The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  We sat up for several hours, drinking screwdrivers. There was a black-and-white movie on, something from the 1940s. He had a fat little dog named Charles, who has since died, that he loved very much. Charles would drink your screwdriver, if you set it on the floor, and McCormick kept having to remind me to put my notepad or a book on top of the glass, so Charles couldn’t get to the drink. Now and then McCormick would pause and send me to locate a binder or folder. Mostly he talked, not tediously but spell-bindingly. His recall was encyclopedic, though he frequently cursed his memory, saying he had suffered a small stroke. Yet he roamed through years and names, stopping to ask if you had heard of some person, carrying on heedlessly whether you said yes or no.

  He had said he didn’t want to talk about Robert Johnson, for personal reasons and on principle. But his talk spiraled inexorably toward Johnson anyway. The singer loomed over his memory as he had over his career. What he told me took me aback. Mc-Cormick said that what he realized, in the quarter century since Guralnick’s book came out, was that most of what we think we know about Robert Johnson—which is to say, most of what Mc-Cormick thought he knew—was highly unstable. We’re not even sure, McCormick said, that the man in the pictures we have, the smiling man with long fingers, holding the guitar, is Robert Johnson. Or that he is, as McCormick put it, “the guy who made the records.” He is a Robert Johnson. But according to Mc-Cormick, the more he has lived with the evidence, the more he doubts. Of the people he interviewed so long ago, more than one of those who had met Johnson and been present at one of his two sessions in Texas told McCormick, when they were shown the famous photograph, “That’s not the guy.” It didn’t look like him, they said. Not everyone said that, but a few.

  What about the death certificate, discovered by the mad Mississippi 78-hound and prolific blues researcher Gayle Dean Ward-low (much as McCormick took a job with the census, Wardlow took one in pest control)? There were problems with the death certificate, McCormick said. You had to look at the back of it. The Robert Johnson identified there was a banjo player. It says, “banjo.” He added that you had to remember how many men were called Robert Johnson, and how ready to hand it would have been for a singer who needed a professional name. There were other historical proofs (or supposed proofs) I offered—David (Honeyboy) Edwards’s testimony, for example—and each one he dismantled with a detailed exegesis. He was saying that we didn’t know how little we knew. Could be him in the pictures. Couldn’t prove that it wasn’t. But McCormick didn’t think so. There were weaknesses in his argument, too, and he didn’t try to conceal them. They bothered him, which made what he was saying more compelling and more startling.

  I’m not a Johnson expert by even the most forgiving definition, and it was not always easy to follow McCormick’s verbal hypertext. At times, too, I experienced queasy flashes of suspicion, partly because it seemed impossible that everyone could be wrong about a figure so central to the tradition. Was this a form of subconscious sabotage on McCormick’s part? A narrative: He hadn’t written his Johnson book; others’ books on Johnson would have the last word … unless, that is, he could pull the rug out from under the whole field. He still comes out master of the chase. His unwritten Johnson book would enact some Borgesian supersession of the ones that had been written.

  My gut said it wasn’t that, though. He seemed too unhappy about it all. His tone said he wished he could skip saying these things. A tone not of ironically regretful satisfaction but closer, maybe, to embarrassment. Was that the reason he hadn’t said this on the record before? Perhaps he felt he had misled us all? And again, just to be clear, he wasn’t saying that everything we thought we knew was flat wrong, only that our faith in it needed to be downgraded by a more-than-symbolic percentage. In the end, the most we could hope for was a kind of less-ignorant fog into which the guy who made the records receded.

  This is all to say that my mind had already been Rubik’s Cubed around by McCormick, when he abruptly picked up a sheaf of papers, four or five pages, and held them out to me. “I found these,” he said. “They should interest you.”

  I don’t remember if we had talked about Geeshie and Elvie or if he knew I had an interest in them. I wrote some pages on them once, on having worked as the fact-checker for an essay about Geeshie that Greil Marcus published fifteen years ago. If Mc-Cormick had read my article, he didn’t mention it. We must have discussed them.

