Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  He bumped the stroller up over a curb, and the baby began to cry. We walked without talking for a few blocks, the clackety-clack of skateboard wheels fading behind us. But closer to home, both he and the baby mellowed. Dilworth stopped smiling, and his eyes stopped squinting.

  “Then,” he said, “there’s that feeling in your spine, and it’s all right.” His voice went up in pitch and grew soft, as if he were embarrassed. He was talking about rock. “When the arc is just starting to arc? And you’re saying this could be Van Halen, this could be Neil Young. It’s like you’re bearing witness. It’s not ‘Ching-ching, here we go.’ It’s ‘I saw it. It does exist.’ There’s something really there. It’s not just a need for chaos. It’s—yeah. That’s what I want.” His voice deepened again, and his pace evened out. The baby had nodded off. We stopped in front of Dilworth’s stoop. “Clear Channel?” he said. “That’s money. I need it to buy liquor and baby clothes.”

  13Born, Again

  ON THE FOURTH OF JULY my friend Jeff and I took a canoe out to the middle of the pond to sit beneath the fireworks. Sparks fell like a hallucination of rain, red, green, and purple streaming down to meet their reflections. The folks in the trailer park on the south beach had strung up speakers from which bass-heavy, bubblegum machismo throbbed across the water, Lee Greenwood’s “God Bless the USA” and Toby Keith’s “Courtesy of the Red, White and Blue (The Angry American).” Mostly we heard the whistle, bang, boom of amateur ammunition, a carnival of gunpowder detonating not so far above us. “Pret-ty, pret-ty, ­pret-ty good,” said Jeff. A neat brick of a man with a drawl that drags on his vowels only when he’s tired, angry, or listening to blues, Jeff is a Mississippian by birth and a New Yorker by mailing address; but after their son died, Jeff’s wife, Gretchen, wanted to go home. That, for her, is New Hampshire, so they bought a cabin beside this pond. There are few restrictions on fireworks in New Hampshire: If it blows up and it sparkles, it’s legal. “Safe”? Live free or die. When the pond’s denizens worked their celebration up to full explosive fervor, we were trapped on the water. Had we headed for shore, we concluded, we might take a direct hit. So we sat motionless in our canoe, glad to be adrift in the glory, purple light and the smell of smoke settling on a cold pond, marijuana threading through the dark from other boats we saw only in flashes.

  My head was full of an idea I want to call quitting, though that seems too agitated, too much of a verb where I need a noun. Quitting is a place, free not just of ambition but of bitterness, too. A place where what could have been is simply not, neither forgotten nor clung to. At most just observed. Like the sparks that didn’t sizzle when they hit the pond.

  A book I’d been working on for years, a book I’d hoped would be the book, an arrangement of words that would rearrange the world, or at least my corner of it, had slipped into publication and then obscurity like a stone into a well; there was the sound of a splash—a review!—and then nothing. The world remains the same, even my corner. I’d survive, but that’s what frightened me. I didn’t want to feel that shock of miscalculation again, my heart seizing up like I was diving into a lake that turned out to be cardiac-arrest cold. I’d been suspended in that moment for months. Half-in, half-out, my breath always gone, startled each day by the disappearance of years. I wanted to follow my book into the water.

  Jeff and I were both close to the country of quitting that night, but Jeff faced something infinitely harder, colder than I can imagine: the one-year anniversary, rapidly approaching, of the death of Jasper, his firstborn, who died less than a month old.

  It is awful and absurd to put these two deaths—a book, a baby—in the same story. But such are the conditions under which I’m considering this word, this place, quitting. I’ve been looking for a map, directions, a way to get there. I think I’ve found it: a tune lodged in my mind, a song called “Down South Blues,” as performed by the late and mostly forgotten Dock Boggs. I came to Boggs through a magazine, which asked me to write about him. I had an idea for an essay about the 1960s folk revival, in which a resurrected Boggs was a minor player, and about the mellowing of age I expected I’d find in the albums he recorded then. But that’s not what I heard. Across three albums recorded by Boggs in the sixties, he’s not so much rooted as unmoored, growing not older but younger. It’s terrifying. Because what’s really happening is that he’s growing backward, back to 1927, when he recorded the eight songs that would for decades define what might with kindness be called a career. Back to 1927 when he was young but not very hopeful, twenty-nine years old, old, indeed, for where he came from, and putting aside his pride to croon or maybe hiss for some record-company men. But he couldn’t really get rid of the pride, so it twisted, became contempt, fury, resignation. Soul-snapping work, that singing.

