Des Jean explained to me that a whole folk culture of rock-shelter digging existed in the caves on either side of the park. They called it sifting (there was a place called Sifter’s Hill by the check-in area, he said). He had put together that it was related to hunting. “The game eat a lot in the morning,” he said. “They’ll be out foraging, and then they’ll be sated, and won’t come out again till dusk, so during that time, you’re out in the woods. What do you do? You go dig for airyheads.” He told me about a family who liked to dig together at night, hooking up lights to the battery in their army Jeep (the influx of Jeeps into the country after the war spurred looting, according to Des Jean). The son of this family, the most zealous digger among them, once remarked to Des Jean that in his opinion, the ringing of dirt in a sifting box was as sweet as music. Des Jean actually took me to meet this man at his home. On the road he told me the tale of Walnut Rockhouse, the family’s favored site. They had looted it pretty regularly for a decade. “If they’d only left it alone,” Des Jean said, “people would be studying it in grad school.” They got into some ancient layers, unusually intact, Early Archaic, almost Paleo-Indian. One burial they removed, Des Jean said, looked to be at least eight thousand years old, possibly older, based on what he was able to gather deductively through the son’s collection.
The son met us at the door of a modest wooden house on a piece of marginal rural property. He introduced us to his mules and to his all-but-mule-size dog. He was hale and hearty. He had gray hair but a sort of boyish haircut. He wore glasses and spoke very loudly. He talked all the time. Sort of talked over you but not in a rude way, more like he was hard of hearing. In the older photographs of him that I saw, he had a beard, including in one photograph in which he stood plunged into the water of a pond, twenty below, with his motorcycle parked next to him on the ice. “I couldn’t even get anybody to come with me and take the picture,” he said. “I had to take it myself.” He wasn’t so wild and crazy now; he’d hurt his back in a motorcycle accident—sold off a lot of artifacts, in fact, to pay the bills on that—but he still seemed happy and proud to open his giant gun safe for us and show us some things he hadn’t been able to part with. Des Jean had assured him that I didn’t intend to use his name, so he immediately started talking about burials—that was what excited him. Des Jean had said earlier that within the culture of Appalachian looting there’s a smaller culture of prehistoric bone fetish. He told me the story of a man in nearby Huntsville, Tennessee, who had lain down, Des Jean said, “next to a fully rearticulated skeleton of a woman estimated to be about twenty-four years of age—she’s a Late Woodland burial, which makes her about twelve hundred years old, thereabouts—and his wife took pictures of him with the skeleton, and they were handing them out to people. Someone filed a complaint with the sheriff. As the guy was being put into the back of the car in cuffs, he was yelling, ‘Do I get back my bones?’”
“I pulled this off a burial,” the son said, peeking at my eyes in readiness for my reaction. “There was an infant and two grown-ups.” He put it into my hand, a necklace of conch beads. Each was taken from the inside of a conch shell, where the spiral is thick enough to make a bead. “You can see where the body’s corroded ’em,” he said. His mother had the muscle-shell burial necklaces at her place.
As I sat in his living room, on the couch, he jogged in suddenly and rolled a chunkey stone at me across the carpet. It was gorgeous. (Chunkey was a game—a little like a running version of curling, in which people sometimes got killed—played all over the prehistoric and even historic Southeast; it had ritual aspects; it was connected to war.)
“They would play with that,” the son said.
He put another weird-looking dark rock in my hand. “Now look at that,” he said. “I found that in a burial. That’s a meteorite. You can’t cut it with a hacksaw.”
He showed me a paper-thin ceremonial point. “Can you believe he could get it that thin?” he says. At one point he was pulling points out of an underwear drawer while Des Jean and I stood there in his unfinished guest bedroom listening. He said that on one day, “my greatest day,” he’d pulled out fifty-seven pieces “in a single day of sifting. And I don’t consider something that’s broken or cracked a piece.”
He said, “Once you hit that ash it’s easier than digging sand.”
He said, “My former nephew by marriage broke into my house, took the points he wanted off of a display mount, and traded ’em for dope.” We were looking at the remnants of what the man had dug in his time.
