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

the time being, but she also started talking about how if he passed the promptness and precision work test on his temporary tasks as the indigent young Booker T. Washington had done so well to enter Hampton she might sponsor him; and for the next week and a half he had bunked in a basement room and helped the janitors and listened to her praise him for being another young Booker T. letting down his bucket and getting ready to be the next one to keep one foot on the trail between the farmland and shop or factory while he stretched the other all the way to tea in the White House and board meetings on Wall Street.

But behold! Outrage! Scandal! Flimflam!!!

His trunk arrived and it turned out that he not only had a trumpet that was more expensive than any brass instrument owned by anybody else on the campus, music school instructors included; but he also had a wardrobe that was as up-to-date as anything in the September issue of Esquire, the number one men’s fashion magazine of the day. The twill topcoat that he had used as a knapsack and bedroll turned out to be the latest thing in what my roommate (who also had one) and I called cloak-and-dagger trench coats.

She was so outraged that she threatened to have him kicked off the campus as an impostor who had come not because he was seeking higher learning and the uplift of his people, but to take advantage of inexperienced younger students and well-meaning but unsuspecting staff and faculty members. She didn’t follow through with her threat when he explained that he was there all on his own and with no family support whatsoever and that he had spent a whole year between finishing high school and his arrival on campus working in a haberdashery shop earning enough money to supplement his scholarship grant and also outfit himself (at employees’ discount rate) in the attire of a self-respecting collegian.

Man, he said, I wasn’t about to let anybody treat me like a charity case because I had to have a job to supplement my scholarship grant. Not that I had anything against that Booker T. Washington and Horatio Alger true uplift grit that they were forever evangelizing as the salvation of the masses, but it was just not for me. My mother had to help me to get that far and when I finished high school I was on my own because she had my younger brother to take care of and she said she was very confident that I could not only look out for myself from then on but would also find a way to make myself somebody special.

And that was also when he said what he said about finding his own way, which reminded me of what Miss Lexine Metcalf would say to me about how I was one who would have to go wherever I would go and do whatever I would do in order to find out for myself whatever I should try to make of myself. Miss Lexine Metcalf, who also said, Who if not you? and then always also called me her splendid young man. Who if not you?, my splendid young man. Which is also what Miss Tee, who almost always spoke as if for Mama herself, implied when she called me her mister. My mister. Here comes my mister. Hello, my mister. Because what Mama had always said from as early on as I ever remembered was, Mamma’s little scootabout man, that’s what him is.

But I didn’t say anything about that at that time. I said what I said about Miss Abbie Langford. I said, Man, you know how some of these old house mothers are about some students that they always remember for one reason or another. Man, ten, fifteen, twenty, thirty years later, when certain ones come back for class reunion, old Abbie Langford is right there expecting them to come by to see her and be reminded of something she reprimanded them for doing however many years ago.

And before he said what he was going to say I said, Hey, but reunion or no reunion, man, you are still one of the ones she remembered every time she heard somebody mention your name while I was down there: You all talking about Taft Edison? That old Taft Woodrow Edison could blow that horn like John Philip Sousa himself when he wanted to and he also could have become another R. Nathaniel Dett. So they used to say over in that music school. But with all them quiet manners and bow ties, and special tailor-made clothes, he was still tangled up with all that old low-life music, too, him and that old Night-hawk Palmer.

As we came on outside again and headed back along Forty-second Street he shook his head chuckling and said, Well, the next time you’re down that way and see that old battle-ax you can tell her you saw old Taft Edison up in New York City still messing around some more of that old back-alley stuff that she didn’t report me and old Sid Palmer for. And tell her I’m not blowing any trumpet like John Philip Sousa or anybody else. Tell her I’m playing my riffs on a typewriter these days.

When we came to the corner of Fifth Avenue, he said what he said about being almost ready to start reading sequences of his manuscript to me, and then just before he turned to head back up to Forty-ninth Street he reached into his right hip pocket and pulled out a set of brass knuckles and said, That old battle-ax never suspected that I was packing these, but man, you never know when you might have to take emergency action on some incoherent fool.

VIII

It was not until the night that I went up to his apartment at 749 St. Nicholas Avenue that I found out that Taft Edison was a longtime