The Best American Magazine Writing 2015

by The American Society of Magazine Editors

  “Skinny Leg Blues”

  Just as we were thinking the research had reached a natural plateau, L. V.’s did something we hadn’t expected, climbing out of the file cabinet and into the world. Caitlin was talking to people who’d known her. Looking back, I know this shouldn’t have been earthshattering, I don’t know why we hadn’t hoped for it. If she were alive today, she would be 122. Maybe she seemed too remote. And in McCormick’s interviews, you got the sense that she knew or saw very few people and was isolated.

  But there was also that one sentence, in the transcripts, suggestive of tethers to a community: “I’m member of the Mount Pleasant Baptist Church out here in Acres Homes, and that’s the only place I do any singing anymore.”

  Acres Homes is a remarkable part of Houston, a big flat area in the northwest part of the city, unincorporated forever, and has historically had a mostly African American population. It’s like a big patch of rural land that the city in its expansion oozed around amoeba-style. When I visited there later, it was startling to see guys going past in full urban hip-hop gear, caps and braids, low-slung pants and new sneakers, cell phones out, only they were seated on chestnut mares, with their girlfriends behind them, trotting by.

  Mount Pleasant Missionary Baptist Church still stands there, in a building within sight of the spot where it was when L. V. attended. Caitlin started going regularly. The people were exceptionally welcoming, well beyond what the code of Southern interracial church politesse demands. The women called her Sister Love. When the time for announcing visitors came, that first day, the pastor, Calvin Randle, recognized her presence and asked her to introduce herself. She gave a very touching unprepared speech that I listened to on MP3 the same night.

  It turned out there were several people at the church who remembered “Sister L. V. Thomas”—or “Mama Thomas,” as others called her—beginning with Randle, who alone of the people we’ve managed to contact knew her in the Fourth Ward, from after her conversion but before she left the neighborhood where she and Lillie Mae played blues together.

  Randle remembered her voice. Everyone remembered her voice.

  Sister Thomas

  L. V. lived near the church. A fiercely independent woman. One of her former neighbors said: “You know how some women gotta have some help, have a man around? She didn’t have to have one.”

  Another thing people at Mount Pleasant talked about consistently were her clothes. Her bulky, orthopedic-style shoes. It didn’t seem like a thing to notice, necessarily, about an elderly lady, but there was something that came along with it, a vibe, with how often people brought it up. We got stray physical details from other people. Dark colors. Long skirts, sometimes, but more often, pants. Hair always “kind of pulled back.” A “very plain” brown hat. She was short, “maybe about five feet tall.”

  Sometime later, we went to her grave. It was easy to find, once you had her death certificate. We called the cemetery, still in business. They looked up her name. The directions to her grave were these: “Cemetery Beautiful, Avenue Love, Row Paradise.” A simple stone, almost level to the ground. Her name and dates written across an engraving of an open book. And beneath, “The Lord is my light and salvation.”

  There was one small memory that people in Acres Homes had that nagged us for some reason: That L. V. used to bring a little boy to church. No one remembered his name or knew who he was, only that he would come with her and sit there next to her.

  Months went by, and Caitlin added to her pile of interviews, but we kept wondering about this boy. A couple of people thought he might have been family somehow. Eventually, Caitlin reached a Sister White, who didn’t want to talk to us, but did say that L. V. had surviving family. No one else in the church had mentioned this. She even had a name: Robin, in California. She gave us a number.

  Robin Wartell, in Los Angeles. A singer. Sang backup for P-Funk and is currently singing backup for Lakeside, of “Fantastic Voyage” fame (“Slide, slide, slippety slide … “). There’s a video of him, shot on Skid Row, in which he discusses his struggles with addiction and his spiritual rebirth. There’s also a video of him doing one of his original songs, “Will I Still Have Tomorrow?”

  I called him. “Robin Wartell?”

  “This is Robin.”

  “Have you ever heard of a woman named L. V. Thomas?”

  “Auntie L. V.?” he said, emphasizing the V, the way she did. “That’s my auntie!”

