David “Honeyboy” Edwards. Bruce Conforth
This stay in Greenwood was no exception. Soon Robert pursued the daughter of one of the sharecroppers on the Star of West plantation. The sharecropper was known only as “Tush Hog,” and he and his family had come from Tunica County, where Robert was extremely well known and had extended family. Tush Hog was a common nickname for an individual who, in any situation or group, was shown respect as the ultimate authority. Such a person had a strong personality, and generally the physical ability to back it up. Plantation worker Rosie Eskridge said she never knew Tush Hog’s last name and she asserted that “people didn’t go round asking somebody their last name.”6
Robert followed Tush Hog’s daughter to the plantation store and juke house known as Three Forks, only a few hundred yards from the intersection of Highways 49 and 82 on the edge of the plantation. Eskridge recalled that Robert would “follow her out on Saturday nights. Tush Hog’s baby girl. I don’t know what the child’s name was. We didn’t even know [Robert] was on the place. He followed her out here.”7 However, at that juke Robert met a woman named Beatrice Davis, the wife of R. D. “Ralph” Davis, who also lived on the plantation.8 Davis worked at the Three Forks store on weekends, doling out drinks to the patrons.
Robert once more went for the wrong woman, and the two found a mutual attraction and started seeing each other regularly. Beatrice had a sister living in Baptist Town near where Robert was staying, and every Monday she would tell her husband that she was going into Greenwood to see her sister. But this was merely an excuse for her to spend the afternoon having sex with Robert in his room.
Through mutual friends R. D. found out that the two were having an affair, and when he heard that Robert was hired to play a country-dance at the Three Forks juke on two successive weekends, he decided to act. On Saturday night, August 13, 1938, at around eleven, Davis gave the unknowing Beatrice a jar of corn liquor in which he had dissolved several mothballs. During a break from performing Robert drank from that bottle. The ingredient that Davis had surreptitiously slipped into the jar was a mostly colorless, odorless, tasteless poison known then as “passagreen” but now as naphthalin. Although it was a common way of poisoning people in the rural South, it was rarely, if ever, fatal. It was even used to remove troublesome drunks from bars or jukes because it would simply make them incapacitated. When Davis was found years later, he confessed that he “really didn’t want to cause any trouble” because he genuinely meant it. If we are to believe his own admission, he really hadn’t intended to kill Robert. Normally the concoction Davis prepared would have primarily caused confusion, nausea, vomiting, and other gastrointestinal distress. Nevertheless, any attempt to put a harmful substance in his drink must still be considered an act of violence.
But Robert, only a month earlier, had been diagnosed with an ulcer by a Memphis doctor, and was also suffering from esophageal varices, which caused the chest pains he experienced. The mixture Davis gave him, while not fatal, was strong enough to cause the ulcer and varices to hemorrhage.
There are several versions of the ensuing drama. Sonny Boy Williamson said that he knocked a bottle of un-bonded, already opened whiskey out of Robert’s hand, or that Robert died in his arms in an ambulance on the way to a hospital in Jackson. Those stories are either exaggerations or outright lies. The most reliable account, corroborated by Rosie Eskridge, is that of Honeyboy Edwards, who explained exactly what happened that night. His narrative lacks the histrionics or romanticism of the falsehoods.
When I come back to the Delta, Robert was in Greenwood playing for this same man. And one Saturday a bunch of us went out to Three Forks on an old flat-bottomed truck. We was all high, ready to ball all night long. When we got there Robert was sitting in a corner with his guitar under his arm. He was sick. And the women jumped off the truck, come in, and said to him, “Play me ‘Terraplane Blues.’” “Play me ‘Kind Hearted Woman Blues’!” He said, “I’m sick.” And they said, “Have a drink of whiskey. Have another drink and you’ll feel alright.”
