Nighthawk Blues

by Peter Guralnick

  Mattie was twenty-three now, bright-eyed, dark, slender, and accommodating in every way. If they did have arguments, Jerry had never witnessed one. If she had any reservations about the role that had been thrust upon her, she never voiced them in or, he suspected, out of his presence. They had been together since just before Jerry had found Hawk, when Rabbit Turner’s new woman put her foot down and said she wanted that child out of the house and Rabbit gave her reluctantly to his old teacher. Some people said he would as soon have given her to the devil (“Jealous-hearted fools,” replied Hawk), and it was true that despite their long years of association the two men had never gotten along. Rabbit was too much like Hawk, they were so much alike in fact some people thought he was Hawk’s son (but that was ridiculous, Jerry thought, if Rabbit had been Hawk’s son then Mattie would have been-). Rabbit came from the same school of music in any case, and like any child following in his father’s footsteps it was bound to be rough for him. So he and Hawk had fallen out violently at times, then patched it up and come back together again, but always there was the thread of their music. And now there was Mattie. Now that Rabbit was gone-they said his woman, Minnie Stovall, had poisoned him shortly after she made him put Mattie out of doors-Mattie was all that was left. “You remember your daddy?” Hawk said to her sometimes, and she would nod. “He was a great man,” Hawk pronounced judiciously. “Great man. Everything he knew he learned from me.”

  About the poison Hawk said to Jerry that all the talk was just horseshit. “Rabbit died from drinking moonshine, rotgut, Sterno, canned heat, anything he could get his hands on. It rotted the lining right out of his stomach, that’s the plain and simple truth of it. When he died wasn’t nothing left. He didn’t weigh but seventy pounds,” Hawk pronounced, not without a certain grim satisfaction. “I think he loved that gal more than he did his life. They was too close together, some people would say. He couldn’t never understand why she stuck with me, I think he expected she come back to her daddy fore too long, Minnie Stovall or no Minnie Stovall. Say, What you doing to that little gal of mine? I think you must’ve hoodooed her or something, cause she don’t hardly look at me no more. Shoot, when she come to me, she so scared she couldn’t even stay in the same room, didn’t sit down at the table with me till we been living together as man and wife for nigh onto a year. Just like a little rabbit, that’s just the way she was-she was that shy, just like her daddy before her. When I first knowed him, he didn’t drink nothing but Pepsi-Cola. We call him Rabbit, cause he so quick, and he didn’t say nothing less’n he was spoken to. Just a kid. He had a thousand different ideas then, man, I thought he’d never run out of ideas, and he wouldn’t have neither, be up there with them Beats or them Rolling Stones if whiskey hadn’t taken him over. He was a nice boy, but he taken the wrong turn. Lots of bad turns in this world, and Rabbit done made most of them, but when he was younger, man he was really something.”

  “Can I get you something, Mr. Jerry?” Mattie’s voice intruded on his thoughts.

  No, no, he shook his head.

  “I don’t know why I been doing all this cooking and baking. I didn’t know that Roosevelt be coming home. But I been cooking for three days now, you ask the kids if I ain’t. It must be second sight, you know my grandmother had second sight, at least that’s what my daddy say, and I can mind her holding me on her knees, and saying, child, you gonna see the world whole. That what she always used to say. You gonna see the world whole. Everybody else tried to make me talk, they thought I was a dumb child, cause I didn’t say nothing till I was five, just didn’t have nothing to say till then, I guess. I didn’t know what she meant, she pat me on the head and say that, but then every night for the last week I been dreaming the same dream, I seen Hawk coming up over the hill, with his guitar strapped over his shoulder, and he be singing that song, you know, that I like so much, ’It been so long since I come into my mother’s home,’ yeah he was. And that dream keep coming back, and that was when I knowed it, and I even told the chillen they daddy’s coming home, didn’t I, Rufus?”

  Rufus didn’t say anything, but then Rufus was like his mother. Jerry, however, was amazed. He had never heard Mattie say so many words at one time before. But then, he supposed, he shouldn’t be surprised. A lot of, things had changed in the last few years. “You sure I can’t get you anything, Mr. Jerry?”

