“You is, but well well well . . .”
And Stack don’t like they answer,
So he shoots them as they plea.
He a bad man, Stackolee.
But somethin’ moves beyond the black wall,
And Stack takes off his bloody hat,
Listenin’ at the black stones, listenin’ for a call.
“What is you? Ain’t you scared? Ain’t I king of Hell?”
And the black wall whispers, “Yes you is, Stack,
You is, but well well well,
King ain’t but a man, and I’m a thunderclap.”
And Stagger sat down heavy,
Landing on his back.
“I am like a mountain, and need no crown on me.”
He’s a bad man, Stackolee.
“I am an ocean, a black and churning sea.”
He’s a bad man, Stackolee.
“I am like a mountain, ain’t need no crown on me.”
It was a long song, and as the cutting arm made its progress across the face of the acetate, I worried I would not get the full rendition of Honeyboy’s version of “Stagger Lee.” But still, as worried as I was, I felt the hairs on my arm prick up at the final few lines of the tune. I obviously had not heard this before, but neither had I expected it to turn in this direction. To cover my befuddlement after the music had died away, I busied myself marking the acetate sleeve with the pertinent information.
When I had finished my task, I looked up at the gathered men and a number of them had expressions of horror, looking at me and Honeyboy as if two cottonmouths had suddenly slithered in among them. No griot would get such a response. When I played back the recording, to check its levels and integrity, damn me if some of the men in the audience did not plug their ears with their fingers to keep out the sound.
“Never heard those verses before,” I said.
“Might be I should sing something with a bit more swing to it,” Honeyboy said.
“Did you come up with those lyrics on your own?”
“Lyrics?” Honeyboy asked. “Them words? Hell naw, I didn’t make them up. Who’d have made up shit like that?” He gave a short, barking laugh. “White folks, most like.”
“So, if you didn’t make them up, how did you learn them?”
And then, for the first time, I saw Honeyboy’s self-assurance leave him. “That ain’t a story I want to tell right now.”
“But I feel like it’s important. For historical and—”
“No, sir. How ’bout ‘Take a Whiff on Me’?” Honeyboy said. He leaned in closer, voice low. “Later, Mister Parker. Get Crossley to let you talk to me in the yard and bring that bottle I know you got.”
I wanted to press but knew it wasn’t going to work. I’d have to wait.
We continued recording. Honeyboy Spoon was a real player, and he moved through a whole songbook’s worth of tunes as fast as I could change discs. “Where Did You Sleep Last Night” to “Sally Walker,” “Rock Island Line” to “Pine Bluff Blues,” “Pick a Bale of Cotton” to “Hot Springs Ladies,” “Whoa Back Buck” to “Little Sugar My Coffee” and more. As he played, I found myself leaning back into my chair, my head pounding and my pulse thrumming in my neck, my chest. Dislocated, as if I were there and not really there all at once—almost as if I were the tinny and scratched acetate recording and all the inmates listened to me. When I looked at them, often they would be regarding me with cool eyes—both the prisoners and the guards. Sometimes they would laugh and stomp their feet with Honeyboy’s rhythms; other times they would call out “Hell yes!” and “Sing it!” when he was particularly hot. I swooned in the heat, pouring sweat. When Crossley called for lights-out, it was a relief. Slowly, I packed away the freshly cut acetates and retired to the guardroom to smoke and pour myself a drink. When Crossley entered at the end of his duty, he found me blurry and slightly drunk. And in a negligent rush to change clothes and leave Cummins farm to reach home, he instructed a guard I only knew as Gene to allow me to talk to Honeyboy in the main yard while the trusty was on watch during the night.
I dozed, passing in and out of consciousness until Gene kicked the cot I slept on, saying, “I thought you were gonna have a little talk with Spoon?” and I rose, shaky. Light-headed, I made my way down and out into the yard, carrying a whiskey bottle in a paper bag. The guards smiled and raised their eyebrows at the package but said nothing: Trusties were pampered here, like gladiators willing to kill in ancient Rome.
Rules were rules, until there weren’t any rules, and then that was the rule.