  He bent forward in his recliner, elbows on his knees. I looked down at the papers. These were apparently photocopies of notes and letters. But the originals that had been photocopied were themselves old, typewritten, from the early 1960s. One was a transcript of an interview with a musician identified as Leon Benton. At the top of the notes, in a header, it said that McCormick had located him in the Acres Homes section of Houston. It was 1961, the year after Mack worked the census in the Fourth Ward, and he was following leads generated there. “And during this same period in the early 1930s,” Benton was saying, “there was a woman guitar player named L. V. Thomas who also lives out here in Acres Homes now. I worked with her a good deal. In fact for a time we had a group with two guitars and a violin—that was myself, Leroy Johnson and L. V. Thomas. She put out some records. She was as good as any man with that guitar.”

  L. V.

  Down another paragraph: “L. V. Thomas has done just like me, she’s joined the church and doesn’t fool with music any longer. That’s a bad life. I like to hear music but it pulls you in the wrong direction. It’s sporting life and helling around and sure trouble coming with it.”

  At some point I looked up. McCormick was sipping his screw driver, twinkling a bit. Savoring my speechlessness. “Keep reading,” he said.

  The next page was a copy of a letter addressed to Paul Oliver, the much-esteemed English blues historian, who is McCormick’s longest and most important collaborator. Oliver’s book Songsters and Saints was the first serious work on prewar black music that I ever read and still one of the most illuminating. Pretty much everything Oliver wrote on the subject is, by definition, essential. “Paul,” it began. “I got a live one! A 70-year-old woman blues guitarist and singer—who recorded for Paramount. She is L. V. Thomas who recorded solo and with her partner Lillie Mae ‘Geetchie’ Wiley in 4 days at Milwaukee, Wis.” In the margin, McCormick had written in black marker, “Prob. Grafton, Wis.?” It continued: “Miss (?) Thomas is old and could be—if she will—a most valuable informant. She is a sweet old lady but is reluctant to talk about blues or music.… Anyhow she’s been playing guitar since she was eleven years old—in 1902! And working, earning money since 1908. Thus everything has to [be] pried out of her most gently else she decide I’m the devil incarnate.”

  It was two in the morning. I’d never spent much time in Texas, and the overcast spring night outside pressed enormously on the roof and windows. I scanned back up the page and found the name again. Lillie Mae. The true name of Geeshie Wiley. A thing I’d wondered about more than half my life but had never allowed myself to imagine anyone would ever actually see or know. Mc-Cormick had known it for more than fifty years.

  And “Elvie” was L. V.? Or was it instead the case that Mc-Cormick hadn’t known who she was when he found her, hadn’t heard her records yet (none of them had been reissued by 1961) and so wrote her name as “L. V.,” when in fact she meant “Elvie”?

  I said several sputtery things. He expressed mild surprise at my overreaction. He seemed unaware that Geeshie and Elvie had developed a following. I asked if he had seen Crumb. He said he didn’t know it. Twenty years, I suppose, was not a significant number for a man who had been chasing these ghosts for almost seventy. The Monster was boxed and shelved in the room directly behind him. It could be full of revelations like these, for all anybody knows. For McCormick, my overly narrow preoccupations on certain singers hinted of amateurism (correct). He didn’t fetishize. He didn’t go in for that. It was about bigger things. The clusters. He had allowed himself to become consumed like that once, with Robert Johnso
n, “carried away with some kind of peculiar enthusiasm,” he said, and look what happened. He wasn’t going to get worked up about a couple of minor blues women whom some wannabes had decided to build a shrine around.

  Still, McCormick couldn’t have been unaware, or at least not stayed unaware, for such a long time (half a century), that people were identifying Geeshie and Elvie with Mississippi, which has long possessed a unique aura in the blues world. Nor was it dilettantes doing the identifying but some of the most notable curators and reissuers of that music. Songs by Geeshie and Elvie show up on multiple Mississippi-themed compilations, among them Mississippi Blues (Belzona, 1968), Mississippi Girls (Document, 1988), and Mississippi Masters (Yazoo, 1994). There are researchers—I know one of them from my time living in Mississippi—who have spent thousands of hours crisscrossing the state, looking for the smallest bent twig left behind by the two women. There are even, it should be added, a few whose ears were sharp enough to hear betraying hints of Texas in the music—figures like Don Kent, who argued years ago that the guitar in “Last Kind Words” employs “a riffnormally associated with Texas artists,” or the collector Chris King, in Virginia, who one night was “listening to some interviews/recordings of convicts in a work camp from around Huntsville, Tex.,” and noticed that their unusual pronunciation of the word “depot,” as DAY-poe, matched Geeshie’s own.

