by Norman Lock
What else?
I rode a trolley up and down the bluffs, exhilarated by the luxury of horseless travel inside a conveyance illuminated by the same electric light that made the place a fairy town. I had no money, as I said; but I was used to getting inside circuses, magic-lantern shows, lectures on the pygmies, and other public entertainments without a nickel to my name.
On one street, people were jostling at the door of a building that had been converted from a grocer’s store into a nickelodeon. I had no idea what a nickelodeon might be, but I was attracted by the bustle and laughter, which defeated solemnity and, with it, death. I slipped inside, as though I had no more substance than a shadow. Maybe I was one; maybe I could’ve strolled, brazen and unseen, through the streets, sat inside the trolley car while it lurched uphill and down again, and walked into the nickelodeon without taking pains to make myself inconspicuous. Maybe on that night in Baton Rouge, I was invisible to everyone but Tom, whose eyes were fixed on ghosts. In my life, I’ve often had the sensation that I was unnoticed to an unnatural degree; that I made no impression on others’ optic or auditory nerves. Then in sudden terror, I’d act in an outrageous manner to make myself apparent. I was like a clean windowpane, unregarded until you accidentally shatter it.
Death had no dominion over me once the moving picture had begun. It routed the darkness, overthrew the gloom of melancholy. It astonished me as nothing before or since has done. A Trip to the Moon. The spaceship of the astronomers, their landing on the moon and battle with the Selenites, their escape back to earth, the rocket’s sinking to the bottom of the ocean among strange yet familiar fish . . . The people who saw it with me that night were struck dumb with wonder. How much more must a boy born three-quarters of a century earlier have been? I never forgot it. A Trip to the Moon—by Georges Méliès; I suddenly remember the magician’s name!—and The Time Machine have been for me bulwarks against the night. Not an April night in 1903, but those at the terrible end of days—without light, without a kind voice, without courage. The moving picture stopped, but the illusion of fantastic life continued awhile. I walked to the river and boarded the raft because it could not have been otherwise for Huck Finn.
I TOLD JIM THAT TOM SAWYER WAS DEAD, and he was sorry only as someone can be who has lost, beyond all hope of rescue, a portion of the past—that is to say, a vital piece of himself. I told him about the moving picture, and the idea fascinated him. Like a Hindu, he believed in the deceptive appearance of things: that the world is a thin film of light and shadows. What might be on the other side of that film, Jim didn’t say. Maybe nothing. From what I’ve come to know of life, probably nothing.
“What should we do now, Jim?” I asked while he untied the line from a cypress tree leaning over the shallows.
My question was meaningless. We were in the current, which was a kind of intelligence: It knew the river’s course and purpose; and even if the atoms of water enfolding us had not yet flowed into the Gulf, the current itself already knew the river’s destination, though perhaps not its final end. We were held in the mind of the river, like a thought. The Mississippi knew what we would do next, notwithstanding the things that kept us busy: seamanly duties essential for life aboard a raft but, in the grand scheme, inconsequential. We were part of the Mississippi’s design and had been since our departure and, if Jim were right, long before that. Jim believed in destiny, which is why, I suppose, he did not bother to answer my question.
When the sun rose, we had covered only a few miles of water since Baton Rouge, but we had left 1903 far behind us. Time seemed more than ever to lengthen the farther we got from the river’s source. Years and years slowly passed—1910, 1911, 1912, 1913, 1914, ’15, ’16, ’17, ’18, 1919—and we felt only lethargy, a slight boredom, which we dispelled with songs, tall tales, fishing, and trailing our hands in the water, like two girls taking the sun. The sun was out more often than not, or so it seemed to me. Later, as I made the final passage alone, the sky would be black—or maybe it was only my own thoughts that were so.
