RL’s Dream

Soupspoon Wise had music on his mind and on the streets around him. The blasting boom bass from the trunk speakers of a passing car. Phonographs out of apartment windows. The bouncing butt of a heavyset girl in short shorts listening to her earphones and licking a soft ice cream cone.

Music had been in his every day almost from the very beginning. He had pledged his life to music when he was still a boy in Mississippi.

“What you mean you gonna be a musician?” Cleophus Brown asked thirteen-year-old Atty Wise. “Have you lost your mind?”

“I’d’ruther to pick guitar strings than pick cotton, Cleo. Damn! I’d’ruther shov’lin’ coals in hell.”

For two years, young Atty Wise had spent every music night right outside the Milky Way. He’d heard Jeff “Little Boy” Tynan, Willa Smith, and Job Landry with Rodeo Bob White.

Nobody saw him because Atty would climb up the live oak out behind the Milky Way and peer in through a flap he tore in the tarpaper wall. He could sit out there all night and watch and listen without all that harsh talk and hard liquor, without the hot smells and hot tempers.

He’d seen two men killed in that first year. One was Shrimper Martins, a great big sharecropper who had left his girlfriend Maretha in Clarksville to go back home to his wife and seven kids in Cougar Bluff. Shrimper, Atwater had learned in the days after his murder, was the kind of religious man who sinned on Saturday and begged the Lord’s forgiveness on Sunday morning.

He was sitting at a card table with his friends making a big celebration out of his return. There was a lot of drinking and laughing. Atty didn’t like it because they made so much noise that Oja called off the music for that night. It was all toasting and roasting and talking loud because Shrimper was a popular man at the Milky Way and they were happy for his return.

When Atwater realized that there wasn’t going to be music he was ready to go. But he wanted to wait till it was dark enough that he wouldn’t be seen. That’s when he saw Maretha walk up to the moon-splattered door of the juke. He didn’t know who she was at that time but he could tell that she was different. To begin with, she was dressed in good brown cotton, good enough for church. And she walked with steady one-after-the-other steps, not like the regular customers ambling to and fro, seeing and being seen.

Atwater saw her at the front door and then he saw her in the bar through his flap. Shrimper was sitting among his friends, smiling and lifting his tin cup. As he brought the cup to his lips, Maretha was bringing her pistol to his head. She said something that Atwater couldn’t hear. Shrimper turned to look but the bullet caught him in the temple before he could face her. The floor around the man and his killer cleared of people. In between the screams and shouts five more shots sounded, each one like the hack of an ax into thick bark.

I told you you’d never leave. That’s what Maretha had said. Atwater heard about it later when the law came to take Maretha to jail.

Six months after that, Atwater changed his name. It was just after “Big Mouth” Willa Smith spied him peeking through the hole in the wall. She stopped singing and went right outside.

“Boy!” she shouted. “What you doin’ up there?”

“Listenin’, ma’am.”

“Come on down here.”

She took Atty inside and pulled him up to where she played guitar and bellowed.

“He a music lover,’ she told the women who tried to pull him away. “He ‘preciate the art.”

Willa loved it that little Atwater had been watching her through that hole and she was determined to make him into a musician.

He’d never played anything, so she gave him four big pewter spoons and showed him how to hold them between his fingers; how to hit them on his chest, stomach, and legs.

“Play somewhere between the way my head moves and my foot stomps. Play it like you love me,” she said. And he did.

He loved her and rattled his spoons behind the brick wall of her voice.

Willa paid Atty ten cents for every dollar she made, and so he was rich. He spent every extra moment he had trying to learn the guitar, because Willa had once told him that “a woman’s heart strings is di-rectly tied to the strings on a guitar.”

