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

was labor unionism, mainly the longshoremen’s union strikes and picket lines and scabs down on the Mobile, Alabama, waterfront, where Uncle Jerome worked for the United Fruit Company. Man, what my roommate told me about the movement in Chicago made it all sound like joining a very strict church whose members were always on the lookout for transgressors.

I said, Incidentally, we also read Malraux’s The Conquerors, but he had transferred before I read Man’s Hope, and I didn’t get around to Karl Marx until my senior year, and by that time not only did dialectic materialism sound as much like the gospel as something you were reading in a political bible, but man, that was also when I realized that all political systems were run by politicians, just as all religions were run by preachers and preachers and deacons elected or self-designated.

I said, Man, when I was a senior in high school, what I was mainly concerned with was getting to college. I said, Man, my preoccupation was not with changing the world. Man, I was still trying to find out what all this stuff was all about. And what I was eligible for. I said, Man, in the third grade there was geography along with all of those maps and the globe and the bulletin board windows on the world and peoples of many lands.

I said, Then when I got to senior high school and started spending more and more time in the library I discovered world history and anthropology. And that was when I began to realize that I was going to have to be a schoolboy for some time to come. So man, I guess that’s where whatever immunity to political recruitment I’ve developed began. I said, Anyway, by the time I was halfway through college I was too wrapped up in doing what I was doing on my own to be recruited for any political movement. I said, Man, none of that theoretical stuff I was also reading in those current political journals in the periodicals room added up to the magic keys I was looking for (mentioning Miss Lexine Metcalf, who said some golden, some silver, some platinum, and maybe some of some as yet undiscovered alloy. But not mentioning Jewel Templeton, who said some sharp, some flat, and some natural).

Then I said, But to answer your question, as yet I haven’t run into the kind of recruitment you’re talking about. Not since I’ve been here and not anywhere on the road with the band. Not even in Hollywood. I said, Man, now that you bring up the subject, come to think of it, I don’t remember anybody in the band ever bringing up the subject of political recruitment at all. Maybe they thought that being a college boy I was already hip to all of that theoretical jive. But none of the fans I got to know in any of our stopping places ever asked me very much about anything except myself and my relationship to the band.

But I didn’t go on to mention anything about people like the Marquis de Chaumienne and Jewel Templeton, and that was when he said what he said about down-home church folks and hypocrisy. There was all that Sunday church meeting singing and shouting and amen corner moaning and clapping. And for those who wished to express a more comprehensive devotion, there were midweek prayer meetings with hymn singing. But as often as not, when things came down to the nuts-and-bolts actualities of everyday goings-on and the situation added up to put up or shut up, you couldn’t tell a spoonful of difference between the most righteous church members and just plain old everyday looking-out-for-number-one folks. So man, you get my point about the folks. Down home it’s religious hypocrisy. Up here it’s political hypocrisy, which just might turn out to be a very crucial saving grace indeed, given the political temper of the times.

XIII

At the end of the spring term I had completed all of the requirements for the Master of Arts degree except the thesis, on which (in addition to the other research reports) I had begun working during the Christmas holiday break and which I finished and submitted by the late-summer deadline. So I was eligible to enter the Ph.D. program that next September. But when I went to register and work out my course of study and request my choice of professors, I had already decided that I was going to spend only this consecutive year attending formal classroom lectures and seminars and doing academic research reports in preparation for the dissertation required for the doctorate in the field of humanities in those days.

One more consecutive year of academic gumshoe, I told Taft Edison the day after I was notified that my thesis had been approved. And when he asked what about the year after that, I told him about Eunice’s plans and also about the letter back in June from the English Department down in central Alabama offering me a temporary position as an instructor of freshman and sophomore composition and introduction to literature.

You didn’t have to explain that the offer did not imply that anybody down there assumed that I had decided to be a college professor and that it had been made only as a suggested option in the event I needed more cash to supplement my fellowship grant. Taft Edison already knew that because he already knew that the head of the English Department making the offer was Carlton Poindexter, whose junior-year class in the English novel he was enrolled in and who also was his informal extracurricular reading consultant when I was a freshman.

By that time Taft Edison also knew that I had not yet decided not to become a college teacher, because he knew that I had not yet finally made up my mind not to complete the Ph.D. program. But he did know that I was beginning to question the relevance