Highway 61 Resurfaced (v5)

by Bill Fitzhugh

  “Mr. Suggs, we can’t,” Buddy said, tipping his hat toward Pigfoot’s car. “That’s all they is to it.” He bit his lower lip to make sure he didn’t say anything else, though there was plenty waiting.

  They glared at one another for a moment before getting into a heated argument. Suggs grew more abusive with each objection Buddy or Willie voiced. The whole thing was agitating Pigfoot, getting under his skin. He was full of piss and vinegar, and this just shook it up. He was young and strong and just finding himself, a man in all of his six feet. And he was damn tired of putting up with this kind of shit. Pigfoot was one of them troublesome coloreds. Talking about people’s rights and all that kinda foolishness. How everybody is due respect, like they was white. With an attitude like that, it didn’t take much of Lamar Suggs to pop Pigfoot’s cork. He tried to tolerate, but the man finally said the wrong thing. Pigfoot took exception to it, and then he took a swing. Suggs partially dodged it but still took a shot on the side of his head.

  A small crowd watched as Earl grabbed Pigfoot while Buddy and Willie tried to calm Suggs. It took all of Earl’s strength to drag Pigfoot toward the car. He was ready to kill the man.

  Buddy and Willie stood between the two parties and, in the process, Buddy did what he could to check Suggs for a gun. He seemed to be unarmed, but Buddy wasn’t sure. He told Suggs they were sorry, but they had a train to catch. “But I heard Elmore James supposed to drop by and play out at Chick’s Inn later on. You oughtta head out there if you wanna record something. Probably be worth somethin’ someday.”

  Earl pushed Pigfoot into the driver’s seat and said to the others, “ Let’s get out of here ’fore anything else happens.” The rest of them got in the car, hoping the trouble was over. They weren’t looking for it. They just wanted to get to Wisconsin.

  Suggs was spitting and cussing and waving his fist. His face was pinched and red and furious. “Don’t you drive off on me,” he shouted as they pulled out of the lot. He bent over, grabbed a rock, and put another ding in the trunk of the old car. “Goddamn niggers!” Suggs stood in the parking lot for a while trying to decide what he was going to do and, after a minute, he turned and headed inside. He needed a drink or two after bein’ disrespected like that.

  BUDDY, WILLIE, AND Earl took turns doing their imitation of Lamar Suggs trying to intimidate them. Pigfoot was still wound up a little bit but laughed and said, “You know I’da cleaned that cracker’s plow, you hadn’t pulled me off like you did.”

  “Oh yeah,” Earl said. “I’m his guardian angel. Probably saved his sorry life.” He turned and threw a phony punch at Willie, who twisted his head like a stuntman to play along. “I’m surprised that right of yours didn’t kill him.”

  They were still laughing at that when the headlights shined on something in the road ahead. Pigfoot slowed down. He leaned forward, pointing, and said, “The hell is that?” A moment later they realized it was a man, facedown in a pool of blood. Pigfoot stopped about ten yards short of it, not sure what to do. They all sort of looked around, but it was pitch black and there was nothing to see. The man was lying in the other lane, one leg akimbo, one arm reaching for the stripe in the road like it might be the thing to save him. Pigfoot slowly eased the car up alongside the body. Nobody said a word until Buddy opened his door.

  “What’re you doin’?” Pigfoot said.

  Buddy didn’t answer. He just got out. Earl and Willie got out too.

  Pigfoot looked into the darkness surrounding them and blurted, “What are you—” His mouth tensed as the fear crept in. “This ain’t nothing but trouble. Get in here and let’s go.”

  Willie looked down at the body and nodded. “That’s Hamp, all right.”

  Pigfoot was half-past nervous. He knew they shouldn’t be there, knew if they hadn’t stopped, nothing bad would have come from this. But now? He said, “C’mon, let’s go!”

  Earl bent down and felt for a pulse. He stood up, shaking his head. “Ain’t been dead too long.”

  HENRY LEFLEUR HAD been searching Hamp’s car back on the farm road. He stopped when he saw the Packard slow down. He watched as the three Negroes got out and looked at the body and he figured this was as good a chance as he was going to get, so he walked back to his car and turned the key to start it.

