Phil Rice
Willie Played the Boogie
There were two janitors at Stratton, a white man we called Mr. Suggs and a black man we called Willie. The only black folks at Stratton were a few cafeteria workers and Willie, a fact that never gave us kids much pause at the time. Of the two janitors, we all knew Mr. Suggs was the boss. He never smiled and never spoke to the children. Willie smiled and, if spoken to first, spoke to us in very friendly but very short greetings.
Willie was always mopping at Stratton. He mopped the hallways and the bathrooms everyday, and the scent of that strange cleaning solution remains as strong in my memory today as it was in my nostrils then. And I can still see Willie, pushing that mop or dipping it into the bucket with the wringer.
The image of Willie made quite an impression on all of the children, and I doubt if I am the only one who, more than forty years later, remembers his distinct visage. The left side of his face was chiseled with handsome and kind features, but the right side was horribly disfigured. The scars started at his hairline and traveled down his face and neck, disappearing under his shirt. His left eye was bright and welcoming, but his right eye was unmoving and always covered by a half-closed lid. The origins of his disfigurement were never discussed, and I don't recall giving it much thought beyond revulsion. But now, some forty years later, I can't help but wonder at the possibilities.
The scars looked as though some huge object had scraped against his face, maybe his whole body, or that he had been dragged against the ground, as if tied behind a pick-up truck and pulled along the road. Perhaps he had been punished for saying the wrong thing—or for looking too long at a white woman. These things happened in the decades immediately preceding my childhood, and they happened with a frequency too disturbing to ponder. Most folks don't. Then again, maybe he was just playing in the back of his own daddy's truck and fell off on the highway, or he might have been a combat veteran of World War II or Korea. I really don't know.
But I do know that beyond these intellectual speculations there exists an organic energy within my memory of Willie, an energy stronger than the scars on his face or the toxic odors that burned my nostrils when I passed his mop bucket, an energy not of sight or of scent but of sound.
Once or twice a year, Mrs. Ingram, the fierce little principal who must surely have been born during the early years of Reconstruction, granted Willie five minutes at the small upright piano in the cafeteria to play for the children. Normally this was where the music teacher would sit and play along with the school choir or lead the students in patriotic songs like "God Bless America" and "You're a Grand Old Flag." But on extremely rare occasions it was Willie, not the music teacher, who would sit on the bench and place his hands on the piano keys.
We watched him try to get comfortable, his back to the students, his head tucked. He would wait a brief moment as if sorting through his mind for possible songs to play, and then suddenly his left hand would be pumping a rollicking rhythm while his right plucked out a solid lead. Instantly the cafeteria was swaying and bouncing with a jubilation far exceeding anything else that ever happened during my time in that little haven of formal education.
I was not yet ten years old, but the music that burst forth from that worn
and warped piano moved me in ancient ways. And once the first note leapt
from his fingers, Willie was no longer the disfigured janitor who mopped the
floors; he was a living and breathing vessel possessing the spiritual energy
of generations, for at that moment, Willie played the boogie, and it meant
something.
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