When I Left Home

by Guy, Buddy

  In our part of Louisiana I never heard stories about the Ku Klux Klan. My father instructed me to address white men as “mister,” but he gave me the same instructions about black men. No color deserved more respect than any other.

  The most respect I earned came from taming horses. As a youngster, I got me a reputation as someone who could tame a wild animal. Neighbors would bring me their spirited horses. Can’t exactly explain how I did it, but it came natural. I could talk to a horse. I could even reason with a horse. I’d say, “I feel that you’re wild. I like that you’re wild. But listen here, boy. I’m gonna let you take me on one last ride, and then I’m gonna make you behave.” I felt a kinship with wild horses—something I understood a little better when I got older and started playing guitar. At a young age, I could see wildness in horses, but I couldn’t see it in myself—at least not yet.

  I loved baseball, but in the backwoods of Louisiana we didn’t have no Little League. We didn’t even have a regular hardball. We mashed up cans to hit with a broomstick. We put down rocks for bases. And when it came to listening to games, we went with our dads where we stood in the backyard of the white man who put his radio on his windowsill so we could hear the broadcast. From faraway Brooklyn, we heard how the Dodgers had signed Jackie Robinson, the first black to play in the majors. I could feel the pride in my daddy’s heart. I could feel my own heart beating fast when Jackie slapped a double against Warren Spahn of the Boston Braves or stole home against the Phils. When Jackie won Rookie of the Year in 1947, I was only eleven, but you’d think that it was me, along with every black boy in America, who had won the award. I guess the award was for all of us who didn’t have the money to buy a mitt or the means to ever see a big league game.

  I was too young to remember when Joe Louis fought Max Schmeling in the 1930s, but as a youngster, I was out in the backyard, standing next to my father and grandfather as Louis beat down Billy Conn in the thirteenth round. I remember all of us hooting and hollering for a man who, before Jackie Robinson, was the only American hero with skin the color of ours.

  When I think of tough characters, my Daddy’s mama comes to mind. I never saw her without a corn pipe in her mouth. When the pipe was smoked out, she’d take the burnt ashes and spread them over her lips. If any of us misbehaved, she was the first to notice. She wouldn’t think twice about grabbing the biggest switch off the tree and tanning our bottoms.

  On the other hand, Grandpa was more a talker. He liked to tell stories. His favorite—the one that spooked us out—was about the Jesse James days, when white folks was scared to keep their money in the banks. Instead they buried their cash in the ground around certain graves. To keep the black man from digging up that cash, the white man spread a scary story—that ghosts guarded the burial grounds. They said that if you wanted to hunt for the money, you had to leave out shots of whiskey. Give the ghosts whiskey and the ghosts wouldn’t bother you none. As a child, these stories messed with me. They crept inside my mind and stayed there. I had dreams of drunken ghosts chasing me all over the chicken house.

  Just as bad weather led to the death of the crops, bad circumstances led to the death of people I knew. In the country, death comes often. I remember putting my uncle George in a plain pine box when he died a young man. When I heard that a neighbor, sick of mind, slit his own throat and bled to death, I thought of Christmastime when I had to slit the throat of the pig. Why would anyone slit his own throat?

  A little friend of mine, Grant Clark, went hunting in the woods with his dad. Many times I’d done the same thing. But my friend never came back. In a terrible accident that was no one’s fault, a gunshot blew off the top of his head. That also haunted my dreams for months afterward.

  Life in the country is set by the seasons. In the early months we sit behind the mule as he pulls the tractor to cut furrows in the soil where we’d soon be planting seeds. The mule ain’t easy. The mule don’t like to be told nothing. “Stubborn as a mule” ain’t no lie. The mule likes to fart in your face and piss in the wind. He got the foulest-smelling shit of any animal on earth. And all the time that I’m shouting for him to get done with this dirty work, I’m whipping his fat butt so I can get home and play baseball or run into the woods with my rifle with the hope of bagging a bird for dinner.

