But what I’m really getting at, he had also made sure to remind me, is doing your thing. Look, here’s what I’m really trying to tell you, my man. You’re not out here to prove that some used-to-be little snotty-nosed kid from the outskirts of Mobile, Alabama, can impress some puffed-up somiches just on some old principles from back during slavery time and Reconstruction. You’re out here to find out what you can make of yourself in this day and age. So don’t give up until you make sure you’re on the wrong track. And on the other hand, don’t get faked out by a lot of applause too early on, either.
He let me think about that for a while as we went on enjoying our soup and salad. Then he said, So how you making out with these up here splibs, homeboy? You remember what I told you during those rookie sessions I made it my personal obligation to put you through?
And I said, Never is to forget any part of any days like that, Papa Joe. You being a statemate to boot and all. And even as I spoke I found myself remembering exactly how he had looked when he pushed his bus seat all the way back in reclining position. Because it made him look exactly like a not-quite-middle-aged general merchandise storefront bench Uncle Bud, Doc, Mose, or Remus who might well have been taking a snooze in Mr. Slim Jim Perkins’s vacant barber’s chair number three in Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy’s Tonsorial Parlor up on Buckshaw Mill Road across the lane from Stranahan’s General Merchandise Store on Mr. Slim Jim Perkins’s day off.
And as he went on saying what he was saying, I was aware once again of that ever so subtle wisp of his Yardley’s English Lavender brilliantine and of the fact that he, like Jo Jones of Count Basie’s band and Sonny Greer of Duke Ellington’s, was an expert twenty-mule-team skinner who never seemed to work up a heavy sweat, which also reminded me of how redolent of bay rum and the aftershave talcum brush mist along with the cigar smoke and shoe polish the atmosphere in Papa Gumbo Willie McWorthy’s used to be. Then by the time I was on my way through the last year of junior high school, there was the precollegiate atmosphere of Shade’s up on Green Avenue across from Boom Men’s Union Hall Ballroom, where the hair and skin preparations came from the same downtown Mobile haberdasheries that carried the latest fashions you saw in Esquire magazine, which by then had become the sartorial bible of the man about town.
Man, these up here splibs, he had said one morning on the road. Man, them and us, and us and them. Man, especially when it comes to these up here jaspers. My experience is that as soon as they hear that you’re from somewhere down home they’re subject to come on like the fact that they’re from somewhere up here automatically gives them some kind of status over you, especially if you ask them something about something, and I’m not talking about asking them for something. Boy, but as soon as they find out that there’s a bunch of jaspers carrying on about you, man, that’s another tune. Man, you go from cotton-chopping pickaninny to street-corner hangout buddy buddy just like that! But now, on the other hand, it looks like some of their jaspers might want to get next to you, watch out!
Because, you see, he had also said during another of one of our early-on sessions, speaking of these up here jaspers, man, the problem with them folks is how many of them can’t tell one of us from the other after all. And these up here splibs figure we’re bound to spot how easy it is for almost any old dog-ass splib to take them in like netting mullets in a goddamn barrel. That’s the big secret. Ain’t nothing a bigger mullethead than a benevolent up here jasper. Man, the hype they lay on these people is a sin and a shame. But the scandal of it is that it’s mostly just about some chicken feed, or some goofy broad that don’t even wear no drawers.
I dropped some pretty heavy stuff on you, right from the get-go, my man, he said as I chuckled to myself, remembering. You being a college boy and all, he said, and you listened like a bass player is supposed to listen. And I told the Bossman, I can see why we can hang this whole thing on a kid like him. I said he’s not only a quick study, he’s somebody that’s been on his way to getting on our kind of time even before he was old enough to know that he could tell the difference between us and somebody else. Which was a hell of a long time before you realized that for us this stuff is not just a job but a calling. Which is another thing that makes for the great big difference between this man’s band and all the others.
That was also when he began saying what he was to say about another thing that he along with a number of others, none of them schoolteachers as such, incidentally, used to remind you of in one way or another from time to time back in the days when I was coming of age but also stretching all the way back to as far as I can remember. Sometimes they called it quality. And sometimes they called it class.
What he had said about