  I told him we’d heard that she used to bring a little boy with her to church.

  “That was me!”

  He had lived with her, off and on, it turned out. His mother had been a “party girl.” His father walked out on them. He and his brother Randy (who later died of AIDS) were often dropped at Aunt L. V.’s house in Acres Homes for safekeeping. “She was a big influence on me,” he said. He remembered that she smoked a lot and that she wore pants and that (tantalizingly) she kept a guitar in the house. “She always encouraged me,” he said, “when other people didn’t take me seriously.” His mother, Dally Mae Wilkerson, was one of the closest with Aunt L. V. and became her caretaker. “She’s really the missing link here,” he said. She inherited a box of pictures from L. V.—the ones Mack had seen, no doubt, of L. V. (and maybe Geeshie?) from younger days—but those were lost when his mother died and they paid someone to clean out her house (too painful): That person probably threw everything away.

  I got a text from him one night when I was in Cincinnati, visiting my mother. It had a little picture attached.

  I opened it and looked into the eyes of L. V. Thomas.

  A Polaroid. Robin had put the image on the sofa and taken a picture of it with his own phone.

  She was in a wheelchair, it appeared. I looked at the mouth—thin-lipped, pursed—that had sung “Motherless Child Blues.”

  I tried forcing myself, through an almost physical mental exertion, not to project momentousness onto the picture. People’s faces often get caught in weird moments. But there was no doubt that her eyes were full of profound melancholy. The other thing you see immediately are her strikingly long fingers.

  She has them folded in her lap. Her skin is reddish-brown, precisely the color of the stain on the wooden lectern that Pastor Randle had pointed to in telling us what color she was. Her straight white hair flowed back from her high forehead in a small mane. It is not a flattering picture. She was already dying when it was taken. But it is a very moving picture of an important woman and our only photograph of a great American artist (again provisional on what Mack has in the Monster).

  A month later we worked with Robin to organize a little family reunion in Shepherd, Tex., at the home of one of L. V.’s great-greatgrandniece’s nieces. The hostess’s name was Holly Bennett. Her husband was a retired firefighter. She very generously opened up her house for the afternoon, at the last minute, and invited a bunch of family in, people who remembered L. V. We sat in a circle in the Bennetts’ living room. Robin’s sisters, Pauline and Charlene, were there, and another woman of their generation, a cousin named Mary Alice. We played them the songs. “Pick Poor Robin Clean” came on, with its curious opening, eight seconds of minstrel-show banter, possibly part of a stage act Geeshie and L. V. had perfected.

  The Reunion

  At that last line, three of the women sitting there did a sudden jump forward in their seats. “That’s her voice!” Pauline, Robin’s sister, insisted. The other two nodded. They were mostly silent for the songs and shook their heads afterward, murmuring. I was at first disappointed, having hoped in some reptilian journalistic way for tears, but something more interesting was happening. They were unsettled. They said, “Beautiful.” They’d known L. V. She wasn’t a phantom artist to them but a woman, not always an easy woman to get along with, and she was their blood. These were some of the people who helped care for her when she was dying. And here I was, presenting them with a hologram of a creature named Elvie, who sang and played on these piercing blues, and I was saying, “Same woman!”
r />   Our interviews at the church had given us a silhouette. Her family filled it in with bold, bright strokes. They told us that she rolled her own tobacco—Kite brand, in a green pouch—but that she also sometimes smoked a corncob pipe. She carried a pistol under her apron, a long-barreled “old type” of pistol. Robin stood and up and did an impersonation of her locking up the house at night. Staggering stiffly around in the nightgown, with the long pistol dangling in her hand. She would sing while doing the dishes and cleaning. Her house had no running water. She didn’t trust banks and kept her money in the outhouse, under the planks. She liked to hunt possums and chopped her own wood. She was “almost a man,” they said. Had I heard that she used to jump trains? She was turning back into a folk figure, only all of it was apparently true.

  In the middle of our talk, Patricia Ware tapped me on the shoulder and said there was someone on the phone who wanted to speak with me, her cousin Gwen. I went into the dining room. She first told me some of the things the others had said. Then she changed her tone. “L. V. was a strange person,” she said.

