I felt as cattle come to a slaughterhouse, hammer-struck in my forehead. I felt the world tilt and sat down heavily.
“Here now,” Honeyboy said, grasping my arm and pulling me back to my feet. “You white as a sheet.” He drew me back to the ward where the guards had their quarters and I can remember falling and the blurred faces of men, white and black, muscling me through the hot, humid confines of the penitentiary. I must’ve moved out of time and mind, for I saw Bunny’s face and my mother’s swimming in my blurred vision. Honeyboy and Steck and Smoot. The loathed man, Insull, and the faces of Negroes, either inmates or minstrels or field hands, I could not tell.
I fell into blackness, as I always have.
There are no endings, just beginnings.
26
Cromwell: Hattie Judges Harlan
The knock comes as a surprise. He’s nodding at the cheap desk, Parker’s journal open in front of him. He rises, opens the door.
“This better be good,” Hattie says, entering the room. She doesn’t seem sweaty but she’s still dressed in workout clothes. He can smell food on her breath, as though she’s been in a restaurant with a fryer or an open grill. “I’m about ready for my pajamas and some HBO. You know they got HBO here, don’t you?”
Cromwell murmurs assent and retrieves the journal and his laptop. “I need you to read this,” he says. “It’s quite a bit, but it’s important.”
Hattie looks at the journal and back to Cromwell and sighs. “Can I take this back to my room?”
“Yes,” Cromwell says. “But I’d like it back before bed. I need to see if I can follow up on what I’ve found.”
“Shit,” Hattie says, and instead of leaving, moves to his hotel desk and sits down. Cromwell remains standing, not knowing what to do with himself. It seems weird to just watch her as she reads, so he sits on the bed and that seems just as awkward, so he stretches out his legs and leans back into the pillows and looks at his phone.
“Cromwell,” Hattie says after what only seems a moment. But the light has changed. It’s darker now, though it was early evening before. Something’s different. He’s kicked off his shoes. “You’re snoring.”
He shifts his position on the bed and in a moment of self-indulgence—or so it feels to him—allows himself to drift off once more.
“Goddamn this motherfucker,” Hattie says, a while later.
“Who?”
“Who else? Harlan Parker. This guy’s a piece of work.”
Cromwell stirs, pushes himself into an upright position. His eyes feel crusty and he fears he’s drooled as he slept while Hattie has been reading. He excuses himself and goes to the bathroom to splash water on his face and returns.
Hattie shakes her head, with a sour expression on her face.
Cromwell says, “His writing is disjointed, surely, but it is a private journal. I plan on a comparative read of it with all of the documents filed with Spivacke at the time. And his other writings from the period.”
“Nah, it’s not that.” He sees she’s filled the book with strips of folded hotel stationery. “It’s bullshit like this.” She flips to a page. “‘I felt a great shame and anger spill over me. These are my brothers. These are my brothers. We are all connected. The hopelessness I felt in that moment was overwhelming.’”
Cromwell rubs his eyes; he is very tired. “What’s wrong with that?” He can’t understand why she’s not focused on the events at the Obion chautauqua. The canker man and Bunny’s disappearance.
“It’s a load of bullshit. It’s the 1938 version of white folks virtue signaling. ‘Oh, look at how much I love black folks and fight for them.’”
“He did spend a good portion of his life studying jazz music, traveling from New Orleans to the West Indies to Africa and back to learn of its roots,” Cromwell says. “The study of jazz is the study of African Americans. It was a different time and what he was expressing was—”
“Spare me the ‘different age’ or ‘it was a cultural norm’ horseshit excuse for a white man’s holier-than-thou behavior.” She stops, closes the book. “But you know what gets me, Crumb? It’s that he’s a damned coward.”
“How so?” Cromwell asks.
“He refuses to use the word. The word. ‘Nigger.’ Makes a big self-righteous deal about never having to write that word again. But then—” She gives a short, disgusted laugh. “But then Mister Delicate writes N and a series of dashes to indicate it. It’s a fuckin’ private journal, Crumb! The man cannot even be honest with himself.”
