And friends, I was smiling to hear it, smiling to see the confusion. I knew what it was before this here flesh-and-blood Runnymede ever figured it out. (Even if I knew the one I dreamed of had known it for years and years.) Because just maybe, I’d seen the lines of this purchase a little bit more clearer than he did, that I’d seen them run deeper and farther. There might have even been something in A.D. all along that was fighting toward this end. Some notion or hidden feeling that had turned up in him after all the truth we’d found out there in the ridge had washed over him after all that we’d done, after all that we’d taken. Sure. A recompense, as it were. An absolving, or pardoning away. Or maybe, it just happened because he seen me held back. He seen me subjugated like he’d never seen me subjugated before. Turned into some property, some sad item to be detained and discarded, and it vexed him. Vexed him to no end. I can’t rightly say.
But if it was true that he was the most un-white man I’d ever known, as I’ve said before, I’ll be damned if he didn’t prove it by what he done next. Because something inside him must have traced back all the names and songs and faces of the folks we’d seen. Across all the lives we’d found on those hillsides and hovels, in those dirty clapboard shacks and shanties, in those old abandoned slave quarters and shed rows, for he just started talking. He talked into the microphone and listed it all out for what he’d taken and had to give back. What we all had to give back.
What the hell is this? The emcee waved his hand now and looked up at the technician in the mezzanine, but his technician wasn’t looking. He was just working the dials, working the levels with his headphones so that A.D. could be heard, so that all of it could be heard.
His confession, Runnymede said and smiled as he shook his head.
His what?
His confession.
You mean he came all the way down here to do that? and the emcee waved his arm again at his technician, waving it frantically as he stomped his foot. But he never seen him. Don’t he know this ain’t no church?
It is to him, I said, and Runnymede looked at me for the first time since I seen him in the flesh and stopped smiling. His lips creased to a thin and vaporous white as he cleared his throat, as if getting set to perform, to set all this nonsense down for good.
Why don’t you just have your boy flash the lights at him? he said.
My what?
Your boy, Runnymede said. The lights, and the emcee looked across the stage at where the light board operator stood at his panel of switches, waiting his cue. Just dim the lights and see what happens.
O my friends, the lights. The lights! To hear that caustic phrase spoken so casually and with such meaning took the smile right off my face. As soon as I heard it, I seen Ezra Lee’s pale visage surface in the ether, as of a ghost come back to haunt us. And as I watched the emcee make his sign to the light operator, the footlights at the edge of the apron dimmed and flickered and wavered down, and the whole time I thought of the Brooklyn Bridge and A.D.’s wish to jump off it. Then I watched in horror as he seemed shaken from his recitation, and moved toward the edge of the stage still mumbling a last few names as he stood before the crowd.
The lights, he finally said, and shook in his soul to see them and to know after all this time the lights weren’t there to lift him up into the promise of his own celebrity, that they weren’t there to anoint him some god or king of music. For as he glanced back to see, he knew there was no celebrity without me, no family without the founder. That the lights were now an indictment of all the hatred and prejudice that had shadowed and stalked our trail this whole time, and he’d had enough. Enough of looking out at the empty seats where he’d hoped his family would be in this ridiculous plan of his. Enough of Runnymede’s smiling, placid face and my hopeless, pleading gaze. Enough of the crowd howling to see him play something, as all the hopefulness drained from his vision for what this moment—our moment—was meant to be. And as the guitar dangled and picked up the pulsation of the dimming bulbs, and he cried out again—The lights!—with the sharp toe of his fine leather wingtip he kicked the bulbs on the front edge of the stage. One by one, they cracked and burst. The glass sparks scattered and spent, so that only ash and bright blue flames leapt up. While beyond him, with each decisive kick, the great roiling crowd erupted with another chorus of shrieks and boos as they stood and shouted down his life, shouting down his soul, pointing for him to leave, to quit.
