ONE WEEK TO THE DAY after Miss Spivey and May and Mrs. Boykin returned from their trip, Uncle Mack the camel man rode into town. He and his camels had gone by truck from the coast to the circus grounds in Macon—it was a beautiful circus truck, which I saw later, with a picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware painted on the side—and after a couple of days’ rest, the camels walked on down from Macon to Threestep.
Uncle Mack looked like a camel man to me. He wasn’t dressed like a Bedouin or anything, but his pants were tucked into tall boots that were black and shiny, and his shirt was white with long full sleeves and buttoned cuffs, and he was wearing a round hat made of thick red felt—just like the one in Miss Spivey’s costume trunk. He was riding the grayish white camel, the smaller one, whose name, according to the letters embroidered on the cushion under his saddle, was IVAN V. (I knew from studying Roman numerals what “V” meant.) The pile of cargo heaped up on the hump behind Ivan the Fifth’s saddle made it look like Uncle Mack was sitting in an oversized easy chair up there. The big brown camel’s name was Sabrina. Her halter was tied to the back of Ivan’s saddle, so that she could mosey along to the side and behind him, her hump and huge belly rocking back and forth with each step. They were both decked out with camel bells, which was why people heard them coming in time for kids to run outside and chase after them and folks to line up along the street and watch them jingle down toward Bibbens’ place. This was on a Saturday, late in the afternoon. Ralphord and I happened to be in front of Mr. Gordon’s law office when the camels passed by. Behind us, we heard Mrs. Gordon say to her husband, “Do you all mean to tell me those creatures walked here all the way from Macon? That’s fifty miles if it’s a mile!”—whereupon Ralphord turned around and delivered point-blank to Mr. and Mrs. Gordon a camel fact he’d been saving up since last fall:
“Fifty miles ain’t nothing to a camel,” Ralphord said.
Luckily, there was room for Uncle Mack and the camels in Bibbens’ barn, even with our minaret and onion dome and arches inside. It’s not like we had much choice about where to put them. Everybody else with a barn that wasn’t falling down had some kind of livestock in it that the camels—or at least Sabrina—wouldn’t tolerate. Camels are even more prejudiced than people when it comes to getting along with their fellow creatures. In Bibbens’ barn, there was a row of empty stalls and a little room in the corner where a hired hand had slept at one time. Mrs. Bibben called the little room “the creamery.” It may have been a creamery once—Momma said the Bibbens’ place used to be part of a great big farm years ago—but it hadn’t been used for anything for a very long time, if the layers of old hay and broken chairs and rusty buckets and the like were any indication. Some of us were relieved from rehearsals and painting during the week before Uncle Mack arrived so we could help Mrs. Bibben clean out the stalls and the creamery and turn them into the “caravanserai,” which is a place where people and their camels live together, Miss Spivey said. (Actually, she said “where camels and their people live.”) Between them, my sister Ildred and Mrs. Bibben made that little room pretty cozy, although we never could get the smell of old hay and kerosene out of it entirely. Miss Spivey sniffed once or twice when she came to inspect, but she decided in the end that it would do. The camel man wouldn’t mind, she thought, as long as he could be near Ivan and Sabrina. “He’ll probably keep the camels outside anyway,” she said. “Who knows? Mr. McComb may sleep out there, too.” That’s what a man of the desert would do.
Miss Spivey always referred to Uncle Mack as “Mr. McComb,” which was, she pointed out, his name. This led to some confusion. Mrs. Bibben had planned on the camel man taking at least some of his meals in the house, which was where Miss Spivey took hers during the week, until the Bibbens found, upon his arrival, that Mr. McComb was a Negro.
“Looks like you could have mentioned that fact,” Mrs. Bibben said to Miss Spivey while about a dozen kids from Threestep School plus the Boykins helped Uncle Mack unload cargo from the camels and put it away in the barn.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Bibben,” Miss Spivey said. “I guess it slipped my mind.”
You could tell they both felt snippy about it.
Uncle Mack never said a word about the kerosene smell, which was, in fact, growing ever fainter. Upon getting the camels settled in the paddock and following Eugene and Theo and a pile of other kids through the creamery room into the barn proper, Uncle Mack’s first words were, “Whoa! What’s all this you got here?”
He already knew about the Baghdad Bazaar—Miss Spivey had it all arranged for him to make some money giving camel rides while adding to the Baghdad atmosphere—but this was his first look at the minaret and arches and all. At Ralphord’s invitation, Uncle Mack climbed up the little steps in the back of the minaret, which was stored underneath the empty hayloft. The ceiling was low there. He had to duck his head when he reached the top.