Cromwell thinks about what she’s said. “I think it’s worse than even that,” he says.
“Yeah, you think he killed Bunny.” She shrugs. “I mean, his brain is for sure rotting from late-stage syphilis. That fucked-up ‘canker man’ might actually be a hallucination embodying the disease. Like, somewhere, inside himself, he knew he’d been infected and couldn’t bear to actually look that in the face. For a dude who went to war and had to kill men as a soldier, he’s surprisingly finicky about a hard examination of himself.”
“I’m a bit dubious about the armchair syphilis diagnosis, Hattie,” Cromwell says.
“I actually took the time to Google some of the symptoms and nothing he describes falls outside of that.”
He opens his computer and Googles “syphilis” and reads the Wikipedia entry. It’s inconclusive, like just about everything else relating to Harlan Parker. He calls up the article on the body found on the Obion River in 1938 and says, “Read this.”
He waits as Hattie scans it. She whistles.
“He damn sure has got some mental health issues,” she says. “But nothing about this could be proven without an enormous amount of detective work and a deep fucking dive in historical records. And maybe not even then.”
“True,” Cromwell says. “But I’ve got nothing better to do with my spare time now.”
Hattie opens her mouth, shuts it. There she is, Maizie again, a presence in the room. You can be haunted without ever seeing a ghost.
“You know, for a second there, Crumb, I thought you were gonna try to put the moves on me,” Hattie says. “When you called.”
He realizes, as she says it, that she knows. About Vivian. “How long have you known?”
“A while now,” she says. “Can’t imagine how you—”
“No, you can’t. Maybe that’s why this Parker thing is eating me. Guilt, maybe.” He thinks about what they must be saying at the office. “And everyone at work?”
“No, I don’t think so. There are a shit-ton of junior archivists who’d have let a higher-up know about it in hopes of getting your job if they knew about it. It’s DC, after all.”
He sits on the bed and allows his shoulders to sag from the weight of it all. Hattie sits beside him and places her warm hand upon his. “We all fuck up, Crumb. We all do. And all you can do is forgive yourself and go on.”
“Easily said for someone who’s never fucked up like—” He stops. “I can’t even make it up to her. To them.”
“No, that’s true.” She pats his hand and stands, goes to the hotel door. “And you’ll just have to figure out some way to move forward, anyway. But I know you, Crumb. Your brain is working. Thinking about a book, maybe. Thinking about a lecture tour. You’re gonna exploit this dead-ass hypocrite just like he exploited those black folks, aren’t you?”
Each word feels like a physical blow, leaving him nothing afterward. He looks at her and feels only desolation.
“Get some sleep. We’ll be done tomorrow. Don’t let this Parker motherfucker get to you. He’s not worth your time. Don’t let him get at your ambition. Because maybe your ambition and pride is what fucked you up in the first place.” She shrugs and he can tell she’s absolving herself of his grief, his adultery, his fucked-up-ness. “You’re gonna do what you’re gonna do.”
She leaves without saying goodbye.
He doesn’t sleep.
27
Harlan Parker: Sickness and Escape
I awoke
in a cell, in an echoing hall stinking of mildew, vinegar, and lard soap. A voice called, “The fish. The fish is up and at ’em, boys. Hey, fish, hey, fishie, you got any smokes?”
I sat up, every fiber of my body outraged and sore. My head pounded and there were needle punctures in my arms, carelessly bandaged. A thick smear of black, crusted blood on the bare, gray-striped mattress where my head had lain. The inside of my mouth was abraded, as if I had nearly bitten through my own cheeks, and the pain was outrageous.
Looking around, I saw that they had placed me in a prison cell but had left the door open. In a pile in the cell’s corner sat my box of acetates, my suitcase taken from the Studebaker, the SoundScriber, my various notebooks and journals, my Dopp kit. I struggled to standing and wandered out into the hall, searching for water.