There, Runnymede said. The Hardy Family. And with a satisfied air, he touched my shoulder lightly, smiled his awful smile, and faded into the shadows. As if that were their signal, them fellows released their grip and I knew that was it for us for sure. To come into the Opry and desecrate such a ground as this— before a live studio audience, no less—not to mention all those folks listening in on the airwaves, had done it, had cast our name to mud for sure. And even as I was free now and A.D. wallowed on the front of the stage, showered in the hatred of that crowd, and the emcee himself staggered out and tried to drag A.D. off, I couldn’t bring myself to go out and help him, to cross that stunning threshold, that last sad divide. Instead, I watched frozen as A.D. stood alone in the darkness, as he rambled on with his guitar, so that finally the bouncers and stagehands had to drag him away. For it was only then, only as he struggled in their grasp singing some last lyric, that it come to me, in-between the swells and curses the crowd cast upon him. That song. The one on his lips. The one in the ridge we said we’d never sing nor sell for all time. The song of Yancey Jakes. The one only now to be sung and heard as never before—the only one that needed to be heard above all else—but that would never be, as he was finally and ruthlessly dragged away.
XXXIV
That urgency and forlornness ~ Out there beyond the ridge ~ Where the music was fresh ~ The City of New Orleans to the Crescent to the Cardinal ~ The great coincidence ~ Electrified on Maxwell Street ~ On the Circe ~ Finally, into Asheville
WHEN THE TELEPHONE RANG, I had a notion not to answer it. I was just setting there in my apartment on the South Side of Chicago, on East 47th and State Street, if you can believe it (just like the State Street in Bristol), when I heard it, calling to me with all that urgency and forlornness that I could tell without answering what it was. Something in the air presaged it. Something I felt building after all these years had become so open and obvious I just let it ring and sipped my coffee all the way down and touched up the collar of my white Pullman Porter jacket before finally stepping over to the counter. I didn’t have to say nothing by way of answering, since she always done all the talking anyways. It was Ms. Clara May. A.D. was dead. An apparent heart attack had taken him where he stood in the kitchen of his two room trailer after he’d moved out of Bristol finally, somewheres closer to Lexington, Kentucky, out there beyond the ridge.
I thanked her for her call, of thinking enough to let me know, then paused, took a deep breath, and said I was real sorry to hear it. I inquired then quietly about the health of Ms. Jolie, now a mother in her own right, with a baby girl named Marie and a young fellow named Amos, but got off before she could even answer. I didn’t have time for all that, going down memory lane and such, for fear of where all those memories might lead. Instead, I just had to set down and write it all out, scribbling my notes first, before composing the longer studied verse to someone—to anyone—even if it was to my own damn self. I just had to write about him. About us. The Hardy Family. About all that we done and played and heard. About all that we made and took and gave. And the more I contemplated and put pen to paper, the more I realized what a hard thing it was to think about a life going out like that, like no more than blowing out a candle, and then to make it mean something. But it brought me back to the Opry that night, and to our moment all those years ago, when I never seemed able to cross that last threshold, that one divide, to help my A.D., to reach out to him. O I so wanted to reach out to him, to pull him in closer. To walk back dignified and tall from that stage and never look back at the hatred and rage of all those folks shouting
out there in the dark. I wanted to recover him, so to speak, to keep him safe, with me, and I suppose I still do.
It’s now November 7, 1960, almost twenty-eight years after the fact, and I’d hoped to find A.D. in much better shape after all this, but knew it weren’t no good. It weren’t no good from the beginning, not with how we left it. Not with how those lights flickered on the edge of that stage and all them people started hollering in the darkness. When all he could do was stare into the theater reciting the names and lyrics and any last hope he still had of making it through, of rising above it all, was extinguished. Yes. Hope. It’s a word I’ve become accustomed to over the years, and do not shy away from. Because I was lost then, I guess you could say, and have been ever since. Even if I’ve seemed to be moving in the right direction all along. Even if I’ve seemed to establish a foothold, or purchase, as it were, in another life entire from what we left behind.
