In those days you took the Delta Airlines Shuttle from La Guardia in New York to Atlanta International. Then you transferred to the southwest-bound commuter flight to Montgomery and central Alabama and so on to Mississippi and Louisiana was only one more hour, departing Eastern Standard Time and arriving the same hour Central Standard Time. And as our flight entered the landing approach pattern and we brought our seats upright, I said, Here we go, thinking, all the way back to within this many Alabama miles north by east from the outskirts of Mobile and the river and the canebrakes and cypress swamp moss and the state docks and the bay and the Gulf Coast beyond the storybook blue and storm gray horizons of which were the old Spanish Main and also the Seven Seas and the seven storybook wonders of the ancient world.
As the airport limousine pulled on away from the city limits and settled into the thirty-mile interstate highway drive to the campus exit, we said what we said about the central Alabama preautumn countryside, and when she closed her eyes I went on remembering how uncertain everything had been for me that first September.
But I had said to myself what I had said to myself even so. Because I was there not only from Mobile County Training School and Miss Lexine Metcalf and her windows on the world and Mr. B. Franklin Fisher and the early birds, I was also there from Gasoline Point. So I said what I had already been saying long before school bell time became more urgent than train whistle and sawmill whistle time. I said, Destination Philamayork, remembering the comings and goings of old sporty-limp-walking Luzana Cholly with his blue steel .32-.20 in his underarm holster and the delicate touch and locomotive thunder of his rawhide tough twelve-string guitar fingers and what he said that time under the Three-Mile Creek L & N bridge. And there was also old patent-leather-footed, pigeon-toed-tipping Stagolee Dupas fils with his diamond-flashing piano fingers and tailored-to-measure jazz-backed suits, who did what he did that night at Joe Lockett’s in the Bottoms and didn’t skip city afterward. Because Philamayork was not somewhere you escaped to. It was somewhere you earned your way to, your hithering and thithering way through, thick and thin and wherever and whatever to.
I also said what I said when I arrived on campus that first September because my destination was already what it was long before I was aware of anything at all about what actually made Luzana Cholly Luzana Cholly and Stagolee Dupas fils the notorious Stagolee Dupas fils. Because for me it all had actually begun all the way back during the now only vaguely remembered time when Mama began calling me her little old scootabout man, even before I had learned enough about words to know what scooter and scooting about actually meant.
But by the time I had arrived on campus as a college freshman that first September I had learned what I had learned from that many rockabye tale times and all the midwinter fireside times and summer night mosquito smoke times even before the day came when Mama let Miss Tee take me to be enrolled because my school bell time had come. And I was a schoolboy from then on and Mama said, That’s Mama’s little old Buster Brown scootabout man over there scooting about that school-yard just like some little old cottontail jackrabbit scooting all over the briar patch.
So I said what I said about myself as I looked out on the part of the campus you could see from my dormitory room, and when my roommate arrived from Chicago, I said what I first said about him because his nickname was Geronimo, which I associated with the escapades of Reynard the Fox. But when class sessions began I said he was like a young Dr. Faustus, which earned him the campuswide nickname of the Snake, as if that made him a devil-ordained tent show and vaudeville magician or snake-oil con man, not to mention an ever so—and ever so lethal snake in the grass.
When the limousine stopped, I opened my eyes and realized I had dozed off and that we had taken our exit from the interstate highway and were waiting to pull into the local route into town. So I said what I said because I knew we would be rolling through the Court House Square area and on out by the old antebellum Strickland Place and into that end of the campus within the next twenty-plus minutes.
We signed in at the campus guesthouse, and when we came back downstairs after I called Mr. Poindexter and helped with the unpacking of what was needed from the luggage for the time being, it was not yet late afternoon. So we decided that there was enough time for a leisurely homecomng alumni stroll before changing clothes to join the Poindexters for dinner and information about a choice of a furnished apartment on or off campus.
Which was why we headed up the incline of Campus Avenue under the overhanging oaks and elms instead of popping across to the off-campus main drag for a drugstore fountain Coca-Cola, for a quick peek around in Red Gilmore’s Varsity Threads Haberdashery, and the mandatory back-in-town-from-up-the-country-and-elsewhere round of palm slapsnatching and back patting in Deke Whatley’s Barbershop.
So here we are once more, I said, as the upcurving sidewalk leveled off and we came on by the concrete steps leading down to the main campus promenade lawn where the outdoor concert bandstand was and across which the three-story dormitory where the dean of
