“I can only imagine,” I said, thinking about “Crowned in Scarlet.”
“No,” Booth said. “You can’t. He killed three men on the outside with a straight razor and he’s surely killed more than that on the inside.”
“Would have thought you’d have hanged or electrocuted him by now,” I said.
Booth smiled. “Jury was kind to him and you’ll see why. On top of that, he’s a useful man in here. He runs the row squad in the day, and after hours he’s the night yard man.”
“Night yard man?” I asked.
“Honeyboy doesn’t sleep but maybe an hour or two a night, and being the meanest son of a bitch on god’s green earth, he’ll shoot any man that makes for the fence and fields.”
“He’s given a gun?” I asked.
“Of course,” Booth said. “Trusties that aren’t in for murder can have guns under guard supervision and if they shoot a man escaping, they’ll get paroled. It’s 1938, bud, and this is America!” He took a drink and lit a cigarette. “But Honeyboy, he knows he ain’t gonna get paroled, however many men he shoots. On account of the murders. He just likes the guns and the shooting.” A thought occurred to him. “Once we take you into the barracks to record, can’t do much to assure you of your safety. Can’t drop everything to make sure you don’t get your throat cut.”
“Surely a guard will accompany me?”
“I’ll have Crossley see if there are any volunteers.”
The sun had gone down, but the sky had lightened in those oblique moments when the sun’s rays cast the land in shadow but lit the clouds from below, creating a titanic spectacle of pastel hues. Lines of dust were raised in the failing light, against the dusty green of cotton. “Looks like the mule plow squad is heading in, and the water wagon, and the rest. Give them a half hour and I’ll take you down.” He stood and went to the door and called down the stairs for Crossley, who soon appeared. He gave him orders to find a guard to accompany me into the barracks.
Soon, two black inmates in striped garb were trucking the SoundScriber into the barracks of the Negro inmates, two buildings over, near the grain dryers and motor pool. It was a shabbier building than the one the guards and Booth loitered in, and hotter. There were no fans here, just stale air and the smell of sweating bodies. Crossley led me through the guard area into a main room that looked like a hospital ward more than a penitentiary—rows of beds all together in one large room, with no partitions or privacy. Crossley bellowed, “Big Head! Big Head!” until a tall, lanky black inmate trotted forward and said, “Yes suh, Mister Crossley.”
Crossley pointed to me. “This man’s from the gubmint and wants to record you lousy sons-a-bitches for a library or some such. You make sure he don’t get kilt, you hear me?”
The man called Big Head nodded—his head was of inordinate size—and Crossley said, “Mister Parker, how long do you figure you’ll be?”
“A few hours, at least,” I responded, checking my watch.
“These boys need to get their grub and wash their nasty asses and then, when that’s all done, there’ll be time enough for your recording. I imagine you could use the time to set up the contraption,” Crossley said. “Bentley here will keep an eye out for you.” The fat man gestured to a younger, hard-faced white man who had a hungry disposition and lean frame, wearing an ill-fitting Arkansas Department of Corrections uniform with a pistol at his side. As Crossley moved to leave, he stopped for a moment near Bentley and murmured something in the other man’s ear that I did not catch, but as the words were spoken, the younger man’s eyes moved in their sockets and his gaze fixed upon me. I felt as though it was not a kind gaze.
I spent my time setting up the SoundScriber and readying the acetate discs. Inmates began to fill the barracks, forty men, sitting on beds in threes, looking at me curiously. In some ways, I felt far more at ease with these men than I did with the guards.
When it seemed as though no more inmates would be returning, I stood before them and introduced myself. “My name is Harlan Parker, and I work for the Library of Congress. I’ve been tasked with recording songs of the common man—”
“Ain’t nothing common ’bout us, man,” a voice said to a spatter of laughter.
I went on, explaining the mission of the Library, and I think the inmates understood my purpose. The gathered men, however, stared at me blankly and did not ask questions. I decided an example of the workings of the SoundScriber might be the best way to break the ice.