“Hey, fish, you got some smokes?” a voice said again. I looked and a bloated pink face leered at me from between scaling metal bars. Rough hands protruded into the open space of the cell block. “I need a square, man. Cummere, willya? Help a brother out.” The rough hands gestured to me to come closer. I would not. Down the length of the hall, other hands emerged from the cells—inmates coming to attention at the doors.
Unsteady, I shifted, and the man reached for me, grasping. “Cummere, willya? I ain’t gonna hurt you. Just give you a little squeeze is all.”
I stumbled down the block, to where two guards looked alarmed to see me coming toward them. I said, “Help me, I shouldn’t be here, tell—” and tried to remember any of the guards or the warden’s name, but couldn’t dredge up those memories. What ended up coming out of my mouth was “Honeyboy” and the guards looked at each other.
I found myself on the floor, again looking up, and then Crossley—I think his name was Crossley—lifted me up and put me back in the cell and forced water on me, which made me cough and splutter. Eventually I slept again.
In dreams, things never come unbidden. The silty bottom of the river churns to the surface, dead things arise.
It was a hot day, in 1914, and I was sixteen years old. I knew where I was from the quality of the sun, the pressure of the light on my skin and clothes and back, the heaviness of the water-laden air. Washington, DC. Past storefronts, the clangor of an oncoming trolley and the rattle of a motorcar, the sulfuric stink of its exhaust. A wood fire burning somewhere near, scenting the air. Uncollected garbage, night soil dumped from an upper window into an alley. Sizzling meat and spiced stew. A cacophony of noise: infant cries, dogs barking, the industrious sounds of hammer-falls, a mule braying, a man calling to workers, a woman wailing. Storefronts in procession: a tailor, a dressmaker, a cheesemonger, an open market in an empty lot like some Anglicized Moroccan souk passing on my right; on the left, the street filled with dray-drawn wagons and motorcars. My gait that of a young man with some urgency spurring him on. Light, arms swinging, sweat at my brow, beneath my arms, and at the small of my back. In my hand I held a scrap of paper, moist with either sweat or the sodden air or both, I could not tell. An address written upon it in my own hand. I had very little time. I was due back for the dinner performance at the Harrow Club, and the internal clock within me wound itself down. Liszt’s Liebesträume ran through my head, as I had been rehearsing it all morning, as I would debut it that evening for the well-to-do men with their scotch and whiskeys as the Negro servants moved among them, lighting cigarettes. Their pampered, flushed faces all turned to me, to these hands. I flexed them. They were strong. Very strong for someone so young.
I had something to do. Something dire. As pressing as the music, as insistent as the rise and fall of the fingerwork on the keyboard. I had someone to see.
There are no endings, only beginnings.
I awoke two days later, with a doctor looming over me. He was saying, “You shouldn’t have him in here. He should be hospitalized, somewhere they can put some fluids in him, and get to the bottom of this illness—”
“This ain’t the Peabody Hotel, Doc,” Crossley said. “And he ain’t got any money on him.”
I struggled to rise, to speak, because I did have money. In the back compartment of the SoundScriber. I had stashed it there for the occasions when I did not want to walk around with the whole amount. Just for a moment like this.
“Here, drink,” the doctor said. “Drink all of it.”
Warm lemonade. Sweet and tart enough to curl one’s tongue. I drank it down. The doctor did not give his name and his eyes were dark and his skin nut-brown and he had rough, calloused hands as if he worked more with farm implements and livestock rather than the sick, which I found strange for a physician. The doctor gestured for more lemonade and Crossley shuffled off, a sour look upon his face, and returned with another glass, which I gulped down.
“Whoa, now, mister,” the doctor said, standing and packing his bag. “That’ll all come up in a mess if you don’t watch out.” He moved to the barred door. “Eat some toast. Some oatmeal. Something mild. Don’t just wade into a big old steak.”
