The Magic Keys Albert Murray (read novels website TXT) 📖

Clark. And then I said, Better known as the ghost of Marcus Garvey. And old Marcus Garvey himself wasn’t even dead yet, he said. And I said, Which is to say ghost as in Holy Ghost, man. Then I said, Zebra jockeys, man, zebra jockeys. I said, Man, Mr. B. Franklin Fisher had inoculated me and most of my classmates against all of that old zebra jockey hocky jive by the time we reached the ninth grade at Mobile County Training School.

That was when Taft Edison said what he said about not having much time to spend on the stem and in the stem lounge, what with working in the library and living in the band cottage, and with all the hours he was required to spend down in those old rehearsal cubicles in the basement of Harrison Hall plus the sheet music copy work and also the endless reading time involved in preparing for Mr. Carlton Poindexter’s junior-year course in the novel.

But I did have one part-time buddy that I used to run with every now and then, he said. Old sleepy-eyed Sid Palmer. You must have known him. We were the same year but he was in the School of Education, majoring in science with a minor in math. He used to make it down to old Jay Gould’s floating concerns pretty regularly. But when he’d get the urge to hit a few spots in the outlying regions he always checked to see if I could go along, and whenever I could I would, beginning back during that first summer that I spent down there. Man, I stuck pretty close to prescribed campus routine during my freshman year. So by that next summer I was beginning to figure that I knew enough about who was who and what was what and where on campus to do a little extracurricular exploration and by that time I also knew enough about old Sid Palmer to take him up on his invitation to come along on a few rounds in the outlying districts.

He went on eating his clam chowder, smiling to himself as he remembered his days on the campus again. And then he said, Old Sid Palmer, down there from Richmond, Virginia. Man, being a loner that I guess I’ve always tended to be, old Sid was about the nearest I ever came to having a running mate down there, not that the two of us actually had any common career objectives. He didn’t seem to have any trouble getting passing grades in those School of Education courses he was taking, but my guess is that he was really interested in becoming some kind of school administrator, not a classroom teacher. Anyway, the only books he read were the ones required by his assignments, mostly chapter by chapter as assigned. But come to think of it, he was pretty keen on the statistics of tests and measurements, which he was taking during our junior year.

He shook his head still remembering, and then smiling he said, We did have fun hitting those joints together though, but that was about it. We liked the same joints, but we never really talked very much about barrelhouse, honky-tonk, and gut-bucket music as such, except to mention the local guys that we liked or didn’t really think very much of. Anyway, when I think about old Sid and all of that now, I give us both credit for realizing that it was something that we should stay in touch with in spite of the fact that most of our teachers seem to regard it as something beneath the taste of the kind of respectable people college-educated people were supposed to be.

I said I knew what he meant because I had gone to college not only from the Mobile County Training School of Miss Lexine Metcalf and Mr. B. Franklin Fisher, but also from the Gasoline Point of old Luzana Cholly and Stagolee Dupas fils and old Claiborne Williams of Joe Lockett’s-in-the-Bottoms. And that is also when I went on to say what I said about the one and only Mrs. Abbie Langford, the legendary housemother of the upperclassmen’s dormitories on the upper end of the campus who was actually employed as the supervisor of housekeeping and maintenance by the Buildings and Grounds Department but acted as if her authority came from the Dean of Men’s Office and the Disciplinary Committee.

Man, I said, not that I have any plans to be heading back down in that direction anytime soon, but boy, just wait till I tell her that old Taft Woodrow Edison is up here in New York City and is still as quietly studious and as dapper as ever, but is carrying a Madison Avenue briefcase instead of a trumpet case.

And when he said, Man, how is that old battle-ax, I said, Still there as far as I know, still exactly the same, and still outraged at the slightest mention of your name.

Oh, boy, he said, shaking his head, and we both laughed and he said, Man, she had me all figured out and sized up on her own and she wouldn’t let me tell her anything.

Everybody down there at that time knew the story about Taft Edison and Mrs. Abbie Langford. When he arrived on campus for his freshman year he was not only ten days early, but all he had with him was a state scholarship voucher and one extra shirt and a change of underwear and his toilet articles all folded up inside a twill topcoat, which he rolled so that he could carry it slung over his shoulder with a belt like a knapsack.

He had hoboed and hitchhiked all the way from Oklahoma City and had arrived so far ahead of time that he decided to look for a temporary job to pay for interim room and board until official check-in and registration day. And when the grand old gal heard this story from somebody she not only hired him for