But there was more. A beyond to my landscape, a horizon to the fields and lakes of my waking, and slumbering, mind.
How could I tell him about the dream of Chautauqua? How could I tell him about the surface of the water, shimmering, the warmth of black faces, black hands comforting me, black voices singing to me? Me, a child? Arrested in forward movement, still caught in an eddy. There are currents in the Mississippi and the Arkansas and the Ohio that turn upon themselves forever, pockets roiling, where fish live their whole lives without escape. The man Insull, holding my mother down, grinning. That maybe I’d never been happy, and never could be happy, unless I could get back to that place where my mother wasn’t dead and a Negro minstrel’s song swaddled me.
The high, rank summer foliage passed by us, dense and green and dark as an ill intent. A water moccasin curled upon itself on the macadam shoulder, taking in the heat for the coming night. Bunny did not alter the Studebaker’s course to kill it, and for that, strangely, I was grateful. The hazy sky burned near white, pushing the blue to the edges. I sweated heavily.
“It’s a fascinating song, and it’s always drawn me, especially the infernal bits I’ve heard,” I said. Even to my ears, it rang hollow.
“The opiate of the masses,” he said. “I thought we’d agreed upon this, long ago. You might not be as red as me, but you’ve got a mind that works, and eyes to see, and enough war behind you to know—”
“The only devils are men,” I said.
Bunny nodded. “That’s why I just don’t understand why you’re all stuck on this ‘Stagger Lee’ business—”
“In a purely sociological sense, it’s important to understand all the different morphologies of a—”
“Spare me the lecture, professor.” Bunny waved his hand as though dismissing everything I had said, as if it were smoke from a particularly noxious cigar. “And you’re no theologian, or man of the cloth. You’re a veteran like me. We came home with enough sense to see the world as it really is. No benevolent god, no prancing imps. Just men. Bad men. Good men. Poor men. Stupid men.” He rubbed his face as if coming to his senses. “I’m sorry, Harlan. Holy hell, I’ve got to lay off the hooch. Not as wet as I used to be and the drink makes me mean-spirited.”
After that, Bunny fell silent and continued driving. But I could hear his voice, echoing my words back to me.
The only devils are men.
We drove north and west and found the wellspring of the Obion River in the hills, a wide, fast-moving body of water, very shallow, and followed it as best we could west, where it would eventually flow into the Mississippi somewhere north of Memphis, stopping in the small flea-bit towns to find rumor of Gramp Hines’s traveling chautauqua. We spent the week moving down its course and camping on its bank. During that time, we had sparse success with our mission, finding only three subjects to record—George Markus, Mary Goodwin, and Wilhelmina Gipps. All fine musicians, if unimaginative. So when we were not recording, we hunted for Gramp Hines’s chautauqua. Independence Day passed without fanfare—though we found a tonk that served cold beer and whiskey and drank enough to be unsteady. Many of the tonk’s patrons had heard of Hines’s chautauqua, but none had seen it or knew exactly where it might be located. Yesterday, in the midst of high heat, we pulled the Studebaker down a side road, came as close as we could to the banks of the Obion River, and stopped in a sort of wordless agreement. We had grown tired from the heat, and each other’s company, without respite from either. The summer had grown unmerciful, and often the hypnotic words of “Ole Hannah” would come to me at odd moments—Why don’t you go down, ole Hannah, well, well, well—and its lolling, rolling melody would fill my head for hours on end. As long as our vehicle moved, the sweat cooled on our skin, but the farther we drove down diminishing back roads, into and out of Kentucky and Tennessee, the more stultifying the temperature of the Studebaker’s cab became. At rest, engine off, the Studebaker hissed and ticked, as if allowing a great anger to subside. When we exited the car, the thick growth and foliage pressed around us, the forest in a summer trance. The rushing water was heard, not seen. The cacophonous discord of cicadas pealing, chitinous. We pushed through the brush and undergrowth to gain the shore. It was shallow and quick water, with brown, current-smoothed rocks. Turtles, surprised at our appearance, plunged in a line back into the flow. We walked downstream, to a soft, placid pool. A water snake cut its path away from us across the still surface. We stripped naked and dove in. It was blessed cool and kept the mosquitoes from us.
