The next-to-the-last weekend had now descended for the gang at Spirit Lake before summer ended and we scattered again to our respective colleges and "whatever" activities. Giddiness was high, which is saying something for the group of friends from the affluent Atlanta uptown district of Buckhead, but we'd been on the other edge of giddy every weekend we'd come down to the lake.
Somehow I think we all knew this would be the last summer we'd gather at my parents' big old Victorian "cottage" on the Woodland side of the lake. It just wasn't the same without David Alexander, our erstwhile leader. The titular role had devolved on me—it was my family's vacation house we came to for our partying and debauching—but I just couldn't live up to David's role in the group—nor did I want to.
It was Saturday afternoon and, having mostly recovered from the party the night before, the six of us had piled into Danny Alexander's '55 fire-engine-red Cadillac Series 62 convertible for a "who knows where?" boredom-fighting road cruise, which Danny decided would be a slum run around the lake. The white-black class line, still strong in the Georgia of the mid fifties, ran down the middle of the lake from north to south. On the western side of the lake, on the outskirts of the town of Woodland, the manicured shoreline was lined with piles of Victorian-style wood monstrosities on verdant lawns owned by rich families like mine, the Maddoxes. The other side of the lake, with the small town for coloreds—the folks who served us on our side of the lake—that we called Coon Town, was where the "others" lived. The shore on their side of the lake was swampy and mostly undeveloped, just waiting for the vacation resort developers of the sixties to "gentrify" that side of the lake and push the coloreds out.
Although this was the second summer for the Alexander family's Cadillac convertible to be strutting around the lake—last year with Georgia University tennis star David Alexander in the driver's seat—it hadn't had quite the same impact this year on the Woodland side. A year-old bright red Cadillac convertible was still a head turner, but not so much with tall, gangling, trying-to-get-on-the-Georgia-basketball-team little brother Danny behind the wheel. This Saturday afternoon Danny's attempt to live up to his brother's aura had apparently caused him to decide to try to wow them with the car on the Coon Town side of the water.
As the current supposed leader of the "Wild Ones," I should probably have been doing the driving, but the Alexander senior's dictum had been "No one but Alexanders at the helm of the Cadillac," and the six of us wouldn't have fit in my jet-black '54 Ford Thunderbird convertible.
The six of us—once seven, with a leader, and now a loosely and mournfully bonded six—the tight little group from Buckhead, known as the Wild Ones. There certainly were more than those at the summer weekend parties at my family's lakeside cottage whatever night the Wild Ones were in residence—some added partiers coming by land and others by boats on the lake—but by day we reverted to the core group. Everything revolved around the six of us in this Cadillac rounding the northern head of the lake and nosing our way toward Coon Town.
The three young men in the car all were jocks—or, in Danny's case, a jock wannabe—at the University of Georgia in Athens, having been a "group" under the tutelage of athletic standout David Alexander since our high school days in Buckhead. The young women in the car also were from the Buckhead neighborhood, but, as they'd been jock groupies since high school, try as they might, the group just didn't revolve around them—certainly not in Georgia in 1956.
The group had always revolved around David Alexander, state tennis champion in his senior year at Georgia the previous year. As I've noted, a loose version of leadership had devolved this summer to me, now a college sophomore—my sports at Georgia were rowing and swimming—mainly because I, Lee Maddox, had the summer house at the lake and David was irrevocably gone. The "honor" had been dumped in my lap when David, out of college and newly in the Air Force, had nosed his P-80 Shooting Star training jet fighter into the ground at Moody Air Base near Valdosta the previous fall. Danny was trying to fill in his big brother's shoes in the group, but until he actually made the Georgia basketball team, he wouldn't be fully believable. He also hadn't achieved the maturity even of the college freshman that he was.
The third young man, Thad Price, an upcoming junior at Georgia, had age seniority in the group now, but, despite being a star All-State fullback on the Georgia football team, he'd had his head rattled on the field a few too many times to be making decisions about nearly anything.
Of the women in the car, Chas—who, for obvious reasons we had named thusly to avoid her given name of Chastity—was the floater, also known as the group punch. Anybody and everybody who had tooled around with the Wild Ones from Buckhead's North Atlanta High School on had had her, with no one claiming her as a steady. Everyone had had her but me, that is, with that missing dangler on her charm bracelet driving her nearly crazy. I'd already had to remove her hand from my crotch twice on our Saturday afternoon ride around the lake. I was wedged in the middle of the backseat of the Caddie with her to my right.
To my left was Maggie Campbell, who was still half drunk from the previous night—her usual condition in her grief. Maggie had hung on David Alexander from early days in North Atlanta High and had followed him to Georgia U. He'd been everything to her, and she hadn't been fully sober since his death. She was trying to substitute Danny for him, apparently thinking that clinging to him and keeping him between her thighs was the answer to her grief. Danny was taking advantage of that. While Chastity was trying to paw me in the backseat, Maggie was leaning forward in her seat, pressed against the back of the driver's seat, running her fingers through Danny's hair and nibbling on his ear. There was a frenetic, surrealistic aspect of Maggie's hanging on Danny, as if it disgusted even her that she clung so tightly to him.
The other two in the front seat were plastered against each other, giving Danny plenty of lateral room in the land boat to try to see the road through Maggie's waving fingers. Thad Price and June Milton had also been a couple from North Atlanta High days, when he was a standout on the football team and June was a cheerleader. June, like Chas, wasn't going to college. Chas was majoring in adding men to her charm bracelet and June was majoring in leading Thad down the aisle as soon as he graduated from college. None of us were hurting for money—all were attached to lucrative family businesses—so jobs didn't need to be a large part of our future planning or present concern.
We were strutting through Coon Town—I couldn't put the low speed Danny was taking on this stretch of the road any better than that—when he swung the Caddie into a rundown Texaco service station that I wasn't even sure was open.
"What are you doing, Danny?" I asked from the backseat. "We don't need gas. You filled it when we hit Woodland on Thursday."
"I want to help the local economy," he said, with a sneery laugh that told me this was the least of his motivations.
Then, as we pulled up to a rusting gas pump, I saw that the place was open. A massively built, the emphasis on built, black guy came sauntering out of the ramshackled service bay and headed toward us.
"Say, isn't that the guy who sometimes plays the banjo to LeRoy Brown's piano back in Woodland?" Chas asked, suddenly all attention to the guy with big chest and bicep muscles, trim waist, and bulging crotch.
Maggie confirmed that we had, indeed, seen him on the banjo at the honky-tonk called just that, the Honky-Tonk, on the edge of Woodland, where we went when we wanted to slum on the white side of the lake. I knew that his name was Sam Jackson. He was about our age and could have flattened Thad in a football game or any other sport I could name. A big, strapping, handsome black. Wearing just coveralls and barefooted, showing bulging biceps and the promise of the same from his pectorals along the edges of the coverall bib.
"Can I do for you?" he said, as he walked up to the car.
"Yes, indeedy, you can do for me," Chas muttered under her breath, although possibly—and purposely—not low enough for Jackson not to hear her.
"You sell gas here, don't you?" Danny asked. His voice was condescending. He'd stopped here for everyone within sight along the dreary street lined with leaning shacks to admire the shiny red Cadillac.
