The Spyglass Tree Read Online Free PDF Page A

education of the children and grandchildren of slaves. They were investing in the future of the reunited United States asa great twentieth-century nation among the other great nations of the world, not in such direct words to be sure, but that was the point they put across.
    Anecdotes and details about all of that were very much a part of the indoctrination that your orientation sessions during that first week were all about. And you were also to hear it again as the “gospel of Afro-American uplift,” not only during the annual commemoration ceremonies that next spring, but also in allusions and quotations by almost every speaker who addressed the general student assembly on any official occasion.

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    I can still see myself at the long corner table by the rubber plant in the southeast wing of the main reading room on the second floor of the library, from which you could see part of the gymnasium through the poplar branches outside the windows that also overlooked the traffic circle and the lot where the visiting athletic teams parked their buses.
    When you stood up you could also see the ticket shack and the admission gate to the athletic field which was out of sight down the hill. Beyond the high fence a few feet off the right of the vehicle entrance you could also look down onto the tennis courts at the other end of which you could also see the red-brick two-story residence of the dean of men at that time, and in the distance beyond the fence line and scrub-oak thicket there was the open sky above the sweet-gum slopes and the pine ridge somewhere south of Montgomery Fork.
    As often as not when there was an assignment with a set of factual details to be looked up, I also used to work for a while atanother long table near the open reference shelves at the other end of the main reading room and from there you could see across the thoroughfare to the back entrance to the administration building and the front columns of the old academic hall, and there was also the traffic along all of the walks in the academic area also known as the upper end.
    Every time I looked down from that end of the library and saw all of the other students coming and going between class bells during those first weeks of that first fall term, I felt that old pang of isolation you often get when it hits you that you’re in a place that you’re not yet used to. But I didn’t feel lost because I also felt how lucky I was to be there and because I was so excited about all of the things I woke up every morning hoping that I was getting that much closer to. It was enough to make you cross your fingers, and every time I remember how often I used to do just that, I still feel very lucky all over again.
    But my usual place in the reading room from the very outset was the table in the corner where the rubber plant was, and this many years later I can still see the chalk white lines against the red clay tennis court and the green-stained bleachers as they were in the late summer sunshine and sometimes also in an early mid-September shower while I was reading about the role of the bards, scops, and gleemen in the evolution of language and literature in England, and also about the origin of civilization in Mesopotamia and about the culture of Egypt and about the Nile Valley and the ancient dynasties.
    Along with what I was reading later on about the decline and fall of Rome into the Dark Ages and about the coming of medieval times, and along with English literature from Chaucer through Sir Thomas Malory and also along with selected freshman classics for the Introduction to Ideas and Literary Forms, there was the central Alabama indian summer outside with the leaves turning from late September green to October yellow mixed with scarlet beforebecoming mostly shades of the tans and browns and brownish grays of harvest fields and game-bird feathers.
    Nothing has ever surpassed the coziness of that corner of the reading room as it was when the first frost came that