All of that was what Mr. B. Franklin Fisher was best known and celebrated for. Whereas with Miss Lexine Metcalf, as with Miss Tee and with Mama, you did what you had to do because that was what growing up into full manhood was all about. And yet even when she insisted that you had to go on beyond high school as she did when you were in the ninth grade, she never was to say which college or what for. Nor did Mr. B. Franklin Fisher himself, who after all was not only the ultimate approval authority on college eligibility and scholarship grants at Mobile County Training School, but also had a record as an expert on vocational guidance that was unchallenged. When he referred to himself as a fisher of humankind, a spotter of prospects, and a molder of heroes and nation-builders, nobody ever took issue, not even in private. In public, the response was always applause, which became a standing ovation.
Still, not even he, with whom my status as an early bird was second to none and who was forever predicting to the student body at large that I would become one who would accomplish something that would make me a credit to my people and the nation, acknowledged or not during my lifetime, but would enjoy the high regard of generations yet unborn even so. All I ask of this one, he said on commencement day, as if keeping a promise to Miss Lexine Metcalf, is that he always do his best. Not even he ever gave the slightest hint of a suggestion as to what my career field would be.
Meanwhile, Miss Lexine Metcalf was the one who never stopped reminding me that I might just be one of those whose destiny was to travel far and wide in order to find out what it was that I should try to make of myself in the first place. Which she had begun to do when I reached the third grade and the firstyear geography book that you had to have for the homework to go along with the maps on the wall rack with the globe and the displays on the bulletin board better known as windows on the world, and also the sand-table cutout mock-up projects that made her classroom seem like a department store toyland from time to time.
That was where she began, and it was as if she were my own private Mobile County Training School guardian from then on, because all of my subsequent homeroom teachers and officially designated class sponsors deferred to her on all matters concerning me. As did Mr. B. Franklin Fisher himself. Or so it still seems to me. Because I still cannot remember any special project that he ever assigned me to be responsible for or any award that he recommended me for that had not already been discussed with her beforehand. But then I had been her special candidate for his early bird initiatives program in the first place.
Whatever she said to him, to me she always said, Who if not you? Who if not you, my splendid young man, who if not you? Who if not you may have to go where you will go and find out what you will find out, whatever you will find out? To me she also said, You will know you are where you should be by the way you feel, where you should be for the time being; at any rate she also said because such was the also and also of whatever you do wherever you are.
All of which is also why she had also come so immediately to mind along with Mama and Miss Tee when my old roommate read to me the passage from Remembrance of Things Past that he was recording in his notebook, the passage in which Marcel Proust has an artist tell the narrator that we do not receive wisdom, we must discover it for ourselves, after a journey through the wilderness that no one else can make for us, that no one else can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to view the world.
Which I also find to be entirely consistent with the behavior of Miss Tee toward me, especially as it struck me after I found out the secret about how she came to be in Gasoline Point that I didn’t know about until the night I awoke on the front porch in Stranahan’s Lane during Mr. Ike Meadow’s wake and kept my head in Mama’s lap as if I were still asleep.
So yes, on the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, where I come from, you were indeed weaned from the home to be bottle-fed by teachers, but from these same teachers you also learned that you had to prepare and also condition yourself to assume total responsibility for yourself, because once you graduated and went out into the world, you were on your own. And who if not Mr. B. Franklin Fisher himself for all of his community uplift and vocational guidance expertise always ended his annual commencement address by reminding the graduating class that it was going out into the real world equipped with what really amounted to a compass, a knapsack, and a notebook or chap-book (for what my old best of all possible college roommates was to call the goods).
III
So you decided to get yourself back
