PEOPLE STARTED ARRIVING before sunset on Friday in wagons, in automobiles and trucks, on horseback and on mules and on foot, some pushing wheelbarrows or pulling coaster wagons with lunch and their kids curled up in them. They came from every town the camel route had passed through and then some: from Brennan and Oconee and Claytonville and Toomsboro and McIntyre and Milledgeville and Ivey and Eatonton and Haddock and Gray—some even all the way from Macon. Donkeys and mules and old farm horses were everywhere, tethered to axles and fence posts and the telephone pole in front of Bibbens’ store. People walked up and down the street looking at the arches and the onion dome and the balconies and all with their mouths hanging open, saying things like, “I drove through this town last week and there was nothin’ here, just like always. Now look at it!”
With the arrival of the crowds, it seemed like everybody forgot all about whatever controversy and trouble Miss Spivey had stirred up, at least for the time being. All folks could think of was how if everybody here spent just ten cents, or fifteen cents, or twenty, or a dollar—I tell you, multiplication facts were flying. We seemed to be teetering on the brink of untold wealth. Reverend Stokes attributed the size of the crowd to God’s blessing on our humble enterprise. “If I said it once,” he kept saying, “I have said it a hundred times. God helps those who help themselves.”
He said it a hundred times.
Shortly after sunset, Miss Spivey sent Ralphord up into the minaret and told him to wait for her signal. It was almost time for what we referred to on the flyers as the Moment of Illumination. Originally, Miss Spivey had been disappointed by Theo’s insistence that, owing to the significant quantity of kerosene we had painted on our boards and mixed into our white dirt, the flaming torches she had imagined in holders on the buildings and all around the stage posed a significant risk of fire. Theo assured her that we had no need for flaming torches. Cecil Wicker had prevailed on Mr. Tuttle the hardware man for a half mile of wire and two hundred lightbulbs, offering him in payment five full months of free electricity, to be donated (unwittingly, I regret to say) by Cecil’s father. Additional lights were obtained on loan from the winter grounds of the Browning Brothers Circus. Strung all along Main Street and in every corner of the Baghdad Bazaar were electric lights beyond counting (hence the estimate of 1,001 bulbs, a symbolic rather than dishonest figure, Miss Spivey had said as she fiddled with the wording for the flyer). From the minaret, Ralphord saw Miss Spivey’s handkerchief emerge, fluttering, from her skirt pocket and he threw himself heart and soul into the little song she’d taught him. He was still holding the last long note when, from one end of Main Street to the other, the lights came on almost all at once.
A sharp and universal intake of breath marked the Moment of Illumination, followed by a murmur of appreciation that seemed to come from every quarter of the Baghdad Bazaar. The camels cut loose and bellowed, Ivan startling everybody over by the Camel Ride and Sabrina hollering her response to his call from Bibbens’ barn. (As the evening went on, we came to realize that it was Ralphord’s singing, not the lights, that set the camels off.) My brother Ralphord was so transported that he yelled from the tower, “Let there be light!”
Judging by the long lines of folks waiting to play, the Dunk Tank and the Turkey Shoot were the favorite attractions in the game area of the Baghdad Bazaar, with the Reverend wives’ Cake Walk and the Duck Drop not far behind. Ralphord, who was released from minaret duty between songs, went around with me for a while, playing the games. He wasted ten pennies, one at a time, on the Turkey Shoot. He was the only one in full Arab dress among the men and boys lined up along the fence with rifles to their shoulders, squinting down the barrels, waiting for the next bird to come gobbling nervously into view. Even in a good mood, I never liked the Turkey Shoot. Between the gobbling and the gunfire, you couldn’t hear yourself think.
While Ralphord aimed and missed, I won a cake with pink frosting in the Cake Walk, which was set up on the sidewalk across from the stage area on Main Street, with Pinkie Lou Griffith providing the stop-and-start music from a piano inside Dot’s former Café. When Ralphord gave up on the Turkey Shoot, we ate cake and watched the Duck Drop, which was the only other game that required no skill, just luck, unless there was some skill involved in predicting which numbered square painted on a wooden tabletop would be the next to receive a deposit from one of the overfed ducklings waddling around on the table. “You mean I gotta guess where them ducks are gonna drop a load?” Ralphord asked Ildred, who was taking in bets on numbers 5 and 7, both of which looked previously stained.
I bet on number 2 and won a comb. Ralphord picked 5 and came up empty-handed. I followed him to the Dunk Tank, combing my hair.
At least a dozen boys were lined up to pay a penny for two chances at throwing a baseball to hit a metal circle that would cause the shelf on which the deputy sheriff was sitting to fall away beneath him and dunk him in the water. So far, he was still dry and looking bored back there, nothing to do but flinch every once in a while when a stray pitch hit the chicken wire that protected him from stray pitches. Of all the fellows in line, Theo Boykin was the big surprise. Everybody knew that when the CME minister in Brennan put together a colored boys’ baseball team a few summers ago, he’d kept Theo out of the lineup by making him the official scorekeeper. Theo was much better at calculating batting averages (in his head, no paper required) than he was at hitting, catching, or throwing. Everybody knew that. So what was he doing in line for the Dunk Tank?
“What’s Theo think he’s doing?” I whispered to Ralphord.
“Waitin’ in line,” Ralphord said.
At this point, I was still piqued at Theo for helping Miss Spivey get herself fired. I can’t deny that. We knew by now that he went with Miss Spivey while she drove Mr. Bibben’s delivery truck all around the back roads between here and Brennan, picking up as many colored children as they could coax into coming to our school, promising them camel rides if they came along. Theo (and Etta!) rode in the back to make sure nobody fell off or jumped ship. I couldn’t help thinking that the world wasn’t going to seem so new or brave come next school year, with Miss Spivey gone.