Afternoons passed into steaming evenings, lost in delirium, where long darknesses were filled with the cries and profanity of prisoners, then the nights lightened into the half-light of dawn and once again through the heat of day. I woke and slept and woke and slept, racked by dreams. Over and over again. Those times I was awake, whatever light there was in my eyes dimmed and I found myself staring blankly at a bit of scaling paint, or the point in the cell’s ceiling where the corners met in a puzzling bit of architectural geometry. When I was well enough to stand on my own without fear of falling, weak-kneed and gaunt, Assistant Warden Booth came himself with a gang of Negro prisoners to collect my things and the SoundScriber and escort me off the farm.
“I need to speak with Honeyboy,” I said, as we exited the main block of the prison, heading toward the Studebaker. “I have unfinished business.”
“Honeyboy?” the warden said. “We don’t have any prisoner by that name here.”
“Lucius Spoon. Honeyboy. The man I recorded.”
“Mister Parker,” Assistant Warden Horace Booth said. He did not look at me while he spoke. Instead he turned his head toward the men who placed the SoundScriber in the backseat of the vehicle. When they had finished, he said, “We have no such record of any prisoner by that name.” He coughed and dipped a hand inside his jacket pocket. He withdrew an envelope and handed it to me, a blank expression on his face. I opened it and read. It was an invoice for food and lodging and medical care to the amount of $67.25.
“A bill?”
“I’m sure you can have the Library of Congress compensate you for the expense.” He sniffed. “I personally do not care if you pay it or not, but this is how Mister Darcy—and the board—instructed me to deal with this matter. Should you not be able to pay, it will be no matter. We can have the sheriff here in a few hours and you will then be his problem. Either way, your time at our little home is over.”
He had hard, shiny eyes. A man with one hand on the lever of the gristmill. I felt myself precariously teetering on the edge of falling between those millstones.
“If you’ll wait a moment,” I said. I went to the trunk of the Studebaker and opened it. I quickly made inventory. My bags were all there, as was the box of acetates. The Underwood. The crate of tinned food and sundries. The case of whiskey was gone and I was unsurprised at that bit of larceny. I opened my suitcase and found my wallet and opened it. It was empty. Either the guards or some industrious prisoners had taken the money I had there. If I had enough money to bet, I would place it on the guards. Booth watched implacably.
“Hold on,” I said. “Let me get at my stash.”
I got in the Studebaker’s driver seat and, leaving the door open so that I was in full view, with my left hand I felt around underneath the steering wheel as if I had something secured there. With my right, I slipped the key in the ignition. Pressing the clutch in, and giving the gas a brief pump, I twisted the key in the ignition and the Studebaker—that wonderful old faithful girl—coughed into life immediate
ly and I slammed the door and ground the vehicle into gear and accelerated the car in the open space of the farm’s main yard. The rear tires shifted and slewed, spitting a plume of dust to swallow Booth and his prisoners, and the Studebaker fishtailed into another vehicle, crumpling its side door, but the wheels caught, the car lurched forward, and I was heading for the main gate without a look back.
I had every intention of barreling through any barrier before me, but there was none: the crossbar was raised and the guard watched me pass through in a blur. In moments I was on the open highway, the Cummins State Farm diminishing in the rearview.
When I could get my bearings, I drove east and north, putting the Arkansas River between me and where I had been for so long. At a roadside Union Gas station I opened the back of the SoundScriber with some difficulty and withdrew the envelope that contained the last of my money—little more than a hundred dollars. I opened the trunk and ran inventory of the acetates, making sure I had all of them. On Amoira’s moaning, Steck in Tennessee, the Obion chautauqua. They were all there, even Honeyboy (I was scared I had perhaps invented him in my delirium).
Near Blytheville, I found this motel and took a room and it is here I commit all of this to paper. I am still so very weak. The land here seems miasmic in its bloom and heat, and the haze occludes the far fields beyond my window. I keep watch, worried that Booth has notified authorities of my escape. I could be wanted by the state police, I surmise. Somewhere there might be a bench warrant for my arrest for an outstanding debt, but there will be no wanted posters for a sixty-seven-dollar bill and a crumpled automobile door.
A Lush and Seething Hell Page 28