Have you considered what this story might mean, or are you taking dictation with no other thought than the payment you’ll receive when I have in my hands the transcript of this—what would you call it? An American picaresque? A chimera spawned by an old man’s grotesque imagination? And will anyone care? I wish I had Jim here to sound! He understood things better than I: the river, life, our helplessness, our desire—the human wish to be elsewhere and not alone. To be unalone, unlike me with no company but a hired amanuensis. I spent a long time in the world but never possessed the knowledge of men and women. Not even with her . . . Maybe the fault lay in my most unusual childhood. If it was unusual. Maybe at its heart—beyond the particulars of shape and circumstance—it was simply a childhood. If that is the truth, why have I failed myself? Unless we all do, but with the grace and courage not to grumble.
Below Plaquemine, there was at that time a mangrove swamp overgrown with cottonwood. Encouraged by its desolate appearance, Jim and I tied up there in order to stretch our legs. As we picked our way into the swamp to conceal ourselves, we heard a cornet playing a music unlike any other we had known. Its novelty drew us farther on into the swamp. How do I explain jazz (for so it was) and the effect it produces when hearing it for the first time? I can’t, except to say it held in its volley of sound a mixture of melancholy and exuberance that thrilled. To listen to it was to be cast down and uplifted, at once. To be dizzied by emotions that, I suspect, were more available to Jim at that moment in our history than to me. That description of jazz is as wide of the mark as a greeting card verse is of a passionate truth. But I doubt I can get nearer. Maybe you can’t with words. Mine anyway. Poets might, but their lines would only approximate the music’s. Go listen to King Oliver or Louis Armstrong play their cornets—then you’ll have an idea of what Jim and I felt among the tangled cottonwoods, but only an idea.
Shortly, we came upon a black man resting on a stump, his horn flashing like a heliograph in whatever light managed to fall from the shifting upper branches of the trees. In the stillness of his deep concentration and in the way the dark green shadows commingled with his own native darkness, he resembled a cemetery monument. A dry stick cracked under my foot, and he promptly turned to me with a fearful look until he saw Jim.
“What’s that you’re playing, mister?” I said.
“Why, that’s ‘St. Louis Blues’ by W. C. Handy. Haven’t you boys ever heard jazz before?”
“No sir,” I said. “We’ve been on the river for quite a spell.”
“Jazz music’s up and down the river,” he said. “I was playing cornet with some black boys on the Natchez when the Dixie Shines came aboard at Donaldsonville. White boys don’t like mixing with coloreds—never mind we swing way better than they do. Last night, them sons of bitches set me down on this island, with nothing except my horn to keep me company.”
“Are you a runaway?” Jim asked, assessing the older man with a narrow look.
“Runaway? Oh, you mean like a slave.”
Jim nodded.
“Ain’t you boys ever heard of the Civil War?”
“We stopped at Vicksburg to see it,” I said casually, pleased by the effect I produced.
The man now eyed Jim and me with mistrust.
“What are you boys?” he asked.
“Just two people floating down the Mississippi on a raft,” I said.
“From where?”
“Hannibal.”
“From when?”
“Eighteen hundred and thirty-five,” I said. “What year is it now?”
“Nineteen nineteen.”
The news surprised neither Jim nor me. We’d already guessed we were traveling in all the dimensions known to humankind at that moment in its history. I’d been reading The Time Machine to Jim, and given our experiences of the past eighty-four years, we deduced that our raft was a time machine of sorts, well suited to a pair of country boys growing up on the river. We had a hard time, however
, convincing the man—whose name was Henry Wilson—that we were otherwise than two disreputable con men. When we’d finally overcome his disbelief, Henry showed an eminently practical cast of mind by suggesting we take him with us into the future—at least until we reached a point in time when we might expect human nature to have improved. Jim was skeptical concerning a future golden age, but he agreed. I hesitated because of the cramped conditions aboard the raft. But in the end, Henry Wilson joined us in our southerly journey.
“So, there are no more slaves?” Jim asked him.
“No. The war and Mr. Lincoln’s proclamation put an end to that evil.”
“And you’re a freeman?”
“In some places more than in others,” Henry said wryly.
“Meaning what?”
“In the South especially, a black man must tread lightly if he don’t want to get himself lynched.”
“What’s lynched?”
“Hung up by the neck from some tree branch or lamppost.”
