by H. M. Mann
Mittie better get better by dinnertime.
On a much-needed break between lunch and dinner, I stand out on the rail in what one old man passing by calls “Scottish weather.” I don’t know about that, but it’s surely rotten traveling weather by any nickname. They seem to have a nickname for everything the further south I go. I grew up with baseball nicknames like “Blue Moon” Odom and Phil “Scrap Iron” Garner, and I heard the old-timers on Centre talking about Babe Ruth as the Sultan of Swat and the Bambino, and Josh Gibson as the black Babe Ruth. I’ve always wondered about that. Why wasn’t Ruth called the white Josh Gibson? Gibson had over eight hundred homers to Ruth’s measly seven hundred something.
The water below me looks angry. It’s a fast ride, but it’s a rough ride. The river’s getting more and more crowded with barges, and there’s almost a bottleneck. I look for the Boonesboro but don’t see it. I watch herons, so patient, so still, so controlled then BAM! They have a fish for dinner. Yeah, it’s an enchanted land filled with massive boulders, tall steeples, numerous islands, and so many colors. Soft grays, greens, and ivory whites float by. When we get to a river feeding into the Ohio, I see its green water spilling into the Ohio’s brown, and the mixture reminds me of spinach for some reason. I wonder what it’ll be like when the Ohio hits the mighty Mississippi.
Later, while I’m serving this old guy, he tells the folks at his table to “wait for it.”
“Wait for what, dear?” his wife or mother says to him.
I can never tell with white people sometimes.
“The Mississippi.” He turns to me. “Are we at Cairo yet?”
Kay-ro? That’s a syrup. “I don’t know, sir. I can check.”
“Oh, I know we’re there,” the old man says. “Didn’t you all feel the boat pick up speed?”
This man is tripping.
“Ah, the mighty Mississippi has taken over with a vengeance,” he says, “and I’m sure he’s way out of his banks.”
“Ooh,” his wife-mother says. “I’m so glad I’m not driving this boat.”
He turns to me. “Your name isn’t Huck, is it?”
My name is plainly visible to him. “No sir.” I hate humoring these people sometimes.
“Your last name isn’t Finn?”
“Oh dear, stop,” the wife-mother says, twittering like a bird.
Three serving shifts like that makes laundry duty from six to eleven a slice of heaven. It’s not that hard because you work hard for a few minutes then rest while towels, sheet, uniforms, and tablecloths wash or dry. My own uniform gets a badly needed washing. I’m supposed to check all the pockets, supposed to make sure linens, which is a fancy name for sheets if you asked me, get taken “promptly” out of the dryer, and I’m supposed to fold everything “just so.”
Which is why I’m doing what I’m not supposed to do because all that bores me. I sit with my notepad and have a conversation with Mary. Well, it’s not so much a conversation as me telling her my life story so she can understand where I’ve come from:
Mary: There’s so much I’ve never told you. And not because I didn’t think you’d understand. I was afraid if you knew the truth about me, that you wouldn’t want to be with me anymore. I’m sure you heard about my mama being an addict. It hurts me to write that, but it’s true. Yet I don’t remember a day I went hungry, I don’t remember a day I wasn’t properly dressed, I don’t remember a day I was wishing for anything. I know I was only four, but I remember I was happy. She left me alone all night just about every night. I guess that’s why I don’t like being alone now. That’s probably also why I don’t like walls around me. Or the dark. I know grown men don’t admit stuff like that, but there it is. So she left me alone a lot, and I mainly stayed in my room playing with the toys she bought me until I fell asleep. Sometimes she brought men home, and I wasn’t allowed to go in her room. Sometimes the noises kept me up at night which is probably why I’m not a very sound sleeper now. But every morning we had breakfast together. Every morning, even though now I know how tired she must have been. And then we’d play or watch TV or just look out the window or go on walks. She even took me to Kennywood Park once. I rode all the little rides, but it was fun.
Only one dryer is spinning and all the washers have stopped, but I don’t care. I want Mary to know everything about me, even if it means that she won’t want me.
Then one morning Mama didn’t wake up …
And then I write out the entire story with tears in my eyes and childhood fears in my head and I don’t care how many clothes I have to fold until whenever it takes because for just a little while, even if it’s just on paper, I have my mama again.
And I’m not as scared anymore.
10: Memphis
On our way in to Memphis, we pass under an M-shaped bridge and slide by the Pyramid, where Mike Tyson and Lennox Lewis fought for the heavyweight title. It isn’t exactly like Egypt, though, because there are million-dollar homes owned by the rich and famous nearby, none of them with any kind of yard.
Who’d want to live like that? If your neighbor farted, you’d not only hear it, but you’d smell it.
When we land in Memphis near Mud Island, very few passengers stay on, and that is a major relief.
“We’ll be off after lunch, just you and me,” Rose tells me, and I smile. “We’ll chaperone each other, okay?”
“What about Rufus and Penny?”
She raises her eyebrows. “They’ll be fine without us.”
“Are they, uh, … you know, a couple?”
“Rufus? He’s as pure as the Mississippi mud. They’re friends, Manny, that’s all. They’ve become fast friends since her, um, conversion. Can I call it a conversion? I guess I can. Anyway, he’s been a wonderful influence on her. Haven’t you noticed?”
