I didn’t say anything about that, because at that time I had never really concerned myself about the overall educational policies of any given college. Once I realized that Harvard, Yale, and Princeton were out of the question so far as my undergraduate student days were concerned, the main thing that mattered to me was what range of liberal arts courses would be available wherever I was able to go. My alternative undergraduate choices had been Morehouse, Talladega, and Fisk in that order, but once I was all signed up and beginning class sessions, especially with Mr. Carlton Poindexter, and settling in with my polymath of a roommate, I had been operating on the principle that everything was up to me and I was on my way.
He (Taft Edison) chuckled to himself again and then he said, But man, that’s not really what this stuff in this bag is really about. Not really and certainly not only. In fact, only incidentally. When I cut out from down there that spring, I really intended to go back and finish. But by the end of that summer I had changed my mind not only about music but also about my whole outlook on life. And while I was trying to figure out what I really wanted to do with myself I fell back on a few things I used to play around with, beginning all the way back in my first classes in the general science laboratory. I guess you could say that I became a jack-legged gadgeteer who became good enough tinkering around with photography, radio and sound system repair to keep enough coming in for room and board and decent changes of clothes. And I’ve also shipped out with the merchant marine from time to time.
Meanwhile, he said after nodding to somebody waving to him from across the street, I’ve also been doing a little journalism, mostly freelance, that doesn’t add up to enough to live on, but as of now I’m managing by hook or crook to bring in enough to allow me to spend more and more time playing around with notes and sketches I’m lugging around in this thing.
And as I looked at it again I decided that it was the same type of expensive attaché case that was used by globe-trotting diplomats and that it made him seem even farther ahead of me as an advanced Manhattanite than he had been as an upperclassman back on the campus down in central Alabama.
Then it seemed to me that when he said what he said next, it was as if he had decided to change the subject because what had suddenly come back to mind was a matter that he had been concerned with time and again and that was no less personal than it was intellectual. People, man, he said. They don’t really see you. There you are, right there in front of them, or beside them and you think they’re looking at you and they don’t see you, close up, full view, multiple takes.
I was not sure that I knew what his point was, so all I said was, And they don’t always hear you either, man. Then I said, Sometimes they do at least recognize you by name on sight. But let them repeat something you’re supposed to have told them about something and you just might not recognize anything that you ever told anybody about anything at any time in your whole life.
I let it go at that because I decided that he was really only musing about some note he had made or was planning to make on one of the scratch pads that I assumed he always carried either in his jacket pocket or along with the other papers in his briefcase. I remember thinking that maybe it was somewhat like people translating what they think they are hearing when they listen to a foreign language. Their vocabulary reveals the limitations of their conception of things. (Which suddenly reminded me of old Joe States looking at somebody out on the dance floor and whispering, Man, don’t tell that cat he ain’t swinging, He really feels like he’s swinging his old butt off, and he can’t even stay in time with most of them other folks out there. It’s all in his own head, man, he said. And then when he said, You got a textbook word for that kind of psychological jive, Schoolboy, and I said, I don’t know, maybe solipsism, he said, No better for him.)
We were standing at the northwest corner of Fifth Avenue and Forty-seventh Street. And when I stuck out my hand before heading for the bookstore, and he said, So what about yourself?, I assumed he was asking more out of the good manners of his down-home upbringing than out of any genuinely personal curiosity, So all I said was that I was checked into graduate classes in the humanities at New York University after two plus years of knocking around to accumulate a little graduate scholarship supplement, among other things.
At that time I didn’t mention anything at all about the time I had spent with the Bossman Himself. It crossed my mind, but I decided against saying anything about it, not only because I didn’t remember him as having any special interest in that kind of music back on the campus, but also because there was no reason to expect him to have any special curiosity about any particular details of my background.