  Pigfoot heard the engine. His head snapped to look, but he didn’t see anything. “Get yo’ black asses back in the car or you be walkin’ to Memphis!” He could feel all kinds of bad about to happen.

  Henry put on his headlights and the red police light at the same time. He hit the siren and the gas and kicked up some gravel. He liked a dramatic entrance.

  Buddy, Willie, Earl, and Pigfoot turned to see the lights coming down the farm road toward them. Pigfoot yelled over the siren for the others to get back in the car. But none of them moved. He yelled again and swore he was going to leave them standing there. The lights were getting closer and he screamed, “Goddammit, c’mon!” But they seemed frozen, like it was their part to play. And it didn’t matter how loud he hollered. But Pigfoot wasn’t going to stay for whatever happened next. If his friends were too dumb to leave, that was their problem. He knew there was no explanation four black men could give that would let them leave the county under these circumstances. They’d all end up swinging in the breeze, like Billie’s strange fruit. Pigfoot couldn’t stand the thought. The tires burned on the road and he shot out of there like a rocket.

  LAMAR SUGGS HAD a couple of drinks before he decided he might as well go on out to Chick’s Inn, see if Elmore James showed up, before he called it a night. He was heading up Highway 61, a few miles north of town, when he saw the red lights, the men standing in the road, and what looked to be a dead body. At first he figured there’d been a wreck. But then he saw who LeFleur had handcuffed together. He was smiling when he pulled up to the scene and said, “Hey, Sheriff, what’s going on? You need any hep?”

  LeFleur explained how he’d come across these three Negroes soon after they’d killed the other one lying on the road. Said there was another’n had driven off. Didn’t get a look at him, though.

  Lamar smiled. “I can tell you who that was,” he said with understated enthusiasm. “It was that Pigfoot Morgan. You know, works over at the cotton compress with this one.” He pointed at Buddy, then explained how he’d seen them all leave the Key Hole Club together, half an hour earlier. As he did this, he turned and gave a squinty smile to Buddy and the others.

  They all denied any wrongdoing. But it didn’t matter, and they knew it. They were in the wrong place at the wrong time. The ambulance arrived a moment later to take Hamp Doogan’s body away. Henry put Buddy, Willie, and Earl into the squad car and said he was taking them back to the jail.

  “Well now, Sheriff, hang on just a second,” Suggs said. “I got a better idea.”

  THEY TOOK BUDDY, Willie, and Earl over to the radio station and put them in the production room. Suggs told them to get the chairs from the far wall and circle them around the X marked on the floor with white tape. Then he set up a microphone in the middle before going to the control room to set the levels.

  The men didn’t speak until Henry walked in. Willie said, “Sheriff LeFleur, you know we ain’t killed that man. You know it. You was watching from up that farm road the whole time.”

  “He was dead when we got there,” Buddy said.

  “This ain’t no bad luck,” Earl said. “This a setup.”

  Henry laughed. “Niggers, y’all crazy? Either you killed that man or it was that Morgan boy. Right? I caught you there with the body. You can’t deny that. I looked around, didn’t see nobody else. You see anybody else out on that road?” He shook his head to emphasize his point. “No, you didn’t. And you know why? ‘Cause there weren’t nobody else. So, like I said, either you killed that man or it was that Morgan boy.” Henry held a finger up, like he was offering a deal, and said, “But I tell you what, I’m gonna be fair about this. I’ll let you pick if it was one of you or the other’n.” He gave a big-h
earted smile.

  Buddy shook his head. “You know that ain’t right.”

  There were no surprises in Henry’s response to this comment. He leaned into Buddy’s face and made things as clear as they needed to be. Then he looked over at Lamar, who was in the control room giving a thumbs-up, saying the levels were good and the tape was rolling.

  Henry swaggered around the room, told them all how it was gonna be. Earl, Willie, and Buddy knew they had a choice in the matter, but it wasn’t a good one. There were too many lives in the balance, women and children who didn’t have anything to do with what had happened. It was a circumstance they had to accept. After he’d made that much clear, Henry said, “Well, anyway, why don’t y’all just start makin’ them sounds you do.”