It was the railroad that done it, if you can believe it. At least nobody could say it wasn’t. For nobody ever pushed me off from Bristol, as you might have thought. Nobody was ever mean to me nor downhearted about our big flame-out at the Opry. Nobody ever blamed me nor my disappearance, as they called it, from the stage for our final collapse. But I sure felt something hovering there. Some absence or energy in the face of what we’d accomplished and left unfinished seemed to haunt me, shadowing my movements in town, visiting my dreams at night, and so I just had to leave. I locked up the door one day, turned off the lights, and rode the rail all the way to Chicago. I went where the music was, where it was building something fresh, where it was another sound entire from what I knew, but familiar too, and true.
O we still played. We played on many occasions after that night at the Opry, after I bailed A.D. out of the Nashville City Jail, though I can’t say any of them were as memorable as that last time. If you’d already guessed, it was the emcee that done it, that accused A.D. with disorderly conduct and creating a nuisance and destruction of property. Even as that goddamned Runnymede swore on the emcee’s behalf, writing his account all up with his nice little flourishes and fancy legal speak, commenting the next morning in the Nashville Tennessean on the particulars against A.D. and me. Against us. Dragging it all out that much more, with our names included (finally saying our names, though only in connection with our disgrace), so that after all that, what else could we do? We just went further out from where all the noise was. We went all the way to Okie country and Arkansas and even Kansas to play some shows. But eventually our reputation caught up with us there too, with what happened in Nashville. It was only in Del Rio, Texas on the border with the radio stations popping up all over Mexico where we ever got any play, any money. Even that didn’t last. O we headlined the occasional benefit then, or a Victor Talking Machine Company reunion or some other event, but mostly we drifted apart. It just didn’t seem right no more. Like we were holding onto something that wasn’t there, that didn’t have no name nor center, so we just had to leave. To let it go.
So when I seen an advertisement to become a Pullman Porter for the Pull-man-Standard Car Manufacturing Company, I just had to take it. By then A.D. had already invested in a hardware store right there in Bristol, where I imagined him moving behind the counter like a sad giraffe, reaching up to the top shelves for hammers and nails and half-cent shingles, for I only ever think he did it to be closer to Jolie. But even they moved away not long after. Gone to Ms. Clara May’s people in Norfolk, Virginia. So it was only A.D. in the end. A.D. alone and not returning my calls nor letters nor even picking up a guitar, I heard, or turning through the pile of names he kept tucked beneath his pillow. So I had to think less and less of my one true friend until finally he fell away from me entire. Until there was nothing left except what he’d once meant for my family, with that great hope he symbolized. That hope. So that I had to think about the Hardys instead, I had to think about my family, and how I was going to get them back.
O my sweet Annie and Lucy girl were still out there, still waiting to see me somewheres on some billboard or festival perhaps, even if they didn’t know it anymore. Even if Lucy had probably forgotten who I was or how I’d touched her cheek in the morning, or placed my hand atop her warm head, kissing her. Even if Annie had gotten herself a new man and lived in a new house in a new life without the echo of my memory no more, of my loving and leaving her still shadowing her. Stalking her, maybe? I don’t know. But I still wanted her. I still needed to find them, to know they were out there and safe. My family. My girls. I still believed in them and thought the railroad would see me through. That it would bring me back to them. Or them to me, whichever came first, for I thought it the best way to cover the territory I imagined them to be in. I know, I know, it sounds ridiculous and absurd, and it was. I imagine if you hired some accountant or even first grader, they could have figured the odds weren’t on my side by a long shot. But it was my hope, you see. My circuit. The shape I was meant to complete again and again, and I couldn’t leave it for nothing.
