Geronimo Rex

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In 1950 I’m eight years old and gravely beholding, from my vantage slot under the bleachers, the Dream of Pines Colored High School band. This group blew and marched so well they were scary.

The white band in town was nothing, compared — drab lines of orange wheeled about by the pleading of an old bald-headed pussy with ulcers who was more interested in his real estate than in his music. But the spade band was led by a fanatic man named Jones who risked everything to have the magnificent corps of student musicians he had. Jones was joked about and sworn at by educators, black and white, all over the parish.

Everyone voted on a special bond of fifteen thousand dollars to renovate the gray plank barn sitting in a basin of clay and pine stumps north of town. This was the colored high school. The bond was approved and they dumped it all on Jones, the principal, to administrate. It was well known that he was not a drunkard, lived with his wife, and was struggling to do something with the school. But the reason they voted him the money was that his school building was uglier than anybody could bear — I mean even too ugly for a casual dove-hunter to drive by and see. It looked like an old chalkboard eraser floating in a pool of beer. They awarded Jones the money at a ceremony where the white parish trustees whetted each other to death explaining what unprecedented heroes they were — most of the bond, of course, coming from white taxes.

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