  I told her that, yes, I’d gathered that she was a loner.

  “Better word,” she said, “hermit.” She told me that when she’d gone with her father, Tommy Grant, L. V.’s nephew, to drop off groceries there sometimes, they didn’t go past the gate.

  “L. V. estranged herself from our family,” she said. “Because of her lifestyle.”

  What did she mean, lifestyle?

  “She dressed like a man,” she said. “Do I have to say anything more?”

  I said I didn’t think so. But did she know anything more about it? Had she ever known L. V. to be with a woman?

  “I never saw it, no,” she said, “but I wasn’t allowed in her yard!”

  She added, “But I’m sure about that.… I’m absolutely sure about that.”

  I ran it past a few other members of the family, not that day but later. All pronounced some variation on, “Well, we always sort of figured.”

  There is a woman, whose identity I had wondered about at length but made no headway on, a woman named Sarah. L. V. was living with her in 1920, when she worked at the oil mill. They are listed as cousins, but Sarah’s family had come from another part of Texas than L. V.’s, and they shared no family names. In the 1940 census, the one Alex van der Tuuk found, they’re together again, listed as cousins again. Her name is Sarah Goodman Cephus or Sephus now. In the intervening years, she married a man with that name, but he abandoned her (very publicly—there was a trial, over his debts). Now she and L. V. were living together again in the Fourth Ward. No one in the family or at the church had ever heard of this woman. So that’s twenty years of her life, minimum, that they knew each other, and L. V. had lived with her for at least two stretches. There was a place for lesbians in the blues world. Ma Rainey, Alberta Hunter, Gladys Bentley, Ethel Waters, many others—you can’t tell the story of the early blues without the lesbians. And according to the music historian and gospel producer Anthony Heilbut, whose The Fan Who Knew Too Much gets into these questions, there was a place for lesbianism in the gospel world as well. I wrote to Heilbut and asked him what he thought about L. V. He knew “Motherless Child Blues” well and said he was confident that any black person listening to it in the late 1920s would have recognized her delivery as “butch.” But would the church have made a place for her? Could you be both?

  I got a message from him a few weeks later. “In the last two weeks,” he wrote, “I’ve asked seven or eight gospel old-timers (late 70s, early 80s) about Those Hard Baptist Women with their ‘sisters’ and ‘daughters’ and received such replies as ‘Forever.’ ‘Shaddap’ … and ‘You know it, baby.’ In other words, yes.”

  Sarah Goodman Cephus died in 1967. L. V. Thomas was the informant on the death certificate. She signed it, in a clear but ever-so-trembly hand. That’s about fifty years that we know they knew each other.

  L. V. and Geeshie? Is that why she had to kill Thornton, had he found them together? It is interesting that, as Greil Marcus said to me, Geeshie doesn’t change the line in the “Pick Poor Robin” song, “Gamblin’ for Sadie, she is my lady.” A slender clue! Anyway, whether or not she was a lesbian is the least of Geeshie’s withholdings. L. V. comes out of it all an indelible character, but Geeshie we don’t know.

  Does Mack know more? It’s the biggest burning question for me, the one that I wake up once a month in the middle of dreaming about. There are intimations that he does. He mentioned to me, that night a year ago, that he had picked up rumors of Geeshie in Oklahoma, and several years ago he told the writer Ted Gioia that he “visited Wiley’s home, and met with members of her immediate family while doing fieldwork in Oklahoma.” McCormick told me that she had Cherokee blood. In those letters to Paul Oliver, he also says that he has “been to see L. V.” again, and “managed to get on a lot better ground with her.” So, there may be more on Sister Thomas, too. Pictures, tapes. The only thing sure is we don’t have it all.