“That’s where I go!” Ralphord yelled. “I’m the moo-ez-zeen!”
Uncle Mack climbed down again and delicately touched the white surface of the minaret, no doubt admiring its appearance of antiquity.
“We painted that with about five coats of kaolin,” Theo said.
“What’d you paint it with?”
“White dirt. Ildred Cailiff came up with the formula.” Theo looked around. “Is Ildred here?”
“You made all this?” Uncle Mack turned from the minaret to one half of what we were calling the Great Gate. He put his hands on his hips. “How’d’y’all know how to make a thing like this?”
Our Chief Engineer was modestly silent on that point, so Ralphord said, “Theo made the plans. We just followed the plans.”
Theo was standing there with his notebook under his arm.
Uncle Mack pointed to the writing on the panels of the Great Gate. “You write that up there?”
“Yes, sir,” Theo said. He had copied a line of Arabian-type letters from the beginning of one of Sir Richard Burton’s volumes, repeating it over and over, to make a kind of border along the top of the gate. Miss Spivey guessed the line was a dedication. “It probably means, ‘To my loving wife,’” she’d said, but it looked very authentic.
Uncle Mack said, “When you wrote it, did you start over to here, on the right, and go backwards to the left?”
“No,” Theo said. “Why would I do that?”
“Y’all don’t know what it says, do you?”
Theo didn’t exactly look Uncle Mack up and down then, but you could tell what he was thinking. He was considering the odds that a circus man from Georgia would know how to read this writing from Baghdad. We were all considering that. “I copied it out of a book,” Theo said. “Do you know what it says?”
Uncle Mack squinted at the writing for a second or two. Then he shrugged. “It looks good on there, that’s all. Seems like you copied it just right.”
Uncle Mack took his meals with several different families during his stay, but most of his suppers were with the Boykins. This arrangement suited us Cailiffs just fine because it meant Uncle Mack would come down the lane past our place almost every day. Often as not, he was riding Ivan the camel! If we were outside standing on the porch, Ivan would turn his head and look straight at the bunch of us. He’d give us that superior gaze camels do, the knowing smile. One time, Uncle Mack and Ivan V going up the lane came face-to-face with Mr. Gordon’s automobile coming down it. Mr. Gordon, no doubt exasperated as usual from talking to the Boykins about leasing their land, came around too fast from behind the Boykins’ place and nearly clipped old Ivan before he swerved (Mr. Gordon, that is), sending up a cloud of pink dust that did not faze that camel in the least, what with his sand-resistant nostrils and double-lidded eyes. Daddy was just about to send Force outside to offer Mr. Gordon a push when his automobile gave a lurch and he was rolling again.
One day, over at the Boykins’, Uncle Mack told Etta and me that his full name was Andrew Browning McComb. “My momma was a Browning,” he said.
Later, I asked Etta George, “If his momma was a Browning, don’t that mean the Browning Brothers, the ones that own the circus, are colored, too?”
“Not necessarily,” Etta said, and her tone of voice made me drop that topic and let it lie.
Another time Ralphord asked him where he got his round red felt hat, and he said he got it from Miss Spivey. Ralphord whistled. “From her trunk, you mean? You best give it back, Uncle Mack. That hat is for somebody in particular!” Uncle Mack just looked at Ralphord, who realized about the same time I did that Uncle Mack must be that somebody in particular, if Miss Spivey gave him the hat.
Miss Spivey wanted in the worst way for Uncle Mack to come and deliver us a lecture and camel demonstration at Threestep School. Among other things, she thought it would lure the older children back into the classroom now that “the first round,” as she called it, of chopping cotton appeared to be winding down. My brother Force did not think this was a good idea. Force said Miss Spivey knew very well what the Superintendent would say about bringing Uncle Mack into our school. It might even be against the law. Force wasn’t sure. Miss Spivey said the real crime would be to deprive the students of a resource like Mr. McComb, and besides, the Superintendent wouldn’t have a lick of trouble with the idea of bringing Uncle Mack into our school if he was coming to paint something or wipe the floors, now, would he? “I’ll just keep a mop handy in case the Superintendent drops by,” she said to Force, who shook his head and said, “Y’all like getting in trouble, don’t you?”
This struck me as mighty disrespectful of him, but she looked Force straight in the eye and never said a word about it.
