by Shelby Foote
She gave the child its father’s name, Durfee, for a first name, and attached her family name, Conway, for a surname. By pronunciation, Durfee became Duffy, which later was shortened to Duff, and that was how he came to be called Duff Conway.
After the water went down she got a job as maid in a cotton factor’s house, and when the cook left three years later Nora took her place. She lived alone with her child in a two-room cabin in a section of Bristol known as Lick Skillet. When she had saved twelve dollars out of her weekly salary of three-fifty, she bought herself a mailorder pistol, a big one, nickel plated, which she kept in a bureau drawer in the front room, near her bed, so that she could turn to it in a time of trouble, as other women would turn to a man.
Aborted thus into a flooded world, Duff was undersized and sickly, cocoa-colored and solemn as a papoose. The red in his skin was like a warning sign to Nora. If the boy could inherit the Choctaw pigment and the pointed cheekbones, she reasoned that he might also inherit the guitar-calloused thumb and the itchy heel. So she kept him by her, in her cabin, at church, and at the cotton factor’s house, where at first she put him in a crib on the back porch and later propped him on a chair in one corner of the kitchen. Perched on the tall straight-back chair he passed the waking hours of early childhood amid a clatter of pots and pans in an atmosphere of flour and frying food, his feet suspended ten inches clear of the floor, then six inches, then two inches, then touching it; then he was six and his mother enrolled him in school. Young enough herself to be mistaken for one of the girls in the upper grades, she would take him there every morning and call for him every afternoon.
“You going to mount to something,” she told him. “Study hard and stay away from riffraff.”
That was how it went; she sought to come between him and whatever shocks might be in store. Then on an April afternoon when Duff was in the fifth grade she missed him among the children trooping out of school. She went by the cabin, thinking perhaps he would get there before her, but he was not there. When she had waited as long as she could, muttering alternate imprecations and prayers, she went back to the cotton factor’s house to fix supper, and when she came home that night Duff was in bed, asleep. She stood over him for a moment, watching. Then she shook him. “Where you been?” she shouted while he rubbed his eyes with his fists.
“Lemmy lone.”
“Where you been all day?”
“Lemmy lone, mamma. I’m sleepy.”
“Sleepy!” She shook him further awake. “Where you been, boy, till all hours of the night? Answer me when I’m talking to you!”
She whipped him. But he cried himself back to sleep without telling her anything, and four days later it happened again.
This time she went looking for him. On Bantam Street, in Bristol’s redlight district, she found a crowd gathered around something on the sidewalk. Mostly silk-shirted bucks and their bright-dressed women, they were standing so closely packed that Nora could not see what they were watching but she heard strange music. She elbowed her way toward the center. There she saw four small boys performing on four outlandish instruments, including a jug, a banjo made from a cigar box and a length of lath, a jew’s harp, and a set of drums invented from a battered suitcase top and a sawhorse with three stove lids suspended from the crosspiece.
Duff was the drummer. He sat on an upended cracker box, drumming steadily with a pair of chair rungs. Oblivious, he was entering a solo break, a caricature of a real full-sized drummer — head turned sideways down near one shoulder, eyes tight shut, lower lip sucked between his teeth — when Nora caught him by the arm, hauled him off the box, and snatched him through the crowd.
“Wait up, mamma,” he wailed, straining back and waving the chair rungs; “I got to get my drums!”
Nora shook him until his teeth rattled above the laughter of the crowd. “Wait till I get you home,” she said. “I’ll drum you.”
He was twelve the following month. For nearly two years after the Bantam Street incident it was a contest between mother and son, she trying in the only way she knew to keep him from becoming what his father had been, and he revolting against being tied to her apron strings. The four-piece band had been organized at school by the boy who played the cigarbox banjo. At first they had practiced only during the noon recess, but after a while that was not enough. They began to cut school, and then they went professional, playing on street corners for nickels and dimes and an occasional quarter. Thus Duff had already come closer to being a part of what Nora hated than she had even allowed herself to fear. He had received not only money but also applause, and from an audience of strangers. Nor was that all. Late at night, after his mother was asleep, he would slip away to Bantam Street, drawn there because something in the music answered something in himself.
At the largest of the places, a two-story frame building called the Mansion House, there was music every night by a blind pianist famous all over the delta. His name was Bailey — Oscar Bailey, called Blind Bailey — an enormous old man built on the lines of a hippo; he had played on showboats until vaudeville and the motion pictures drove them off the river. Duff liked him best, but in time he came to know them all. He would sit under barrelhouse windows, listening to ragtime piano and rare three- and four-man groups, and next day he would teach the songs to the other members of the sidewalk band, drumming the rhythm, humming or whistling the melody, perhaps even singing snatches of the words, if any:
Blow your whistle, freight train,
Care me on down the line!
In this way he developed a sizable repertory of the songs which remained his favorites always, the old riverboat and New Orleans classics, Eagle Rock Rag and Creole Belles and Ostrich Walk, Hilarity Rag and San and High Society. Just before dawn he would slip back into the cabin and creep into bed without waking Nora.
