Edisto - Padgett Powell (6 page)

The Federal Oral History

"Take him to the museum," the Doctor told
me, "and get those boys to show him the tape of her." She
did not mean the Charleston Museum, a place where you can see all the
birds east of the Mississippi preserved in these little bullet shapes
like they were squeezed to death by the hand of, and rode in from the
field in the pants pockets of, James Audubon himself, and kept in
drawers like silverware after that, since about 1850—I never
thought about it before, but those could be antebellum birds. A
whale
is hanging from the ceiling, and drawing rooms cut out of local homes
are in there too, whole complete rooms like they glued everything
down and buzzsawed it loose from the Russell House or somewhere, and
lugged it over and put little cards in it telling what everything
was.

She meant the art museum. The best thing in that was
the desk man, who sat stoned just inside looking at a Salvador Dali
picture book, saying "Wow" very gently, and told you where
you wanted to go in the museum, and whom past you could have carried
any painting in there as long as you put the finished side at him so
the gliding colors and lines would mesmerize him. But it wasn’t the
painting part we wanted anyway. We wanted the federal oral history
program, which was in an outbuildlng. That’s where they had Theenie
on a tape. Now I personally don’t think Taurus needed to see her
again, certainly not for the purposes the Doctor had in mind. Because
he took the news that he was the Grandson of the Lost Nigger Maid so
cool she thought he did not believe it, which most certainly was not
the case. You could not say he believed anything and you could not
say he disbelieved anything. He was a heroin baby, I told you that. I
thought I made it up. but now I don’t know. I may have heard It in
the Doctor’s relayed story. Once he told me he remembers very
little of what happened before "last night."

"That’s an exaggeration," I said.

"That’s an exaggeration," he said. But he
offered no more. And he never said his name was other than the tag I
gave him, or where he came from, or why he was here.

What that means, a heroin baby, if he is one, I don’t
know, because my first and last brush with that stuff was reading the
most genteel addict of all time’s monograph, which the Doctor
didn’t have to tell me to read, because I got after that one on my
own, thinking from the title it was going to present some titillating
scenes of delectable and naked girls, which it did not. Everybody in
that book sounded like these Dobermans I heard about at the Grand.
They feed them ashes in their food, which somehow lowers the oxygen
in their blood, and when they grow up they don’t believe in
anything, except maybe killing, and even the handler has to wear a
football suit, more or less, and throw meat to wherever he wants them
to go.

"Them Dobes light a nigga’s ass
up
,"
Preston says.

Well anyway, it was something like these Dobes that
happened to Taurus, which I say changed his whole approach to
believing things. Like killing everything. Except his stance was more
like killing nothing, as if he thought everything was alive or
possible. It’s hard to say. But I do know he did not not believe
that Theenie was his grandmother any more than he did believe it, and
so going for the Doctor’s reason to see the tape was moot, but we
went anyway, for the trip.

We went past the stoned dude down a hall with the
two-tone wainscoting of green and lighter green—very soothing
greens that they use in schools for hypers. Then we got to the
studio.

In there on three walls were TVs banked into holes
like microwave ovens, and all over the room, in strapped-up boxes
with cables and ropes and wires and sockets and jacks all over them,
was this Sony stuff—enough to, I swear, film a whole war. Half of
it’s on triangle dollies and tripods. I expected even a director’s
bullhorn.

Well, hidden down in this load are these two guys
bent over a switch panel, messing with it, so that six of the TVs are
on and President Nixon is talking on all of them. He says the same
thing, but the angles are different and they’re playing a sentence
over and over and pointing at different screens. It’s pretty
obvious they’re casing him for lies like everybody does, even
without forty-five TV sets. I heard all that stuff.

Suddenly they turn around and look at us.

"Yes?" says one of them. I notice how pale
and zitty he looks for a college guy.

We don’t say anything and their foreheads start
wrinkling up.

"Ye-yes?" he says again.

"Are you Bob Patterson ?" Taurus says.

"It’s Robert." He doesn’t move toward
us or anything, just says It’s Robert like you’d say It’s
candy.

It’s time for the Boy Act and a solid job of it
too, and before I knew it, I was acting like I had palsy and
stumbling around the room across these rivers of technology, and
going to try to hit his balls like that midget at the cockfight. It
was funny how fast I was this pygmy wiseass, in a way that scared me
it was so thorough and deep and quick, and I can’t explain how I
knew to do it or why I wanted to, but I would have hit that bastard
harder than a golf ball, when Taurus has me by the back and holds me.

He has his thumb on my shoulder, his middle finger
down my back on the edge of vertebrae, and he has a light frog on the
muscle so I can’t move without getting a real frog.

"Well, Robert," he says, "Dr.
Manigault sent us to see one of your tapes."

"The famous basket tape," I said, and
Taurus frogged me so that I gargled a little trying to shut up.

"Oh yes," Robert Patterson said. "She
did call."

Then he put his head in his hand and acted like he
had a headache. "It’ll take us a while to find it. It’s not
in our permanent collection." The other guy got up and said he
knew where it was and bumped into us, so they said we should stand
outside until they got it set up, or until the second guy did,
because he was the only one doing anything human. So we waited in the
hall. I knew of the tape but I’d never seen it. They got Theenie at
the market weaving one Saturday when she was off, and I learned of it
only because she wouldn’t talk about it. The Doctor told me because
they had had to have a man-to-man talk after it happened, to settle
Theenie down. That was because Theenie somehow thinks TV is the law,
and being on it is like being on trial or something. TV and the law
are both these large things that are technical and controlled by
white people, so it nerved her out.

I would tease her. "Hey Theenie, when’s your
show coming on?"