25
Harlan Parker: The White Woman of the Wood
I passed into the main yard, walked through the parked vehicles. My watch read three thirty a.m., and most of Cummins State Farm was silent. It was a clear night and thousands of insects swarmed the electric lights at the corners of the yard.
Honeyboy stood in a pool of light near the far fence, looking small in the large open space. I crossed the packed dirt and approached the man. He held a shotgun with the breach open, hanging over the crook of his arm, the brass of two shells shining in the artificial light.
He noticed my looking at the weapon. “Only time they let me close the breach is if I see some fool making for the fields or fences,” Honeyboy said. “Lemme get at that bottle.”
I handed the package over and Honeyboy spent ten, maybe fifteen minutes alternately drinking and smoking cigarettes and saying softly, “Hoo-ee,” and “Ain’t that right, goddamn,” and hissing with alcohol as it hit his stomach.
Finally, when he had had enough to sate himself, he said, “You ain’t so bad, is you? Fit right in here.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said.
“Naw,” Honeyboy continued. “You ain’t so bad because you just as bad as me.” He passed the back of his hand across his mouth and spat into the dirt. “Ain’t no innocent babe asking after them parts of ‘Stackolee,’ I can tell you that true.”
“I’ve done my share of bad things, I guess,” I said. “Over there.”
“Naw,” he said, “that ain’t it. But it’s your business.”
“I imagine so,” I said. “About this song. The verses at the end of ‘Stagger Lee.’”
Honeyboy raised his hand. “I’ll tell you. But it ain’t something I’ve thought much about these last twenty years. Ain’t something I wanted to think about.” He lit a cigarette with a match and then gestured at the bottle, which I’d been holding, dumbly, and then took one last, great swallow and launched into his story.
“It was in Blytheville. They had us clearing the swamps and paid good money, five dollars a week to chop lumber and kill them damned snakes that was everywhere. This was before the flood of twenty-two, and way before the big boy five years later, when not everywhere was all leveed up.” He thought for a moment. “I was just a young buck, but the farm manager saw I knew how to handle the horses and mules, and I lived with my momma nearby so I guess he knew I weren’t going nowhere. He picked out me, Rabbit, and Jofuss, to ride out west past Crowley’s Ridge and Newport and into the hills to pick up a head of cattle and bring ’em back to Blytheville. I rode point, Rabbit rode swing, and Jofuss was to ride flank—only three men to bring back twenty head—only their most trusted n——. Maybe that was why it went wrong, I don’t know. Just three men. But we getting out there where the roads got small, heading west, and the land rises. Ain’t no n—— wants to head up there, because them folk don’t want the sun to set with us sleeping in they towns, or in they barns, or bunking down anywhere near they water or women or children.
“Anyhoo, I find the Hodgson farm and the farmer—he don’t like having to talk to a black man like me, ain’t no doubt about that—but he tells us how to get to the field he’s pasturing the cattle, and we ride out. It’s up the skirt of one of the first hills of the Ozarks and them woods is dark and the light is falling, you know? There was this big . . . I don’t know . . . big old ball of dark clouds coming at us, blottin’ out the sun, catch me? D
ark as my daddy’s ass. It was like ole Hannah gone dipped behind the mountains and gone away, leaving us in that nowhere light before full dark.
“The mule I was riding fell, tossing me. Don’t know if she just stepped in a hole, or her foot slipped on a rock, but her leg was broken. Horses scream like people, but a mule, she’ll holler. Awwoooo. And boy, I ain’t never heard nothing like that mule hawing and panting, and god save me if I’m lying, that damned thing was crying.”
He paused, thinking back. “You know, I’m a bad man and they oughta write songs ’bout me, but I ain’t a man without love. I love the women. And I ain’t never had a bad thought about a dog. Can’t abide cats, though. But a good dog, a good dog is love through and through. But that mule, I felt a powerful sorrow listening to it. Jofuss and Rabbit realized we weren’t gone be able to bring back the cattle with just three men, and I told them to ride back to Hodgson’s farm and ask the man if we could bunk down in his barn for the evening and in the morning we could figure out what to do about the cattle. I waited until they was far enough away before I took out that old forty-one and put it to the mule’s head and stopped the poor thing’s misery. Sound of the crack, and then the silence . . . something you don’t forget real easy.
