White Tears

by Hari Kunzru

  —Charlie Shaw is real.

  —Now this comes out of his mouth. It’s a Greek fucking tragedy up in here. Yeah, I know. Big bad Charlie Shaw, coming at you out of the heart of darkness. Sold his soul to the devil, most probably, to learn to play guitar. So here’s where I get to break it to you that he’s also twenty-four-carat vaudeville.

  —We didn’t make him up. He exists. He’s stalking me. He’s threatening my life.

  —Sorry, does baby need to go to his safe space now?

  —He’s messing with me. He’s going to kill me, if the thing in my chest doesn’t get me first.

  —What thing?

  —I have a burning. A thing in my chest. Like your friend.

  —My what?

  —Like Chester Bly. I know what happened to him. The same thing is happening to me. I’m in danger.

  —Like Chester? Sure, like Chester. Well, I don’t think Charlie’s going to let you fry before he’s finished with you. That’d be a rookie move. But you need to know something about Charlie. He’s Wolfmouth Shaw, the Wolfmouth who toured with the medicine shows. Sure, he knew a lot of black people. That’s how he got it down so well. The voice, the guitar picking, the dance steps.

  —What are you saying?

  —You know what I’m saying.

  —It’s not true.

  —It is so. White as me and you.

  —That cannot be true.

  He imitated my voice, making it into a vile constipated whine.

  —That cannot be true, that cannot be true. Fucking folk collectors, all the same. Let me tell you the trouble with you people. You hate the real music, the music that was actually happening, because you’re so hung up on what you like to call the authentic. A man plays a lick he learned from a record, you throw him out because he ain’t authentic enough for you. I arrive in your studio with a spear and a damn bone through my nose, you’d get down on your knees and pray to Jesus because there I was and I hadn’t been influenced.

  —He can’t be a white man.

  He paused, scratching at some eczematic patch buried in his chin stubble.

  —Well, I admit I’m not a hundred percent. Never easy to tell what’s going on when they’re in the makeup.

  He began to splutter with laughter. The laughter turned into a coughing fit, and he made another lunge for my water jug. I twisted round to keep it out of his reach. He recovered himself and looked at me sullenly.

  —Fine, just my little joke. So he’s black. Where does that leave you? Charlie Shaw is a professional entertainer, is all I’m saying. Not some fucking mud man, crawling out of the primal ooze. And he ought to get paid.

  —For what?

  —What does anyone want to get paid for? For the work they’ve done.

  —You act like you know everything, but you’re full of shit. You don’t know what he wants any more than I do. You don’t even know what’s on the other side of the record he made.

  —About that.

  —Yeah, who’s the bigshot collector, now? The one with all the information. You were desperate to know what was on the other side. You were begging me to tell you. Well, now I’ll tell you. It’s called “The Laughing Song.”

  I thought he’d be impressed, or at least interested, but he just made a face and started fishing around in his pockets. Finally he uncrumpled a piece of paper, a photocopy of some kind of form or index card, filled in by hand in a scratchy ink pen. Dates, song titles, timings. On a line headed “location” were the letters SJH.

  —What you have here is the log for a recording session that took place at the Saint James Hotel in Jackson, Mississippi, in November of 1929. Look at the lineup. Slim Duckett and Pig Norwood. Emmett Charles. He was a minstrel too, by the way, worked with Daddy Stovepipe. And you see there, Charlie Shaw.

  —His name’s scratched out.

  —That’s right. And what does that tell you?

  —I don’t know.

  —That he didn’t make the session, dumbass. He was down to be recorded but for whatever reason, it didn’t happen.

  —Well, he must have been recorded another time.

  —There was no other time. That’s it. That’s the only time Key & Gate ever recorded in Jackson. All their other sessions were in New York. I’ve seen those session sheets. All of them. Every last one. I have a contact, a collector friend. I’ve seen every name, every date. This is the only time Charlie Shaw comes up anywhere.

  —So the crossing out must be a mistake. He made the session. I’ve heard the record, for God’s sake.