The contest between mother and son ended with an event that took him beyond her control. He was indicted by the grand jury for burglary and larceny, arraigned by the district attorney, and tried by the circuit court. On a plea of guilty, while Nora wept into her handkerchief and sometimes into the hem of her petticoat, he was sentenced to be placed in reform school for an indefinite period, to be released at the discretion of the authorities. It really happened that suddenly, and here was how it came about.
His three sidewalk-performing partners spent their share of the coins as fast as they made them, but Duff had been saving his fourth ever since the day he saw a set of drums in the window of an uptown music shop. When he had accumulated almost four dollars in loose change, which he carried in a Bull Durham sack worn on a string around his neck, he felt qualified to price the drums. He did not believe that it was enough but at least he felt financial.
He chose a quiet time; there was only the proprietor in the store. When Duff said abruptly, “Captain, how much you aks for them drums in the window?” the proprietor looked up from his newspaper, startled. He had been sitting with his feet on the desk, reading the comics, and had not heard Duff come in.
“Dont sneak up on me like that, boy,” he said, loose-jointed, with gold-rim spectacles and a receding chin. His eyes, watching Duff over the edge of the paper, seemed to bulge and spin behind the heavy lenses. “Thats a fine set of drums,” he added.
“Yes sir. Sho is.”
“You want to buy them, or are you just looking and asking?”
“I want to buy them,” Duff said. He unbuttoned his shirt and took out the tobacco sack, beginning to pluck at the knot with his teeth, the way he did every night when he added the day’s receipts and counted the total.
“They are seventy-eight dollars and fifty cents,” the proprietor said, still watching over the edge of the newspaper.
“Thank you sir.” Duff returned the sack, still knotted, and buttoned his shirt. “I be back.”
He was seventy-four dollars and thirty-two cents short. Using what little arithmetic he had managed to absorb in class while looking forward to the noon rehearsals, he computed that at the prese
nt rate he would require six years to earn that much. But three nights later he got what he believed was a chance to do something about it, a chance to increase his earning power in another direction. At the Mansion House — he had graduated from crouching under the side windows; now he came onto the porch to listen — he encountered a boy about four years older than himself. Duff had never seen him before. The boy asked if he wanted to make some easy money.
“How?” Duff said.
“Take it.”
“Take it how?”
“Through a window, man. How you reckon?”
It would be easy, the boy told him. All Duff had to do was stand outside the house and whistle if anyone happened along, particularly the law. They would split the take. “Fifty fifty,” the stranger said.
“Will it come to seventy-five dollars?”
“Ought to, easy.”
“Then I’m game,” Duff said.
“Come on—”
But when he turned and saw the policeman walking toward him, his mouth went dry and all he could manage was a faint low moan. It was enough, however; the stranger got away through a window on the opposite side of the house. A neighbor had seen them and telephoned the police.
At the arraignment the district attorney gave Duff what he called “every chance,” but all Duff could do was repeat what he had told the police. He did not know who the stranger was; he had seen him only in the gloom and could not even give them a description. “Dark, I think, and taller than me,” was the best he could do. They did not believe him.
“All right, boy,” the district attorney said. He was fair and pink cheeked, with hard eyes. “If thats the way you want it.”
In circuit court he recommended that Duff be placed in the state reform school until such time as the warden and the parole board would declare it safe to return him to society. The judge so ordered.
Traveling in the custody of a white deputy, Duff and four other Negro youths rode across the dark flat delta and into the brown loam and loess hills where scrub pine grew and knee-high cotton stalks stood bare in the rain. This was his first ride on a train, his first sight of hills. He enjoyed it, up to a point. When they arrived at the reform school that afternoon, standing in the bed of the open truck which had met them at the depot, it was still raining, a slow steady drizzle that ran down their faces like tears. The school was an all-Negro institution, visited yearly by a group of white politicians on an inspection tour for the legislature. It was a low, gray building of weathered clapboard — a short dogrun with a narrow gallery connecting two deep ells: one the prisoners’ dormitory, with swinging oil lamps and three-decked bunks along the walls, so that it resembled the fo’c’sle of an oldtime sailing ship; the other the prisoners’ mess and an apartment for the warden and his family, the kitchen being shared — set back from a gray, hard-packed, grassless yard like a surface of zinc, and surrounded by a high wire fence which in the dull light of the rainy afternoon had the flat, deadly glint of gunmetal. All this combined to give it the look of an enormous torture machine.
The boys stood in the truck bed, looking, and said nothing. “Well, here you are,” the deputy told them, turning on the seat to look at them through the rear window of the cab as the truck pulled up to the gate. “You can call it home for a while. Hey?” None of the boys said anything. They stood looking and the rain ran down their faces.