  What was Mack thinking, during all that time? Was he laughing? Was he taking a dark satisfaction in watching the errors pile up, errors that he knew he would one day sweep away? Maybe he just didn’t know what to do, what to say.

  The Collectors

  It’s funny to think that Mack, the person who found them, or preserved the information of who they were, alone encountered them with absolutely no mystique. When Leon Benton told him about this woman in Acres Homes who could play guitar but had given it up for the church, that’s all Mack knew, and that’s the woman who was in his head all those years while the rest of us were constructing a faceless ideal. He met L. V. She even showed him a picture, that first day, of herself when she was young. “Very nice-looking at that period,” he recalled.

  Did he have anything else? Had he made a transcription of those interviews?

  Yes, he said, he knew he had it somewhere. But he couldn’t find it. His papers looked organized, from the outside, they weren’t messy, but there were tens of thousands of pages. And photographs? Thousands of them, scattered through which are images of people we have no other images of. Multiple clashing archival code systems had been brought to bear over the decades, but then half or partly finished, and now they existed in skeins on top of one another. The entrance to the labyrinth had been walled up, closed even to the one who had the clue.

  For some months, I kept in sporadic contact with McCormick, and through a friend in Arkansas, got in touch with a young woman, a twenty-one-year-old undergraduate, curious about the old music, who said she was willing to drop out of school for a year to help Mack. She came complete with the made-up-seeming name of Caitlin Rose Love. With the blessing of her school, she packed her bags and moved to Houston.

  It didn’t work out between Mack and Caitlin. I won’t go into why; it’s their business. Nothing unseemly. She had “ideas” about what they should accomplish, and he needed someone who would sit there and do what he said. Fair enough. She, for her part, may have felt there was a lot of storytelling time for a project she had changed her life to help move forward. Didn’t he understand the urgency, after all? But a person couldn’t bring that up. Didn’t need to. Hadn’t he written himself, in that open letter in 1976, addressing his writer’s block and the singular problem it presented for the field—namely that you couldn’t tell the story of the blues without Mack McCormick, and you couldn’t tell it because of him—“a related problem that may help explain my personal conflict is the pressure of death and the passage of time.” He fired her.

  He lost a beloved wife to cancer when she was still young. He has a daughter, who is married and comfortable. She’s not interested in the blues and perhaps can’t help resenting it for all the times it took her father away, but she loves the man, as I learned the hard way when I called her in an attempt to get her to reason with him. It was the last straw for Mack. He didn’t like that, my calling his daughter. He wrote me a letter saying thanks for trying, then stopped communicating.

  A night came when Caitlin was sitting on the balcony of her apartment in Houston. It was too late to go back to school. She felt judged and rejected in some unarticulated way, and instead of having jumped a few spaces on the board of life, she had been forced to put the game on pause. I tried to help her see that whatever had played into Mack’s decision making had little or nothing to do with her, that it was larger than that. At some point I asked if she’d ever seen, in the time she worked with Mack, anything with the name “L. V. Thomas” on it?

  She had, yes. A folder.

  Good sense said it was the letters he’d already shown me and to breathe.

  No, it was notes. It was a couple of interviews. There was also a tape box, one of those boxes that says “Scotch,” with her name on it.

  Did she remember anything about the notes?

  “I took pictures of them.”

  I asked him about the fate of those pages a dozen times since that first night at his house, to a degree that in hindsight was pushy. Had he deliberately left these papers in the open in order to test her? Still, it was hard not to feel that he arranged for this little disclosure, even if the pea was very many mattresses down in his psyche.

  Minutes later, scans were coming through of old yellowed pages. Typescript, ring-binder holes in the left margin. “L. V. Thomas … Interviewed June 20, 1961.” It was late and everyone else in the house was asleep. L. V. Thomas spoke. He found her, in Acres Homes, and approached her gate, and she let him in. He was thirty, she was about to turn seventy. He found her “dried up and shrunken,” such that the next time he visited, five months later, he was at first surprised that she was still alive. She told him she was born in August 1891, in Houston. “I was born right down here at 3116 Washington Avenue,” she said.