Back at the Studebaker, we both took pulls off a bottle of whiskey and smoked. We did not speak.
Dressed, we traced our way back down the dirt road and continued on, Bunny in a much better mood. Whether it was the hooch or the swim, his demeanor had righted itself and he was joking in a short time.
At a roadside store, we topped off the Studebaker and underneath a Nehi sign we found an old man to give us directions to the last place he’d heard that Gramp Hines had been.
“That odd tent revival over near old Mills Ferry? Take yonder highway until you come to the fork and keep right.” He looked at the fading light of day. “Should see the fires soon enough.”
“Fires,” Bunny said. “All right, old-timer.”
“Hot, but they got pinewood fires burning near the tent to keep the skeeters outside and music and storytellin’ inside.”
“Have you been?” I asked. “Seen the show?”
“Naw, but my daughter told me about it. Got a guitar picker, and a banjo man, and a lady that plays the dulcimer. Real family affair. Singin’ and dancin’. Spinnin’ tales.”
We thanked the old fellow and drove on, following his directions as best we could, though we were soon almost completely lost. Another dark night on a dirt road, surrounded by steaming dark forests, insects flashing in the headlights. Bunny drove, hunched over the wheel, a pained expression on his face, illuminated only by the faint light coming from the Studebaker’s dashboard. I could feel his agitation rising. I was the one who spotted the faint firelight flickering among the dark bristle of tree trunks, saplings, underbrush in the distance.
We found a small side road—something that more resembled an overgrown wagon trail—and followed it to a spot where the trees withdrew and the light from the stars made the brown, sluggish waters of the Obion silver. A towheaded white boy in overalls and a grass hat stood near a wood fire, and the smoke wreathed his figure, though he did not cough. Two kerosene lanterns burned, past him, illuminating the front of a large canvas tent, the like of which one might see in rural come-to-Jesus revival meetings from Vermont to western Texas. Outside of the tent stood a tractor, a twenties-model Ford truck much the worse for wear, and a mule-driven wagon. We parked, careful not to startle the animal transportation.
“Hello,” I said to the boy, exiting the car. “I hope we’re not too late for the show.”
“Ain’t a show,” the boy said, without looking up. “It’s a shad-talky.” He spoke with a mealy-mouthed indistinctness, as if there was too much saliva in his head for proper pronunciation.
“Can we go in?”
“Coster dimer piece.”
I gave the boy two dimes and we passed the lanterns. In more rural chautauquas, there was always a heightened salacious and carnival bent—tents emblazoned with their attractions in gigantic letters, devil child! bearded woman from borneo, tattoo art, cannibal pygmies, and so on, all in the guise of education, to lure in the provincial, the bored, the untraveled. They had fallen off in popularity, drastically, since the end of the war and now that radio was so popular. But most people in the rural areas of America, the forgotten fields and riversides, those small towns with a lot in which a carnival might set a pavilion—they still remember the chautauquas. Music and education and storytelling—possibly a little proselytizing—and mostly good, wholesome fun for the whole family (though I daresay many a country girl found herself in trouble months after, and hastily married).
Hines’s chautauqua was si
mply a single canvas tent, no signage, quite large, with at least three center poles. I could hear no music from inside, just the hushed voices of conversations. The wall flaps had been dropped, no doubt to fend off the mosquitoes. Pulling back the lip of the tent, we entered.
There were more lanterns burning inside the tent, placed at regular intervals. A cluster of wooden folding chairs stood mostly empty at the far end, but there were ten or fifteen men, women, and children clustered around three seated figures—a white-haired man holding a guitar, a boy without eyelashes and with a port-wine stain on his neck cradling a violin, and a wisp of a woman with a dulcimer in her lap.
The white-haired man—Gramp Hines, I was sure—spoke softly to the gathered people. “Now, let me instruct you, since you so kindly asked: Never step over a fishing pole or another man’s fishing line. Nor your own. If’n you do, you’ll catch no more fish that day. Understand?” There was murmured assent and some of the gathered folks’ heads bobbed in agreement. “They bite best when the light of the moon falls upon the water’s upturned face. But if you pull them danged fish up, and the moonlight stays on them too long, they’ll rot in a’hour unless you wrap ’em in walnut leaves.”
