Routes

by John Okas

  “Hello there,” she calls. “If I give you these pieces of silver will you take custody of this baby, no questions asked?”

  Bess and Porky Priest know the money is dirty, that it was made by slaves for their masters, but they say, “Done!” and not another word until they are out of earshot. Bessie once had a baby sold out from under her. She takes to the bundle as if her arms were made of glue, the answer to her prayers, plus thirty dollars. Porky, at the tiller, jingles the bag of silver coins. “Justus Priest! Mama, that’s what we’ll call the boy.”

  Thus is Jimmy Elbert Junior, son of a belle, the shady landed lady of Delta plantation, transformed into Justus Priest, son of a pair of dirt poor but proud and sober sharecroppers.

  They use the money to rent themselves some land. Porky knows a thing or two about cotton and Bessie is an old hand with the chickens. Justus continues to be a blessing to his adoptive parents. He is a born cotton picker and a chicken plucker. When work is through, young Justus, with his manchild hands already a coat of callus, hits the wire fence behind the shack, amusing himself with all the different twangs he can make.

  Porky understands art. When the boy is six, he invests ten dollars in a real guitar for him. Justus takes it to the back porch to pick out and pluck in a system higher than that of fiber and fowl. Songs come naturally to him. He sits out there every night playing for hours. He can play a lively country blues music with both his hands going a mile a minute, his right sliding across the frets as if it were made of glass, his left fingering rhythm on the body, his mouth blowing on a mouth harp, and his feet stamping on the wood board step. You’d think it was a freight train coming down the track. The son of the spiritual singer can sing too. His music can be slow as the river and his voice as blue and deep and wide, like his father’s, naturally seasoned with hope and despair, and as satisfying as pork and beans and rice.

  Sweating It Out in Bullets

  Justus Priest is devoted to his adoptive parents and lives at home picking and plucking until he is well near thirty years old. What else is a poor boy to do but try to scratch a living from the land?

  I’m too young to marry too old to masturbate,

  I’m too young to marry too old to masturbate,

  ain’t had no hen from the barnyard,

  since this morning quarter past eight.

  Then a flu comes and flies away with the souls of the Priests, Porky, first and, forty-nine days later, Bess. The last thing that Bess does before she goes is tell Justus about the white woman at the bank with the dirty silver dollars.

  “The truth is, honey, you could be just about anybody.”

  This revelation is eclipsed by Bessie’s passing. Justus, in a world of blues, mourns at Bessie’s funeral.

  Seven weeks of blue, Mama,

  and one day be moving on.

  Seven weeks of blue-hoo-hoo,

  and one day and one day be moving on.

  It’s one day you’re tired of living,

  The next day you’re dead and gone.

  I count seven times seven, Mama,

  every hour seems like a year to me.

  I count seven times seven, Mama,

  every hour seems like a year to me.

  It’s not just the days of the week now,

  it’s the nights I cry myself to sleep.

  That train’s going to come,

  and take us all way up to heaven.

  That train’s going to come,

  and take us all way up to heaven.

  All the money’s gone now,

  one, two, three, four, five, six, seven.

  Hear that whistle blow!

  Justus cries into his wheezy harmonica and all the people say, “Amen, amen, brother Justus, you ought to take yourself down to Louisport.”

  Life is short and impossible to understand. Not so the art of Justus Priest. The form of his lament is an idea whose time has been a long time coming in the work songs and lullabies of slavery. And like many an idea whose time has come it is thought of by several different people in several different places, simultaneously, independently. In from the cotton fields and out of range of the master’s voice the music runs on a spiritual track both ways on the Big Muddy backbone river of the Land of the Free, up north to the Windy City, down south to nearby Louisport.

  The southern states also give birth to jazz. By the time the new century takes its turn there are several new things brewing under the stars and stripes. In Louisport Justus finds his first cousins in ragtime and in the unruly dirges of bands of second generation freemen. While the blues are nursed in every bar, rehearsed on every street corner there, those groups of second-hand brass, infused with the friendly spirit of the blues, start spreading joy over the whole Freeway.