  Life was steady. We grew the greens, we picked the cotton, we planted the corn. It was a cycle that didn’t stop. We watched the sky, hoping that the weather be kind. We watched the fields, hoping the crops would grow.

  In a world without changes, one change did come. It didn’t keep us from farming like we’d always farmed, but it did give us something we’d never had before.

  Light

  It was near the end of the 1940s when we finally got an electric line. I was twelve. There was one little light bulb that hung down from the ceiling. Didn’t take much of a storm to knock out the power, though. Fact is, that the roof of our shack was so flimsy that any heavy rain created big leaks. Mama had tubs lined up all over to catch the pouring water. Wasn’t till much later that I learned what it was like to trust the roof over my head.

  The introduction of that little light bulb in our cabin didn’t improve life much. But our first piece of electrical equipment, a beat-up used phonograph that played 78 records, changed everything. I thank God that my daddy loved the blues and wanted to hear music when he came out from the fields. I thank God that my daddy had this one record by John Lee Hooker called “Boogie Chillen.” That’s the record that did it.

  In 1949, about when I turned thirteen, “Boogie Chillen” was the biggest hit in the country among black folk—it was by far the biggest hit in the Guy household. Wasn’t anything more than one guy playing his electric guitar by himself. Notes were simple. Words were simple. Words didn’t even rhyme. But the groove got to me. The mood was so strong that after the song had done played, you had to play it over. When the man said, “Mama told Papa, let the boy boogie woogie,” I figured that this John Lee Hooker had to be talking about me. I figured that one way or the other I had to get me a guitar and learn “Boogie Chillen.” I knew that inside that song was a mystery I had to know. Once I figured out how the notes worked together, once I memorized all the words and sang the song myself, I’d have a key that would open a door. Didn’t know what was on the other side of that door—but I had to find out.

  I’d wait for Christmas—not because there were presents, but because Coot was coming. Like everyone who had a guitar, Coot had figured out “Boogie Chillen” and didn’t mind when I asked him to play it six or seven times in a row. I’d watch him real careful. Didn’t miss nothing. And when he went to drink the wine my daddy had set aside for him, I picked up the guitar and tried to play it myself. My mind heard it, but my fingers couldn’t coordinate it. I fumbled. I was frustrated, and when Coot came back, a little happier for the wine, I asked to play the thing again.

  “Ain’t you ever getting tired of that tune, boy?” he asked.

  “No, sir.”

  Must have been two or three months into the new year when I walked to the little general store. I was on an errand for Mama, buying sugar and salt. I happened to glance outside as an old car pulled up. A skinny man got out. He was wearing a big straw hat, and when I saw what he was carrying under his arm, my heart got to beating so hard I thought it’d bust out my chest.

  He was carrying a guitar along with a big black box.

  “Who’s that?” I asked Artigo, the white man who ran the store.

  “Lightnin’ Slim.”

  “He play guitar?”

  “Famous for it.”

  “He gonna play here today?” I asked.

  “He will if I give him a bottle of beer.”

  “Give him two bottles.”

  He walked in real slow, giving Artigo a big smile.

  “That beer cold?” he asked.

  Artigo said, “Got a kid here who loves him some guitar.”

  “What’s in that black box?” I asked Lightnin’.

  �
�Just a bunch of wires and tubes. Ain’t you never seen no amp?”

  “No, sir. What it do?”

  “Pushes electricity through the guitar. Makes it louder and stronger. Makes it scream until you can hear it over folk talking. You can hear it over anything. When this here electrical guitar starts to buzzing, folks gonna be flying in here like bees to honey.”

  “You know ‘Boogie Chillen?’” I asked.

  “Who don’t?”

  “You gonna play it?”

  “Sure will. You gonna sing along with me, boy?”

  “I can’t sing.”

  “Boy, everybody can sing, just like everybody can talk.”