  —The record you told me you and your friend cooked up.

  —I don’t know. I don’t know why we thought that. It seemed obvious at the time. I don’t know. I think he must have made the record. How else could I have heard it?

  —Charlie Shaw went to Jackson but he never came back. He vanished. They scratched his name out of the session log and no one ever saw or heard of him again. Charlie Shaw never recorded.

  —So what was it we put out?

  —There’s a question. I got to warn you, when you eat at that breakfast place, go easy on the hot sauce.

  I don’t remember anything after that. Night had long fallen. The lights in the bus were dimmed. I was exhausted. Headlights streamed past. Everything was a jumble. Eventually I slept. I was woken by the driver calling out a stop. The seat beside me was empty. It was the parting of the ways. JumpJim had gone.

  NEXT STOP. JACKSON. Jackson, Mississippi, where this bus terminates. Jackson, the air like syrup. The driver throwing down the cases, sweating under his cap. A big laugh echoing through the bus station waiting room. Shuffle step, shuffle step. I couldn’t spot him, though I tried. However many sudden turns I made.

  A downtown of brown concrete and squat modern blocks, eighties money frozen in smoked glass and olive stone cladding. Chemical freight, tank after tank, moving slow and heavy along tracks running over the roadway. I walked until I saw the Saint James Hotel, a stern brick building looming over the boarded-up shop fronts of Farish Street. Mounted on a scaffold on the roof, the single word HOTEL, illuminated at night. I was not ready to go there. Around it lay an obliterated grid, ruins and grassy intersections, weeds growing chest-high in vacant lots. One solitary store was open, selling hats and belts. The clerk didn’t think for a minute I would buy anything. In the distance was the new city. Parking lots, a couple of office buildings, a high-rise perimeter about a mile away. I climbed through glassless windows, found sleeping bags, plastic soda bottles of urine. I saw tags and throwups, many names and signs. Propped up against a wall was a board with a carefully painted picture of a pianist, the remnant of some community mural or children’s project, a smiling jazz man tagged by $eeWeed and $Murda on either side of his head. I had a camera. I do not know how I came to be carrying it. While I was taking a picture, my back to the street, I heard something behind me and turned to catch a glimpse of a man walking a large black dog. I had no distinct impression of him, but at the same time I knew who he was. Dark skin, a flash of a white tee shirt. He had been following me as I walked back to the motel where Leonie died. He had followed me at other times, in other places. Papa Charlie, guardian of the crossroads, where the two worlds meet. Excuse me, excuse me, as I step across the threshold…

  When I went outside, the street was empty.

  I took pictures in the old Palace Auditorium, a treacherous shell of rotting boards and missing joists. I photographed the Alamo cinema. I went back out onto the street, and wandered past vacant lots until I saw a lone building with glass in the windows, occupying one corner of an intersection. A sign in the front window said Closed, next to a sticker: Got soul? I was framing the little building amidst the emptiness, composing my shot.

  —I saw you.

  I had no idea where she came from.

  —I saw you! Poking your nose in.

  She was in her sixties, perhaps. A head wrap in red, black and green, heavy wooden earrings, her arms fiercely folded.

  —Who told y
ou you could take photographs?

  I said something about the historic blues neighborhood. She rolled her eyes and turned away.

  —Is this your business, ma’am?

  —What if it is?

  —Is it a music store?

  —It is a community bookstore. And it’s closed. And it’s not for you.

  —I’m just interested in local history. This was called the Black Mecca, did you know that?

  —Local history. Have mercy. Only two reasons people like you come down here. The blues or taking pictures of ruins. We’re fascinating to you, long as we’re safely dead.

  —Look, I had nothing to do with whatever happened to your neighborhood. I’m not the one to blame.

  —You for real? Get the hell out of here. People live here.

  —I just have some questions.

  —I am not obliged to be your goddamn cultural tour guide.

  I walked away hurriedly.

  —That’s right. Go on. Hipster asshole!

