White Tears
Page 26
The Nix by Nathan Hill
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
“The Ballad of Geeshie and Elvie” by John Jeremiah Sullivan for The New York Times Magazine
Slipping Into Darkness
When I write fiction, it’s important for me to go to the places I’m writing about. There’s something about the feel of a place, the smell, the textures, that a novelist can’t pick up any other way. Invariably I find that when I’m travelling, things happen to me that find their way into my books.
To write White Tears I made pilgrimages to various places in the Delta associated with the blues, such as this, one of several graves reputed to be the last resting place of Robert Johnson. It was a lonely place, a burying ground outside a rural Baptist church. As I got there, a huge thunderstorm broke out…
All over the south, and particularly in the Mississippi Delta, are places with historic echoes in blues lyrics. Here’s where ‘the southern crosses the yellow dog’, a railroad junction where itinerant musicians would hop on and off trains as they made their way from camp to town to plantation.
The Southern cross the Dog at Moorhead, an’ she keeps on through If my babe gone to Georgia, believe I’m goin’ to Georgia too
This is the Dockery plantation in Bolivar County MS, where Charley Patton would play for the workers as they collected their pay. The particular blues style of this small area has been incredibly influential – both on musicians who followed Patton like Robert Johnson and Muddy Waters, and on modern rock music, in which you can still hear rhythms, lyrics and guitar styles that originated here.
Believe it or not, the next photo is Avalon. Not where Excalibur was forged, but where Mississippi John Hurt spent his life as a share cropper.
Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind
Avalon, my hometown, always on my mind
Pretty mamas there in Avalon, want me all the time
I nosed around in towns like Clarksdale and Greenville, places that boomed when cotton was king, but are now sad ghosts of their former selves.
I spent the night in a shotgun shack, so-called because if you pull the trigger when you’re standing at the front door, the pellets will blow right through, hitting everyone inside.
I drank a few beers at the Blue Front café in Bentonia MS, talking to the owner, Jimmy Holmes, about what it’s like operating one of the last of the old juke joints.
I stumbled on the ruins of Bryant’s Grocery, one of the grimmest sites in the south. This is where fourteen year old Emmett Till ‘recklessly eyeballed’ the white owner’s wife. The owner and a friend kidnapped the boy, tortured in the back of the store and then murdered him, throwing the body into the river, weighted down with an engine block. The incident galvanized the civil rights movement. An all-white jury acquitted both defendants after a 67-minute deliberation; one juror said, “If we hadn’t stopped to drink pop, it wouldn’t have taken that long.”
That old time religion has a dark side too…
The world of 78 recording collecting is populated by eccentrics and misfits. It’s very closed to outsiders. One of my best guides has been Christopher King, a collector who lives in rural Virginia. An evening drinking bourbon in his listening room is a pleasure and a privilege.
Chris finds something occult and mystical in the music. Elsewhere, such as the tomb of ‘voodoo queen’ Marie Laveau in Saint Louis cemetery, New Orleans, the occult is alive in a more literal sense.
As I traveled, I wrote notes and took photographs. I ate well, if not always healthily…
I took inspiration from the working habits of a great southern writer at the Faulkner house in Oxford MS.
I climbed into abandoned buildings in Farish Street, Jackson, once known as the ‘black Mecca’, now almost completely forgotten. I like to think this was where Mr. Spier’s record store was once located. Spier, a white man, discovered many of the great blues musicians, and acted as a scout for record companies in the twenties and thirties.
I looked up at Corinthian columns, all that remains of Windsor House, one of the last great antebellum plantation mansions, near Port Gibson.
Even back in New York, where I live, the meaning of ‘the south’ is fraught and contested.
White Tears is about records
But records are only the part of history that was captured, the part that remains. For the rest, you have to go south and listen. White Tears is a record of what I heard. I hope you enjoy it.
- Hari Kunzru August 2016
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
* * *
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.