He was still playing spoons, though, on the night of the second killing. Willa was singing, making up a song, really, that might have been called “Ain’t Gonna Be No Cotton When I Die.” She was strummimg on her big-bellied seven-string guitar and Soupspoon (that was his name by then) was clattering alongside. A commotion broke out in the bar. Soupspoon looked over and saw Vesey Turnot push Tree Frank. Tree fell backwards but helping hands kept him from falling and pushed him back into the fray. Vesey hit Tree’s jaw so hard that it sounded like a convict’s hammer on a ripe stone ready to crack. Soupspoon knew that the blow would lay Tree down.

But it didn’t.

Tree waded in swinging. Vesey did too. They looked less like men and more like little boys settling a dispute before running home for supper.

But these were men. Vesey was fast and accurate with his fists. He hit Tree where he wanted, and he hit him a lot. Tree was slow and lumbersome. For all the times he swung he hardly hit Vesey at all. But every time he connected, that part of Vesey’s body stopped working.

First Tree put a dent in Vesey’s side. Then he made the left arm fall down. When Tree finally laid his fist against Vesey’s head it looked to Soupspoon like a watermelon had been cracked open.

The blood came from Vesey’s face like a red snake jumping from a stone. The proud boxer put up his right hand to catch the blood and then he shouted, “Oh no! No!”

He grabbed for Tree’s right arm so that he wouldn’t get hit again.

Tree swung his arm around, tossing Vesey this way and that, but the bleeding boxer hung on.

“Please don’t kill me!” Vesey yelled. “Please! Please!”

Finally Tree threw Vesey to the floor. Tree would have left him there but poor Vesey had been demented by the sight of his own blood. He grabbed Tree around the legs, bleeding on his ankles and begging, “I’m sorry! Please don’t hit me again!”

Vesey showed more strength on his knees than he did with his fists. Tree couldn’t push him away no matter how hard he tried. He had Vesey’s blood all over his clothes and hands.

“Let me go, fool!” Tree shouted.

Willa had stopped singing.

“Pull that man offa there!” she shouted.

Tree backed up against the bar. He reached behind and grabbed a crock that was filled with pickled pigs’ feet. Tree hurled that thick crock down with all his strength, hitting Vesey on the top of his head.

The clay didn’t give.

Vesey stopped struggling and yelling. The whole jar of pig gelatin spilled down over his head. He slumped back against the bar and everybody else in the room went still.

Ulla Backley finally checked Vesey’s breathing and his heart.

“He’s dead.”

Tree had his head in his hands. He never thought that he would kill a man and was brokenhearted at what might happen to his soul. That’s when Soupspoon decided to become a professional musician.

“When I heard that they was fightin’ ‘cause’a name-callin’ I knew that I had to do it,” he told Cleophus the very next afternoon. “I knew my life weren’t worf a damn. Might as well do sumpin’ I want ‘fore they get me.”

*

The memory of Robert Johnson was so strong in Soupspoon that he sometimes felt that he could actually talk to the guitar man.

It all came in one big rush; too much for him to make sense of. He tried to write it down but the words were flat and toneless. He turned on a cassette recorder from Radio Shack and tried to talk out his stories. But when he played the tape back he was reminded of a hapless baby-sitter trying to tell a fairy tale that he couldn’t remember.

Finally he asked his friend Kiki to help.

“Just listen to me,” he said. “I’m a storyteller. Storyteller need somebody wanna hear what he got to tell.”

*

I run into RL at harvest time in Arcola, Miss. He told me t’come on later and join’im, but by the time I got there he was already at work, playin’ his guitar. He was playin’ a new song like I never heard the blues played before. It was his own words and they was something’, but I didn’t care ‘bout the words at first. I was moved by his wild voice and the way he th’owed his head back like somethin’ in’im might break if he didn’t holler it off with a song. He was like some righteous Baptist minister rapt in prayer. Not that religious folk would ever claim ole RL an’ his devil music.

He was a skinny boy with one good eye and one dead one that floated in its socket. With that dead eye they said he could see past all what we see, into hell--where everyone knows the blues come from anyways.

