SMACK!
Right into the ear. Blood began to pool near Laz’s auricle. He staggered back against the wall, and the ringing, God, the ringing, which sounded like the tin music box Marie-Anne played for him. The song it played was the Für Elise. Every night he was at the Keiths’ house, he would play it for the girls as a lullaby. Aimee would place her ear to the floor and Marie-Anne would sit cross-legged and play the music box to accompany him. Sometimes, he played so softly that they could hear the gear churn inside the machine. He wished Tommy was here to help him stand up straight, because he was halfway slipped down the wall. He wished Tommy could get his Grandma Ady to make up one of her horse-chestnut teas to help soothe his whole body. He thought about Bessie hugging him tightly as he scrambled to his feet. He was tear-blind; Mr. Richard had turned into a nighttime mirage. In the haze, he experienced the man vaguely. Go home. They would talk in the morning. If he was sick, go
home.
The blood pooled in his ears made him half-deaf. He gripped his knees and inched his way down Main Street. He slunk into the shadows of the cool of the moon. He remembered being young, watching Esther do this, her saying she was turning into tar. He thought of the tar people she said lined the street these days, faces shrouded in the stickiness, and they reached out from their existence into his own. He had used to believe Esther, but he was nearly eighteen now. There was no time for Esther’s odd words, half-past and future tenses. Bessie and the baby who was coming and college. That was all he had. And maybe his body had rejected his hands because college was not his either. That would be okay. His whole life he’d heard about Br’er Rabbit stories and got familiar with growing up in thorny places. It makes you clever, perhaps wise enough to stay put. They’d build a life: Bessie and him and the baby. He was the son of a peach picker and a seamstress, and of this patch of earth, twisted up and thorny. There, from the corner of his tear-stained eyes, he caught a glimpse of the hunched figure of the Barghest, gnawing on fifty-four ringlet curls.
Fifty-four blonde curls were scrunched in the bloody hands of the Barghest, who crouched a few feet from what was once Verity Ailey’s head. The moon lit up his blueish skin as he bent down and licked her sweet blood from the mud. Having taken only poor, black, dusty blood, he found this decadent blood near royal in his mind—like a fine wine pressed in the light of the nearly new moon, and just as intoxicating—thick with delight. He wanted more with each bite of her body, pure and hollow. It smeared his lips. It dripped onto his tongue. It ate him back in a sweetness that burned his esophageal lining. It choked him a little, soldering one side of his throat to the other. She was good.
The scalp and strands would be haphazardly sewn back on her head and the fifty-four blonde curls would remain youthful until their decay. A diadem of roses would be placed to hide the jagged stitch line. Her mother’s beautification club friends would sit in the back of the Second Baptist Church and talk from underneath their hats.
“She looks good,” one will say. “That Dickens man did a good job with her.”
“You probably couldn’t tell that she was murdered if you didn’t know already,” the other will reply. The mortician will even have stuffed her ribcage full of cotton fluff to keep her body from collapsing. It will seem a marvel.
The Barghest looked up to Lazarus, eyes beady and satisfied. He held his finger to his lips to shush the boy. Lazarus looked up to the end of the street. His voice moved before his brain could stopper it up. So, it spilled into the night. On Main Street in Napoleonville, not down Freedom Road in the Bramble Patch. Once, when he was a child, he had attempted to pick up an armful of peaches only to watch them drop and bruise and litter the entire floor; some snuck out the door into the wild street. His voice scattered and rolled away like that escaped fruit in Marion Chapman’s store.
He caught a glimpse of the Barghest shimmering into the darkness and ran to the body, ran into the pool of blood knees-first. He cradled the scalp and tried to stitch it back to the head using only his mind. He saw her face, serene and quiet. He had passed her on the porch, seen her with his adopted sister brushing her hair or holding her babies. Once she’d offered him a glass of water on a hot day and one other time, she had him chop some wood for her in the back. She had talked about a horse in the field where there wasn’t one; she spoke of her husband’s affair with a neighbor. She was sad, always sad, always half gone. His sister would carry that curdled sadness home to her little nest among the rat traps.
“Mrs. Verity?” he whispered. Spittle drained from his mouth on to her eyes. He was crying, dropping tears onto her crepe dress and into her hair now as he leaned to listen for any sign of life. “Mrs. Verity? Please. Please. God. Please.”