  Orphaned Justus arrives in Louisport, carrying his guitar in a feed bag, looking like one poor farmer boy. He dives into the romantic corner of the city and finds work at a gin joint named Bullets’, named after its owners, the brothers Pierre and Roger Bullet. Changing names runs in our family, and Justus Priest, considering his too plain to shine on stage, takes the name “Liberty Star” to perform under. The pine plank stage at Bullets creaks as the country boy does his freight train imitations and sings sleepy blues about how his mama did tell him he had the drifting blues before he was born. When the people hear Liberty sing they cry in their gin in a way that makes them feel better about bad things.

  Here a happy ending takes a turn for the worse. While Liberty Star has inherited his unknown father’s musical gift, he also has within him his unknown mother’s penchant for alcohol and self-pity. A sucker for the bottle, while he’s at it he develops the habit of narcotics. And, like any country boy in the big city, he is taken advantage of. He helps the Bullet brothers to help themselves to the gate he brings in by continuing to work, year after year, for peanuts, gin and morphine.

  When Liberty is forty, man can fly and the construction of the new southland is well under way, but his own life is in the toilet. The star of the show is shooting up between sets, a fixture on a dead end street, a landmark still sweating it out in Bullets. He looks back on his sharecropping days with the jaundiced eye of romanticism. “Because of these bad habits,” he cries, “a life that was once full of promise is now a-fixing to die.” Somehow, from where he sits, those eleven-foot cotton sacks and the hundred-pound bales of hay don’t seem so heavy.

  Then one night a woozy white woman with gray hair, cracked red lips, peeling paint, and skin that looks like brown spotted porcelain comes into the bar.

  “Liberty Star, formerly Justus Priest?”

  “Who wants to know?” asks old yellow eyes.

  “Son, behold your mother. Let me buy you a drink.”

  The two sit on opposite sides of a bottle and Mary confesses. “I felt guilty as hell for giving you away like I did, my own flesh and blood, with only thirty dollars in your trust fund. It made my drinking worse to think about it. Now the doctors have given me a year to live and I’ve used up eleven months of it tracking you down. I want to make it up to you by giving you the land you were conceived on.”

  By the sad shape Mary is in Liberty does not imagine her bequeathal will amount to much, but finding out he is half white, even though he doesn’t look it, changes his thinking. Fair enough, it softens some of his despair back into hope. He thinks, why shouldn’t I take a crack at living with the privileged folks? Meeting my real mother must be a good omen, having some land, this plantation, put in my lap like this, unexpectedly, and seeing what drinking has done to my own mother, are three good reasons to go straight and sober myself.

  “Mother,” he says, spilling out his drink on the sawdust floor, “living here gives me the worst old headache I ever had. At heart I’m just a simple country boy with a bad case of the big city blues. If I remember right, farming’s not bad. Earth clods under your feet are the same as rhythm and soul in the music.”

  He takes his guitar and goes on a three-day wagon ride back to Delta plantation with Mary.
He can hardly believe his eyes when he sees Delta plantation, a full five hundred fertile acres, and the gardens of Mary Eaton, overgrown though they be, give him a thrill, and the house, rundown as it is, is a mansion like those in his dreams of heaven. With such a turn of fortune Liberty hangs up his guitar and gets busy with a mule and a plow.

  It’s too late for Mary. She spends her last thirty days as drunk as she likes. She takes to her bed and lets the son of the last dark hand to leave take as good care of her as he did the parents who loved him. He nurses her while her complications get complications.

  “Son, your goodness makes me feel better about sending you down the river with those Priests,” Mary says her last words. “Surely you have more character than you would have had I raised you.”

  When she dies she rests in peace. But no sooner has she passed on to her desert, than he is paid a visit from the men in the white sheets, the clan of poor spellers from Zero County who hide their faces in white pillow cases. They burn a cross on his lawn, upon that patch of tall grass where he was conceived.

  “When you can predict your own death, there isn’t much comfort in being right,” says Liberty. “If I hold my head as high as my pride these backwoods chickenfuckers will kill me quicker than living the low life in the big city. Damn this bad luck and trouble! I might as well give up trying to get something, and from now on just be a happy camper under the stars.”