His hands was like angry spiders up and down them guitar strings. No two men could play what RL, Bob LeRoy, Robert Johnson could play. He was a field nigger too lazy to pull cotton. He was scarred and scared and smallish. He loved his momma an’almost ev’ry other woman he ever met.

But like I was sayin’, it was late in the day an’ there there wasn’t too many people out ‘cause it was cotton-choppin’ time in Mississippi an’ all the colored folks was workin’ except for me an’ RL an’ maybe five or seven lazy souls like us.

I remember four nappy-headed boys and a old man called Crawdaddy an’ two young girls. The girls was Linda Powell and Booby Redman. The boys was all stampin’ they feet an’ noddin’ they agreement with what RL sang. An’ old Crawdaddy shook his shoulders like he was a young man again, ready to get out on the dance floor or pull down his terrible Texas jackknife.

It was like hurricane weather that day, both warmish and cool, with a wind comin’ up from the Gulf and mockingbirds wheelin’ across the sky at every note.

At first he played “Love in Vain” but it was when RL sung “Me and the Devil” that Booby’s jaw dropped down. She had on a plain cotton dress with red rag across her head. She was a healthy girl with upstandin’ bosom and sturdy legs, but when she heard RL her jaw hung open and her hands dangled down at her side. By the time RL told us that his evil soul would catch the Greyhound I thought that Booby might just fall down and cry.

That boy could play the clothes right off a woman’s back.

RL stamped his hard soles and sung new blues. I mean he was playin’ music that nobody ever heard before, he was makin’ history right there in front’a our eyes. The people came, more and more, and the nickels fall into his old bean can. When there was enough of a crowd I went across the street and took out my own guitar. I was just sixteen but you know I could play.

Bluesmen in the Delta liked to play both sides of the street. It made us kind of a spectacle that the country Negroes wanted to see. And it didn’t hurt too much if you was on the road an’ you had somebody willin’ t’jump in if some field hand got mad at the way you made his girl laugh.

I guess RL’s music was too much for Booby, because she come across the street, really it was just a graded dirt road, to hear my soft sweet blues. Satan wasn’t after me. That’s why I’m still here in the flesh.

That was a day to remember. It was the end of a hard day in the fields. People was so tired that they fingers dragged in the dust, but they still come to see what everybody else was doin’. Even the sky was curious. Big ole fat clouds rushed over and then passed for a glimmer of sunshine that would blind for a minute. People was yellin’, “Play it!” an’ “All right!” Some of the girls was movin’ they feet and the boys was soon to dance with’em because back then when a woman got the urge to dance she was serious. If her boyfriend didn’t wanna dance she’d take her another man by the hand. That’s just the way it was.

We played and played. The nickels fell like hail. Everybody was movin’ to RL’s evil moods. And when they got tired they’d come over to me an’ I’d sooth’em with songs like “Got Me a Country Girl” or “Blind Catfish Blues.”

There must’a been forty people listenin’ an’ dancin’ to me and Bob. Forty poor-as-the-day-they-was-born colored souls. We was higher than a holy roller’s shout when the county sheriff come up.

Heck Wrightson was a white man big as two men and meaner than a hungry rat down yo’ pants. He threw his billy stick on the wood sidewalk so that it rolled and clattered on the slats. He called out, “Everybody better hit the ground the time that stick stop rollin’ ‘cause I’m shootin’ waist-high.”

Booby was the first one to scream. Then black folk started runnin’ with they heads down and they hands up. Colored souls piled one on the other, and Heck was true to his word. He held a forty-one-caliber pistol at his beltline and squeezed off shots at a leisurely pace.

POW! Bang! Heck was smilin’. Linda Powell hit the ground with this loud humph! I seen’er boyfriend, Lyle Cross, run away from her an’ go ‘round the general store.

I was in a awful state ‘cause of my guitar, which I had received from my Uncle Fitzhew and which I named Bannon after my murdered friend. I couldn’t just th’ow it down or run wild with it. So I tried to lower myself down off the side of the wood walkway. People was still yellin’ an’ runnin’ an’ I was leanin’ over the side, prayin’ t’God that I’d save my life along with my guitar.

