by Tim Bryant
"Now Jube's daddy, he drove the mule cart down to the riverboats and back. Did you know riverboats used to come right up this river, right up to Pattonia? Big steamboats come to bring coffee and sugar, salt and flour, tools and cloth. Take away cotton. Bales and bales of it. Three hundred, four hundred bales."
By this time, I had taken the notepad out of my back pocket and was hurriedly taking down notes, most of them in a shorthand only I would be able to decipher.
"Jube's daddy, he had shown us some of the different constellations, and we were eager to try it for ourselves. We were eager to try it out for ourselves. After a full day's work, though, I tell you what. It was hard to keep our minds on it. At least, it was for me. My head was buzzing with the heat of the day or maybe it was cicadas. You still got cicadas around here? Still got them goddamn cicadas. Can't get rid of 'em. Well, my head was buzzing good. Maybe the way some of y'all's is buzzing, I don't know. It was hard to keep from slipping off into sleep, and that's exactly what I did. Exactly what I did. I ain't lying When I woke up, said when I woke up, Jube was gone. He was long gone. And music had already started up just around the back of the quarters."
Well, that was when he slid off into the old slave song "Follow The Drinking Gourd."
The riverbank will make a very good road,
the dead trees show you the way,
Left foot, peg foot, traveling on,
Follow the drinking gourd.
Where the great big river meets the little river,
Follow the drinking gourd,
The old man is awaiting
for to take you to freedom,
If you follow the drinking gourd.
The way he was stomping his foot on the plywood stage, I was afraid it was about to buck up and splinter. Maybe he saw that too, because he brought it all back down.
"Ladies and gentlemen."
That's what he said, even though I don't think there was a lady within half a mile of The Pepper Pot.
"Ladies and gentlemen, I remember I looked up into the sky that night and saw that Big Dipper, its handle pointing the way, sure as the world, toward the evening star. Sure as the world it was. I never will forget. I was about to push myself to my feet, just about to push myself up, when there was suddenly a split in the sky. I'm telling you there was a split in the sky like two parts of a curtain pulling apart. Can’t you see? There was a flash of light— quiet, like some kind of heat lightning— and then I seen a man's face."
The music had pulled back to where it was mostly just hum, like an electric wave washing over the room and then ebbing to reveal more words.
"Not the face of a God or angel as I'd seen in Sunday books, but a normal face like that of Mister Conray or Mister Patton, looking down at me."
Wave and ebb.
"The man had a startled, almost angry, expression as if I was gazing on him in the bath or some private endeavor. Then he reached and pulled the curtain around him. He reached and pulled the curtain around him and was gone..."
The music gone momentarily, along with the man in the sky, Art Patton sat on the stool and talked to the half dozen of us who had formed a half-circle around him.
"You know, I told this to my mother, Jodora. My mother's name was Jodora. I told it to my friend Jube. I even told Mrs. Lucy. That's Mrs. Lucy Conray, the lady who owned me and my family. Only one who didn't laugh accused me of drinking from one of Mister Conray's moonshine jars. Y'all know about them moonshine jars. Jay Henry probably got one he'll sell you. They all dismissed me, every single one of 'em. But you know what, I don't think I even knew how to tell a lie back then. I don't think I even knew how. I know I never ever forgot what I saw, and that ain't no lie. I continued on, going to the Sunday school, but I would no longer hold any belief in the stories they told us there. I was convinced I had been given a glimpse of something truer."
He looked down and flipped his banjo in his hands, rubbing the gourd with his palm like it would bring him good fortune.
"It put an effect on the whole rest of my days, right up until all those other people were long gone dead and buried. Yes sir, it did. Until all the people around me were gone and buried, and I was the last old man living in Pattonia."
He strummed an open chord.
"But that, as they say, is another story.
"When I was seventy-six years old, a white man named George Delafield— who lived right here in Pattonia, although there wasn't really any Pattonia left to speak of— died and left almost everything he owned to me. To me. Artillery Conray Patton.
"Now George Delafield and I had spent a good portion of the last fifteen or twenty years playing four card stud and forty-two and swapping the same stories back and forth. Back and forth. Still, it might have made less sense, him bequeathing his entire estate to a colored man four years older than he himself, if there had been anyone else left alive to claim it.
"As it was, there was George and me living in houses on either end of Pattonia Road, the colored nurse who tended to George and lived with her two kids down on the county highway, and about one hundred and thirty dead souls in the Mount Violet Eastview Cemetery. One hundred and thirty dead souls in Mount Violet Eastview. I expect there's a few more out there nowadays. At that time, I was the only one left. The only one left. I had managed to bore everybody in Pattonia to death.
"Harmon Littlejohn, who lived in Oak Ridge, halfway between Patton Landing and Marion's Ferry, was the only other face I saw on a regular enough basis to know it. Harmon played blues and old-timey music at saw mill and paper mill camps around the area under the name Little John Harmon, because he said people could remember it better. When he was down on his luck, Harmon lived in the old seed store on the main road through Pattonia. The old store has literally gone to seed, but it's still there. Anyway, Harmon lived there in George Delafield's seed store whenever he was down on his luck. I had never seen a man so down on his luck. I mean down.