“Walnut? I heard oak when I was a girl,” a woman said.
“You misheard. Or listened to the wrong man,” Hines said, shaking his head. “Don’t bother with spoonbills, they ain’t wholesome for eatin’ and can’t swim downstream. If you catch one, hang it high in a tree in an offering to the birds of the sky, because birds themselves swim in their own right. Swim in the currents of air.” He held up a finger. “Catch you a mud turtle, and you’ll feast on seven kinds of meat straight from the shell—pork, beef, chicken, duck, fish.”
“That’s only five,” a boy said.
“What did I forget?” Gramp Hines counted his fingers and the gathered laughed. “Mutton and venison.” He struck a chord on his guitar, a jangling discordant sound. “Spoonbills’ll eat pawpaws, which is why they ain’t good for people eatin’, because everybody knows you always find a pawpaw next to a dogwood.”
“Why’s that matter?” the boy asked. Gramp Hines seemed to focus on the lad, peering at him.
“You got a mouth full o’ questions,” Hines said.
“He don’t mean nothin’ by ’em,” a man said. “Just powerful curious, he is.”
Hines nodded sagely. “Everybody knows—everybody except Junior here—that the dogwood was the tree they made the cross our lord and savior was crucified upon from, and all sorts of black things are drawn to them. Why, I once saw a dogwood with its boughs heavy with black serpents a-hissin’ and spittin’—”
He stopped.
“Well, what have we here? You there in the back, come join us. Say hello, introduce yourselves.”
Bunny and I moved forward into the light and began to introduce ourselves.
“Oh ho! It’s the boys from the government,” Hines said loudly. “Did you bring your record maker?”
“How—” I said. “Yes, we did. We hoped you’d allow us to record you.”
“Well, of course!” Hines said. “Part of every good chautauqua involves some learnin’, and I’d like everyone to see this newfangled technology at work.”
Closer, I allowed myself a moment to take in Hines. He was a compact, solid man, with a jaw like an anvil and heavily muscled arms. Like Amoira, his age was indistinct, but I placed him at near sixty years old. Still hale enough for life on the road but waning in physical prowess. Maybe.
“How’d you know who we are?” Bunny asked.
Hines smiled. “Little bird told me.” His answer did not sit well with me, though I did not allow my face to show my displeasure.
“Bring in the record maker! Gents, help the government boys out. They look like they could take a load off.”
Bunny sat down and I managed the men who went to the Studebaker and trucked the SoundScriber into the tent. They were as solicitous of its well-being as I was—no lord or lady from Achæan past rode in a gilded palanquin with more careful bearers. But I sweated anyway. It was blasted hot, and the fire made the night hotter. I felt as though my blood boiled and all the water in my body wanted to evacuate through my pores.
We set up the SoundScriber and I gave a perfunctory lesson on its design and usage. The locals looked on with interested, if not too bright, faces. Happy to be spoken to, happy to be entertained.
Hines reasserted himself. “All right then, let’s play a song for you,” he said.
“We like to start off with ‘Stagger Lee,’ since it’s such a—”
“We might get to ole Stack Lee, son, eventually,” Hines said. “But I’ve got a few doozies up my sleeve these fine folks might want to hear. Might want to send the young ones out, though,” he said, winking at an unaccompanied mother of two boys. Even in the low light of the tent, I could see her blush.
I readied an acetate disc, set the SoundScriber to recording, and lowered the cutting arm.
“Gramp Hines, accompanied by his family, recorded July 5 on commission by the United States Library of Congress, Harlan Parker, archivist.”
Hines wasted no time before he started playing. He called out, “‘Cotton-Eyed Joe’!” and the young man with the port-wine stain began sawing madly at the violin—or fiddle, as these rough-spun mountain folk would call it—and Hines and the woman with the dulcimer joined in a rising crescendo until Hines called out, “‘Granny, Does Your Dog Bite’!” and the tempo shifted, the melody pitched upward with a single minor interval, and the music trundled along for a while until Hines bellowed, “‘Hot Time Down Below’!” and the tumult of instruments repeated a single tritone through an ascending scale—diabolus in musica—and so forth and so on for four or five more instrumental songs, filling the acetate.