Then there was this hard boot next to my head.

“Git up from there, nigger,” the boot said. An’ I knew right then that Heck Wrightson had got me.

I look up an’ seen Heck towerin’. That ugly gun muzzle looked back down at me. With his other hand Heck had RL by the scruff of his shirt.

The look on Bob’s face spoke the whole history of Mississippi colored life. RL was a brash young man and he was conceited and wild. But when that lawman grabbed him he just slumped down and took it. His good eye was starin’ out beyond the dirt road and his bad one searched a thousand miles further on. Even his lips sagged. Because when a white man, especially a lawman, grabbed a nigger, that was all she wrote. If you gave him any trouble or any mouth, or if you stood up straight and looked him in the eye -- if you did any’a them things there, death waitin’, death just as quick as my momma’s biscuits.

Heck dragged us down to the white barbershop where his uncle extracted teeth and cut hair. They kept a cell in the back. It was just a closet with a cast-iron doorframe that sported five metal bars. But it wasn’t much of a jail. They didn’t even have bars on the li’l window but we had enought sense not to try an’ get away.

Bob sat himself down in the corner like he had been punished at school. He sat on the floor, because there wasn’t no furniture or even a stool in the room. The only thing there was was a tin pail that smelt powerfully of sour vomit and shit.

“Hey, Bob,” I whispered when Heck went out to talk to his uncle.

RL shook his head so hard that his cheeks made a flappin’ noise, but he didn’t say a word.

I turnt away from him to the cell door an’ looked out into the barber’s room. Heck had put our guitars in the corner, underneath where the customers hung their bags and coats. I wanted to yell out for that white man to put our guitars somewhere safe. But then I worried that if I said somethin’ he mighta popped a string or worse just for spite.

That’s when Bob started in. “Ohhh, momma yeah. Yeah, yeaaaaahhhh,” he sang out.

“Ohhh, momma, I” he cried. Then he th’ew his head back and crooned a long high note.

“What’s that?” I heard Heck say. I could see the barber, a red-headed man, look up from the head bowed down in front of him. I grabbed RL and shouted, “Quiet, Bob. Sheriff don’t like no noise.” But by then Heck was at the cell door. He had on Levi jeans and a snap-down-the-front cowboy shirt. There was a awful green patch of skin across his left cheek. He was chewin’ on a nail as most men migiht chew on a toothpick. He says, “What’s goin’ on in here?”

I said, “Ain’t nuthin’.” But just then RL go, “Ohhh. Oh.”

“What’s wrong with him?” Heck had his fist around one of the bars. I was afraid that he’d yank that pole right out the door and beat us both to death.

“RL got spells,” I told him. I figured it was true.

He go, “You tryin’ t’mess wit’ me, boy?”

An’ I says, “Nawsir, nawsir I ain’t.” I fell right into the plantation nigger’s stoop. I mean, I was sittin’ on the floor but I stooped just the same. I let my head hang down and my lips hang loose when I talked. I know you don’t wanna hear ‘bout how somebody might act like a nigger when the white man crack his whips. But you never lived through the early south like I did. You ain’t never been on the floor with a man like a bear lookin’ down on yo’ weak flesh.

Soupspoon had begun to breathe hard at this point in his story. He reached over and picked up a glass of whiskey that Kiki had poured. He finished it before he started speaking again.

Heck swung the jail open and went right over to RL. “Stop that growlin’, boy!”

And RL says, “Ohhh, momma!” an’ he sway from side to side. Heck hit Bob so hard that the poor boy rolled across what little floor they was. But he jumped right up into a crouch and scrabbled back to his corner and started singin’ again. And Heck hit him again. But this time RL had his behind anchored. You could see how hard the slap was but RL just shuddered, shuddered and moaned.

The sheriff was a little worried when he seen that his slaps didn’t bother RL. So he turned to me and said, “What’s wrong with him?”

