- SCREECH: AIN'T NOTHING BUT THE BLUES
Amburthon Butler-Warner. Lordy he hated that name. What is it about southern families that work so hard to preserve ancestral name chains? And what a price to be paid in the legal tender of embarrassment and poor self-esteem.
Why should I carry this burden? Amburth asked himself. He had not known Great Grandpa Butler Travis Amburthon anymore than he knew his paternal grandpa Roland Deplantis Hebert. With a mighty grappling for control, his mother, arguing for southern chic, clawed and bellowed to use Amburthon's great grandfather's surname, Amburthon, along with her father's given name, Butler, to concoct a first name and hyphenated middle name for her son, already two weeks old and expeditiously named “New Boy” for the time being. Then she combined her maiden name, Warner, to his father's surname, Hebert, to fashion a hyphenated last name hybrid. Had she prevailed his full name would have been Amburthon Franklin-Butler Warner-Hebert. The hyphenated Franklin-Butler and Warner-Hebert had to be said with out a pause lest it sound like Amburthon, Franklin, Butler, Warner, Hebert; five distinct names—five people. Indeed when neighbors heard the names-litany they naturally assumed she had delivered quintuplets.
Ooh wee, wid all dem names I taught Miss Charmaine give burt to, how ya call'em, quindtrupilets, some said.
Trosclair Hebert, his father, expecting that he should be the giver of last names, finally and sternly put his foot down in the fashion of a spirited Cajun danse over Miss Charmaine's genealogical surname labyrinth. His objections were not just to the pretense of the name fabrication, a thick cloak of arrogance he thought, much too weighty and uncomfortable to be worn by the son of a maintenance mechanic, but also to the undue burden to his mind’s having to remember such an order, what's to say of connecting the right hyphenations, to the correct forebears. In the end, Trosclair Hebert won the battle sans hyphenation, but lost the war con propagation of the Hebert name. The child would be called Amburthon Butler-Warner.
People can say the name WARNER correctly the first time, but not Hebert--is what his mother said in her nasal sing song way. They say HEEBURT when they see the name and not A-BEAR like it's pronounced--she argued. I'll not have my Amburthon going through life called Heeburt. It'll crimp his psyche fa sure.
Amburthon’s unusual name along with his mother’s unusual doting could have been responsible for his unusual need to blend into the setting as he grew older. There was nothing remarkable about his height, or the shape of his head, or the girth of his ears that should have caused him to be so self-conscious as to want to hide. While in the fourth grade, when everyone had accepted him and saw no issues with his name, especially Effie Lilou Goutreaux and Festus Leroy Mantooth-Froemel, the band teacher was making his classroom rounds searching for students interested in learning to play a band instrument. Amburth was quick to raise his hand. “Good,” the music teacher said, took his name, and went on to the next classroom. On Monday of the next week, the overhead loudspeaker announced those students volunteering to join the band should report to the band room. As they all entered the room’s double doors they saw instrument cases lining the perimeter of the room, opened cases, their instruments snuggled in blue and maroon velvets, gleaming like uncovered treasure under the fluorescent lights. The teacher, Mr. Chemay, looked at Amburth’s face, sized up his lips, and pointed him toward a small case toward the back that held a silver plated cornet. Amburth carefully lifted the nesting horn from its case. It smelled of oil and mustiness from months of dark encasement. He blew air through the lead pipe until Mr. Chemay showed him the mouthpiece and how to place it in the lead pipe. He continued to blow air making only a swishing sound.
Amburth was excited to bring the horn home. His father picked it up, wiggled his fingers over the three values, and handed it back to his son.
“Very good my boy,” he said.
His mother, Miss Charmaine, had a different reaction. She wanted to know why her son was given a shorter trumpet than everybody else. She threatened to go to the school board to protest that her boy was being “short changed,” the phrase she kept using over and over. Amburth didn’t know enough about the instrument to explain what a cornet was, but he did have the quick sense to mention that he had seen longer horns of the same type and perhaps the music teacher would let him exchange his short cornet for the longer trumpet, which, as it happened, was the case. But then, his mother saw an article in the Enquirer Gazette, a paper that was delivered to her door every Wednesday. The full front page was a picture of a child dressed in a marching band uniform with a trumpet half protruding from his mouth and what appeared to be a surgeon, mask and surgery gloves, working to remove the wedged instrument. The headline read: MARCHING BAND STUDENT SWALLOWS HALF A TRUMPET. The article tells of the misfortune of a marching band student who turned left when he should have turned right. The left turn led him smack into another student who was turning the correct way. After seeing the story, Miss Charmaine demanded Amburth switch to French horn. “The bell turns toward the back of you Amburthon she pleaded. Nobody’s going to run into your bell that way.”
The band director was understanding and gave Amburth a mellophone, explaining that the school budget didn’t allow for French horns and the look alike instrument sounded just as good. “When we can afford a French horn, Amburthon, you’ll be the first to get one,” he said. From then and on through college, Amburth played mellophone always thinking that he could have been a much better trumpeter. Even as he planned to complete a PhD. of Music degree at Northwestern University at Southeastern Indiana, he still inwardly pined over sitting in the French horn section holding what he considered to be a stepchild of all brass instruments, the mellophonium.
"OKAY, GET OVER IT. GET OVER IT," Amburth said out loud. He didn’t see anyone sitting near him in the university’s library, so it was okay. "STICK TO THE WORK AT HAND,” He pulled himself up straighter in his chair and moved his stomach a bit closer to the desk. As he rubbed the back of his neck and rotated his head slowly, he realized that he had been sitting in this one place for at least three hours. He looked at his watch. It was 8:45. The university library closed at nine on weeknights. He hadn't found that much on his subject, Screechwater Thibeau. Just a brief obituary in the archives of the New Orleans Times-Picayune that read . . .
Booley "Screechwater" Thibeau, born around 1898. Blues singer from Foster's Canal, Louisiana. Known world wide for his original blues style, Thibeau was discovered by Colonel Lucas Porter singing for small change around the New Orleans -Algiers ferry approach. It was said that his voice was so strong that it could be heard ‘Screeching across the water’ from the New Orleans east side to the Algiers west side. "I ain't gonna call you Booley, son, I'm gonna call you Screechwater" the Colonel told him. And so Screechwater it was. The article ended with the initials djz
“My Lord,” Amburth said out loud. What he was reading wasn't going to be information enough on which to propose a doctoral thesis. "What have I done? What have I done? I’m sitting here with a week’s deadline for my proposal, a stiff neck, no information to use, and I’m talking to myself, out loud.” Amburth let his head drop on the desk with a loud thud. A few people ran over from their carrels to peek between the shelves, just over the books, to discover what might have made that noise. He quickly sat up and waved an open hand, like a man just shot out of a cannon lets his audience know he has survived; but no one waved back. They just turned, crestfallen faces, no drama to see in the stacks. Doubtlessly they had their own deadlines to meet.