Sweet Heaven When I Die

by Jeff Sharlet

  So “Down South Blues” is also a tramping song, a wandering song, a going-home song. Only home is notable chiefly for what it’s not, which is up there. Where love fails, where the Man will make a fool of you. And getting away isn’t a matter of pride but of survival, not a march but a lips-pursed leave-taking. Boggs’s banjo makes it sound like a tiptoe. Cartoonish, like a black-and-white Bugs Bunny making a getaway, a rubbery rabbit sneaking out the back door. Chastened by a man or the Man or “those men,” as Boggs sang it in his old age, or his fellow man, period—the human race that one cousin, admiring his ferocity, said Boggs belonged to only by half measure.

  He looked like a cartoon himself, a tall, lead-limbed, big-hipped boy. He couldn’t seem to find a pair of pants that fit him. Posing in a suit, banjo on his knee, his cuffs ride up his shinbones; towering over two pals in a portrait, his black-and-white-check trousers bunch around his waist. He wanted to be a dandy, but he had neither the resources nor the taste. He seems to know it, glaring at the camera, his nose askew, eyes burning, furious at the lens for pegging him as what he was—a damn hillbilly. Young Boggs imagined himself becoming a cosmopolitan. As a teenager already working in the mines (he started at twelve) he’d saved up $1.50 for The Standard Book of Etiquette, so he would know how to “act at parties” in case he was ever invited to the White House. “I never been out of this hill,” he’d say of his 1927 trip to New York City to record “Down South Blues,” a song that spelled its own failure, the singer’s predetermined defeat. “I was self-conscious enough and always had enough of a thought about myself as far as to care about what people thought about me and wanted to act as much like a human being as I should, I could.”

  There were limits to that, and Boggs knew it. You can hear him creeping around them in his interviews with Seeger, boasting of how the record men had wanted more and how he’d showed them. Eight songs committed to wax, he returned to the mountains. He’d record four more, not nearly as good, in 1929. Then he pawned his banjo sometime in the early 1930s, and didn’t play again for three decades.

  WHEN I’VE HAD ENOUGH of the dark and the cold, I walk up the hill from the lake and go inside and down to the basement, to look up Boggs on the computer; to find a conversation about him and what I thought I’d heard. There’s a great deal written about Boggs, most of it amiable, much of it concerned with his peculiar banjo-playing style. Look it up if you have a banjo. My friend Jeff loaned me his. For a long time after Jasper died, I don’t think he played much of anything. But when I gave him a copy of this essay, he told me he’d taken his guitar down from the wall to puzzle his way through “Sugar Baby,” a song sung most venomously, most beautifully, by Boggs in his 1927 recording session.

  Got no sugar baby, now

  Got no honey baby, now

  Done all I can do,

  Said all I can say.

  Or maybe I’m wrong; maybe it’s the 1965 version we should be most wary of. His voice is woodier, and he gargles when he sings, “Done all I can do,” and he fades at the end of the song so subtly it takes your breath away and doesn’t give it back.

  Who’ll rock the cradle,

  Who’ll sing the song,

  Who’ll rock the cradle when I’m gone?

  “Boggs sang like a seer,” writes Greil Marcus, who describes him “standing outside of himself as the prophet of his own life, the angel of his own extinction.” That sounds about right; “to prophesy,” the philosopher Cornel West reminds us, “is not to predict an outcome but rather to identify concrete evils.” But in an essay against Marcus called “Corn Bread When I’m Hungry: Dock Boggs and Rock Criticism” that’s nearly as good as the Marcus essay itself, William Hogeland charges that prophecy and darkness are the products of the critic’s own romantic inclinations. “Marcus insists on hearing in Boggs’s recordings from the 1920s what he imagines about Boggs’s personal pain and anxiety; he describes Boggs’s singing and playing as if music were always literally reflective of the life of the musician.”

  Well, yes. “‘Men can see nothing around them that is not their own image,’” Marcus quotes noted old-time music aficionado Karl Marx. But Marcus, it turns out, is skeptical about the efficacy of mirrors. “Here,” he writes of the mountains from which Boggs emerged in 1927 and to which he returned to lay his banjo down, “you could look a lifetime and not see your reflection.”