  God, it sounds good to me right now. This is what it might sound like to you: There’s a banjo; imagine the finger-picking style of a fat, hairy spider. And a voice; think of a thick-necked tomcat with a broken paw.

  I’m a-goin’ to the station

  Going to catch the fastest train that goes,

  I’m a-goin’ back South

  Where the weather suits my clothes.

  This isn’t a song about the weather. Boggs’s voice is a mean, disappointed slur, the narrator of his song a man in retreat.

  I was reared in a country

  Where the snow it never fell

  I’m a-goin’ back South

  If I don’t do so well.

  If ? It’s a foregone conclusion. That’s the twist on the song’s homey title: “Down South” isn’t a better place, it’s what he’s settling for.

  I’m a-goin’ back South

  If I wear out ninety-nine pair of shoes

  ’Cause I’m broken-hearted,

  I got those down South blues.

  I’m writing here about this song and Boggs and what he means to me and might mean to you not because “Down South Blues” contains some old, strange folk wisdom, forgotten truths, but because I want to write about the question of quitting in the most general sense. Quitting not a career or the prospect of being a parent, but abandoning a certain modest expectation. The expectation that, with some dues paid, some losses registered, some ambitions shelved, life might proceed for a spell roughly according to the laws of physics. An input of energy results in motion. Simple math, nothing more than 2 + 2 = 4. Pages pile up and become books; babies grow up and become children.

  The belief that either will necessarily prosper, that health and success are the natural outcomes of hard work and careful planning, that “things will work out,” is grotesque: tragic and comic at the same time, funny because it’s sad, sad because it’s funny, awful because it just might be true. Seen from a distance, through a telescope or at the far remove of “art,” a story or a painting or a poem or a song, both the most mundane of expectations—one’s work acknowledged—and the most fundamental of ambitions—a life conceived—are painful spectacle, grievous mismatches of desire and power, of want and the ability to make it so.

  But the grotesque hints at its own cure, the speculative creation otherwise known as “hope.” We hope when the odds, no matter how good, are still that: odds, chance, a gamble in which the rules may change at any time, for any reason, with or without our acquiescence. We hope when we understand that circumstances are beyond our control, when will is not equal to effect, when we are not the subjects of a story but its objects. Hope isn’t optimistic; it’s the face of despair. My grandmother taught me that, not long before she died. “Despair,” she said, was her favorite word. “It’s not a bad thing. It’s a gift. A recognition.” It’s the opposite of dread. Perception, not speculation. You accept the facts of your fate rather than reading them as evidence of a judgment or a moral. Some people might call that quitting.

  I’ll keep writing; it’s how I eat. Jeff and Gretchen? They’re still here. But, after Jasper died, just
barely on some days. The details of Jasper’s struggle aren’t mine to tell. It was short in the scale of ordinary things but very long and very deep on the chart of lives lived and lost. He fought for his, and if we accept that the only real dignity afforded to the human frame and condition is the ability to “contradict what is,” as a theologian I admire puts it—to speak, or to simply be, against the fundamental unfairness of living and dying—then Jasper’s life, less than a month in totality, was magnificent. He should not have died, but he did.

  I don’t know what happened then between Jeff and Gretchen. The next time I saw them was from a distance, sitting in the front pews at Jasper’s memorial. An Episcopal priest from Mississippi named Buddy, a white-haired, square-jawed man Jeff had known since he was a boy, presided and gave the finest eulogy I have ever heard, a remembrance and a reminder: Friends, family, don’t tell Jeff and Gretchen that Jasper is someplace better, don’t tell them this was a lesson, do not say that God works in mysterious ways. Death is an end. Something—someone—Jasper, in this world—isn’t anymore. That’s it. Over.