“Spells,” I said. I hunched my shoulders up to my ears. “Had’em since he was a babe,” I lied.

That time Heck used his fist on RL. That boy’s head rolled back and so did his eyes. He slid down on his side but he was still singin’, “Ohhh, momma yeah. Yeah.” And a sweet smile crossed his beat-up face.

Heck backed on away from him then. He looked down on that po’ bluesmaster with a kind of awe.

He whispered, “Spells.”

“Bad ones,” I tells him.

Then he says, “Get this nigger up an’ get outta here!” He banged out of the door and walked out to the barbershop.

I helped RL up an’ half drug him through the shop. An’ all the time he was moanin’ and rollin’ his eyes. I pulled him outside and propped him up against a wall. Then I went back in for out guitars.

I got them both and slung’em around my neck. Then I stood there, lookin’ at the floor. An’ any brave soul who mighta thought I was a coward to bow my head in that cell might wonder at me bowin’ now with courage. Because I was standin’ my ground with Mr. Wrightson right then.

“Sumpin’ wrong, boy?” he asted me when it come clear I weren’t goin’ nowhere.

“Our money, suh,” I said.

An’ he sneer and he say, “What money?”

“That tin can RL had,” I told’im. “I had one too but he had a bigger crowd.”

“What you sayin’, nigger?” Heck said, and you know it was sore on my mind to hear him talk like that.

But I answered in a civil tongue, “I just want the can, suh. That’s all, Can is our’n. We the ones played for it.”

When Heck grinned I seen that his teeth was green too. He say, “You broke the law playin’ ‘fore sunset, son.”

But I told him, “Nawsuh. Nawsuh, the law just say that you cain’t play on Sunday in Washington County. You cain’t play day or night on Sunday.” And he knew that it was true.

To this day I remember that one lonely drop’a sweat that trickled down my spine. In them tiny little seconds between my last protest and Heck’s reply I saw a mouse come out of a crack in the corner of the wall. That li’l thing looked at us and got so scared that he th’ew hisself against the wall three times before he could make it back into his hole.

Heck stroll over to his coat and pull RL’s can from out of his pocket. He held the can up to his ear an’ shook it. Then this bitter stain cross his face, what some folks might call a smile.

The can hit me in the shoulder before I seen him th’ow it. Silver clattered all over the floor. I was down on my knees pickin’ up whatever I could while them white men laughed and stamped around my fingers.

After I got almost half’a what fell I jumped up and run outta there. They stamped their feet like they was comin’ after me, but the door slammed on behind. The guitars banged together and cried. The white men was laughin’ in the barbershop but the street was quiet.

Robert Johnson was gone.

I went down Germaine but I didn’t see him. I cut down there to Winslow and into the colored part of town. You could always tell the colored neighborhood because the flower gardens got scarce and the shotgun houses ran in rows.

I saw RL goin’ down toward Carver’s Road, which led out to the farms and plantations.

I shouted, “You, Bob!”

He started to run.

“Bob!” I goes after him.

RL was runnin’ like I used to in my dreams. A giant be comin’ after me an’ I’d be huffin’ but my feet hardly made no progress. RL was runnin’ like that, movin’ his legs from side to side. When I caught up to him he fell to his knees.

“Bob!” I says. “Bob, it’s me, Soup, Soupy!”

RL huddle down in the yellah dirt and sobbed. I helped him up and got’im t’walk wit’ me. I told’im that we could get some whiskey if we went back to Mary’s general store. Back then the general store was also a juke joint, what they call a nightclub nowadays.

RL says, “Why you got my guitar, man?”

“Just carryin’ it till you want it back, RL. Ole Heck almost busted it.” RL looked at me so wary I didn’t think he knew who I was.

“Where my money?”

“Right here in my pocket, Bob.”

He stopped walking and I dug out his change. I kept a few coins in my pocket though, I figured I earned that.

