White Tears

by Hari Kunzru

  Twelve gates to the city, hallelujah

  There was a café. There was a furniture store. A tailor. A Frosty Freeze ice cream. People in from all over, farmers in their overalls, gawping at the windows. There was a music store. Speir, the man’s name was. H.C. Speir. A white man. It was a long dark narrow store. Four listening booths, two white, two colored. Racks and boxes of records behind the counter. In the front window, he’d fixed a black rubber snake to a phonograph turntable, so that when the handle was cranked, the snake jumped and juggled, rearing up like it was about to strike. Everybody loved the black snake. Kids, everyone. Speir knew how to draw people. Every day someone was out in front of his place with a guitar or a fiddle, trying to catch his eye. If he liked your music, he could get you twenty-five dollars to do a recording session. That was a generally known fact.

  I played for Mr. Speir and he told me I was good and to come back in a month when he would give me an answer. In that time I rode clear to Birmingham and back, playing every night. The people loved me. They put money in my pocket and hollered for more. You’re in luck, Speir said, when I turned up at his door. You won’t have to go nowhere. They gone come to you. He showed me a telegram. HAVE SHAW AND PARTNER IF HE HAS ONE REPORT DIRECT TO SJH TEN AM TUE 6 AUGUST I CAN’T BE THERE COHN AND ENGLAND WILL HANDLE. Ten dollars, he said. Not twenty-five, but enough. And all the dreams of what might happen after that. The train car with my name on the side. The silk suits.

  I did have a partner at one time. Went by Guitar Jimmy. Boy had talent. I never seen him learn a song, it was like he already knew. Any kind. Polka, Irish, you name it. He just had to put the hat down and they’d drop the money right in. Guitar Jimmy or Jimmy Clean. You could walk all day in the summer heat and he looked like he just stepped out of a limousine. Together we were free. No man to tell us where or when or how. You could finish playing at two and he’d wake you at three saying I heard a train, let’s get on it. And we would. We were under nobody’s command. One time we were staying at a boardinghouse in Evansville, burned down in the night with our guitars inside. Burned right to the ground. We started up Sixty-one, walking. He had a harmonica, started blowing it with me singing. People stopped their cars to give us dollar bills. By the time we reached Clarksdale we had enough to buy ourselves new guitars. That’s just how it was with me and Jimmy. But he liked pussy and that was his undoing. Some woman, her man found him, shot him with a forty-four right in the side. Right through his lung. I see him in the kingdom. I hope to see Jimmy there.

  I know exactly to the moment when my own luck ran out. There was a woman over the river in Arkansas. When she call, you better come. She fix you so you come. That woman call me and told me to sing for her. She was powerful. She could have a man rolling on the floor, walking like a hog. I sang to her about money and good fortune and the suit of clothes a woman in Memphis promised me if only I would stay with her just one more night. Her husband’s suit of clothes. The granny woman was tickled by that one, so she made me a conjure hand, but I lost it and after that I couldn’t get along. I lost the hand she made for me, just left that little root bag on the sink in a bus station bathroom. I don’t know why. I was riding away before I knew. After that, everything I did seemed to be in vain.

  So by the time the recording session came around, I was a worried young rounder with a troublesome mind. I could not sleep and I could not eat. I knew all my power had been in that hand. I knew I ought not to go to Jackson, but all the same I waited for the Yellow Dog to take me there, sitting outside the Moorhead depot playing my guitar. Something must have stopped my ears, because I never even heard the train coming. No way I wouldn’t have heard it, unloading its cargo and taking on more. No way I wouldn’t have heard that whistle blow, but it happened. I ran and watched it pull away down the track, and right then I could feel it, the jinx, slipping round my ankles like a cat. I thought I was doing OK when I got a ride most of the way on a truck, but those boys were making a delivery at a farm and I had to walk the last four or five miles into town. That way took me through a white neighborhood, where it was not safe to be on the street after sundown. Though the light was failing, I didn’t feel afraid. I had cash money and a letter from the Key & Gate Recording Laboratories in New York City, inviting me to Jackson’s famous Saint James Hotel to make a disk of my music. I was a young man, young enough to believe in the power of my charm. Then the policeman drew up beside me in his big Ford car.