  I think of that priest when I listen to Boggs. Not because Boggs was kind or wise but because blues music, even Boggs’s hillbilly blues, is death music. Recognition music, as full an expression of despair as is possible.

  I’m writing this beside another dark lake, but tonight there are no fireworks. It’s October, the moon is full, the water is black, slicked flat by the cold. It’s too thick to ripple for the sliver of a breeze that slices across my neck. Jeff and Gretchen are back in Brooklyn; they’re expecting another baby. The pregnancy is hard on them both, and frightening, and sometimes they speak of a feeling of doom, but I never hear dread in their voices, just the despair of which hope is born. They hope this baby will survive. My wife and I are expecting a child, too, our first. We don’t hope ours will survive because, despite what we know, we can’t really imagine he or she won’t. We haven’t yet been pushed to the point of despair.

  I SAID THIS WAS a story about quitting, didn’t I? In fact, it’s a story about Boggs, born Moran Lee Boggs on February 7, 1898, in Norton, Virginia, half of his life lived underground as a miner, a scoop-faced, dainty-fingered man, deceased February 7, 1971, in the same grim country, remembered—when he is—mostly for his first recordings in 1927, eight sides that are as dark a document of pop music as any I know.

  “Nasty” might be a better word. Here’s his “Pretty Polly,” an old, old ballad sung about a man who seduces his fiancée—she’s pregnant in earlier versions—into the hills, there to show her the grave he has dug for her.

  She threw her arms around him and ’gan for to weep

  She threw her arms around him and ’gan for to weep

  At length Pretty Polly she fell asleep.

  He threw the dirt over her and turned away to go

  Threw the dirt over her and turned away to go

  Down to the river where the deep waters flow.

  Boggs was nine years married when he sang that song for a New York City record company. His wife, Sara, had not borne any children, and an illness she’d suffered had wiped out their financial prospects, putting an end to Boggs’s almost-career as a coal operator, a subcontractor who might stay on the surface while other men worked for him underground. Boggs turned to liquor, for himself and for sale. He was, he’d say, a “rambling man.” A vicious one, too. He once planned on killing Sara’s entire family for being “overbearing.” “I’m talking about being set on it,” he told a nervous Mike Seeger in interviews recorded as part of the folk revival of the sixties. Maybe those were just words; all he ever did was beat his brother-in-law within an inch of his life. “The blood was just squirtin’—I guess sometimes squirtin’ three-feet high.”

  Take that image and tack it onto “Pretty Polly.” Picture the mouth of the singer open in an oval; snag the lower left corner of the lip and pull. The voice you imagine, an upside-down sneer, is the sound of Dock Boggs. Not hate; something broken.

  Old-time music, with those eerie tunings and coal-filtered voices that sound so strange to contemporary ears, has no monopoly on darkness. Dock Boggs—a man with fists for hands and a voice like strychnine—belongs as much on a bill with filth-punk G. G. Allin (“Die When You Die”), grunge fatality Kurt Cobain (whose song “Polly” is itself a distant relation of Boggs’s “Pretty Polly” and just as brutal), and assassinated hip-hop genius Biggie Smalls (“Ready to Die”)—dead, respectively, of overdose, despair, and the murderous ebb and flow of insult and capital—as he does with old-timey all-stars Dick Justice, Aunt Molly Jackson, and Clarence Ashley. Maybe more so, for like Allin, Cobain, and Smalls, Boggs was a theatrical man, both a balladeer and a blues singer. He knew how to snarl and wink at the same time. That’s what makes such artists frightening—you can never be certain which is surface and which is true meaning. Is it the threat or the invitation?

  What marks Boggs as different from other musicians murdered by their own songs is that he survived. That’s simply a fact, not a clue; it’s a result of chance, not the saving grace of art, much less the religion Boggs would find and then lose again. Maybe that’s what’s drawing me to his music: It means so little. One musician pulls a song—yes, “Be My Fuckin’ Whore,” by G. G. Allin, is a song, no uglier than Boggs’s “Pretty Polly”—out of his soul and then dies, scraped empty; another plucks songs up by the roots, gathering a thin fist of daisies, and remains standing for no good reason, with no moral.

