 
“We lived at Magazine Point, and that was the end of the streetcar line to downtown Mobile.” He calls into the station of memory the cars that took him to points about town, but he also remembers those trains that took him to most any city in America. “Magazine was on the L&N line. The L&N is the Louisville and Nashville, see.” Murray rattles off the city names like the shuffling letters on railway departure boards. He says New Orleans with a laugh, pronouncing it in that precise way locals do. He then moves north. Memphis. Pittsburgh. Detroit. “That was a big deal when I was a kid, going up to Detroit.” Murray has covered the black migration in his work, and he has also covered his family’s journey. Shortly after his birth in 1916, his family left Nokomis, Alabama, in search of work near Mobile. Trains run through Murray’s memory because the railroad was family business. “Mr. Murray, who was my adoptive father, was a great crosstie cutter,” he says. “You know what a crosstie is?” “For the railroad?” I say. “Yes, for the railroad. That was a big deal, man, in terms of work. Some people have forgotten it.” That sense of remembrance has driven Murray to chronicle journeys, real and imagined. After a twenty-year Air Force career and posts in higher education, Murray published his first novel in 1974. His debut, Train Whistle Guitar, won the Lillian Smith Award for Southern Fiction. He published three more novels in that series, The Spyglass Tree (1991), The Seven League Boots (1996), and The Magic Keys (2005). In Train Whistle Guitar Murray writes of two schoolboys, Scooter and Buddy, poised to jump a freight into the unknown. The author chronicles the journey from Mobile to New York, coloring both cities with his trademark language. He calls Mobile the Alabama bay city gateway to the Spanish Main and the seven seas, and his New York the beanstalk castle town of skyscrapers and patent-leather avenues and taxicab horns and motors and subway trains… His real-life journey from Magazine Point to New York started with education. A 1939 graduate of the Tuskegee Institute, Murray completed graduate studies at New York University in 1948 while serving as an Air Force staff-training officer. Murray has lectured at Columbia University, Emory University, and his undergraduate alma mater. Tuskegee was dear to Murray because it is where he met classmate Ralph Ellison, who went on to write Invisible Man. They developed an enduring friendship, and Murray coedited Trading Twelves, a collection of letters they exchanged. His affinity for letter writing was cultivated in his whistle-stop hometown, a place that offered two avenues to the outside world. “In Magazine Point there was a post office, and there was a train stop.” During a pre-interview phone call, Murray asked me to send him a note about the particulars of my visit. It is fitting that my trip began at the post office and ended at a subway stop. I arrived in Harlem early and visited the New York Public Library on the corner of 136th Street and Lenox Avenue. A gentle rumble passed through the building as the subway moved underground. Perhaps this image best symbolizes the prose style of Albert Murray. The lines are heard as well as read. Nor can I remember when I had not yet heard him playing the blues on his guitar as if he were also an engineer telling tall tales on a train whistle, his left hand doing most of the talking including the laughing and signifying as well as the moaning and crying and even the whining, while his right hand thumped the wheels going somewhere. The more I considered a writing career, the more I saw Murray’s work as a guide. My grandfather worked the shipyards that Murray has described. I have visited Bienville Square in downtown Mobile and on Murray’s pages. He defines his Alabama just as Ernest Gaines presents his Louisiana, Lee Smith her Virginia, and Pat Conroy his South Carolina. A jazz historian and Count Basie biographer, Murray has evoked music on the page. As one of the cofounders of Jazz at Lincoln Center, he has earned the respect of musicians. Perhaps Duke Ellington said it best: “An authority on soul from the days of old, [Albert Murray] is right on track back to back and commands respect.” Murray has likened the paragraph to a jam session. Sentences are improvisations, and the writer should be open to where the journey leads. In Murray’s four novels the journey leads to Philamayork, the fictional Northern Atlantis that beckons Murray’s Scooter. Before his travels begin, Scooter climbs a chinaberry tree, his “spyglass tree,” and looks out on the horizon of sawmills, marshes, and rail yards. He adds what he imagines. As Albert Murray and I sit in his apartment, Scooter is on a nearby shelf in worn editions, and through the spyglass window Mobile and Harlem share space on the horizon. You cannot see the trains, neither bygone trolleys nor modern subways, but there are places around Harlem where you can feel them underfoot. There are places in Mobile where you can imagine their passing. As it is in fiction, the unseen becomes vivid. We are standing near the tracks with Murray and his Scooter, who after these many years finds himself this many miles along the way. |
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