by Sid Holt
I’ll never fall in love again
If I should live three hundred years
I’ll never give my heart to another woman
No matter who she is
You did me wrong, baby
That’s why I’m singing this song.
Had they broken my daddy’s heart while he was breaking Mama’s? Did he hear Mama’s city pain in Bland’s declaration that he had a “hole where [his] heart used to be”? Or was he thinking of his own heart, and how he had turned Mama mean? I wondered if Daddy was listening for the country in Bland, or if he just needed someone who sonically and ontologically knew his regret and guilt and sorrow and heartbreak. Like Bland, Daddy had “felt so bad” and found places to “steal away and moan sometimes.” If I couldn’t know where he stole away, I wished I could know what or why he moaned.
To triangulate and make sure my research was robust, I started listening to WDIA incessantly. I listened to the parade of voices, newcomers and regulars, weighing in on the day’s events, half hoping Daddy would call in and say “psych!” and laugh and laugh and laugh until tears came. I tried to recall those snippets of songs I used to hear on the way to Sunday school, the only time Mama would switch from the oldies station to WLOK. All those years listening weekly on the fifteen-minute ride to Orange Mound, and I only came up with enough memory matter to Google two songs. “A witness? Can I get a witness? For Jesus? Somebody know Jesus? Won’t he make a difference in your life?” That one turned out to be “You Brought the Sunshine,” a Clark Sisters song originally recorded the year before I was born. I listened to all of the available versions, watching those four Detroit Clark Sisters singing and shining and glittering with their spectacular hair. Without that AM crackle and on-the-way-to-Sunday-school anxiety, I couldn’t catch whatever it was I was looking for.
The other lyric I recalled was “I lift my hands in total praise to you.” I remembered the song’s concluding chorus of amens because that was the snippet WLOK would play between tracks. Atlanta-born, Chocolate City–raised Richard Smallwood had written that song—“Total Praise.”
Lord, I lift mine eyes to the hills
Knowing my help is coming from you.
Your peace you give me in time of the storm.
You are the source of my strength.
You are the strength of my life.
I lift my hands in total praise to you.
Amen, amen, amen, amen, amen, amen, amen, amen.
I listened to it over and over and over and got nothing.
• • •
There was business to tend to. My sister and I were grown daughters for real now, and we made plans and helped Mama make plans like grown daughters do. That Monday, the day after I found the truck, we met with the funeral director at my dining room table. Her wig was a carefully manicured synthetic helmet of sorrow, jet black with blond highlights. Both ancient and from the future, it swooped gently across her forehead, framing her face. I figured she must have worn it to communicate how sorry she was about Daddy’s death.
She knew Daddy and demonstrated how she would pull his face into his signature smile. We were going to put him in a red tie, and the theme color would be red. Mama and Daddy’s pastor was there, too. He pulled my sister and me aside to warn us not to let this light-eyed lady with her Sorrow Wig trick our grieving Mama out of money. He admonished us to tell the lady we only had $3,000. Later, I told Mama what the pastor said, and she said Daddy would have gotten up from the dead and said, “Bitch, why you put me in this wooden box?” if she had given him a $3,000 funeral. She tickled herself with the truth and absurdity of the prospect. There was some longing there, too.
My sister and I worked tirelessly on the program, she on the format, me on the obituary. Mama tried to get the order of the siblings from both sides straight so no one would be offended. She wouldn’t let me put my brother in the obituary, but he was in the list of survivors and in the funeral car, our fragile family making small talk and nitpicking over funeral details. I was a weary country accomplice.
By the day of the visitation, I had cried, but I still had not been carried away like I needed to be to clear my system before the show. Walking into the church, I saw the red tie first. I went straight to the casket. The diabetes got his body. The barber was terrible. They hadn’t cut his nails again. The makeup was too light. They hadn’t pulled the wires hard enough for the smile. I touched the tie, careful not to mess up the delicate but grotesque system that held his body there propped up for us to see. I had cleaned his signature cap—it said ROB in white lettering on a black surface with a red rim, something he had specially made with a gift card I got him. I had intended to place it in the casket, but I changed my mind and kept it, withholding it from this body I didn’t recognize.
