by Alan Rodgers
When they’d talked for hours Leadbelly took a flask from the pocket of his coat and offered Robert Johnson spirit liquor.
Now Robert Johnson hadn’t touched the demon rum since the night he brought the vengeance of a cuckold husband down upon himself. Mostly he’d avoided the stuff because he was dead, and everybody knows the terrible things that happen when deadmen touch that awful stuff.
But Robert Johnson wasn’t dead anymore. He was alive, and the truth was that even if he’d repented the folly of his sinful ways, he still had a taste for good brown mash. And is that such a crime? Lots of righteous gentlemen imbibe a measure now and then; it doesn’t turn them into demons when they drink in moderation.
Robert Johnson thought, What could it hurt?, and then he made a terrible mistake.
He said, “Sure, sure, I’ll take a lick,” and he took the cask of spirit liquor from Huddie Ledbetter.
And drank that poison down.
Robert Johnson woke on a dock above the Mississippi in the small hours of the morning. He couldn’t remember nothing after the drink he took from Leadbelly’s flask of mash, but he remembered that drink so clearly: it was the savor of every sip of whiskey he’d ever drank, distilled into a moment richer than the warmth of morning sunshine on a deadman’s cold dewey-slick skin; it was half the sight of Heaven half-obscured in the clouds that surround the Pearly Gates; it was greater than the doomed damned majesty of Lucifer’s throne in the Mansion called Defiance along the shore of the Lake of Fire where it reaches down to Hell.
Spirit liquor was a lover he’d always known but never thought to cherish. When he woke on the dock, bloody and aching like to die, he knew he loved that liquor so dearly that he never dare to touch the stuff again.
“Lordie Lordie Lord,” he said, and as he spoke he heard his words rasp and burble in and out his throat, and it began to sink through to him how dire were his circumstances, “dear God please forgive me.”
And he reached up so carefully to touch the wound he could feel cut across his throat.
And felt with the tips of his fingers the same terror he heard burbling around his words:
He felt his throat cut open wide where Leadbelly had slit him open to the bright light of the moon.
And left him on the dock where his blood gathered in a pool that drizzled slowly into the river, draining toward New Orleans and the sea.
Robert Johnson should have died the moment Leadbelly cut him. If he lived even a moment after he never should have had the strength to wake and see the horror that became of him. But he did wake, aching bloody terrified and alone, and he saw the river; saw the blood and the bright moon high above him; and he saw the Eye of the World.
It hung in the sky brilliant as a red second moon — no, brighter, infinitely brighter than the first — and it watched Robert Johnson through its shattered lens.
Robert Johnson saw the deep bright cracks in the lens of the Eye of the World, and all he could think was I did that, I broke the Eye of the World, I was so full of myself and now I’m so ashamed. When he saw the Eye he saw his own hubris, and it shamed him. You can’t say a thing about a man that marks the change in him as clearly as that marked Robert Johnson. The man he’d been the day he died would have seen the Eye and wondered what it meant to him, and meant about him. But that night as he lay on the dock clasping his throat, trying to stop his blood spurting and leaking into the river, it didn’t even occur to him to wonder why the Eye watched him. He didn’t think to wonder why he was alive, or why Leadbelly drugged him, or even why the river whispered his name so softly as it lapped the shore.
“I’m sorry, Lord,” Robert Johnson said, still looking at the Eye, still mourning the consequences of the song he’d sung a lifetime ago. “Lordie Lordie please forgive me.”
As he wrapped his shirt around his open throat and stumbled away from the river, away from the dockyards, toward the hospital in Memphis where seven doctors gasped in fear and wonder when they saw him.
They rushed him to their operating room and sewed his throat together. When they were done an orderly wheeled him into a hallway and left him there where the doctors could watch him until they were ready to put him in a room.
But Robert Johnson wasn’t having any of that. The moment their eyes were off him he pushed himself up off the stretcher, got to his feet, and staggered down the hall. He followed the hall through seven heavy doors until he found the hospital’s bright wide entrance. That led him onto the streets of Memphis, where the sun was rising and the birds were calling and the day was wide and full of possibility.
Robert Johnson shambled through the morning streets of Memphis until they led him home. When he reached his room he fell into his bed; in a moment he was sleeping.
It was days before he woke again.
The Ballad of John Henry
When John Henry was a little baby boy
Sitting on his mother’s knee
He pointed straight at a piece of steel
Said that steel’s gonna be the death of me
Yes, yes
That bridge and tunnel, that bright wide steel
Are gonna be the death of me
Yes, yes
They’re gonna be the death of me
Some people say John Henry was born in Texas,
Some say he was born in Maine,
But he really came from the hills of Carolina
That’s the last place that he went to ‘fore he died
Yes, yes
That’s the last place that he went to ‘fore he died.
John Henry told his Captain one day
Says, A man ain’t nothing but a man
Before I be beat by your steel-driving gang
I’m going to die with this hammer in my hand.