  EVERY NIGHT FOR THE past week I’ve walked down to the lake to sit on the dock and listen to Boggs. It’s not his heartache or mine that I’m really trying to understand. I’m listening for something else; something about despair, letting go of something that was, but will not be, whether it’s a book or a baby or a way out of whatever Boggs wanted to escape—the mines? his childless marriage? the violence not just of his days but his mind?

  The violence seems essential. Not the fists and the bottles and the bullets but the rage and abandon, thorny plants as native to the country of quitting as to the land of ambition. “This violence,” Professor Barry O’Connell of Amherst College warns us in an essay on Boggs, “was not, as some writers would have it, an inexorable element of “mountaineer” character. The conditions for dependably ordered human relations did not exist because of the governing political economy.”

  Ain’t that the truth! Here’s another one. The violence is an inexorable part of human character, as bred into my bones and yours as into Boggs’s. Greil Marcus, describing the difficulty of describing Boggs and his conditions, cites D. H. Lawrence writing on the American desire to believe that art is necessarily creative, that it redeems. “Destroy! destroy! destroy! hums the under-consciousness,” wrote Lawrence. “Love and produce! Love and produce! cackles the upper consciousness. And the world hears only the Love-and-produce cackle. Refuses to hear the hum of desperation underneath.”

  That hum is not a governing political economy. It’s not capitalism, industrialism, or contemporary consumerism; it’s merely amplified by such conditions. I hear it now, sitting by the black water. I’ve settled across the evenings into a playlist that begins with “Pretty Polly” and jumps forward to some of the gospel numbers Boggs recorded in the sixties—“Little Black Train,” which is just about as scary as a murder ballad, and “Calvary,” which isn’t, although it is, technically, a murder ballad, one in which we’re all guilty—and then through some of the funny songs, “My Old Horse Died” and “Brother Jim Got Shot,” the kind of stuff that passes for laughs in the world of Boggs, and coming around to the two songs that won Boggs his first recording contract: “Country Blues” and “Down South Blues.” I’ve tried dividing Boggs songs up into lists of tragic, comic, and religious, but although these two tunes are not the latter I can’t say for sure whether they’re meant to be funny or sad. “Country Blues” is, at best, bitter comedy. “Give me corn bread when I’m hungry, good people,” keens Bog
gs,

  Corn whiskey when I’m dry

  Pretty women a-standin’ around me

  Sweet heaven when I die.

  Which, of course, he does by the song’s end.

  “Down South Blues” is even more of a puzzle. It’s the only one of his original eight sides that sounds close to a traditional blues song, which is what it was; Boggs thought he’d heard it on a record by a blues singer named Sara Martin, but Boggs scholars—there are many—speculate that the source was more likely Alberta Hunter, Rosa Henderson, or Clara Smith. Which is to say, hillbilly Boggs learned one of his signature numbers, the tune the New York talent scouts who discovered him on a quest for “mountain music” marked “good,” from a black woman, who likely as not sang the song in Chicago or Manhattan, and sang it about a man who’d made of her a fool, a rambling man like Boggs.

  “I found out / It don’t pay to love a Northern man,” sang Rosa Henderson in her version. “You’ve got another sweetie to soothe your brow,” lamented Alberta in hers. “Don’t go off and let them men make a fool out of you,” sang Clara. “Because their love’s like water / It turns off and on.” Some women sang it with piano, some with a horn; they all sang it slow. Boggs played it on a borrowed banjo, fast, and put the “love like water” up at the front of the song, broadening the scope of his accusation—love itself, not just a fickle lover, is unreliable or worse in Boggs’s “Down South Blues.” There are no Northern men in his song; it’s “the man,” singular. Authority; the law; the record-company men Boggs spurned after only eight sides to show them they couldn’t walk on him just because he was a country boy. “We’s all borned equal,” he’d insist in old age. To prove it as a young man he recorded eight songs and then he went home, down south, and like Clara and Rosa he’d wear out ninety-nine pair of shoes to get there.