  I flinched. Not that she was telling the truth. I’d seen her eyes. Her empty eyes. No one lived there. She didn’t live there, among the ruins. She was no more alive than I was. And so I walked away from Farish Street, out of town, until the city streets became dusty rural roads running between cotton fields. Sometimes I carried a box of records. Sometimes I carried a guitar. Finally I came to the old wooden shack with the peeling pink paint and the barbecue pit in the yard and the line of expensive cars parked out front.

  The smoking skillets of the women in the kitchen, the greasy bills changing hands. I was shown to a corner table covered in a red-checkered vinyl cloth. I ordered steak and eggs. Plotting was taking place all around me. Machinations. Allocation of funds. Though the surroundings were humble, even crude, I saw gold watches, handmade shoes scuffing the bare board floor. When my food came, I spooned on the hot sauce and examined the photos on the wall. Convivial scenes, said JumpJim, and so they were. Smiling fellows in aprons holding out cuts of meat, groups in sports and military uniforms. Then I found myself examining the faces of three old men, sitting, it appeared, in that very corner, sometime in the nineteen forties or fifties. Three men in their shirtsleeves, with wide silk ties and prosperous bellies and frosty glass tankards of beer. The caption: “Big” Jim Wallace, Judge Wilbur Wallace and Jack Wallace: still rolling along.

  I knew those faces, versions of those faces. I’d seen many of those faces on the family pool house wall. I forgot about food and got up from the table to look around. Leaning over other diners, I began to cause annoyance and consternation. I was eventually made to leave, thrown out physically by a burly cook, but not before I had seen a photograph of Judge Wilbur as the winner of a 1932 fishing competition and another, dated 1929 but otherwise uncaptioned, tucked away on the wall near the bathroom. It was taken high on a ridge. A river was visible down below. Three white men stood in postures of ease and authority, one with folded arms, a second with his hands in his pockets, the third cradling a shotgun. Behind them, scattered through the frame, were black workers, carrying spades and picks or paused in the action of wheeling barrows along a duckboard path. They were dressed in convict’s stripes.

  Captain Jim, Captain Jack and Judge Wilbur, up on the levee. Starting the family firm.

  Sprawled in the dirt outside the shack, I could feel the earth rising up, the cold wet earth of the levee. These were Carter’s people. This was the earth they came out of. I remembered something Leonie had said, about grandpa somebody or other moving the family up to DC, so the firm could bid for Federal Government contracts. Already big by then, Wallace Construction became a money machine. Then, years later, the DC children took the next step and moved to New York, to convert all that capital into culture. An invisible thread connected Carter and Leonie to Charlie Shaw. I thought of the buildings I had lived in, the expensive things I had handled and consumed. Whose work had paid for them? I peered at the faces, the black men with their picks and shovels, but they were too small, too blurred to recognize. I could not see if he was one of them.

  I walked back into town. Whenever I heard the sound of engines or saw headlights in the distance, I climbed into the ditch and hid. As I reached the suburbs, the light began to fail. I walked the blocks until I saw the red HOTEL sign. As I grew closer, I kept it in view, or perhaps it kept me in view. The sign seemed to follow me as I walked the blocks. Sometimes I carried a box of records, sometimes I carried a guitar. I went to sleep under a carport, picking up my sleeping bag when the flashing blue lights came around. Later I walked to Farish Street and found a spot in an abandoned building. I lay, curled up on a broken-down cardboard box, listening to Wolfmouth prowling in the alley outside. Step shuffle switch, step shuffle switch. Wolfmouth, Papa Charlie, Charlie Shaw, crossing the threshold, walking out of the picture frame. For much of that day, he had left me alone. Now he seemed closer than ever. As the thought formed in my mind, the spray-painted walls around me were lit by a flickering light and I sat up in a state of terror to watch him slowly come cakewalking in, a lantern in one hand and a silver-tipped cane in the other. He bowed with a courtly flourish. I could not move. His teeth were like tombstones, his great mouth ready to swallow me up. He swung his cane, pointed it at me.

  —Sam, you sure am look like you got the miseries.