  His throat was dry, and he was dog-tired. “Maybe a glass of water.”

  “Show went okay? Did they like him?”

  Jerry nodded.

  “I sure was surprised to see you drive up,” she said, bringing him the glass. “Didn’t see you in my dream. You taking a little vacation?”

  Jerry nodded wearily, though he knew it couldn’t be very convincing.

  “Well, it sure nice to see you. Roosevelt think the world of you, you know. I wonder sometimes what would have happened to us if we hadn’t met up with you. You know, when I go to church, sometimes I pray for you, you don’t mind, do you, Mr. Jerry? Because I hope it ain’t against your religion. See, I just pray that you be well, have a nice life, get yourself a nice woman you can depend on, nothing fancy or nothing—”

  “No, I wouldn’t want anything fancy. Probably be too confusing.”

  “Reason I do, it feel like we owe you something. Course Hawk don’t think so. He don’t think he owe nothing to nobody. But I know we wouldn’t have this nice house, we wouldn’t be able to bring up the kids to go to school regular and make something of themselves or nothing like that if you and them other boys hadn’t come down here in the first place. You remember that falling-down cabin out in the woods, where you first come acrost us?”

  Jerry remembered, he couldn’t very well have forgotten. It was all so different-not only from anything he had ever seen before but from what he looked at now with the added perspective of knowledge. He remembered his first glimpse of this town, seemingly no different from all the other flat little one-horse towns that fanned out from 61 back out into the fields and farmland, back into the bogs and swamps and piney-woods wilderness, where, it seemed, progress had stopped along about fifty years ago. He remembered his traveling companions and the expectations they had had both of each other and of their quest. He squirmed at the memory of himself, so ridiculously lost, so ridiculously hopeful.

  They met on a frosty spring morning in late April of 1966 at the airport in Memphis: Ralph Thayer, a bearded poli-sci teacher from Berkeley with heavy horn-rimmed glasses, George Hard, a long-haired freelance who had contributed one or two pieces to the Village Voice, and himself, recently jobless, disengaged, drifting. They had corresponded for years, though they had never met, but they knew each other immediately, being the only people in the small airport who looked anything like one another.

  The trip started off on a sour note, as Hartl and Jerry suggested that they go to a barber shop before even renting a car, and Thayer was resolutely opposed. “No, no,” he kept shaking his head, impervious to their arguments. It wasn’t his beard so much as his principles. They, with visions of Goodman-Chaney-Schwerner, the three murdered civil-rights workers, in their heads, argued that it had nothing to do with principle, it was simply anonymity they were seeking. “So is it religious?” said Hartl, who volunteered to shave his sideburns in exchange. They stood there in the middle of that pastel, sickly-smelling lobby arguing at the top of their voices, glancing around nervously all the while to see if anyone was paying attention to these three exotic foreigners.

  “No, I’m not going to be intimidated,” Thayer insisted, his big Adam’s apple protruding, his eyes watering behind the thick lenses, as Jerry learned they always did when he got excited. He was the oldest of them, thirty-four then, and had been involved in the exotic world of blues collecting for the longest time. He had three Charley Patton 78s in mint condition, a library of green-sleeved originals from the ’20s and ’30s, and a wife and children and career. He was a Marxist theoretician who would later become prominent in the Free Speech Movement, after he got tenure. Still, h
e seemed to Jerry irremediably self-centered and bourgeois in his protective mechanisms. “I won’t be intimidated,” he repeated, “by a bunch of crackers and racists.”

  “Look, Ralph,” Hartl said in his soothing New Yorker’s whine. “It isn’t as if anyone is asking you to compromise your beliefs or even to cut off your beard. We’re only asking you to get a little trim. I thought we all agreed we wanted to be as inconspicuous as possible—”

  “I can’t trim my beliefs,” Thayer thundered. “Besides, my wife cut my hair before I left. My wife always cuts my hair. I don’t go to barbers.”