The break did not come at the wake or the next day at the funeral, not even when the casket was reopened because my “whole” uncle from St. Louis got lost and was late. The pastor said a few words about Daddy, and Mama whispered to us even though she is biologically incapable of whispering. (“He should have seen the hell in him before he got to church every week.”) The pastor then launched into the kind of homophobic and sexist tirade that made me hate the church as a child, managing to condemn Caitlyn Jenner before opening the doors of his Father’s house to receive new members. The choir, sparse because it was Memorial Day weekend, didn’t sing anything of particular note. I was fidgeting for a break, but I would not get it there.
Mama had designated one friend, one church member, one coworker, and one family member to speak at the funeral. She wanted to prevent infighting about who in the family had the most right to speak. There had already been a squabble about who was the oldest of his sisters. To settle the argument, they drew out their driver’s licenses and compared.
The coworker who spoke had worked alongside Daddy for years without knowing his full name; everyone knew him as Rob. A frail man with glasses, he said he had once told Daddy about his rheumatoid arthritis, and how his doctor said he wasn’t going to be able to work anymore before long and that he was going to have to get a cane. Daddy told him, “Get an umbrella.” The man replied that an umbrella was fine for the rain, but what would he do when it was sunny out? Daddy said, “Use it to keep the sun off ya face.” So the man got an umbrella, and held it up for the church to see. With his umbrella cane still raised, he concluded, “He loved his whiskey, and he loved his family. And I’m gon’ miss him.” No one could ever tell if Daddy was serious.
After everyone was gone, when the lights were off, I thought release would come. It didn’t. I just kept listening for things.
What did come was a windstorm that shook the house and knocked down the two trees in my backyard. I heard the crack like lightning and got up from the dining room table and walked into the kitchen in time to see a massive branch fall and take out the east fence. I stood there waiting for the rest. Just take me on out, then, if you wanna, shit. But my daughter screamed at me to move and get to the basement. She had already been upstairs to fetch her baby brother from his crib. I was still staring when she commanded me again: Move, Mom.
No power lines down, no structures damaged but the fence. The second tree had been plain snatched up at the roots like a giant had plucked it up to floss with and dropped it when he was done. There was nothing left but heat, so much sun now where there once had been shade. It hurt. I had grown so accustomed to the shade that I had forgotten where it was coming from all these years.
• • •
The last piece of business was Daddy’s car, a red Oldsmobile 98, the same shade as his truck. It had been given to him by his brother, and he planned to drive that car when he retired. He kept it in storage, spending thousands of dollars over the years, awaiting that day. Since he had turned fifty-five, he had been threatening to retire at sixty-two. Mama couldn’t bear the thought of his not getting the full Social Security benefit. Even though she knew he could get the full benefit at sixty-six, she wanted him to wait until sixt
y-six-and-a-half, perhaps for good measure. Well.
We had to cut the storage unit’s lock because none of Daddy’s three dozen keys fit. I squatted down as far as possible to have enough force to lift the door. Seemed like ages since it had been raised. And there was the car. It had three flat tires and part of the unit’s ceiling had caved in on it. But there it was. Still proud. Hidden away in a tight, musty space and entombed with cancerous stuff crumbling around him, but there he was. Arthur Lee Robinson. There were two air-conditioning motors inside, too. A Mama size and a Daddy size.
I had driven over in the truck, and WLOK was on the radio when I returned to head to the other side of town. I had just left it on in there. “Lord, I lift mine eyes to the hills, knowing my help is coming from you,” said the voices from the speaker. “Your peace you give me in time of the storm. You are the source of my strength. You are the strength of my life. I lift my hands in total praise to you.”
Halfway down Park in Orange Mound, “Total Praise” came on. It finally got through to me—catharsis came so hard and fast I could not see. My eyes were raining and there were no damn windshield wipers. I just pulled in the turning lane and parked and waited for the rain to pass but knew it wouldn’t. There came that chorus of amens, one on top of the other, and I wailed until I was afraid I was being sealed away, too.
Sometimes I’m still there in that lane, facing east, hands lifted, unable to get out and back home to myself until somebody brings the right key.