The crowd clapped and exclaimed when I played back the recording, and even Hines chuckled at his own voice. “Damnation, Hank, that fiddle really cuts through the guitar and harmonium!” He turned to me. “Why, I thank you for the pleasure, Mister Parker, was it? It ain’t often a man gets to put on a performance for his own self.” I made notations on the disc’s sleeve with a grease pencil, stored it in its carrying case, and withdrew a virgin disc for the SoundScriber.
Hines and his children did not hesitate; they quickly began strumming once the SoundScriber was cutting and began to play a happy melody. The fiddler boy opened his mouth and, in a pealing voice, began singing.
Big Tom, Little Tom, Big Tom Bailey,
He had a wife and three little babies—
One got sick and one got drownded,
One got lost and Grandpap found it.
One in the corner grave, the other in the cradle,
The other’n in the soup pot up to its ladle;
I love my wife and I love my baby,
And I love my biscuits sopped in fresh gravy.
Climb up, little boy, climb up higher,
Climb up, little one, your foot’s in the fire—
Poor little Bailey—poor little fellow.
Poor little boy, he died in the cellar.
Big Tom, Little Tom, Big Tom Bailey,
He had a wife and three little babies.
It was sung in such a spritely and jovial manner, with such a youthful timbre, it took a moment for the words to register on me. What a morbid little tune. The next song was “Jump Jim Crow” and I won’t bother with transcribing those lyrics here, but I’ve made note of them on the liner notes and will file them with Spivacke and the acetates once we’ve completed our assay and had a chance to transcribe them.
Hines played for an hour or more, and we used six acetate discs for that portion of the night. When I indicated that the last acetate was about to exhaust its available recording surface, Hines brought the song he was singing—“My Ship Is on the Ocean”—to an abrupt close. The dwindling crowd clapped, and he bid them good night. The few lingerers were shooed away. Once the tent was empty, Hines placed his hands on his knees and said, “Hoo-eee. All this singing
sure brings on a powerful thirst. Martha?”
“Yes, Pa?” the wisp of a woman said.
“We got anything to drink?”
“Just a bucket of river water,” she said.
“A powerful thirst,” Hines said again.
A simple request would have sufficed. Instead, a telegraph. A performance. I looked to Bunny, hoping he’d take the hint and retrieve a bottle of whiskey from the car, but he was slumped in the folding chair, his legs stretched out in front of him, arms crossed, and head down. As a soldier, he could sleep while the Hun shelled our trenches in a downpour. Civilian life had not changed him. The excesses of his previous evening had caught up with him.
The package of blank acetates I’d brought in with the SoundScriber had been exhausted, so I took the fresh recordings out, went to the car and stored them in the lidded box provided me by the Library of Congress for disc storage, and placed them with their brothers. I took a fresh packet of paper-wrapped acetates and retrieved both a half-empty bottle and a full one, and a fresh pack of Pall Malls. I will not deny I was ready for a drink myself. I took a long pull from the open bottle before returning to the tent, the liquor worming its burning path down into my belly as I walked back. The boy guarding the front of the tent was gone and the fire had died down to seething coals. I reentered the tent and handed the bottle to Hines, who tilted it up and killed it. I broke the bonded papers on the fresh bottle, twisted off the cap, and passed it to Hines, who took another long drink. He in turn handed it to his son, who sipped daintily, then over to his daughter. She wiped the mouth of the bottle with the hem of her skirt and then tilted it up and nearly retched with the shiver of alcohol.
“So, Mister Hines, you seem to know quite a few songs. A man in West Virginia told us you know fifty-two songs more than anyone else.”
“Just fifty-two?” Hines said. “I knowed more than that. They taught us well back in Cidersend.”
“Cidersend?” I asked. That strange word rang a bell. “That’s where you’re from? A town, correct?”
A Lush and Seething Hell Page 21