Penny has been less street and more country. “She’s eating more, if that’s what you mean.”
“Hush up, boy, and go get a shower.”
Maybe they’re more than just friends. Hmm. Penny and Rufus. Stranger things have happened, I guess. Like Emmanuel and Mary, which has to be the strangest relationship of them all.
During my shower, I notice that my postage stamp is still shrinking and almost closed. My tattoo looks like it’s completely healed, too. My body is coming together. I just hope I can also keep my mind in one piece.
I have never been anywhere quite like Memphis, mainly because it’s rare to see people of all races interacting in the same space at the same time. The only time that happened on the Hill, so the old-timers told me, was during the riots in ’68, only the interaction wasn’t exactly mutual or friendly.
“We are not going to Graceland,” Rose tells me as we stroll downtown.
“What’s that?” I ask.
“Elvis Presley’s mansion.”
“Oh.” He named his mansion? I knew Elvis was strange. I mean, you name a dog or a cat, but an entire building?
“And he wouldn’t have had that mansion if it weren’t for Otis Blackwell.”
“Who?”
“Otis Blackwell, the black man who wrote ‘Don’t Be Cruel,’ ‘All Shook Up,’ and ‘Return to Sender’ for him. Mr. Blackwell also wrote songs for Jerry Lee Lewis. You ever hear of ‘Great Balls of Fire’ or ‘Breathless’?”
“No.”
“You have heard of Aretha Franklin, right?”
I shake my head.
“Boy, what have you been listening to?” Rose asks.
Mainly to the voices in my head here lately. I wonder where The Voice hangs out when he’s not being ugly. I hope it’s some place horrible. Maybe The Voice has gone to Graceland. “I don’t have much time for music.”
“You’re about to make time.” She takes my hand. “You are about to learn an awful lot about everything. You know that Memphis is the home of the blues and the birthplace of rock ‘n’ roll ...”
And while we walk under an overcast Memphis sky, Rose schools me on just about everything, most I’ve never heard about before. We visit
W. C. Handy’s little shotgun house on Beale Street and listen to a jam session under his statue in Handy Park. We check out the church nearby that was the first brick church in the South built by blacks. And after we visit the Rock ‘n’ Soul Museum, I know more than I ever wanted to know about how the blues came to Memphis from the Mississippi Delta.
“How are you doing?” she asks as we leave the museum.
“Okay.”
“Too much for you?”
“No ma’am.”
“Good, because there’s so much more to learn at the Lorraine Motel.”
I blink at her. “You’re taking me to a motel?”
“I certainly am.”
“But Rose, I—”
“It ain’t like that,” she interrupts. “Didn’t they teach you anything in school?”
They tried, but I wasn’t having it. The chips on my shoulders grew right up to and clogged my ears.
“The Lorraine is where Dr. King was shot, and now it’s a civil rights museum.”
“Oh.”
The Lorraine certainly looks like a motel from the outside with its original old-fashioned sign. But once we’re inside, everything changes.
I learn more during the ninety-minute tour than in my entire time in school on the Hill. I learn that Nat Turner was only thirty-one when he led his rebellion, that Harriett Tubman convinced runaway slaves with her shotgun, saying, “You’ll be free or die,” that Ku Klux Klan robes can scare me even if they’re just on display, and that I’ve had it good compared to the Jim Crow South where kids were often reading from one book at one desk.
The places stream by me like Little Rock, Montgomery, Birmingham, even Memphis where garbage workers carried signs proclaiming, “I am a Man.” I see sit-ins, a burning bus, marchers, a re-creation of Dr. King’s Birmingham jail cell, and Dr. King’s hotel room, unchanged since 1968. The marchers get to me most, though. White plaster statues of black people carry signs and have sure strides, and it makes me think of Freedom Corner and the marchers I thought looked so foolish. They won’t look foolish at all when I get back.
And to think that Dr. King was only thirty-nine when he died. Thirty-nine. All that he accomplished in just thirty-nine years, and I’m only ten years away. What a waste my life has been. And to stand in the place where a great man was shot, to be where Dr. King died, to know about the exact moment in history that would cause the Hill to riot … It’s like I’ve come full circle or something.
“You okay?” Rose asks as we leave.
“Not really,” I say.
“Pretty intense, huh?”
“Yeah.” And it makes me realize how incomplete my life is. All those people, some white people, too, fought hard for me to have a better life, and what have I done with that life but waste it?
“It overwhelmed me the first time I went through,” Rose says. “I had lived through much of what you saw, and even though I knew it was coming up on the tour today, it still gave me chills, and it’s still giving me chills.” She rubs her arms. “We’ve come a long way, but there’s a whole long journey left to go.”
I wish I knew how long my journey was going to be. I wish I knew where I was going, too.
“You hungry?” Rose asks.
“Starving.”
“I told you we’d get some wet ribs, right?”
“Sounds good.”
“I know just the place.”
“Let’s go.”
We walk into Peabody Place, a huge mall-like complex of stores and restaurants and go to Isaac Hayes Music*Food*Passion. Once we’re seated, I don’t want to leave. It smells so good, and when I look at the menu, I smile.