While he waited, Theo was talking in a very lively way to somebody’s cousin who was visiting from up North someplace, Cleveland, I think. A pretty girl named Lucille. She was one of maybe a dozen colored people standing around watching the Dunk Tank—some that I knew and some that I didn’t—but like I said, Theo was the only one in line for the game. A crowd made up mostly of strangers had gathered to watch Theo hand a coin to Arnie Lumpkin’s father, who, it was said, hadn’t touched a drop since the Martians landed. He took the coin but hesitated and looked around, like he was trying to get a signal from the crowd, before he gave Theo a baseball in return.
You could tell that Lucille was a girl who had spent her formative years someplace other than Piedmont County, Georgia. She looked at the baseball in Theo’s hand and asked Mr. Lumpkin boldly, “How come he don’t have two balls like everybody else?”
The men in the crowd erupted in laughter, and for the first time, Theo looked around. Mr. Lumpkin might have turned over a new leaf in some respects, but he couldn’t resist an opportunity like this one. He said, “Well, honey, I reckon you’d have to ask him about that!” The crowd hooted again, louder than before—as I am sure Mr. Lumpkin expected they would—and Lucille’s face crumpled a little, like she was all of a sudden trying not to cry. Theo said something to her and reached for her hand, but she jerked it away and ran off. “Lucille!” Theo called after her. The crowd hooted again and whistled, some of them yelling, “Lucille! Hey, Lucille!” and “Come on back here ’fore you break this boy’s heart!” Theo still had the baseball in his hand. He wound himself up furiously and threw it as hard as he could, with hardly a glance at where it was supposed to go. He said later that he didn’t even see the ball hit—he had already turned to run after Lucille—but he heard it: thunk, clunk, and splash!
The crowd went wild. People came running from the pie booth and the Cake Walk to see the deputy sheriff struggle to his feet in the Dunk Tank, dripping and wringing out his hat. I spotted Mr. Greene, the newspaperman from Claytonville, and Mr. Tuttle the hardware man sort of holding each other up, they were laughing so hard. I think they might have been drinking more than iced tea while they were waiting for night to fall. Even Reverend Stokes was showing a lot of teeth, and my brother Ralphord was hysterical. We looked around for Theo, thinking to congratulate him, and that’s when I noticed that all the pointing and laughing and slapping of thighs was being done by the white folks in the audience. The few Negroes who were left appeared to be trapped by the press of the crowd. Theo, suddenly, was nowhere in sight.
At ten o’clock sharp, everybody in Alaeddin: Or, the Wonderful Lamp was supposed to report to Miss Spivey and Mrs. Lulu Blount in the hardware store, where Miss Spivey had set up her backstage wardrobe and makeup area. There was a flurry of veils and robes and long strips of turban waiting to be wound around various heads. Shahrazad and the Princess and all of us harem girls were crammed into the back office with my sister May in charge, leaving the front part of the store to the male slaves, the eunuchs, the nabobs and viziers, and so forth. At a half-past ten, Eugene Boykin hadn’t checked in yet. Miss Spivey was in a state.
“I risk arrest by giving him this part, and then he declines to show up?” she said.
“There wasn’t nobody ever going to arrest you,” the deputy sheriff pointed out calmly. Having come straight from the Dunk Tank, still dripping, to change into his Sultan robes, he had been lounging around the hardware store ever since. “Not on account of Eugene, anyway,” he added.
Miss Spivey made no reply, except to send Ralphord and a couple of O’Quinns in search of the Jinn of the Lamp, while she turned her attention to the two dozen slave boys who had to get painted up white.
When the Superintendent of Schools stood fast in his refusal to allow a colored boy to take part in her production, Miss Spivey had hit upon a truly ingenious method to get around the obstacle to Eugene’s debut, a method that combined camouflage with what she called “delicious irony.” We had discovered the skin-covering capabilities of Ildred’s kaolin formula while painting the props and scenery, thanks mostly to my brother Ralphord’s tendency to drop his brush into the bucket and plunge his whole arm in after it, which arm would come out white as bone to the elbow. Now, you would expect that watching Ralphord walk around with his kaolin-covered arms looking like long white gloves might very well give Miss Spivey the idea to paint Eugene white, but she didn’t stop there. In Sir Richard Burton’s translation of The Thousand Nights and a Night, all the jinni and most of the male slaves and eunuchs were blackamoors—Negroes, in other words, and “heathens to boot,” Mavis said—which was precisely why Miss Spivey decided to paint all the slaves and eunuchs, as well as Eugene the Jinn of the Lamp, white-dirt white. They worked on each other backstage in the hardware store, painting themselves from the waist on up with a creamy coat of kaolin. They would be most impressive onstage with their arms folded across their bare chests and their eyes straight ahead—boys like Sammy Bonner and Harlan O’Quinn and Cyrus Wood—standing still as statues all along the backdrop, like they were part of the scenery. A gasp went up from the audience at the end of Act I, the first time all those slaves turned smoothly on their heels and marched off the stage, most everyone having forgotten that they were real people under their white, white skin.
All of us females were dressed and ready, and the slaves and eunuchs were standing around in the hardware store with their arms folded and their faces as stern and still as they could keep them, waiting for their paint to dry, when Theo and Eugene showed up looking terrified. I don’t mean that they came in screaming or anything like that. Exactly the opposite, in fact. They slipped into the hardware store so quietly that somebody had to tell Miss Spivey they were standing there, just inside the door, Theo looking at her back like he was trying to burn a hole in it. He never said a word until she turned around and exclaimed joyfully, “Eugene! At last! Mrs. Blount, here he is! Your costume is laid out in the storeroom, Eugene. Be quick, now!”
