FROM THE OUTSIDE, Theo Boykin’s notebook was an ordinary school notebook with a marbly black cardboard binding, the same as the ones Miss Spivey gave to all the rest of us. I’m not sure when she gave him one—after Halloween or maybe when we started the tutoring—but once she did, it seemed like he was never without it under his arm or stuffed into the pocket on the front of his overalls. Ildred teased him one time about carrying that notebook like other folks carried a rabbit’s foot. Theo told her, “You carry a rabbit’s foot, nobody knows if you can read or write.”
She said, “Theo, everybody knows you can read and write.”
“Maybe they know I can, but I carry this, and they know I do.”
He had everything in there: sketches and plans—including alternate and final versions—for everything we built, measurements, favorite lines from Alaeddin and other literature, lists of materials and of names and of places he wanted to go someday. Baghdad was on his list, of course, the one in Iraq, and also Atlanta and Stratford-on-Avon (the original one, in England), and Nashville and Chicago and Washington, D.C., and other places I can’t remember. There were figures and faces, doodles and curlicues in all the margins, “to do” lists that covered every aspect of the Baghdad Bazaar, and several pages devoted to a complete hand-printed calendar for 1938–39, with dates of special significance colorfully decorated in the manner of those manuscripts from the Middle Ages. Theo’s birthday was marked and Eugene’s and his momma’s, the Halloween party, the day we went to the circus in Oconee, every day of tutoring both at Threestep School and out at May’s place, the date of Miss Templeton’s departure, three or four different dates for the Baghdad Bazaar (Miss Spivey kept moving it back to give us more time), and a day marked “BNW,” which is a day I’ve yet to tell about, when he and Miss Spivey put their heads together to cause some real trouble. We’ll be getting to that soon enough.
By May the ninth we had most everything built: the minaret, of course, and the onion-domed ticket booth, the arched entrance to the food and sales area which Miss Spivey said constituted the bazaar proper, the big gates for the end of Main Street, and most impressive of all, two sections of false front—“flats,” Miss Spivey called them—that Theo had designed to roll right up to the real buildings on Main Street, one on either side of the sidewalk stage. Each flat was one and a half stories high and a storefront wide, with a “functional” balcony upstairs and arched doorways on ground level. Theo decided that it would be easier and safer to build the balconies this way, rather than try to attach them to the real fronts of buildings in town. (“And we can use ’em again,” he said, as if he already knew that the Baghdad Bazaar was destined for posterity.) Like the smaller pieces, which we built inside Bibbens’ barn, the flats had wheels so we could move them out to their designated places when the time came, but they were much too large to fit through any barn door. They had to be built out back of the barn, lying flat on the ground—this was, I thought, why Miss Spivey called them flats—with various big boys and men and my sister Ildred hammering and sawing on them at all hours of the day.
When the first flat was ready for painting, Miss Spivey had us start in the middle of the whole thing and work outward to the top, bottom, and side edges. We didn’t have to worry about drips, since the flat was laid out on the ground, so we were able to lay the white dirt mixture on pretty thick, with plenty of little peaks and swirls, like meringue on a pie. We let it dry flat for two days, keeping a nervous eye on the weather. Then Force and Theo and a bunch of other boys used Theo’s system of ropes and blocks-and-tackles to hoist it upright, and let me tell you, we were all astonished at how it turned out, with that white stuff on the window arches and the balcony and all. I don’t recall who discovered that adding a little kerosene—which we used originally for the purpose of killing termites—also made the white dirt mix crack a lot less when it dried. I won’t say that it looked exactly like stone, but it didn’t look like wood anymore, either. It was like a building covered in stucco, with a lot of fine lines and little cracks that gave it, Miss Spivey said, “the appearance of antiquity.”
Once they had the whole thing upright, they leaned it against the barn, wrong side out, to protect it from the weather—just in time, as it turned out. According to Theo’s calendar, on May the tenth a hailstorm struck in patches throughout our three-county area, pelting seven hundred chickens to death on a poultry farm north of Claytonville, all of which had to be dressed and sold as fryers in the space of one day. Miss Spivey said we weren’t taking any more chances with the weather after that. We would wait and paint the other flat on location, along with the rest of Main Street, at the last possible moment.
A few days after the hail spared us, Miss Spivey looked up from sewing gold stars on a piece of blue muslin that covered her desk at school and said, “Where is everybody?”
