The Magic Keys: A Novel - Hardcover

Murray, Albert

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0375423532 ISBN 13: 9780375423536

Publisher: Pantheon, 2005

Synopsis

The Magic Keys winningly evokes the coming to maturity of one of the great characters in contemporary American literature: Scooter, the central protagonist of Albert Murray’s highly acclaimed autobiographical novels Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree, and The Seven League Boots.

Growing up brilliant and curious in Alabama, Scooter was told he was destined for greatness. Now newly married and a graduate student in humanities at New York University, he goes about discovering just what he is destined to be great at. Anchored by Eunice, his “Mrs. Me,” Scooter makes the rounds of Manhattan’s libraries, jazz hangouts, galleries, skyscrapers, and endlessly fascinating streets, meeting the people who will help him find his way: dapper Taft Edison, who is setting their down-home dialect onto the pages of his novel-in-progress; Joe States, a drummer who brings old expectations to Scooter’s new life; and Jewel Templeton, no longer his girl but still a believer. When his budding career takes him back to Alabama, Scooter discovers both the promise of everyday bliss and intimations of adventures to come.
In his inimitably musical, ardent prose, Murray captures the joyful rhythms of youth and the pulse of life at the moment when everything seems possible, in an exhilarating, tender, and masterfully crafted novel.

About this title

About the Author

Albert Murray is the author of The Omni-Americans, Stomping the Blues, The Hero and the Blues, South to a Very Old Place, Conjugations and Reiterations, and From the Briarpatch File. He is the coauthor of Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie and the coeditor of Trading Twelves: The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray. He lives in New York City.

Reviews

At the age of 89, Albert Murray -- essayist, novelist, literary and social critic, raconteur and highly influential adviser of Jazz at Lincoln Center -- is sometimes regarded as the eminence grise of African American arts and letters. Born in Nokomis, Ala., in 1916, Murray grew up in Mobile and was educated at the Tuskegee Institute, where he first met Ralph Ellison, then an upperclassman, who went on to win lasting fame with the publication of Invisible Man. Through many years of friendship and correspondence, Murray riffed on distinctly Ellisonian themes in the work that first brought him public notice in 1970, his collection of essays, The Omni-Americans -- a no-holds-barred attack on the "folklore of white supremacy" and the "fakelore of black pathology" that have historically undermined any understanding of the richness and complexity of African American life. Since then, Murray has cut a wide swath across the literary landscape, penning works such as South to a Very Old Place, Stomping the Blues, The Hero and the Blues, and co-authoring Good Morning Blues: The Autobiography of Count Basie -- in the process celebrating a view of art, identity and African American culture that draws deeply upon the blues and the values he acquired as a boy in an orderly and disciplined Southern black community.

The Magic Keys has been hailed as the final volume of Murray's semi-fictional portrayal of his Southern childhood and youth, an extended exploration of the making of an artist that began in 1974 with the publication of Train Whistle Guitar. The Seven League Boots, the third volume in the series, received a similar reception when it was published in 1996. Considering Murray's capacity for mining his past, I suspect that the saga will continue as long as Murray's capacity for recall.

Train Whistle Guitar, set in Gasoline Point, Ala., during the 1920s, chronicled the childhood and youth of Murray's alter ego, Scooter, through a series of evocative episodes and a range of colorful characters -- all filtered through the lens of a nurturing, supportive and healthy black community. Murray resumed Scooter's story with his 1991 sequel The Spyglass Tree, set at the Tuskegee Institute during the 1930s. In The Seven League Boots, Scooter, now renamed Schoolboy, has graduated from Tuskegee and landed an enviable position as a bass player for a swing band headed by the Bossman, a character very similar to Duke Ellington. Under the tutelage of the Bossman and other musicians in the band like Joe States and Big Bloop, Scooter crisscrosses the country and the Atlantic, learning along the way that improvisation is not only a musical skill but also a way of life.

The Magic Keys picks up Schoolboy's story in Greenwich Village in the 1940s. Accompanied by his new bride, Eunice, he has enrolled as a graduate student in the humanities at New York University. As in the earlier novels in this saga, Schoolboy continues to marvel at the lasting impact of his early teachers, particularly his third grade teacher, Miss Lexine Metcalf, who always reminded him "that I should never forget that I just might be one of the very special ones who would have to travel far and wide to find out what it is that I may have been put here on earth to make of myself."

In his quest to fulfill his destiny, Scooter roams the streets of Manhattan, exploring its libraries, art galleries, restaurants, skyscrapers and jazz clubs, as well as the streets of Harlem. Characters from Murray's earlier novels reappear, like the drummer Joe States, and others emerge, like the debonair aspiring novelist Taft Woodrow Edison (Ralph Ellison), an artist named Roland Beasley (Romare Bearden) and a recording studio technician and conductor named Eric Von Threadcraft.