Theo started to come forward, Eugene hovering behind him, but when he saw it was the deputy sheriff sitting in the chair behind Miss Spivey, getting his turban wrapped, Theo stopped dead. He took a step backward, bumping into his brother, and said, “Can I ask you to come outside for a minute, please, Miss Spivey?”
“Does it look like I can come outside, Theo?” She held up the end of the silvery cloth that she was winding around Linwood Perkins’s head. “Why is everyone always asking me to come outside?”
“It’s real important, ma’am,” Theo said. Eugene continued to hover at Theo’s elbow like the protective spirit that he was supposed to be. Both their faces were glistening. Miss Spivey gave them a measuring look, and then she told Mrs. Blount to take everybody else outside in the back so the slaves could dry in the breeze. “But make sure nobody sees them.” I was about to follow them out when she handed me the loose end of the Sultan’s turban. “Gladys, hold this,” she said. “Don’t pull it, don’t drop it, just hold it.” And she turned to give her full attention to Theo. “You have one minute,” she told him.
He looked from Miss Spivey to me to the deputy and back to Miss Spivey, taking stock of us all, I expect, before he whispered, “Etta heard folks saying I shouldn’t’ve dunked the deputy.” His eyes flickered over to Linwood Perkins. “I didn’t mean to.”
“You shouldn’t have done what?” said Miss Spivey. She must have been the only person in the county who was unaware of what Theo Boykin had done. She turned around to shoot the deputy sheriff a look. “Theo dunked you?” she said.
“That’s all right, Theo,” the deputy sheriff said. “It was just a lucky throw.”
“Etta and Lucille…” Theo began, and then he seemed to run out of breath. He started again. “Etta George and that girl Lucille overheard them say they’re gonna teach me to show some respect.” Eugene looked forlorn.
“They overheard whom?” said Miss Spivey.
“I don’t know,” Theo groaned. “It wasn’t anybody they knew.” He took a deep breath, as if to calm himself, but it didn’t seem to work. I could see his hands trembling.
“He’s got to hide, Miss Spivey!” Eugene cried.
“Y’all take it easy, now,” Linwood said. “We won’t let nothin’ happen to Theo.”
It was clear that something had to be done to calm them down. Right then my brother Force came into the hardware store, out of breath, with a Bedouin robe thrown over his Alaeddin costume and the Jinn of the Lamp’s wooden sword poised in his hand. (And where had he been? I wondered.) Miss Spivey took the sword and handed him a paintbrush. Theo and Eugene slipped into the storeroom to change their clothes, and then Force went to work on them. The last thing I heard Miss Spivey say to Theo a little while later, as she put him in the lineup of white slaves, was, “Don’t sweat!”
I didn’t find out until after the fact where my brother Force went off to in his Act I Alaeddin costume (consisting of a loose shirt and tight pants like the ones Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., wore in The Thief of Baghdad, for which Miss Pinkie Lou Griffith had played the organ back in 1922, you may remember). While the rest of us were in the hardware store getting ready for curtain time, Miss Spivey had sent my brother back to Bibbens’ to pick up that wooden sword, which got left behind somehow in the barn.
Where Force went, and why, is not as important as who he ran into when he got there.
He was coming out of the barn, sword in hand, when he looked up at the Bibbens’ house and saw the light on in Miss Spivey’s room. That struck him as odd right off. Electricity was not something folks wasted in Piedmont County, Georgia, in 1939, and he sure didn’t notice any light on up there on his way across the Bibbens’ yard to the barn. While he was concluding that going up to Miss Spivey’s room to turn off the light (or for any other reason) might not be the most discreet plan of action, he saw a shadow pass back and forth across the ceiling of the room. That sure enough drew him up short.
Force let himself in the back door quietly, but at the bottom of the stairs he decided, instead, to announce himself by making as much noise as possible. He had clomped about halfway up when the light from under Miss Spivey’s closed door went out. He stopped to listen, heard nothing, and went up the rest of the way by moonlight coming through the window at the top of the stairs. When he paused with his hand on the doorknob and his head to the door, he heard shuffling and scrabbling inside the room. He took a deep breath, tightened his grip on Eugene’s wooden sword, and pushed the door inward.
Both windows were open, dotted swiss curtains blowing around like ghosts. From where he stood in the doorway, Force could see every part of the room except for one corner, on the far side of the bed. The door on the closet was open, clothes spilling off the shelves as if someone had been looking for something, but the rest of the room looked no messier than the way Miss Spivey normally kept it, with big books lying open on the little table that she used for a desk, and scraps of fabric everywhere. Force took one step into the room.
“Well, now,” he said, “either y’all went out the window or you’re under the bed.”
Nobody had anything to say about that. Force took three long strides past one window—giving a quick glance out, just in case somebody was hanging on a rope or crouching on the back porch roof—which landed him near the other window and gave him a moonlit view of the formerly hidden corner on the far side of the bed. It took him a moment to recognize the oddly shaped object visible where the bedspread met the wooden floor as a bare foot.
“I don’t see no ladder by the window, so I’m guessin’ you’re under the bed. Why don’t y’all come on out now?”
Three or four seconds of silence followed his question, and then there was a shriek and a great scrambling and scraping as Mavis Davis did her best to propel herself out from under the bed and through the door and down the stairs and into the night. She didn’t get far, though, as Force had already bounded back to the door, pushed it shut, and leaned himself up against it, arms folded across his chest.