“I was about to turn back but the sky opened up and damned if the lightning and thunder didn’t make me hunch over, it frightened me so, and I took myself away from the dead mule and into the tree line to get out from the storm and it was there I saw the white woman.”
“White woman?” I said, amazed.
“When I say white, I mean white. White hair, white dress and everything. She was gesturing to me with her fine hand, you know, like ‘come here.’ So I did, though there was a powerful fear startin’ to eat at me. But the rain was beatin’ down and it had turned cold and to be honest, maybe I weren’t right in my head because it seemed like it was dryer by the lady. So I goes up to her and says howdy, and she laughs and says hello and puts her cold hand on my arm and starts humming and then says, ‘I can sleep you, and I can eat you, but you have to come with me aways up in the trees,’ and right then I was hungry and tired from the trail and her voice held the warmth of blankets and the smell of good food, pork and hominy and greens and corn. So I follow her up into the trees, you know?
“We walk a good long while and when I say, ‘Where we going?’ she says back to me something that sounds like ‘Cidersend’ but it weren’t quite that if you catch me and I found out later what she was saying. She says, ‘You like music, don’t you,’ and I admitted that I could pick some on the guitar my daddy left me before he took off for Texas. So she starts humming and singing about kings and crowns and that ole black wall that whispered and over time, walking and listening to her, that music seeped into me. I could feel it come in me, if you catch my meaning.”
I said I did not, fully. So Honeyboy drank more whiskey and smoked another cigarette and thought about it.
“You know how a real stomper is, don’t you? Like that song gets in your head, and you can’t get it out. Little snatches of it keep churnin’ in you, like you got a river you never meant to have running through you.”
“I think I understand,” I said. “Can we sit down?”
“Naw,” Honeyboy said. “Ain’t no sitting in the yard.” Honeyboy waved a hand toward the towers at either end where the electric lights shone over the rows of cotton. They appeared as obsidian hedges, flecked with white, in the dim illumination. “Them guards will bust me down from being a trusty and take my goddamn shotgun if I did that, so naw, ain’t no sitting. But you look like five pounds of dog shit hammered flat, that’s for sure. You want to go back to the big house?”
“I’ll be fine,” I said. “Please, go on. You were talking about the music. The song, ‘Crowned in Scarlet.’”
“That its name?” He chuckled mirthlessly and then spat again into the dirt. “Damned thing didn’t just get into my head, like a good boogie-woogie number, it kinda came in sideways. The melody floated around and the woman, she played with the time, you know? The rhythm? I’d be thinking the beat might fall one place, and she’d trick me and it would fall in another, while that black wall was talking to us. And that song came inside me, in my body, if you catch me. Like I’d got the clap all of a sudden, just from listening. But I was also wanting more of it, you know? The music, just like the white lady, was leading me on and on.
“Don’t know how long we walked. I’d like to pass out or eat a whole hog by the time she stopped singing. We was in a grove of apple trees, and the ground was covered in them, and they was all brown and splotchy and worm-eaten. The white woman took my hand and led me through them trees and them rotten apples squelched under my feet and I looked down and realized I didn’t have my boots on. No pants neither. And my dick was out there for this woman and all to see, just swinging in the breeze. And that made me scareder than almost anything else, my nakedness under the sky. Where’d my clothes go? How’d I lose them? What if some white man saw me walkin’ with this white woman with my prick out? They’d lynch me for sure.
“We came through the trees and there was this big-ass old metal gate, and beyond the gate I saw all these tombstones and at the top of the gate, they was the words ‘Idyll’s End’—”
“What? Can you spell that?” I said, wondering if he could read.
“Hell yeah, I can. I never forgot the look of it, if you catch me. And they taught me to read in here.” He spelled it for me. “Ain’t likely to forget something like that. I can close my eyes and see it right now. I can hear her words. And that’s what she had said, Idyll’s End and not Cidersend like I had first thought. And this woman—I saw she was naked too—and she looked real old and real young all at once. I remember looking at her caboose and thinking all the bad things I could do to that ass and right when I would think it, she would smile real big like she knew what I was thinking and I guess my dick was holding its own apple if you catch me, and I think you do.”