  Liberty takes a bedroll to the stable where there is an old horse named Broadway. He saddles him and puts his guitar in a saddle holster that belonged to Major Jack Eaton. “I was a fool to think I could leave these blues behind.”

  He crosses the Big Muddy River on the midnight ferry, and once on the other side he kicks Broadway in the direction of wide open spaces. Maybe out west, he thinks, I’ll find enough room for a black man to call a life his own.

  And so he goes with his back to the rising sun, in the hopes of finding freedom ringing out where the buffalo roam and the skies are clear all day.

  Good Love Medicine

  Our great-grandmother is a member of the Running Rabbit society, a clan of desert folks, native to the Land of Enchantment. The Running Rabbits are an endangered species. Once, when they had free run of the range, the bucks were brave, had healthy ears of corn that pointed straight up with the seeds of future generations. But then the white man made a reservation for them and it was not for dinner at eight. The bucks lost the war to save the land of their fathers and pass it on to sons of their own. Humiliated, fenced in on a fraction of what used to be their whole and happy hunting and gathering grounds, the bucks who remain have problems raising their corn.

  Although it is almost unheard of for a Running Rabbit wife to complain about her husband, Cactus Flower, a young bride, speaks out for all when she goes to the tannery and tells the old wives about her mate Grey Fox.

  “We’ve been married for three whole moons and he has yet to fulfill my insides with seed. Every night he’s out drinking with the boys. Is this the way love’s supposed to be?”

  The old wives look at one another and say, “He’s not the only brave afraid of what happens between the hides. We have the same problem too. The old husbands avoid us. They’re more interested in their old Tomahawk Veterans Club meetings than they are in us.”

  The secret is out. The old wives wonder what to do about it. Somebody says, “I remember my mother saying that oatmeal makes good medicine to restore confidence in weak men.”

  The other old wives tell what herbs and remedies they have heard will cure a man of self-doubt, alcoholism and impotence.

  “Bread made from ground acorns.”

  “Yellow root tea with yucca honey.”

  The young bride Cactus Flower says, “I know of a small grove of oaks up the dusty trail, acorns never fall far from the tree. On the way back, if I follow the yellow root trail, won’t I pass through a field of wild oats? I’ll take several baskets and gather enough good love medicine to make all the men stand up tall again!”

  Another Hit and Run Affair

  The next morning Cactus Flower sets out for the thicket of scrubby oaks she has in mind. The old dusty trail is hot as usual, even hotter. By the time she sees the outline of the low chaparral in the distance, she is desperately looking forward to a seat in the shade. The sun towers at noon and she becomes dizzy, passing into a state of enchantment within a State of Enchantment, a spell in which the heat waves with the spirits of nature. At the high point of the day a prairie dog with a sly smile comes up beside her and with a wink gives her the strength to finish her journey.

  When she is within earshot of the grove she hears someone singing. A Running Rabbit girl can sneak into almost anyplace. Cactus Flower creeps up, within spitting range of the singer.

  Yes, it is Liberty Star, Justus Priest, Jimmy Elbert Junior, the man with three names, taking shelter from the sun under an oak and in some minor chords, off Broadway, who’s grazing nearby. No surprise, he’s singing the blues.

  Some get rich and some get lucky.

  Some are white and some are golden.

  But all I got’s this here guitar,

  a name I made up Liberty Star,

  and this old horse named Broadway.

  With strange things happening to her all day, Cactus Flower takes the development in stride. What she sees is the magic Buffalo Man. She thinks, the Coyote Spirit has seen what a long walk I have taken to help the Running Rabbit braves get back their courage so that my people will be fruitful again and is rewarding me for my effort by putting something special in my path.

  The Buffalo Man is a semi-divine hero of Running Rabbit legend, famous for his potency.

  Liberty Star stops to tune his guitar.

  “Hey Buffalo Man!” She calls. “Look here!”