“Force Cailiff, you let me on out of here right this minute!” Mavis cried. She had her hair braided and put up on her head and she was wearing a denim shirt and dungarees, no doubt to look like somebody other than Mavis Davis.
“I sure enough will do that,” Force said amiably, “as soon as you tell me what you’re doing here, hiding under Miss Spivey’s bed.”
“I ain’t telling you nothin’,” Mavis shot back, “and you cain’t make me.” Her eyes betrayed her, though, with a quick glance toward the floor. In her scramble out from under the bed, she had dropped something. It lay on the wooden floor behind her, whiter than white, practically glowing, in fact, in a patch of moonlight. A folded square of paper.
Force dove for it, but she was closer and quicker. He caught her wrist, she elbowed his chest, he lost his balance and fell back on the floor, she scooted toward the window that faced the barn. Force got to his feet. “Mavis,” he said, “I want you to give me that paper.” He said it kindly, but she backed away.
“I won’t!” she said.
“Now, Mavis,” he said, “don’t make me take it from you.”
“Your goose is cooked, Force Cailiff!” she cried, and she tried to fling the paper out the window behind her. Force caught her hand in his and squeezed it tight, crushing the paper in her fist. They were face-to-face, or more like her face to his chest. Mavis kept her fingers tight around the paper, Force’s fingers tight around hers. Someone looking up at them from the yard outside the window might have thought they were dancing together. Mavis had to lean her head far enough back to look him in the eye.
“D’y’all think I’m stupid, like she does?” she asked him, her voice strained by the awkwardness of her position. “D’y’all reckon sometimes I don’t think at all?”
“No, Mavis, I do not think that,” he said in the same calm, kindly tone.
This, Mavis told me later, may have been the moment when she fell in love with him. In her defense, nobody standing face-to-face with my brother Force like she was, only inches away, looking into the blue of his eyes, could help but fall in love with him, at least temporarily. It was, in any case, the moment when she started to cry.
“Aw, come on, Mavis, don’t cry. Just give me—”
“You want this piece of paper—well, take it!” she said.
Mavis opened her hand inside of his and he let her go, left her sobbing by the window. He stepped back and unfolded the sheet that was now crumpled into a ball. There was no expression whatsoever on his handsome face as he looked over the list of dates, times, and places where Mavis had spied on him and Miss Spivey. When he was finished, he folded it up and tucked it into the little pocket Mrs. Blount had sewn inside his Alaeddin vest. Then he turned to go.
“I got me another copy,” Mavis said to his back.
Force looked at her, sadly, over his shoulder. “Mavis,” he said, “I don’t doubt you do.”
She stayed by the window while he ran down the stairs and out the Bibbens’ back door. She watched him for as long as she could see him—a figure out of a storybook running in a moonlit cloud of milky-looking dust through the yard—and then she slid down to the floor under the window and cried her eyes out.
Upset though she was, Mavis did not forget to retrieve the other piece of paper she had hidden on top of a sweater in the closet before Force showed up. It was too bad, in a way. This copy of the list, which she’d intended to leave for Miss Spivey, was the neater of the two—she’d worked harder on the penmanship—but Mavis had an appointment to keep and she couldn’t show up empty-handed.
The line for the Camel Ride was still so long at a quarter-past eleven that Miss Spivey expressed her concern about curtain time getting delayed until after midnight on account of it, Ivan V being an essential part of Act I. She sent me and another harem girl, minus our veils, to communicate this to Uncle Mack.
The Camel Ride was set up at the far end of Main Street, so it was the last thing you came to while strolling through the Baghdad Bazaar. Ivan V carried two to four riders at a time, depending on their size, around a course laid out in a temporary paddock that had electric lights strung all along the fence. From a distance it looked like somebody had drawn a dotted line to make a great big oval. In the middle of the course Ivan could cut loose a little and pace instead of walking, with Uncle Mack in Bedouin robes almost running alongside to keep hold of the rope. Leaning against the fence was a sign that Uncle Mack had brought with him from the circus, which said CAMEL RIDES in big red letters. The number 5 was lettered in black next to a big red cent sign in a spot that had obviously been painted over as prices rose and fell from year to year. In the lower corner of the sign, the head of a camel looked out at the viewer with the usual superior smile and a cartoon-type balloon coming out of his mouth. Ride the Ship of the Desert, the camel said.
Miss Spivey need not have worried. By a quarter-past eleven, Uncle Mack had already led a total of seventy-four customers up the wooden steps of the camel-mounting platform, and he knew exactly when to close off the line. “Y’all come back after the show!” he was telling the unlucky ones left in line when Harriet Eskew and I arrived on the scene. I waved to my daddy, who was waiting with two of May’s girls. They looked disappointed but didn’t protest when Daddy took them each by the hand and started leading them our way. Up front of the line, some folks were taking the news a little harder.
“Whoa, now, whoa,” said a skinny man in overalls with a matching skinny little boy at the end of his arm. “You cain’t be sayin’ that we been waiting here and now we don’t get a ride.”
Uncle Mack had a majestic look about him in his Bedouin outfit. The man in overalls looked small and kind of colorless by comparison.
“No, sir,” Uncle Mack said to the man. “I don’t mean that at all. Come on back directly after the show, and you’ll get your ride, sure enough.” Uncle Mack looked at the little boy—a child with sticks for arms and legs and huge pale eyes and a mouth that was always working on something, probably the inside of his cheek. It was in regard to that hungry-looking child (who would most likely have preferred a trip to Mrs. Veal’s fried chicken booth over a ride on the camel) that Uncle Mack made his mistake, which was to smile at the little boy and say, “Maybe you’d like a extra turn around the track.”