  I doubt that; I suspect that’s all we can see in a place that’s alien, all we can hear in a song that’s strange. Or, at least, in Dock Boggs’s odd recordings, dispatches not just from the coal-stripped, overgrown moonscape of southwestern Virginia but from the White House reception of his imagination. His music comes from the country in between, the lost and little-documented consciousness of an original voice, self-created out of wreckage, false starts, dying sounds, retooled clichés, and sprawling ambitions. Such art doesn’t redeem, it reflects, like the surface of a pond.

  Which is why, perhaps, Dock Boggs could pick up his banjo after three decades during which he got God and got sober and got old and then play “Down South Blues,” a song about quitting—a song about going home—for college kids up north, kids just beginning their adult lives, kids thrilled by the authenticity of the buzz-cut old miner with his skinny black tie cinched tight around a neck gone flabby with age, titillated by “Pretty Polly,” and—maybe—rattled by the implications not just of Boggs’s biography but by the bones of a song like “Down South Blues,” the comedy of ninety-nine pairs of shoes and the tragedy of the singer’s inability to endure, his determination to check out rather than be made a fool.

  And then, after another three decades, here’s yet another Boggs revival. Now there are rediscoveries of the albums he recorded upon first being rediscovered. Three decades hence, there’ll probably be another. Maybe my child-to-be, all grown up, will sit by a lake listening to Boggs, licking inevitable wounds, smoothing down regrets, wondering about quitting, about giving up, giving in. I guess that possibility—that this could go on forever, that there is no real answer to the question of quitting—is what you call, in music, modal; the tune refuses to resolve.

  That’s how it was for Boggs, too: always quitting, going back where he came from, and somehow never getting there. A brute in his youth, he found peace in middle age, only to revert to savagery and ambition in his last years. Boggs had meant to give it up, to quit, to become a Christian, a churchgoer like his wife, Sara—to become as much like a human being as he should, or could. And then those old songs ruined it all. By the end of the forty hours of interviews recorded by Seeger, in December 1969, he’s no longer in the actual South in which he spent most of his quiet years, but in the dark of the songs that he’d haunted even more than they haunted him. “I’m going over to the hardware and have them order me a snub-nose .38 Special”—Boggs’s old weapon of choice—“The Smith grip,” he clarifies. “Don’t want to kill nobody, but if anybody fool with me, they encountering danger.” The issue at hand involved the legal status of a cesspool. Tragic or comic? Religious? “Inexorable”?

  So Boggs wasn’t quite a human being yet, not a whole one. But then, who is? We are none of us human yet, only trying and quitting and trying and tiptoeing out the back door. We recorded our eight sides and went home, singing the “Down South Blues,” and then we had a baby and now the little guy, the little gal, is going up north, always up north, where they’re going to sing their little hearts out, to escape the mines, to get up from underground, to walk like a man, walk like a woman, to become human. We are trying to become human and we are not there yet. We are still licking our wounds, fighting over cesspools, sitting perplexed by the side of the water or brokenhearted in the middle of the pond while the world blows up and sparkles. We’re praying that the baby will live, knowing it might now, recognizing that there are odds, there are always odds, a chance, a gamble, a blues. Which is why there will always be another Boggs revival, or if not of Boggs then of some si
nger like him—a man or a woman who wanted to be human and failed and accepted that and then tried again, anyway. This is not a redemption story. Born again? Christ, no. We’re still waiting to be born. Not waiting; hoping.

  Acknowledgments

  I WROTE MOST OF these essays during a period in which I was also engaged in writing two linked books about the history of Christian fundamentalism and American politics. Echoes of that work can be found here, particularly in “Clouds, When Determined by Context”—a dispatch from the archives of American fundamentalism that seemed to me to be what my mentor back in college, Michael Lesy, called “precious and useless knowledge”—and in “It Costs Nothing to Say,” the story of a side trip I made while doing some research in Germany. But “side trip” isn’t really the right word—all these pieces represent escapes, or attempted escapes, from my long immersion in an authoritarian worldview that seeks only the lowest common denominator. In “You Must Draw a Long Bead to Shoot a Fish” I make fun of a bit of academic jargon, “sites of resistance,” but the truth is I experienced the writing of these pieces as investigations of the most essential dignity, as defined by Cornel West: “the ability to contradict what is.” One needn’t be a radical scholar, like West, to do so. I was drawn to all the people about whom I write here because I saw them as making those contradictions: West (and his assistant, MaryAnn Rodriguez), the late Brad Will, Chava Rosenfarb, Sondra Shaye, and also those with more complex relationships to the powers that be, the “what is”—in particular, Valerie (“She Said Yes”) and Bryan Dilworth. I’m grateful to the many dozens of other individuals who agreed to speak with me for these stories, on and off the record, as central subjects—Ron Luce, for instance—or as passersby. Last but not least—just the opposite, in fact—are those subjects who were friends before I began writing these pieces and, miraculously, remain friends now: Molly Chilson and John Kearley, Ann Neumann, Jeff Allred, and Gretchen Aguiar.

