all-powerful Ifrit, the greatest of all the jinni, the mighty Slave of the Lamp. She expected Theo to be drawing these things as she described them, but I could see that he was doodling swirls of smoke in the margins of his notebook instead. Finally Miss Spivey slowed down a bit and peered across the table to see how Eugene’s costume was progressing. When she saw only smoky doodles in Theo’s notebook, she asked him if he knew what she meant by a “fez.”
At that, Theo, so to speak, erupted. “I don’t see why Eugene has got to be the Slave of the Lamp!” he burst out. “I don’t see why he has got to be the slave of anything.”
This surprised Miss Spivey, we could tell. She tried to exchange looks with Miss Templeton, but Miss Templeton kept her eyes on the book in front of her on the table. Miss Spivey turned to Theo. “The Ifrit is a very powerful jinn, you know. No task is beyond him. He can travel the globe in an instant. He can build a palace in the wink of an eye. With the snap of his fingers”—and she snapped hers—“he can level a mountain or dry up the sea!”
“Long as somebody lets him out of the lamp first,” my sister May said.
We all looked at her. Miss Spivey lowered her finger-snapping hand to the table.
“And commands him to do it,” Theo added. “What I wish I knew, Miss Spivey, is where does a jinn go when he’s not doing somebody’s bidding? That’s what I’ve been thinking about. Where does he go? Does he get time off? Does he get to conjure things up for his own enjoyment? Or is he just stuck inside that little old lamp, all cramped up and small and…incapacitated?”
Incapacitated was a vocabulary word from weeks ago. Suddenly I was picturing Eugene Boykin curled up inside a silver gravy boat with his head between his knees. What did happen to a jinn when he wasn’t doing somebody’s bidding? I’d never thought to wonder until now.
Miss Spivey said she’d look into it.
Later that week, I was helping Ildred wash the supper dishes when a heavy knock at the back door made both of us jump. As we turned around, the door flew open and Ildred dropped the pot she was drying. Over the clatter she cried, “My Lord amighty!”
Eugene Boykin filled the doorway from bottom to top—billowing pantaloons, glittering vest, folded arms, scowling face, and golden fez. He had some kind of pointy shoes on his feet, and stuck in a wide scarf tied like a belt around his middle was a curved and gleaming sword. Momma and Daddy and Ralphord had all come running to see, and while we stood there, all of us, speechless, Eugene took a deep breath and announced in ringing tones, while scowling for all he was worth, “Behold the mighty Jinn of the Lamp. Your wish is my command!”
Then he broke into a grin, and we saw Theo behind him on the steps. They both came in. Before long, Ralphord was wearing the fez and swinging the sword, the curved wooden blade narrowly missing the kerosene lamp on the table. Daddy snatched the sword away from Ralphord and held it up in the light. “Wherever did Miss Spivey get a thing like this?” he asked Eugene.
“Theo made it,” Eugene said proudly. “With Mr. Hall’s jigsaw.”
Theo was slouching around next to the back door with his hands in the pockets of his overalls. I could just see how Miss Spivey had reeled him in. He was not the kind of boy who could resist a chance to use that jigsaw.
“Where’d y’all get the paint?” Ildred asked him. She meant on the sword.
“It’s really tar,” Theo said. “I sprinkled white dirt on it while it was sticky.”
When you looked at it closer, you could see that’s what it was—black speckled with white—but from a distance, it gleamed.
“Well, son of a gun,” Daddy said, turning it back and forth.
Momma said, “It shines so nice.”
“That’s the egg whites,” Theo said. “I shellacked it with egg whites to shine it up.” Theo took the sword when Daddy held it out. He touched the pointed tip of it with his thumb, like he was testing how sharp it was (not very). “You, know,” Theo said, “Miss Spivey told the Reverends that Eugene was playing a slave. That’s why they said he could do it.” Theo ran his thumb along the whole curve of the sword’s wooden blade. “Slaves don’t carry swords,” he said. “I guess the Reverends didn’t know that.”