I stopped coloring the flyer Mr. Greene, publisher of the Piedmont County Weekly, had printed up to advertise the Baghdad Bazaar and looked around myself. Bolts of muslin dyed green, tan, blue, and red were piled up on every available surface, giving the schoolroom the look of a dry goods store and to some extent obscuring the fact that all but eight of the students’ desks were empty. It was no mystery where the rest of them were. Like most able-bodied country people in Piedmont County, they were out in the fields with canvas gloves on their hands and big floppy hats on their heads, chopping at the first crop of weeds that wanted to compete with the little cotton plants.
Beating me to it, Florence Hodges said, “They’re choppin’ cotton, Miss Spivey.”
Miss Spivey dragged her muslin, gold star, needle, and thread to the window. From there, if you squinted, you could see the hoes rising and falling in the corner of a nearby cotton field. It looked like somebody was throwing matchsticks in the air. “And why aren’t you out there?” she asked us.
I said, “Momma won’t let nobody chop cotton till they’re thirteen.”
“It’ll crook your back,” Ralphord put in.
“What about Force?” Miss Spivey asked, turning back to the window.
“She won’t let him skip school to do it. They go till June in Milledgeville.”
Most country schools like ours were closed already—with Miss Chandler, we never went past the first week of May—but Miss Spivey had wisely surmised that the best way to get ready for the Baghdad Bazaar was to keep as many of us as possible coming to school every day. Most of us were happy to come. It sure beat chores like chopping cotton.
Miss Spivey remained at the window, watching the matchsticks rise and fall, for a long time. Then she turned around and dismissed us, just like that, for the rest of the day. When Ralphord and I started collecting erasers and all, she said, “We’ll do that later!” and hurried us out the door. She walked us halfway to our place, dropping Ralphord at the O’Quinns’ on the way, before she revealed to me her plan to borrow Daddy’s T-Model Ford, if she could, and go on up to Macon. “To see a man about some camels,” she told Momma, and with her next breath, Miss Spivey asked for me to go along with her. I could scarcely believe my good fortune when Momma said yes.
The winter grounds of the Browning Brothers Circus were in Central City Park, at the end of Walnut Street, along the Ocmulgee River. Miss Spivey drove up Spring Street to Walnut and through the park entrance, and then past baseball fields and picnic areas to the circus grounds, which consisted of fenced-in fields, wooden sheds, and a row of larger buildings shaped like barns, all laid out in the shade along the river. Except for two men who appeared to be repairing the seams of a big tent advertising sideshow attractions—LYDIA THE WORLD’S FATTEST LADY and ALBERT THE ALLIGATOR BOY were on the panels I could see—the whole place seemed deserted. One of the two men pointed us toward a building with a fading pair of elephants painted trunk-to-trunk on the double wooden doors. We did not expect any kind of good news from the wizened man who sat, small and brown and sipping tea, at a desk in the corner of the cavernously empty elephant barn, but good news was what we got. Setting his china cup with a delicate clink on a saucer edged in gold and painted flowers, he told us that two camels on tour with the circus this spring had been “relieved of duty, I reckon you’d say.” A female who was in a family way had gotten so ornery, biting folks and making a mess everywhere, that the Browning Brothers decided to send her on home with a gelding to keep her company.
“Are they here?” Miss Spivey asked him.
The news was not that good. The circus had been halfway down the Georgia coast at the time the decision was made, which meant they weren’t too far from the camel trainer’s hometown, on one of the coastal islands. The camel man had convinced the Browning Brothers that it made every kind of sense to leave those two camels at home with him, until such time as the she-camel was ready to travel. The rest of the circus moved on, but the camels stayed back on the island.
“Which one?” Miss Spivey asked excitedly.
The wizened old man looked at her from under half-lowered eyelids. He reached for his teacup. She had to ask again—“Which island, do you know?”—before he recalled that the camel man was from Sapelo.
“So that’s where they are?” Miss Spivey asked. “Two camels? On Sapelo Island?”
That was where they were. Two camels. Soon to be three. “It’s a dark place,” the old man said.
We stepped from the dim barn into the sunshine, blinking and nearly blinded. When our eyes adjusted, we were astonished to see in front of us, painted on the half-assembled sideshow tent, a larger-than-life-sized picture of none other than the wizened man. He appeared to be sitting cross-legged in midair above a banner that said OLDEST LIVING MAN, a teacup and saucer in his hands. Floating over his head, four beautifully printed words entwined with roses advised us to DRINK LIFE EVER LASTING TEA.