That’s what he said,
I’m going to die with this hammer in my hand
Well, the paymaster loved to see John Henry,
Water boy loved to hear him sing,
Most of all what the paymaster loved
Was to hear John Henry’s hammer ring.
Made his hammer ring like it was a bell
And it rang so clear, rang yes baby
And it rang
John Henry knew a woman
Her name was Polly Ann
When he got so sick that he lay abed
You know Polly she drove steel just like a man.
Polly she drove steel just like a man.
One day John Henry got a notion
And he had to climb the hills
His Captain said, John Henry, those hills are sinking in!
He said shut up, Cap’n, you don’t know what you saw
It wasn’t nothing but my hammer sucking wind
Lord yes,
That wasn’t nothing but my hammer sucking wind.
That day John Henry told his shaker
I declare you a better pray
If I miss this steel with this ten-pound maul
Tomorrow is going to be your burying day
Yes, yes
Tomorrow’s going to be your burying day
Lord knows.
John Henry looked at the sun one day
And the sun had done turned red,
And he looked over his shoulder Lord
And he seen his partner falling dead dead
Then John Henry went to the Mansion
Tell the head of his hundred-car fire
Crying, George just pick ‘em up and let ‘em down again!
We’re going to work until we die
Yes, yes
We’re going to work this line until we die.
John Henry worked until he died.
When he fell they carried Johnny up the Mountain
Up on the Mountain so high
The last words he said to the water boy
Was, Give me a cool drink of water ‘fore I die.
Lord yes,
Give me a cool drink of water ‘fore I die.
When the woman in the west
Learned of John Henry’s death
She came awake in her bed
She was dressed in white
She was dressed in red
She wailed for old John Henry
He was dead dead dead
John Henry
Just give me one cool drink of water before I die.
John Henry and the Wizard Kings
When the world was whole and the Wizard Kings still ruled the Delta, there was a King who stood foremost among them. He was first because he’d come before them, and also because he was the wisest, truest, and greatest of them all.
His name was John Henry, and he could make his hammer ring like a bell.
In his time he talked to God and he talked to the Devil; he got religion and gave it back; and then learned the error of his ways.
Some people say he was a scoundrel bloodthirstier than Leadbelly. Others say he was a saint as holy as Sister O.M. Terrell. The truth is probably somewhere in between — for though hoodoo men always serve the Lord (just like the blues that breeds them) they serve Him most often at cross-purposes, perversely.
His history is a mystery made of legends that everybody knows and everyone denies. His story is the glory of the nation and the wonder of the world: everyone who knows John Henry celebrates him, and no one does him wrong.
Three times in those months he spent in Memphis, among redemption and salvation but before he had the chance to go astray, Robert Johnson went hiking up on the bluff above the city, searching the woods for Blind Willie’s shack. But he never found it, maybe because he never took the hardest way.
On Fat Tuesday, Peetie Wheatstraw came looking for Robert Johnson.
He found him in a cheap café not far from the riverfront — the kind of two-bit place where dockhands go for breakfast and no one orders anything but eggs, potatoes, coffee, toast, and grits. It wasn’t a fancy place, nor even an especially good one, but it was a place where a man can drink his coffee slow enough to read a paper and no one really minds. Robert Johnson went there a lot in the months when he lived in Memphis under the name of Hinky Tom, and the waitresses knew him for a regular.
Robert Johnson knew Peetie Wheatstraw, too — the moment he set eyes on the Doctor he recognized him for a deadman. Robert Johnson had that kind of sight, and he didn’t lose it just because he came alive.
“What you want?” Robert Johnson asked, as if he didn’t know. “I been waiting for you.”
“I bet you have,” the Hoodoo Doctor said.
“Waiting for a long time.”
“Good, then,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “That makes it simple.”
Peetie Wheatstraw was the youngest of the Kings (who weren’t yet seven, but five). Because he was youngest he was their arms and legs, and spoke for them just as Blind Lemon had spoken for the kings through the 30s. When he was alive and singing he called himself “Peetie Wheatstraw, the Devil’s Son-in-Law,” but William Bunch was his born name. He was born in the low country of Alabama, which is a province of the Delta Kingdom, but he spent most of his life up north. He knew the Lords of the Piedmont (who govern the high country in the east as the Seven Kings ruled the Delta, but differently), and paid them the respect they were due.
William Bunch who was Peetie Wheatstraw died in a car wreck in 1941, four years after the accident that killed Bessie Smith.
After he died he was always Peetie Wheatstraw, and William Bunch was dead and gone forever.
“What do you want from me?” Robert Johnson asked.
Peetie Wheatstraw grinned wide and wicked as the Angel Death. “I only want to help you, Hinky Tom,” he said, and he laughed perfidiously.
“The hell you say,” said Robert Johnson. “You want to help me like a buzzard wants to help a sojourner.”
Peetie Wheatstraw pushed himself away from the table. He looked offended.
“You got me wrong, Hinky Tom,” he said. “I come to seek you for the King.”