“What are you smilin’ about, boy?” Rose asks.
“Real food.”
She snatches the menu from me. “And mine ain’t?”
“It is, Rose, you know it is.” I reach for the menu.
“You won’t need this. I’m taking care of everything today.” When the server comes to us, Rose tells her, “Hot Buttered Soul! for two, please, and keep the ice water coming.”
When the server leaves, I ask, “What did you just order?”
“You’ll see.”
For the next hour, everything I see, I eat. I eat half of a slab of wet ribs, most of an herb-roasted chicken, coleslaw, fries, cornbread muffins, rolls, baked beans, and something called Memphis Chopped Pork. I drink lots of water and go through at least twenty napkins in the heart of the pork barbecue capital of the world while Rose tells me everything I didn’t know about Isaac Hayes.
“Good stuff, huh?” Rose asks.
“The best.”
As darkness falls, the party begins. We go a short distance to Beale Street, where the neon isn’t as flashy and harsh as it is in Pittsburgh. It’s restrained neon, if that makes any sense. It doesn’t scream at you. It beckons you, calls you, waves a hand at you, saying, “Come on in, the party’s just gettin’ started.” And though we’re inside the Rum Boogie Café, the party goes on outside on Beale Street as well, with hundreds of people listening to outdoor musicians, drinking, laughing, and dancing right there on the street.
“Get ready to jump,” Rose says as the Boogie Blues Band starts laying out some hot rhythm and blues.
“This place is a poem waiting to happen,” I tell Rose.
“Then write it.”
“No paper.”
She hands me a napkin and asks a passing server for her pen. “Knock yourself out.”
And I do:
With a bounce to their flounce, sophisticated ladies and gents
fly high for a song, get hepped off their feet,
shake ends sweet on night flights together
listening to James Govan and the Boogie Blues Band.
Almighty hollers swell and vanish into gin air
while Saxman grinds and blows off dreams
Pianoman knits brows and notes,
Demon’s drums rush, Riffster gets moist with his guitar,
and Brassman shoots high,
anchored by Bossman bassman’s flay and flow, his
feet tapping into the groove
notes progressing, regressing, digressing into smoky skies,
flying, blazing, wailing, breaking rules gladly
until sunrise when everybody jets whispering
three beats to the wind.
I hand it to Rose, and she reads it. “You got all this out of this place?”
“I have a good imagination.” And I feel this place. It’s talking to me.
“I’ll say, and ‘gin air’ is right. We got to get up out of here.”
But when an old stomp song comes on, Rose drags me to my feet. “You ain’t heard nothin’ till you heard this, boy. Get your feet a-stompin’.”
Rose knows all the lyrics, something about a mannish boy who’s going to be the greatest man alive, and the song speaks to me, talks to me, whispers in my ears, and shouts in my head.
Ba-BOOM-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch, ba-BOOM-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch.
And Rose is the stompin’ queen, wearing the finish off the floor in her bare feet. They could play this song all night. That harmonica speaks of the railroad, the bass speaks of the sea, the—
I write those lines down.
“What are you doin’?”
“Some lines popped into my head.”
She tears me away from the napkin. “I’m gonna pop your head myself if you don’t dance with me.”
“Sorry.”
“Don’t leave me hangin’ like that again.”
“I won’t.”
And I don’t. I work off all that barbecue, dancing sober with people of every race and culture. I could live right here at the Rum Boogie Café where the music is groovin’ and the people are movin’—
I add those lines to my napkin, too.
Rose has to tear me away from the Rum Boogie Café a little after midnight, and on the walk back to the American Queen she stops me in front of a phone booth.
“You’ve got to call her, Emmanuel.”
“Nah. Mary’s probably working.”
She hands me a calling card. “Well, call somebody. Share some of this night with someone.”
“I’m sharing it with you.”
“That’s sweet, but call, what was her name?”
“Auntie June.”
“Call Auntie June.”
I press in a series of numbers until the phone rings.
“This had better be good,” Auntie June says.
Oops. I woke her up. “Auntie June? It’s me, Emmanuel.”
“Emmanuel? What time is it?”
“A little after midnight, Auntie June, and I’m in Memphis.”
After a short silence, Auntie June says, “Emmanuel isn’t here.”
“I’m Emmanuel.”
“Huh?”
“Auntie June, it’s me.”
“Emmanuel?” Auntie June always was a hard sleeper.
“Yes. I just called to talk to you. Did you get my letter?”
“Sure did.” She sounds more awake now. “And I tore up that check.”
“Why?” I turn to Rose and whisper, “She tore up the check.”
“The destruction of money must run in your family,” Rose says.
“I tore up that check because you can’t fool me, boy,” Auntie June says. “I know you’re not clean, and you aren’t working on any boat. I couldn’t even get you in the water at the YMCA when you were a little boy. You’re just into something different is all, writing bad checks like that. And now you’re trying to get me arrested for cashing it, huh? Have you no shame?”
Wow. “Auntie June, listen to me. I am working in the galley, the dining room, and the laundry room on a boat called the American Queen.”
