by Tim Bryant
Sometimes the stories seemed unreal to me. At night, I could go out on the bow of the boat, look upriver and almost make myself believe I was back on the Angelina. Ndar was home, and yet Pattonia continued to pull at me like a mischievous child. I would look up at the moon and think about the people looking at it from back there. Angelina, river of angels. Angel in Sabine Pass. I had been guided by them. Did the people standing on the banks of that dirty little river understand. Did they believe that it could take them to the other side of the world. To another life.
I had been totally and completely transfigurated. It took me a while to understand. Understand may be the wrong word. I'm not sure I will ever understand it. But I learned to believe it. I had first heard the word from the bocar, or maybe it was Jean Telly, in Haiti. They saw something happening that set me apart. More lives. More stories.
Jean Telly said that Jesus himself had been transfigurated.
As Jo Biidéo grew, she started to tell stories of her own. Her stories all looked ahead instead of back. She talked of where she wanted to go, the things she wanted to see. I began to see things through her eyes. I began to understand that I had put the Lady Camargo back together not for myself. Not to get myself to Haiti or Trinidad or even to Senegal. I had rebuilt it to take Jo Biidéo on her journey. We began to talk about coming to America.
In 1956, she would arrive in Charleston with me, and by the end of that year, she would be enrolled in Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. Jo Biidéo Patton of Dakar, Senegal. Who never would have had a story to tell if not for Marietou. If not for a nameless Ghanaian in Saint James. If not for the Haitian bocar. Angel in Sabine Pass. Harmon Littlejohn in Pattonia. George Delafield.
It all comes back to George Delafield. I can't say he ever had any idea what his gift to me would turn into. But I also can't say he would be surprised. He told me once, many years ago, while we were sitting in front of the seed store playing bones, that one of us was bound to live forever. Maybe he just meant that either of us would do anything we could to outlive the other. Or maybe he knew more than he was letting on.
Anything I did that was truly special was done there at that damn seed store. That's where I got it in my hard head that I didn't want to die there. You keep yourself from dying long enough, you're bound to go a few places. Bound to collect a few stories. Bound to learn how to make some kind of a racket that's never been made before.
You'll get yourself into all kinds of things you never expected. You might even get yourself transfigurated.
I watched for Art at The Pepper Pot and all up and down Patton's Landing Road, but I never did see or hear anything from him. Ephriam and me wondered if he had gone back to Alabama to see his daughter, but neither of us had any way of pursuing the matter. I wrote a short article for the Gazette about his appearance at the juke joint. I don't think anyone ever read it but me. I messed around with the idea of writing something more substantial, but I decided I couldn't tell part of the story unless I told all of it.
Sometimes I would drive out to the river, away from the street lights in town, where the stars seemed to multiply. I would find the Big Dipper and the North Star and wonder if, just maybe, Art was looking at it as well.
I never will forget what he said about constellations. Art, who looked up into the sky and saw strange signs as a small boy, who followed those same signs halfway around the world and back again, knew his way around the sky too.
"The same constellations that brought Columbus over here, that brought all kinds of explorers to the new world, well, those are the same goddamn constellations that took enslaved negroes to freedom up in the north. The stars don't care who reads them. Don't give a damn. Don't care if you got black skin or white skin or no skin at all. See, the constellations don't even give a damn whether you're a good man or a bad man. You can be running away from evil or running smack dab into its arms. Don't make them no difference.
"This whole world is sailing through the sky. Going around and around, never staying in one place. You can sit right here on the banks of the Angelina River and think you're never going anywhere, and, in one way of seeing it, you couldn’t be more wrong.
But here's the thing I'm trying to tell you. Nothing stays the same. Time keeps moving, and we keep moving with it. What's here today will be gone tomorrow. But no matter what else happens. No matter how many days and years and lifetimes go by. No matter how far we sail through the sky, when you look up, those damn constellations are gonna be there. They don't ever change. You may not be able to count the stars, but you can sure enough count on that."
That might be my favorite thing the man ever said, and he wasn't on a stage when he said it. He was standing in the dark and looking me straight in the eye. Art Conray Patton was a slave. He was a son and a brother. He was a carpenter. A friend. A boat captain. A musician. He might have been transfigurated. But more than all these things, he was following the stars. He was an explorer.
Almost a week after the Gazette ran my article, a white man came walking into the Gazette office and asked for me. He was a history professor at the college in Nacogdoches, and he had somehow picked up a copy of my story. He didn't have the regulation Army haircut. He looked young to be a professor.
"You the one who wrote the review on Art Patton?"
I had been writing an article on upcoming family reunions. I stood up and shook the man's hand. Dr. Coleman.
"Yes sir," I said.
He seemed nervous. Most likely because he felt out of place.
"This Pepper Pot," he said. "It's over on the road to Marion's Ferry?"
I said that it was.
"Do the whites go there? What I mean to say, are they welcomed?"
I thought it funny the way he said they, as if he weren't one. I told him that I had seen a white person or two there, usually saw mill employees from around Kelty's, usually with colored co-workers. We wound up talking about Mance Lipscomb, who he had just seen at a picnic in Navasota, Texas. I had never seen Mance, but I knew who he was. I took down the man’s phone number and agreed to call him up the next time I was headed to The Pepper Pot.
Almost as a second thought, he reached inside his jacket and handed me a page from a newspaper.
"I thought you might be interested in this."