  There was a lot of dust on the roads. I was tired from walking. My clothes were dirty. Sweat on my brow. Maybe I seemed like a vagrant to him. I told him everything, about the money, the letter. Boy, he said. You look like a ghost.

  If you ever go to Jackson, better walk straight. You better not stumble and you better not fall.

  —Where you going, Sam?

  —Farish Street, sir.

  —Farish Street? That’s a long way from here. You sure are in the wrong part of town.

  He told me to get in the car. And I did. After that came nothing good.

  A dark night in a jail cell and no sleep. They took away my guitar. I never saw that guitar again. In the morning I was shackled to a long chain with five other men and taken to the courthouse. The very day I was supposed to be recording. Judge Wilbur Wallace presiding, under the cool breeze of an electric fan. Anderson, Solomon; Boyle, James; Hardy, Charles; Hill, Isaac; Jackson, Thomas; Mitchell, Edwin; Shaw, Charles. They called my name and found me guilty of vagrancy, fined me a hundred dollars.

  —You got a hundred dollars, boy?

  —No sir.

  —Declared unable to pay and so remitted to J.J.W. Wallace Construction for one year in lieu.

  Ten of us they sentenced that morning, everyone the same. Judge Wilbur, on behalf of the thrifty state of Mississippi, set us all to work for his brothers on the levee. Then he broke for lunch.

  And just like that, I was thrown into silence and darkness. Never to have my voice recorded. Never to be remembered, never known for who I was or how I could play. Instead of going to the Saint James Hotel to take my first step into history I was driven in a wagon to a camp on the river up near Rosedale, almost within sight of Mister Billy’s farm. They took me there and put me to work.

  CAPTAIN JACK AND CAPTAIN JIM were the riding bosses. Walking boss was a man called Ferguson, work you from can to can’t. First light till you drop, rolling your wheeler and dumping the earth, all in the Mississippi summer heat. Only word Captain Jack ever spoke to me was I don’t like your look. You better watch out, he said. My eye’s on you. The Wallace brothers had camps all up and down the river by then, building the levee back up after the great flood. Everybody knew them. There were songs about the Wallaces. They were on their way up. Boys, Big Jim would say, when he came around. You ought to be proud. You working for the US Government now.

  I once watched Jack Wallace go wild on a man. Just got down off his horse and beat him with a pick handle until he stopped twitching. We laid the body down in the levee and we rolled our wheelers and covered him up with earth.

  All day from can to can’t. Up at first light, knowing there’s nothing until sundown but heat and mud. Knowing I ought to have been sliding down Farish Street in my sharp suit, followed by female eyes. I never knew how many of us Jack Wallace put down in the levee. They say he once shot a mercy man for telling him not to work some broke-shouldered mule. He didn’t like to hear the word no.

  Not all of us were convicts. Some were even getting pay, just enough money in the pocket to gamble and visit the whores who pitched their tents down below. Sally and Suzie calling who wants me, waving at the river, waving at men on boats. The stink of that camp. The fever in that camp. A kitchen tent, a mess, a commissary, a hog pen, a barrelhouse, a corral of mules and tents for the men. They chained twenty of us bad ones together when we slept. Others could come and go. You tied up and someone wants to cut you or fuck your ass, not a damn thing you can do. The knife blades working, making another dead man while I squeeze my eyes tight, hoping t
hey don’t come for me.

  Captain Jack rolling down to the water trough to tell his little joke.

  —Nigger dies get another, mule dies I got to buy another.

  That was his joke. My heart was full of hate for Jack Wallace. I polished my hate-filled heart like a precious stone.

  I did not deserve this.

  Went to the Captain with my hat in my hand

  Went to the Captain with my hat in my hand

  Said Captain have mercy on a long time man

  Well he look at me and he spit on the ground

  He look at me and he spit on the ground

  Says I’ll have mercy when I drive you down

  I had a mouth, they said. No one liked a coon with a mouth. I worked. I rolled. I dumped the earth. And I knew that if one afternoon I fell in the heat, Captain Jack would set to until I died or got up again. Every day that awful morning bell. You wake up and for a moment you forget where you are. Only for a moment. And always the fines for falling behind, talking back. Everything you do they add days or dollars. And you got no dollars so they add days. That’s how they do. That’s how they drive you down.

