The Spyglass Tree Read Online Free Page A

window and find her peeping down to see how well I was making out.
    I said, That’s all right about some old lady Metcalf, man. I said, Come on, let’s go, Jaycee, man. I got your old lady goddamn Metcalf swinging, man. I didn’t say what you mean
old
lady Metcalf, because everybody knew that she was hardly even thirty yet, but I also knew that as far as most grade-schools pupils during my time at Mobile County Training School were concerned, it was as if she didn’t have any business being that young and good-looking and wearing such stylish clothes to boot if she was also going to be that book smart and that serious about everything anyway, although she was just as nice as she was strict. When a lot of them had to say something about her, they always made it sound as if they were talking about a middle-aged nun from the Saint Francis Charity Hospital.
    I said, Man, don’t worry about no Miss Lexine Metcalf. I said, She promised my big auntie to keep a special eye on me, so you know what that mean. But I wasn’t about to tell him anything at all about how I always felt when she used to say, You will go where you will go and you will see what you will see, so you must learn what you must learn because who, if not you, will do what you must do, my splendid young man.

IV
    T he monument that marked the site of the original campus—the original log cabins of the old slave compound—had been in place for some twenty-odd years. It had a triangular base that supported three bronze men, the one on the right holding a seed in one hand and a hoe in the other, the one on the left with a hammer and an anvil, and the one in the center seated with an open book on his knee, and not only had it been the most famous landmark on the campus ever since it was dedicated, it had also become one of the national emblems of Afro-American aspirations and achievement through education.
    In the classroom that first Monday morning with my chair facing in from the wall of shoulder-high windows toward the lectern and the blackboard because that way you could see the back row without having to turn and look behind you, and with everybody hushed and waiting to hear and see whose name came next, and with the hailing and chattering back-on-the-scene voices coming and going down along the walks and hedges outside andwith the back-to-work sky music of delivery truck horns and motors grinding and rumbling and honking in the distance beyond the nearby tempo of the neighborhood traffic humming and buzzing and beeping back and forth along the campus thoroughfare, I said what I said. I said, Here, meaning not only here as in present in the flesh on the spot as of now as against absent and thus not here but elsewhere. I said, Here, meaning not only as prescribed and thus required by attendance codes and regulations but also as promised on my own in all sincerity and thus here above all as in partial fulfillment of that which has long since been intended.
    Because even as I said it I was thinking, Me and my own expectations me and also the indelibility of the ancestral imperative to do something and become something and be somebody
. Then when the instructor finished checking the roster and opened the textbook and held up the blackboard pointer for attention it was precisely as if he were about to say and one and two and three and four and so forth and so on and onward.
    The campus was inside the corporate limits of the township that it was named for, but it was also almost like another complete town in itself, with its own surrounding communities and satellite neighborhoods. The main grounds added up to about 145 acres at that time, and the tree-lined avenue that ran from the dormitories near the academic quadrangle and curved and sloped all the way past the trades school workshops and ended on the low hill known as the ag side just about one mile long. Then there were some three thousand more acres of cultivated fields, orchards, and fenced-in livestock