I glanced at it. The Beaumont Enterprise. Dr. Coleman excused himself, saying he hoped to hear from me again soon. I returned to my desk, pushing the family reunion news aside and unfolding the article in my hands.
It was dated September 24, 1957.
"This week, a local hunter and his son discovered the wrecked remains of a steamboat just south of the Sabine Pass area in an area hit hard by Hurricane Audrey. The steamboat had been hidden by years of forest growth and changes in the river brought about by newer, man-made lakes. The boat, with its name Lady Camargo worn but still legible on the side, had likely been used to bring loads of cotton down the Neches River, possibly as long as one hundred years ago.
There were no human remains or signs of the boats crew."
I shared the article with Ephriam that same evening. I had to share it with someone. It was too much to take home and file away. I drove out to Oda's place, only to find that he had moved into town. It was late by the time I found his address and knocked at his door. We talked on his front porch. Short and straight to the point. For reasons I wasn't up to discussing, I felt low. Low and lonesome and let down.
Sometime in the spring of the following year, I took a trip to The Pepper Pot with my friend Bob Coleman. Juke Boy Bonner was playing. I had heard a couple of his records and liked them. When we arrived, Jay Henry was working the bar, and there was already a decent crowd in the place. Juke Boy was setting up in the opposite corner from where Art had played, a wise decision I thought.
I walked up to the bar to order two beers. Jay Henry did the pouring and then told me to hold on for just a minute He disappeared under the bar and came up with a cigar box full of papers. He rustled around in it and fished out a
n envelope with my name on it.
"I believe this is for you, young man. It's been setting out here a while."
I turned the envelope over in my hand. Aside from my name, no other clues. I took it and the two cups and returned to our table. Juke Boy was tuning his guitar, a pretty white Fender with a red pick guard. He had a harmonica rack that made it look like he was wearing some kind of neck brace. The first one I had ever seen.
The envelope contained a card and a piece of paper. On the card was printed:
Stillman College
announces the Commencement Exercises
Saturday, May 16
Nineteen Hundred Fifty-Nine
Tuscaloosa, Alabama
and then beneath that:
Jo Biidéo Patton
A piece of paper accompanied it, with the scratched message: Do you think you can find room for this somewhere in your newspaper?
A month later, I was standing in the office of Maydell Records on Hadley Street in Houston. I had two copies of the acetate for "This Little Light Of Mine" under my arm and a fresh rejection from the Peacock label, who said it was an old-timey song that nobody wanted to hear again. Marcell Ashbrook at Maydell took one look at what I had and hurried me into his office.
"This is the same Art Patton who played in Africa? The same Art Patton who played on WERD out of Atlanta? The one who played with the 5 Royales at the Saenger in New Orleans?"
I looked at the photographs on Mister Ashbrook's wall and tried to find someone I recognized.
"I think he's probably most of those same ones," I said.
There was a photograph of Mister Ashbrook with Mahalia Jackson and another man, and a different one of him and The Soul Stirrers, his arm around Sam Cooke like they were old friends. I signed the papers, and he agreed to release the single before even hearing it. They called it "This Blues Light Of Mine (Part One)" by Art Patton featuring Eulalie Glover. The flip side had part two and it was even better.
Marcell Ashbrook said Art had established quite a name playing in Africa and had recorded a handful of songs for a small label over there.
"Radio songs, with a dude named Cachao," he said. "They play his shit on the radio from Dakar to Nigeria and up to France. Cuba too. Impossible to find in America. Impossible."
Art had been making waves as he made his way across the south, picking up dates on the circuit and building word of mouth along the way. So much that Marcell had been put on notice by a label head in New Orleans.
"He's from your neck of the woods. Look out for him."
As far as I know, the Maydell single is the only recording he ever made in the United States. Mister Ashbrook got in touch with me a couple of times over the next year or so, asking if I had heard more from Art. Then the phone stopped ringing.
The record never sold in any great numbers, never became a hot collector's item, although I've heard that copies turn up every now and then. In old boxes, at garage sales, places where people don't have any idea who he is or what he did or even what they have in their hands.
I was talking to a music collector not too long ago, and Art's name came up. She wanted to know if I still had a copy of the record. I played it for her twice. She sat there for a minute after the needle lifted up. Then she leaned in.
"So what do you think the real story is?"
I think the real story is this. I think Art Patton and Harmon Littlejohn left Pattonia in 1924 headed for Sabine Pass. I think they made it that far and sold all of George Delafield's possessions. I think they either decided to ditch the Lady Camargo or ran into trouble between there and the gulf. I think they bought a ticket on a boat bound for Cuba. I think they went from there to Haiti. I think somewhere between Haiti and Trinidad, Art Conray Patton got sick and died. And I think somewhere between Trinidad and Senegal, Harmon Littlejohn— who had been known to change his name to Little John Harmon if he thought it would help him be remembered— was transfigurated. I think he absorbed everything he had known about the man who was born into slavery, who had been given the name of a dead brother himself. And I think he took the story, added it to his own and pushed it further up and further in, as C.S. Lewis said.
I didn't tell this music collector that, of course. You choose which stories you tell and which ones you keep to yourself.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Tim’s first novel DUTCH CURRIDGE was published in 2010. He has since published two more in the Dutch Curridge Series, including 2014’s SPIRIT TRAP, for which he was named one of the Top Five Texas Authors of the year by BookPeople in Austin. His short story “Doll’s Eyes” was published in Subterranean Press’ IMPOSSIBLE MONSTERS. He lives in East Texas with his wife and two children.