The whole time we were talking, there was a very conspicuous thing on top of the TV; it was covered in a big sheet of green tissue paper. The son kept eyeing it, daring me to ask about it. Finally I did. He brought it over—a female skull that he believed to be twelve thousand years old. (It was the one Des Jean thought dated closer to eight or nine thousand.) He presented it to me. He showed me where her teeth are ground almost to nothing “from chewing hides.”
He talked about local people who were “buying and selling.” He added, “I’d never sell my collection for any price. I didn’t dig it to sell.”
He talked about a “fella who has a mechanic shop, who’ll do service for you, and you can pay him in relics. You need new brake shoes and you don’t have any money? Lay out some points, some relics. He’ll give you your brake shoes.”
I asked if he was still digging. Sometimes, he said. Not as fast and effectively as before. He liked to go out and “collect” around ten or eleven at night. I asked why. He said, “’Cause I work. ’Cause I’m not on welfare. I oughta go on welfare. Then I could dig all the time.” He talked about people jumping his claims. Said that at night when he’s done he empties out the trench and casts it all into the woods. A lot of times the next day he’ll come back and the trench is full. Somebody’s come in and dug behind him.
He said that of all the people in his family, only his father, who was a quarter Cherokee, wanted nothing to do with sifting. “What do I wanna be scratching around in some cave for?” the old man had asked.
On the way out he showed us a letter he got from Ronald Reagan, saying how interested Reagan had been to learn about his passion for artifact collecting.
* * *
We entered the twilight zone; the sunlit world was now a gaping hole at our backs. Jan switched on the magic wand. He was different in this cave; he didn’t talk much. When I asked him about it later, he said he’d made more mistakes in that cave than anywhere he’d ever worked, because for the first hour and a half he was totally freaked out. I let my eyes adjust to the wand light. I had been in four or five Unnamed Caves by then and was learning to look at cave walls differently, more patiently. I never got very good at it, but I could see what others had found.
It was easy to see what had so impressed Simek about this place. You could look through any number of coffee-table books on prehistoric Native American art from the Southeast and see absolutely nothing that looked like these pictures. We saw birds, yes, but this seemed to be a sort of box bird—its square body was feathered. Now there were more of them.
A sun glyph, just as the sunlight disappeared.
Moving in, the creatures were changing. These weren’t birds, but they were related to the birds; they seemed to emerge out of them; they were other box beings of some kind.
Now we saw box persons in juxtaposition to more natural-looking humans. Once again the glyphs were exchanging imagery, echoing and rhyming with one another.
The tunnels got lower, narrower. Our faces were inches from the cave walls. We encountered weird paddle-handed creatures with long wavy arms.
I began to feel that I was inside a hallucination, not that I was hallucinating myself—I was working very hard, in that cramped space, to write down Jan’s few cryptic remarks—but that I was experiencing someone else’s dream, which had been engineered for me, or rather not for me but for some other, very different people to progress through. It may have been shamanic. There’s a spring in that cave,
Simek said, that can start to sound like voices, after you’ve been in there for a while.
“It’s composed like a mural,” he said. He thought it might be an origin myth, or a way of indoctrinating the young into the religion of the tribe. I looked at him. For once he seemed as overwhelmed as I generally felt in the Unnamed Caves. He was still saying, “We don’t know,” but now it was coming at the end rather than the beginning of his riffs.
At one place in the tunnel, there was a birthing scene. “A triptych,” Simek said. Box person on the left, with a square head and long alien arms. She has concentric circles in her belly. Distended labia. Appearing to deliver a tiny human being. She’s holding hands with a more conventional anthropomorphic figure.
Not far off the floor, in a close tunnel, a dancing man with some kind of head regalia and a huge erect penis.
And now we arrived at the panel of birds. Tiny birds, each about the size of a silver dollar. Turkey. Hawk. At least one small songbird. Very finely etched into the limestone with a flint tool. Another cave that began and ended in birds.
Back outside and resting before the hike back to the truck, Simek said, “Think about it. What was there none of in that cave?”
I had no answer. Hadn’t there been everything in that cave?