“My Lord, Miss Spivey,” Mrs. Boykin said when we got back to Threestep. “Sapelo Island? That’s where my grandmomma came from! Do you reckon I’m related to that camel man?”
Miss Spivey thought that would be quite a coincidence, but Mrs. Boykin said pretty near everybody on Sapelo Island was related somehow, most of them being descended from the slaves who used to work the big plantation there. “And there’s a lot of their relations in these parts, too,” she said, by “these parts” meaning Piedmont and Baldwin counties and thereabouts, on account the owners of that plantation sent their “property” inland during the war. “For safekeeping,” Mrs. Boykin said. “They were afraid the Yankees would come off their ships and steal the slaves and set ’em free.” Her own grandmomma remembered getting on a boat with her momma to leave the island and then walking and walking for days.
“You don’t say,” said Miss Spivey.
“Gran was just a little girl then,” Mrs. Boykin said. “She didn’t know it was Milledgeville they were going to, but that’s where they ended up, right outside of town, around Hopewell. They moved the whole plantation up there, except for the very, very old folks. When the Yankees took the islands, old folks was all they found. After the war was over, some of those people stayed around here and some went back to the island. That’s why I still have kin out that way.”
“Your sister lives out that way, don’t she, Miz Boykin?” I was thinking about the seashells and sand dollars Theo and Eugene used to bring back from their visits to the coast. Miss Spivey looked at me, astonished. I quickly corrected myself: “Doesn’t she?”
“Yes, she does,” Mrs. Boykin said. “My sister lives on the mainland now, but she works on Sapelo. Goes back and forth on a boat they got that carries people out there across the water.”
Miss Spivey, who seemed very excited, asked Mrs. Boykin if she knew why the Oldest Living Man would say that Sapelo Island was a dark place.
“Can’t say as I know, Miss Spivey. It’s mostly Negroes live there—them, and a few rich folks that come and go.”
“My grandmother used to have a place on Skidaway Island,” Miss Spivey admitted. “Is that near Sapelo?”
“Skidaway’s closer to Savannah,” said Mrs. Boykin. “You just got to cross a river to get from the mainland to Skidaway Island. Sapelo is down south maybe thirty or forty miles from there. And farther out in the water.”
For a person raised around Milledgeville, she surely knew her islands.
Mrs. Boykin also knew that her sister worked in a house—“More like a palace,” May said later—which was built on the foundations of the old plantation home on Sapelo from years ago. Now the house belonged to R. (for Richard) J. Reynolds, Jr., the tobacco man. Mrs. Boykin said he’d bought almost the whole island four or five years ago from a down-and-out auto industry millionaire. Her sister used to work for that fellow, before. It looked like people didn’t buy a lot of automobiles when times got hard, but they sure enough didn’t give up smoking, so Mr. Reynolds did all right.
Miss Spivey made some telephone calls from Bibbens’ store, and she sent and received two telegrams. Before you knew it, Miss Spivey had a visit to the Reynoldses’ island home all arranged. “My folks know everybody,” she explained. The lord of the manor was not on the island at present, Miss Spivey was told, but she was welcome to come anyway. “So much the better,” Miss Spivey said. “We’re not looking for him.”
I noticed right away that she said “we.”
From the first, she wanted my sister May to come along. That was a surprise—to me, anyway. A bigger surprise was that May wanted to go. It was unheard-of for May to go anywhere without her children, but here she was, willing to leave them at Momma’s for two whole days while she went on an excursion with Miss Spivey, and so excited about it she could hardly talk straight. “I don’t got anything to wear!” she said when we went to get her in McIntyre, but Miss Spivey said she had a dress or two that would do May just fine. May was so skinny to begin with that she could fit in a regular-sized dress if the style was loose. Miss Spivey also insisted that Mrs. Boykin should come along. At first Mrs. Boykin said she was way too busy, but Theo said, “How long’s it been since you’ve seen your sister, Momma?” and Eugene offered to pack her bag and carry her bodily to the train, if need be.
“Lord, what kind of boys have I raised?” Mrs. Boykin asked my momma. Her voice was thick with happiness.
Meanwhile, I kept waiting for Miss Spivey to invite me to come along. I was one hundred percent available—I couldn’t chop cotton, I didn’t have school—so what was stopping her? I did not for a minute entertain the possibility that she wasn’t going to ask me. I kept on waiting, right up until the moment when May took both my hands in hers and asked me if I would help her girls keep watch on little Ed and little May while she was gone. “Ed’s away and Momma will be out in the fields. Somebody’s got to watch those little ones, Gladys, somebody I can put my faith in—or else I can’t go.”
