“I might go on back to the army,” said Harley. “You don’t get cut in the back.”
“Ah! Not the army, man,” said Silas.
“I liked the army. Everybody gave such a damn. More people were honest. I think you meet a better breed of people in the army.” He looked awfully tired around the eyes then. He thumbed the music on the stand dismally. Beyond him I saw his wife and kids, all of them sitting patiently except the baby. He wanted to get at those drums.
“I don’t think I know your wife,” I said.
“That’s Miriam.” He made no move to introduce us.
“You have good music here.” Harley suddenly pulled out a band piece called “Charlemagne.” Lower on the page was the composer’s name: H. J. Butte. “This is yours truly.” I examined the score. It was a march, full of runs. In the margins were directives; I should say imperatives, with exclamation points, and inside the cover was a short, exhorting essay on how this piece must be played. The publisher was a New York firm.
“I can’t think right off of any band that could cut this,” I said.
“My band can cut it,” said Harley.
He said goodbye. The family arose and followed him. “Get little Harley, John Philip,” the wife said. The older boy took the baby’s hand and led him out the door.
After they left, a tubby clerk came up and straightened the music on the revolving stand.
“Were you having a family reunion with that nigger?” he said.
“How well is ‘Charlemagne’ moving?” Silas asked. “That nigger wrote ‘Charlemagne.’”
“Well, nobody is buying it. One band director was interested in it. But he said it was too difficult. And I no more believe that nigger wrote it than I believe the moon is the North Wind’s cookie.”
When the parade began, Silas and I went out and found a place next to a lamp post. There was only a thin crowd. A bum leaned against the post itself, taking stock of the two leading floats. Behind them, where we couldn’t see, a band was playing “Silent Night” in march time. The bum turned around. He was tickled pink.
“Nigras!” he said. He was smoking the hell out of a roll-your-own and his eyes were wide as clocks.
“God damn!” shouted Silas. He’d just caught the wind off the bum. I’d been holding my breath.
“I might use tobacco, but I would not take the name of the Lord my God in vain,” said the bum.
“Move out,” said Silas. The bum drifted away, protesting. “Look at the creeps and yokels gawking at the parade. They all think it’s so very amusing. Look at those goddam Central High hoodlums giggling,” Silas demanded.
“Wait. Just wait a bit.” I heard, or felt, the shudder of a certain drum corps putting into action a hundred yards away. “Wait for the big green band.”
“Who is that?” he asked me. “That’s him, that’s who it is! And that girl.” I looked, and right across the street, on the corner, was Catherine. She had seen me and was waving timidly now. Uncle Peter stood by her. He was squinting and lifting himself up on his toes, with the cane rammed behind him on the sidewalk. I felt disarmed without my cosmetic spectacles, but I had my beard as usual.
“Yeah, I know him. I know you, old snake. He’s looking at us, Monroe. I wonder if that cockhead remembers me. Fil drop something on your head, buddy!” Silas shouted across the street at him. Luckily, for me, a band was close on us and the shout was unavailing; as the band passed I jerked Silas back.
“Shut up, shut up!”
“He better watch it. I’ll crown him. I’ll lay some kind of dent in that buckaroo hat for him.”
The next band was Harley’s. I nodded wisely.
“Gawdamighty! Tremendous!” yelled Silas.
The yokels along the street cringed back a bit and looked askance lonesomely. This thrilled Silas. He threw out his arms and greeted the band with his outstretched chest. I didn’t recognize what the band was playing, at first. It was somehow, in a clashing, agonizing way, Moorish and Christian both: medieval feast music. Then I knew it was “Charlemagne”—gloomy in its brass, in minor key, harsh and radiant in its woodwinds, with a crowning tinkle of bell lyres at the top, all of it lifted up by a whirlpool of bass, trombone, and drum muscle. Then I picked out an odd sound: tambourines. I kept listening for the Sousa. It wasn’t there.
“Magnificent!” shouted Silas, as we began walking. He was right. In front, on the other side, strode the principal in the white uniform and helmet. Now this man could walk. Was he smug and imperial.
“That Ethiopian’s having fun, ain’t he?” This was Harley talking to me. He was walking along too. Some ways in back of him were his wife and boys, walking too, but slower. The baby boy was toddling vigorously, with an apple in his hand. The band cut off with a grand weird chord. The drummers rolled like an engine that had cranked up underground and was going to drive off with the whole city.
“That ‘Charlemagne’ is really a horse. That’s the best thing I ever heard on the march,” I told Harley.
“I’ve made a hundred and five dollars on it. It’s the best thing I ever heard, too. And to this date, that’s how much … uh oh! Lookit there.” We’d gotten out some twenty feet in front of the band. There were Peter, Catherine, and a skinny man with a potbelly in a white shirt, tie, plastic penholder at the pocket. A clerkish greaser, he was. They were all walking parallel with us on the other side of Capitol Street. Peter had his eye on the man in a white uniform. We were getting into a thicker crowd of Negroes on the sidewalks now. Peter touched his cane to the backs of people to get a clean view, moving them aside, thrusting his head and wide hat over the curb.
Harley got a pert, scandal-bent look on his face. “You don’t reckon he’ll use that stick on our principal?”
“I’d be surprised. He—” At that time, Peter reached the cane out and tapped the principal on the arm. Just tapped him, just a flick of cane, so as to make the man look his way. The principal didn’t notice, though. He was blowing the whistle and nodding to the drum major as he made inept directing motions with his arms, wanting the band to play. At last the drum major understood and the band was into an intimidating new march.
Silas rushed up to me, really furious, throwing his arms up and down. “Did that son of a bitch hit him? Did you see?!” I didn’t see Silas run back up the sidewalk and borrow the apple from Harley’s baby. Next thing I knew he was in front of us at the curb, making his way through the Negroes. We were at the intersection of Farrish Street, and there seemed to be hundreds of tall men in hepcat clothes around us.
“Don’t let him do that,’ Harley said in my ear. He had a firm grip on my arm. The Negroes were backing away from Silas, who was walking in the gutter. When I reached him and looked across the street, of course it was Peter, his niece, and the other man, walking ahead of the band too, Peter studying the man in white. Silas threw the apple at him with everything he had, and it was rising when it got to him. The apple missed Peter but struck Catherine directly in the face and flew to pieces. A scream went up. I caught a view of her down on her knees, holding her face, just as the band came between. Silas turned toward me, hands on his hips, eyes down. We, Silas and I, passed Harley and his family on the sidewalk. Harley would not look at Silas. He was gesturing in anger to his wife. Then we passed them. I saw two policemen running down the sidewalk on the other side, toward Peter’s vicinity. There was commotion over there. The last rank of the band went by and I saw the enormous hat waving back and forth, and heard, even over the band, a man screeching. Then an arm went up, pointing to the Negroes across the street from it. The potbellied thin man ran across the street in front of a float. Then came a cop waddling after him. Whoever the man in the white shirt was, he drove into a group of tall hepcats, and they gave for a second. Then the cop drew up, and suddenly jumped to one side. Somebody in the crowd had laid one on the fierce boy and he was hurtling out in the parade like somebody trying to lift off and fly by running backwards. He fell flat out under another float — snowy-looking flannel hanging all over it — and the rear wheel of the float rolled over him. It was only a flat-bed trailer being towed behind a car, but there were several Negro girls in evening dresses sitting on it, and my stomach sank when I saw one side of the flat lift up and unseat a couple of the girls. The cop went back out in the street toward the, well, at least, outraged form. The big Santa Claus float rolled down and obscured my view.