  In the end they worked out a compromise solution. They rented a car at the airport unshorn. Jerry and Hartl went to the nearest barbershop, which happened to be in a mixed neighborhood. Meanwhile Thayer trimmed his own beard in a public restroom, and though they couldn’t detect any difference in appearance he emerged with a fistful of jet-black hairs.

  Then there was the problem of who was to drive and who would sit in the front seat. Hartl, it turned out, was absolutely hopeless at map-reading, and the map-reader, they had determined, would sit beside the driver. They could all, as far as Jerry was concerned, have squeezed into the front seat, but Thayer, a large somewhat heavy-set man, was firmly opposed to that. Hard, not surprisingly, didn’t have a driver’s license, and he bitterly protested being exiled to the back. “It’s not my fault,” he protested, “that I’m a city-dweller. I never had any trouble reading a subway map. Besides, I get carsick, and I can’t hear a word you guys are saying without leaning forward, and if I lean forward I feel like I’m going to barf.” In the end Jerry sat in the back most of the time, and when he stretched out and tried to shut out the noise of their constant bickering, stood accused of having usurped the most favored place for himself.

  There were a hundred other similar details in the first day alone. Where they stopped to buy gas. Where they stopped to relieve themselves. If they stopped at all. Who kept the accounts. Where they ate. What they ate. Hard, for example, ate nothing but hamburgers medium-rare and Coke from the bottle. If he got a hamburger that was undercooked or too well done, he just pushed it away from him and went out and sat in the car. Which meant that they had to stop at the next fast-food chain down the line and try again. Thayer had a passion for chili sauce and hot spices and would have stopped at every little Bar-B-Q they passed by, but Hartl said that barbecue, whether domesticated or the real thing, only gave him the runs.

  It turned out, Jerry concluded glumly on the first night as Hartl showered and Thayer nervously tested his recording equipment in the first of what was to become more than two dozen Holiday Inns listed in Thayer’s Mobil Travel Guide, that they just didn’t like each other very much. Which was a hell of a discovery to make on such short actual acquaintance, after a correspondence which ranged over five or six years and a host of subjects (politics, civil rights, the stuffiness of academics, the entrenched racism of Amerika), a shared passion, and a resolute commitment of energy and resources (they had pooled over $1,200 and set aside nearly a month for this quest) to find the Screamin’ Nighthawk (a.k.a. T.R. Jefferson) or bust.

  It wasn’t going to happen. Once again Jerry had that sinking feeling that all was lost, even before the battle was effectively joined. They would never find Hawk, they would never even last a week like this, the whole thing was a mistake from start to finish. A roommate in college had once suggested to Jerry that he was an idealist who put too much faith in beginnings, refusing to allow things to develop at their own pace, spinning out endings which could never be realized. His roommate was talking about a girl-but Jerry had married the girl, the girl was Lin, they had simply marched up the steps of Ann Arbor’s city hall shortly before graduation and reemerged married, in a single stroke of legal independence which left two sets of parents speechless with shock. The fact that it hadn’t worked out had nothing to do with expectations, he and Lin were very different people, she wanted things he wasn’t prepared to give her (furniture, respectability, children), lots of marriages didn’t work out.

  What had worked out for him, though? Jerry had thought a career in television or photojournalism would be somehow exciting. When he was at the University of Michigan, his pictures had appeared regularly in the school paper, he did several innocuous word-and-photo seasonal essays only slightly enlivened by shots of girls he might have liked to have known better-and occasionally did-and he was color commentator for football and basketball his junior and senior years, providing statistics and analysis for the drowsy Saturday afternoon broadcasts. He had majored in communications, got to know the jocks, and once in a while even got to pontificate about his newest enthusiasm, the blues, which he had discovered through records by Lead-belly and Big Bill Broonzy and which he found lent itself to every Rousseauian fantasy he had ever had about art and authenticity.