He took off his jacket to stopper the blood. He knew Ma Lyons would be furious at it, but he could not help but try to stopper the blood. It did nothing but soak the jacket further; he began to cry harder and watched the shadows of the moon dance across her little nose and lacquered mouth. She had near a smile in the red of her own blood. She was pale blue. He was dark blue. He had to get help, but he could not bring himself to leave this poor woman alone in the dark when the Barghest might come back to pick her apart. He looked up and framed the stars while he prayed that God would send help. He caressed her bloodied cheek with his swollen knuckles and looked down on the pale blue face.
The light changed. His shadow covered her face, which was now white and red with death and blood. The ringing in his ear gave way to a growl. He knew that growl came from a Dodge, Mr. Richard’s Dodge. He felt snot drip down his shirt, not daring to gaze into the light but letting it bathe the back of his head.
“Dolly. Tell the girls to look away.”
“Richard. I told you! I told you!”
“Dorothée. Enough.”
“Look what he did! You let him in our home! You let him near our girls!”
“Take the car! Go home!”
Footsteps crunched on the dirt road. Daddy King said that someday this street would look like the streets in the city, plastered over in stone. Daddy King seemed to know a lot. Lazarus wanted to ask him how to be a father now, too. Was this what it was like, holding a scalped woman back together again? He clutched her shoulders and tried to find the words: “It was the Barghest.” He screamed that in his mind over and over. But his mouth just spittled into pools around her head. Her eyes looked violet by moonlight and headlight. A second car engine roared.
“Peter, don’t come down here!”
“Is that her?”
“Peter.” That was Mr. Richard’s threat voice.
“What’d that black bastard do to my wife!”
Claws dug into Laz’s shoulders and wrenched him backward into the mud. He let go of Mrs. Verity’s head. Her scalp went into the air. That was all he saw as he covered his face from the incoming blows.
“Son of a bitch!” Dr. Peter said. “Son of a bitch! Nigger shit! Son of a bitch!”
He flailed his hands against Laz’s body, finding every point he could to make the pain grow. Laz heard a crack in his ribcage, and the pain burned through his body. Fists came down on his ears; the ringing got worse. This time not a music-box ringing but the sound of when you find yourself drowning. Laz felt pain in this calf, right where his switchback of scars was. Again. They blistered anew and opened up. All the keloid tissue began to ooze rivers of Lazarus onto the back of his pants. For a moment, he thought that his pants might be ruined. But as he felt his body tremble, he knew he might not have to worry about his clothes anymore.
A knife slid down his spine, opening up his shirt and epidermis, opening little strings of fat and exposing them to Dr. Peter’s blows. Lazarus was slowly being transformed into a delta of blood. More hands were on him than before. Nails dug into his scalp as a voice shrieked. Rivulets came down into his eyes and God, they stung. Worse than that bee on his lip this morning. The blood got into his crying mouth, and he could only
choke on himself.
Then he felt the blows hush. A hand grabbed his, gently. He had learned his lesson—don’t take off your jacket in a white man’s house, he thought over and over, don’t go anywhere that don’t lead back to alive. The hand traced his own delicately as if his fingers were frail slivers of glass upon which one might cut the skin. Fingers encircled his thumb, a thumb braced against his where the proximal phalanx and the metacarpal met. Lazarus would not have known this, but Peter Ailey did. He knew how to wrench the thumb back with his finger and push back the joint with his thumb. He knew to do it slowly so that the son of a bitch would scream in fear first and then in pain second. He looked over his wife’s corpse as he did it. He saw her mangled and nested hair so far strewn from her head; her crepe de chine dress disheveled; her snake-like scar exposed for the world to see; her hand, lost seven years prior, which had once had fingers that intertwined with his. He heard the pop of the joint snapping and breathed a sigh of relief.
Lazarus cried out as he felt Mr. Richard’s knife touch the flesh of his thumb, dig in, slice, fillet it. His piano, his hully-gully, his valse, his ragtime, his rhapsody all disappeared as the flesh hung from the bone. That is what made him keen as several pairs of hands lifted him up and carried him towards the white side of town. His voice spilled out; this time, though, it spilled out towards the Bramble Patch.