“Do any of you men have songs you might want to perform? I will record you and then play it back so that you might listen to yourself sing.”
Near the back of the room, a black man—bald and sleek and very good-looking, with blue eyes and a muscular physique—sat with his arms crossed. He said, “Clyde, get yo ass up there and sing something for the man.”
Another man, Clyde apparently, popped up and positioned himself before me. I asked his name, and wrote it down—Clyde Bush the Third, a man from a long line of bushes, he assured me, a hedgerow even—and he, unasked, said, “In for armed robbery, five years.”
“That’s fine, Mister Bush, no need—”
At the word “mister” the inmates fell out, laughing, holding their stomachs, slapping knees, until the sleek man who had originally volunteered Clyde whistled and then everyone fell silent. He said, “Ain’t no misters in here, mister.” He sucked his teeth for a moment and then said, “Go on, Clyde.”
Clyde, who had been looking back at the sleek man, turned back to face me.
“Do you know ‘Stagger Lee’?” I asked, explaining why I usually started off with that.
“Naw suh,” he said. “But I do know ‘Midnight Special.’”
“That will be fine, Mister—” I said, stopping myself. “That’ll be fine, Clyde.”
I set the cutting stylus to record, and the man intoned a sonorous version of “Midnight Special” full of the woes of being a black man incarcerated, and when he had finished I asked him to sing another since there was room on the acetate and he began “Ole Hannah,” entreating dead men to rise up and help him hoe his furrow and voicing his hopes the sun would never rise again. When he was through, I lifted the cutting stylus and blew upon the fresh-cut acetate. The light caught its surface nicely and shone in the barracks. The men were hushed.
I placed the record back on the turntable and, using the tone arm, set the acetate to play. I looked out at the gathered men’s faces. The sound emanated from the speaker and I saw the words of Clyde Bush reflected in every man’s face. At first they smiled, amused with the technological wonder of captured music, and then their faces became somber, thinking about their lot, possibly, or affected by the song, I could not tell.
Afterward, many men queued to sing their songs. And I recorded until the guard came in and said, “Trusties, get up, you flop-eared sons-a-bitches. It’s lights-out and you got cotton to chop tomorrow.” He withdrew a billy club and began striking the gray metal bars with it. Men lumbered into their beds.
“Can I get someone to help me move the SoundScriber?” I asked the guard.
Bentley opened his mouth to speak but the sleek fellow said, “Naw suh, don’t you worry ’bout that none.” He approached me and I was able to get a better look at the man. He was almost perfectly formed, with white teeth and a pleasant face, bright blue-green eyes that shone against the rich color of his skin. His scalp was oiled and smooth and I suspected he shaved his head, rather than allow whatever hair nature had left him to grow.
Standing by me, he turned out to the men, readying themselves for bed. “Ain’t that right, fellers. Ain’t none of you gone touch this contrap, is you?”
“Naw,” a man said. Others joined in.
“Because if you do, we’ll have to have a little conversation out in the yard, and that kind of conversing you ain’t gone come out of without some leaks.”
“That’s right!” a man said.
“Yes suh, Honeyboy!” another called.
And then I realized who had been ta
lking to me the whole time. Lucius Honeyboy Spoon, the man whom I’d come to see. I began introducing myself again, telling him how I had learned of him, but he interrupted me and said, “I know who you is, Mister Parker. You just introduced yourself.”
Embarrassed, I said, “I look forward to recording you, er . . . Lucius.”
“Errbody calls me Honeyboy, ain’t no reason for you to be different.”
“I look forward to recording you,” I said. “I want to hear your version of ‘Stagger Lee.’ I’ve heard a part of it and would love to hear more.”
“We’ll see about that,” he said. “Got some conditions and the mood has to hit me right.”
“The mood?”
In a lower voice, he said, “Them bulls put a goddamned damper on music, if you catch me.”
“Ah,” I responded stupidly. “I think I do.”
He turned to Bentley. “Gone get some sleep, boss, but I’ll be up in an hour or so for the yard detail.” Bentley nodded in response and brusquely ushered me out of the barracks.