  Without them there would be no stories here; without editors, they wouldn’t be worth reading. My most important thanks in this regard goes to Alane Salierno Mason at W. W. Norton. Years ago Alane read an article of mine in a trade publication I thought nobody read, invited me for lunch in New York, and suggested that I consider making a book out of it. I didn’t, but that suggestion gave me the courage to go on to make other books, which is why I’m so grateful for this chance to work with Alane on this one. That, and she’s a great editor.

  A writer I admire, Charles Bowden, says in his acknowledgents for Blues for Cannibals that “I tend out of emotional or economic need to park versions of what I am working on with magazines.” I like that way of describing the relationship between the version that appears in a periodical and the version that appears in a book, but in my case I have to give more credit (and some apologies) to the magazine editors who provided me space, money, ideas, and plenty of excellent contradictions, only some of which I’ve chosen to respect here. In particular I’m grateful to Will Dana, Sean Woods, Jason Fine, Eric Bates, and Coco McPherson at Rolling Stone; Bill Wasik at Harper’s; Paul Reyes and Marc Smirnoff at Oxford American; Chris Lehmann at New York; Kiera Don and Lewis Lapham at Lapham’s Quarterly; and Nansi Glick and Aaron Lansky at Pakn Treger.

  Of course they were all getting paid, so I’m even more grateful to those who read drafts of these pieces along the way just because I asked them to: Mia Gallagher, Kathryn Joyce, Peter Manseau, Victoria McKernan, Robert Sharlet (my father, editor, and collaborator), and Meera Subramanian. Most writers pal around with at least a few bookish types, and often they tend to talk about writing. Some of the conversations that were especially helpful in thinking about these pieces were those I had with Michelle Aldredge, Melvin Jules Bukiet, Adam Becker, Paige Boncher, Greg Brooker, Anthea Butler, Mark Dery, Omri Elisha, Joe Fox, Kevin Gray, Miriam Greenberg, Cynthia Huntington (whose poem “Witness for Jehovah” provides the epigraph to chapter 9), Kurt Hartwig, Miriam Isaacs, Stellar Kim, Jay Kirk, Scott Korb, Lori McGlinchey, Fred Mogul, Paul Morris, Quince Mountain, Joachim Neugroschel, Adele Oltman, Matt Power, Irina Reyn, Nathan Schneider, Osagyefo Uhuru Sekou, Kio Stark, Darcey Steinke, Jean Valentine, Eric Vieland, Stewart Wallace, Ben Weiner, Tom Windish, Diane Winston, JoAnn Wypijewski, and Angela Zito. I’m grateful to the institutions that made many of these conversations possible: the MacDowell Colony, the Blue Mountain Center, the Kopkind Colony, the National Yiddish Book Center, Hampshire College, the Dartmouth College English Department, and, at New York University, the Center for Religion and Media, the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute, and the Religious Studies Program. Alyssa Misner and Silvia Iris Carabello provided help with Spanish for “Quebrado.” Emily Missner contributed financial research to “Rock Like Fuck.”

  Like the music industry, publishing is a business, not an art, which is why I know I’m lucky to work with a number of people who see beyond the dollar signs, even as they make sure I get paid: in particular my friend and agent Kathy Anderson, her associate Jessie Kunhardt, and, at Norton, Denise Scarfi and Sue Llewellyn. Even greater thanks must go to those who have no choice but to put up with me, my family: Sharlets, Tezcans, Rabigs, Bakers, Dotis, and, always, a Burde.

