At the intersection of Bardstown Road and Eastern Parkway, polite residences with tidy lawns gave way to dusty commerce. Tall trees clothed neighborhoods with shade, and magnolias cast warm scent into summer nights. Winds whispered before storm. In Kentucky summers the trees made Eastern Parkway coolish, while Bardstown Road fried.
The intersection hosted a sleepy drugstore, a new and yellowish Shell station, a busy White Castle from which flowed smells of fried onions and 5 cent hamburgers, while a nondescript car dealer's display windows boasted Kaisers and Fraisers, the early, lumpy models with hood ornaments of buffalos; and which looked like buffalos.
Hang a right before entering Cherokee park, and Bardstown Road ran all the way to Bardstown where stood a brickish southern mansion. In the music room of that mansion a painting portrayed Stephen Foster seated at a piano. His Muse, dressed as a diaphanous Victorian angel, floated airily above while pressing her finger to his brow. Had he been consulted, Foster might not have been totally pleased with the painting. He had, after all, been an abolitionist from back east during the War of Northern Aggression.
In the garden of the mansion a very black old man played the part of a darky and plucked a banjo. He dressed in the style of a minstrel, and his main tune was My Old Kentucky Home which was also the name of the house.
But, if you hung a left Bardstown Road took you in the direction of the river. It passed run-down houses and small businesses. Wade's auction house stood beside a shotgun-style house in disrepair. Further along were a few bars, an orphanage, another auction house until Charlie Weaver died, a hardware, a roller rink, dry goods, and more houses until the intersection with Broadway. At that intersection and to your right, Cave Hill Cemetery contained only the best people, but hang another left. Keep traveling, and bingo, you soon arrived at Jackson St. where the world turned black and brown and beige.
Three-story brick houses with concrete stoops lined a street where cars with flat tires outnumbered cars that ran. On windy days religious tracts and pieces of newspapers flew along the street. Top floor rooms or apartments looked out on a neighborhood of black folk leavened by an occasional white, like cream stirred into chocolate.
Mohammed Ali dwelt nearby, but was only six years old, and in those days was known as Cassius Clay; when he wasn't called 'boy', 'sugar', 'sweetness' or 'whatcha-say-little-nigger'. Jonah Jones had lived just down the street, but he took his magic horn and moved uptown, Chicago, New York, and around. Jackson St. also sported institutions: a Methodist church, an undertaker, a junior high school, a hock shop, and a bar painted in fading and flaking green named the Sapphire Top Spot.
Through all the jobless days, through days of canned heat strained when a man was cashless, the raggedy Sapphire Top Spot stood through Louisville weather that boiled in summer, deep-pressure-cooking sweat so abundant even young guys almost didn't want to 'mess'. Sapphire Top Spot served cold beer, also whiskey with ice, could you cost it.
Jackson St. and Bardstown Road: Auction houses: Colored guys: White guys: It's in those places a man named Lucky Collins would help two kids named Jim and Howard, and two men named Lester and Wade, solve problems of business and race. Lucky would also suffer hurt of the kind that almost kills.