The Spyglass Tree by Albert Murray

First published: 1991

Type of work: Novel

Type of plot: Psychological realism

Time of work: 1910’s-1930’s

Locale: Southern Alabama

Principal Characters:

• Scooter, the otherwise unnamed narrator, a young African American boy who grows up in Mobile County, Alabama
• Little Buddy Marshall, the narrator’s best friend while growing up
• Luzana Cholly, a blues singer, master of the twelve-string guitar, and mentor to the two boys
• Lexine Metcalf, a teacher at the Mobile County Training School
• B. Franklin Fisher, the head of the Mobile County Training School
• T. Jerome Jefferson, Scooter’s eccentric college roommate
• Giles Cunningham, the owner of a group of jazz and blues clubs in the vicinity of the college attended by Scooter
• Hortense Hightower, a jazz singer at Giles Cunningham’s clubs
• Dudley Philpot, a white businessman and owner of a check-cashing operation

The Novel

The Spyglass Tree is the story of a young African American who grows up in Gasoline Point, Mobile County, Alabama, and who attends a famous African American college, identifiable geographically as Tuskegee Institute (now Tuskegee University) in Tuskegee, Alabama. The story is a continuation of Murray’s first novel, Train Whistle Guitar (1974), which follows Scooter from the ages of ten to fourteen. This novel is told in a series of flashbacks, dealing alternately with Scooter’s days at the Mobile County Training Academy and at the university, ending with his full entry into the African American adult world after he spends a night riding shotgun as the bodyguard of Miss Hortense Hightower, a singer.

The early teen years of Scooter and Little Buddy Marshall are driven by their two ruling passions, blues and baseball. They are torn between the world of respectable people—the one that Scooter finds at school—and the unrespectable realm of bad men, exemplified by legendary local blues player Luzana Cholly, master of the twelve-string guitar. The two inseparable companions become distant, however, when Scooter is chosen as one of the “talented tenth” by his teacher, Miss Lexine Metcalf, at the Training Academy. With Scooter spending an increasing amount of time after hours at school, Little Buddy soon decides that he will take to the road in emulation of Luzana Cholly.

Scooter finds the distinction between the respectable and unrespectable worlds to be present at college as well. His eccentric roommate from Chicago, T. Jerome Jefferson, who is alternately known as Geronimo, Doctor Faustus, Snake, or Snake Doctor, embodies both worlds. Although his family was originally from Lowndes County, Alabama, Snake plans to spend two years studying at Tuskegee, after which he will transfer to an Ivy League or Big Ten university. His two-sided greeting card, or “reversible escutcheon,” as he terms it, posted on the door of the dormitory room, illustrates the dual personalities of the occupants. “Atelier 359” is printed on both sides of the card. One side features a monk with a T square and the warning “CAUTION . . . work-in-progress.” The other has a top-hatted satyr playing a trumpet and dancing on a keyboard; it says “WELCOME . . . mischief afoot.”

The crisis of the plot occurs in the second half of the novel, entitled “The Briarpatch.” Scooter is introduced to the briarpatch of race relations through his relationship with Hortense Hightower, a local jazz singer, dancer, and music aficionado. He spends many afternoons at Hortense’s house listening to a collection of what seems to be every blues and jazz recording made. Hortense’s employer, Giles Cunningham, is a successful African American businessman and one of the few locals who is willing to come into conflict with the white establishment. Giles antagonizes one white businessman, Dudley Philpot, when he cashes a check for a client and deprives Philpot of the customary “percentage” taken for check-cashing privileges. When Philpot threatens to run Giles out of town, Giles enlists the aid of Scooter, Giles’s business associates, and three Thompson submachine guns that he keeps in a locked trunk in one of his clubs. The crisis is averted, however, when Giles is able to work out a deal with an influential white family, which in turn keeps Philpot from attempting any violent acts. Scooter’s reward for riding shotgun with Hortense is a bass fiddle that he takes back to room 359, a place that has by now become his own personal spyglass tree.

The Characters

Scooter as a narrator serves two functions in the plot. At one level, he is the older narrator who has escaped from the briarpatch to become one of those who are qualifying instead of just signifying, to paraphrase the character Dewitt Dawkins. Thus Scooter as narrator brings a sophisticated understanding to the plot as well as a perspective on the significance of the events that occur. Secondarily, Scooter is the teenager and young man who manages, unlike many others, to avoid all the hazards that await an African American male growing up in the South in the 1930’s. Scooter exhibits this double perspective through his fascination and interest not just in the intellectual life, but also in the active popular culture, of Gasoline Point, consisting mainly of blues, baseball, and nicknames.

The young Scooter is chosen by the teachers at Mobile County Training Academy as one of the academically talented elite. While he is going through the transition from adolescence to adulthood, he is aided by a wide-reaching network of supportive adults in Gasoline Point. Miss Tee, who is revealed to be Scooter’s biological mother, aids him in his education by making him promise to fulfill his potential. Scooter’s adoptive parents also urge him to become somebody “worthwhile.” Even Luzana Cholly, the itinerant blues musician, makes Scooter promise not to follow in his tracks, riding the rails from town to town, but to place all of his attention on his education.

