“You know who that is?” Peter had drawn right up to my ear, although I looked away. His breath touched my neck. “That’s Victor. He knows me.”
“Magnificent,” I said. By then Victor was not there any more. Peter stood on the step directly in front of me. Over his big hat, I could see the hats of the bandsmen and little else.
“I got old Pete. Twice,” whispered Fleece, stepping down next to me. “Once he took his hat off and I caught him. The fruity-cheeked old soldier of Eros, bellowing away.” I pointed to the hat in front of me.
A band came on with rowdy syncopated drumming and choreographed trotting and sudden oblique marching, with the majorettes doing swaggers and shimmies that they would never repeat the same way again. I moved over to watch them. There was a fellow with a clipboard kneeling on the pavement I suppose he was a judge. When the end majorettes saw him, they went berserk, doing the mashed potato, rearing up and down so as to reveal faded sateen panties under their uniforms. Peter howled something charged with revulsion, took off his hat, and waved it back and forth across my field of vision, as if to knock down the musical notes like flies.
A small black-uniformed band came down then. They had the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Mississippi State flag flying out front. They were a meek little unit, all boys, and they gave out a lonely, thin sound, “Onward Christian Soldiers,” stressfully, but flat and wheezing. Fleece elbowed me.
“A hymn on the march?! I’m absolutely limp. Where’s the organ? If my mother ever led a band this would be it Look at that slave playing oboe! That’s her musical dream of me! This has to be the Gladiators. You ass. I don’t think they’re funny.”
“No, they aren’t.”
Whitfield Peter was standing at brace, following the American, Christian, and Mississippi flags with his eyes. He held his big felt hat over his heart in the layman’s salute. I had seen earnest old fellows do it when the flag appeared in the Shriner’s parade in Shreveport.
Peter was braced there, nobody around him owned a hat, and his pants whipped as a cold wind blew downstreet from the Old Capitol. Somebody laughed at him. There was a long gap in the parade, then along came some more bands, sincere but puny. You could imagine them as the heralds corps for a Moorish children’s crusade. Peter had apparently been preparing a speech to the crowd of whites on the post office steps. He dropped the hat to his side and addressed himself to the right, where the laugh had come from.
“No, gentlemen, I am not ashamed to salute the flag of my country. The heartbreak and the shame is that you and I have less of a choice every day about who holds that banner. Yet we stand here…. Yet we are constrained … we are the constrained …” Either he had been weeping or his eyes were purple with emotion. He put a handkerchief to his mouth. From this side he looked older. His left hand was hanging down at his watchchain like a punctured udder. I was sure I could knock him around if I wanted to,
“Another letter to the editor,” said Fleece. Then we forgot him.
Harley’s tremendous green band swung around the corner in front of the pinkish bricks of the Old Capitol. That’s three blocks from where we stood, but up a slope, and I saw Harley with them, like a tan lollipop in an all-white suit and, sweet Jesus, a short-billed British helmet of canvas. Easy, easy, they came down, the lazy dragon-body of them almost never finishing its turn down toward us. The shakos and the plumes stood ten across. Spectators on both sides of the street had to retreat to the sidewalks, and I saw Harley using his arms to spread the crowd back as the band marked time. There was no music from them yet. Just the drums. The patient boiling holocaust of the drums. They went deep into the concrete and you could feel them through your shoes. I noticed the fine sand of the street gutters rise in a sheen. There were three other bands in front of Harley’s, knocking and tooting their hearts out, but his drums were going right through them and under them.
Then the Gladiator band had its way cleared free and wide. Harley made a motion to the drum major, and the band oozed down towards us, no hurrying this green monster, still leisurely, eight steps to five yards, the drums still holding back, but like a hungry tiger in a rotting net; and yet no music. Harley walked with them on the opposite side from me. He was not in step, this being the director’s privilege. Neither did he seek any lead or spotlight, merely escorting the head rank of brass in this green-suited musicians’ army. We saw at last its people and its beaming metal. Brass mirrors in phalanxes, and on back in the multitude, waves of tubes at arms, three lines of every kind of percussion and behind them the three lines of tubas, like caves about to spout fire, walking toward you. They had the faces of a dead-eyed Ethiopian corps, so damned certain about the outcome of whatever they were marching toward, or against, that they hadn’t even raised their weapons yet You did not think of sixteen-year-old boys and girls of the colored high school when they came down.
All of them were snobs. They were such snobs a delicate judge might have counted off for it: they were too stiff, too certain, too proud, and too callused from being proud, riding too casually along, too confidently with that corps of drummers bombing down on what sounded like a hide stretched over the Grand Canyon.
My eyes went back to Harley. He had brought them down to the head of our block now, still their humorless lackey, Director Butte. But — maybe his white suit and helmet put this across — you saw his short red-brown beard and the mouselike cunning in the eyes, and you saw now the control he bore over this green immensity of snobs: the control of a mouse over an elephant, say. Then he proved it. He put his right hand in the air.
A piece of chrome jumped up in the air, some cannons erupted down the mouth of a cavern, the brassware pipes stood up all at once, and we were looking up throats of gold and silver as far as we could see. The bottom fell out of the street.
I had that lonely, stranded, breathless feeling I’d had once before, watching Jones’s band from under the bleachers, when I was a sneak and a twerp, in 1950. But it was much changed now, now that I knew music, now my heart had room for it, now I had grown an ear that could pick out mistakes of technique and tone, and I could not be washed clear off my post by fear of music as in the old days.
I tell myself this fraudulent blab about my musical progress. The verities are that I was washed away again, ripped off, out, away, and that for me even to name the march they let loose is impossible, the same as it’s impossible for a man drowning, waves blasting him, to pronounce the name of the ocean he’s in. When I got back to my post with my mind, they were half through the march and almost upon us. One resents being knocked out by musical teenaged children when one has earned oneself a purchase on cool, and I came back very skeptical about the Gladiators. But still they were a scare, a magic scare, even if you hated Sousan music. They were not overcharged or too tinny or loud in the brittle way bands are when they’re trying to make up for shallow talent. Talent went deep in this band. The third-part harmony boys were making it on trumpet and trombone; the clarinets, saxophones, and flutes were all making it. The basses were making it, way under everything, with restrained mastery, so you never heard them pumping at the notes but sensed something moving wild at the bottom of the world. A few trumpet men played a melody of sixteenth notes an octave over everything, and all in tune (which H. Monroe, trumpet man, would have been hard-pressed to do, sorry to confess). They were cutting Jones’s band. They were as thorough an orchestra as I’ve ever seen or heard off the stage. Music so big; and they were, incredibly, carrying it down the street with them.