• • •
Daddy liked to tell Mama that when they retired, he was moving them to some land in Mississippi and giving her a truck patch to garden. Mama would balk, saying proudly that all the plants would die if she were in charge. When any of us would sing, he would ask if we sang in parts, though we were all better singers than he was, with or without a choir. He ran us out of rooms with his flatulence and paid us a dollar to scratch his dandruff and a dollar for each A we earned. He always brought money right on time when I hadn’t asked, and we knew he was so proud of us. He loved sausage links and chitlins and peanut M&M’S, and had his absolute favorite—ribs—for his last dinner of jury duty. He loved Mama the best way he knew how. He was sorry he hurt her, though he didn’t ever say so except for with the Bobby “Blue” Bland, and the appliances, and the new car he wanted Mama to have. She finally got it after he died.
Mama still finds things of Daddy’s that she thinks my brother would like, and in my accomplice role, I get them from her and give them to him. Watches, shirts with “Rob” on them, caps. She asks me what my brother has said about these things. She’s said his name or referred to him as my brother more in the few months since Daddy died than she did in his entire life. In the end, Mama did right by Daddy’s son.
I will always wonder what songs of comfort he sang to himself, what he hummed alone before he flew home in the end. “This old world is so lonely. This old town is so sad. This old room is so cold and empty,” Bland had sung. Daddy must have felt so bad. What of his gospel? When he lay on that cold tile to rest and prepare for flight, was DeMadre there with a warm laugh and his own caterwauling, returning the favor? When he at last no longer had to steal away into himself to moan, what was his solace? Did he take his final right to cry? Did he lift his eyes to that hill where he saw Big Mama, knowing help was coming from her, and from the Lord? What did he pray?
In the end, I hope there was a chorus of rising amens to free him, lifting him in total praise for a life well led.
I hope he had all the amens. Amen, amen.
Amen, Daddy, amen.
Amen. Amen.
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Contributors
Shane Bauer is a senior reporter at Mother Jones and recipient of numerous awards, including the 2017 National Magazine Award for Reporting, the Goldsmith Award for Investigative Reporting, and the Hillman Prize for Magazine Journalism. He is also the coauthor, with Sarah Shourd and Joshua Fattal, of A Sliver of Light, a memoir of his two years as a prisoner in Iran.
Pamela Colloff joined the staff of Texas Monthly in 1997. She is a six-time National Magazine Award finalist and won the Feature Writing award in 2013 for her story “The Innocent Man.” Her work has also appeared in The New Yorker and has been anthologized in Best American Magazine Writing, Best American Crime Reporting, Best American Non-Required Reading, and Next Wave: America’s New Generation of Great Literary Journalists. In 2014 the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University awarded her the Louis M. Lyons Award for Conscience and Integrity in Journalism. She is currently a senior rep
orter at ProPublica and a writer-at-large at the New York Times Magazine.
Jeffrey Goldberg was a Middle East correspondent and the Washington correspondent for The New Yorker before joining The Atlantic in 2007. He was previously a correspondent for the New York Times Magazine and New York magazine. He has also written for the Jewish Daily Forward and was a columnist for the Jerusalem Post. Goldberg’s book Prisoners was hailed as one of the best books of 2006 by the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, The Progressive, Washingtonian, and Playboy. He received the 2003 National Magazine Award for Reporting for his coverage of Islamic terrorism and the 2005 Anti-Defamation League Daniel Pearl Prize. He is also the winner of the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists prize for best international investigative journalist; the Overseas Press Club award for best human-rights reporting; and the Abraham Cahan Prize in Journalism. In 2001, Goldberg was appointed the Syrkin Fellow in Letters of the Jerusalem Foundation, and in 2002 he became a public-policy scholar at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars in Washington, D.C.
Nikole Hannah-Jones is a domestic correspondent for the New York Times Magazine focusing on racial injustice. She has written on federal failures to enforce the Fair Housing Act, the resegregation of American schools, and policing in America. Her extensive reporting in both print and radio on the ways segregation in housing and schools is maintained through official action and policy has earned a National Magazine Award, a Peabody, and a Polk Award. Ms. Hannah-Jones earned her bachelor’s degree in history and African American studies from the University of Notre Dame and her master’s degree in journalism and mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Ms. Hannah-Jones lives in Brooklyn with her husband and very sassy daughter.