time she went out to California to spend six weeks with her father, whose name was Alvin Calloway (Senior) but who was called Cal Calloway andwho had gone out to Los Angeles not long after he came back from France with the AEF. He had a job as a carpenter in a moving picture studio.
I remember knowing that she took the southbound L & N Pan American Express from Mobile to New Orleans and changed to the Sunset Limited, which I can still see pulling out of the Canal Street Station as if with the departure bell dingdonging a piano vamp against the crash cymbal sound of the piston exhaust steam and as if with the whistle shouting California here I come like a solo above the up-tempo two-beat of the drivers driving westbound toward Texas and across the cactus country and the mountains en route to the Pacific Coast which was two whole time zones and three days and nights away
.
You couldn’t say that she stayed on in Gasoline Point because she hadn’t even been anywhere and seen anything else. She went everywhere she wanted to go whenever she wanted to go, especially after Miss Cute left town. But she never went anywhere without a return ticket, and she always came back not only as if on a strict schedule but also almost always before most people who didn’t happen to know when she left had a chance to miss her.
That was why even those who knew better used to talk as if she were always in and around town. But then she, which is to say her stunning good looks, always had been and always would be a source of confusion and anxiety. So much so sometimes that people used to accuse her of causing outbreaks of trouble that she had absolutely nothing to do with, as if she caused trouble just by being in town. As if Gasoline Point which had also come to be known and shunned as the L & N Bottoms long before Creola Calloway’s parents were born had not been a hideout hammock for bayou-jettisoned African captives and runaway slaves before that and a buccaneer’s hole even before that.
When she got married to Scott Henderson, whose family owned the Henderson Tailor Shop and Pressing Club, nobody expected her to settle down, and she didn’t. She was going ontwenty-two that summer and the whole thing was over in less than a year. Scott Henderson had left town to start his own dry cleaning business down in Miami, Florida. So when Eddie Ray Meadows, who worked in a drugstore downtown and was one of the best tap dancers around and also a pretty good shortstop and base runner, took her to the justice of the peace, people didn’t give him but six months and he barely made it. Then there was Felton Edmonds from the Edmonds family of the Edmonds and McKinny Funeral Home downtown. He and his silk suits and two-tone shoes and fancy panama hats and Willys-Knight sports roadster made it through one high rolling summer.
I don’t know which ones were annulled and which were divorced, but by the time she was thirty she had gotten rid of four husbands, because Willie York, better known as Memphis Willie the gambler and bootlegger who was sent to the penitentiary sometime later, was also with her for about a year.
People didn’t know what to make of all of that, but they had to wag their heads and say something so the word was that she just really didn’t care any more about having married than she cared about anything else, and they also decided that she didn’t make things happen. She just let things happen. Not anything and everything, to be sure, just the things she became involved with. In other words, she didn’t get married any of those times because she had picked out a husband for herself on her own. She just let one man like her for a while and then there would be somebody else.
One thing was always clear. She didn’t have to marry or become a common-law wife to get somebody to earn a living for her. Everybody knew that as an heiress to the old Calloway place she not only had a home for herself and her own family if any for the rest
I remember knowing that she took the southbound L & N Pan American Express from Mobile to New Orleans and changed to the Sunset Limited, which I can still see pulling out of the Canal Street Station as if with the departure bell dingdonging a piano vamp against the crash cymbal sound of the piston exhaust steam and as if with the whistle shouting California here I come like a solo above the up-tempo two-beat of the drivers driving westbound toward Texas and across the cactus country and the mountains en route to the Pacific Coast which was two whole time zones and three days and nights away
.
You couldn’t say that she stayed on in Gasoline Point because she hadn’t even been anywhere and seen anything else. She went everywhere she wanted to go whenever she wanted to go, especially after Miss Cute left town. But she never went anywhere without a return ticket, and she always came back not only as if on a strict schedule but also almost always before most people who didn’t happen to know when she left had a chance to miss her.
That was why even those who knew better used to talk as if she were always in and around town. But then she, which is to say her stunning good looks, always had been and always would be a source of confusion and anxiety. So much so sometimes that people used to accuse her of causing outbreaks of trouble that she had absolutely nothing to do with, as if she caused trouble just by being in town. As if Gasoline Point which had also come to be known and shunned as the L & N Bottoms long before Creola Calloway’s parents were born had not been a hideout hammock for bayou-jettisoned African captives and runaway slaves before that and a buccaneer’s hole even before that.
When she got married to Scott Henderson, whose family owned the Henderson Tailor Shop and Pressing Club, nobody expected her to settle down, and she didn’t. She was going ontwenty-two that summer and the whole thing was over in less than a year. Scott Henderson had left town to start his own dry cleaning business down in Miami, Florida. So when Eddie Ray Meadows, who worked in a drugstore downtown and was one of the best tap dancers around and also a pretty good shortstop and base runner, took her to the justice of the peace, people didn’t give him but six months and he barely made it. Then there was Felton Edmonds from the Edmonds family of the Edmonds and McKinny Funeral Home downtown. He and his silk suits and two-tone shoes and fancy panama hats and Willys-Knight sports roadster made it through one high rolling summer.
I don’t know which ones were annulled and which were divorced, but by the time she was thirty she had gotten rid of four husbands, because Willie York, better known as Memphis Willie the gambler and bootlegger who was sent to the penitentiary sometime later, was also with her for about a year.
People didn’t know what to make of all of that, but they had to wag their heads and say something so the word was that she just really didn’t care any more about having married than she cared about anything else, and they also decided that she didn’t make things happen. She just let things happen. Not anything and everything, to be sure, just the things she became involved with. In other words, she didn’t get married any of those times because she had picked out a husband for herself on her own. She just let one man like her for a while and then there would be somebody else.
One thing was always clear. She didn’t have to marry or become a common-law wife to get somebody to earn a living for her. Everybody knew that as an heiress to the old Calloway place she not only had a home for herself and her own family if any for the rest
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