  As Lightnin’ set up I studied the whole situation. Saw him plug the amp thing in the wall. A tiny little light turned red. As he started fingering the guitar, I stood there right in front of him. With the first twang of his guitar a shock ran through my body. The blood inside my head, the blood pumping my heart, the blood running through my limbs—all that blood started into boiling. When Lightnin’ began singing, the raw sound of his voice and the jolt of his guitar set me back on my heels. My mouth dropped open so wide a family of flies could have flown in. At that moment I wasn’t noticing nothing but Lightnin’ Slim playing “Boogie Chillen” on his electrical guitar. He didn’t sound like John Lee Hooker—no one does—but he sounded good. While he played four or five other songs, I didn’t move a muscle. I focused my eyes on his fingers like a hound dog focused on a rabbit hole. He played for a half-hour and drank three beers. When he was through and I looked around me, I saw that little store was filled up with people. Don’t know where they all came from, but they was there.

  Slim winked at me and said, “Out here in country, when I play this here electrical guitar, you can hear it three, four miles in the distance. Didn’t I tell you, boy? Folk come buzzin’ in like bees to honey.”

  And then, like the Lone Ranger, he packed his guitar and amp, walked out to his car, and rode off into the sunset.

  I knew about the Lone Ranger because every few weeks Artigo would let us black boys pile into the back of his pickup and he would drive us to a movie theater in a little town ten miles away. Fact is, me and Artigo’s son had been good friends as little boys. When we got older, though, we was told that whites and blacks couldn’t be buddies. He didn’t like that, and neither did I, but that’s how it was.

  At the movies blacks had to sit upstairs while the whites went downstairs closer to the big screen. I loved seeing Gene Autry and Roy Rogers riding their horses and gunning down cattle rustlers. When Gene picked up his guitar and sang around the campfire, my eyes went right to his fingers. How did he make that nice, calming sound? Lightnin’ Slim and John Lee Hooker didn’t calm me down. They worked me up. I liked being worked up, but I also liked a guitar that was smooth and easy. Those cowboy songs were like lullabies. You had to love a lullaby. Because I wasn’t a bad lasso man myself, I got a big kick out of Lash LaRue and the other cowboys who knew how to work a rope. I liked all them lasso artists and gunslingers.

  Back in our little country shack I kept close to the phonograph. After John Lee Hooker, we got some records by Lightnin’ Hopkins. There was “Lightnin’s Boogie” and “Moanin’ Blues.” Lightnin’ was a little softer than John Lee. He had a different kind of twang. When he played, his little notes seemed to be walking, like when I would walk down by the bayou. When he sang, he was telling me a story, almost like my daddy or uncle telling a story. I believed every word he said. And when those words was put to a rhythm and the rhythm got my foot to tapping and my heart to singing, all I could do was take that needle and put it back at the beginning of the record so I could hear the man do it again.

  The general store where I saw Lightnin’ Slim had a jukebox that held all the records I liked so well. That’s where I first heard Muddy Waters singing “Rollin’ Stone.” Like John Lee and Lightnin’, he cracked open my soul to everything he said in his songs. I felt like I knew him.

  “Where does Muddy Waters live?” I asked Artigo.

  “Chicago. All these guys live up there in Chicago.”

  “Chicago far away?”

  “Real far.”

  Artigo said the harmonica man called Little Walter lived in Chicago too. He pressed a button, and I watched as one of Walter’s records came on.

  “Sounds like a woman crying, don’t it?” said Artigo.

  “Yes, sir,” I said.

  “Or a man begging,” he added.

  I wasn’t sure what he meant.

  “You ain’t ever begged for it, boy, have you?”

  “I guess not,” I said.

  “You will.”

  I did.

  It happened around the same time all this music started kicking in.