They have given me a cot to sleep on for the night, in the guards’ barrack, a smaller, much nicer affair than the quarters of the black inmates. I’ve commandeered a spot on their mess table and set up my typewriter, poured myself a glass of whiskey (I still have some of my own supply left, thankfully), and typed this. Had I the SoundScriber, I would transcribe some of my recordings of the past days, but the thought of listening to the music from the banks of the Obion and Hines’s chautauqua depresses me and makes me uncomfortable in ways it is hard to put into words. It’s become a jumble in my mind, and as if it’s some festering wound, the more my waking mind picks at it, the more inflamed and aggravated the memory becomes. I would forget much of it—Bunny, the canker man, the two Amoiras.
Better to write and work.
And drink until sleep takes me and hope I have no dreams.
24
Harlan Parker: Honeyboy
July 13, 1938
I slept restlessly last night, and so was tired throughout the day. The penitentiary never seems to still or quiet—guards moving; men crying out in their sleep; sounds of unknown machines, either farm equipment or motorcars, I could not be certain; a buzzing; metal doors being opened and shut; the baying of a dog in the middle distance, filtered through concrete and cinder blocks; yips of coyotes in moments of silence in the small hours of morning; calls and responses and the jangle of keys; the whine of a mosquito; the low rumble of a freight train impossibly far away; a bell ringing somewhere out above a darkened cotton field. It was a constant and persistent demand upon my senses. I felt as though I had a fever and found myself in the guardroom lavatory, washing my face and wetting my clothes to cool myself. Even with the ceiling fans in the guards’ quarters, the air was still, heavy, oppressive. By morning, I welcomed the weak coffee and cigarettes and ate the prison farm scaugh—slabs of corn bread, a hunk of gelatinous fat and gristle most likely harvested from porcine feet, and a mess of greens cooked until near tasteless. Bentley was kind enough to give me a powder for my pounding head that I chased with coffee, but no amount of joe or cigarettes would relieve the throbbing pain. So, when I saw a guard withdraw a flask and take a belt, I rummaged through my belongings for the bottle and drank a long draft. The rasp of alcohol smoothed out the worst of the rough edges.
Booth was gracious enough to give me a tour of the farm. I know now far more than I had ever wanted to know of the life of Southern prisoners. I had come into this endeavor thinking they were in cages and locked away, working the fields in shackles and chains. That was untrue. There was a remarkable amount of freedom—many teams working the fields were supervised solely by trusties, with guards watching on towers. I saw countless opportunities for inmates, both black and white, to flee into the high, rank summer growth around the farm.
But they did not.
When I asked Booth about this, he shrugged and simply said, “You run, you die. That’s the beauty of paroling trusties who kill any man who attempts to escape. They want the other inmates to try, because it means their own freedom if they kill them.”
Another reminder that the millstone of the state is made to grind men to dust, setting us against each other.
There were a few inmates wearing tin cups around their necks on twine strings. Booth explained they were “bell cows,” which puzzled me until he went on to describe the lamentable situation in prison: There were some men who were discovered to be homosexual or were forced into being so, and the cup was a marker or punishment. Or both.
As in any environment in the South—and America—mankind within the Cummins State Farm had separated into layers of sediment, with the black man at the bottom. White inmates had better jobs, better food, better access to the commissary. White men made up the majority of trusties and worked the easier farm jobs: the water wagon, the vegetable fields, the motor pool. The black inmates chopped cotton and cleared the swampy edges of the camp of timber, scrub brush, canebrakes, the air swimming in mosquitoes and horseflies, the water thick with cottonmouths. They sang in groups, call-and-response field hollers, hoeing the line, turning the soil, cutting the timber. Booth kept me far enough away from the black teams working the fields that I could not pick out Honeyboy—all the men wore grass hats to protect their heads from the merciless and beating sun, making most indistinguishable from their fellow inmates.
