High Cotton by Darryl Pinckney Page A

Perhaps the person on the other end of the line was like me and believed everything everyone said.
     
    Soon it would be time again for school, for gray Sundays of “Izler Solomon Conducts the Indianapolis Symphony Orchestra,” for cold Mondays of new math, new threats to the cliffs of Dover, stapled mimeographed sheets of paper crowded with “Thoughts for the Day” and rhymed couplets in praise of the War on Poverty.
    Sometimes, after school, these sheets dropped from linty pockets and sailed ahead of me in the wind. Once, when the rain was falling quickly, smoothly, like grain from a silo, I watched a sheet get away from me into a locked yard formerly known for its peonies. The blue-green ink dissolved and made a map of some far country, of roads into the open.
    Buzzy made racing-engine sounds behind the wheel of Uncle Castor’s Studebaker, and the dandy who reversed charges in the middle of the night leaned through the passenger window and struggled to calm the windshield wipers and lights. I arrived as he finished his story.
    “I spent the first twenty years of my life assuming that my feelings would be hurt. The people coming toward me on the
street I thought were going to beat me up. Like they did Roland Hayes in Georgia. You may think I exaggerate, and I do, but it was like that.”
    I watched Uncle Castor in his outlandish suit with the Chaplinesque seat head toward the filling station to begin his daily look around the neighborhood. Buzzy stroked the corroded edges of the car’s body and said that Uncle Castor had been, like him, a janitor’s helper. The big boys from the alley had teased Buzzy about the pickup truck he rode around in when he worked one Memorial Day weekend helping one of his mother’s friends to spear and bag litter in the city parks.
    I was sure Buzzy had gotten it wrong or was just being evil, but when I later asked Uncle Castor to set Buzzy straight he said that he had been a shoeshine boy as well. One summer when he was still a student, he bumped into a nice little ragpicker who had the 25-cents-per-hour practice room across from his. The Italian boy worked as a barber’s apprentice and talked his boss into giving Uncle Castor a job. The boss didn’t like the way they got on. He gave them breaks at different times and then ordered the ragpicker to keep his distance from the shoeshine boy because their friendship was bad for business. Eventually, he found fault with Uncle Castor’s buffing and fired him.
    Buzzy continued to position himself on our steps, but he wasn’t waiting for me. I suspected that Uncle Castor bought him pizza. He could go to the bad corner anytime he wanted. He shared with me his versions of Uncle Castor’s stories, who in turn was delighted to confirm that he had once earned $19.80 a week in a railroad yard replenishing the linen supply on the sleeper cars and worried about his hands, the bags were so heavy. When Uncle Castor was not much older than we were he had worked at a steel mill in Youngstown, Ohio. He hurt himself making
bands for cotton bales and was reassigned to a more strenuous position at stacking until a friend told the foreman that Uncle Castor had lied about his age.
    “It usually means your ears are not working when you prefer slow pieces to fast pieces. You should be glad to have them both.” I’d intercepted Uncle Castor and played the new Beatles album twice in an effort to detain him. He was itchy, as though his Stutz were waiting so machine and man could flash together down the Avenue Gabriel. Uncle Castor said the houses on our block were close together, but there was more neighborliness in the beagles’ pen behind the filling station and the helicopters overhead returning to the army base.
     
    My friends were divided into those whose houses I could enter and those I couldn’t. On our block it was advisable to play only in yards when I went visiting. If I wanted water, I had to come home. From the outside, on Capitol Avenue, the