But Robert had got poisoned. Robert was crazy about whiskey and this man was mad about Robert going with his wife. He had a friend lady give Robert a glass of whiskey that had poison in it. People would do that. They poison you rather than shoot you, get you in a smooth way. That way people don’t know what you done. All the folks kept on hollering “Play!” “Play!” “Play!” He tried to play once or twice but couldn’t and said, “I’m sick. I can’t play.” They took him and laid him across a bed in the back room. And everything got quiet then. Before day, some guy who had an old car carried him back to Greenwood, to his room in Baptist Town.9
The basic facts of Honeyboy’s story are true. At first, the dosed liquor only made Robert nauseous and confused. It incapacitated him enough to prevent him from playing, and that’s when he was taken into a back room to try to recover. But the nausea became worse and Robert’s pain increased. Seeing that he was not improving, a few of the juke’s patrons decided it to bring him back into Baptist Town to sleep it off. Davis must have been satisfied that his trick had taught Robert a lesson and that he had been forced to leave Three Forks and Beatrice.
Once Robert was dropped off at his Baptist Town room he was alone and languished in pain, his stomach cramping and the nausea getting worse. He must have vomited, causing some of the varices in his esophagus to rupture blood, for when he was visited the next day it was reported that he was howling and bleeding at the mouth. It’s not uncommon for an esophageal hemorrhage to start as a preliminary bleed and then to stop, only to be followed by a larger, fatal attack soon after.
Robert languished for two days in his room with severe abdominal pains, vomiting, and bleeding from the mouth. Bleeding in the esophagus is extremely serious, with a death rate greater than 50 percent of cases, even with the attention of a doctor. Without medical attention there was little or no chance of survival. In 1938 Greenwood had a Colored Hospital where Robert could have been treated, but he was in no condition to go there himself, and no one else wanted to be implicated in what might have eventually been seen as murder. Even if he were taken to the hospital, there was little medical help to save his life: his loss of blood alone would have been fatal.
The night before Robert’s death, either through his daughter’s pleadings or the request of Robert’s relative Jessie, Tush Hog went to Baptist Town and brought Robert back to his plantation house. Robert survived an excruciating night but had a major hemorrhage and died early Tuesday morning at Tush Hog’s shack. Tush Hog knew that the plantation overseer had to be alerted, and he informed Luther Wade, his employer, that someone had died in his house, but since Robert wasn’t one of Wade’s workers, Wade only asked a few questions before deciding to bury the body.
That morning was a hot, torrid summer day and Wade walked to the Eskridges’ house in search of Rosie’s husband, Tom. “Mr. Wade come to our house up in the day,” she remembered, explaining how she and Tom became involved in one of the blues’s longest mysteries. “He told my husband, Tom, to go to [Little Zion Baptist, the church Wade used for burials for his sharecroppers] and dig that grave for that man who died that morning. He said the man didn’t have no family on the place but he wanted to give him a Christian burial…. Wudn’t no funeral. Put him in a box, little wood box, nailed it together and put it in the ground,” she recalled. “His truck driver went over there [to the county barn], picked up the box, brought it back—put the body in it.” Robert’s body was wrapped in a white linen sheet and placed in the skinny wooden boxes that were used as coffins for indigents. “Brought it up here—slid it off and come on back. In them days they buried you the same day you died. Wudn’t no way to keep a body like today. It would start smellin’.” Because of the hot summer day, Eskridge took some cold water to her husband, who dug the grave by himself. “I couldn’t see his head in the grave he dug. It must have been seven feet deep,” she said. “He dug his grave with a sharpshooter,” a small shovel used on plantations
. “I took a fruit jar with some water up there for Tom.”10
The digging was extremely laborious for the earth there is called Mississippi Gumbo—thick clay that can clot and stick like cement to your shoes or anything it touches. Tom Eskridge toiled in the heat but finally finished the grave. Even though Robert apparently never attended church during his blues career, Tom suggested that they find someone to read some words from the Bible before the burial. “My husband told the truck driver to go down there and get Reverend Starks. Reverend Starks come up here—he didn’t have no church—and said a few words over him.” Starks was a jackleg preacher—he had no formal training or ordination but rather made his living by providing spiritual services in exchange for food, drink, or trade. Eskridge paid no attention to the Bible verse nor had any particular thoughts about the man’s burial without family members.