The fellow in overalls gave his son’s stick of an arm a tug that almost knocked the little boy off his feet and said, “Who you talkin’ to? To my boy? You talkin’ to my boy? Did I give you leave to talk to my boy?”
“No, sir,” said Uncle Mack. He had started undoing Ivan’s harness but he stopped now to give the skinny man in overalls his full attention instead. My daddy kept on coming toward us, but he was moving slower now, cutting a wider berth, like he was assessing the situation. Then I heard laughter and saw over my shoulder a bunch of big rowdy boys, five or six of them, high school age or a little older, moseying down Main Street toward the Camel Ride. Ralphord tugged on my harem girl sleeve and whispered, “Gladys! Gladys! Them’re the ones.”
“What ones?”
“The ones at the Dunk Tank, watchin’ Theo.”
Arnie Lumpkin was the only one I recognized. He was in his Chief Eunuch costume: billowing pants tied at the ankle, a red scarf a foot wide wrapped round and round his belly at the waist, a smaller scarf wound like a bandanna around his head, and a wooden sword at his side. He had been bragging, no doubt, to the other boys about watching over the harem in Act II. They didn’t look like the kind of boys who would know what a eunuch was, so he was probably safe there. The boys reached the paddock just in time to hear the skinny man in overalls saying to Uncle Mack, “Who d’you think you are, boy?”
“Andrew Browning McComb is my name, sir.”
“Boy, your name don’t make no never mind to me. We been waitin’ and it’s our turn to ride that critter of your’n, so bring it right here ’fore I got to do something about it.”
As if that settled the matter, the skinny man in overalls took to dragging his little boy up the steps of the camel-mounting platform. When the little boy tripped on the second step, his father just lifted him by the one arm and carried him, dangling, up the rest of the way. The two of them stood at the top, waiting. There was nothing but air in front of them at the edge of the platform, and the way the man swayed back and forth on his feet was making me feel pretty nervous for his little boy. If he fell off there, it looked like he’d break something for sure. Uncle Mack must have felt the same. He led old Ivan over to the platform. It took the skinny man three tries to climb up into the saddle.
Uncle Mack gave the skinny man and his child not one, not two, but three turns at varying speeds around the oval paddock, throwing in a couple of figure eights through the middle. We could hear the little boy shrieking with pleasure every time the camel picked up his pace. At first, Arnie Lumpkin and his friends, if that’s what they were, hung around the steps to the platform in a swaggering way, as if they’d had something to do with Uncle Mack knuckling under, but they soon lost interest. By the time Ivan V brought the little boy and his father around to the steps to dismount, the little boy looked tickled and lively in a way he hadn’t earlier. His father was clinging to the red-wrapped saddle horn with a look of fierce determination, his lips pressed together and his face pale in the electric light. Uncle Mack swung the little boy to the platform and gave him a camel bell for a souvenir, along with a hunk of peanut brittle taken in payment earlier from somebody who didn’t have a nickel, and then he waited still as a statue while the little boy’s father slid off the camel, both feet first, then his backside and the rest of him following after. Watching them walk away down Main Street, the man taking one careful step at a time while his little boy hopped and bit and chewed and jingled, Uncle Mack remarked to my daddy that a swiftly pacing camel does swing his rider some from side to side. Daddy laughed, quietly but pretty hard.
After that, Ivan stood patiently while Harriet Eskew and May’s two girls and I scrambled up into his saddle. We made a little procession down Main Street toward Miss Spivey’s staging area, Uncle Mack leading the camel and my daddy walking alongside. Approaching the Turkey Shoot, from my position high on the camel I saw two of Arnie Lumpkin’s “friends” talking to the skinny man, all three with their heads together. They looked up as Ivan passed them by. The little boy waved his camel bell at us. The father turned his head to spit. A fourth man stood near them with a rifle in his hands, as if he had been waiting for his turn at the Turkey Shoot and listening to them at the same time. When the fourth man turned around to see us pass by on the camel, I saw that it was Mr. Gordon. My first thought was that I hadn’t expected to see Mr. Gordon at the Baghdad Bazaar—although I guess he had as much right to be there as anybody else. My second thought was that I wished I hadn’t seen him at all.
Alaeddin began at the stroke of midnight. Reverend Stokes rang the bell at Threestep Methodist, Ralphord started singing, the camels started baying (Ivan onstage, Sabrina a distant echo from the barn), and the audience filled the street. Within minutes, all the benches and chairs and overturned tubs were taken, another twice as many were hauled in, and we still ended up with standing room only. A dozen girls in bloomery pants and face veils—me included—stood along the edges of the sidewalk, yards and yards of light brown muslin hanging from the eaves behind us, hiding the stage. At Miss Spivey’s signal, each of us grabbed ahold and gave the cloth a well-placed tug. The muslin billowed down into sand dunes surrounding the tent of the Sultan, who sat majestically, stage left, in his silvery turban, the beautiful Shahrazad on a heap of colorful cushions at the his feet. White, white slaves stood like statues along the back of the stage behind them.
A genuinely cool breeze had come up after nightfall. Later, the wind would stiffen and pile up thunderclouds, but for now the breeze played the role Miss Spivey assigned to it, blowing away mosquitoes and stirring the string of bulbs, their light flickering on the faces of the actors, making them look dramatic even when they messed up their lines. It seemed like the moon itself had risen on cue. By midnight it was high enough to cast Eugene’s huge shadow in the street. When Force rubbed Mrs. Blount’s silver gravy boat, causing the Jinn of the Lamp to pop up out of the hole we’d dug for him at the edge of the stage while Miss Spivey punched a sack full of flour to release a smokey white poof, the whole audience gasped.