“Out of more than three hundred images, there wasn’t a single weapon anywhere,” he said. “We have here an early Mississippian art in which there are no images of violence, where the birds are pure birds, not linked to war—they’re in flight. Even the human figures are not obviously warriors.”
Also there had been women and sex in that cave. I thought about it. No women and sex in any of the other caves.
“The old-time religion,” Jan said.
Since I stopped following Simek and the CART crew, they’ve found several more sites on or next to the plateau that seem to contain imagery from this previously unknown tradition. Some of them are even further out, stylistically. One is full of those little naturalistic birds, hundreds of petroglyphs, turkey-cocks flying everywhere. In another cave they found, carved into a ceiling, a humanlike figure. His torso is a bent rectangle with Xs inside. His arms are scarecrowy and come off at ninety-degree angles. He has a round head with rabbit ears sticking out of it. His feet have long flowy toes, vaguely reminiscent of the paddle hands back at Twelfth Unnamed. The sun is coming out of his belly. “That’s the most succinct way to say it,” Jan told me. “The sun is coming out of his belly.”
As years went by, Jan’s statements about the artwork’s possible meaning began to change. So many sites had come to light, so to speak—there were so many data points now—that some speculative stabs could be made. He wasn’t going all the way out into SECC Working Group territory. Anyway that wasn’t an option. There are no extant myths for those Woodland people, not even indirect sources. We will never know the names or characters of their gods. But what Jan and his colleagues were seeing was something deeper, something antecedent to myth, namely a spiritualized vision of the landscape. Both the caves and the aboveground sites “identified places of power, where they tied themselves spiritually to the land,” and the sites were connected. In this discovery, Simek unexpectedly overlapped with one of the very first observers of Tennessee antiquities, Judge John Haywood, who had written, in his 1823 Natural and Aboriginal History, of a “connexion between the mounds, the charcoal and ashes, the paintings, and the caves.”
One night on the phone Jan said they’d found a site—it was just outside Knoxville, not far from his house—with a hunting scene in it, a charcoal dark-zone pictograph of a man hunting a deer. They extracted a microflake of carbon. The date came back: six thousand years old. They didn’t believe it. Sometimes the organic material left over in the limestone, the proof of its biological origins (limestone is essentially prehistoric shell), will leach out and contaminate the samples. They tested the stone. No such material.
The weapon the man in the picture is holding may be a spear. But when you throw a spear, you keep your nonthrowing arm in the air. This person has his off-arm down at his side. That’s what you do when you throw an atlatl, the spear-flinging weapon that preceded the bow and arrow.
There survive, as far as I can determine, no other images of people using atlatls, anywhere in the world, New or Old. This would be the only one. A weapon that kept our species in meat for thirty thousand years and has something to do with our dominance on the planet. The hunter who holds it is just releasing the missile from its shaft.
Two thousand years ago a Woodland explorer, a contemporary of the artists who made those intricate panels of birds, might have passed this little picture—farther from his own time even than he is from ours—and wondered who made it, or what it meant.
UNKNOWN BARDS
Late in 1998 or early in ’99—during the winter that straddled the two—I spent a night on and off the telephone with a person named John Fahey. I was a junior editor at the Oxford American magazine, which at that time had its offices in Oxford, Mississippi; Fahey, then almost sixty and living in room 5 of a welfare motel outside Portland, Oregon, was himself, whatever that was: a channeler of some kind, certainly; a “pioneer” (as he once described his great hero, Charley Patton) “in the externalization through music of strange, weird, even ghastly emotional states.” He composed instrumental guitar collages from snatches of other, older songs. At their finest these could become harmonic chambers in which different dead styles spoke to one another. My father had told me stories of seeing him in Memphis in ’69. Fahey trotted out his “Blind Joe Death” routine at the fabled blues festival that summer, appearing to inhabit, as he approached the stage in dark glasses, the form of an aged sharecropper, hobbling and being led by the arm. He meant it as a postmodern prank at the expense of the all-white, authenticity-obsessed country-blues cognoscenti, and was at the time uniquely qualified to pull it. Five years earlier he’d helped lead one of the little bands of enthusiasts, a special-ops branch of the folk revival, who staged barnstorming road trips through the South in search of surviving notables from the prewar country blues or “folk blues” recording period (roughly 1925 to 1939).