  Life wasn’t like that, though. After graduation their friends had dispersed, and he and Lin moved to Springfield, Illinois, where his brother-in-law, his sister’s husband, then an assistant director with CBS News, had found a job for him writing ad copy for the local affiliate. For a while he maintained his freelance ambitions, even selling a picture once to Sports Illustrated. His father had the picture framed (it showed a marathon runner collapsing in a fellow runner’s arms with the finish line just visible behind them) and placed it behind the counter from which he dispensed prescriptions, but he refused Jerry’s offer of an original print; instead he cut out the magazine page itself, even retaining the advertisement for Johnson outboards that went with it.

  In the three years that they were married he and Lin moved often, and sometimes Jerry thought that he was making progress, gaining a reputation for efficiency and dependability, even if it was in a series of limited-audience, low-rating markets. By the time that he moved back in with his parents, in Brighton, after his marriage and lease had come to a virtually simultaneous end, he knew that he was mired in the same rut of “professionalism” and parochial ambition he had sought so vigorously to escape when he first rejected his father’s clean white pharmacist’s smock, his father’s clean white innocent ambitions for his only son.

  For the fourteen months that he was at home he found himself increasingly drifting into the past, a past which had never interested him in the slightest when he was growing up and all eyes were forward-away from grandparents’ embarrassing accents, away from burdensome differences, toward an assimilated, progressive, American future which lay just over the horizon. Now he revisited the scenes of his youth, the schoolyard where a Catholic friend in second grade had said, “Are you Jewish?” and he responded, “Are you kidding?” Back to the temple from which he had escaped at fifteen with never a backward glance. He talked to the rabbi who had conducted his confirmation class but who didn’t seem to understand what he was driving at now. He started reading Isaac Bashevis Singer. He pumped his father for stories about ancestors, about the old country, about his father’s growing up. “What do you want to know all that stuff for?” his father would say impatiently. “Haven’t you got enough problems of your own?”

  It was a strange time. Jerry went to work, came home, closed the door of his room, turned on occasionally, and listened to his records-once an eclectic collection that could encompass Miles Davis, Pete Seeger, and Miriam Makeba, now blues exclusively-which more and more took up every available inch of floor-space. In the increasingly exotic sounds-so painful to his parents’ ears and sensibilities that they left the television at high volume even when they weren’t in the room-he caught a whiff of an acrid reality that strangely corresponded to his own. In the rarefied world of the collector he found a companionship, a sense of belonging, if only at a distance, that allowed him to share secret passions, secret obsessions, a secret language, that encouraged an exchange of views, an animated debate, an engagement that excluded the casual outsider. He became something of an expert, started writing for Broadside and a British blues magazine, interviewed Mississippi John Hurt, and began to suspect that it w
as his own hovering presence (perhaps now he was the unassimilated embarrassment) that caused his father to retire and led his parents to cut all ties, unload the pharmacy, sell the house, and move to Florida.

  Jerry felt totally bereft, now his childhood was really gone. All he had were his books and records-even his papers, his first published stories, the bylines his mother had so carefully saved were carted off with baseball cards and other boyhood mementoes. He moved into a rooming house in Cambridge, then, when that became too small, into a modest apartment. He still reported to work for a while; he marched in civil-rights marches, signed petitions occasionally, became known a little bit around the folk clubs and to the longhaired girls, and brooded over whether his fantasy could ever become reality. This was his fantasy: he sought to create his own life, give up his assigned identity and forge another. Setting off to rediscover some old blues singer on impulse alone was just the first step toward freedom. But now he was afraid that this, too, was going to be another dead end. …

  By the end of the third day they weren’t speaking to each other except to criticize a wrong turn taken or question Thayer’s driving habits. They had stopped off in Commerce, Tunica, Austin, Senatobia, Bobo, Alligator, and Mound Bayou, following the same pattern in each little town, going to the post office, then to the general store if the two were not the same, finally to the police station, carefully explaining that they were looking for a man who used to be a singer with the idea of recording him again, attempting as scrupulously as they could to show a neutral goodwill neither hostile to the Negro they were looking for nor inimical to the white men they were asking. Originally the idea was that they would take turns as spokesman, but Jerry was soon elected representative and, dragging his feet all the while, trudged reluctantly in and out of stores, in and out of official buildings, sure that everyone was laughing at him or worse.