Meanwhile, stage right, my sister May was nothing short of magnificent, draped in midnight-blue muslin studded with golden moons and stars. She hardly had to look at the pages that were hidden, like her belly, among the folds of fabric in her lap. In her script, Miss Spivey had combined the poor tailor’s son with various comely youths from other tales, sometimes sacrificing plot to poetry. May delivered all her lines like strings of gleaming pearls: “Now, this boy,” she said, “Alaeddin hight, had been from babyhood a scapegrace and a ne’er-do-well, wont to play at all times, and yet was he so cast in beauty’s mould, that idleness became him.”
Idleness was my brother’s cue, and when he made his entrance in the big white shirt and tight pants, a group of girls from the college fairly swooned in the front-row seats.
During the first Intermission, word came around that people in the audience were asking who the actors were and where they came from. “Never underestimate the power of moonlight,” Miss Spivey said to us. To Theo—who was sweating dark brown stripes down his back and arms—she whispered, “Relax. Nobody can tell it’s you up there.” And to Eugene, who got hit in the fez by a gob of spit while he cast a spell on the Princess, Miss Spivey counseled patience as she cleaned off his hat.
“Can’t let one bumpkin spoil the show,” she said.
After the second intermission, the wind picked up and clouds began to gather, but the electric lights held steady, so even with the moonlight cutting in and out amongst the clouds, things continued to go pretty smoothly until we got near the end of Act III, where the jinn sneaks the Princess out of her father’s palace in the dead of night. I wish you could have seen the slaves pick up the sleeping Princess in her bed and carry her off. They were wearing dark robes and gloves to hide their white-painted selves, and she was wearing a white nightgown kind of thing, and the mattress was covered in black, so it looked for all the world like she was floating through the darkness by magic. The almost-invisible slaves were about to whisk the Princess around the back of the buildings and out of sight when we heard somebody shouting, faintly at first and then louder and louder, “It’s coming! It’s coming!”
Folks started looking around to see where the shouts were coming from. The slaves wavered and bumped into one another, letting the Princess down none too gently (we heard Louise yell, “Ow!”), and the Sultan stood up so quickly that his turban slid forward over his eyes, causing him to knock it back out of the way and almost clean off his head. In the midst of the ruckus I heard a man in the audience say, “Well, damned if that Sultan ain’t Linwood Perkins!”
Everybody was standing up by now, knocking over benches and kicking buckets out of the way, trying to get a look over everybody else’s shoulders at none other than Mavis Davis, running toward us up the middle of Main Street, waving her arms and shrieking. “It’s coming! It’s coming out!”
The first person to enter Bibbens’ barn and come around the side of Sabrina’s stall was a long-legged boy from Irwinton who outran us all, and the first words out of his mouth when he laid eyes on Sabrina were, “My Lord, they got them a two-headed camel!”
It did look that way for a while.
Uncle Mack was right behind the boy, and behind him was my brother Force and then Eugene Boykin, holding on to his fez with one hand and the hilt of his wooden sword with the other, and behind him was a whole row of peeling and flaking white-painted slaves.
This part of the night, when Sabrina gave birth to Ahmed, was like no other night in our lives. I can close my eyes right now and see everybody lined up against the fence along the whole length of Bibbens’ paddock and into the barn—about half of us in bloomers and veils and spangly vests painted with gold stars and moons that caught up the light of the real moon peeking through clouds. When Uncle Mack came out of the barn and saw how many people were lined up outside, he pulled Ralphord, who pulled me, who pulled Harriet Eskew out of the line. Then Etta George appeared out of nowhere, and Uncle Mack hauled the four of us into the barn, where he had us hold hands—Etta on the end next to me so mine was the only hand she had to hold—to form a living gate across the front of Sabrina’s stall. Ralphord and Harriet and Etta faced into the stall and watched the whole thing, but I kept my back to the action except for taking a peek over my shoulder whenever a passing viewer whispered something like, “What’s that? Is that his head?” or “Sweet Jesus!”
The scene was almost biblical. You had the straw, and the camels, and halos of yellow light around everybody from the lanterns hanging on hooks near the stall. Uncle Mack looked like a Nativity scene shepherd in his Bedouin robe and headdress, and he was soon joined in the stall by horse doctor Billy Bonner, who, in the fancy pants and turban of the Vizier, was a dead ringer for one of the Three Kings. Then my sister May came along in her midnight-blue robe and veil. All she would have needed to complete the picture was a baby in her arms.
It was amazing how quiet everybody was. I believe folks did feel like they were in church at Christmastime. Although Sabrina had been restless earlier in the evening, she stood hushed and still now, as if she were concentrating. Uncle Mack said that was the way with camels. As for the baby, he came out front legs first, with his head between them, and kind of hung there for quite a while, almost touching the ground with his front feet and thus creating the two-headed camel effect—I did get a peek at that. The whole time, he was making a humming noise. Uncle Mack said that wasn’t too unusual. He had heard it before from baby camels. He thought maybe it helped them clear out their nose and throat and all. The humming had two different notes to it. Uncle Mack said the higher pitch meant that Sabrina was working on pushing that baby out and squeezing him in the process. Once she finally succeeded and he sort of tumbled out feet first and slid the rest of the way to the straw, then the humming stopped, at least from the camel. My brother Ralphord hummed those two notes on and off for days without even knowing he was doing it. You’d have to nudge him to make him stop.