  Now when girls fall in love for the first time, they’ll tell you that the music they happened to be hearing at that time is the prettiest in the world. When boys start into moving with the sex urge, music also goes along with that feeling. Girl or boy, that’s the music that’s gonna travel with you for the rest of your life. It gonna talk to you, walk with you, slip into bed with you, and wake you up in the morning. The seeds of that music are planted in fertile soil.

  For me that music was the blues. Everyone knows that the blues can be both sad and happy. But the blues is also sexy. When the blues gets inside you, it stirs up your nature to get down and dirty.

  In the country, especially in Louisiana where the ground is moist and muddy, we had to get down standing up. We had to learn to make love from a vertical position. That ain’t easy, but baby, where there’s a will, there’s a way. First time it happened I was probably fifteen. It could be awkward, but it also could be good, especially if you find a little bench where your honey could raise up her leg.

  When it came to music, I was wild. When I’d learn Lightnin’ Slim was coming back through or a new Big Boy Crudup tune was loaded on Artigo’s jukebox, I’d run like the wind. When it to came to girls, though, I wasn’t wild. I was careful. That’s ’cause my grandma was careful to warn me that women are like plants in the jungle: many are beautiful and contain ingredients that can heal your body, but others, just as beautiful, contain poison.

  “The wrong woman,” said Grandma, “can kill you. Or treat you in a way that will make you wanna kill yourself.”

  As a young buck, I was following my nature—and my nature was strong—but I was also following Grandma’s advice. I was avoiding the crazy girls, the ones who’d tell everyone their business—and yours. I liked the quiet ones who seemed happy just to enjoy the boy-girl feeling that makes life worthwhile.

  While I was still on the farm, though, it wasn’t sex that was most on my mind but baseball and music. And if it came down to choosing between the two, music was the winner. If me and the boys was hitting the tin can with Mama’s mop stick, for example, and we heard a radio playing Smokey Hogg’s “Good Morning Little Schoolgirl,” I’d shout out, “Rain delay!” and run to the radio. The rain delay lasted as long as the announcer kept playing blues. If the weather was clear, the radio could pick up a station from far-off Tennessee, where they might be playing Willie Mabon’s “I Don’t Know,” J. B. Lenoir’s “Korea Blues,” or Howlin’ Wolf’s “Moanin’ at Midnight.”

  In the catalogues we got from Montgomery Ward and Sears Roebuck I studied the pages with musical instruments. I studied pictures of guitars like other boys studied pictures of half-naked ladies. I had to have me one. There wasn’t a chance in the world to get twenty dollars to send off for a new guitar, but one Christmas something happened that was nearly as good.

  As usual, we had our dinner of fresh pork along with fresh greens, beans, and sweet potatoes. In the evening Coot showed up with his guitar. After drinking more than his fair share of wine, he broke into a sped-up version of Joe Liggins’s “Honeydripper.” That got everyone up to dancing. The weather had been right that winter, and it looked like the land would yield Daddy a decent penny.

  “Henry,” said Daddy, callin
g Coot by his right name, “I been knowing your daddy Jim Smith for many a year. How old was you when he got you this here guitar?”

  “I’d say twelve.”

  “Just about the age of my boy Buddy.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “And I’m guessing that this ain’t the only guitar you have.”

  “You guessing right. Got me another at home. That’s my dry stick for a rainy day.”

  “Well, looks like a little rain today, Coot, ’cause I’m prepared to buy this here guitar from you.”

  When Daddy said those words, my heart started thumping hard against my chest.

  “I couldn’t let you have it for less than five dollars, Mr. Guy.”

  “Well, I got me four dollars just waiting to warm the inside of your pocket.”

  “Four dollars and a little change might do it.”

  “I can find some change,” said Daddy, searching through his pockets. “I can find a quarter.”

  “That quarter,” said Coot, “gonna be lonely by itself. It needs another quarter go with it.”

  “I got a dime to go with it. I got four dollars and thirty-five cent. You can take that money and buy you enough wine to last till the weather turns warm.”

  Daddy handed over the money, and Coot handed me the guitar.