  I don’t know if Mack will be angry. Certainly, during the months we worked on this, there were times when I felt angry at him. It would happen every time we heard (and we heard it over and over): “I wish you’d gotten here”—fill in a number—“years ago! So-and-so could have told you all about her.” I would shake my fist at Mack a little inside. Thief of souls! If we had known about this discovery in 1961—or in ’71, ’81, ’91, ’01, or even 2011—our knowledge of these two artists would be larger by an order of magnitude, and we might have a real notion of Lillie Mae, instead of coordinates. And yet Mack was the only reason we found any of it. The dualism of the man was defeating, finally. It can’t have been easy for him to carry.

  Also—the truth I forget more often than any other, in thinking about this—L. V., too, wanted it hidden. Or at least part of her did.

  A few weeks ago, Caitlin got in touch with a woman in Houston named Jana, who hadn’t been invited to the family reunion (by oversight, not intention). She lived with her father, John D. Wilkerson, who goes by Don, and her mother, Elnora, taking care of them. Don, she said (the family confirmed it) had known L. V. better than about anyone, but his mind was mostly gone. Just in the last two years, it had slipped precipitously. But he enjoyed passing windows of clarity, during the day.

  Jana allowed Caitlin to come out, and Caitlin went back to Houston one last time (she was re-enrolled in school in Arkansas). Mr. Wilkerson was foggy, as warned, but he did something very important, the moment Caitlin walked into the room. His daughter told him that this young woman was here to ask about L. V. Thomas. “You want to talk about Slack?” he said.

  Caitlin hadn’t played him any of the songs yet. There was no way for him to know that, at the beginning of “Pick Poor Robin Clean,” Geeshie calls her that. He said he gave her the nickname. Couldn’t remember what it meant.

  With that single word from his mouth, “Slack,” Wilkerson sets falling an interesting chain of dominoes. This establishes beyond doubt, you see, that it’s L. V. playing with Geeshie on “Pick Poor Robin Clean.” Which proves in turn that the song was recorded in 1930—because L. V. is emphatic about there having been only one session, or series of sessions (“[We] made all of our records at that time”)—and not recorded in 1931, as has been discographic wisdom since the 1950s.

  That wasn’t all Don Wilkerson said. He told Caitlin that he was once a Texan saxophone player and that he always considered L. V. to have been his “musical mentor.” Jana watched them all play together, when she was a girl, she said. Don’s mother, “Big Mama,” would play piano, Don would play the sax, L. V. would play the guitar. And they did play blues.

  Jana went into another room and got a 45 that her father made, in Los Angeles, on the unknown Tomel label, a song called “Low Down Dirty Shame.” She gave it to Caitlin, who, when she got home, put it on the turntable. She held her phone to the speaker. Don Wilkerson’s voice burst out. “It’s a low, it’s a low low, it’s a low down dirty shame.” It was her! It was her in him. The
first line of “Eagles on a Half.” Almost the exact same stuttered delivery. They must have played it together one of those nights.

  He remembered Geeshie. He is in his nineties, his memory is mostly gone and there is a very good chance that he is the last man on earth who can say that he remembers Lillie Mae (Geeshie) Wiley, knows who she is and has seen her face (unless Mack found her). He implied that there was something funny about her background. He said that she’d been “maybe Mexican or something.” That was it. But he saw her, he remembered. He was someone we almost didn’t talk to because people had said it was too late.

  Chicago

  FINALIST—REPORTING

  This, said the Ellie judges, is “old-fashioned, idealistic reporting at its best: a piece of journalism that exposes clear and consequential wrongdoing by public officials”—the underreporting of murder and other crimes by the Chicago Police Department. Chicago was also nominated for the Reporting Ellie two years ago for another story—“Lawbreakers, Lawmakers,” about the sordid relationship between street gangs and Chicago pols—by the same team. David Bernstein is the features editor at Chicago; Noah Isackson a contributing editor. Chicago, like many city magazines, is largely devoted to service journalism but also has a distinguished record of Ellie nominations in literary-journalism categories such as Feature Writing, Essays and Criticism, and Fiction.

  David Bernstein and Noah Isackson

  The Truth About Chicago’s Crime Rates

  I. Dead Wrong

  It was a balmy afternoon last July when the call came in: Dead body found inside empty warehouse on the West Side.