Salt and Pepper

FICTION Salt and Pepper Jim R. Hinsdale Frances Hiawatha McTavish, like the Bohunk, played football, an AllState guard next to the Bohunk's tackle at Harlan. While his former teammate simulated a 1938 Kelvinator, McTavish resembled a happy ebony Buddha. I never understood why some junior college football program hadn't scarfed up both ofthem right out ofhigh school. Generally, boys named Frances don't get a lot of peace. Some twit constantly kids them about the feminine name. Frances's mother had compounded the crime ofgiving him that name by using the spelling that commonly denotes the distaffgender: Francis is a very respected male name in parts of South Carolina where the memory of Francis Marion, the Revolutionary "Swamp Fox," still gallops through local lore. No one hassled Frances McTavish, though. He stood six feet two inches tall, 250 pounds ofgraceful hell. Unlike the Bohunk, he'd found the adaptation from football to "fútbol" quite easy. He fit right in with African and Oriental students who constantly amazed me, doing things with their feet that I, a varsity basketball player, couldn't do with my hands. Careful people, searching for a short name to call him besides Frances, settled on "Salt." They called him Salt for the same reason they called Isiah Handy, who, at six foot, six inches, towered over most of us ordinary mortals, "Shorty." Just as Shorty was not short, Salt was not just brown or black. To quote James Weldon Johnson, he was "blacker than a hundred midnights deep in a cypress swamp." Salt's roommate, a short, skinny, red-headed art major from near Asheville, North Carolina, pale as a freckled cadaver, they called "Pepper." Except for the reversal of their colors, the nicknames fit perfectly . Ifyou saw one, you saw the other. Aside from classes and practices , they were inseparable, like Damon and Pythias, Davy Crockett and Geòrgie Russell, the Lone Ranger and Tonto, George Burns and the cigar. Jim R. Hinsdale is restoring hisgreat-grandfather'sfarm in Green Creek, North Carolina, andfarming in Northern Kentucky. The title "Saltand Pepper" is a chapter from an unpublished book-length manuscript, "The Backside ofCampus: Pranks, Tales, and Outright Lies," which describes life on the campus ofa Southern work college during the late 1960s. 43 Students usually change roommates after their freshman year at Hebron, preferring a bunkie oftheir own choosing to one that the dean foisted upon them. Not Salt and Pepper. A perfect alliance Salt excelled in physical activities, Pepper in aesthetics. Pepper could draw. His charcoal sketches mirrored the subject's looks and personality. The boy had talent. The walls of their room always showcased Pepper's latest project. My roommate, Scorer Phillips, didn't think much of Pepper's girlfriend . Since the first week of school, Pepper had dated the same tall, slinky, big-hipped blonde from Tennessee. At five foot, eleven inches, Tamara Jones towered above Pepper and outweighed him a good twenty pounds. Because her beam spread slightly wider than normal, Scorer referred to her as Pepper's broad, not Pepper's girl. When the Bohunk compared the trio of Salt, Pepper, and Pepper's girl to Roy Rogers, Pat Brady and Dale Evans, Scorer snorted and said it was more like Roy, Pat, and Bullet. When Pepper's art class advanced to the study of nudes, Tamara modeled for him. He covered the walls of his room with sketches of her in exotic poses. If Pepper's work was even slightly realistic, she looked much better out of her cut-offs and sweatshirt than in them. The walls of the gallery in Salt and Pepper's cubby-hole rivaled the pictorials in Playboy and were much less expensive. About a month into our junior year, things suddenly changed. Tamara dumped Pepper. Where we used to see Salt and Pepper strolling to class with Tamara between them, attached to Pepper's arm like a fetus to an umbilical cord, we now observed Tamara, vise-clamped to the arm ofher new boyfriend. She walked, leaning into her new escort, laughing at his jokes, or staring mesmerized into his face. Her new escort was Salt. Pepper would have been torn...