“It was a real hot day. It was in the summer and I wudn’t doing nothing, so I walked up there with one of Tush Hog’s daughters. He come in here with one of his daughters.” But his daughter, Josephine, was “not the same one he come in here with. It was the other one. They both were married. They all come in here together. They all left here together. Don’t know where they went [or] when they left here. They didn’t stay here but one year.”11 Traditionally, many sharecroppers farmed for one year on a planter’s land and then moved on to another plantation for either more money or better working conditions after the fall harvest.
With little ceremony and brief formalities, Robert Johnson’s life had come to an end, and he was buried under a large pecan tree in the small graveyard next to Little Zion Church on Money Road, a twenty-mile road that runs from Greenwood to Highway 8.
When Robert’s half sister Carrie Spencer Harris heard of his death back in Memphis she was terribly distraught, “broken up, just torn apart,” Annye Anderson recalls.12 Carrie immediately decided to go to Greenwood with Julia and Dusty Willis and Robert’s half sister Bessie Hines, with whom he and Virginia had lived in Bolivar County. She asked several of Robert’s other friends to accompany them. One of them, Willie Coffee, was unable to attend but recalled some of the preparations for their trip. He noted that a number of Robert’s friends from Commerce, Mississippi, went to Greenwood with Carrie. Coffee had just been the victim of a house fire, however, and did not have the clothes to accompany them.13 Even by train, in 1938 the one-hundred-plus mile trip would have taken the better part of a day.
Little Zion Church and cemetery, Greenwood, Mississippi. Bruce Conforth
Once in Greenwood Carrie contacted the only local black undertaker, Paul McDonald, who had one of his embalmers, Fletcher Jones, exhume Robert’s body, remove it from the pine box the county provided, and place it in a proper casket. He was reburied in the same spot with family members and a preacher in attendance.14 Through McDonald’s office, Carrie was able to obtain a copy of Robert’s death certificate that had been filed on Thursday, August 18.
The certificate provided all correct family information: the name of his mother with her maiden name, Julia Major; the name of his biological father, Noah Johnson; the fact that he was born in Hazelhurst [sic], Mississippi; that he was “about 26” (actually twenty-seven) years old; and that he had been a musician for ten years (further evidence that he was performing before he met Son House in 1930). The cause of death was listed as “No Doctor,” and the information was provided by one Jim Moore. The identity of Moore remained a mystery until Rosie Eskridge was interviewed. She confirmed that Moore had lived on the plantation for at least ten years. “Jim Moore farmed across the river, on the other side of the river. I knew him well. He lived here for years and years. He was a tall, light skinned man. Had a wife and one daughter. He left here years ago. That man’s been dead for years.”15 Recently examined census records also confirm that Moore was indeed a resident of the plantation and lived there with his wife, Callie; daughter, Mildred; sons Alis and James; and six grandchildren. But most important, Moore’s neighbor in 1938 was Jessie Dodds, Robert’s relative.
Front of Robert Johnson’s death certificate. Mississippi State Board of Health
Carrie had heard rumors that her half brother had been poisoned, and through McDonald she contacted the state’s director of health, Dr. R. W. Whitfield, asking him to investigate the possible murder. On the front side of the state document, Cornelia Jordan, the registrar who had signed Robert’s death certificate, listed no cause of death—“no doctor” was present to rule on the cause. Under state law, a coroner’s inquest must be conducted when such a death occurs. One had not been done. Dr. Whitfield ordered that Jordan investigate the death further. The results of her investigation were mailed to Carrie in Memphis on September 14, 1938. No files exist from that year to confirm whether or not the sheriff’s office investigated, but Jordan’s report on the back side of the certificate raised interesting questions.
I talked with the white man on whose place the negro died and I also talked with a negro woman on the place. The plantation owner said this negro man, seemingly about 26 years old, came from near Tunica two or three weeks before he died to play a banjo at a negro dance given there on the plantation. He staid [sic] in the house with some of the negroes saying that he wanted to pick cotton. The white man did not have a doctor for this negro as he had not worked for him. He was buried in a homemade coffin furnished by the County. The plantation owner said it was his opinion that the negro died of syphilis.