In the end, though, Miss Spivey did not bring Uncle Mack into our school. She had us all sitting outside on chairs and logs and such in the schoolyard, waiting for him to show up with the camels. There was quite a crowd of folks from around town who joined us. Eugene and Mrs. Boykin were there, too, and Etta George, and some children from the colored school. Those children all sat a little farther off on the cushiony pine needles at the edge of the woods around the schoolyard, some of them with their baby brothers and sisters and their mommas and grand-mommas and even granddaddies along with them. When Ivan V came jingling around the last curve in the road—Uncle Mack up on top in the saddle that looked like a chair with no legs—all the colored folks stood up and clapped and cheered. That kind of surprised me, to tell the truth. Uncle Mack bowed to them from up there on the camel, and he did something with the reins that made Ivan dip his long neck like he was bowing, too.
When everybody settled down again, Uncle Mack tapped Ivan’s shoulder with a long wooden stick while at the same time saying something that sounded like, “Oosh,” the result of which was that Ivan lowered himself, front end first, then hindquarters, and then a final bending of his front legs that put him in a Sphinx-like position, which allowed Uncle Mack to slide off with ease. Using the long stick, Uncle Mack pointed out features that made the one-humped camel, or dromedary, particularly well suited to the desert that was his natural home. Some of these we’d already learned about during the week we spent studying camelids, but that only made it all the more exciting to encounter them in the flesh: the flat feet and long curvy neck, the droopy double eyelids—one pair that moved up and down, the other side to side!—and thick curly lashes, the flaring nostrils with extra folds that could close like tiny awnings in a sandstorm, and, of course, his hump. The hump was the reason a camel could go without food for eight to ten days, Uncle Mack said. Sometimes even longer. He had that built-in storage. I had been picturing a giant canteen of water up inside there, but Uncle Mack said it didn’t work quite that way. He said that camels stored water in their cells. He said a thirsty camel could drink a quart of water in four gulps. Somebody filled a bucket from the pump so Ivan V could demonstrate.
While Ivan’s lips slurped and burbled, making short work of the two-gallon bucket, Uncle Mack set us straight on what he called dangerous myths about camels’ feats of endurance. (Miss Spivey wrote down myths and feat—the spelling of which surprised me, as did cells.) “A camel’s like a human being some ways,” Uncle Mack said. “They’ll work hard for you, then they got to rest. They got to stock up on food and water. That’s where the French and the English and all made their big mistakes. They’d drive their camels day after day, hundreds of pounds piled up on their backs, and expect them to get by on one watering a week. Drove their camels to death half the time just because they didn’t know any better.” There were heartbreaking stories, too sad to tell, of whole herds perishing in military campaigns in Egypt and the Afghan wars and Algeria and the like, eighty thousand camels in this war, twenty thousand in that. It was terrible to imagine the path of a retreating army strewn with the corpses of camels. Later, Miss Spivey showed us on the map the places to which Uncle Mack had referred.
Everybody wanted to know why he left the other camel in Bibbens’ barn instead of bringing her along. Uncle Mack said Sabrina flat-out refused to come, due, no doubt, to the temperamental nature of her condition. “If y’all ever seen a mule plant its feet, then you have some idea of her mood,” Uncle Mack said. Even Ivan couldn’t get her to come, “and she’s prone to follow him like puppy.” Sabrina was due to give birth in July or August after expecting, in the manner of camels, for thirteen months, which fact instantly won her the sympathy of every woman in the audience, you could tell by the murmur that went up. Uncle Mack said the foal would weigh about eighty pounds when it was born—“No wonder it takes thirteen months!” Momma exclaimed—and would stand four feet tall, once it was able to stand. He also told us that a camel foal can almost always find its way back to the place where its mother used to drink before the foal was born. “In the desert, that’s likely to be a camel well, but y’all just might find a young camel moseyin’ up to your friend Mr. Bibben’s watering tank someday on down the road.”
“You mean he could find his way back here all the way from Macon?” Florence Hodges asked. This was a bold move on her part, asking a question of the camel man. Mavis Davis, who was standing at the edge of the schoolyard, as far from Miss Spivey & Company as she could get, scowled at Florence long-distance for taking an interest.
Uncle Mack said, “Miss, if the stories I’ve heard are half true, I reckon he could find his way back here from Jerusalem.”
“Or Baghdad!” said Ralphord.