Tommy gripped Bessie’s hand. Through the years of her life, through all that she would think of her brother after he left, she would always come back to this moment: when he held her hand so tight as they fled into the night. When she’d tell her son, Lyman, about the night his daddy died, she’d say: “Your uncle Tommy hasn’t done everything right, but that night he did not let me go.”
Tommy had held his breath in the plunge into the night, when he heard Ma Lyons scream into the street and up and down the river. It was an echo of her son’s scream; she had heard it from the town above in the Patch below. Lazarus screamed and her house rattled; the world herself shook and Ma amplified the sound. One day, when he would record in a studio, Tommy would look at the microphone and remember how the one scream had amplified the other. Tonight, he grabbed his sister’s hand and pulled her through the Bramble Patch.
“White folks took him,” he said. “There’s a rumor going round that he killed Mrs. Ailey and ate her.”
Bessie shook her head as they skirted the river, where Esther rocked back and forth in prayer, throwing dust upon her face and neck. By the waters of Babylon, thought Bessie, we wept as we remembered Zion. She could not contain her tears the way the river could not contain all the sadness of the world. Esther was the embodiment of sackcloth and ashes all rolled into one. Bessie stopped for a moment. And she watched Esther bathe herself in dirt and soot. She memorized the alignment of the heavens that night and saw the particles of dust fall from moonbeams onto Esther’s breasts and settle there.
“How can we sing the Lord’s song in a foreign land?” her future husband would preach one day. As a deacon in the AME, he’d be giving the pastor a break, ten years later in 1930—the same year the flood would come. Her six-year-old, Luella, and her son, Lyman, would flank her in the pew. And while the whole congregation would think the foreign land was this earthly plane and home was Beulahland, Bessie knew that home could become foreign and strange in an instant.
Bessie would be the last person to weep when the flood came in the summer of 1930, because long ago, so much of her hope had drowned anyway; it was in this moment, watching Esther at the river.
Esther and Tommy moved into the coolness of the trees. Knowing that if they came too close to the road, they might get swept up in the anger.
Someone said that some white folk had come down to the junction where Marion’s store was and had busted the windows. They were coming for the Bramble Patch and would set brushfire to it if they had to.
“He didn’t do it, Tommy.”
“I know.” Every man in the Bramble Patch had a hunch as to who it was. No one could ever name the fear.
They whispered between the trees, scuffing up pine needles as they went. Listless wind encircled them in the dark, and hovering over it all was the moon.
When Tommy was in his fifties, high as high could go, he told his second wife the story of watching the moon settle above Napoleonville. How she crept up and smiled a big old broad grin when Bessie and Tommy broke through the clearing. “Bessie wouldn’t go no further. She didn’t want to see him. She didn’t want to be seen.”
In the tall grass, they slumped into the mud and watched the moon. They could hear his screaming. They weren’t far. Bessie jammed her palms over her ears. “No more,” she whispered. “No more.”
Tommy draped his arm over his sister’s shoulder. He listened. He listened to cries of agony turn to gurgles and then grow too dim to hear. His cheeks grew slightly warmer, but he pretended they did not. The moon was suddenly shrouded in a blue haze that dampened the light. Through the trees a dim glow could be seen, but he pretended it could not. He looked at Bessie, who looked up where the moon had been. Strung-out Tommy in his fifties, resting his head on his wife’s bosom in his stupor, could still see her silhouette.
“Tommy?” asked Bessie.
“Mhm.”
“Are those clouds or smoke?” asked Bessie.
They were too quiet. And then he said, “What’s bad is I can’t tell you.”
Requiem
Hell is the end of a rope where the arthritis-twisted hand of Marion Chapman fumbles with a dull blade—watching him cut down your sweetheart.
Hell is the old man rubbing your belly. The water poisoned by your lover’s blood. Hell is having the whole town quench their thirst with his blood. And his empty casket, placed into a hole in the woods. What was left of his body had been tossed into the river by the sheriff and was later found scuttled on Tata and Rhea’s island. His putrified abdomen burst suddenly at midday, spattering the edenic sunflower patch and the baby’s bassinette. Auntie Rhea found Snow-baby gored up. Tata Duende knew from his circus days that he could sell the body as an oddity. And so he did. Peter Ailey bought the body. Taxidermied it. This is Hell.