“This all they is?” he asted me. And I told him that Heck Wrightson took all the rest and th’owed it on the jailhouse floor.

RL took his guitar and we headed for Mary’s. He didn’t even say nuthin’ ‘bout bein’ in jail. I don’t even think it was real fo’ him. It was more like we had passed through a dream and now we was back to where we was.

Mary’s store was a big square room with a counter running across the back wall and shelves full of canned and boxed goods behind that. In the middle of the floor she had a pool table that had been shipped all the way from Ohio.

There were tables and chairs around the room for nighttime when people came out to drink.

Mary, who was a big woman, sat next to her cashbox behind the counter. She eyed every soul who came through the door. So when me and RL come in lookin’ like yesterday’s po’k chops she say, “What’s wrong wit’ you an’ yo’ friend, Soupspoon Wise?”

I told her that Heck Wrightson had us in jail but she says, “I know that. What I mean is why do yo’ friend look so beat-up?”

RL was lookin’ ‘round the room like a man comin’ awake after a long afternoon nap. “You got music tonight, Mary Wade?” he asked her. She said no. It was a weeknight and the juke joint wasn’t gonna have enough customers to pay musicians to play.

But RL says that we’d play for a bottle’a whiskey and a hat on the table. “Yeah, momma,” he said to Mary. “We play the house down for a quart bottle and a hat for some tips.” And RL cracked a smile that woulda made a sweet girl’s photograph cry.

He said, “You know we bluesmen, Mary Wade. Bluesmen born to trouble in a land Christendom never seed.”

Mary was no saint. She loved the blues and the men and women who played it. She got all coy and toothy andn said, “You and Soupspoon can play okay. I give ya a pint right now an’ if we get some people in here like you had outside then I’ll pass you over another pint.”

We took our bottle and sat at a table in the corner. I told RL that I couldn’t play too well because of my shoulder. It was stiff from where Heck hit me. RL rubbed his swole chin an’ said, “You just strum on behind me, Soup. You just follow me an’ I show you how t’get there.”

Booby and Linda got the word ‘bout us an’ come by t’help us drink our liquor.

When we finished our pint, RL came up with two bits for another one and then I scraped together my change for a third.

Booby sat down next to me but her eyes were fixed on RL’s baby face. Linda was laughin’ an’ grabbin’ onto RL’s shoulder whenever anybody said the least funny thing.

Lyle Cross come in and sits down on t’other side’a Linda, but she acts like he ain’t even there. You see, she was mad at him fo’runnin’ off when Heck was shootin’. For all I could tell, RL didn’t even know that Lyle was there. RL’d put his arm over Linda’s shoulders an’ laugh and make friendly just like they was onna date. I thought he shoulda showed me a little more sense because, like I said, RL was a small man--and Lyle Cross was as big as a sharecropper comes.

But nothin’ happened because Lyle was ashamed of the way he acted and because we were the musicians. Mary’s was gettin’ full about then and the people wanted to be entertained; they didn’t want no mess wit’ they music.

We started playin’ Robert Johnson’s blues, naturally. I don’t remember him or me sayin’, “Let’s play,” all it was we had our guitars in our hands and the music started.

RL played music that told you how it was. He’d sing like a miserable hound yowling after a bitch in heat and here he cain’t get through the fence.

Booby Redman and Linda was right near us. Linda’d give Bob a kiss now and then. Lyle moved back toward the door to show he didn’t care. And sixty or more other people danced and nodded, put their hands together and drank whiskey.

You don’t understand how it was for us back then. You think all that drinkin’ and consortin’ an’ playin’ wit’ danger was too much an’ why didn’t we do sumpin’ else? But you don’t know our place back then. We was the bottom of the barrel. We were the lowest kinda godless riffraff. Migrants and roustabouts, we was bad from the day we was born. Blues is the devil’s music an’ we his chirren. RL was Satan’s favorite son. He made us all abandoned, and you know that was the only way we could bear the weight of those days.