It was a relief when Booth brought me back to the stockade and barracks, and I spent the rest of the afternoon dozing in a near delirium from the heat and my pounding head.
As evening drew on, Bentley came and kicked the leg of the cot. “Honeyboy’s asking after you.”
I followed him out of the guard quarters and back to the barracks, where there were the cell block’s inmates, but now Crossley and Booth and a passel of other guards sat on benches nearest the bars separating the sleeping floor from the guard area.
When he saw me, Honeyboy said, “We thought you expired from the heat. And you ain’t even hoeing rows or chopping cotton.”
“I must admit,” I said, “I have felt better.”
“Ain’t we all,” Honeyboy answered.
“I was hoping I could get you to perform the version of ‘Stagger Lee’ that I had from Otis Steck in Alabama. It was quite a ballad,” I said.
Honeyboy cocked his head and regarded me with electric blue eyes. “Maybe you’d prefer ole John Henry.”
This was new. In my experience, not many black balladeers sang, or even held the barest interest in, “John Henry.” That song was found in the Ohio River Valley, mostly, though the location of Henry’s titanic struggle against the steam drill moved west with each version with our country’s Manifest Destiny. “Why do you think that?” I asked.
“Ole Stack is a bad n——. So why’s a white fella like you so interested in him?”
Many things went through my head all at once, but none of them made it into speech. “Why does anyone like the ballad of Stagger Lee?”
Honeyboy slapped his knee, laughing. But the humor didn’t touch his eyes. “White folk like John Henry because he a n—— that did what they said to do until he died. He worked with them. He was a democratized man.”
I did not correct his usage. I said, “And Stagger Lee?”
“Black folk like old Stack because he sharp, he got a smart-ass mouth on him, and he don’t run by white man’s rules. He jump when he want, he fuck when he can, and he’ll kill you dead as sure as the sun gone rise.”
It was an interesting contrast, one man working within the white man’s system and dying because of it, the other outside the system, living by his own rules. I said, “But they both died.”
“Hell yes, they did, but at least Stack died with his Stetson fucking hat, you catch me?” A grin cracked across his face. “Ole Stack a bad, bad man. But he’s a man.”
“Does this mean you’ll record your version of it for me?”
“I reckon so,” Honeyboy answered.
Honeyboy was as good as his w
ord regarding the SoundScriber. It had not been touched since the previous evening’s recording session. I placed a fresh acetate on the turntable and readied the cutting arm. Counting it down, I began the recording and indicated to Honeyboy he could start when ready.
Honeyboy leaned into the microphone and said, “My name is Lucius Spoon, and I’m in for life for three counts murder in the first.” He smiled, and this time it was wholehearted. “When I was a boy I always wanted to be warden and when I got in here, they told me I had to work my way up.”
Even the guards laughed at this, and for a while the barracks were full of the laughter of incarcerated men. They sounded like any group of men gathered together. Each full of his own particular sorrow, his mirth, his guilt, the comet’s tail of his existence pulling wreckage after him.
With no further preamble, Honeyboy launched into “Stagger Lee.” He had a fine tenor voice that could rumble and soar up to surprising heights, rich with vibrato. Had he been anywhere else, with his good looks and ability, he might have gained fame and fortune. And that is the world’s loss. Yet he had killed men, and from what I could tell, not in defense or in revenge for some injury. Like Stagger Lee, he was a bad man put to use by the state.
He ran through the verses, very much the same as Otis Steck’s, up through the gates of Hell, where Stagger Lee kills Lucifer himself and supplants him. Here’s where Honeyboy went on.
He’s a bad king, Stackolee.
The king gots his kingdom.
He goes through every bit,
From the fountains of the palace
To the edges of the pit.
They’s a black wall he can’t figure;
They’s a black wall he can’t break.
They’s somethin’ movin’ beyond he can’t see
In the shadows, Satan’s wake.
He’s a bad king, Stackolee.
He ask, “What behind this wall here?
Ain’t I king of Hell?”
And the devils all around him answer,
A Lush and Seething Hell Page 26