Hell is the Barghest growing pregnant with his own delight at everyone’s suffering, especially Tempess’s. Hell is seeing your lover’s hands butchered so skillfully into thin slices that it could have been done in a delicatessen. In Harlem, they hung the black and white flag for him: “A man was lynched today.” But that’s Harlem. This is the Bramble Patch. This is Hell.
Hell is a breech birth for one of the dead man’s twin sons. So he comes out strangled like his father before him. His uncle takes him away, so you won’t see. But you do—you see the blue of his lips and his knuckles. He has his father’s nose. And his living brother cries, and you flip him towards your breast for him to suckle, but your chapped nipples burn and bleed instead. It will be Marion Chapman’s tangled fingers resting on your cheek as he asks for your hand in marriage. You say yes, inasmuch as you have any say. Soon the new year comes: 1921, the first year the world has no Lazarus Lyons. Some white man goes door to door selling photos of your lover’s death to curious white folk. The Barghest’s place gets a better piano man and gets busy again. He likes white blood. So sweet. This is Hell.
Bessie Teller Chapman was the Queen of Hell.
From Heartland Melodies:
Inspirations for Blues Standards from Middle America
Chicago’s Tommy “Bobwhite” Teller is a perfect example of a writer whose work has location-specific historicity as well as universal appeal. Teller’s song “Flame-licked Lover”, for example, references the famous Chicago fire of 1871 throughout but simultaneously describes an affair between unfaithful lovers. As Teller’s biographer Markus Kennedy notes:
His contemporaries anthologized this song in particular, because its symbolism seemed to resonate everywhere and with everyone. Bassist Freddy Lipton, who played with Teller between 1944
and 1958, said it was a particular favorite of his: “I ain’t ever known that song to not work a crowd. We played everywhere from London to San Francisco, and ‘Flame-licked Lover’ always got people cheering. I bet it’s the only time Mrs. O’Leary’s cow got applause.” The lyrics capture the universal experience of jealously while remaining a pure Chicago classic.4
Some lyrics in Teller’s work have the opposite effect, becoming almost hauntingly personal in their lack of specificity, as in the early recording from 1931, “Don’t Lead Back to Alive.” The work is markedly primitive; Teller still features the fiddle as his lead instrument instead of his signature guitar, yet Kennedy calls these lyrics “achingly personal” despite the lack of reference to a particular location: “The moon was shrouded in blue fog/ and it was hard for her to tell/ if clouds were what the pines were showered in/ or the smoky cracklings of Negro skin.”
* * *
4 Markus Kennedy, Mournful Hollerin’: The Life and Music of Tommy ‘Bobwhite’ Teller (Chicago, IL: Easterly Winds Press, 1999).
Sermon against Scofflaws
January 6, 1924
Rev. Jonah Kincaid of Napoleonville Second Baptist
Lord, bless me and my flock! Give me Your words. Soften the hearts of my flock, Lord, Abba Father. Give them ears to hear me. Bury their sinful nature, Lord. Strangle it. Strangle them with Your wrath as they give in to their temptations. My flock is a weak and idle people in a weak and idle age. Help them, Father. Amen and amen.
Brothers and Sisters. I will be reading from the Book of Exodus, chapter 32, verses 19 through 25. “And it came to pass, as soon as he came nigh unto the camp, that he saw the calf, and the dancing: and Moses’ anger waxed hot, and he cast the tables out of his hands, and brake them beneath the mount. And he took the calf which they had made, and burnt it in the fire, and ground it to powder, and strewed it upon the water, and made the children of Israel drink of it. And Moses said unto Aaron, What did this people unto thee, that thou hast brought so great a sin upon them? And Aaron said, Let not the anger of my lord wax hot: thou knowest the people, that they are set on mischief. For they said unto me, Make us gods, which shall go before us: for as for this Moses, the man that brought us up out of the land of Egypt, we wot not what is become of him. And I said unto them, Whosoever hath any gold, let them break it off. So they gave it me: then I cast it into the fire, and there came out this calf. And when Moses saw that the people were naked (for Aaron had made them naked unto their shame among their enemies); then Moses stood in the gate of the camp, and said, Who is on the Lord’s side? let him come unto me. And all the sons of Levi gathered themselves together unto him.”
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