  Julie Rabig read every word of this book several times over, and saw to it that a lot more words were left on the cutting-room floor. She’s my first, last, and best editor, and it’s been my honor to be her editor, too. Conveniently, we’re married, although that fact may not have seemed so convenient to her when I was on the road following a story for more days than I like to think of. Patience is a virtue, but wit is essential, and wisdom is a gift; it’s a lucky writer who marries someone with all three. And lucky us, we have a daughter who thinks it’s funny when we type, which makes our work a form of entertainment. Or maybe just a joke. That’s all right, so long as Roxana laughs.

  *On the Brink of the Precipice, 1939; From the Depths I Call You, 1940–1942; and The Cattle Cars Are Waiting, 1942–1944. In 2000 Syracuse University Press published two new novels by Chava, both of which she translated herself: Bociany and Of Lodz and Love. In 2004 Cormorant Books published a collection of stories titled Survivors, translated by Morgentaler. Four books of poems remain untranslated, as does a play, Der foigl fun ghetto (The Ghetto Bird).

  *The woman I call Vera requested that I give her a pseudonym.

  More praise for

  Sweet Heaven When I Die

  “Jeff Sharlet delivers a fine dose of thoughtful skepticism in Sweet Heaven When I Die, his collection of 13 trenchant essays on how we gain, lose, maintain and blindly accept faith. The book belongs to the tradition of long-form, narrative journalism best exemplified by writers such as Joan Didion, John McPhee, Norman Mailer and Sharlet’s contemporary David Samuels.”

  —Michael Washburn, Washington Post

  “No one parses the history of Christian fundamentalism as succinctly and elegantly as Sharlet. . . . Taken together, these essays begin to give shape to a multifaceted America that is so much more than east and west, left and right, religious and secular. And there’s no better guide to this ‘country in between.’”

  —Brook Wilensky-Lanford, Boston Globe

  “Superb. . . . From what people in the publishing business tell me, collections of essays are not easy to sell these days. I hope Sharlet proves conventional wisdom wrong. This is a fine book, by a deeply thoughtful writer.”

  —Steve Yarbrough, Oregonian

  “Beautifully written. . . . Sharlet’s previous works have incisively critiqued fundamentalism and American power. Sweet Heaven is equally thoughtful, but tender, acknowledging that between the extremes of snake handlers and nihilists, most of us wander through life groping for meaning, with consolation that in the act of finding, we too, may be found.”

  —Durham Independent

  “Had John McPhee been a religion writer, he might have written something like the collection’s first essay. . . . The characters in Sweet Heav
en When I Die are rough, unfulfilled, often doomed. But that’s what makes this collection so strong, so human. We always suspect that by the end, they will be betrayed by their beliefs, will be disillusioned or destroyed. But failure doesn’t make belief meaningless. It may be the only thing that gives faith meaning at all.”

  —Eric Scott, Kansas City Star

  “In a crowded field, Sweet Heaven stands with the few books that aren’t afraid to look at the realities of American religion.”

  —Malcolm Harris, The Daily

  “A beautifully written bricolage of reported narrative, character study, and memoir tracing [Sharlet’s] travels among the faithful in the United States.”

  —Jeremy Keehn, Harpers.org

  “I was immediately taken with Jeff Sharlet’s new book Sweet Heaven When I Die. All I had to do was open to the first lines of ‘Sweet Fuck All, Colorado.’ ”

  —Deirdre Foley-Mendelssohn,

  Paris Review (staff pick)

  “Entertaining, humorous, incisive, and original, Sweet Heaven is a unique melding of literary genres.”

  —Gwarlingo

  “Sweet Heaven When I Die blurs lines between investigative journalism and pilgrimage. . . . We need weird religion and Sharlet continues to provide maps for finding it, for finding ourselves. . . . A great, incisive writer.”

  —S. Brent Plate,

  Religion Dispatches

  “[Sharlet] embodies true engagement in all his encounters documented in the book. . . . I couldn’t help noting . . . Sharlet’s prose. There’s the matrix of far-flung allusions. There’s the intimate knowledge of popular culture laced with highfalutin theory in a distinctly non-highfalutin manner. There’s the smart and unexpected reversals. There’s the humor.”