Jim and Henry spent long hours in conversation, heads bent together, while I made a show—in jealous annoyance—of steering the raft with immense effort and concentration. My exertions were a pretense; the river had a mind of its own, expressed by the current, which was sometimes headlong and at other times contrary. Jim and Henry traded thoughts, the river kept its secrets, and I leaned against the sternpost like a man up against a taproom’s bar without a worthwhile thought in his head.
As we slipped effortlessly downriver, scarcely aware of the Mississippi’s hold on us, Henry told Jim about a war he’d fought in France, at Château-Thierry and at Belleau Wood. He’d been a soldier of the 369th Harlem Hellfighters, a black regiment raised in New York City for the defense of civilization. Henry’s Great War reminded me a little of what Jim and I had seen in the aftermath of the siege of Vicksburg. But mostly, I could form no clear picture of his travail from the words he used to describe it.
He spoke to Jim about garlands of twisted wire hung with dead men and also with living ones who screamed out their agonies until friend or foe could stand it no longer and—in pity or in sudden anger born of an overmastering irritation—shot them, allowing silence momentarily to pour its balm over the devastated ground. Henry spoke about cages of fire falling from the night sky, about poison gas clouds that smelled like geraniums, mown hay, apples, or almonds. He spoke, too, about winter—its gray snows growing minutely on the barrels of machine guns and cannon, on the broken boots, iron helmets, and great coats of the unharvested dead. It might have been a foreign tongue in which he spoke. I understood very little of what Henry said.
You’re right: Henry would never have said this, would not have uttered such high-flown crap. A lyrical turn of phrase—no matter how impassioned—cannot capture cruelty, terror, waste, stupidity, and death. Only plainest speech is apt for the occasion of so much misery. What he might have said, as he leaned against the forward post in his baggy corduroy suit, was this:
“I sat in the rain or snow or stench, in a shitty ditch that was muddy, freezing, or choked with dust, according to the time of year. I pissed myself in fear, played cards or had fistfights out of boredom; I got drunk when I could and prayed to go home. I got no medals or kisses on the cheeks from French generals. Instead, I got lice, crabs—caught the clap once—and spent two weeks in the hospital for trench foot. Lucky for me, I lost only one toe, the little one, which I wasn’t using anyway.”
Maybe. Maybe not. I never went to war, although I did go to a prison, of sorts. I’ve been scared many times, but not as Henry must have been—or Jim would be, before his journey’s end. But you make do with what you’re given, and I’ve spent a good many years learning to write fine-sounding sentences so that I can hide behind them. It’s the way of the hermit crab, with nothing to recommend it but the pretty shell it annexes for its own. Henry scared me—worse; he’d given me the taste of bitterness that comes when you realize the world is irredeemably evil. I wanted him off the raft, as you would someone with a fever, a sickness you’re afraid to catch.
Buzz, buzz, buzz! They spent their time, whispering together like two spinsters—like Miss Watson and the Widow Douglas, whose meanness and piety were unsurpassed. Like flies crawling on the inside of a window, wanting to get out. I got so I hated the sight of their woolly heads. What in hell did they find to talk about all those years?
The years passed: 1920, 1921, 1922, 1923, 1924, ’25, ’26, ’27, ’28, ’29, 1930. And in all that time, Henry aged no more than Jim or I, which was not at all.
“We’re far enough into the future for you to get off,” I said to Henry when Edgard, Louisiana, came into view around a bend. Jean Lafitte had favored the town’s rum and women with his swashbuckling presence. I doubted Henry would be welcomed with an equal warmth.
Jim took me aside and said we should wait a few more years; he didn’t think we’d given Homo sapiens nearly long enough to improve its low character. He thought the job of civilizing human beings was far too big to be accomplished in only a single decade.
“Give him another ten years,” Jim said. “What’s ten more years to us who never alter in time or feel the least inconvenienced by its passing?”