  She continues: “I started playing guitar when I was about 11 years old. There were blues even back then. It wasn’t so big a part of music as later but there were blues. I can’t hardly name them—I don’t know that those songs had a name. One song was, ‘Oh, My Babe Take Me Back,’ and another was ‘Jack O’ Diamonds.’ There was a lot of set pieces, stuff that’d be called for dancing, that everybody learned.…

  “But in 1937 I joined the church so I gave up all I ever did know about music. I joined the Master and followed after him and gave up all my music since 1937 and I hate for you to ask me about my sinful days. I’m a member of the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church out here in Acres Homes and that’s the only place I do any singing anymore.”

  The two interviews went on for four single-spaced pages. They silently vacuumed out the story of Geeshie and Elvie as it had existed and been accruing conjectural details in my head for twenty years and replaced it with something utterly different. L. V. spent her whole life in Houston. Born into a large family, she says, she was at first the only one interested in music. Some neighborhood boys she ran around with, “They had guitars and liked to fool with them, so I guess they kinda got me started.”

  Among my first thoughts while reading the transcripts was: this could be fake. Not even in the sense of a forgery but in the sense of a joke. Maybe Mack decided he didn’t like me and figured he would detonate my cerebellum for fun before going back to the seven books he has in the works. Or maybe it was even more complicated than that. Maybe it was a History of the Siege of Lisbon–like thing; maybe he was tinkering with the machinery of reality because he could or to settle some balance. Other major blues people I spoke with warned me of the same. “I’d be very careful,” one said. Another said, “that sounds like fantasy.”

  The only way to know if the documents were real was to check them against reali
ty. And we had this lucky situation, a catastrophic situation that might be turned to good use. Caitlin was stranded in Houston. I’d still never met her, but the photorealistic detail of her dispatches from inside the Monster had been enjoyable to follow, and I admired the bravery of her act of quasi theft, feeling strongly that it was the right thing to do. You’re not allowed to sit on these things for half a century, not when the culture has decided they matter. I know he didn’t want to sit on them—he was trapped with them. I give us both a pass. Caitlin had no job. Mack had been her job. But we had these pages, a grand total of nine, the letters and the transcripts. And we had a full-time, on-the-ground researcher/reporter in Houston, whom fate happened to be catching smack in the midst of her own budding Geeshie-and-L. V. enthusiasm. If Mack wouldn’t talk to us anymore, we would do this as an assignment for him, we would follow his leads. Caitlin started barnstorming government offices, where old records are kept. Libraries and archives. Back-office experts she was referred to, small-town historical societies, basements with open shelves. It was jealousy inducing—I’d always dreamed of doing blues research like this, the way they did it back in the 1950s, the way Mack had done it. I knew what he meant now when he said that what he did wasn’t research, it was search. She was searching. And after some weeks, she started finding things; L. V.’s will, some tax records. And after more weeks, we had enough data between us to start crossing the streams of what Mack had given us (or withheld from us), and not only did everything that McCormick had claimed to hear in 1961 check out; it started to multiply.

  The year 1891: the Mauve Decade. Benjamin Harrison is in the White House. Famine in Russia, civil war in Chile. Oscar Wilde is writing Salome in Paris. August 7, the day L. V. Thomas is born: Walt Whitman is alive but depressed and eating a bowl of ice cream that he later decides was too much for him. He’ll die in about half a year. An old German woman is attacked with a razor blade on a street in London, causing people to fear that the Ripper has returned, but it emerges that she had been trying to fake her own murder, so that her son could collect insurance money. The Knoxville Journal reports that the coming Grocer’s Association Picnic will involve, as no. 13 in its list of entertainments, “Throwing eggs at Negro’s head.” The Cincinnati Enquirer reports that a Dr. Ege of Pennsylvania has “succeeded in transplanting the skin of a Negro to the arm of a white person.” The Charlotte Democrat reports that the Rev. Dr. Ebenezer Judkins of Houston, Stonewall Jackson’s brother-in-law, has fallen dead on a railroad train, and on Washington Avenue, at some unknown hour, L. V. is born.