Booker T & Them: A Blues

Interlude 12

Interlude twelve 01 Harris text.indd 236 12/13/11 11:26 AM The Cock Crows Up a Dark Day. Of a Pastoral Interlude. Thursday, Nov. 18, 1915 From oak & morning mist, like phantoms forming in silver emulsion, gray, work- & sun-aged figures in their work & bluing-bleached sun-aged clothes, appear into Tuskegee campus’s chapel-like aura. Stoic, mute silhouettes flocked against encircling woods’ panorama, witness official shuttling & scurry of doers & dignitaries. Their stately darkness, more defined now in warming light, honoring the man, the occasion. Dr. Carver, fighting to recall if he has or has not completed some intended chore, shuffles about with puzzled purpose, stopping midtask to whisk cotton fuzz from his dark, time-shined suit with the light purple Ruellia strepens (wild petunia) pinned on its lapel. The only constant, his lips moving in silent prayer. A viewing line 8,000 long is not recorded on film. TR deeply grieves; praises BT for helping bar shiftless Blacks from public office; praises him for turning Negroes’ minds from fruitless musings on political advancement. Theodore, TR, “Teddy” Roosevelt, president by bullet at 42, in a wish unfulfilled, succumbs 6 January, 1919, not in bright 01 Harris text.indd 237 12/13/11 11:26 AM ( 238 ) battle, as was his fondest wish, but girded in unspeakable grief from the year ago blow of his youngest plunging Daedalus-like from the sky, in a war the Bull Moose’s bloodlust did not prompt. 10 days later cussed Prohibition kicks off. As a tourist attraction, his & 3 others’ stony 60-foot-high mugs are blasted & hacked into South Dakota’s Black Hills on seized Native land (Ain’t it all?). Its design & construction overseen by a card-carrying member of the K.K.K. Dakota means “Alliance with Friends.” Ugh! William Monroe Trotter, in 1934, wearied to a frazzle by the spun-around perceptions & distortions of his passion for equality, will, in a final act of single-minded discontent, on his 62d birthday, spin around & jump down, from his roof, to his death. 01 Harris text.indd 238 12/13/11 11:26 AM ...