“I do,” I said. “Not leaving much to the imagination.”
Honeyboy shrugged. “You asking the questions, I’m telling the story. I ain’t shitting you.”
It was my turn to shrug. The admission of nakedness and sexual intent toward a white woman alone might get him in trouble in Cummins. Might find him tied to a tree. But it wouldn’t happen because of me.
“We head into that graveyard, and she starts singing the last few verses over and over, about the black wall whispering, and she goes to a grave that has this big old statue standing over it, an angel with a sword and a long crooked finger pointing to the ground, them wings folded up behind, and I look at the standing stone and there ain’t no name on it. A gravestone with no damned name. This woman lies down on top of that grave and spreads her legs and puts her hands down there to open herself up to me on top of that grave and the only thing not white is the pink of her center and it darkens to red like blood and the whole time out her mouth the black wall is talking and my dick drops that apple. She says all I need is to drink the wine of her body, and eat the rind of her cheese, kiss the crust of her bread. How ’bout that shit. Talking ’bout food with that pussy spread open for me. Hundred white motherfuckers with forty-ones could tell me grind that white lady but ain’t no way I’d do that, and I ran. I ran so far and so fast that my heart was like to give up, come up and out of my chest through my mouth in a big ole bloody mess. And behind me that lady laughing and singing and telling me in the voice of that wall that I would come to her someday and the wall would open up and take me in.”
He stopped. The shotgun lowered and he looked out into the darkness of the fields.
“Came out of them woods, cold and hungry. Naked as I was born. Farmhand saw me and ran and got other men and for a while I was figuring they was gone string me up on account of being a black man running around with his tallywhacker just swinging around but they didn’t. I told them I worked for the Stephensons out of Blytheville and about the white lady and the grave and they shut up real quick and
wrapped me in a horse blanket and put me in a wagon and when I got back to Momma’s I found out that my momma was dead and I’d been gone for two months. Momma had come down sick, sick of grief that her boy had died. That’s how she was thinking. That’s how everyone was thinking. But there I was. That woman took me into the forest for two months, though it seemed like a single goddamned day.”
Under my breath I said, “Jesus Christ.”
“He couldn’t help me.” Honeyboy placed the knuckle of his free hand to his forehead and twisted, as if he were taking a corkscrew to his temple. “That goddamned song was eatin’ at me. And eatin’. And it wouldn’t go away unless I sang a little of it and it wouldn’t feel right unless they was someone to hear. I could go into the corncrib and sing to myself but that wouldn’t do nothing. So, in the end, I had to take up that guitar and go out and play that motherfuckin’ song. I could play whatever I wanted, but that song would seep in, like floodwaters. Seepin’ and risin’. I be layin’ in bed at night hearin’ that song running in my head. I close my eyes and that woman opening herself up to me. So I have to sing it. I might try to push that shit away and play some barrelhouse, a stomp, and the music would change as I played it and before I knew it I’d be talking ’bout that black wall and whispering to come to me. Wasn’t sleepin’. Wasn’t eatin’. Drinking all day long. Got real sick and then finally, I had an idea. I worked a little magic of my own. I built a goddamned black wall myself. And that wall was ole Stackolee. I put that cursed song inside him. After all, he’s a baaad man.
“After that, song didn’t eat at me so much. I sing it once in a while. Taught it to that boy Steck and he took a big ole chunk of the burden from me. Maybe in a hundred years, ole Stackolee will be forgotten and ain’t nobody will sing that song. It’s like drinkin’ poisoned whiskey, share it around enough folks and it won’t kill you.”
Honeyboy, having uttered the word “kill” and allowed it to sound aloud and fall away, stood thinking. Throughout this revelation, he did not look at me. “Maybe I killed them men so I could get in here, with all the other bad men. We all Stackolees in here.” He raised a hand and gestured at the dark fields. “Wouldn’t take nothing to get over them chain fences and I could be gone. Larry’s up there sleeping with his carbine or jerkin’ himself. That fool’d never see me. The world is spread open before me and I could slip into it easy as you please. But it’s better if I stay here,” he said, and patted the shotgun.
A Lush and Seething Hell Page 27