“I know your city supports at least one.”
“We have three. The Roxy’s nearest, just down the street.”
“When does its next feature presentation begin?”
“Seven thirty,” the clerk said, and Jumbo turned me towards the Lafayette ’s revolving door. “But it’s Saturday, right? The fourth Saturday of the month?”
“Yes,” Jumbo said.
“Then yall can’t go there tonight. You wouldn’t want to.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Fourth Saturday of the month. It’s nigger night at the Roxy, place’ll be crawling with em.”
“I beg your pardon.”
“Well, the rain could hold a few of em out. But it’s finally stopping”-he nodded at the lobby’s only window-“and you’d have to declare martial law to keep em out after a day as dull as this un. Why don’t yall try the Cairo or the Pastime? They have colored-only balconies, but yall wouldn’t run slam into the foppery of nigger night.”
“My profoundest secret”-Jumbo leaned into the clerk’s face-“is that I am an honorary nigger.”
“A what?”
“And Daniel, whom others paid you to mock, cares less for his seatmates’ color than for the quality of the film.”
“Okay.” The clerk produced a copy of the LaGrange Daily News. “At the Cairo, Reveille with Beverly . At the Pastime, a Mickey Rooney thing. At the Roxy, a triple bill yall wouldn’t care to-”
“Hush,” Jumbo said.
“Yessir,” the clerk said.
And after a quick bite to eat in the nearby Magnolia Café, Jumbo and I hit the sidewalk, not in a downpour but a tingly drizzle, and walked through the early twilight to the Roxy for a triple feature of some sort.
24
It was nigger night at the Roxy for sure. Even the rain couldn’t spoil these folks’ Saturday evening. They’d turned out in chattering, straggle-in mobs. Groups of them clogged the sidewalk under the marquee and stretched around the corner from the box-office window.
One double file hugged the Roxy’s brick wall in a futile effort to keep the drizzle from beading their hair or soaking their out-for-fun finery. They couldn’t go to the ballpark to watch their Gendarmes bruise the Hellbenders again, but they could catch a delicious scream fest-three classic chillers for the price of one-here at the Roxy. The storm had no power to chain them in their mill houses.
The Roxy’d thrown LaGrange’s coloreds-and any other soul open-minded enough to wait for a ticket-a horror festival. The marquee told the story:
FRANKENSTEIN
BRIDE OF FRANKENSTEIN
SON OF FRANKENSTEIN
Boris Karloff as the Bogeyman to End All Bogeymen
When Jumbo saw the marquee and realized what he’d let himself in for, he had second thoughts. He mumbled something kindly about Reveille with Beverly. But I wanted this triple feature. I’d never seen a one of these films (even though I’d read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in high school), and I hoped the films would shear my mind away from dumbass thoughts of getting back at Hoey and his pals.
We finally reached the ticket window, and I handed in my money. Jumbo pushed up right behind me.
“If you haven’t already seen Frankenstein,” he said, “you may find it a… a primitive dramatic vehicle.”
Did he want to talk me out of seeing it? The white girl in the booth, with her hair in a kind of mesh oriole’s nest, said, “Ticket money, sir.” Jumbo paid her and shoved behind me into the salty popcorn smells of the lobby.
In its crush, he said, “Bride of Frankenstein surpasses in quality the film to which it is the sequel, and Son of Frankenstein features Karloff’s last essayal of the role that made him famous and a good performance by Bela Lugosi as Ygor. Should we stay for all three, however, we’ll violate curfew.”
Jumbo stood out like an ostrich in a parade of penguins. His whisper boomed above even the feisty talk of those black folks, and some of them looked at him like he’d arrived aboard an ambulance.
At the refreshment stand, I nodded at the Coca-Cola toggle and the glassed-in popcorn popper next to it. Soon as I had my stuff, Jumbo marched me towards the screening room. The seats there’d begun to fill. Folks surged through the lobby and into the auditorium. We slipped in at the back, after two thirds of the crowd’d already gone in, and found seats against the rear wall, under the projection booth. Bodies crammed every nook, teenagers eeled up and down the aisles searching for friends or showing themselves off, and the hoots and cat-calls didn’t fade away until the house lights’d dimmed.
The curtains over the screen, the royal-purple one and the see-through job behind it, purred aside. Coming attractions, newsreels (mostly war stuff), and a Popeye cartoon that prodded the crowd to talk-back applause.
Then Frankenstein, with an opening scene-Latin mumblings, peasant faces in a cemetery-that really did slap a chill on everyone’s high spirits. Except for the projector purr and the film’s sound track, all you could hear now were creaking seats, nervous titters, and coughs. Bodies dug up, hanged murderers cut down, the theft of an ABNORMAL brain by the doctor’s stupid helper. Halfway along, the crowd’d really gotten into it. Squeals, shrieks, laughter. Some folks stood up to yell at or plead with the actors on screen.
“Come on now,” a man told the monster, “you don’t want to do that. Uh-uh. Gon bring you nuthin but misery.”
“Vile!” somebody else said. “He so vile!”
“Lawd, cain’t you see he didn’t mean it?”
“Naw, naw, naw. Go back! Go back!”
The longer I sat there the queerer I began to feel. I kept sneaking peaks at Jumbo, who sat rigor-mortis still. He didn’t much favor Karloff playing Dr Frankenstein’s critter, or else Karloff s goose-stepping monster didn’t exactly favor Jumbo, but you’d’ve had to be blind not to see a likeness-the lumpish blocks of their heads, the bearishness of their bodies. Still, Jumbo had a suppleness lacking in the other, a sad lopsided quirk of face that made Karloff s monster look regular, even handsome, by comparison. There was a mechanical, a robotlike, quality to the screen thing Jumbo didn’t have. He sometimes lumbered and wrenched, but when he did, it was more like a hurt beast than a broken robot. Anyway, Jumbo’s resemblance to the made-up Karloff didn’t scare me-it embarrassed me into a fever. Even the Roxy’s “iceberg air” didn’t help. How must Jumbo feel, towering there marble hard as the Lincoln memorial, hands clutched like gauntlets to his knees?
He must’ve had an inkling half the people there, including his own roomy, ’d already compared him in their minds to the bogeyman on screen. And the inkling could have come from a lifetime of overheard slurs and otherwise hard-to-account-for snubbings. I knew such stuff myself.