Then gradually, after the nightmare introduction, they discovered that their fears had been largely of their own invention. It was not as they had supposed from that early look. They were left in the dormitory their first full day, but the following morning they went to the field. Duff learned to run a straight furrow behind the straining crupper of his mule, to wear the lines looped around his neck like a long necklace as he walked, and to reverse the plow with a quick, lifting motion at the end of the row. The hours were long—from dawn to dark during the busy season; “kin til kaint” the inmates called it — but he enjoyed the work and the queer, trembly feeling of fatigue which came when he lay in his bunk after lights-out. He had never known it before.
Sundays were best, however. Five of the prisoners had formed an orchestra. They had real instruments, and every Sunday afternoon they would play a gallery concert from two oclock till sundown. Duff became friendly with the drummer, a light-skinned boy from the piney hills, and was allowed to sit in on an occasional number, reviving the technique of his Bristol sidewalk performances. It involved a good deal more motion than sound, for he flailed his arms and rolled his head, hunching his shoulders like a victim of Saint Vitus.
“You pretty good,” the drummer told him; “yair. But you dont hold the sticks right. Look at here.” He tore off a long, pulsing snare passage. “Try it.” Duff tried it. “Yair,” the drummer said. He nodded approval. “Thats more like it, sure enough. But looky. Keep your wrists up. Like this here.” He rolled another passage that rose quickly to crescendo, then died to a whisper, as if a mouse had scurried across the drum.
“Something must be wrong with me,” Duff said. “I get it, all right, but it dont seem to come out right on the skin. I keep wanting something I can pick up on.”
It was six months before he got what he wanted. Then the cornetist died of tuberculosis, a sad-eyed boy who had not been required to work in the field. Apparently he had no people in the outside world; all he ever cared about was music. He was not quite right in the head, and while the others were out working he would lounge around the dormitory, breathing sad, almost tuneless songs into the silver horn. He was sick a long time. Toward the end, though he could no longer play the instrument, he kept it with him in the bed, holding on to it even while unconscious. Then he died. There was no one to claim his effects, so the warden divided them among the prisoners as far as they went, which wasnt far.
“Ive seen you watching him,” he said to Duff. “Here” — handing him the dead boy’s cornet “— see can you learn to blow it.”
Duff took it with both hands. It was heavier than he had expected, the dull gray of old silver, pewter-colored, nicked and battered along the column and at the bell. He held it close to his chest, walking back to the dormitory. This was Sunday and he sat sideways on his bunk all afternoon, learning to blow it. He found that he could control the sound by pushing down on the valves, but this made it doubly difficult because they would stick and he also had to learn to pull them up again. He was still there, and he was still trying, when the others came in for supper and began to undress for lights-out. “Give it a rest, man,” someone said from down the line. So he lay quiet in the dark, lips pursed, imagining he was practicing.
Two Sundays later he joined the musicians on the gallery. At first he merely blared the horn, backing up the other players as if the cornet were a rhythm instrument, more or less like a trombone. They gave him strange looks, turning in their chairs, but the drummer said, “Let him blare. Everbody got to learn.”
Soon he was able to follow the musical line. By the end of the month he was beginning to lead the way, the horn riding rough and loud above the other instruments, gravelly, sclerotic, and by the end of the year there would be large groups in the reform-school yard, their faces lifted toward the gallery and the five musicians. They came from miles around, their wagons and dusty automobiles parked hub to hub in a field across the road, and sat or stood from soon after the midday meal until well past sundown and into the gathering dusk, when the supper bell would clang, strident and insistent, and the breakup would follow, the boy prisoners going into the low, rambling building and the visitors dispersing to their wagons and cars across the road. They spoke in admiration of the music, their voices floating back through the fading light:
“That was playing, warnt it now?”
“It sho was. How about that horn?”
“That boy mortally plays that thing!”
“He sho does.”
The warden arranged Saturday night engagements for them, loading them into the truck, drums and all, to drive to Jackson and nearby com
munities for dances and barbecues; whatever money they received went into a recreation fund administered by themselves though with considerable cross-checking to discourage peculation. Within a year of the time Duff was committed, the reform school band had become well known throughout the central portion of the state. On Catfish Row and down Ramcat Alley, wherever people collected who were followers of such music, Duff’s cornet began to be talked about. “I heard me a horn last week,” a voice would say at a fishfry. He was beginning to amount to something in a way his mother never intended when she told him to study hard and stay away from riffraff.
Soon they were being offered more engagements than they could fill. The drummer was nominal leader of the group — they called themselves the Noxubee High Hat Rhythm Kings in memory of the dead cornetist, who had been sentenced from Noxubee County — but Duff was leader once the music got underway. There was no doubt about that; it had been true almost from the outset. The others followed his loud, blary horn on every number. They had no other style; apparently it had never occurred to them that any other style existed. They played the things Duff had learned while crouching under Bantam Street windows, the old songs that had been great before some of the boys were born, things never set down on paper but kept alive in places and in memories such as these. Thump: the drum would beat once and the others would go immediately into it. If anyone got left behind he caught up on his own. There was no vamping, no announcement of theme, no quiet introduction to set a mood. It came out full and uninhibited, the cornet riding high and wide, the other instruments falling in behind its lead like leaves sucked into the rearward vacuum of a speeding truck.