“
What show?”

"Your TV show."

"Ain’t no show."

"Wel1, I’m going to get me a TV Guide and find
out."

"No you ain’t. There ain’t no show."

"I heard there was."

"Where you hear?"

"I heard is all. Like you do. From a little
bud."

She used to tell me she heard stuff about me from a
little bird.

"Aw Got! Simons. Simons, why you wont to grind
me up? You allus just grinin’ me up." And here she would be
about to cry, I swear, and I’d pull off surprised. I only did it
twice, because it really did get to her. You could do the same thing
by saying she had a phone call from a man about her social security
check and she’d start in on aspirin and leave early.

“
I’m leaving, never coming back, Miz Manigault.
Simons, that Simons is just
grinin'
me up . . . " 
And she’d leave ten minutes early and always be back. She could
take any other teasing but the gubmen and the TV show.

They called us back in and we watched the tape. In
the frame were tourists and baskets and then Theenie and her aunt—she
calls her that but I think lt’s her neighbor—weaving, over
against a wall. The second video lord, who was nice to us, is running
over the baskets with an electric-shaver light-meter thing, poking it
at everything. Then he gets this boom mike and says okay and the
action starts. Then leaves the frame and we hear a thump and
sound
check sound check okay
.

So they had Theenie and her aunt there, all conned by
those python co-ax and lesser electric mba, afraid to move because of
the equipment d the occasion. But they won’t take any kind of
picture guff except TV, which is too big to refuse, unless they are
disoriented by having gone to Chicago or someplace when young, or
somehow else got sophisticated. An integration program or two don’t
change a person’s fundamental suspicion of film. It may even be old
voodoo stuff.

Once we stopped on Meeting Street to get some flowers
and a lady was selling baskets. The thing is, they always have about
a thousand items arranged around them and they sit in some aspect of
focus in the center or at a corner of the inventory and weave more.
You could run off with eighty pieces before they could get up and
shake off the marsh grasses and throw the one-tined weaving fork at
you and call down Wrath. It wouldn’t be pretty when It caught up
with you and the loot, sitting around with eighty hot basket things
you stole from a woman. So no one ever tries it. They are so
confident—sitting and weaving, their whole factory spread out,
being walked on by tourists—they watch only the present basket,
reach into their grocery sack beside the chair for new straw, and
answer questions.

"Ma’am, how much is this one?"

"Hum? Hum fuff-teen.”

The basket is preciously set down.

"And this one?"

"Hum sebem."

Ah. The money begins to fish out and she stops
weaving. "Two for twelb." Consternation. But no.

One will do.

During the purchase a man with his family steps up
and says, "Ma’am, can I get a picture of you and your work?"

She ignores him and he starts eyeballing with his
camera. "What choo wont?" she says.

“
A picture—-”

"You ain'
buyin’
."

"Well . . . no . . . I just-"

"Well, you got to be buyin’."

The first deal is still closing. The buyer gets a
bright idea. "
I’m
buying," he says. "I could
take it for him."

She looks at him with a reserved scowl—reserved for
the money yet in his hand. "Is it your cambra?"

"No."

"Is the pitcher for you?"

"No."

"Wel1 den." And they close the deal. The
false buyer leaves, uppity in his mlnd. He considered buying
something to get the picture, but the word "extortion" or
some such got to him. He don’t know she knew he wouldn’t buy, she
wasn't trying to sell anything, she was just stopping the
picture-taking.

Well, that’s what happens when a plain camera comes
around. But when the federal oral boys rolled up looking like Fellini
with zits and surrounded them with a TV studio—brushed aluminum and
diffusion parasols—and scared them with the full brunt of the Modem
Age, they took it, staring into the Indigo zoom. Great big glass eye
looking like a gasoline spill on a black tar road.

It makes me think of the first federal historians.
What a time! The W.P.A. hired writers to write stuff like this. At
least I have this book the Doctor said was very good and it seemed
like this kind of stuff. But those writers were invisible, perched up
in a corner watching sharecroppers bag z’s, composing with a
whispering pencil. Today’s federal historians perch you up, light
you up, make you up, and put you in the can, electronically. So
here’s the part of basket weaving that they got, which they wanted
to get—Theenie and her aunt sitting there weaving away. They wrap
coils of grass around the shape in their mind and tie the coils in
with other straw, which they push through with one tine of a fork.
They mix in dark pine straw to make their design. They reach into
their grocery bags for grass and keep building the coils. 'Their eyes
never leave the work except when tourist money comes out of a pocket.
Then something happened, right in the middle of a perfectly good
taping. The bag holding the green and brown spray of grass and pine
needles fell and exposed Theenie’s feet, and one of them was in a
slipper, which was fine, and one of them was in a steaming half of a
sweet potato, which was not fine.

"What is that?" cried the sociologist
behind the camera.

Looking down at it, the other historian bent over and
accidentally let the boom mike into the picture, like a closed
umbrella pointing at the potato, going to stick it.

"Cut," said the first cameraman. "Dammit,
it was perfect."

"We can edit it," said the sound man, and
that's all you see, except for the sound man’s head going in for a
look at Theenie’s foot in the potato, like he’s going to hold his
nose. His head is at the very bottom corner of the frame looking at
it, and Theenie is in full center, looking at the camera with the
face of a bull. Then they cut the filming.

"Never did edit out that damn potato," the
pale one says when the show was over.

"Why would you want to?" Taurus says.

"Hey. Who would like believe it wasn’t a joke
or Monty Python or something? This is oral history? Taurus looked
evenly at the six screens whining off with little piss noises coming
out. "I guess so,” he said. ·