  “We ain’t got no guitars,” Willie said, throwing a finger toward Memphis. “Pigfoot run off with ’em.”

  Henry hadn’t thought of this until now. He got red in the face and yelled at Suggs, “Lamar! Where we keep the gi-tars?”

  The gi-tars weren’t that much to speak of and the harps were pretty tired too, but they played, and after everybody more or less tuned what they had, Buddy counted ’em down. Slowly. One … two …

  One … two … three …

  Buddy started with a lone note, low and troubled. He bent the thing just as Willie came in to make a chord of pure despair. Earl played along underneath, with a steady, cheerless rhythm. Their changes were brooding, dark. The lyrics full of doom and injustice.

  They did six songs before Henry said they were done and made them sign the contracts and the statements naming Clarence “Pigfoot” Morgan as the killer of Hamp Doogan. He held them all in jail for a few days, until they caught Pigfoot, then he told them all to make themselves scarce. Said he didn’t want to see any of their sorry black asses until Pigfoot’s trial was long over, lest they get a subpoena, show up in the courtroom, and contradict their previous statements. That wouldn’t do.

  When they got out of jail, they all went their separate ways. They’d missed their train and their opportunity in Grafton, Wisconsin. They stayed away for a couple of months thinking about what they’d done. And when they finally returned, none of them was the same man that had left. Willie had turned to Jesus. Buddy had grown hard and self-loathing. Earl had turned up his crazy knob.

  After getting out of jail, Earl tried a hand to fix things. Went to a slaughterhouse and bought him a beef tongue, split it from the tip down to the base. Wrote the name of the district attorney and Henry LeFleur on a piece of paper and put it in the split. Added eighteen pods of hot pepper and pinned the tongue back together before dropping it in a tin pail filled with vinegar. Kept it there until the day they were supposed to hand down the verdict on Pigfoot. Took the tongue out, doused it with kerosene, and burned it. But hoodoo’s no different than regular praying. The prayers are always answered, just that sometimes the answer’s no.

  Pigfoot never had a chance. He was caught trying to cross the river at Friar’s Point and was brought back to Greenville where, it would be fair to say, he received a swift trial. It would be less fair to say he was convicted by a jury of his peers. But convicted he was and sentenced to fifty years on Parchman Farm. He maintained his innocence for fifteen years before he gave up. Figured he was wasting his breath.

  About thirty-five years later, a lawyer named Jeremy Lynch read an article in an obscure blues fanzine that a friend of his published. The article was titled, “Blind, Crippled, Crazy, and Railroaded—What Happened to Pigfoot Morgan?” It was a broad-strokes retelling of the legend of the night Buddy and the others were to leave for Wisconsin, including the pure speculation that Pigfoot had been framed for the death of Hamp Doogan. There was no proof offered, just a what-if, but it was enough to tickle a lawyer’s antennae. Sensing an opportunity, Jeremy Lynch did some research that led him to the special-collections library at the University of Mississippi law school. There he found the prosecutor’s original notes along with the tape recording of Ruby Finch’s testimony which, together, brought Pigfoot’s conviction into serious doubt. With this, Lynch knew he had a solid (and profitable) case, so he went to visit Pigfoot and offered his legal services.

  32

  “WE’ RE BACK ON WVBR-FM,” Rick said, coming out of a commercial break. “If you’re just joining us, we’re talking to Buddy Cotton, Willie Jefferson, Earl Tate, and Pigfoot Morgan about the legendary Blind, Crippled, and Crazy sessions. Also here in the studio is Shelby LeFleur Jr., who has been in possession of the lost tapes for all these years.” Rick looked at his guests and said, “Unless any of you have something to add, I suppose it’s time to play the tapes.”

  No one said a word. They all had their eyes on the reel to reel. So Rick reached over and hit play.

  “Y’all sit over there,” Suggs was heard saying. “‘Ginst that wall. Bring ’em chairs out at the end, a little crescent shape, like ’at. Where ’at X is.” You could almost see him pointing.