So riding the Panama Limited (later the City of New Orleans) to the Crescent to the Cardinal (formerly the James Whitcomb Riley) became my life for the next twenty-five years. My route, as it were, my great triangle of becoming and hope. Ah, the trains, the rhythm of it all, the great steady power of the rails rolling beneath my feet, or rocking me to sleep and jolting me back awake. I loved every second of it and wouldn’t have quit it for nothing if what came next didn’t happen. For I don’t know how many of them I rode over the years, nor how many bags and cases I hauled, or the great number of beds I turned down, or the shoes I shined up. But the fear in me was that the one time I wasn’t on a train, the one time I wasn’t working for all I was worth, would be the one time they’d be standing at some concession stand or ticket booth. Or passing behind some trolley car. Walking out in plain view for all to see, as simple as that, and so it charged me. It made me work from Chicago to Memphis, New Orleans to Carolina, Virginia to Indiana, before finally rolling back into Illinois—it became my journey, my mission, so to speak, year after year. It got so familiar, I could tell the depth of the Mississippi River just by the shadow of the water heading south. Or, I could guess the time of day just by watching the grassy lowlands before turning up north through Georgia. When the Blue Ridge rose up before me as the whole sad dance of it unfolded again and seemed one continuous rolling away, one grand circuit. But it never seemed complete. It never seemed to change neither. Now I’m not saying it never got old or tired. Just that the different faces and mornings and moonlight I seen never once shined on the ones I wanted it to shine on, and so it made me forlorn. It never once helped me craft the great coincidence I was hoping to orchestrate, by following those great centric routes of migration and commerce. My great wearing away and becoming. Yes, becoming, and last sad entrance through the years.
Though I’d be remiss if I didn’t speak about the faces I did see back then, the ones that reminded me of my pilgrimage. The faces that kept me company as I rolled along and searched the land and watched for my girls, as all the faces of the black boys and men poured up from the South. All on their way to Chicago or St. Louis or Detroit. All hungry and determined to work, determined for the money and savings they’d send back to the ones they’d left behind in Slidell and Jackson and Birmingham, in Macon and Hattiesburg and Brownsville. All the wives and sisters and girlfriends that the men saw less and less of the more the years dragged on, as their paths branched off and diverged. For it all seemed written down on some great ledger years before, the pain and loss meant for them to suffer. The lost love and betrayal, the anguish and displacement written on our faces and in our dark skin like a mark of our loss. Of our guilt and bereavement at moving forward without the ones we loved, and of then loving others closer to us (who we tried to start the whole bond of family and togetherness with again). But like everything else we’d been through—from the cargo holds to the cotton fields to the sharecropper shacks—we found our solace in music. The music made us whole again. Fo
r however long it played, for however long we remembered, for however long we sang and shifted our tired feet to the sound, the music made it true.
Though as I write this, I’m wondering what I could possibly say that you haven’t heard? How the music changed me, how it changed the very air the world seemed comprised of, for it sounded so much like what we’d made in our own day, but different. Electrified they called it. Electrified blues and rock n’ roll scattered like thunderbolts in the alleys and juke joints on Maxwell Street. Scattered like lightning in the ears and minds and hearts. Blowing away your eyes. Blowing away your bones and blues. For I played it too, from time to time, with a few fellas who knew me—McKinley and Albert and Jimmy Reed—when it first broke for all of them in the way it must a broke for A.D. and me with our first big hit. They knew what I’d done and revered me in a way that made me a sort of patrician to their lot. Yet in those smoky bars and barbeque joints, in those packing plants and garage stalls, I swear it was like the thing jumped in my hand. Those hot guitar coils. Each reverberating note and feedback loop. Like holding a snake or electric eel out in front of you. Something buzzing and livid and alive. With the soul of the life in it dying to get out, to be free, to rise up ahead like what we always wanted with our music, but which Runnymede stopped plain and cold in Nashville.
Ah Runnymede . . . I seen him again too after all this, after I heard about A.D.’s passing. After it threw me something awful and I got to thinking on all of this again, and just had to go, to ride my circuit again, following it through the land. And even if I can’t be sure Runnymede seen me when I did meet up with him again, I know he sure felt me. O he felt me through and through for what I’d become—and what I could only become—but we’ll get to that soon enough. For now we’ve got time. Time to ride the rails. Time to mark the land. For I was working on the Crescent, as I’ve said, portering on the Pullman named Circe of all things, if you can believe it, if you can allow me such latitude with mythology and coincidence.
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