  “You mean me?” The man with three names already turns his head and sees Cactus Flower lying on her back on a pile of leaves, acorns strewn all around, holding up her hide skirt, showing him what is hidden.

  The blues singer changes his tune. “Lord, I’m a lucky man today to find this jewel in the desert.”

  He is quick to join her on the bed of leaves. He digs in and sticks around all afternoon sowing his wild oats.

  “Oh! Ooh! Oooh! Ooooh! Oooooh! Ooooooh! Oooooooh!” She is as happy as a sidewinder in sand, but she doesn’t forget what she came for, or where she came from. At dusk she says, “you must excuse me but I am here to find medicine to help my husband.”

  Husband? There’s one word that could mean trouble in any language, thinks Liberty.

  She dresses quickly and goes about her business of filling the medicine baskets with acorns, then yellow root, and finally, in the dark, she gathers some wild oats. She is rather late getting back to Grey Fox’s mud hut in the village. By now he is pacing around on fire, drinking heavily. He brandishes an empty bottle of firewater and curses his wife for being late, and not having his cornmeal mush and beans on the table on time.

  “It’s because I’ve been out gathering love medicine to improve your desire!” She shows him the baskets.

  “You know how I hate health food, you stupid bitch!” he says, and kicks the baskets, sending the grain, nuts and roots flying in all directions.

  Cactus Flower has had enough. Outspoken as she is, she cannot stop her big mouth from spilling the big news of the day. “Today I met Coyote Spirit along the dusty trail and he blessed me by putting the magic Buffalo Man in my path. The Buffalo Man called me his Jewel of the Desert and made a woman of me at last. Too bad you can’t do it the way he does!”

  The truth hurts.

  Running Rabbit law provides that if a wife is a shrew, her husband may whip her until her hide is raw. But even raising a band of welts on the backside of Cactus Flower does nothing for the desire of Grey Fox. He is more interested in revenge, getting a bottle, gathering his friends in the Tomahawk Club, and going on a hunting party to find this Buffalo Man, magic or not, and separate him from his ear of corn.

  Like father li
ke son. As Jimmy Elbert knew when the Queen of the Delta passed out in the high grass, so knows Liberty after the Jewel of the Desert runs home to her husband bubbling over with the realization of her womanhood. He doesn’t have to see fire to smell smoke, but slings his guitar into his saddle holster and says to his horse, “There’s always trouble following whenever I get lucky.”

  Another hit and run affair. Liberty Star wisely pushes Broadway to beat his hooves in double time out of the danger his inner voice tells him is brewing in the Home of the Brave. He escapes the Tomahawk Club but not the years of self-abuse, hard living and homelessness. At fifty-three he is too old to be chasing around like this. When he stops for his afternoon coffee so does his heart. His soul drifts off on Broadway, while his body goes face down in a grove of honey locusts, later to be dinner for a desert dog and her pups.

  Radical Surgery

  On the Running Rabbit reservation the Buffalo Man plays the role that drifters often do when they pass through small towns. He leaves a mighty figure behind to challenge the simpler, more routine lifestyles he has touched.

  Cactus Flower bears the issue of their intimacy, our grandfather. Not black and wooly-headed like the buffalo, nor ocher-skinned and straight-haired like a Running Rabbit squaw, the boy baby, through some shifting strands in the gene pool, inherits a good share of his looks from Mary Eaton. Only from the neck down, in his sinuous torso arms and legs does he resemble his father. Look past his high cheek bones and his rich harvest bronze color, and you see features that could make him any blond blue-eyed mother’s son. His lips are thin, his nose is large, his ears stick out, his eyes have more than a touch of the white woman’s blues in them and his hair is wispy and wavy, light brown with streaks of yellow like the Delta Belle’s running through it. No one, least of all Cactus Flower, expected there would be so much gold in the Buffalo’s long black ear. But the baby lies on its wool blanket a breed apart, the color of corn in an autumn sunset. Cactus Flower remembers that on the day of her adventure with the Buffalo Man, the wily-eyed Coyote crossed her path. She’ll be willing to bet her best copper bracelet that the sandy desert dog had some influence on the baby.