Uncle Mack asked if there were any other questions, and to everyone’s surprise, Arnie Lumpkin’s hand went up. “What’s that camel smilin’ about?” he wanted to know.
We all looked at Ivan V.
“I believe he finds the world to be a funny place,” said Uncle Mack.
When the informational part of Uncle Mack’s visit was over, he invited everybody who wanted a camel ride to line up over by the front stoop of the schoolhouse, on which he had placed a desk for added elevation and a wooden chair to step up onto the desk. He led Ivan V over to this arrangement and parked him there. Everybody just sat and stared at Uncle Mack for a moment when he first said “camel ride,” as if they could not quite believe their ears. Thinking that folks might be scared by the prospect of mounting such a tall and shaggy beast, Uncle Mack explained, “The easiest way to get on up there is while he’s in a standing position. If y’all want to climb up from the steps to the chair, and then—”
That was as far as he got before there was a general stampede to get in line.
On the day after Uncle Mack’s visit to the schoolyard, more desks were filled at Threestep School than had been for a while, so Miss Spivey put her question to a sizable group: Why, she asked us, couldn’t we invite the children from Miss Templeton’s school, many of whom had joined us for the camel lesson, to come to our school now that their teacher was gone? Most of us didn’t know what to say. Mavis Davis wasn’t part of that tongue-tied group.
“They can’t come here!” she said.
“Why not? We do have room for them,” Miss Spivey said reasonably.
“They are colored.” Mavis said this slowly, as if Miss Spivey needed time to take it in. “And they’re ignorant.”
“And they stink.” That was Arnie.
“You stink!” That was me. I could hardly believe my ears. Arnie looked like he couldn’t believe his, either. In fact, pretty much everyone in the room turned to see what might have come over me.
Except for Miss Spivey. She paid no attention to Arnie and me. “Well, now. Let’s see,” she said in that same reasonable tone. “The children can’t come to school because they’re ignorant. Is that what you said, Mavis?”
“Everybody heard what I said.”
Miss Spivey looked around the room like this was a spelling lesson. “Who knows what ignorant means?” she asked.
Mavis didn’t bother to raise her hand. “It means they don’t know nothing,” she said.
“Ah,” said Miss Spivey. “I see. ‘They don’t know nothing,’ but they can’t come to school to learn.” She looked around. “Does that make sense?”
“No,” I said. Mavis glared at me.
“What about the rest of you?” Miss Spivey said. “Does it make sense to keep children out of school because they are ignorant, which is to say, they don’t know and need to learn? Does that make sense to you? Yes or no?”
About half the room responded, although without enthusiasm, “No, Miss Spivey.” Cyrus Wood mumbled that all the country schools were closed by now anyway “except this here,” but only those closest to him heard him say it. The rest were silent. They kept their eyes on the floor, or else on Mavis, who looked fit to explode.
Miss Spivey leaned back against the blackboard, half sitting on the ledge that held the chalk. I worried about her standing up with a white stripe across her backside. She seemed unconcerned about that. She folded her arms and looked up at the ceiling, buying time, I thought, trying to think of a way to win this one for the cause, although I couldn’t tell you if the cause was something noble or just Miss Spivey’s determination not to let Mavis win a round. She stirred on the blackboard ledge, as if she’d settled on something to say. “Some years ago,” Miss Spivey began, “when I was in Baghdad—”
“My momma says there’s no such place!” Mavis cried.
A stunned silence fell over the classroom. Even Miss Spivey was speechless at first. No such place as Baghdad? No such place? Miss Spivey stood up, blinking at Mavis for so long that Mavis took to pulling nervously at the skirt of her dress. It was the same white-and-yellow-striped dress her mother had worn to old Miss Chandler’s funeral, which fact I remembered because I’d heard Mrs. Reverend Stokes whispering to somebody in church that day that this here was a funeral, not a ladies’ tea.
Miss Spivey went to her teacher’s desk and sat in the chair and folded her hands in front of her. “Mavis,” she said, “I’d like you to come up here, please.”
I believe Mavis was expecting to hear that. She left off picking at her skirt and marched up front, her shoes slapping her heels and her long chin sticking out, as if Miss Spivey had dared her to do something.
This was a moment of significance for all of us: the first and only time all year that Miss Spivey had ever called anybody to the front of the room for anything other than reciting or auditioning or writing on the blackboard (which we all loved to do). Our old teacher, Miss Chandler, would have been busy selecting a paddle from the ones that used to hang on the wall behind the teacher’s desk. All of us were wondering what Miss Spivey was going to do, although we knew for a fact that she wasn’t going to be hitting Mavis with any paddle. She had thrown them all away the first week of school.
