Padgett Powell - Edisto

The Federal Oral History

"Take him to the museum," the Doctor told me, "and get those boys to show him the tape of her." She did not mean the Charleston Museum, a place where you can see all the birds east of the Mississippi preserved in these little bullet shapes like they were squeezed to death by the hand of, and rode in from the field in the pants pockets of, James Audubon himself, and kept in drawers like silverware after that, since about 1850—I never thought about it before, but those could be antebellum birds. A whale is hanging from the ceiling, and drawing rooms cut out of local homes are in there too, whole complete rooms like they glued everything down and buzzsawed it loose from the Russell House or somewhere, and lugged it over and put little cards in it telling what everything was.

She meant the art museum. The best thing in that was the desk man, who sat stoned just inside looking at a Salvador Dali picture book, saying "Wow" very gently, and told you where you wanted to go in the museum, and whom past you could have carried any painting in there as long as you put the finished side at him so the gliding colors and lines would mesmerize him. But it wasn’t the painting part we wanted anyway. We wanted the federal oral history program, which was in an outbuildlng. That’s where they had Theenie on a tape. Now I personally don’t think Taurus needed to see her again, certainly not for the purposes the Doctor had in mind. Because he took the news that he was the Grandson of the Lost Nigger Maid so cool she thought he did not believe it, which most certainly was not the case. You could not say he believed anything and you could not say he disbelieved anything. He was a heroin baby, I told you that. I thought I made it up. but now I don’t know. I may have heard It in the Doctor’s relayed story. Once he told me he remembers very little of what happened before "last night."

"That’s an exaggeration," I said.

"That’s an exaggeration," he said. But he offered no more. And he never said his name was other than the tag I gave him, or where he came from, or why he was here.

What that means, a heroin baby, if he is one, I don’t know, because my first and last brush with that stuff was reading the most genteel addict of all time’s monograph, which the Doctor didn’t have to tell me to read, because I got after that one on my own, thinking from the title it was going to present some titillating scenes of delectable and naked girls, which it did not. Everybody in that book sounded like these Dobermans I heard about at the Grand. They feed them ashes in their food, which somehow lowers the oxygen in their blood, and when they grow up they don’t believe in anything, except maybe killing, and even the handler has to wear a football suit, more or less, and throw meat to wherever he wants them to go.

"Them Dobes light a nigga’s ass up ," Preston says.

Well anyway, it was something like these Dobes that happened to Taurus, which I say changed his whole approach to believing things. Like killing everything. Except his stance was more like killing nothing, as if he thought everything was alive or possible. It’s hard to say. But I do know he did not not believe that Theenie was his grandmother any more than he did believe it, and so going for the Doctor’s reason to see the tape was moot, but we went anyway, for the trip.

We went past the stoned dude down a hall with the two-tone wainscoting of green and lighter green — very soothing greens that they use in schools for hypers. Then we got to the studio.

In there on three walls were TVs banked into holes like microwave ovens, and all over the room, in strapped-up boxes with cables and ropes and wires and sockets and jacks all over them, was this Sony stuff — enough to, I swear, film a whole war. Half of it’s on triangle dollies and tripods. I expected even a director’s bullhorn.

Well, hidden down in this load are these two guys bent over a switch panel, messing with it, so that six of the TVs are on and President Nixon is talking on all of them. He says the same thing, but the angles are different and they’re playing a sentence over and over and pointing at different screens. It’s pretty obvious they’re casing him for lies like everybody does, even without forty-five TV sets. I heard all that stuff.

Suddenly they turn around and look at us.

"Yes?" says one of them. I notice how pale and zitty he looks for a college guy.

We don’t say anything and their foreheads start wrinkling up.

"Ye-yes?" he says again.

"Are you Bob Patterson?" Taurus says.

"It’s Robert." He doesn’t move toward us or anything, just says It’s Robert like you’d say It’s candy.

It’s time for the Boy Act and a solid job of it too, and before I knew it, I was acting like I had palsy and stumbling around the room across these rivers of technology, and going to try to hit his balls like that midget at the cockfight. It was funny how fast I was this pygmy wiseass, in a way that scared me it was so thorough and deep and quick, and I can’t explain how I knew to do it or why I wanted to, but I would have hit that bastard harder than a golf ball, when Taurus has me by the back and holds me.

He has his thumb on my shoulder, his middle finger down my back on the edge of vertebrae, and he has a light frog on the muscle so I can’t move without getting a real frog.

"Well, Robert," he says, "Dr. Manigault sent us to see one of your tapes."

"The famous basket tape," I said, and Taurus frogged me so that I gargled a little trying to shut up.

"Oh yes," Robert Patterson said. "She did call."

Then he put his head in his hand and acted like he had a headache. "It’ll take us a while to find it. It’s not in our permanent collection." The other guy got up and said he knew where it was and bumped into us, so they said we should stand outside until they got it set up, or until the second guy did, because he was the only one doing anything human. So we waited in the hall. I knew of the tape but I’d never seen it. They got Theenie at the market weaving one Saturday when she was off, and I learned of it only because she wouldn’t talk about it. The Doctor told me because they had had to have a man-to-man talk after it happened, to settle Theenie down. That was because Theenie somehow thinks TV is the law, and being on it is like being on trial or something. TV and the law are both these large things that are technical and controlled by white people, so it nerved her out.

I would tease her. "Hey Theenie, when’s your show coming on?"

“What show?”

"Your TV show."

"Ain’t no show."

"Wel1, I’m going to get me a TV Guide and find out."

"No you ain’t. There ain’t no show."

"I heard there was."

"Where you hear?"

"I heard is all. Like you do. From a little bud."

She used to tell me she heard stuff about me from a little bird.

"Aw Got! Simons. Simons, why you wont to grind me up? You allus just grinin’ me up." And here she would be about to cry, I swear, and I’d pull off surprised. I only did it twice, because it really did get to her. You could do the same thing by saying she had a phone call from a man about her social security check and she’d start in on aspirin and leave early.

“I’m leaving, never coming back, Miz Manigault. Simons, that Simons is just grinin' me up. . " And she’d leave ten minutes early and always be back. She could take any other teasing but the gubmen and the TV show.

They called us back in and we watched the tape. In the frame were tourists and baskets and then Theenie and her aunt — she calls her that but I think lt’s her neighbor — weaving, over against a wall. The second video lord, who was nice to us, is running over the baskets with an electric-shaver light-meter thing, poking it at everything. Then he gets this boom mike and says okay and the action starts. Then leaves the frame and we hear a thump and sound check sound check okay .