At the level of plot, very little happens in The Magic Keys. Schoolboy shuttles between the routine demands of graduate school and wide-ranging, often inspired conversation with his friends. They talk and reminisce as one story unspools into another, most of them leading invariably back home, "south to a very old place," the deepest source of Murray's imagination. And the narrative literally moves in this direction, too. At the end, Schoolboy makes the fateful decision to return to Alabama to teach, a decision that coincides with his selection to collaborate on writing the biography of a famous bandleader named Daddy Royal (who sounds a lot like Count Basie). No one is better qualified, Joe States assures him: "Your ears are something else! . . . Maybe it's a part of your gift as a storyteller and lie swapper like back in primitive times even before English was English or, hell, even Greek was Greek or the Bible was the Bible. I don't know, but I do know you've got the musical version of a photographic memory. You hear it, you've got it. And that includes absolute pitch, and along with all that, you hum everything like a conductor who knows how all the sections hook up." Thus does Schoolboy begin to fulfill his destiny: "I began to smile because it was as if I were all the way back in Miss Lexine Metcalf's third-grade classroom in Mobile County Training School again and she was going to say, 'Who if not you, my splendid young man?' "

For readers who have traveled with Scooter/Schoolboy on the earlier stages of his journey, reading The Magic Keys will be like rejoining an ongoing conversation with an old friend; for those who have not, it would probably be worthwhile to get acquainted with Murray first before taking the plunge.

Reviewed by James A. Miller
Copyright 2005, The Washington Post Co. All Rights Reserved.

No one has brought jazz to the page as vibrantly as lauded essayist and fiction writer Murray. In a string of collagelike novels--Train Whistle Guitar (1989), The Spyglass Tree (1991), and The Seven League Boots (1996)--Murray recounts the coming-of-age adventures of his gifted hero, bass player and book lover Scooter of Gasoline Point, Alabama. In this episodic and syncopated installment, Scooter is living in New York and searching for his true calling, a quandary sorted out in free-flowing conversations with Taft Edison, a fictionalized portrait of Murray's dear friend, Ralph Ellison, and the artist Roland Beasley, a homage to the great Romare Bearden. As Scooter and his friends talk about literature, art, music, and life, Murray riffs on the richness of the "down-home idiom," spins bebop variations on fairy-tale motifs, and digs the improvisational energy of creative lives. Born in 1916, the still-swinging Murray is also reflecting on his own experiences and, most splendidly, summoning up the great whirl of life, "the also and also of all which is." Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

The early-morning walls and windows of the fourth-floor apartment were there once more even before you opened your eyes. And outside, the nightlong mid-September drizzle had finally stopped. So you already knew how the neighborhood streets of your part of Greenwich Village and what you would be able to see of the Manhattan skyline would look later on when you came along the sidewalk to the Sixth Avenue bus stop. With your eyes still closed you were also already aware of how the recently rented three-room apartment looked in the dim early-morning daylight.

But before any of that you were already also very much aware of the also and also of who was no longer in bed beside you because you could hear her moving about in the bathroom, and then there was the sound of the shower, which is why I crossed my fingers for good luck once more, thinking, This many miles from Gasoline Point, this many miles along the way.

(You do not wake up every morning actually saying or even consciously thinking: and one and two and three and four and one two three four/one two three four plus the also and also of the specific day of the week, month, and year once more. Not as a deliberate or even conscious routine. But the also and also continuity of the pulse of the conventional actuality of the workaday world of clocks and calendars and maps and mileage charts is there even so. As is also the awareness of local landmarks, and thus destinations and aspirations, however obscure, without which chronology itself may well be not only pointless but perhaps also even inconceivable.)

When I heard the softly padding footsteps heading back through the living room to the kitchenette, I still didn’t open my eyes. So what was said was not good morning. What was said was seven o’clock. Which was also the way Mama used to say what she used to say to let you know that it was time to rise and wash up and brush up and shine up before breakfast and the first bell of school bell time. September, September, and this time in New York. The Philamayork of the old Mother Goose mantelpiece clock fireside tell-me-tale times of the long-gone boyhood nights on the outskirts of Mobile, the Alabama Bay city gateway to the Spanish Main and the Seven Seas.

And also the New York City during the time of the central Alabama college campus clock tower chimes as you heard them through the shrubbery outside the ground-floor periodicals room of the library and beyond the tip-tops of the poplar saplings outside the long second-floor main reading room during study periods; and also as you visualized it in the after-hours darkness of the dormitory lounge when the radio announcers said it the way they used to say it along with the sound of the station signal.

Nor was there anything more evocative of New York as beanstalk castle town of skyscrapers and patent-leather avenues and taxicab horns and motors and subway trains than the Street Scene score that so many sound tracks for drawing-room comedies used to begin with, the camera panning the skyline from the air and then zooming in on the midtown traffic and people along the sidewalks with the shopping district showcase windows sparkling in the background, before settling on the swanky hotel, apartment building, or town house where you picked up the story line.