His concern for Henry hardened my heart. I pulled at the sweep oar until the raft scraped up onto a gravel beach, and then nodded to Henry, who understood and got off with his cornet. For a moment, I feared Jim would get off, too; but he remained aboard, although he turned his back on me—whether in disapprobation or disgust, I don’t know. I pushed the raft off the gravel into the river, and we were once again in the current. We spoke not a word while the river reasserted its influence. I looked over my shoulder at Henry, who shrank until there was nothing left of him but the sunlight on his horn. The sun vanished in clouds, perfecting Henry’s obliteration. The world seemed to have hushed, with only the “St. Louis Blues” to disturb the mournful silence. And when we had put the town behind us, Henry’s music was drowned in the noise of water and of the wind that blew with the force of history at our backs.
JIM WOULD NOT SPEAK TO ME, and the years passed in silence. I hated him and might have tried to knock him overboard if it were not for the feeling that my destiny was entangled in his. (I believed at the time that I had a destiny, separate and apart from what the river willed.) Could I go on without Jim? What would it mean for my life, for his to end? That he could have considered himself bound up in Henry Wilson’s fate didn’t occur to me—or if it did, I put it out of my mind as a complication beyond its power to unravel. Time slowed as though it meant to stop. I worried what it might mean to me if it did. Would the river, raft, and we two seize up, like a watch in whose works a bit of grit or rust has lodged? Jim did not speak to me, nor I to him. I longed for a scrap of conversation or even a bone of contention we could have gnawed aloud. I don’t mind silence so long as it is companionable. Standing at the sweep oar, I looked at Jim’s back as he sat well forward on the raft. When our positions were reversed, I looked at the river and its shores.
Let me describe once again the beauties of the way: There were swans toward shore that knotted behind them long threads of brown water; and herons standing on one leg, necks preening in the light or elongating suddenly to spear small fish flashing in the shallows; and pelicans straining at the oars of their wings; and geese that hurtled down from the upper air, flailing as they skidded to a stop on the face of the water. There were animals onshore drinking from the river and others on the headlands and in the hills. The trees on the hills and in the valleys and pastures beyond them were green or the color of old gold or, farther to the east, white—in their seasons. I knew how the land lay on either side of the great river that divided it. And I had it on good faith that the earth was rich and yielded ample harvests unless it was a time of drought or scorching heat or annihilating rains. But they, also, had their places in the shaping of the people’s character. So, too, the western desert and the northern plains and the smoking cities of the East. The river was not so wide as it w
as up above, but deeper—its depths communicating to me a knowledge of shoals and reefs and of other things hidden from view that give us fear and also hope: the one, that we will founder and drown; the other, that we will avoid—by luck or providence—the snares and continue on our way into a future that may be better than the past.
“He may have played his cornet in the town hall,” I said to Jim at last to break the silence.
He turned to me and said, “Yes, he may have taken the train to New York and played with Louis Armstrong and Fletcher Henderson or gone to Chicago to play with Jelly Roll Morton and King Oliver.” (The men’s names meant nothing to me, since, unlike Jim, I hadn’t “been to school” with Henry Wilson during his years on the raft.)
I’ve never known whether Jim was serious or sarcastic at that moment. In any case, the ice between us had broken, and we talked while we floated so very slowly downriver. But it was never the same again, and our talk was not easy or pleasant anymore. Time drained away like sand in an hourglass: a figure of speech that makes up for its unoriginality by its exactitude.
The years rolled on: 1940, 1941, 1942—there was another war, but we didn’t feel it—1945, 1950—and there was yet another war—1954, ’55, ’56, ’57, ’58, ’59. . . .
In 1960, Jim decided to leave the raft for good. We had been on the river for one hundred and twenty-five years.
WE PUT IN AT WAGGAMAN, on the west bank of the Mississippi. Jim took his pipe and several plugs of tobacco, the darning egg, the stovepipe hat, and The Pilgrim’s Progress. We shook hands formally and gravely. He left the raft. I watched him until he disappeared down a side street. I sat for a long time, wondering how it would be to go on without him. Twice, I attempted to gather myself together and push out onto the river, but I couldn’t. I smoked a pipe, drank a little whiskey, and wondered why Jim had taken the darning egg and not his petrified frog. In the end, I followed him into town.