  The words and the ambient sounds triggered memories as strong as smell for the men who were in the room that night. It was as if the magnetic tape had recorded their fear, preserving it for half a century, so they could experience it again. Hearing these voices was like a visit from the grave. Buddy, Willie, and Earl exchanged eerie glances.

  On the tape, Henry made things clear. One of them was going to jail for Doogan’s death, or they could put it on Pigfoot Morgan’s plate. The choice was theirs.

  “You know that ain’t right,” Buddy said.

  Henry barked, “You know what, nigger? Turns out that me and the sovereign state of Mississippi are the ones ’round here gets to say what’s right, not you.”

  “Levels’re good,” Suggs said. “Let’s cut a side.”

  Henry gave half a laugh. “All right, boys,” he said. “Here’s the deal. First we gonna get that recording you’s supposed to do for Mr. Suggs and then you gonna sign some statements against that friend of yours, I mean, if you can call him that. I’m not sure that’s what I’d call somebody left me standing out there on the side of the road. But, you know, that’s just me. Oh, then you gone sign some contracts.” After a pause Henry casually inquired about the well-being of Willie’s sister’s children and Earl’s wife, Claudie. He said he was glad to hear they were all doing well and said he hoped they stayed that way. Then he said, “Well, okay. I guess we’re ready. Why don’t y’all just start makin’ them sounds you do.”

  There was a pause before Buddy counted ’em down. Slowly.

  One … two …

  One … two … three …

  And then he struck that lone note.

  And every note that followed lived up to the legend that had been growing for fifty years. Buddy’s slide-guitar work was heartbreaking. Willie was blowing tragedy out of the harp and Earl’s voice was possessed of all the misery and hopelessness of their circumstances. They started with a sorrowful version of “Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad.” Earl’s phrasing conjured the moan of a tortured man’s soul at the end of each chorus when he sang, “Don’t wanna be treated this way.”

  Henry browbeat and threatened the men between each song. They did “Big House Blues” and “Born for Bad Luck.” The passionate playing and the intense vocals raised the hair on Rick’s neck and made him think of Neil Young as he sang about the screaming and bullwhips cracking, especially when they did a version of Leroy Carr’s “How Long, How Long.”

  Buddy, Willie, and Earl were moved too. They’d been so terrorized when they made the recordings that they hadn’t really heard themselves. Between songs, the three men listened stoically to the words that had come out of Henry’s mouth fifty years ago. It was the second time they’d heard him say these things and they didn’t hear any new meaning or significance this time around. That’s just how it was, the way they were treated, business as usual in a place that seemed a million miles away now.

  But, as this was the first time Pigfoot had heard these words, he listened keenly. He’d heard about the tapes, bu
t he didn’t know they were real. He figured they were just the product of somebody’s imagination and never thought if they did exist, that they were anything more than a few songs. But the tapes were real, as real as the threats Henry was making on them.

  Not surprisingly, it was the stuff between the songs that was music to Pigfoot’s ears. Every word out of Henry LeFleur’s mouth helped lift the dark cloud that had descended on Pigfoot after he’d found the burned files and the melted reels in Jeremy Lynch’s office.

  As the tape neared the end, Rick noticed Pigfoot grinning like a small dog with a big bone. “Mr. Morgan,” Rick said, “it looks like you might have something to add here.”

  “Well,” Pigfoot said. “I had this lawyer name of Lynch contacted me a year or so ago. Said he’d found some evidence that would help prove I hadn’t killed Hamp Doogan, like I’d been sayin’ all along. Said he thought I might have a good lawsuit’ cause of all the time I was in jail. He said if I could get Buddy, Willie, and Earl to tell what went on out on Highway 61 that night, along with the evidence he’d found, he said he could put things all right for me. But the lawyer disappeared and somebody destroyed the evidence he’d found, so things were looking down.” Then he smiled and said, “But I believe these tapes might be just the thing.”

  He was right. By the end of the tape, Henry had said everything necessary to back himself and Washington County into the corner that is a civil-rights lawsuit. Malice, coercion under color of state law, actions that were racially motivated. It was all there.