  BECAUSE NO ONE REMEMBERS ME and no one living will ever hear my music, because I am down in the levee where it is cold and dark. How did it take me? What difference does it make? Typhoid. Heat stroke. An accident, my body broken or cut or crushed. Captain Jack, looking down on me, telling me to get back to work. Captain Jack with the whip and the gun.

  I’m tired, I say. Me and some of the others. We’re tired. We want to sit down and rest.

  —Plenty of rest where I’ll send you.

  We are all down on the ground, lying or sitting. Captain Jack waves off the water boy, who is trying to give us a drink, and walks up behind the man next to me and takes out his forty-four. Don’t even hesitate, just blows the side of his head off. It sprays all over me, brains and blood. The world is quiet. My lips move but there is no sound. Just a high whine in my ear. Oh, please don’t do me like you do poor Shine. Don’t do me.

  The end is the same, however it comes. They lay me down and cover me in the cold dark earth. Lay me down in the mud with hate in my heart. I ought to have made that session, ought to have walked through the door of the Saint James Hotel. Instead I’m twenty-seven years old and rotting in the levee with hate in my heart. Starless desolation in my heart. I was never paid for the whip and the gun, never paid for the work I done. Hate in my heart that can never die because no one will ever hear my music and no one even remembers my name. But I turn out to be stronger than death. The record I never got to make is out there, at least sometimes, for those that have ears to hear. I put it there. I kept pushing it out. And now I have found a horse to ride. This boy. This weak boy. I have found a way back up into the world.

  So I look through his eyes, early one morning, and we wake up on the levee and stare down at a great gray mass of moving water. I am up on the levee, thinks the boy. I am in a bus. I am waiting for a bus, my clothes inexplicably covered in mud. I walk and ride and walk again. In slow stages I make my way back to the city. Far away I can see the sign, the red illuminated sign saying HOTEL. When I get there, I walk up the front steps like Saint James himself. I do not go round to the kitchen entrance. I have a right to be there. I am keeping an important appointment with the gentlemen from the Key & Gate Recording Laboratories. The lobby is bustling. Middle-aged men walk to and fro with conference passes on lanyards. On either side of the entrance doors stand a pair of banners, the vertical kind that come with a lightweight metal stand. The 33rd Annual Congress of the American Federation of Incarceration Service Providers. Girls in conference tee shirts are handing out flyers.

  —Just over there is the registration table where you can pick up your packet.

  —I have a letter. Mr. Speir sent me.

  That hard face getting out of the elevator, its expression set and bland. Cornelius Wallace, as I live and breathe. A circle of men surround him as he walks through the lobby, shaking hands, stopping once to have his picture taken with a man in a police uniform. I call out to him.

  —Cornelius? Corny?

  He looks in my direction, frowns, then turns away.

  —Yeah, that’s right. Pretend you don’t see me. I know you see me. I know you, Corny Wallace. I know you can see me.

  People are staring. Men with conference passes on lanyards.

  —I know about your family. About how you made your money.

  Security people converge on me. Do I hold a delegate’s pass? No? They think it would be best if I leave. No, it is not a public event. They don’t care about my letter. I am in the lobby. I am out on the street. I am walking up the front steps of the Saint James Hotel, carrying my guitar. The doorman, dark as I am, won’t let me any further. He looks at me like I’m crazy for even wanting to try. I have to go through the alley, past the trash cans, into the stink. My clothes are fine. The alley does not touch me. It is an old guitar, the varnish worn away on the back, the neck repaired more than once. The doorman makes me turn down the alley and this is how I make my way into the Saint James Hotel. Through the kitchen and up the back stairs. The room the record company has hired is at the end of a corridor where guests won’t walk past. Discreet. They’ve put a row of wooden chairs outside. Two other Negroes are already waiting, a man and a woman. He has a banjo, on her lap is a tambourine. We nod at each other. No one wants to risk a conversation. This is not our place. A word wrong here and there could be consequences. The door is half-open, and I see two white men sitting in front of an electrical box, wearing headphones. One smiles at me in a welcoming way. The other comes out and shakes my hand, calling me Mister Shaw. I look around to check no one else has heard. They are from New York City. They don’t know how to behave. He hands me a printed sheet of paper.