"Harmon went with me to the funeral home just south of Nacogdoches when George Delafield passed. I went into town as seldom as possible, just about always on Saturdays and sticking close to the Church Street area, what the whites called Nigger Main. Do they still call it Nigger Main? George, he was dead as a wagon tire and wouldn't have known if they had rolled him right through the town square, but I had promised that I would try to see to it he was buried in Mount Violet. What seemed like an easy enough request at the time proved not to be."
Art looked down at my table and saw me scratching into my notepad.
"You taking notes out there, better take this down. What seems like an easy enough request don't always prove to be. That's why I don't take requests."
The whole room seemed to laugh, which made me realize how many of the patrons were listening to every word he said. Art stopped talking and concentrated on the music for a minute, coaxing out sounds I'd never heard from a banjo. I decided it needed another name. This was definitely not banjo music.
"This ain't no nigger funeral home."
He flattened his voice into a hillbilly drawl that made a good portion of us snap our necks around.
"The man high-stepping across the lot toward me and Harmon was in no shape to fight. I can tell you that. Fatter than both of us put together and stuffed into the cleanest white suit you ever saw, he was talking faster than I could keep up with and walking even faster."
Art puffed out his chest and stomped his feet in time, like he was marching off into battle.
"The veins were standing out on his forehead, I tell you what. I wasn't sure if it was due to that tight suit, the physical exertion of coming to meet me and Harmon, or the idea of having two niggers sullying his establishment."
When he said the word nigger, he slashed out at his banjo and made a fierce racket.
"Harmon immediately backed up to our wagon. Yes sir, he backed up and gave my old mule Zeus a nervous slap on the back."
He popped the head of the banjo with the back of his fist.
"The man come within t
en feet of me and stopped."
The music came to a standstill. Silence.
"I know you know what come next."
The music strummed back to life.
"You hear me?" he said. "We don't serve you people. You need to go on into town. Go on into town, head out east past the main square. That's where your people do business."
Orton Hill. Orton Hill on East main in Nacogdoches. Where I still did business to that very day. Where all the negro business was done. I almost felt embarrassed. As if I had suddenly become a witness. As if I had become a character in the story. It was something I had no desire for.
"I took off my hat and looked down, careful to avoid the man's eye."
I looked down at my notes and pretended to write.
"I understand you've got my friend George Delafield in there."
Dellafeel, I wrote, with a question mark.
"Man spit a wad of snuff at the ground, right where my gaze had fallen. Said you work for Mister Delafield?"
He stretched the words this way and that, like they were saltwater taffy.
"I shook my head. No sir, he was a friend. I looked up and watched the man scratch his head and wipe his brow. His skin was so red it looked almost purple, specially up against that white suit.”
Scattered laughter.
"You boys ain't from around here, are you? I nodded yes. Then I shook my head no. I nodded yes. Then I shook my head.
"We're from Pattonia."
"He didn't seem to know where Pattonia was at or have any desire to learn it. Didn't seem to have a clue that it was right down the road a few miles.
"The service is tomorrow morning at ten, he said."
Art lowered himself into a whisper. He was still working that hillbilly voice, but it was now a hillbilly whisper.
"It won't hurt none for you to come in quiet and stand along the back."
A few men standing along the back, where the card tables lined a wall that was covered in beer and cigarette ads, threw out a few catcalls.
"I told him that George and I had said our proper goodbyes, and I wasn't there to request any such privilege."
He played for several bars, seemingly deep in thought. Or maybe deep into the music. It was hard to tell. When he looked up, he seemed surprised to see us all still listening. He smiled.
"I explained as briefly as I could how the Delafields had run the seed store in Pattonia for over sixty years, and that when there wasn't hardly any Pattonia left. See, everyone in George's family had either died off or moved off. Mostly they had all died. Old George had continued to run that seed store until finally there wasn't anybody but me and young Harmon Littlejohn left.
"Me and Zeus here, we don't eat no seed and neither does my friend Harmon, I said."
The place seemed to shake with laughter. I didn't know how to write what it felt like to be in there at that moment.
"I told that peckerwood that during our final game of forty-two, I had promised George Delafield— that dead white man you got in your building right there— that I would do whatever I could to see that he was properly buried in Mount Violet, where his wife Carrie is buried as well as their young daughter Lovey. Y'all can go out there and see if I'm lying. I wasn't lying to that white man, and I'm not gonna lie to y'all.
"I'm sympathetic to your little story, the white man in the tight white suit said. However, seeing that you're most certainly not family, I'm not free to just hand the body over. What you need to do is get somebody from Mister Delafield's family to make that kind of request."
I laughed to myself. I had never been in that position before, and yet I had. Hadn't we all been.
"I reminded him of the part in the story where there was no family left that wasn't already buried in Pattonia."
Art shook his head in mock disgust.
"If that's true, he said, you'll need to take it up with the local authority."
He leaned into his microphone and worked the last word over really hard, stretching it out.