It took pretty near an hour to walk the entire population of the Baghdad Bazaar single-file down the center aisle to the stall where Sabrina was calmly giving birth. Some folks hurried on past. But most people paused for as long as they could before the press of folks behind them forced them to move on. Only a few actually witnessed the miracle of birth, but the rest got to see the baby camel chewing and sucking and yawning and pissing on its tail and then slapping the tail up on its back, splashing almost all the way over to Ralphord and Harriet and Etta and me. Uncle Mack, who got a shower of it, announced at that point, “It’s a boy.” Mother camels don’t lick their babies clean, we found out, but if that was the point of the shower, it didn’t work very well. Ahmed the baby camel remained matted and sticky-looking and prickly with straw. More like a big old skinny wet dog than anything else. When he couldn’t have been but a few minutes old, he tried to stand up already. He kept trying—crouching and wiggling, lifting his backside as high as he could—but for a long while he couldn’t get his front legs up to match the hind ones. The very last people were filing through when he finally hoisted his hind end up and put out first one miniature clown foot and then the other, and he was standing. A cheer went up and he fell down.
When people came out of the barn, we were amazed to find them returning to their seats in the street, looking for Act IV of Alaeddin.
Harriet Eskew went off in search of her sister Mamie, and Ralphord said he’d catch up with me in a minute, which meant, I knew, that he needed to answer nature’s call. I went straight to the backstage area in the hardware store and found nobody there at first except for Miss Spivey, who was peeking through a curtained window at the crowd reassembling out in the street. “Oh, dear,” she said. “The show must go on, apparently.” When she turned around, I was shocked to see that she had been crying a good one. She was done now, but her face told the story.
I didn’t know a thing about the list that Force had gotten away from Mavis, which was now balled up in one of Miss Spivey’s skirt pockets, so all I could think to say was, “Miss Spivey, what’s wrong?” to which she responded by tapping first one shaky finger to her lips and then two. She said, “Hold the fort, will you, Gladys?” and she slipped out the back door of the hardware store. She only had to go a few steps before she disappeared into the darkness the electric lights couldn’t reach. I waited to see the match flare up, but she must have turned her back to me.
I’m going to tell you something about Miss Spivey now that you will find hard to believe. I could not have believed it myself at the time. But it’s the truth.
I never saw her face again.
So what do you think Mavis Davis did with her list of times and dates and places where Miss Spivey and my brother Force touzled or tumbled or just sat and talked? I mean, with the remaining copy, the one that she was going to leave for Miss Spivey until Force came along.
Did she herself deliver that list triumphantly to the Superintendent of Schools? No, she did not. Did she give it to her mother to pass along? No. Did she give it to the Reverends Stokes or Whitlock? No and no. Their wives? No. My mother? No.
Did she nail it up to the schoolhouse door?
No.
What she did with it was this: she sold it, for cash money, to Mr. Gordon. I believe he gave her ten dollars for it.
Miss Spivey hadn’t been gone for more than a few minutes when Mrs. Lulu Blount came into the hardware store through the same back door and announced to me and Ralphord, the Eskew girls, and a few other members of the cast who’d arrived in the meantime, that Miss Spivey had put her, Mrs. Lulu Blount, in charge of Act IV.
“Where’s Miss Spivey?” Ralphord asked.
There was no time for questions, Mrs. Blount said. We had a show to put on.
We gathered a ragtag cast of patched and peeling white slaves. Theo, I noticed, was not among them. Then Linwood Perkins showed up, and while Mrs. Blount tucked in the ends of the Sultan’s turban and deflected questions about Miss Spivey’s whereabouts, I helped the Eskew girls pick the straw out of Shahrazad’s veil and gown. Alaeddin and the Princess were located in the meantime, as was the Slave of the Lamp. Finally, Ralphord was dispatched to the minaret to announce, “Alaeddin: Or, the Wonderful Lamp, Act Four and Conclusion,” and with a skeleton crew of harem girls and no Chief Eunuch in sight since nobody could find Arnie Lumpkin, the show went on.
We harem girls were supposed to spend most of Act IV lolling around on the westernmost part of the sidewalk-slash-stage. This gave us ample time to talk quietly amongst ourselves—remaining “in character,” Miss Spivey said—as you would probably expect real harem girls to do. My sister Ildred was the first to look west up Main Street and ask the rest of us, quietly enough so the audience wouldn’t hear, “What is that yonder, comin’ up the road?” Harriet Eskew said, “Looks like it’s afire.” Her sister Mamie said, “Well, it hadn’t oughta be. Theo Boykin said no flames, no torches.”
All this talking was in whispers, while the audience listened to Shahrazad catching them up on Alaeddin and the Princess, who were about to be reunited for the final, triumphant time, after which they would live happily ever after until the Destroyer of delights and the Garnerer of graveyards came their way. My brother Force was hunkered down and hiding in the balcony right overhead of the harem, waiting to make his entrance. Ildred went, “Hssst!” up to him, pointing unobtrusively up the street, and from his slightly better vantage point, he peeked over the edge of the balcony and whispered, “Goddamn!”
One of the younger harem girls covered her ears.
“Force Cailiff!” Ildred hissed.
“It’s the Ku Klucks!”
Ildred stood straight up out of the harem like a sore thumb. “How can you tell?” she said, looking up the road. I looked that way, too, but there were trees in the way—or maybe it was the corner of Bibbens’ store obstructing the view. All I could see was a yellow flickering between patches of black.
By now the audience was whispering. At first, you could tell, they thought it was part of the show. Even when we could clearly see the white robes and hoods on either side of the wagon with a giant torch-like thing flaming up from the wagon bed, folks in the audience—white folks, anyway—still seemed to think it was part of the show. Ildred said, “Gladys, git!” I ducked down and scurried for the center stage door, which opened while I was still on the way. Mrs. Blount stuck her head out and cried, apparently to the audience, which had got to its feet again, “This is it! If you all leave again, we are not going to finish—where are they going—what is it now?”