  There was another name for what I’d got. On the floor beside me was a cracked sliver of mirror. Wolfmouth put the lantern down and handed me a champagne cork, which he produced from his pocket like a magician with the card I’d just been thinking of. I started to burn it on the flame. I had always been burning it on the flame, turning it round so it seared on all sides, just as I’d done many times before. Wolfmouth held up the lantern so I could see as I smeared my face. When I was finished, he examined my work, first one cheek and then the other, careful not to dirty his white kid gloves. He laughed his great hearty laugh and stretched like an athlete limbering up for a race. Then he stuffed his hands into my mouth, pulling my jaws wide open, then wider still, until I was in excruciating pain. I tried to scream but I could not, and he stretched my jaws until they cracked, the top and bottom hanging a whole hands-width apart. He peered inside like a dentist or a plumber examining a pipe, then stretched some more. Even that wasn’t enough for him. He pulled ever wider until he was able to fit, first one patent-leather pump, then a knee, then a second shoe and a second knee into my mouth, and finally it was the work of a moment to climb inside entirely and disappear down my gullet like an eel down a chute. My jaws snapped back in place. Now I was the horse and he was the rider.

  Somewhere near the river. Frogs croak from a swamp at the edge of the field where we’re set up. Kerosene torches spit and gutter at the four corners of the stage.

  Spat spit. Spitting, guttering. I am sitting by the tent, as I always do, and as always a crowd of white children is watching as I put on the greasepaint and the cork. I make my eyes wide, my mouth wider. I show my pearly white teeth. I make them squeal and run.

  The comedian comes on, to tell the story about the loyal old slave who got lost in the war.

  —Lord I am Found Again! I done brought you a whole mess o’new niggers, Marse George! Some folks tell me dey is free, but I know dey b’long ter Marse George.

  Putting on the burnt cork. Age of seventeen years, singing “He’s In The Jailhouse Now” before the pitch doctor comes on to sell his Congo salve. The learned professor has consented to share with you a secret discovered at peril of his life! Purifies the blood and cleanses the stool!

  I left after a season. I could not hear myself anymore. I could not see myself in the mirror.

  LET ME BE CLEAR. I PLAY TWO KINDS OF MUSIC. God’s and the other kind. That is to say I play both sides. Sunday picnics and work camps. All the different kinds of camp. Logging camps, levee camps, places where they’ll kill a man and step over his body to get to the barrelhead. Ruled by the knife and the whip and the gun. Turpentine in Louisiana and coal in Alabama. Cane on the Brazos River in Texas. It’s all the
same, the whole country one big camp. They are making dead men in camps all over this land. No one bats an eye.

  Since I was a child I could always play, always find the thread of what I was feeling and follow it up and down the strings. I grew up playing rags and jigs and whatnot for Mister Billy, as he sat in a rocker on his porch and slapped his fat thigh in time. When you play music you don’t always have to work. I teamed up with a pianist in Memphis and we made money then. But I worked too. I picked on Mister Billy’s farm. I cut willow and drove a team. I did all those things at one time or another. There were years I stayed in one place. The Choctaw mounds by the river, the glitter of the water sliding by. Time slowed down. But I was a rounder, born to roam. I had a little girl in Greenville, another in Natchez. I found it easy to say goodbye, easier not to say goodbye at all. I rode buses and trains. On Farish Street I built a reputation as a slick young sheik, in any game you care to name, a winner. When I smiled, everyone smiled back because I was so damn pretty. Farish Street, the Black Mecca, the shining beacon of the race. My shiny shoes. I never stayed at the Saint James Hotel. I never shut one of those heavy wooden doors behind me, the doors with the brass numbers, never shut the door and lay down and went to sleep on clean white cotton sheets that smelled of lavender. There were black-owned boardinghouses around Farish Street. The musicians all stayed in those, when we came in to town.

  Sometimes I played on street corners. I played outside a general store. I played outside a Chinese laundry.

  Oh what a beautiful city

  Oh what a beautiful city