"The local authority?"
"The local….authority."
The music was working its own magic, repeating itself until it became like the snake eating its own tail. I couldn't tell where one line began and the next ended. If I concentrated on it, I was missing part of the story. If I got up to buy another drink, I was missing part of the story. I couldn't move.
"Just who exactly is the local authority? Harmon said to me.
"By this time, Harmon was sitting on the wagon looking at a copy of Just So Stories that we'd dug up in the back of the seed store. I had convinced Harmon to teach himself to read so he could write down all of the songs he made up. He played long songs. Lots of words. Lots and lots of words. Kind of like this one."
I had never seen a musician have the patrons of The Pepper Pot so completely in the palm of his hand.
"I don't know who the local authority is, I said. I was too afraid to ask."
I saw Jay Henry Britt behind the bar. Even he was laughing.
"I climbed up next to him into that old wagon and grabbed the lines.
"Haw!"
I watched his fingers on the strings. It seemed like he couldn't hit a wrong note if he tried. It was as if his fingers had a mind all their own.
"I drove old Zeus out of the lot, tipping my hat to a passing group of young children.
"I'll be surprised if there's three people at that funeral tomorrow, Harmon said.
I said...and that's counting George."
"There was no way I was going to tangle with any Nacogdoches law. Everybody knew the story of them hanging a colored man there in the town square. They'd given him a trial too, they said, so the hanged man had nothing to complain about."
How long ago was he talking about? I couldn't be sure. I wondered how long Chief of Police C.E. Battle had been in power, imposing his curfew on the colored population, patrolling our neighborhoods and shaking down anyone he happened to come across that didn't look just right.
"Hanged man didn't have nothing to complain about."
I was laughing, but I couldn't say why.
"At best, they might throw you in the back of the jail and forget you were there until someone come along and reminded 'em."
He stopped talking and played, the thumb on his fretting hand wrapping over the top of the banjo neck to grab the bass notes. I wondered how long he'd been playing. And why he had chosen a banjo instead of a guitar.
"No, there was enough trouble in the world. No need in Art Patton asking for extra. Me and Harmon went back home with the sun falling into the trees to their right. As the moon came up on the left, I wondered if there were people up there."
There were only two windows in The Pepper Pot. I looked out, almost expecting to see the moon right there. All I could see were pine trees, but there was a hint of green to them, which let me know there was a moon spilling down on them from somewhere.
"As the moon came up, I wondered if there were people up there on it looking back at us, or if the people up there could even make out enough to know we were down here."
I wanted to thank Whitey. Not because I could see any big story in Art Patton, but because I had never heard music like that. It wasn't the blues. At least, it wasn't any kind of blues that I could pin down. It didn't have the twelve-bar form. The repetition had no set formula at all. There was no rhyme or reason to any of it, and yet it mesmerized in the same way that Lightnin' Hopkins' best stuff did. Or like good gospel music. It seemed to bring the dark and the light together in a way that made a complete picture. I wanted to see more.
Sitting where I was, it was hard to see the room filling up behind me, until people started moving to the other two tables near the stage. It wasn't unusual that the crowd would get bigger as the night went on, but usually the stage tables would slowly make their ways back to the side, away from the music, to where people could sit and talk and hear themselves curse as they lost their week's pay. So tonight was a little different.
"Who the fuck are
you?"
Sam Bolden had arrived and taken a table directly across from me. From the looks of things, he was already liquored up when he walked through the door. He was loud and boisterous from having to shout over the saw at Spurlin Tie and Timber, where he was a foreman. People pointed to him as one of the most successful colored men in the Nacogdoches area. They also pointed to him for less savory reasons.
"My name is Art. For a long time, that's all it was. We're talking about a long time ago. Even before you was born. Even before the war. We never knew anything about the war until it was already halfway over. We never knew what the fighting was for until the Union army sent four soldiers up from Houston who read aloud from a piece of paper saying all of the slaves were free to go. I didn't know what a slave was. I had never heard the word. I didn't know what they meant when they said I was free. It was like telling Bonny the hound dog she now was free to speak her mind."
He wasn't talking about World War II. He wasn't even talking about the Spanish-American War. He was talking about the Civil War.
"Funny enough, it was J.T. and Lucy Conray who packed up their suitcases and left Pattonia. A good portion of the workers had nowhere to go and didn't know how to get there if they did. Me and my family stayed there on the farm for another year or more, until finally a hard rain season came and the cotton played out. Then we moved a few miles closer to Lufkin."
There were more catcalls, Lufkin being an arch enemy in football in both the colored and the white schools.
"You gotta understand. By that time, we all knew that Nacogdoches was chock full of Confederates. Angry sons of bitches who would be reminded why they were angry every time they laid eyes on my black skin. Lufkin, it was said, was full of Yankee sympathizers. We believed it too, because we had seen more than one white farmer from Nacogdoches literally spit the words from his mouth and wipe them on his shirt sleeve. You know how white people in Nacogdoches hate the people in Lufkin? Now you know why. Now you what it all goes back to. I wouldn't lie to you. Why would I lie?"