Fahey was someone whose destiny followed the track of a deep inner flaw, like a twisted apple. He grew up comfortable in Washington, D.C., fixated from an early age on old guitar playing, fingerpicking. After college he went west to study philosophy at Berkeley, then transferred at a deciding moment to UCLA’s folklore program, a degree from which equipped him nicely to do what he wanted: hunt for old bluesmen. He took part personally in the tracking down and dragging back before the public glare of both Booker T. Washington “Bukka” White and, in a crowning moment, Nehemiah Curtis “Skip” James, the dark prince of the country blues, a thin black man with pale eyes and an alien falsetto who in 1931 recorded a batch of songs so sad and unsettling it’s said that people paid him on street corners not to sing. Fahey and two associates found him in a charity hospital in Tunica, Mississippi, in 1964, dying with cruel slowness of stomach cancer. We know you’re a genius, they told him. People are ready now. Play for us.
“I don’t know,” he supposedly answered. “Skippy tired.”
I’d been told to get hold of Fahey on a fact-checking matter. The magazine was running a piece about Geeshie Wiley (or Geechie, or Gitchie, and in any case that was likely only a nickname or stage moniker, signifying that she had Gullah blood, or that her skin and hair were red tinted). She’s perhaps the one contemporary of James’s who ever equaled him in the scary beauty department, his spiritual bride. All we know about Wiley is what we don’t know about her: where she was born, or when; what she looked like, where she lived, where she’s buried. She had a playing partner named Elvie Thomas concerning whom even less is known (about Elvie there are no rumors, even). Musicians who claimed to have seen Geeshie Wiley in Jackson, Mississippi, offered sketchy details to researchers over the years: that she could have been from Natchez, Mississippi (and was maybe part Indian), that she sang with a medicine show. In a sad
istic tease on the part of fate, the Mississippi blues scholar and champion record collector Gayle Dean Wardlow (he who found Robert Johnson’s death certificate) did an interview in the late sixties with a white man named H. C. Speir, a onetime music store owner from Jackson who moonlighted as a talent scout for prewar labels dabbling in so-called race records (meaning simply music marketed to blacks). This Speir almost certainly met Wiley around 1930 and told his contacts at the Paramount company in Grafton, Wisconsin, about her—he may even have taken the train trip north with her and Elvie, as he was known to have done with other of his “finds”—but although at least two of Wiley and Thomas’s six surviving songs (or “sides,” in the favored jargon) had been rediscovered by collectors when Wardlow made his ’69 visit to Speir’s house, they were not yet accessible outside a clique of two or three aficionados in the East. Wardlow didn’t know to ask about her, in other words, although he was closer to her at that moment than anyone would ever get again, sitting half a mile from where she’d sung, talking with a man who’d seen her face and watched her tune her guitar.
Not many ciphers have left as large and beguiling a presence as Geeshie Wiley’s. Three of the six songs Wiley and Elvie Thomas recorded are among the greatest country-blues performances ever etched into shellac, and one of them, “Last Kind Words Blues,” is an essential work of American art, sans qualifiers, a blues that isn’t a blues, that is something other, but is at the same time a perfect blues, a pinnacle.
People have argued that the song represents a lone survival of an older, already vanishing, minstrel style; others that it was a one-off spoor, an ephemeral hybrid that originated and died with Wiley and Thomas, their attempt to play a tune they’d heard by a fire somewhere. The verses don’t follow the AAB repeating pattern common to the blues, and the keening melody isn’t like any other recorded example from that or any period. Likewise with the song’s chords: “Last Kind Words Blues” opens with a big, plonking, menacing E but quickly withdraws into A minor and hovers there awhile (the early blues was almost never played in a minor key). The serpentine dual guitar interplay is no less startling, with little sliding lead parts, presumably Elvie’s, moving in and out of counterpoint. At times it sounds like four hands obeying a single mind and conjures scenes of endless practicing, the vast boredoms of the medicine-show world. The words begin,
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