  Walxr (part of the Wallace Magnolia Group) is a leading provider of detention, correctional and community reentry services with 58 facilities, approximately 25,500 beds, and 8,000 employees around the globe. Walxr operates in the United States, Canada, Israel, the United Kingdom, Australia and Afghanistan. Our goal is to assist our clients in serving those assigned to their care through provision of high-quality cost-effective solutions, including design, construction and financing of state and federal prisons, detention centers and community reentry facilities as well as the provision of community supervision services, using advanced networked monitoring technologies.

  There are two rooms together, a kind of suite. One is the control room where Mister Zachary and Mister Joel sit. Wires go under the connecting door to a microphone on a stand. You sit in the far corner of the room and face the microphone. You sit facing into the corner like a naughty schoolboy. They say it’s better for the sound. It’s like singing for yourself, without caring if anyone’s listening. They’re friendly in a way that makes me nervous, a way that could rub other people up wrong. Mister Shaw. You don’t call a Negro mister. They say it gives us ideas.

  I sing the first number. Right away, they tell me they liked it and I should do it again. This time they will be recording.

  I sit facing in to the wall. I finish one song and take a sip of water. I try to read their expressions. What they like and what they don’t. What song shall I sing next? Which kind of song?

  —No more of those church numbers, Charlie. What else you got?

  —I got the other kind. I know a lot of songs.

  And I sing into the microphone, not too close, bet they thought they’d have to show me how. Just because I never had the chance before, doesn’t mean I don’t know. And the sound goes down the wire to the recording box and the vibrating needle writes it on their wax disk. The two white men in headphones, listening and nodding and smiling at me. A white envelope with a ten dollar bill. And they take the wax disk away and shut it carefully in a case and drive it off somewhere and press a record on marbled shellac and the record sells and later I have to go to Mr. Speir’s to have my portrait made and I wear a good suit with wide lapels and well-shine
d shoes and I hold a brand-new rosewood guitar. It is the portrait I will use when I become a name, a household word, when they advertise my records in the newspaper and the rich invite me to dine and I take a steamship to France to sing for the crown heads.

  Mister Zachary and Mister Joel glance at their watches.

  —Looks like he ain’t coming.

  —On a drunk, probably. Speir said he was the type. OK, scratch him. Who else we got out there?

  And just like that, I am gone. Never to be remembered. Never to be spoken of again. My voice, the way I bend a string, the way I can play a bassline with my thumb, filling in a melody with my other fingers so that it sounds like two or even three players at once. No one has my style, my particular style. And just like that it is gone, vanished into the past.

  I go back to the boardinghouse. The red sign blazes over the roof line. In my stifling little room that does not smell of lavender I change clothes and make my way back along Farish Street and down a side alley by the Saint James Hotel. I go down the alley, with the dented trash cans and the rotten smell. This is the way they make me come in. I enter through the kitchen, past the chefs shouting orders and slamming trays into ovens, the waiters pinning tickets to a board. And no one notices me, because in my white shirt and black pants I look like one of them. A valued team member. A faceless face. So no one questions me in the kitchen. No one pays attention when I pick up a steak knife and step through the swing doors into the service corridor.

  In the lobby a cocktail party is taking place. The lights are low. Middle-aged corrections officers network with service providers in the romantic light. There is Cornelius Wallace, shaking more hands, then taking a phone call, breaking away from the party and heading to the elevator. I get in beside him. He sees my uniform. That is all he sees. Someone like him never really sees someone like me. He gets out on a high floor and I wait for a moment, until the elevator doors start to shut, then I follow him along the corridor. I stay a few paces behind. If he knows I am there, he pays no attention. Cornelius, fiddling with a keycard, pushing it into the lock. As he opens the door, I come up behind him and shove him inside.