I am always glad to make investigations for you. C. Jordan
The white man Jordan spoke to was Wade. The woman could have been one of Tush Hog’s daughters, Callie Moore, or even one of Robert’s relatives. The information is surprisingly accurate. Robert was about twenty-six years old, he did come from near Tunica, and he had been there a few weeks to play (guitar, not banjo, but an understandable mistake) for dances on or near the plantations. Robert was not staying on the plantation, but the statement that he had been “in the house with some of the negroes saying that he wanted to pick cotton” was a convenient excuse as to why and how he died there.
Back of Johnson’s death certificate with notes. Mississippi State Board of Health
Was this the beginning of at least a minor cover-up?
Since Robert died in such pain, vomiting blood, and experiencing other agonies, the proposition that he died of syphilis was impossible, but almost certainly Wade did not want to give any indication that foul play was involved. Did Wade believe Johnson had been murdered? It’s impossible to tell. Obviously, he had contacted the county sheriff or Jordan directly. Was he completely forthcoming with his facts for the investigation? No. He only revealed enough information to absolve the plantation of any culpability in Robert’s death. Was he entirely to blame for his omission or alteration of facts? Again, no. Wade was not present when Robert died, so he got his information from Tush Hog’s family or Jim Moore. They knew the truth. Wade was only trying to whitewash the death.
Robert Leroy Johnson, the man, was gone.
His legend was just about to begin.
EPILOGUE
LAST FAIR DEAL GOIN’ DOWN
The legend of Robert Johnson began only a few months after his August 1938 death, at the historic Carnegie Hall “From Spirituals to Swing” concert. This groundbreaking show featured such bandleaders as Count Basie and Benny Goodman; singers Big Joe Turner and Helen Humes; pianists Meade Lux Lewis, Albert Ammons, and James P. Johnson; vocal groups Mitchell’s Christian Singers and the Golden Gate Quartet, and many others. The concert was the brainchild of John Henry Hammond II, and his plan was to provide a musical journey through the history of black music, as well as presenting his favorite artists in a major venue, one usually reserved for the classical world.
In selecting artists to be featured at the show Hammond chose Robert Johnson to represent the Delta blues. It was natural for Hammond to want to include Robert: he had been championing him since his first records were released in 1937. He was certain he would be able to find and hire Robert to perform and
give him his big break, and he had Robert’s name included on the original promotional ad for the concert, printed in November of 1938, even though he had not yet had success in contacting Robert. When finally told of Robert’s demise, Hammond would not be denied his great find. He wrote the following words for the December 13, 1938, issue of New Masses magazine, and then repeated them from the stage ten days later at the opening of the concert:
It is tragic that an American audience could not have been found seven or eight years ago for a concert of this kind. Bessie Smith was still at the height of her career and Joe Smith, probably the greatest trumpet player American music ever knew would still have been around to play obligatos for her … [and] dozens of other artists could have been there in the flesh. But that audience as well as this one would not have been able to hear Robert Johnson sing and play the blues on his guitar, for at that time Johnson was just an unknown hand on a Robinsonville, Mississippi, plantation.
Robert Johnson was going to be the big surprise of the evening for this audience at Carnegie Hall. I knew him only from his Vocalion blues records and from the tall, exciting tales the recording engineers and supervisors used to bring about him from the improvised studios in Dallas and San Antonio. I don’t believe Johnson had ever worked as a professional musician anywhere, and it still knocks me over when I think of how lucky it is that a talent like his ever found its way onto phonograph records. [Tonight] we will have to be content with playing two of his records, the old Walkin’ Blues, and the new, unreleased Preachin’ Blues, because Robert Johnson died last week at the precise moment when Vocalion scouts finally reached him and told him that he was booked to appear at Carnegie Hall on December 23. He was in his middle twenties and nobody seems to know what caused his death.1
Up Jumped the Devil Page 21