They left the next day. Momma wouldn’t let Force skip school to drive them, so they called on the train to stop at Threestep and carry them up to Macon. From there they took the Central of Georgia all the way to Savannah, where Miss Spivey planned to “hire a car,” which she herself would drive the rest of the way down the coast. Mrs. Boykin would stay at her sister’s while Miss Spivey and May got on the boat the Reynolds people had promised to send for them. Momma and May were both worried how May would take a boat ride, but Miss Spivey said that May spent the whole forty minutes or so standing forward at the railing with her hair and her clothes all flying back in the wind. They saw two dolphins on the way.
On Sapelo, a big fancy car was waiting for them. When May heard that the house was only half a mile from the dock, she told Miss Spivey that it might be better for her to walk than to ride on a bumpy dirt road, even in such a nice car. They could tell the driver was worried that he’d get in trouble for letting them walk, so they both got in the car right before they reached the house. The house, May said, the house plain took your breath away. May said the first thing you saw as you walked toward the house—before the white columns and the colored tiles and the gardens and all—was a big pool of water shaped like a cross with a statue rising up from the middle.
“It was a swimmin’ pool, Gladys! And there was another one inside the house—a whole room with birds painted on the walls, and a beautiful tile floor with a hole in the middle, full of water! Can you believe it?” May said. “Miss Spivey and I sat at the edge and put our feet in that pool, just like we were down at the Rocky Creek, only we were inside the house.”
May said they ate supper at a table big enough for twenty people, the three of them clustered at one end. It was just May, Miss Spivey, and the lady of the house, who looked to be about their same age and whose name was Elizabeth, but everyone called her “Blitz,” she said. The only other people May saw were dressed in maids’ and cooks’ uniforms, and not a one of them called the lady “Blitz.” That supper was the only time May and Miss Spivey saw her anyway. They stayed in a different building that was for guests, May said. She couldn’t eat the food, which included a fish with the head still on it. While the soup was served—“It had toadstools in it,” May said—Miss Spivey told their hostess that she was looking for a camel man.
“Oh, the camel man!” said Mrs. Reynolds, and May said Miss Spivey’s spoon stopped halfway between the soup and her mouth.
“You know him?” Miss Spivey said.
“I know of him,” Mrs. Reynolds said. She put her spoon down. “Well, you know, Dick mentioned one day that if you turn your back to the water, then Nanny Goat Beach looks like the desert, and someone said wouldn’t it be clever to take some photos of a camel standing on the beach. It was about the cigarettes, you understand. Well, one of Dick’s stable boys said he had a friend who owned a camel. And so Dick offered him a sum of money—my husband is generous to a fault. A few days later, they bring the camel and it’s white! A white camel! Had they never seen a package of the cigarettes? Well, it seems they had a brown camel, too, but the brown one was ill or something. They couldn’t bring the brown one. So they expected Dick to take photographs of a white camel—and pay them for it.”
The lady of the house stopped there. May and Miss Spivey waited, but Mrs. Reynolds just went back to her soup, so Miss Spivey asked, “What happened to the camel? Is it still on the island?”
“I hope not. I believe Dick sent that camel man on his way. Haven’t heard another word about it. Ah, here’s the fish. Thank you, Lily.”
May spent the rest of the meal trying to avoid the eye of her “trout almondine.” She noticed Miss Spivey had no trouble at all getting acquainted with her fish.
The next day, after sleeping all alone in a bed big enough for six people—“I don’t believe that bed would even fit in Momma’s whole bedroom, Gladys!”—May came back across the water with Miss Spivey and they drove the hired automobile to fetch Mrs. Boykin and find out what, if anything, she had learned about the camels by asking around. “Fingers crossed, May,” Miss Spivey said, crossing all of hers on top of the steering wheel as they approached the dock where they’d arranged to meet. There, standing right next to Mrs. Boykin, was a tall and lanky fellow who introduced himself to Miss Spivey as Andrew Mack McComb. “Uncle Mack, folks call me,” he said. Two camels were tied to a sweetgum tree right behind him: an enormous brown one with a kind of harness around her head to keep her from biting and a smaller one that May would have called light gray rather than white. “Done found the camels,” Mrs. Boykin said.