Barry Hannah - Geronimo Rex

Out on the street, Fleece was shivering. I was such an amateur about cameras, I thought the camera might’ve worked somehow by itself. I asked Fleece if he had gotten the shot.

“Hell no. When he came in, I turned the thing upside-down.”

I drove up to Lamar Street, couldn’t find a space, and finally found one on Pearl, behind the post office building. We walked around the porch of the building. Being on Capitol Street again, we sat down, on the post office steps. On the curbs it was solid spades, young and old. Fleece was wearing his camera in case he saw something, but he was not hopeful. As for me, knowing his mind was still on Peter, I’d slipped the gun out from under the carseat and dropped it in my raincoat.

I’d never seen so many Negroes together at one time. You could smell a high character of smoking fish in the air. We stood up when the first band came down. On the steps like this we could see. The colored girls would walk with the bands. They had on sweaty bobbysox and pointed witch lace-ups like the fad at Dream of Pines two years ago. I was looking at their ankles as they tried to break into the line of spectators to see their band. Some just followed the band on the sidewalk. One group was four-across, doing the skip-and-kick for school spirit, and they created a jam coming down the sidewalk.

The first four bands had snaky ranks and played very loud, with majorettes desporting on their own, each a star in a separate audition; and this held true for some of the musicians too. I saw a tuba man doing a private jazz ballet and skiffle to the march, his eyes closed, and dancing off into the spectator ranks before he opened his eyes and found out where he was. Then we saw him and his huge instrument running after his band. A small boy ran after him slapping his pants like he was a stray dog. The crowd in front of the post office put up a cheer. Up till now it had been Count Basie set to march-time, and shallow in arrangement.

“This is awful!” said Fleece. “You hear that a nigger has rhythm, and these bands are making a fraud out of that .” I was absorbed in the way the bands kept tooting away and falling apart One drum major who was using his band as a moving, undulating yellow backdrop was hopping and slithering and even doing flips on the pavement, grinning, and confident that we were seeing him in black relief, as we were. At the peak of arrogance he would throw his baton.

There were quite a few whites standing on the steps with us. That arrogant drum major’s baton shot up some forty feet in the air, spinning, and we watched it come down at his skinny body, wishing — if the crowd was with me — that it would crash on his teeth and take some of that prissiness out of him. But he caught it mid-twirl in an even more arrogant act, looking sideways away from it and catching it in a strut, as if ignoring it altogether.

“Look at them jump! Look at the niggers jump!” said a man on the higher step behind me. This man wore a big felt hat The hat seemed to have started out as a full cowboy venture, had a wide brim, but it was crushed deep across the crown like somebody had slammed it with a crowbar. It was beige with a gray band. The fellow’s suit was a speckled beige sort of wrap. The pants rolled out like curtains. Then I caught the face. I jerked my face away. Then I nudged Fleece.

“Look behind me.”

“Great God. Him. How fast did he fly this far up Capitol Street.” Fleece put on the snap-on sunglasses again. “I’ m going to step up two steps and see if I can shoot a profile. Don’t move or look his way.”

Peter had been hollering all the while.

“Give that coon a spear!” he called, about the drum major. “Did you ever think you’d see Jackson so full of jungle bunnies?! I’ll tell you what the problem is going to be. The problem is going to be getting this trash out of town once this honky-tonk jamboree is over. It’s going to be dogs and hoses, my friends…. You call that out there marching ? What we’re looking at is a Mau-Mau rehearsal. These Afra-coons have been given dope , you can tell by their eyes. You know who’s in town?” I felt his hand brush my shoulder. I felt ill. Kept my face forward. “Martin Luther Coon, that’s who. Don’t tell me I didn’t see a black Cadillac full of silk-suit jigaboos riding up and down Capitol this morning,” he challenged me. I did not swerve. Out of the corner of my eye, his hat and suit seemed frighteningly large. The suit seemed to flare at me. All I could tell was that he appeared to have no special friends on the steps. But there was a cop leaning on the pole at the curb, and he turned around, looking over the Negro heads at the bands. Peter made a motion and the cop gave him a smile and put his hands up to his ears.

“You know who that is?” Peter had drawn right up to my ear, although I looked away. His breath touched my neck. “That’s Victor. He knows me.”

“Magnificent,” I said. By then Victor was not there any more. Peter stood on the step directly in front of me. Over his big hat, I could see the hats of the bandsmen and little else.

“I got old Pete. Twice,” whispered Fleece, stepping down next to me. “Once he took his hat off and I caught him. The fruity-cheeked old soldier of Eros, bellowing away.” I pointed to the hat in front of me.

A band came on with rowdy syncopated drumming and choreographed trotting and sudden oblique marching, with the majorettes doing swaggers and shimmies that they would never repeat the same way again. I moved over to watch them. There was a fellow with a clipboard kneeling on the pavement I suppose he was a judge. When the end majorettes saw him, they went berserk, doing the mashed potato, rearing up and down so as to reveal faded sateen panties under their uniforms. Peter howled something charged with revulsion, took off his hat, and waved it back and forth across my field of vision, as if to knock down the musical notes like flies.

A small black-uniformed band came down then. They had the American flag, the Christian flag, and the Mississippi State flag flying out front. They were a meek little unit, all boys, and they gave out a lonely, thin sound, “Onward Christian Soldiers,” stressfully, but flat and wheezing. Fleece elbowed me.

“A hymn on the march?! I’m absolutely limp. Where’s the organ? If my mother ever led a band this would be it Look at that slave playing oboe! That’s her musical dream of me! This has to be the Gladiators. You ass. I don’t think they’re funny.”

“No, they aren’t.”

Whitfield Peter was standing at brace, following the American, Christian, and Mississippi flags with his eyes. He held his big felt hat over his heart in the layman’s salute. I had seen earnest old fellows do it when the flag appeared in the Shriner’s parade in Shreveport.

Peter was braced there, nobody around him owned a hat, and his pants whipped as a cold wind blew downstreet from the Old Capitol. Somebody laughed at him. There was a long gap in the parade, then along came some more bands, sincere but puny. You could imagine them as the heralds corps for a Moorish children’s crusade. Peter had apparently been preparing a speech to the crowd of whites on the post office steps. He dropped the hat to his side and addressed himself to the right, where the laugh had come from.

“No, gentlemen, I am not ashamed to salute the flag of my country. The heartbreak and the shame is that you and I have less of a choice every day about who holds that banner. Yet we stand here…. Yet we are constrained … we are the constrained …” Either he had been weeping or his eyes were purple with emotion. He put a handkerchief to his mouth. From this side he looked older. His left hand was hanging down at his watchchain like a punctured udder. I was sure I could knock him around if I wanted to,