And as for our identification with life in the grimy garrets of bohemian Paris, not with berets and goatees but with plain gray extra-large sweatshirts symbolizing smocks that made being in college on scholarship merit awards (but in my case mostly without pocket change or even bus fare for a two-hundred-mile trip to Mobile for Christmas) more a matter of bohemian glamour and vagabond adventure and romance than of the grinding poverty that it undeniably was.
But when I arrived in New York that September, being a graduate student was another matter altogether. So much so that the fact that I was now actually living in Greenwich Village, the legendary center for bohemian life in the United States, had much less to do with what I had read by and about the generation of Edna St. Vincent Millay, Maxwell Bodenheim, E. E. Cummings, Max Eastman, and the like than with New York friendships I had made backstage or in nightclubs when I was in town as a member of the band. And besides, along with the time that I had spent doing what I had been doing since leaving the campus in central Alabama, there was also the fact that I had now become a man with a wife.
Perhaps for some of those who go directly from the bachelor’s degree to the master and sometimes the doctorate programs, often on the same campus and sometimes with some of the same professors, the break was not as obvious as it was for those who took time out to teach for a while or did something else, as I did before enrolling as a graduate student. In any case, I had decided that graduate-level academic work was really a special form of adult education, and as such there was something part-time about it even when you were enrolled in a full-time course of study that you were expected to complete in a scheduled (even though not strictly required) time frame.
What I really had in mind when I decided that the time had come for me to register for a graduate course of study that year was not a specific profession, but what Miss Lexine Metcalf had kept repeating to me when I reached senior high school because that was when you really began competing not only for college eligibility ranking, but also for scholarship grants, some special few of which were not only for tuition but also for room and board. And it was also at this point in the Mobile County Training School program for upward-bound early birds that vocational guidance sessions began to focus on individual career choices, which in due course also became a matter of the choice of your first, second, and third preference as to the college you hoped to attend, given your final grade-point average and your financial means. Which in my case was a matter of a high grade-point-average eligibility and high faculty recommendation and hardly any financial means whatsoever. As she well knew but only regarded as a challenge to my ingenuity and no great one at that. Certainly not for the sort of splendid young man that she herself always led me to believe that she thought I was, or that she was still counting on me to become, as she had begun doing when she became my homeroom teacher when I reached the third grade. Which was the beginning of geography books and maps and the globe and the sand table projects and windows on the world bulletin board displays of peoples and customs of many lands. That was where and when it had begun between her and me. And she was the one who even so early on as that had already earmarked me as a likely prospect for Mr. B. Franklin Fisher’s early bird list of candidates for the Mobile County Training School extracurricular program for the talented tenth, who according to his doctrine of uplift and ancestral imperative were the hope and glory of the nation. It was the early birds from whom he expected the most immediate and consummate response to his exhortation to so conduct, nay, acquit yourselves in all of your undertakings that generations yet unborn will rise at mention of your name and call you blesséd.
Incidentally, it was Mr. B. Franklin Fisher, the principal and thus the man as in the big man and bossman, but who looked like a boy evangelist, who was the one who spoke of ancestral imperatives in national and also in ethnic terms, such as our nation and our people and our people in this nation, whereas Miss Lexine Metcalf never said who else among our people if not you, but who else in the whole wide world if not you. Which is why hers was the school bell time voice that I always found myself responding to even as I had always that of Miss Tee’s rocking-chair storybook time voice and as I had also already been responding to the baby talk voice of Mama herself calling me her little mister scootabout man out there among them! Which is why Miss Tee also called me little mister man and then my mister. Hello, my mister. You, too, my mister. You can, too, my mister.
But it was when Mr. B. Franklin Fisher, whose pulpit eloquence with its reverberations of Henry Ward Beecher and Abraham Lincoln, Frederick Douglass, Booker T. Washington, and W. E. B. Du Bois and ranging from