Robert Johnson eyed him uncertainly. He knew (as all bluesmen know) who the Kings were, and he respected them. But he also knew they serve their own ends, and when his preacher railed against them during the Sunday service, Robert Johnson took his words to heart. “I got religion now, Peetie Wheatstraw. When I play I sing to serve the Lord.”
“So?”
“So I got no business with the Devil’s Son-in-Law.”
Peetie Wheatstraw swore.
“You got me wrong,” he said. “And you’re doing worse by the King. John Henry is an upright man.”
Robert Johnson thought about Leadbelly and the music and the Good Word of the Lord, and he wanted to help because he thought he could. But the Lord don’t want nobody acting like a fool, and that’s a simple truth. “When he died he got religion, that’s what they say,” he said. “You can’t prove it by me either way.”
“I never said I could,” Peetie Wheatstraw said.
“What do you want from me?”
Peetie Wheatstraw didn’t answer straight away. He just sat there, staring at Robert Johnson so young and healthy and alive sitting across the table from him, and maybe the Devil’s Son-in-Law envied him his life and his health, and maybe he only wondered how a man could die such a colossal fool and still find redemption and the miracle of life. Whatever it was that went on in his head, he shrugged it away. And sighed, and leaned close across the table to whisper at Robert Johnson.
Robert Johnson smelled his breath before he heard his words. It was deadman’s breath, cool and stale, and somewhere hidden in the staleness there were hints of brimstone and decay.
“John Henry wants to see you,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “He sent me here to bring you back.”
I’ll go, he thought, even though he was half afraid it was a terrible mistake. Because there was something in his heart that told him that he had to — maybe it was the song that is the music of the world, or maybe it was the song the great King whispered in his ear across the years and miles. But his heart told him to trust it, and it wasn’t wrong.
“Where is he?” Robert Johnson asked Peetie Wheatstraw.
“He lives up on the Mountain,” Peetie Wheatstraw said. “Everybody knows that — I don’t know why you got to ask.”
Robert Johnson shrugged. “Just uneasy,” he said. “I got to say a reason?”
The Devil’s Son-in-Law smiled. “Don’t got to say nothing you don’t want,” he said, getting up from his seat. “We best get started — it’ll take us a few days to get there.”
“All right,” Robert Johnson said.
They went to West Memphis — in Arkansas, on the far side of the river — three hours later, and took the afternoon train bound north toward Chicago
Spanish Harlem - School
The Present
The night after Lisa came alive for the third time, her mother told her it was time she got herself back to school.
Lisa never liked school, and she never liked kids, either. She didn’t want to go.
“Oh Mama,” Lisa said, “I can’t go to school! They don’t have schools for babies.”
Lisa’s mother frowned.
“Child,” she said, all frustrated and flustered. She didn’t like it when Lisa talked back, but she abided it. She liked it even less when Lisa was right.
“I’ll go to school when I get big again,” Lisa said. She looked up at her mother with her wide and tiny baby eyes and pouted like she had to cry. “I promise I’ll go then, Mama.”
Her mother crossed her arms and gave Lisa the eye. “You’re mistaken, young lady,” she said, “and you’ve
got a lot to learn.”
“I’m not! I don’t!”
“Say that if you like,” her mother said. “But you’re going to school. I’ve made arrangements with a day-care center. You start tomorrow.”
And Lisa got so mad.
So mad!
“Mama! You can’t send me to nursery school! I won’t go.”
“You will,” her mother said. She sounded like she didn’t want to hear another word about it.
“No,” Lisa said, “I won’t.”
And suddenly her mother’s eyes went wide with indignation, and she swore under her breath. “That’s enough from you, young lady. To your room! I don’t want to hear another word about it.”
Lisa did as her mother said, but she didn’t like it, not one bit. She stumbled toward her room on her tiny baby legs that still felt so uncertain under her.
When she got there she closed the door behind her, climbed up on the bed that still stunk like Lisa dead and rotting even though her mother had spent all day laundering the bedclothes. The whole room stank, and it probably always would, no matter how her mother scrubbed the floors and washed the walls, no matter what she took down to the laundry and wrung through the machine.
“I hate you, Mama,” Lisa whispered. That was how mad she was, hateful mad, like she wanted to hurt everything she could wrap her tiny hands around.
But the moment she heard herself say those words, I hate you, Mama, she wanted to cry. Because they were so ugly, so untrue. She loved her mama. She’d always love her mama!
But she still felt hateful mad.
She didn’t know why she felt that way, but she felt it so intense, sharp as vinegar when you drink it from a cup, but commanding like she had no choice. She felt a lot of things she didn’t understand and didn’t even mean — she’d felt a lot of things like that ever since she died.
Sometimes Lisa thought she got those things from the music. All her life she’d heard the music of the world inside her head, but since she’d died the song had been a thing consuming her. Enfolding her, leading her — and saving her, too, because there were times when the music was the only thing that kept her from doing something awful.