Lexine Metcalf, the teacher given credit for discovering Scooter’s talent, and B. Franklin Fisher, the principal of Mobile County Training Academy, are also representative of the adults who help Scooter to overcome the obstacles that would otherwise have prevented him from achieving academic success. These are not just stereotypical heroic educators; they are reasonably well-developed characters with idiosyncrasies of their own and a not unreasonable pride in the achievements of their students. They each give Scooter a present to take with him to college, as does Slick McGinnis, the sophisticated lady who initiates Scooter into the adult sexual world. Through each of these characters, Scooter gains some knowledge of the world outside Gasoline Point. Unlike his friend Little Buddy Marshall, he is able to escape all the traps, as Slick calls them, that wait for the talented but unwary.

At college, these two different character types merge to help mold a talented but adult Scooter. His roommate for the first two years, T. Jerome Jefferson, combines the traits of the juke joint blues players with the intellectual abstractions of the Mobile County educators. Jefferson, who intends to study architecture at a nationally prominent university, is a phenomenal student who also gains a reputation for his sexual exploits. Scooter nicknames him Dr. Faustus to reflect what he sees as Jefferson’s flexible moral standards and unnatural ambition. Jefferson also becomes known as Snake and Snake Doctor, all elaborate puns on his mental and physical capabilities.

The two most important characters outside the university community in Tuskegee are Hortense Hightower and Giles Cunningham. Both are prospering in spite of the hostile surroundings in Macon County and rural Alabama, primarily because of their strength of character. Hortense, a jazz singer, is known to the band as “Boss Lady,” and she is able to take control of any situation with little apparent effort. Giles is definitely the male counterpart of Hortense. His successful group of clubs is guarded with ferocity and cunning. Scooter is highly impressed by Giles when, during a conflict with businessman and stereotypical white Southerner Dudley Philpot, Giles shows Scooter a closet full of various weaponry, including three Thompson submachine guns.

Critical Context

Albert Murray, a longtime resident of Harlem, first became known as a music scholar and essayist before he began writing novels. His interest in blues, jazz, and African American popular culture combines with his erudite sense of literary and intellectual history in his two novels Train Whistle Guitar and The Spyglass Tree. In one review of The Spyglass Tree, musician Duke Ellington referred to Murray as “the unsquarest person I know.”

Murray’s views on African American culture first became widely known when a collection of his essays from the 1960’s, The Omni-Americans: New Perspectives on Black Experience and American Culture (1970), was published. He argued that writers, African Americans among them, who pictured African American culture primarily from a sociological point of view were ignoring the strength and vibrancy of the culture, particularly its musical and oral forms. It is these oral and musical traditions that Murray depicts through his character Scooter, a semi-autobiographical figure. Scooter speaks of the heroes of his adolescence as members of an oppositional culture: Luzana Cholly, a hard-living, twelve-string guitarist; Gator Gus, the original free agent baseball pitcher who would change teams between games; and the slaves who helped to organize and maintain the underground railroad.

Even Murray’s description of his alma mater, Tuskegee Institute, differs from that given by his close friend and classmate Ralph Ellison. Ellison, in Invisible Man (1952), presented a now-famous scathing description of Tuskegee as a repressive institution run by a Machiavellian Uncle Tom administrator, funded by guilt-ridden white liberals who were so emotionally disturbed that they could not face the realities of life in the South. Murray, on the other hand, presents Tuskegee as a place where young African Americans could receive the academic and social training they needed to succeed beyond the Jim Crow world of the South. The Tuskegee section of the novel is called “The Briarpatch,” and Murray’s sentiments match those of Uncle Remus’s famous rabbit: It may look bad from the outside, but it is home for those who are accustomed to its geography.

Bibliography

Gates, Henry Louis, Jr. The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of Afro-American Literary Criticism. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Contains detailed descriptions of Gates’s concept of “signifying,” using three novels and several slave narratives to provide examples.

Jones, Malcolm, Jr. “An Old Grad Aces the Course.” Newsweek 118 (December 9, 1991): 71. A positive review of the novel, emphasizing the second half of the book. The reviewer concludes that Scooter is on his way to becoming the wise man who wrote the novel.

Karrer, Wolfgang. “The Novel as Blues: Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar. ” In The Afro-American Novel Since 1960: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Peter Bruck and Wolfgang Karrer. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1982. A complete survey of the influence of the blues on the prequel to The Spyglass Tree. Karrer concludes that Murray’s views are too “middle class” to do justice to the blues tradition.

Maguire, Roberta S. “Albert Murray’s Swing Poetics.” In Blue Notes: Toward a New Jazz Discourse, edited by Mark Osteen. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004. Analysis of Murray’s literary style as incorporating the aesthetics and rhythms of swing music.

Mercier, Vivian. “Gasoline Point Blues.” Saturday Review/World 1 (May 4, 1974): 51. A negative review of the novel, comparing the author Murray to Uncle Tom, the fictional character from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Or, Life Among the Lowly (1852).

Schiff, David. “Blues and the Concrete Truth.” The New Republic 206 (February 3, 1992): 39-41. An extended positive review of the novel, presenting an overview of Murray’s career along with a review of the novel. Schiff places Murray in the context of the debate over African American art forms since the 1960’s and outlines theories of the roles of blues and jazz music in American and African American culture. He concludes with a comparison of Murray’s description of Tuskegee Institute with that of Murray’s friend and classmate Ralph Ellison.