September, September in New York City once more, and this time also the also and also of Eunice née Townsend now become Mrs. Me plus the also and also of my graduate school course of study at New York University off Washington Square and of hers at Teachers College, Columbia University, up on Morningside Heights. Eunice Townsend, Eunice erstwhile Townsend who was there because she was the one above all others ever considered all the way back to the crepe myrtle yard blossom and dog fennel meadow days of Charlene Wingate, who said, Not now, Scooter, and said, I’ll tell you when, Scooter, and finally did. But not for always.

Eunice Townsend, Eunice née but now erstwhile Townsend. (And also no longer the Nona that she had been nicknamed during her freshman year at State Normal Junior College.) She did not say anything else to keep me from dozing back off to sleep, because we had been married and living together for many weeks then, and she knew that I was already sitting up. Because she was also very much aware of the fact that I was the way I was about never being late for anything, and also that with me it had already become a matter of not being tardy for school bell time long before it also became the basic principle of road band bus departure schedules and being dressed up and tuned up and onstage before curtain time.

Before I opened my eyes I was also aware of the sounds and aromas of breakfast preparations in the kitchen then. But then, as also used to happen during school bell days of the week when it was Mama in the kitchen, and the stove was a wood burner and the light was from an oil lamp, it was almost as if you were all alone. Because you had to prove to Eunice as you used to feel that you had to prove to Mama that you could go out and do whatever you were supposed to do. Because then I was re- membering what book I had been reading the night before and what references I was using and where I stopped and put in the page marker and turned off the light. Which is why I also al- ready knew how the desk would look in the morning light be- fore I opened my eyes and stood up and headed for the bathroom.

Which is why what I began to think about then were the specific research materials needed for the term paper I was working on. And about how much I preferred looking things up in the New York Public Library up at Fifth Avenue and Forty-second Street to trying to use the crowded university campus library. New York, New York. So far the public library was never overcrowded in the mornings and as you worked on your academic exercises you were also aware of being in the midst of the comings and goings of professional scholars, authors, and journalists, many of whom you recognized at first sight. New York, New York.

When I stepped out of the shower and began getting dressed, there was the static blurred chatter that was the portable radio chatter that in those days was the equivalent of the New York tabloid newsprint, from which you could foretell the headlines and flash photos that you would see along with the bright covers of the weekly and monthly magazines on the sidewalk stalls on your way across Sheridan Square to the uptown Sixth Avenue bus stop.

We ate breakfast sitting on the high stool at the barlike sideboard shelf attached to the ledge of the wide window that overlooked the backyard patio four flights below and from which you could also see out across the rooftops of many of the old Federal period buildings in that part of town, which had turned out to be less than a ten-minute walk from the University Place and Washington Square corner of the campus.

All of the graduate school sessions for my course of study in the humanities were conducted in the evening in those days. And the special advanced seminars and laboratory sessions in Education for which Eunice had enrolled at Teachers College met in the afternoons. So there was no rush to be in place for morning roll checks, but we kept ourselves on strict morning timetable anyway, precisely because of all the local attractions in New York City that were not there for you in any conventional university town, where campus activities were the main local attraction. Not that we passed up very many of the not-to-be-missed feature attractions that we could afford from time to time, but otherwise we followed our regular self-imposed Monday through Friday study schedule, even on the mornings we spent studying in the apartment and taking care of domestic chores.

Me and you, I said as I kissed her at the door on my way to the elevator, me and you, which she knew was a jive line that I had picked up from Joe States, the all-star drummer who was also from Alabama and who had become my self-elected mentor the day after I joined the band of the Bossman Himself as a temporary replacement bass player in Cincinnati the week after I graduated from college, because I had told her about him in the first letter I sent back to Alabama, and I began using it as a complimentary close before my initials on all of my letters and tourist postcards to her from then on. And her response when I finally came back south and said it in person was always a playful mock pucker as she kissed me back—as if to say, One jive gesture deserves another.

What she said this time was, See you back here for dinner at eight-thirty sharp, rover boy. Or for warmed overs if not too long thereafter. After which it’s leftovers—but of course there’s always the phone. And I said, Hey me, I did time helping to keep time for the Bossman Himself.

Which is why when I came on outside and headed for the bus that morning I was thinking about Joe States again. Good old Joe States from the ’Ham in the ’Bam. Who was to say what he was to say when the band came back into Manhattan several weeks later, and I took her backstage that first time. Hey, here he is, he said, coming toward us. What did I tell you about this schoolboy statemate of mine! Check it out for yourself, fellows.

And as I told her he would, the Bossman Himself said, He said you were most beautiful, but he didn’t say that you were this beautiful. And she smiled as he gave me an ever-so-father-caliber avuncular wink as he spoke and then he gave her the one for each cheek routine, and Joe States hooking his arm in hers took her in tow to introduce her to everybody else while I talked to the Bossman and then Old Pro, the chief arranger and straw boss in charge of rehearsals. Then there was Milo the road manager, also known as Milo the Navigator, who gave me the rehearsal schedule and address of the hall that they would be using before moving into the recording studio that next week.

Eunice Townsend, Eunice Townsend, Eunice Townsend, Joe States said again a...

Edition details

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375423532
• ISBN 13: 9780375423536
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 256