When Mavis reached the front of the room, Miss Spivey said, “If you would, Mavis, pull the map down for us, please.”
Mavis took ahold of the button on the end of the cord that hung from the map, and as she pulled down on it, slowly and carefully, the world unfolded as usual.
We all knew that the real city of Baghdad, the one to which Miss Spivey traveled with Dr. Janet Miller, was located in Iraq, and that Iraq, more widely known in bygone days by the ancient name of Mesopotamia, was, in its present shape, one of the “newer” countries whose borders Miss Spivey had added to the map in thick red lines. Baghdad was tucked in the Cradle of Civilization, near the ruins of ancient Babylon, Miss Spivey had told us—oh, so long ago, it seemed—between two rivers whose names she guaranteed we would remember for the rest of our natural days.
Now, the ancient city of Babylon may have been the place where both the alphabet and the rule of law got their start, as Miss Spivey said, but in our minds, Babylon was pretty well stuck to the word whores—the same way handmaidens was stuck to Satan—thanks to Reverend Stokes’s frequent preaching on the loose morals and half-naked actresses in Holly wood movies, those temptations to which we all succumbed as often as we could scare up a nickel for admission. (When Gone with the Wind came to Claytonville, Reverend Stokes, who saw it twice, lost half his congregation by remarking, at the sight of all those bare-shouldered belles, that it was no wonder the South had lost the War.) We were all a little startled, then, when Miss Spivey told Mavis Davis to point to Babylon on the map at the front of the room.
“Babylon?” Mavis said. She sounded not only surprised but indignant, as if Miss Spivey had called her a bad name.
“Baghdad,” Miss Spivey corrected herself. “Point to the city of Baghdad, please.”
It was easy to find. Miss Spivey had lettered two triangular flags to say Baghdad in fancy letters and put one of them between the Tigris and the Euphrates and the other about midway between Milledgeville and Claytonville, Georgia, although we hadn’t changed the name of our town officially as of yet.
“What if I do?” said Mavis. “It don’t mean a thing. You wrote it on there your own self.”
The whole room gasped. But Mavis wasn’t finished.
“Just like you wrote all these here names. Eye-rack!” she jeered, and looking for all the world like one of Satan’s handmaidens, she poked hard with her finger right through that fragile territory. Then instead of pulling it out in unspeakable horror, such as the rest of us were feeling, she left her finger in the hole and pulled down hard until she hit the stick across the bottom of the map, having just torn the world in two.
When the ripping sound ended, all you could hear in that schoolroom was the button on the pull-down string tapping on the blackboard while the torn map flapped back and forth, back and forth. Mavis stood there hunched like a person at the starting line of a race, with her hands clenching and unclenching down at her sides, and her eyes shooting bolts of defiance and hatred at Miss Spivey.
Normally, a hush like that lasts only so long. A chair scrapes, the floor creaks, a dog barks, a magpie or a mockingbird complains outside the window, and the quiet breaks up, it lets people breathe again. Not this hush. Instead of breaking up in sniffles or coughs or throats clearing, it deepened into a silence so intense and suspenseful you could almost see it, like the air going yellow before a thunderstorm. It didn’t seem like there was anything Miss Spivey could do to Mavis to top what Mavis had done to the map. It didn’t seem like anybody in that schoolroom was ever going to be able to draw another breath again.
That whole time, Miss Spivey didn’t look at Mavis or the map. Miss Spivey stared straight over the tops of our heads at the back of the schoolroom, where Theo’s Baghdad pictures covered the wall. She waited until the button stopped tapping on the blackboard. She must have been watching it, too, out the corner of her eye. When the pull-down string hung perfectly still again, Miss Spivey took a deep breath. She said, “Mavis, you are excused.”
Mavis hung there for a moment, fists clenched.
Then Miss Spivey said, “You are all excused.” Her eyes had shifted down from the pictures to look at the sorry lot of us. From the look on her face, I was afraid she might start to cry, in which case, I didn’t know what would happen to us, but all she did was say, “Class dismissed,” and then, when we went on sitting there, staring at her, she snapped, “Go on home!”
Mavis Davis took off like a bat out of hell, leaving her lunch bucket behind in the half-room and her shoes on the floor where she’d stepped right out of them in her dash for the door.