“Something’s coming, Mrs. Blount,” my sister Ildred said. Like the audience, all the harem girls were standing now and looking up the road. Ildred pointed.
The wagon bearing the burning cross was coming straight up Main Street toward the stage area. Most folks in the remaining audience were busy getting out of the way. Many retreated to the covered sidewalk on the other side of the street, while others stepped right up onto the stage. You got the impression they planned to watch, rather than flee, whatever was going to happen next. I ended up standing in the street next to Linwood Perkins, still in his Sultan gear, watching the wagon move toward us. I thought the flames coming off the cross looked like arms waving, reaching toward whichever side the wind blew or the wagon wheels dipped.
“Kind of makes me wish we didn’t mix any kerosene into the paint,” I said.
The deputy sheriff looked at me.
“So it wouldn’t crack when it dried,” I explained. He kept staring. “We soaked the boards to kill the termites, too.”
Standing in the middle of the street, Linwood Perkins looked left and right at the “flats” pressed up against the buildings of Main Street.
“Ralphord!” he yelled. Ralphord was behind us by about half a block. “Git up there and tell everybody, git off the sidewalks! Git the heck away!”
I looked around, up and down the street, amazed at how easy it was to picture everything aflame.
Ralphord ran to the minaret. He scrambled up into the crow’s nest part and hollered, in a kind of ecstasy, “Clear the decks! All hands! Clear the decks!”
I climbed halfway up the ladder and tugged on his robe. “Ralphord! Say sidewalk, not decks! Sidewalk, Ralphord! Folks don’t know what you’re talkin’ about.”
“All right,” he said, and sang out, “Git off the sidewalk! Di-rectly!”
The flaming cross was a lot closer now. The wagon had drawn almost even with Bibbens’ store. A team of white-robed and -hooded men lined up like horses were pulling the wagon from up in front, with more of the white robes pushing it from the rear.
“Who the heck are they all?” asked Reverend Stokes, who was right next to Linwood Perkins.
“I don’t know, Reverend—looks like the whole town was here to begin with.”
The wagon and its burden of flames had passed Bibbens’ store. It was only fifteen or twenty yards from the end of our white-painted block.
Without warning, the deputy sheriff took off down the middle of Main Street, running toward the cross, his Sultan’s robe whipping open—luckily, he was fully dressed underneath. For a terrible moment, I thought he was joining them, but then I saw him waving his arms at them and probably yelling, although there was too much noise around me to hear what he was saying. They stopped while he hopped up and down in front of them, his robe flapping, their robes flapping. The wind had picked up suddenly. It was one silvery turban vs. I don’t know how many pointed hoods. Then the Klansmen shouldered their ropes and came forward. The deputy sheriff turned and ran back up the the street toward us, hollering, “Back off! Clear the area!” From the minaret, Ralphord yelled, “Abandon ship!”
As the wagon and its fiery load drew even with the end of Main Street, the whole population of “Baghdad,” Georgia—times ten, I expect, with all the visitors—moved slowly backward, away from it, step by step. I found I was squeezing Ildred’s hand on one side and Florence Hodges’s on the other. I remember thanking the Lord that the cross went by Bibbens’ place without setting the barn on fire and praying that Uncle Mack and Eugene got the camels out back through the woods and far away, just in case. I wondered if Ahmed rode on his mother’s back as they made their escape. (He didn’t; Eugene carried him.) I tried to believe that only moments ago, only moments—it couldn’t have been an hour—I was in the barn watching that baby camel trying to get to his feet. I saw the first bits of glowing ash and charcoal flying in the air above the burning pole. It was a pole now, not a cross, the horizontal part must have fallen or slipped down, and it was right in front of the flat to the left of the stage now, right where we harem girls used to be.
To this day, I do not believe the Ku Klucks wanted to burn our whole town down to the ground, even if Eugene Boykin had cast a spell on the white Princess, and even if he did walk on the same stage, and even if he might have touched her, almost. They couldn’t want to burn down our whole town because eleven black children had spent an hour or two sitting next to white children at Threestep School, or because Theo was smarter than everybody else, or just because he had written on the board, O brave new world! Those Ku Klucks must have thought the deputy sheriff was making up a story about the kerosene. Or they must have thought he was smelling their own burning creosote and tar. I tell you, it was downright fascinating to watch the sparks and ash roiling around in the troubled air above the flames, fiery bits flying up and circling down closer and closer to the lovely arch painted in white dirt and kerosene above the very balcony where Force had crouched, waiting for his cue. It was only a matter of time, seconds most likely, before a spark landed and we’d find out just how quickly the flames would spread: In a sheet down the front of that painted flat? In a whoosh along Main Street? It occurred to me, moving backwards with the crowd and watching a flaming ash—the biggest yet—fly up into the air, that at least my brother Force would never have to give the Princess that dreaded wake-up kiss.
The flaming ash I was watching dropped into our beautiful white balcony like a coin into the collection box. Right then, as if in response to that contribution, the sky lit up with the longest, brightest branching fork of lightning I had ever seen. The fork went out in a blue-bright flash, taking all the electric lights with it.
The image of the flaming pine trunk and the Ku Klucks in their pointed hoods was still etched against the lightning flash on the inside of our eyes when a clap of thunder punched everybody in the eardrums, announcing the arrival of the rain that had been threatening since first intermission. The whole sky spilled over like a bucket. Everybody ran for cover. I didn’t count, so I can’t say how many seconds of downpour it took before the burning pine went out just like that—black and wet and hissing steam like the devil.